SARAH HOYT: Come On, Take It. “If you don’t believe in the founding principles, you’re not an American. You’re at best a permanent resident who grew up here and behaves generally within the law. . . . Do I think it was a mistake of the founders to allow citizenship of birth in a nation of volition? You bet your beepy I do. They got so much right, though, and they were only human. They couldn’t believe anyone born here, enjoying the blessings of liberty could possibly wish to believe that a system where ‘we belong to the government’ is better. . . . Take the oath. Then keep it.”
Archive for 2016
January 14, 2016
GOP DEBATE: John Kasich Just Bored Twitter to Death.
AT AMAZON, 50-75% off New Jewelry. Only a month until Valentine’s Day.
STEVE GREEN IS DRUNKBLOGGING TONIGHT’S GOP DEBATE; click here to join in.
WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Mid-Life Crisis? No Way – Most of Us Are Getting Happier.
AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Pet Supplies.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hit The Road, Jeb: Bush moneybags couldn’t compensate for failure to address voter concerns.
Concerns about the impact of money on politics assume that if you buy enough ads you can elect anybody. If that were true, Jeb would be the frontrunner. Instead, he’s running way behind other candidates who, in different ways, have done a better job of addressing voters’ concerns.
It turns out that addressing voters’ concerns is more important than slick TV spots. And that means that the only campaign finance “reform” we need is for candidates (and donors) to quit tossing money at consultants and instead to speak to the American people about what the American people care about.
If nothing else comes from Jeb’s candidacy, that’s a valuable lesson indeed.
If people pay attention.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO’S CLIMATE BATTLE CLASHES WITH LAVISH LIFESTYLE:
“We’re changing our climates irreparably, and climate change lasts tens of thousands, if not millions, of years,” [DiCaprio mutters to Parade magazine.]
MailOnline can report that DiCaprio took at least 20 trips across the nation and around the world this year alone – including numerous flights from New York to Los Angeles and back, a ski vacation to the French Alps, another vacation to the French Riviera, flights to London and Tokoyo to promote his film Wolf of Wall Street, two trips to Miami and trip to Brazil to watch the World Cup.
“The idea of pursuing material objects your whole life is absolutely soulless.”
The top quote belongs to DiCaprio, who was paid $25 million up front for The Wolf of Wall Street. But this came with a catch: It also included his producing fee, and budget overruns meant he had to defer some of his salary.
The actor owns properties on both coasts. His Tinseltown compound lies in the Hollywood Hills, comprised of two adjoining land parcels (one purchased from Madonna ) and touting a massive basketball court the movie star built. He also owns two Malibu beachfront homes, including a seven-bedroom Malibu Colony home asking $75,000 per month in rent.
An inquisitive journalist might want to press the actor on these inconsistencies. If DiCaprio wants to use his celebrity bully pulpit, then he should be ready to defend himself.
Read the whole thing.
MAX BOOT: Is a New Republican Foreign Policy Emerging?
This, then, is the choice confronting Republican primary voters in 2016: Whether to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling.
Cruz and Trump claim they can project power, keep America safe, and destroy our enemies without putting troops into harm’s way or getting embroiled in long, costly occupations or nation-building exercises. They argue that they can defeat our foes simply by killing lots of people, without worrying about setting up more stable governments that will ultimately become American allies.
If only all this were true. But long experience shows that America has been most successful in achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fostered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objectives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops have sought to achieve.
But as both Congressional Democrats in 1974-’75 demonstrated by hamstringing America in Vietnam and Obama in 2011 by unilaterally choosing to abandon Iraq after bragging about the success of George Bush’s surge, how can Americans have a foreign policy that isn’t something other than short-term oriented, when leftists and conservatives have such differing worldviews?
DOING THE JOB THEIR GOVERNMENT WON’T DO: Civilian defense groups on the rise in Germany. Of course, all the Right People are dismayed. But they never learn that the way to prevent this is for the authorities to do their freaking jobs. . . .
That said, if I were in Germany I’d be mounting a public harassment campaign at the responsible bureaucrats and politicians. I’d picket their homes, and make it impossible for them to show their faces without being screamed at as rapist-enablers.
PENN LAWPROF PAUL ROBINSON: The Legal Limits of ‘Yes Means Yes.’
The public discussion about affirmative consent seems to have mixed two quite different issues. Most criminal-law theorists would point out that there is a crucial difference between what they would call in legal jargon an ex ante rule of conduct — that is, telling people beforehand what the law requires of them — and an ex post principle of adjudication — setting the rules by which a violation of the rules of conduct is to be judged.
I think there is little dispute about the value of “yes means yes” as a rule of personal conduct understood beforehand by both parties; the only dispute is whether it is an appropriate standard to determine liability and punishment if those rules are violated. . . .
Modern American criminal law has almost always chosen to require not only proof of the harm — causing another’s death, or having intercourse when the partner is not in fact affirmatively agreeing — but also to require that there was some minimum level of culpability or blameworthiness in the defendant.
Indeed, it is this aspect of criminal law — its commitment to imposing liability only when there is sufficient personal blameworthiness — that has given it the moral prescriptive power that it has. The criminal law that punishes without regard to blame loses moral credibility with the community it governs and is discredited and ignored. A criminal law that earns moral credibility with the community is one that has the power to persuade people to internalize its norms.
Ironically, it is the reformers seeking to change existing norms — such as the norms of sexual consent on college campuses — who would most benefit from a criminal law that has earned moral credibility. It is their reform efforts that are most injured when the law’s credibility is damaged by using affirmative consent as a standard when determining guilt.
The weakness in this analysis is the assumption that the “reformers” care about justice.
BIDEN JUST TOOK HILLARY CLINTON OUT AT THE KNEES:
“Bernie [Sanders] is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real,” Biden told CNN’s Gloria Borger. “And that is the absolute enormous concentration of wealth in a small group of people, with the middle class, now being shown, being left out.”
When Borger pointed out that, “Hillary’s been talking about that as well,” Biden was undeterred.
“It’s relatively new for Hillary to talk about that,” he said. “Hillary’s focus has been on other things up to now, and that’s been Bernie’s — nobody questions Bernie’s authenticity on those issues. . . . I think they question everybody’s who hasn’t been talking about it all along, but I think she’s come forward with some really thoughtful approaches to deal with the issue.”
You don’t say this sort of thing if you’re enthusiastic about Clinton being the Democratic nominee in 2016. Either the vice president wants to ensure that Sanders gets a fair shot at the nomination, or he’s itching to reverse his own decision not to run in 2016.
Related: “There’s a sweat-bead reunion on Hillary Clinton’s brow, and the minions are starting to mutter. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not this time. This time, there would be no hypnotic upstarts waiting patiently in the wings. This time, the bleak lessons of Iowa would have been learned and internalized. This time, the Clintonian personality would be calibrated to exquisite perfection. There would be challengers, of course. But they would be there to serve as a benign foil and to make the victories appear less regal. They weren’t supposed to be fundraising at a breakneck speed. They weren’t supposed to be leading in the early theaters of war. And they certainly weren’t supposed to be approaching national parity. That tragic play has been staged already; this one was to have a new and updated script.”
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
LATERAL CAREER MOVE: Ed Schultz leaves MSNBC for Russia’s RT America network.
DIT DAH, DIT DAH DAH DIT, DIT DAH DAH DIT, DIT, DIT DAH, DIT DIT DIT, DIT, DAH DAH, DIT, DAH DIT, DAH: “Here’s how to sum up the Obama administration’s reaction to Iran’s seizure and release of our sailors: dit dah, dit dah dah dit, dit dah dah dit, dit, dit dah, dit dit dit, dit, dah dah, dit, dah dit, dah. We use that language in honor of Jeremiah Denton. When, as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, the admiral and future senator was marched in front of a newsreel camera and forced to testify to how well he was being treated, he blinked out the Morse code for t-o-r-t-u-r-e.”
FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: Muslim: I trolled a Trump rally and wasn’t bullied. Waah!
Kaddie Abdul, “an IT data engineer working in Silicon Valley,” decided to drive four hours to a Trump rally in Nevada to show how racist “those people” are. She wore her Muslim garb, held her Koran, and waited for someone to attack her. No one did. A few people gave her an odd look, but nary a nibble.
Darn it.
Apparently the Guardian in Britain had paid for her gasoline, so she had to write something, so she wrote: “I went to a Trump rally in my hijab. His supporters aren’t just racist caricatures.”
Actually, she meant “just aren’t racist caricatures.”
The article is itself racist, portraying Trump supporters as a bunch of hick white people who want to kill Muslims.
That sort of racism is always acceptable, apparently. Plus:
But what she did was not dangerous. Going outside without a male escort in Saudi Arabia is dangerous for a woman. The only physical danger in driving to Nevada to troll Trumpkins was the drive itself — something she will not be able to do when she makes her pilgrimage to Mecca.
Trump supporters did not gang rape her because she was Muslim. They did not beat her because she was Muslim. They did not to a damned thing to her — and she should have known they would not. There are no thugs or bullies at these rallies. They are a fiction, just like the fiction that the Tea Party was racist.
But without that fiction, what have they got?
RIP ALAN RICKMAN, star of beloved Christmas movie, Die Hard. co-star of Galaxy Quest, and the Harry Potter films. The London Daily Mail notes that Rickman died at age 69 “following his secret battle with cancer,” a sentence I’ve typed twice too often this week.
CHELSEA CLINTON GOES ON THE ATTACK; DEMOCRATS ASK WHY: “They note that Chelsea Clinton has mostly been used to highlight Hillary Clinton’s softer side as a mother and grandmother and say she seemed uncomfortable shedding her first daughter persona for the role of attack dog.”
Attack dog? Well, I’m glad I didn’t write that.
“The thing that tells you as much as anything about [the Clinton campaign’s] current state of mind is Chelsea going on the attack. It tells you everything you need to know,” said one Democratic strategist. “That this [challenge from Sanders] is real and they’ve got to be freaking out.”
See also: The 2008 Hillary flameout, when she thought she had her coronation in the bag.
And camp Clinton is freaking out: Chelsea’s claiming that Bernie “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance,” without mentioning that his goal is to usher in single-payer healthcare, as Jim Geraghty writes:
But as flawed and dangerous as single-payer is, Sanders’ plan only “dismantles” Obamacare, CHIP, Medicare and private insurance to replace it with taxpayer-funded care for everybody. Chelsea’s pointing to only one-half of Sanders’ agenda in order to make it look like he wants to unplug Grandma from the respirator and snatch away Tiny Tim’s cane.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be stunned that Chelsea Clinton, former NBC News reporter under the tutelage of Brian Williams, is running around telling stories that are exaggerated to the point of falsehood. Alternately, maybe Chelsea inherited the shameless lying gene from both sides.
Geraghty notes the logical next escalation of the blue-on-blue war: “What happens when Bernie Sanders shoots back, and calls out Chelsea Clinton on this? ‘HOW DARE HE ATTACK A PREGNANT MOTHER!’”
Heh — that 2008 parody of Hillary as Norma Desmond is still looking pretty spot-on.
COULD THERE REALLY BE THREE TIMES AS MANY SUNDAY CHURCHGOERS AS FOOTBALL WATCHERS? Turns out there are, at least if NFL data on its TV ratings and the Gallup Survey on church attendance can be believed. So why is utter ignorance about the most basic Christian beliefs espoused by millions of Americans so prevalent in the MSM? I humbly offer some thoughts here.
A LOOK AT THE 2017 Lincoln Continental.
WELL, ARROGANCE BEGETS BLINDNESS: Henry Olsen at NRO writes about how the GOP establishment must try to understand, not ridicule, concerns of blue collar workers.
Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see. Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.
That effort is both a fool’s errand for the country and a poisoned chalice for conservatives and Republicans. It is foolish because the reasons the peasants are revolting will not fade easily. Ignoring and ridiculing their concerns, the way European elites have done with their own electorates for most of the last two decades, will simply intensify the masses’ rage and ensure that their political spokesmen become more intransigent and radical. If you want an American version of Marine Le Pen tomorrow, ignore the legitimate concerns of blue-collar Americans today.
And it is a poisoned chalice for the Right because such a strategy requires a permanent informal coalition with the Left. Keeping blue-collar white Americans out of political power will result in exactly what Washington elites have wanted for years: a series of grand bargains that keep the status quo largely intact and the Democratic party in power. . . .
The constituency that is rallying to Trump is not fully conservative, but it shares more values with conservatives than do any of the other constituencies that could possibly be enticed to join our cause. It is thus imperative that conservatives understand what these fellow citizens want and find ways to make common cause with them where we can. . . .
I agree with Olsen’s basic thesis that the GOP establishment must consciously embrace and court blue collar workers, but the overall “us” (“true” conservatives) versus “them” (blue collar workers) tone of the piece seems to reinforce the notion that these groups are fundamentally distinct– a proposition of which I am not yet convinced.
It presupposes that there is a rigid definition of “true” conservatism that blue collar workers inherently do not embrace, such as Olsen’s notion that any “true” conservative would never support spending power-based entitlements such as Social Security or Medicare. In Olsen’s words:
Blue-collar whites are also more open to government action than many movement conservatives. For example, 87 percent of “Steadfast Conservatives,” Pew’s term for movement conservatives, think government is doing too much that should be left to individuals and businesses; only 44 percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics agree. Sixty percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics think government aid to the poor does more good than harm; only 10 percent of Steadfast Conservatives agree. Seventy-nine percent of Hard-Pressed Skeptics say that cuts to Social Security benefits should be off the table. Clearly a campaign based on cutting food stamps and reforming entitlements will not resonate with blue-collar whites.
I’m not so sure. Blue collar workers may well vigorously support “reforming entitlements” such as food stamps and Social Security (particularly the former) if the reform is phased in, offers commonsense incentives, and/or expands individual choice. Just because blue collar workers do not want to completely eliminate middle-class entitlements such as Social Security or Medicare (entitlements upon which they rely post-retirement) does not mean they are not “true” conservatives who would not support well-crafted reforms.
What Donald Trump has captured–and the GOPe still remarkably hasn’t yet figured out–is that these “Reagan Democrats” were lured away from the GOP post-Reagan, in part, by some of the moderate reforms embraced by Bill Clinton (e.g., welfare reform) and the simple fact that Clinton (himself a product of a blue collar upbringing) seemed like “one of them.”
Blue collar workers’ general fiscal conservatism, patriotism, and general cultural conservatism are “conservative” values that should, in theory, fit comfortably under the GOP umbrella. The intriguing question, to me, is why hasn’t the GOP understood this all along? Why and when did the GOPe decide to shun the backbone of America?
The GOPe’s elitist condescension, combined with the Obama Administration’s overt 8-year progressive bias towards fringe, non-white, non-blue collar issues, has created the 2016 presidential phenomenon and the voters’ hunger for a candidate who doesn’t embody either of these extremes.