KANYE WEST: Why Liberals Are So Freaked About Him.
Archive for 2018
May 4, 2018
MONICA SHOWALTER: Democrats’ worst nightmare about Kanye West just came true.
The shift in black opinion represents a major break in the cultural firewall that has kept black people from embracing the Republican Party and left them taken for granted by Democrats. Do Democrats pay any attention to widespread black views on gay marriage or transgenderism, for example? Do they pay any attention to whether black teenagers need jobs and how calls for minimum wage hikes shut them out of the market? Do Democrats pay any attention to how gun-free zones facilitate violence in black neighborhoods in places such as Chicago? Do they pay any attention to how illegal immigration has driven down the wages of black unskilled workers? Not in the least: The only thing they ask themselves is where else black people can go – and well, now they have their answer, because Kanye opened that door.
Kanye’s own bad experiences with self-centered, rude Democrats such as President Obama, as well as his pleasant experiences with President Trump, probably had much to do with his own epiphany, as did his concern about the sufferings of black people by violence in Chicago. But it wasn’t just a loud endorsement of President Trump that went on with his series of tweets. He not only broke the barrier to blacks supporting Republicans, but did two other things to change perceptions. He made a massive series of tweets about the importance of “love” and how he is centering his life on “love” (and talking like that takes a lot of courage), and he tweeted a lot about thinking freely. Both of these things went a long way to breaking the perception among blacks and others that Republicans are hateful and that Republicans are narrow-minded.
There’s nothing more narrow-minded than identity politics, which is the modern version of Marx’s false consciousness, which is a gussied up version of “You’re just stupid if you don’t agree with me.”
FEDERAL JUDGE: THIS MUELLER THING KINDA LOOKS LIKE A WITCH HUNT TO ME:
A federal judge on Friday sharply criticized Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal case in Virginia against President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and openly questioned whether Mueller exceeded his prosecutorial powers by bringing it.
“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia said.
At tense hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the judge said Mueller should not have “unfettered power” in his Russia probe and that the charges against Manafort did not arise from the investigation into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Indeed.
US District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III suggested that the reason prosecutors are going after Manafort is to try to get him to flip on President Donald Trump.
“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Ellis said to prosecutors. “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. … What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
Well, that’s clearly true.
UPDATE: You know it’s bad when even Vox has this headline: Robert Mueller’s team just had a really rough day in court: Judge T.S. Ellis III questioned whether Mueller had just charged Manafort to try to “get” President Trump.
Related: Rod Rosenstein is doing a star turn as principled defender of the law, but he’s performed abysmally as deputy attorney general, and President Donald Trump would be fully justified in firing him. “Neglecting to place restrictions on the Mueller investigation is grounds for his removal.” (Bumped).
I HATE IT WHEN THIS HAPPENS: Robot Stingrays Sunk Your Battleship.
RELIGION OF PEACE: ‘Go to Hell!’ Egypt Responds to French Call to Revise Koran. “Sarkozy and 300 other French notables asked them to remove the commands to murder.”
To be fair though, I wouldn’t expect Christian leaders to take seriously any Muslim call to rewrite parts of the Bible.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Media Is Killing the Democratic Party.
Reports from the front lines of the Democrat-Media Complex:
What the Democratic Party has not recognized is that Trump’s legal dramas, though good for ratings, have done little to benefit the political opposition. On the contrary: President Trump’s approval rating has been on the upswing. He stands at 44 percent approval in the Real Clear Politics average, his highest rating in a year. That number might well be slightly higher, given the existence of “Shy Trump Voters” who are afraid of the stigma attached to approving of the president.
Meanwhile, since December, the Democratic advantage on the congressional generic ballot has been cut in half, from plus 13 points to plus 6.5 points. In a new survey, pollsters for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund, while optimistic about Democratic chances in the fall, nonetheless concede that the party’s “momentum has stalled in the last few months.”
Why? Well, the most obvious answer is the economy, with its strong job market and positive wage growth. One could also say that voters like peacemakers, and so have embraced President Trump’s desire to meet with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Both explanations sound reasonable to me.
But I would also suggest another one: The American electorate has not changed fundamentally in the decades since the Clinton presidency, when in the words of the late Jeffrey Bell it held a “bifurcated view” that separated the man from his policies. And as long as the policies seemed to be working, the man’s opponents found themselves wrapped around the axle of personal disgust, waiting in frustration for voters to recognize and repudiate defects of character that were all too plain to see.
Kurt Schlichter was right: They don’t like playing under the new rules they made.
SWAMPLAND: Trump’s Appointees Pledged Not to Lobby After They Leave. Now They’re Lobbying.
Glenn’s revolving-door surtax — now with bipartisan appeal!
#THEMTOO: No 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Panel Says Amid Sexual Abuse Scandal. “The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature said on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of not naming a laureate this year — not because of a shortage of deserving writers, but because of the infighting and public outrage that have engulfed the group over a sexual abuse scandal.”
Our political and cultural betters are anything but.
THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE, SHE IS FIERCE: On this day in 1776, Rhode Island (officially the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) renounced its allegiance to George III—a full two months before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. For such a little squirt, Rhode Island was fiercely independent. It refused to send a delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and for a long time refused to ratify the Constitution the Convention produced. Finally, after the Constitution was up and running, President Washington was inaugurated, and the 1st Congress was assembled, Rhode Island was reminded that if it isn’t part of the United States and America, then it’s a foreign country. If it’s a foreign country, then tariffs can (and likely will) be imposed. Meanwhile, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, which reduced some of the concerns of Rhode Island citizens. Rhode Island decided to be “in.”
So if Crown Prince Bin Salman is serious about introducing pluralism to his country — and there’s no denying it now — this one big and in-your-Wahhabi-face way of going about it.
IN THE MAIL: Published by Castalia House, Wardogs Inc. 1: Battlesuit Bastards (Wardogs Incorporated)
FASCISM IS THE NEW ANTIFASCISM: L.A. Antifa Group Hangs Trump in Effigy, Calls for ‘Revolutionary Violence’ Against ‘the Capitalist State.’ “We must carry out military actions against the enemies of the people!”
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Kanye West banned from radio station over recent comments.
OOPS: Twitter Tells Users To Change Passwords After Discovering Glitch.
The company says it fixed the bug and there is no indication of a breach or misuse.
Still, it’s urging its 330 million users to change their passwords as a precaution.
The issue appeared through a bug in Twitter’s password hashing. It’s a standard security practice for companies to encrypt passwords to store on its internal servers. So if your password is “12345” — which we highly recommend against — it wouldn’t show up on the website’s database as “12345,” but rather a random mix of numbers and letters representing each character.
Twitter said it stored encrypted passwords using a hashing algorithm called bcrypt. But the social network had stored the password in plain-text before it was encrypted. Twitter said this happened because of a bug. The company did not respond to a request for comment to clarify what the bug was.
If you’re still on Twitter, here are instructions for changing your password.
IF YOU’RE FROM BANGLADESH, $30K GETS YOU SMUGGLED INTO THE US VIA MEXICO: It costs more if you want to be smuggled alone instead of with a bunch of other illegals on a tractor-trailer, but being from Bangladesh, odds are you are accustomed to over-crowding. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby reports on the swelling tide of border-crossers who are not from south of the border. You know smuggling humans into the U.S. is extremely lucrative because, as one of the Border Patrol agents tells Kirby, “every sector of the border is controlled by a particular drug cartel.”