DOMINIC CUMMINGS: How The Brexit Referendum Was Won. “It is hard to explain the depth of TV derangement that gobbles up SW1 souls. Much of politics involves very similar tragi-comic scenes re-created by some of the basic atoms of human nature – fear, self-interest and vanity.”
Archive for 2017
February 9, 2017
PASCAL-EMMANUEL GORBY FOR THE WEEK: Liberals are wrong to gang up on Betsy DeVos.
I’m a conservative. But sometimes wonder if I could describe myself as a member of the political left.
After all, I am animated by the same moral instinct that leftists endlessly and loudly profess: the belief that a society’s moral worth is measured by how it treats its weakest, neediest, and most marginalized members. Like them, I am outraged by all the ways in which our society screws over the little guy. These convictions are born of my Christian faith and are anchored deep in my mind and heart.
But it’s those same moral convictions that too often make me angry at the political left as it currently exists in the West, and make it impossible for me to call myself a leftist. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the debate around the confirmation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her stance on school choice.
Read the whole thing. Education ought to be one of the Right’s best wedge issues, but they still haven’t figured out how to exploit it.
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Man charged after ‘multiple sexual assaults’ at West Edmonton Mall waterpark. “Soleiman Hajj Soleiman, a Syrian refugee and father of six, has since been charged with six counts of sexual assault and six counts of sexual interference.”
I imagine it’s disorienting to come from a culture of prudery and covering up, to a culture of water parks and bikinis. But that’s the move he made, and those who welcomed him should have made damn sure he understood.
DANA LOESCH: Racist Hypocrite Elizabeth Warren Is The Original Rachel Dolezal.
“I think it’s hysterical that this woman, who is a cultural appropriator, who is a race appropriator, that she has the audacity to engage in some sort of race-based attack against someone simply because she doesn’t like their party affiliation and doesn’t wish to see them confirmed to be AG,” Loesch said. “And I’ll tell you this, the closest that her ancestors ever came to American Indians was rounding up my ancestors, so let’s get that straight right now if anyone wants to have a discussion on what is or is not racist.”
In case the NRA’s stalker, Media Matters, missed it, Dana made her feelings extremely clear:
“I’ll reiterate that so the folks at Media Matters, for whom we pay the bills over there, so they can get it right. She’s a racist who appropriated an entire ethnicity so that she could get a job at Harvard,” Loesch said. “[She’s] a racist hypocrite. Democrats, and particularly all these anti-gun people, need to stop making excuses for the original Rachel Dolezal.”
Ouch.
WHY THE EURO LEADERSHIP HATES TRUMP: Most Europeans want immigration ban from Muslim-majority countries, poll reveals.
OF COURSE IT DOES: Gravy Train Flows Wide And Deep At Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Agency.
The Senate majority and minority leaders are paid $193,000 annually. Two hundred and one CFPB employees outdo Sens. Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer in pay.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin receives $223,000 per year, but that’s less than what 54 CFPB employees are paid.
Another 170 CFPB employees earn more than the secretaries of defense and state, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. All cabinet salaries are capped at $199,700, but not at the bureau. Thirty-nine CFPB employees earn more than the $230,000 paid to Vice President Mike Pence.
A total of 198 CFPB employees also earn more than their ultimate boss, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellin, who is paid $201,700.
Overall, 449 CFPB employees get at least $100,000 per year and 228 CFPB are paid more than $200,000, according to publicly available 2016 data.
These findings are part of a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group salary analysis for the consumer agency that was founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and then-President Barack Obama in 2011. The agency was created under the Dodd-Frank Act to serve as a consumer agency protecting the poor against financial fraud.
You can’t make an omelet without slushing a few funds.
FLASHBACK: 100 percent of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s donations went to Democrats.
SO MUCH LOSING, THEY’RE GONNA GET TIRED OF LOSING: WaPo: Can Democrats get used to all the losing that lies ahead?
President Trump has promised so much winning that people will get tired of it.
But for Democrats, the question is whether they can stomach the amount of losing they’re in store for.
Despite the party base digging in for fights on Cabinet nominations and Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation, they’ve come up empty. And it’s looking more and more like the fight just may not be in Senate Democrats — or at least, not to the extent the base is looking for. . . .
Democrats have a weak hand in Washington — even weaker than the one Republicans had when they were in the minority and after Democrats partly dismantled the filibuster in 2013. And as I’ve written, an unprecedented Supreme Court filibuster against a clearly qualified and likable nominee would just give Republicans a good excuse to do away with the rest of the filibuster. This would only further weaken Democrats’ ability to stop Trump, stripping them of their last real lever of power.
And even worse for Democrats is that the path back to congressional majorities isn’t apparent, no matter what they do today. Despite Trump’s historically bad image for a new president, the 2018 electoral map is a daunting one for Democrats, with very few good opportunities to win the three Senate seats they need and plenty of tough seats to defend. The GOP also retains its big advantage on the House map, which would require a huge Democratic wave to sweep Republicans out of power.
It’s so daunting that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the much-heralded political mind behind Democrats’ successful campaign to win the House majority a decade ago, says the idea of retaking majorities in 2018 is pie in the sky.
“It took us a long time to get this low; it ain’t gonna happen in 2018,” Emanuel said Monday at Stanford University. “Take a chill pill, man. You’ve got to be in this for the long haul.”
Well, I can’t tell you how many “permanent majorities” I’ve seen crumble in my lifetime. But yeah, the Dems are in a bad position. They shouldn’t get too crazy, and the GOP shouldn’t get too cocky. Because things always turn around eventually.
February 8, 2017
A NEW SCIENCE FICTION/FUTURE HISTORY ANTHOLOGY, based on California seceding.
WHY ARE DEMOCRATS SO RACIST? Video: Sen. Tim Scott Reads His Hate Mail On The Senate Floor — ‘I Left Out All The Ones That Used The N-Word.’ “South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott read the hate mail he has received for supporting President Trump’s attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor Wednesday evening. . . . ‘If you sign up to be a black conservative, the chances are very high you will be attacked,’ the South Carolina Republican stated. ‘It comes with the territory, and I’ve had it for 20 years, two decades, but my friends and my staff, they’re not used to the level of animus that comes in from the liberal left.'”
DONALD SENSING: Lefty Coup Hopes Go Mainstream.
Was my paper on military coups timely, or what?
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research. It’s at Cornell, alma mater of Keith Olbermann.
JOHN C. WRIGHT: “Conservatism, while perfectly sound when facing Commies in a Cold War, Nazis in a World War, or Slavers in a Civil War, has no defense to offer when the fascistic cultural Marxism seeps peacefully into the ivory tower, the theater, the press, the halls of power.” Well, this is why you got Trump.
AUTHENTICITY: New York Times Touts Senator Schumer’s Recipe for Pork Meatloaf. “If anyone at the Times wondered even for a second why a Jewish senator would be promoting a recipe for a dish that violates the dietary laws of the Jewish religion, it’s not evident from the story, which portrays the recipe as somehow a perfect fit for the senator.” Oh, I think it is.
DOCUMENTED BUT UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENON FINALLY EXPLAINED? Sandia researchers offer explanation for hissing and popping noises heard from meteors. It’s a case of radiated heat producing expansion — and thus sound — in air and other materials near the listener.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE NANNY STATE AND THE EDUCATION BUBBLE: Single mother in Buffalo, NY says she was arrested and her kids removed from her because she was homeschooling.
CHANGE: Jeff Sessions Confirmed As Trump’s Attorney General. I love this: “Democrats changed the rules in 2013 so that only a simple majority is needed to approve a president’s Cabinet nominees. Under those rules, the Senate easily confirmed Sessions in a party-line 52-47 vote, and was helped by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had said he would support Sessions’ nomination.”
THE ULTIMATE WAGON? 2018 Mercedes-AMG E63 S Wagon. I liked my Passat wagon — except for the reliability problems — and I often wonder why so many people drive sport-utes when wagons have similar cargo space and more civilized driving characteristics.
HERE’S JOHNNY: Jack Nicholson, Kristen Wiig to Star in ‘Toni Erdmann’ Remake.
Nicholson had been out of the public eye for so long, I was certain his health or acuity was in decline.
AS EVEN THE NYT ADMITS, THE CASE FOR DOING SO IS PRETTY STRONG: White House Weighs Terrorist Designation for Muslim Brotherhood.
President Barack Obama long resisted pressure to declare it a terrorist organization.
But the Brotherhood calls for a society governed by Islamic law, and some of its former members and offshoots — most notably Hamas, the Palestinian group whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel — have been tied to attacks. Some advisers to Mr. Trump have viewed the Brotherhood for years as a radical faction secretly infiltrating the United States to promote Shariah law. They see the order as an opportunity to finally take action against it. . . .
The proposal to declare it a terrorist organization has been paired with a plan to similarly designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to current and former officials briefed on the deliberations. Leaders of the corps and its Quds Force unit have already been put on a government terrorist list, but Republicans have advocated adding the corps itself to send a message to Iran.
Well, they’re both terrorist organizations, so calling them such isn’t much of a stretch.
Of course, the usual suspects object: “Among those objecting is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which describes itself as the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States.”
It describes itself that way, but how many members does it actually have? The story, as usual, doesn’t say. But last I heard their membership was minuscule. “For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout.”
NEW FROM DON SURBER: Trump the Establishment: The Elitists Never Learned in 2016. (Bumped).
MORNING CONSULT: Poll: Trump’s travel ban enjoys majority support, 55/38. But his approval rating is dropping. I wonder if he’ll be the opposite of Obama, who always polled better than his policies did.