Archive for 2018
August 31, 2018
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: NBC, In-N-Out and Much, Much More. “Well this is certainly a surprise–a surprise that NBC tanked an investigation that didn’t fit in with it’s editorial agenda and industry alliances.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Will Venezuela explode before it implodes? My latest Creators Syndicate column. (It’s gpnna pode, one way or another.)
SLATE NOW HIRING BLIND PHOTO EDITORS: I, for one, support hiring physically challenged people. Or perhaps that thing on the left side of his desk is actually the Weather Control/Time Warp device he bought from Dick Cheney.
AND YOU THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings.
TAMMY BRUCE: Too much of Trump’s time is spent cleaning up Obama’s and the Democrats’ deadly messes.
Consider the focus of newly elected President Barack Obama. In 2009, the first year of his first term, Obama began a public campaign to convince people that going to the doctor can be fraught with risk, and even dangerous. He argued on multiple occasions that doctors want to perform surgeries and cut things off just to make a buck.
”‘You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,’ President Obama explained at Wednesday’s press conference. ‘The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out,’ ” the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2009.
He then immediately moved the argument to pill taking.
” ‘If there’s a blue pill and a red pill and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well,’ he asked, ‘why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?’ ” the Journal reported.
In other words, why trust a doctor when you can take a pill? Besides, it’s less expensive. That’s the point and the irony — saving your life is the only time the government is suddenly interested in cutting costs. Why? Because it means more money for the system and its bureaucrats.
Read the whole thing,
REMEMBERING JOHN MCCAIN: “John taught us how to lose.”
Going back four decades, starting with the 1980 election, 15 men and women have been nominated for president by our two major parties. Until now, only one of them had left us — Ronald Reagan, born in 1911, who announced his withdrawal from public life in 1994, a quarter-century ago.
Four of these nominees are now past 90 and two more, including McCain, passed 80; seven passed the 70 mark in recent years, and just one, Barack Obama, is under 65. We’re used to having them around. In contrast, 40 years ago there were only five living presidential nominees, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, plus landslide losers George McGovern and Barry Goldwater.
John McCain does not belong in landslide loser territory. His loss by 7 points to Barack Obama in 2008 was the widest margin since 1988, but his 45.6 percent of the popular vote was just slightly under President Trump’s 45.9. The difference in the result was that Hillary Clinton ran 5 points behind Obama.
“John taught us how to lose,” his friend and colleague Lindsey Graham said on the Senate floor Tuesday. He was referring especially to McCain’s gracious concession speech on Election Night 2008, rallying Americans to support the first black president. This was indeed a national service, one Hillary Clinton failed to provide eight years later.
Indeed.
CHANGE: Trump cancels pay raises for almost 2 million federal workers.
“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the president wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.
Under Trump’s policy, roughly 1.8 million people wouldn’t get an automatic pay boost next year, including Border Patrol and ICE agents.
That stance puts vulnerable GOP lawmakers representing northern Virginia — home to tens of thousands of federal workers — in the political crosshairs. And it sets up an all-but-certain funding fight with Congress next month, as party leaders attempt to reach a sweeping agreement to keep the government open before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1.
The deal used to be that Federal workers traded high pay for virtually guaranteed job security. Now they get better pay than almost anyone else, automatic pay raises most years, and they’re not only virtually un-fireable, but can’t or won’t be held to account even for criminal activity. And at least at the top echelons, have developed an attitude problem to go with their perceived invincibility.
All this has led to well-deserved outrage out here in flyover country, which as best as I can recall has a lot more seats than even northern Virginia.
STILL VERY LOW BY THE STANDARDS OF MY LIFETIME, BUT IT’S THE TREND THAT ULTIMATELY MATTERS: Inflation hits 2.3%, a six-year high.
STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: Argentina’s central bank hikes rates to 60% as the currency collapses.
THE REVOLT AGAINST THE MASSES: Two Years Later, the Elites Are Still Disconnected From Voters.
In our May Winning the Issues survey, we asked voters if they thought their voice was heard effectively in the political and public policy discourse on major issues. By a 21 percent to 61 percent margin, they said “no.” Republicans were at 32 percent to 49 percent (yes/no); independents at 11 percent to 72 percent, and Democrats at 20 percent to 63 percent.
Most people that we survey and talk with in focus groups aren’t angry as much as frustrated and despondent over what they see as a political system run by elites who do not understand the problems they are facing. A January 2017 Congressional Institute survey found that by a 73 percent to 15 percent margin, people agreed — elites don’t get them or their concerns.
Some political observers — elites themselves — have put the blame for the division we’re seeing in the country on ordinary people feeling that they have no purpose. That’s certainly not what I’ve seen in focus groups or in the results of our research.
In fact, it’s just the opposite. People believe that it is the elites and institutions that don’t value the average person and what they contribute to the nation.
The thinking goes: If average people actually contributed, they’d be elite, right?
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said on Wednesday that when it comes to what public policy issues are a priority, there is an enormous gap between everyday people and the elites in government, media and academia.
“I would challenge you that politics today is a lot less about ideology and a lot more about the disconnect between the people who make our laws and the people that live underneath them,” Rubio said in an interview with CBS Miami. “If you want to understand 2010, 2014, 2016, and I believe, future elections, you have to understand that there is an enormous gap between what public policy elites—people in government, the media, and academia—are focused on, and what everyday people care about. And they’re not lined up.”
Rubio added that people in politics spend too much time fighting over things that don’t matter in the “real world.”
“So I think there’s a sense across the American political spectrum that the people in office spend all their time fighting for things that don’t matter in the real world. And the things that matter in the real world aren’t getting enough attention,” Rubio said. “And so they want to send people that are going to blow it up, that are going to basically force change in the status quo, and the more the established figures in politics attack you, the stronger it makes you in the eyes of the people that want to see something different.”
It’s interesting to think what politics would be like if the news media were trustworthy.
SCOTT JOHNSON: The Ellison Enigma. “Note that Ellison declined a request for an interview by the Times. He is afraid he won’t get the light-touch Star Tribune treatment. He’s grown accustomed to it over the past 12 years.”
ASHE SCHOW: SJWs Lose It After Peter Dinklage Cast As ‘Filipino.’ There’s Just One Problem.
Dinklage, an accomplished actor who happens to have dwarfism, will play Villechaize in an upcoming HBO movie called “My Dinner with Hervé.” The “Game of Thrones” star has been accused of “whitewashing” because Villechaize was supposedly half-Filipino.
Except he wasn’t.
Villechaize was actually French, and was of German and English descent. But because he looked like he may have been Filipino — and Wikipedia told them so — social justice warriors accused Dinklage of “yellow face.”
Never have so many known so little about so much.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Sessions Mystery. “If President Trump is as furious with Attorney General Jeff Sessions as he would have us believe, then why hasn’t he replaced the AG? Or why hasn’t Sessions stepped down? It’s a puzzlement, as the king famously sang in The King and I.”
I don’t know the answer, but it sure baffles me. I know lots of people in and around the Justice Department, and I keep asking them what I’m missing. Some of them have an intriguing answer, which crops up from time to time in blogs. The answer: the Trump-Sessions falderal is a deception, distracting us from what is really going on.
I think this is a fantasy, but it’s great fun, and it bespeaks the nutsyness that characterizes contemporary politics, here and throughout the Western democracies.
Needless to say, read the whole thing.
CONSEQUENCES: Man accused of grabbing ‘MAGA’ cap, throwing drink in teen’s face indicted. “A Bexar County grand jury has indicted a 30-year-old San Antonio man who was arrested in July after he was captured on video grabbing a ‘Make America Great Again’ cap from a teenager who was dining at a San Antonio Whataburger. Bexar County court records show Kino Jimenez was indicted Wednesday on a charge of theft of person, which is a state jail felony. He was located in Universal City in July by San Antonio police robbery task force detectives who took him into custody on an arrest warrant.”
NYT, DAILY BEAST EXPOSE HOW NBC NEWS TRIED TO NIX BOMBSHELL WEINSTEIN STORY: “The accusations against NBC seem to show a cultural environment that was resistant to exposing powerful people accused of sexual misconduct. And their opposition to outing Weinstein may have been informed by their knowledge of Matt Lauer’s behavior.”
The evergreen tweets by Jim Treacher and Iowahawk remain evergreen:
August 30, 2018
AT AMAZON, save on Men’s Underwear. Also socks.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE BIG BANG THEORY: ‘My robot makes me feel like I haven’t been forgotten.’ Note the photo captioned, “The mobile Ohmni robot enables users to feel present at get togethers.” It looks very much like the robot Sheldon built as the Sargon-like receptacle* for his consciousness:
* Sorry to cross the TV sci-fi streams there.
WELL, AT LEAST THE RESPONSE SEEMS BETTER OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS: Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak could become ‘worst ever’ in East Africa, IRC warns.
HE WAS MY BROTHER-IN-LAW’S GRANDFATHER-IN-LAW, AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT RELATION TO ME HE WAS, BUT HE WAS A COOL GUY: Skiing pioneer Rolf Lanz made Tennessee ‘think snow.’ Rest in peace, Rolf.
OPEN THREAD: You know.