The measure fell under a somewhat obscure and, until recently, rarely used Congressional Review Act that allows a new Congress to undo actions of the old Congress during the first few months of the year.
It returns to the states the power to exclude health care centers that perform abortions from receiving Title X money set aside for family planning and related preventive health services for women. Title X grants cover contraception, as well as cancer and other disease screenings and treatments, but they cannot, under current federal law, be used to pay for abortion services.
It’s good to see Congress exercising its authority over the Executive branch via the CRA, and the leadership has promised much more to come.
“Dare I suggest,” writes the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, “that the quality of governance in this country has taken a downward turn of late?” Or as Casey Stengel, while managing the New York Mets on their way to a 40-120 season in 1962, reportedly asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
In successive weeks both Democrats and Republicans have shown a downward trend in the quality of governance and raised questions about whether anybody in Washington can play this game.
Start with the Democrats, and their strikeout last week in the hearings on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Their attacks on Gorsuch as a scourge of “the little guy ” were, as liberal Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman wrote, “a terrible idea.” Judges are supposed to decide cases on the law, not the net worth of litigants.
Democrats are now lining up to filibuster the nomination, on the spurious grounds that confirmation has always required 60 votes. Actually, Justices Thomas and Alito were confirmed in 1991 and 2006 with 52 and 58 votes.
Democrats are still steamed that Senate Republicans blocked Obama nominee Merrick Garland last year. But the Constitution doesn’t require the Senate to hold hearings or a vote on nominees.
Joe Biden in 1992 and Charles Schumer in 2007 argued that no nominee should be approved in a presidential election year. That makes sense in an era when Supreme Court decides partisan issues like abortion, gun control and campaign finance. Give the voters a chance to weigh in. . . .
Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?
House Republicans certainly don’t, judging from their debacle of their attempt to fulfill their seven-year promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Bell-Boeing is continuing its work to develop a roll-on/roll-off aerial refueling tanker capability for the company’s MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor at the behest of the U.S. Marine Corps. If all goes well, the Marines should have an organic aerial refueling capability for their expeditionary strike groups operational by the 2019-2020 timeframe.
The service wants the tanker capability for its fleet of Osprey so that the tilt-rotors would be able to extend the range of the Marines’ F-35B Joint Strike Fighters—which is becoming an increasingly important factor in the Pacific theatre. Dubbed, the VARS—V-22 Aerial Refueling System—the idea is for the Ospreys to top-off the F-35Bs as they takeoff from a large-deck amphibious assault ship with a full load of weapons but not fuel. The Ospreys would also be able to refuel the jets as they return—acting as a recovery tanker.
I was an early critic of the Osprey, but it keeps proving its worth in new and unexpected ways.
In truth, Trump’s action just exposes what we have known for a while: The Paris Agreement is not the way to solve global warming.
Even if every nation fulfilled everything promised — including Obama’s undertakings — it would get us nowhere near achieving the treaty’s much-hyped, unrealistic promise to keep temperature rises under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The U.N. itself has estimated that even if every country lived up to every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030, emissions would be cut by just one-hundredth of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2 C.
My analysis, similar to findings by scientists at MIT, shows that even if these promises were extended for 70 more years, then they’d only reduce temperature rises about 0.3 degrees F by 2100.
Moreover, many poor nations signed up to the treaty largely because of a promise of $100 billion a year of “climate aid” from rich nations, starting from 2020. Over the past five years, rich countries have managed to come up with only a 10th of one year’s promise.
Even its most ardent supporters treat their Paris obligations like the sham they are.
And in this country at least, calling the Paris agreement a treaty is a misnomer. Former President Obama never submitted it for Senate approval, relying instead on his pen and phone to give it more legal weight than it actually has.
The warning came Thursday from Chung Ku-youn, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
Because of its outdated aircraft, North Korea has focused on developing drones, the research fellow added. The development of various versions of the drones, known as “Banghyun,” have been under way since the early 1990s,Yonhap reported.
Recently, North Korea has developed a large stealth drone “Banghyun 5” that can carry explosive devices and radioactive materials, Kim Heung-Kwang, a defector and the head of a private think tank, said last year, Yonhap reported.
According to Business Insider, the first installment of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II is scheduled to be delivered to South Korea in 2018 – a delivery that could make North Korea’s jets obsolete, and drone development more urgent.
Until then, the Pentagon announced that the Marines have dispatched eight F-35B fighters to South Korea, “where they will be permanently stationed and on call to respond quickly if a crisis occurs on the Korean Peninsula.”
House conservatives fought back, furious at the president for picking the fight at a time when congressional Republicans are trying to move past last week’s bitter legislative defeat.
“Most people don’t take well to being bullied,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a Freedom Caucus member, told reporters. “It’s constructive in fifth grade. It may allow a child to get his way, but that’s not how our government works.”
Freedom Caucus members argued Thursday that they did Trump a favor by sinking the American Health Care Act, which was reviled by grassroots conservatives and failed to attract support from even some moderate members of the GOP conference.
Until now, Trump had differentiated himself from his predecessor by forming working relationships on Capitol Hill — and listening in private rather than tweeting in public. A little more of that ought to do him good.
Internet Noise acts like a browser extension but is really just a website that auto-opens tabs based on random Google searches. Schultz isn’t a hacker but a concerned do-gooder trying to get Americans to understand how much their online privacy is at risk. “I cannot function in civil society in 2017 without an internet connection, and I have to go through an ISP to do that,” he says.
To counter that threat, Schultz wants to make it impossible for ISPs or anyone they’ve sold your data to accurately profile you. The vote yesterday implicitly legalized such tracking by explicitly rescinding rules against it. By muddying your online identity, advertisers can’t accurately target you, and authorities can’t accurately surveil you. To create noise that blocks your signal, Schultz googled “Top 4,000 nouns” and folded the list into his code. When you hit the “Make some noise” button on his site, it harnesses Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to search those phrases, then opens five tabs based on the results. Every ten seconds it does another search and opens up five more. Within minutes, my entire browser history was a jumble. Internet Noise will keep going until you hit the “STOP THE NOISE!” button. Schultz envisions you running this while you sleep.
Even more useful if Internet Noise works in private tabs, which won’t clutter your personal browsing history with unwanted junk.
If I were the kind of person who recklessly intellectualized pop culture, I’d contend that Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club” was the coda to GenXers’ disaffection with the 1970s and ’80s, a distillation of angst and confusion created by assaults on masculinity. “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” the nameless narrator famously explains. That echoes a familiar complaint these days.
When I first read the book in my mid-20s, it wasn’t a profound literary experience, but rather something visceral — maybe culturally akin to watching “Pulp Fiction” for the first time, if “Pulp Fiction” had a moral (amoral?) center. While “Fight Club” is violent and funny, it’s also a book about despair, isolation, pessimism, and slackerism. Palahniuk’s lean sentences toy with unpleasant notions; his characters speak about men in a ways they understand but rarely express. I’m not sure there is any other book quite like it.
Rereading “Fight Club” might have made me feel older, but its satire and prose still stand out in a culture teeming with phony edginess. Perhaps it’s just sentimentality about the ’90s, but so much of today’s output seems an exercise in back patting. “Mr. Robot” or “Girls” — or, well, any other supposedly socially conscientious film, show, or novel that pops into my head while writing this — are preachy exercises that bolster notions already fully embraced by its audience. No one is challenged, because being challenged means being offended.
Not long ago, I ran across an article in which Palahniuk took credit for the use of the term “snowflake,” a moniker some people on Right use to insult the easily outraged on the Left. The line in the book is: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Get back to glad-handing GOP congressmen, Mr. President.
HOW A GENERATION LOST ITS COMMON CULTURE: “My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.”
Trump told the Post that he first thought of it after the Republican loss in the 2012 presidential election. Republicans were surprised at the loss, having thought their nominee Mitt Romney could have beat President Barack Obama, and Trump was considering how he could brand a run for president as a revival of the party and the country.
“As soon as the loss took place, I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, assuming I’m in a good position, assuming all of the things that you have to assume, which are many, I’m going to run next time,'” he told the Post. “And I sat back and I said, ‘What would be a good expression? And I said, let’s do this.'”
Trump outlined his thought process to the Post: “I said, ‘We’ll make America great.’ And I had started off ‘We Will Make America Great.’ That was my first idea, but I didn’t like it. And then all of a sudden it was going to be ‘Make America Great.’ But that didn’t work because that was a slight to America because that means it was never great before. And it has been great before.”
He continued: “So I said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ I said, ‘That is so good.’ I wrote it down. I went to my lawyers. I have a lot of lawyers in-house. We have many lawyers. I have got guys that handle this stuff. I said, ‘See if you can have this registered and trademarked.'”
One of the designers of the Hillary H-logo was Michael Bierut, who was featured in the (actually really fascinating) film Helvetica, released in 2007 to celebrate the ubiquitous font’s 50th anniversary. When I wrote a long post on the movie in 2010, I dubbed it “Liberal Fascism: The Font,” due to how effortlessly the Helvetica font unites the world of business and government into a seamless corporatist whole.
Bierut is quoted by the Washington Free Beacon today as being quite proud of the Helvetica-derived logo he created for Hillary, and apparently quite astonished that “The majority of the reviews were negative:”
He didn’t know his logo had been chosen by Clinton, however, until he saw it in Clinton’s official launch video in April.
“What we had been working on in secret was suddenly public,” Bierut wrote. “It was really happening.”
The majority of the reviews were negative, which was difficult for Bierut to deal with, but he was told by the campaign to “adopt a no-comment policy about the logo.”
Though he was unable to defend the logo publicly, he believes that “the world noticed” how great it actually was as the campaign went on and its versatility became known.
Bierut also thought that Donald Trump’s visual campaign was awful—”Bad typography; amateurish design; haphazard, inconsistent, downright ugly communications”—and that gave him added confidence as he settled into the Clinton campaign’s election night victory party in New York City.
“It was going to be the most thrilling night of my life,” Bierut wrote. “As I walked the darkening streets of midtown Manhattan toward Jacob Javits Convention Center, from blocks away I could glimpse an enormous image on the JumboTron over its main entrance, a forward-pointing arrow superimposed on a letter H.”
The night, of course, did not go as planned.
Heh.™ In the Helvetica movie, there’s a clip of Bierut that to date as received 94,000 views on YouTube, as it neatly summarizes both the film and its subject matter’s history, which is quite a double-edged sword:
The pre-war socialist modernists of Weimar Germany’s Bauhaus and Holland’s De Stijl produced some genuinely impressive graphic design and architecture, but as with political correctness, another prewar German product that flourished in America after WWII, by the 1960s, architects and designers were trapped by the soul-crushing limitations of its rules: only Mies van der Rohe steel and glass boxes were considered acceptable architectural designs, and only Helvetica-based logos were considered acceptable graphic design, destroying much Americana and great design in their wake.
Just as Pauline Kael infamously described Nixon voters as “outside my ken,” no wonder Bierut couldn’t imagine being defeated by “Bad typography; amateurish design; haphazard, inconsistent, downright ugly communications” – everything terrible except a slogan that genuinely resonated with the American people exhausted after eight years of Obama and dreading another four of the same.
And speaking of graphic design and Obama, lest you think I’m reflexively bashing the left, compare Hillary’s soulless H with the iconography of the 2008 Obama campaign. The Obama “O” logo’s brilliant graphic design – the sun rising, the red, white and blue “Morning in America” symbolism all inside Obama’s namesake initial — leaves Hillary’s clunky H in the dust, as PJM’s own Bill Whittle explained in 2009:
HMM: Mike Flynn Offers to Testify In Exchange for Immunity. “Mike Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has told the Federal Bureau of Investigation and congressional officials investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia that he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution, according to officials with knowledge of the matter. As an adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and later one of Mr. Trump’s top aides in the White House, Mr. Flynn was privy to some of the most sensitive foreign-policy deliberations of the new administration and was directly involved in discussions about the possible lifting of sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration. He has made the offer to the FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees through his lawyer but has so far found no takers, the officials said. . . . It wasn’t clear if Mr. Flynn had offered to talk about specific aspects of his time working for Mr. Trump, but the fact that he was seeking immunity suggested Mr. Flynn feels he may be in legal jeopardy following his brief stint as the national security adviser, one official said.”
THE DEATH OF FEMALE BODYBUILDING, and the rise of “Man Face.” “When Corey Everson was Ms. Olympia from 1984 to 1989, the contest was often held in Madison Square Garden in front of a sellout crowd of screaming fans. Thirty years later and it’s a sideshow at the Olympia expo, or at least it used to be.”
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