2103 FLASHBACK: Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite. “This Weimar decadence is very bad. What comes after the decadence is likely to be worse, and if you listen closely you can almost hear the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.”
Archive for 2017
August 25, 2017
IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO? Trump Has Made Progressives Fall in Love With Federalism.
It’s almost as though they should never have fallen in love with overweening centralized power in the first place.
THE INSTA-WIFE: Do Men Like “Mean Girls?” Well, Hillary landed Bill.
CHRISTOPHER JACOBS: Here’s The Obamacare Grand Bargain That Will Satisfy Both Republican Factions.
Rather than constructing substantively cumbersome waiver arrangements—the legislative equivalent of a camel being a horse written by committee—Occam’s Razor suggests a simpler, cleaner solution: Preserving the status quo (i.e., the enhanced federal match) on Medicaid expansion in exchange for full repeal of Obamacare’s insurance regulations at the federal level.
A “grand bargain” in this vein would give Senate moderates a clear win on Medicaid expansion, while providing conservatives their desired outcome on Obamacare’s regulations. For this conservative at least, the regulations represent the heart of the law, prompting both its spending on exchange subsidies—to offset the higher premium costs from the regulatory mandates—and the taxes needed to fund that spending. Expelling the regulations from the federal statute books would represent a clear step towards the promise of repealing Obamacare “root and branch,” and return control of health insurance to the states, where it lay from 1947’s McCarran-Ferguson Act until Obamacare.
ObamaCare was never meant to be the Democrats’ “final solution” on health coverage, and repealing it in this political climate is also going to have be a multistep process.
LOOK OUT! FASCISTS ARE MAKING MUSIC! Dennis Prager explains in The Daily Signal how he was mugged by The New York Times in a story about his (gasp!) conducting an orchestra.
The Times writer wasted no time in portraying me [as a bigot]. He wrote, “a number of [the musicians] are refusing to play the fund-raiser, saying that allowing the orchestra to be conducted by Mr. Prager, who has suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest, among other contentious statements, would be tantamount to endorsing and normalizing bigotry.”
Prager continues with a series of explanations on how a clever but dishonest reporter (and his or her asleep-at-the-switch editors) can create a political narrative out of thin air:
“Lesson No. 1: When the mainstream media write or say that a conservative “suggested” something that sounds outrageous, it usually means the conservative never actually said it.”
Gee, it’s almost as if there were a standard operating procedure to create a smear!
WELL, HE’S NOT WRONG: Trump blames GOP leaders for debt ceiling ‘mess.’
August 24, 2017
BLAME MILLENNIALS FOR KILLING A WHOLE HOST OF BUSINESSES, FROM RESTAURANTS TO PAPER PRODUCTS.
Well that tends to happen with less income and higher taxes. As Steve likes to say, “If Millennials ever wake up to how badly they’ve been robbed and by whom, the political reckoning will be earth-shattering.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: Young Chinese are ‘too fat and masturbate too much to pass army fitness tests.’
A rising number of young Chinese people are failing fitness tests required to join the army because they are too fat and masturbate too much, state media has proclaimed.
The high rejection rate has triggered concerns that there are not enough youths in good physical condition to fill the ranks of the Chinese army.
A poor diet and frequent masturbation, leading to abnormally large testicular veins, are believed to be behind falling fitness levels, according to a report published in state-run military newspaper the People’s Liberation Army Daily.
Authorities also think the constant use of smartphones and drinking water with too high a mineral content are to blame.
In one city, 56.9 per cent of potential recruits were rejected after failing fitness tests. One in five was simply deemed too fat.
See, before the hungry new powers can challenge us, we’ve already brought them down to our level.
Well, maybe not all the way down: Help! My Boyfriend Cried All Week Because He Was Afraid of the Eclipse.
LONGTIME ESPN HOST SHARES NAME WITH INFAMOUS NAZI WHO SUPERVISED SLAVE LABOR:
ESPN refused to acknowledge whether or not it had plans to pull pundit Robert Ley off of the air, despite the fact that he has the same name as an infamous Nazi official.
The original Ley was head of the German workers’ front, and was quoted as saying that “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep” — now a mantra for CNN and Google in 2017.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Dungeons & Dragons Promises To Make Its Adventures More Queer.
As Ace of Spades tweets, “Dungeons & Dragons finally figured out what’s been holding the game back: Not queer enough, it turns out. My 8th grade bullies disagree.”
HILLARY CLINTON: IT TAKES A DISTILLERY.
Ironically, this headline applies to both the reader trying to hack his or her way through Hillery’s new book, as well as the author itself, it seemed at times during her various campaign misadventures.
#HillarysNextBookTitle
Guzzlers Travels pic.twitter.com/0XzNh9QlvV— Lizzy Lou Who? (@_wintergirl93) August 24, 2017
THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: First picture of functional SpaceX spacesuit. “Worth noting that this actually works (not a mockup).”
OUT: NOTHING CAN STOP A SMART, TOUGH WOMAN. IN: Poor Hillary, intimidated in the debates by big, bad Donald Trump.
TWEET OF THE DAY:
POINTS AND FIGURES: Some Common Sense Economics.
LIKE SPOCK AND DEANNA TROI, THERE ARE LIMITS TO TOM BROKAW’S PSIONIC POWERS. Brokaw can read the mind of every journalist past and present…
…But despite having the collective reporting resources of NBC, CNBC and MSNBC to help him, somehow just can’t ascertain Obama’s worldview on the eve of the 2008 election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMas1bVidw
Just think of Tom as a Democrat operative with a lavalier, and it all makes sense.
THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Germany Considers Sale of Parasitic Worm Eggs … as Food.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Trend? More Naked Men Behaving Badly.
The 21st century isn’t working out quite the way I had hoped.™
WELL, IT’S AN INFERIOR PRODUCT THAT’S ACTUALLY BAD FOR YOU, PUSHED BY THE GOVERNMENT/MEDIA COMPLEX, SO YEAH: Is Communism Like Margarine?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Gender Ideology’s Kindergarten Commissars. “Schools are teaching small children about transgenderism — without parents’ permission or knowledge.”
AT AMAZON, still on sale, Rain-Mate Compact Travel Umbrella – Windproof.
THE ACLU TURNED WHITE SUPREMACIST SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED. The ACLU’s Twitter account gets a lesson in political correctness:
Earlier this week, the Twitter account for the American Civil Liberties Union posted an innocuous picture of a toddler wearing a tyke-sized ACLU T-shirt with the words “Free Speech” on the front. The little one was holding a stuffed animal in one hand and a mini American flag in the other. The tweet that accompanied the photo said “This is the future that ACLU members want.”
Within moments, the tweet was descended upon from the corners of the outrage twitter-sphere because that’s what social media is now. The great social injustice committed here by the ACLU? The child in the picture was white and therefore declared as racist and propping up white supremacists…Within the hour, however, the ACLU posted a weird retraction of the image, stating “When your Twitter followers keep you in check and remind you that white supremacy is everywhere,” along with a Kermit the Frog gif.
Read the whole thing.