IMMEDIATE TWITTER CONSENSUS: Marco Rubio ‘En Fuego’ with Cuba #GOPDebate Response.
Archive for 2016
March 11, 2016
REAPING WHAT MERKEL HAS SOWN: Nationalist party set for gains as 3 German states vote.
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, formed three years ago, is wooing voters with slogans such as “ENOUGH!” and “Secure borders instead of borderless crime.”
It’s expected to enter legislatures Sunday in the diverse regions: prosperous Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the east. Other parties won’t share power with it, but its performance could complicate efforts to form state governments — particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, where polls give it up to 19 percent support.
Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year as Merkel insisted “we will manage” the challenge, a stance lauded by many but that drove others into AfD’s arms.
What remains to be seen is whether AfD is just an outlet for angry protest voters, or harbinger of the future of German politics.
ACTUALLY, IT KINDA IS, YOU ALINSKYITE DIVIDER YOU: Obama: Trump’s rise not my fault. You gleefully tore down all sorts of bipartisan traditions, from the filibuster to bipartisanship for important legislation to meaningless ritual courtesy to opponents, and those traditions opened the door for Trump, who’s really just you in orangeface mostly anyway. And you, and a lot of people, will be repeating the Eisenhower-era phrase “have you no decency?” after displaying none, and after, for decades, treating the Eisenhower era as some sort of low point for America. Well, that era was Peak Decency, and lefties have been going out of their way to tear all that hokey old-fashioned stuff down. Now you’ve got Trump — and, much more frightening, whatever comes after Trump.
And the Gods Of The Copybook Headings smile.
WHATEVER YOUR IDEOLOGY, YOUR OPPONENT’S WORLDVIEW IS OFFICIALLY DEAD:
Shot: MSNBC Fires Melissa Harris-Perry. Is Left-Wing News Dead?
—PJTV, March 7th.
Chaser: The Conservative Era Is Over.
—Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, March 8th.
As I wrote back in the run-up to the 2010 midterms when alternating headlines declaring “The Death of Neoliberalism,” “The Obsolescence of Barack Obama,” and “The Death of Conservatism” were being put into circulation by pundits of all political stripes, “Whatever Your Ideology, Your Opponents’ Worldview Is Officially Dead.”
Of course, in early 2016, it is safe to say that, as Jim Geraghty writes, “Both Parties Are Coming Apart at the Seams:”
Will the Democratic and Republican parties break up? The enormous logistical challenges of building a new nationwide party from scratch make it unlikely that any faction will want to completely break away. But with such intense and irreconcilable divisions about the role of government, policy priorities, and just what the country needs, the two parties are already broken. And neither one looks likely to be genuinely united any time soon.
For over a century, the “Progressive” goal has been to transform America into Europe Lite. As Geraghty suggests, that could well mean fractious multiparty squabbles could become the norm here as well. How did we get here? Why, it’s as if the guy who said in 2004…
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
…was lying through his teeth about his ultimate goals. Nahh — heaven forfend.
SO, SECOND LOOK AT BERNIE? Sanders isn’t true friend to environment. His plan would undermine Obama emissions progress.
If he wins another primary, perhaps Hillary will sic Loretta Lynch on him.
ROGER SIMON ON TRUMP, ISRAEL AND ISLAM:
When CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Trump after the debate whether he meant all of Islam hates us, Donald simply replied “A lot of it.” How politically incorrect can you get — and undoubtedly how accurate. What a long way we have come from George W. Bush’s “religion of peace.” It’s hard to even know whether George, in those days, knew the real translation of Islam was “submission,” something far from peace, indeed the opposite of peace — at least until everyone becomes Islamic. And that is what we have been witnessing across the globe.
Whatever one thinks about Trump, and I certainly don’t always agree with him, he is the first major American politician (something he clearly is now) to name directly the entity that seeks to destroy Western Civilization. He didn’t even cloak it in “radical Islam.”
We’ll see if this moves the Overton Window, as Trump’s earlier, highly-un-PC comments on immigration did last year. Faster, please, as my colleague Michael Ledeen would say. Read the whole thing, though more sensitive socialist souls should heed the Trigger Warning first…
FRIEND OF THE WORKING MAN: Clinton Foundation Hires H-1B Guest Workers in Place of American Graduates.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Walmart’s customers are too broke to shop. Fundamentally transformed!
On the losing side of automation, globalization and the “rural brain drain” our community was powerless to stop furniture factories from closing down or Wal-Mart from coming in. And after decades of decline folks were too beaten down and disorganized to fight back when pharmaceutical companies flooded the area with OxyContin. As a result, Wilkes had the third highest overdose rate in America in 2007 and busted 50 meth labs in 2013. [Overdose rates dropped 69 percent by 2011 after North Carolina responded to the crisis.]
Now, I walk into the courtroom every week and see the faces of childhood friends in a town where 23 percent of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent never finished high school.
So if there are winners and losers in America, I know the losers. They lost jobs to China and Vietnam. And they’re dying younger, caught in an endless cycle of jail, drug charges and applying for disability to pay the child support bill.
They lost their influence, their dignity and their shot at the American Dream, and now they’re angry. They’re angry at Washington and Wall Street, at big corporations and big government. And they’re voting now for Donald Trump.
My Republican friends are for Trump. My state representative is for Trump. People who haven’t voted in years are for Trump. He’ll win the primary here on March 15 and he will carry this county in the general.
His supporters realize he’s a joke. They do not care. They know he’s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who’ve long ignored their interests.
Read the whole thing. At this point, a lot of Americans hate our political class more than they love America, and that’s not a good thing, but at this point, it’s also kind of understandable, no? I’ve been warning for a long time about the consequences of having a lousy political class.
Now other people are noticing. “The rise of Trump, love him or hate him, conveys an inescapable message: The United States’ political institutions are in decay, and voters are angry at a government that they perceive (correctly) to be broken.”
That’s true. The solution there isn’t very well thought out, nor is the anger at “tax cuts” (where’s mine?) but here’s a thought: When you have a society that can’t do things that need to be done because every change threatens somebody’s rice bowl or offers insufficient opportunities for graft, you’ve got a society that is due for a reset, not for incremental change.
The thing is, resets are often kind of ugly.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Swastikas on Campus: Anti-Semitism Blamed on Anti-Israel Academics.
THEY CHOSE POORLY: Both Trump and His Campaign Manager Now Say Michelle Fields Is Lying.
TURNS OUT AT THIS POINT IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE: Hillary Has a Benghazi Mom Problem.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: The Obama Administration’s Idea of a Crime…
WHAT CAN’T GO ON: Cloud People And Ground People.
THE MEME WILL LIVE FOREVER: Dos Equis retiring its ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’.
IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW MANY CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS WERE IN THOSE PICTURES: The Man Who Illustrated ‘The Joy of Sex’ And Then Defined the Look of Sci-Fi.
MAGIC EIGHT BALL IS UNCLEAR. ASK AGAIN: Will the U.S. Deny the Evidence or Declare a Genocide?
A FORCE WITH UNCERTAIN MISSION AND LEADERSHIP, DRAWN FROM SOME OF THE EARTH’S HELLHOLES MISBEHAVES? GASP. I SHALL GO PUT ON MY PEARLS SO I CAN CLUTCH THEM: U.N. Peacekeepers Are a Sexual Menace.
WELL, THEY ARE INTELLECTUAL EQUALS:When Justin Met Barack.
THE POISONOUS FRUIT OF TOXIC POLITICS: Union Officials Admit They Let Veterans Die Rather Than Talk To Republicans.
March 10, 2016
MAX BOOT: Obama’s Cringe-Worthy Presidency. I have two kinds of regrets about the past decade or so. I wish that Obama had been as tough on America’s enemies as he was on Republicans, and I wish that John McCain and Mitt Romney had been as tough on Obama as they were on . . . Republicans.
WELL, WHO AM I TO ARGUE? NPR and Harvard Say: Obamacare Is a Complete Failure.
SCOTT ADAMS: Can we agree that calling the candidate with German ancestry “Hitler” is racist? “If he were female and Asian – with exactly the same policies – would we be comparing him to Hitler every five seconds? I don’t think so.”
Well, the basic rules are twofold: First, it’s only racist if calling it racist advances the preferred narrative. And second, in the future — by which I mean the present — everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes. This was predicted over a decade ago.