THE ADMINISTRATION WHO NEVER SUBMITS PROPER BUDGETS FINDS A SCAPEGOAT: White House Blames Republicans for Pending Government Shutdown.
Archive for 2016
December 11, 2016
SNIFFLE. THERE IS NOTHING STRANGE! Humans’ Strange Love Affair with Cats.
December 10, 2016
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HEH: “I really hope Tillerson is the choice for secretary of state just to see the Left go insane. It’s better than watching Game of Thrones. But, it’s an NBC story, so accuracy isn’t always the case.”
HOW BAD HAS THE LEFTIE MENTAL MELTDOWN GOTTEN? So bad that Glenn Greenwald and Juan Cole are voices of sanity.
Greenwald: Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence. “Needless to say, Democrats — still eager to make sense of their election loss and to find causes for it other than themselves — immediately declared these anonymous claims about what the CIA believes to be true, and, with a somewhat sweet, religious-type faith, treated these anonymous assertions as proof of what they wanted to believe all along: that Vladimir Putin was rooting for Donald Trump to win and Hillary Clinton to lose and used nefarious means to ensure that outcome. That Democrats are now venerating unverified, anonymous CIA leaks as sacred is par for the course for them this year, but it’s also a good indication of how confused and lost U.S. political culture has become in the wake of Trump’s victory.”
Cole: No, America, it wasn’t Russia: You did it to Yourself. “Clinton’s own polling people found the big turning point was when she called Trump voters a ‘basket of deplorables.’ Americans don’t like being talked down to, and had already gotten rid of Romney for the same sin. The spectacle of Clinton taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech to the people who put them out of their homes in 2008-9 also turned many of them off so that they stayed home, while another section of them decided to take a chance on Trump. He will screw them over, but from their point of view, they worried that she might have, as well. Trump was promising to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs via protectionism, whereas everyone understood that Sec. Clinton’s first instinct was to do TPP and send more jobs to Asia. So it was Clinton’s public persona and public positions that hurt her and depressed Democratic turnout in places like Detroit and Flint, not anything in Wikileaks (can anyone name even one newsworthy email?)”
PROOF THAT IT’S EITHER A GREAT IDEA, OR A TERRIBLE ONE! “It’s not every day that I read Glenn Reynolds and Matthew Yglesias and find that they’ve independently come to the same good idea.”
IN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR, Hans Bader busts the WaPo for Petula Dvorak’s Fake News:
A Post writer decried fake news even while peddling it. In her Dec. 6 Metro column, “When spreading fake news leads to real consequences,” Petula Dvorak baselessly blamed the shooting of former representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) on Sarah Palin supporters.
Ms. Giffords was shot by Jared Loughner in an attack that also took the life of Judge John Roll, a Republican appointee. There is no evidence that Mr. Loughner was a supporter of Ms. Palin, a former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential running mate of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2008 presidential election, or that he saw the “map with crosshairs” put out by supporters of Ms. Palin. (That map “targeted the districts of 20 House Democrats,” including Ms. Giffords’s.)
Yet Ms. Dvorak strangely claims the map’s “consequences” were that “Jared Loughner showed up with a gun” and shot Ms. Giffords. But images of crosshairs do not cause violence. As one journalist noted, “crosshairs and bull’s-eyes have been an accepted part” of the political lexicon.
The Dvorak column was disgraceful, as I noted here. In retrospect, the column has a shake-n-bake feel to it. I wonder if it came from a Media Matters release. . . .
52 SEATS: Louisiana Republican wins final unsettled U.S. Senate race. “With the Democrat’s defeat, Republicans will hold a 52 to 48 edge in the Senate when Trump assumes the presidency next month.”
The WaPo story, oddly enough, doesn’t give the vote margin, but it’s 64/36.
UPDATE: Heh:
DON SURBER: The Washington Post is looking for a few good tokens. “You cannot show your politics in the newsroom unless it is for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat on the approved list. The people covering Hillary were all pro-Hillary. So were those covering Trump. See? Equal coverage. Now that the election is over, the newspapers are looking for pro-Trump columnists.”
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MICHAEL LEDEEN ON TRUMP’S GENERALS:
Most writers/pundits/broadcasters I talk to think that our soldiers are marginal losers, who probably entered the military because they couldn’t find anything “better” to do.
They are also inclined to believe that military leaders are less educated than the intellectual elite. Many don’t know that all our commissioned military officers have college degrees, and most of them have done post-graduate study at top colleges and universities. Trump’s three nominees are cultured, well read, and thoughtful. They are certainly more deeply engaged, intellectually and emotionally, than most of the civilians headed for Cabinet slots. They know all about political correctness, for example, in very concrete ways, because the armed forces are the laboratories in which the PC theories of gender equality are most intensively tested. When Marine officers debate whether women should serve in infantry units, it’s not just academic; people will live or die based on the decision.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Fall 2017 Law School Applicants Down 5.1%.
WAS TRUMP’S SWIPE AT ARMY-NAVY FOOTBALL MEAN OR FAIR?
He just couldn’t help himself.
The President-elect of the United States took a soft swipe at the quality of the football game he was watching in Baltimore on Saturday between two branches of the armed forces.
During the annual Army-Navy game — during which he was loudly cheered by the cadets in the stands — Donald Trump was interviewed by CBS Sports’ Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson. In Trump parlance, he attempted to tell it like it is. In this case, that meant saying the Black Knights and Midshipmen football players weren’t the best he’s seen.
“I just love the armed forces, love the folks. The spirit is so incredible. I mean, I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best football, but it’s very good,” said Trump…“But boy do they have spirit. More than anybody, it’s beautiful.”
It’s not like the president-elect actually owned a professional football team or something. Oh wait:
The Generals went from 6-12 in their first season to 14-4 in their first season with Trump.
In the third and final season of the league, the Generals went 11-7, making Donald Trump 25-11 as the owner of a professional sports team. The team was 0-2 in playoff games under Trump. Strong in the regular season, fading down the stretch. That’s a little literary device Shakespeare like to call foreshadowing.
Or not. Et tu, Fox Sports?
LIFE IN CIVILIZED EUROPE: Guys in Berlin Kick an Unsuspecting Woman Down the Subway Stairs.
ARMY BEATS NAVY: Final score in the football game was 21-17. Army had lost 14 straight coming into this game.
The Black Knights’ 14-game losing streak was the longest by either academy in a series that began in 1890. Army(7-5) now trails 60-50-7 in one of the nation’s historic rivalries.
Hats off to the young men on both teams.
WELL, HE DOES HAVE THAT RAT PACK/MAD MEN VIBE ABOUT HIM: Donald Trump Just Made So Many Old Things Cool Again; Dissent, executive restraint, gridlock, you name it. Now that Donald Trump will be president, stuff that used to be treason is suddenly cool again.
AARON MACLEAN: Requiem for a Narrative: Eight years of fake news.
For years, Americans were told that after the financial panic in 2008, the president’s policies had put us on a steady course to a strong economy. But in much of the country, people looked around them and thought, That just doesn’t seem right. Especially in those parts of the country hit the hardest by the transition from the Industrial Era to the Information Age, people asked a number of questions. If the economy is doing so great, why are my adult children not moving out? If the unemployment rate is declining, why are so many prime-age males not working? And doesn’t it matter that the quality of jobs for non-college graduates is so obviously worse than it was a generation ago? Why, instead of working, are so many people dependent on public benefits and falling prey to addiction?
All of these questions had answers—but looking to the Obama White House for clarity about the uncomfortable tradeoffs their policies involved was a fool’s errand. Take, as an example, the crusade against coal, pushed by activists and coastal liberals for whom shutting down these companies was a clear and uncomplicated good deed on behalf of Mother Earth, of which the only real victims would be the greedy energy executives. The miners could retrain, or get “green jobs,” or something.
Well, a lot of the coal companies did shut down, or all but shut down. Many of the owners cut their losses and moved on—capital may be inconvenienced, but it generally does not suffer. The workers just lost their jobs. The economy in places like southeastern Ohio wasn’t exactly ready to absorb them, and as for retraining—well, you give that a try when you’re 45 years old. The availability of welfare and disability payments is a bitter replacement for the dignity of an honest, decently paid job. The only good news in some of these regions for much of the last eight years was the fracking revolution, a phenomenon that generally occurred in spite of the president’s best efforts.
We were also told, again and again, that things were going well abroad. The tide of war was receding. Afghans and Iraqis were taking the lead. Osama bin Laden was dead, and al Qaeda was on the run. And people again thought, That just doesn’t seem right.
Well, that’s because it was a lie.
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IN “SITUATIONAL UNAWARENESS,” RICHARD FERNANDEZ WRITES:
How much of what we think is true it fake; what proportion of our portfolio of Hope is real if even Hillary can be fooled? Just how completely they were snookered is exemplified by [MSNBC anchor and self-admitted socialist] Lawrence O’Donnell who, genuinely perplexed at Hillary Clinton’s loss, argued that America had been steadily going up, up, up when SUDDENLY everyone decided on Nov 8, 2016 to cut their own throats and betray their best interests…Following Sherlock’s dictum that when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains however improbable must be accepted, the only explanation is that O’Donnell’s ‘progress’, the last 8 years of it at least, was illusory. He had bought into the illusion of gain perhaps because it was consistent with his own. He relied on it and trusted it and it betrayed him. In consequence never saw the disaster coming and neither did Hillary.
When the best informed establishment figures wreck their careers by relying on “real news” it raises the possibility that public policy and economic management is based upon a information corrupted by years of political manipulation. It would be like an airline pilot realizing, as he is hurtling down the runway, that the view through the windshield was a matte painting and not real. That means the world could potentially be flying blind with jagged terrain just beneath it without anyone knowing how close it is because we have filtered it out.
Read the whole thing.
REPORT: Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson emerges as State Department frontrunner.
So if the Secretary of State pick is a “branding” decision for Trump, what brand does this advance?
LIKE HILLARY AND HER BOSNIAN SNIPER? Study: Half of people “remember” events that never happened.