Archive for 2017
October 20, 2017
BUSINESS AS USUAL: John Cornyn holds up top White House nominee.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn is frustrating both administration officials and conservative movement leaders by holding up the confirmation of Russ Vought to be Mick Mulvaney’s right hand man at the Office of Management and Budget.
Cornyn — a member of Senate leadership who has a strong say over the floor schedule — has made it clear that Vought will be held up until he gets more funding for Texas’ hurricane relief, according to three sources close to the situation. It’s unclear how Cornyn has phrased his demand or how much extra money, exactly, he’s asking for, but his message has been heard loud and clear by top Trump administration officials.
Cornyn’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Sources said the next supplemental bill — and therefore Vought’s confirmation — could be held up for at least another month.
This White House has suffered some serious staffing injuries, but not all of them have been self-inflicted.
SPACE: Blue Origin just sent a jolt through the aerospace industry. “The company’s success is all the more significant because it was largely funded by Jeff Bezos, without direct cost to taxpayers. Up until a few years ago, every US-based rocket engine was funded almost entirely through government contracts, such as the Saturn V’s F-1 and the space shuttle’s main engines. SpaceX changed the model by building its Merlin rocket engine through a fixed-price contract to fulfill its launch commitments for NASA, but that engine was still built largely with taxpayer money. SpaceX has invested significant amounts of its own funds into its new Raptor engine, which has a sea-level thrust of 380,000 pounds. But this engine has yet to undergo full-scale testing. Meanwhile, Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine is more powerful, at 550,000 pounds of thrust—it is in fact the most powerful US rocket engine developed since Rocketdyne built the RS-68 engine two decades ago.”
Whatever other criticisms you have about Bezos and Musk, if they get us into space in a serious way that pays for all.
SARAH HOYT: The Left’s Long Post-Election Tantrum.
I started noticing some acts of truly bizarre public performance during the Bush years. It was as though, with Motor Voter and the ease of election falsification, they’d assumed no Republican candidate would ever displace theirs, and therefore they went utterly unhinged when Bush won. From trying to disqualify the election results, to bizarre displays including hanging him in effigy, they were off the reservation. On the other hand, I understand their public displays were always fairly unhinged, including the “marching around with giant papier-mache puppets.” But even then I thought that “women dancing around in vulva” (unlike them, I know anatomy) “costumes” was a step beyond.
Maybe those costumes and the silliness of them were around before, and it was only their being reported on new media that made them so completely insane.
In fact, I think what is happening is a combination of New Media plus their completely and totally losing their minds more and more every year, culminating in Trump’s election.
Trump’s election does seem to mark some kind of watershed, in that now they’re being definitely non-normal not just in street displays, but in their own channels and their own publications.
Read the whole thing.
Sarah’s observation dovetails with something I’ve noticed over the last few weeks or months. Opening Salon or Slate or various other lefty publications was almost guaranteed to generate something blog-worthy, even if only to rebut or to cringe. But if you’ve noticed far fewer links here to those sites, it’s because the material there has gone so far over-the-top that I won’t waste your time with it.
PERHAPS SARAH HOYT WILL LET ME BORROW HER SHOCKED FACE: Harvey Weinstein doesn’t seem to be taking sex rehab seriously.
HMM: IRS to block, suspend tax returns that lack Obamacare disclosures.
“Taxpayers remain obligated to follow the law and pay what they may owe at the point of filing,” the IRS said in a description of the new policy.
The ACA requires most people to have some form of health insurance coverage or pay a tax penalty — a requirement known as Obamacare’s individual mandate.
That penalty is the higher of 2.5 percent of adjusted gross household income or $695 per adult and $347.50 per child under age 18.
The agency, in an online notification to tax professionals, said that in the upcoming tax filing season “the IRS will not accept electronically filed tax returns where the taxpayer does not address the health coverage requirements of the Affordable Care Act.”
“Returns filed on paper that do not address the health coverage requirements may be suspended pending the receipt of additional information and any refunds may be delayed,” the IRS said.
I had thought the White House had more or less gutted the individual mandate.
IN THE MAIL: From David Weber, In Enemy Hands.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
“THOSE CALLING FOR A WORLD WITHOUT HATE SPEECH NEED NOT LOOK FAR AWAY OR FAR BACK TO ENVISION THE SOCIETY THEY SEEK TO CREATE. WE ENCOURAGE THEM TO SIMPLY OPEN THEIR EYES.” Great column by Zach Greenberg at FIRE.
TRUST REQUIRES TRUSTWORTHINESS, AND OUR RULING CLASS IS ANYTHING BUT. Collapsing social trust is the biggest problem we don’t discuss.
The main toxin ruining our politics and coarsening our society is the loss of trust. Not Trump, or evil liberals, or the dishonest media, or right-wing populism, or insufficient fervor for this or that candidate or cause—but rather the widespread and growing belief among Americans that many if not most of their fellow citizens lack basic honesty, integrity, and reliability. Our loss of trust in one another is arguably our biggest social problem, mainly because it helps to drive so many others, from family disintegration to political polarization to post-fact public debate. . . .
Evidence of our loss of trust in one another is clear and abundant. For example, a 2013 study reports: “Trust in others and confidence in institutions, two key indicators of social capital, reached historic lows among Americans in 2012 in two nationally representative surveys that have been administered since the 1970s.”1 In Bowling Alone, the great sociologist Robert D. Putnam similarly describes a decades-long U.S. trend of “declining generalized trust and reciprocity.”2
Today, three main types of mistrust course through our society. One is partisan mistrust: Americans increasingly believe that those with whom they disagree politically are not only misguided but are also bad people, members of an essentially alien out-group.
A second is class mistrust: The approximately 30 percent of Americans with four-year college degrees are mostly thriving; the other 70 percent are falling further and further behind on nearly every measure. Upscale Americans are increasingly isolated from and ignorant about the rest of the country, and large numbers of middle and working class Americans resent and mistrust the nation’s elite class.
And a third is governing mistrust: Huge numbers of Americans no longer believe that their elected leaders, including those from their own party, are honest or can be trusted even to try to do the right thing.
All of these feed on one another, but it’s the failure of those who run institutions to be trustworthy that is the worst. They clearly care more about their standing within their peer group than anything else, and that’s a recipe for institutional failure.
THEY ALL KNEW: Tarantino on Weinstein: ‘I Knew Enough to Do More Than I Did.’
Quentin Tarantino, the Hollywood director most closely tied to Harvey Weinstein, has known for decades about the producer’s alleged misconduct toward women and now feels ashamed he did not take a stronger stand and stop working with him, he said in an interview.
“I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said, citing several episodes involving prominent actresses. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”
“I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard,” he added. “If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”
As Weinstein-employed screenwriter Scott Rosenberg wrote on Monday, “So what if he was coming on a little strong to some young models who had moved mountains to get into one of his parties? So what if he was exposing himself, in five-star hotel rooms, like a cartoon flasher out of “MAD MAGAZINE” (just swap robe for raincoat!) Who were we to call foul? Golden Geese don’t come along too often in one’s life.”
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Driven by unrest and violence, Venezuelans are fleeing their country by the thousands.
“Everything there has turned ugly. There’s hunger and crime. You can’t leave your house after 5 p.m. because you’re going to be robbed or killed,” Linares said, adding that she now earns enough to afford three meals a day, an impossibility for many these days in Venezuela.
“I miss my mother, my house and at times I feel out of place here, like in someone else’s home,” Linares said. “But Peru has opened its doors to us.”
Linares is part of the rising tide of Venezuelan immigrants washing over Latin America as conditions at home steadily worsen. Arrivals in Peru have roughly doubled since last year and more than 20,000 Venezuelans have either applied for or received a special residency permit since the government began offering them in February.
And here’s the one mention of socialism in the lengthy Los Angeles Times report:
Eduardo Febres Cordero, 32, a former Venezuelan consular official from Maracay, decided to stay in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, after resigning in 2011 and marrying an Ecuadorean woman. He says President Maduro “betrayed” the socialist revolution begun by his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, whom he served as a student leader.
Scapegoats, scapegoats everywhere, but never a socialist to blame.
AMBITION SHOULD BE MADE OF STERNER STUFF: Cambridge University students have been warned that Shakespeare plays may distress them. As one academic quoted in the article says,
If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.
What is it about places called Cambridge?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prof frets that female students don’t feel oppressed enough.
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Fusion Collusion: Democrats are trying to protect the firm’s secrets—so the GOP should keep digging.
Washington is obsessed with the word “collusion” but has little understanding of its true meaning. The confusion might explain why D.C. has missed the big story of collusion between Fusion GPS and the Democratic Party.
To read the headlines, a poor, beleaguered opposition-research firm was humiliated and constitutionally abused this week by partisan Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Fusion’s lawyers sent a 17-page letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, accusing him of misdeeds, declaring his subpoenas invalid, and invoking a supposed First Amendment right to silence. Yet the firm’s founders, the story went, were hauled in nonetheless and forced to plead the Fifth. “No American should experience the indignity that occurred today,” Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, declared.
Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear jobs, but few have noticed the operation it’s conducting against the lawmakers investigating it. The false accusations against Mr. Nunes—that he’s acting unethically and extralegally, that he’s sabotaging the Russia probe—are classic.
This is a firm that in 2012 was paid to dig through the divorce records of a Mitt Romney donor. It’s a firm that human-rights activist Thor Halvorssen testified was hired to spread malicious rumors about him. It’s a firm that financier Bill Browder testified worked to delegitimize his efforts to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer beaten to death in a Russian prison.
It’s the firm behind the infamous “dossier” accusing Donald Trump of not just unbecoming behavior but also colluding with Russia. Republicans are investigating whether the Fusion dossier was influenced by Russians, and whether American law enforcement relied on that disinformation for its own probe.
But Fusion’s secret weapon in its latest operation is the Democratic Party, whose most powerful members have made protecting Fusion’s secrets their highest priority.
The obvious inference is that Fusion’s secrets are their secrets, and they’re devastating.
NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: NORTH KOREAN MILITARY OFFICIALS WATCH ‘MORNING JOE,’ BELIEVE TRUMP IS ‘MENTALLY ILL.’
Well, Joe’s always seemed like a bit of a Juche, to be honest. And Pyongyang approving of the far-left Comcast-owned channel does put this infamous network promo from 2013 into perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjczwQOnMqg
ACCOUNTABILITY, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: B-21 cost info to stay secret despite new Air Force leadership.
Air Force leaders claim that the B-21 program is going swimmingly and has remained on budget and on schedule. Earlier this year, Gen. Stephen Wilson, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, told lawmakers it had recently completed its preliminary design review.
The service plans to buy at least 100 Raiders — although that number could change as a result of the Trump administration’s defense strategy review and the Air Force’s bomber road map — at a price of about $550 million (in 2010 dollars) per copy.
The engineering and manufacturing development phase is being carried out under a separate, cost-plus contract that is estimated to amount to about $21.4 billion.
“The program is on track,” Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the service’s top uniformed acquisition official, said Tuesday. “What I will say is that we are marching to the acquisition program baseline timelines that we’ve established, and we don’t have anything … that has risen to a red flag.”
I’d be willing to cut the Air Force more slack if they had a procurement history showing that they’d earned it.
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: Cornell’s Black Student Disunion: A radical group calls on the university to disfavor immigrants.
The BSU argued that “the Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America.”
There’s a contradiction here. For years liberal writers have blamed black poverty and undereducation on racism—the experience of being more likely to be pulled over by police, to be looked at suspiciously in department stores, to be discriminated against in schools and the workplace.
But it doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not to the same degree, among immigrants. “The more strongly black immigrant students identify with their specific ethnic origins, the better they perform [academically],” Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld observed in their 2014 book, “The Triple Package.” . . .
Why does racism not seem to keep black immigrants down? The answer is obvious: Black immigrant culture tends to value academic achievement and believe it is possible no matter what happened to your ancestors. As one business school graduate born to Nigerian parents tells Ms. Chua and Mr. Rubenfeld: “If you start thinking about or becoming absorbed in the mentality that the whole system is against us then you cannot succeed.”
Groups like the Cornell BSU insist that the system is out to get them and they cannot succeed. This makes the presence of high-achieving immigrant black students inconvenient. Between diversity and victimhood as the highest good in today’s academia, it’s hard to know where to place your money.
None of this is doing anything to shore up higher educations diminishing reputation.
DO TELL: The Hill: Judging by Mueller’s staffing choices, he may not be very interested in justice. He’s hopelessly compromised, and should step down.
GREAT MOMENTS IN RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY FROM THE LEFT: “Kirkus forces a female, Muslim book reviewer to change her review,” Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic tweets. “This is what totalitarianism looks like.” The Vulture article she links to is giant blinking warning sign of what happens when the current leftwing obsession with identity politics overruns a literary criticism site.
Meanwhile in the Jerusalem Post, “Actress Mayim Bialik has apologized following a backlash against her New York Times op-ed suggesting that dressing and acting modestly is protection against sexual assault and harassment..”
Or as Yoram Hazony, the author of The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture tweets, “Translation: Actress recants traditional Orthodox Jewish views after being publicly shamed for expressing them.”