LEFTY ROWBACK: The “Blue State Secession” Thing Is Not Helping.
Archive for 2017
March 16, 2017
VIDEO: A Dem Congressman Called Rachel Maddow ‘Sir.’
Officially, that’s not funny.
LEFTISTS WILL MISS CIVILITY WHEN IT’S GONE: Radio Host Michael Savage Attacked At Dinner. “As Savage was heading out the door, the verbal abuse allegedly turned physical when the jeerer knocked the septuagenarian to the ground, according to the talk show host’s attorney, Daniel Horowitz. When another diner tried to step in between the brawlers, he was punched in the face, Horowitz told the Mercury News.”
MY MY WHAT ELATION: Vibrator maker ordered to pay out C$4m for tracking users’ sexual activity.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Steven Kates, The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J. Trump as President.
HEALTH: Common Pain Meds Are Linked to a Higher Risk of Heart Problems. Note, however, that this is extended use — for a couple of weeks or more — not the occasional Advil.
Plus: “He points out that most cases of cardiac arrest in the study were in elderly people with existing risk factors, not people who were otherwise young and healthy.”
IT’S THE ARTS: Rapper Threatens to Make a Sex Slave of Melania Trump.
AT THE ATLANTIC, Peter Beinart observes that post-Christian America isn’t turning out as he’d hoped. “Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal.”
Observing “partisan clashes” in non-Christian countries might have provided a hint that this was possible.
TIS A PITY THRY CAN’T ALL LOSE: ISIS Infighting in West Mosul as Baghdadi Shows Favor to Foreign Fighters.
AL QAEDA REORGANIZES IN WEST AFRICA: A detailed analysis from the Long War Journal.
On Mar. 2, a merger of al Qaeda groups in the Sahel was announced. The “Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims” (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) brings together four existing al Qaeda organizations under one banner. Ansar Dine, Al Murabitoon and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s (AQIM) Sahara branch are all part of the new entity. The Macina Liberation Front, an arm of Ansar Dine, is as well.
The analysis includes a discussion of how AQIM established Ansar Dine as a very calculated “cut out” operation. An AQIM senior commander “did not want the jihadists’ governance efforts [in Mali] to appear foreign to the local populace.”
This StrategyPage update from November 2016 provides more historical background on AQIM/Ansar Dine.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Amtrak Train Blasts Waiting New York Commuters With Massive Blast of Global Warming (Video).
Huh – just three years ago, the New York Times was asking in headlines if we were seeing “The End of Snow?” As always, Betteridge’s law of headlines (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”) is not just a good idea — it’s the law.
(Classical reference in headline.)
BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL ROAD TRIP, TEXAS TO DC: The snowstorm disrupted airline flights, so two Texas congressmen rented a car and drove — for 36 hours. They streamed some of their conversations.
What began as a travel headache ended in a bipartisan bromance after two Texas congressmen, one Republican and one Democrat, launched a 36-hour road trip after flights to Washington were canceled and broadcast the journey on Facebook.
The whole thing began when Reps. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, and Will Hurd, R-San Antonio, became stranded in the Lonestar State due to the mass flight cancellations up and down the East Coast due to this week’s snowstorm. Both men were in jeopardy of missing Capitol Hill votes and hatched the plan to rent a car and drive together to the Capitol.
The two men began broadcasting the trip, and their far-reaching conversations about everything from health care policy to doughnuts, on Facebook Live. They took questions from the thousands of users who peeked in on the broadcast and aired policy agreements, and disagreements.
O’Rourke and Hurd even got a phone call from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy who promised to get them a place to park and to keep votes on legislation open as long as he could.
Sure, this is great PR for both of them. It also sounds like they made the best of a difficult situation and had some fun in the process.
YES! THE KIDS LOVE IT, TOO — EVENTUALLY: Half The Fun Of Being A Parent Is Trolling Your Children.
Expert parent-trolls don’t get half the credit we deserve.
HAVEN’T YOU HEARD? THIN IS IN: Trump’s Ridiculously Skinny Budget.
In order to offset a proposed $54 billion bump in defense spending, the administration wants to take a chunk out of most other federal agencies, often in the most cartoonishly villainous ways possible. Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Check. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps people pay their heating bills? Gone. The Chemical Safety Board, which investigates chemical accidents at federal facilities? See ya.
But those sort of programs amount to rounding errors in the context of the federal budget. The big proposed hits are to the State Department (nearly 30 percent), Environmental Protection Agency (31 percent), Agriculture Department (21 percent) and Department of Labor (20 percent).
And again, this is all to fund a 10 percent increase for the Pentagon, not even to reduce the precious deficit that conservatives always pretend to be worried about.
Longterm, entitlement spending is going to break us, and it’s a pity that Trump hasn’t shown any more guts on entitlement reform than any of his predecessors. But as for the rest, “elections have consequences.”
LIFE IN THE CRAZY YEARS: Professor Horrified to Learn Daughter likes George Washington, Tells her he was Racist. The progressives want to erase or discredit all American heroes, because that is what one does to a conquered people.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UW-La Crosse backs down after firing employee for supporting Trump policy.
Higher ed has been pretty open about choosing sides. This strikes me as unwise.
Or maybe it’s just that La Crosse is a cesspit of anti-Republican hatred: La Crosse man admits throwing nails in driveways of Republican supporters.
OOPS: Marijuana-filled cooler worth $24G donated to Goodwill.
“(The) employees were surprised when they opened the lid,” the police said in a tweet.
The Monroe Police Department said the cooler contained 3.75 pounds of pot, with an estimated street value of $24,000.
Police said Goodwill was examining its surveillance video to see if it can find an image of the person who may have dropped off the cooler.
Recreational marijuana is legal in Washington state, but 3.75 pounds is a bit more than the possession limit of one ounce.
CHANGE: Kalashnikov Is Now Building 20-Ton Tank Drones. “It’s unclear exactly what the utility of a 20 ton UCGV would actually be. If a seven ton warbot can carry a machine gun or eight anti-tank guided missiles—as many as an attack helicopter—what is the point of building a vehicle three times bigger? Could Kalashnikov be planning on building an actual remote-controlled tank with a 125-millimeter anti-tank gun?”
They’ll call it the Bolo-ski.
ROGER KIMBALL: Grandstanding Judicial Supremacy Must End.
LEGAL INSURRECTION: Hawaii TRO and 9th Circuit En Banc Denial effectively strip Trump of executive powers. “At this point, only the Supreme Court can restore presidential powers.”
Makes you wonder what Hawaii TRO and the 9th thought of President Obama’s “pen and phone.”
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Astronomers Just Found a Star Orbiting a Black Hole at 1 Percent the Speed of Light.
WHO IS MORE FOOLISH — THE FOOL OR THE FOOL WHO FOLLOWS HIM? U.S.-Style Homeland Security: Back on Australia’s Agenda?
Recycled in various forms for more than a decade, the idea of bringing together the national security responsibilities of various security agencies, units within different departments and law enforcement bodies under one superstructure is now on the desk of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Just why it is back is not clear.
Various suggestions have been put forward, from conspiracy theories about it being used as a vehicle for the ambitions of Peter Dutton, the Minister for Immigration, and his department head Michael Pezzullo, to the more prosaic idea that Prime Minister Turnbull is looking at it as part of a big shake up of administrative arrangements and a major Ministerial reshuffle after the May Federal budget.
The initial reaction to speculation that the idea of a major restructuring of the existing security machinery to create a US-style Department of Homeland Security is back on the agenda indicates that it is still an idea with only luke-warm support.
A who’s who of former senior officials with backgrounds in security policy has been publicly quotedas opposing the idea, or at least seeing no overwhelming case for it. Political interest in the idea outside those directly involved in its consideration seems non-existent.
Turnbull might want to talk to some actual Americans about DHS before he decides to sign that bill.