Archive for 2019
February 7, 2019
AT AMAZON, trends in low-priced watches.
IT’S NOT THAT THEY’RE ABANDONING THEIR PRINCIPLES, IT’S JUST THAT THEIR ONLY REAL PRINCIPLE IS STAYING IN POWER: Democrats mute calls for Va. resignations with power at risk.
DOING SO WOULD GIVE TRUMP ADDITIONAL LEVERAGE IN TRADE NEGOTIATIONS, WHICH IS WHY PELOSI WILL REFUSE: GOP Senators Ask Pelosi to Invite Taiwan President to Speak to Congress. “Address would infuriate China, ‘send a powerful message that the United States and the American people will always stand with the oppressed, and never the oppressor’.”
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Court upholds conviction of girl who urged suicide with texts and calls.
SPACE: The Story of the Saturn V.
DAVID CATRON: Pelosi Outsmarted Herself on the SOTU.
By the time he entered the House chamber, it was already obvious that the national audience would very likely exceed last year’s larger-than-usual viewership for such speeches. This is not typical for the SOTU address. The normal pattern is a reasonably large audience for a president’s first address, followed by a gradual decline in public interest each year thereafter. This was certainly true for Trump’s predecessor. Tuesday evening’s speech, however, drew a larger audience than did the President’s 2018 address. According to a report in the Hill, broadcast TV numbers from Nielsen show the audience share was 10 percent over last year’s speech:
The four major broadcast outlets — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — combined for a 16.3 overnight rating during the address Tuesday night, which could result in total viewership of approximately 49 million when final numbers, to include the cable news networks and other outlets, are in later Wednesday.
Moreover, CBS and CNN conducted polls of public reaction to Trump’s words and the vast majority of viewers liked what they heard. The CBS/YouGov poll found that 76 percent of the public approved of the address, including 97 percent of Republicans and a whopping 82 percent of Independents. And a majority of viewers agreed that the President accomplished one of his primary goals for the address — improving national unity. According to CBS, “Fifty-six percent of Americans who watched tonight feel the president’s speech will do more to unite the country.” On specific issues, an unambiguous majority of viewers agreed with the President.
It isn’t just that Trump had the stronger arguments (although he did), or that the Democrats behaved badly (although they did). Almost just as important — and as subtext, probably the most important element — is that Trump looked like he was having fun up there.
That’s no small thing, especially after eight years of Obama, who never looked like he enjoyed these things (because he admittedly didn’t), and eight years of Bush, who wasn’t often very good at them.
GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: Nancy Pelosi on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Green New Deal” mantra:
Pelosi’s efforts have paid off with Ocasio-Cortez, especially. The freshmen superstar told NPR on Wednesday that Pelosi has “done a really good job so far,” even as Pelosi has sidestepped one of the left’s top priorities — a “Green New Deal.”
Progressives had demanded a special climate panel tasked specifically with drafting legislation to end the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels in just over a decade and transform the economy.
The California Democrat did agree to launch a select committee on climate change, similar to the one she created back in 2007, when she first became speaker. Pelosi said Wednesday, however, the panel would not be tasked with writing a specific bill, and brushed off the idea of the Green New Deal as a “suggestion.”
“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”
I think what Pelosi means that we’ll have to pass the “Green New Deal” in order to find out what’s in it. But don’t worry — I’m sure that if you like your car and air conditioning, you can keep your car and air conditioning.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I might support the “Green New Deal” if it includes my plan to ban air conditioning in Washington, DC.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” How a Tiny Cabal Galvanized Venezuela’s Opposition.
When Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela’s interim president on Jan. 23 in front of a crowd of 100,000 people under a broiling sun, some leading opposition figures had no idea he would do so, say people who work with Mr. Guaidó and other top leaders. That included a few standing alongside him. A stern look of shock crossed their faces. Some quietly left the stage.
“What the hell is going on?” one member of a group of politicians wrote to the others in a WhatsApp group chat. “How come we didn’t know about this.”
The plan was largely devised by a group of four opposition leaders—two in exile, one under house arrest and one barred from leaving the country. It came together only in recent weeks, as Mr. Maduro prepared to start a second six-year term on Jan. 10 after elections widely seen as a sham. Mr. Maduro has denounced the ceremony as part of a U.S.-backed coup to overthrow his government.
The act of political skulduggery paid off. The crowd reacted ecstatically to Mr. Guaidó, and one nation after another recognized him within hours.
The strategy has dramatically altered Venezuela’s political landscape, empowering a faction led by Mr. Guaidó’s Popular Will party that has long lobbied for more direct confrontation with the Maduro regime.
A preference cascade in action.
WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS, BLACKFACE, AND THE KKK? Blackface lynching pictures from UNC Chapel Hill 1979 yearbook emerge – the same year NC Gov Roy Cooper graduated – just days after HE called on Virginia Governor to resign over racist photo.
On the one hand, this is pretty thin gruel: “Aside from the shot where they use a lighting fixture with a noose, the two-page spread for the frat shows a woman kissing a man’s cheek and they too have their faces blacked up in the black-and-white pictures. There is no suggestion that Cooper is in any of those photos but they feature in his 1979 yearbook.”
On the other hand, if he were a Republican the press would consider this totally relevant. Remember when the press went crazy over a “racist rock” that might have been on a ranch Rick Perry’s family once leased? So live with it, Dems.
WHY SO MANY VIOLENT, HATE-SPEWING LEFTISTS IN EDUCATION? Canadian teacher allegedly threatens to punch MAGA hat wearing student.
On Tuesday Mr. Trump enlarged the public’s idea of himself and his presidency, and in proportion diminished his enemies. That was his most effective stroke on Tuesday night: to make the left seem to be lost in irrelevant obsessions and guilty of misinterpreting—falsifying—America and its values.
He redrew the battleground, leading the discussion abruptly away from progressives’ preoccupations with race and sex. He redefined himself in a more civilized light and sought to lend credibility and bipartisanship to his “Make America Great Again” theme by evoking American history and summoning the better angels. He fetched back to the 20th century’s binary moral perspectives, to the victorious fight against Nazi Germany and to the Cold War against communism.
The speech sought to annul, or at least soften, the left’s radical critique of American history, which has been the theme of elites since the 1960s, and to define Mr. Trump not as a chief of yahoos but a leader of a thoughtful, broadly respectable patriotism. It’s wishful thinking to hope that the speech might help to break the cycle of mutual contempt that has so demoralized the country.
The web has teemed for the past few years with comparisons of Mr. Trump to Hitler, warnings that Trumpism was the start of a new Reich. Mr. Trump installed two Jewish guests in the House gallery—Herman Zeitchik, who went ashore at Normandy in 1944, and Joshua Kaufman, whom Mr. Zeitchik helped liberate from Dachau the following year. The television picture of those two old Jewish men might have come from the epilogue to “Schindler’s List.” Mr. Trump beamed upon them from the podium as if, like Prospero, he had conjured this sweet denouement out of thin air.
The president twice mentioned the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and he proudly took credit for moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If Hitler was history’s supreme anti-Semite, Mr. Trump did a fair job of presenting himself as the opposite.
The president played a sly game of trapping his antagonists into applauding when they would have wished to sit on their hands or jeer. The white-clad vestal brigade of new Democratic congresswomen, including that one from Michigan who’d proclaimed her intention to “impeach the m—f—,” were seen turning to one another in confusion and trying to decide whether they would look worse applauding or sitting still.
Mr. Trump manipulated the theatrics inherent in the State of the Union, including the TV cameras’ restless and vigilant reaction shots, to his advantage. As he promised that America would never become a socialist country, the camera focused on the glowering self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, who looked like a grumpy old man out of Dostoevsky.
Mr. Trump turned things upside down. Portrayed by the left as a lawless president, he insisted on the rule of law, especially regarding immigration. Condemned as a racist, he defused the issue, to a degree, by embracing prisoners’ rights and condemning discrimination in the justice system.
Yes. As I said yesterday, “One of the most interesting things about Trump’s speech last night is how it seemed calculated to demolish all the standard anti-Trump tropes from the media and from the left and to do so with compelling imagery.”
SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING FRANCE CAN USE ABOUT NOW: “These tendencies appeal to a wide-ranging, well-heeled conservative crowd but haven’t cost him the loyalty of a younger audience, who delight in the way he combines the cable-news pugnacity of Tucker Carlson with the studied contemptuousness of Christopher Hitchens.” That’s a good combination. Plus:
At the Salle Gaveau, I spoke with one such fan, a 27-year-old named Jacques, the founder of a successful start-up. As he saw it, 90 percent of the French media were on the left, and they hid the truth about the failure to integrate immigrants; this was readily apparent in the drug dealing and crime in the banlieues and, of course, the terror attacks of the last three years. Zemmour’s words were merely good sense. In fact, there was an adjective for the few willing to say aloud what everyone was thinking: “Zemmourrian.”
“I’m not nostalgic,” Jacques said. “I think there’s a lot that’s not working in modernity. But we have to say that when you come to a country you have to integrate and assimilate.” A lawyer friend of his had recently defended an immigrant against domestic-violence charges, and his friend advised the client not to say that he thought what he did was right. But during the trial, the wife testified that her husband was angry that she went to see her friends, and so he was right to beat her. “That’s what happens when you accept all cultures and you refuse to force people to accept certain norms,” Jacques said. “We’ve really gone somewhere irrational, out of fear of shocking or provoking. But we’re creating a horrible world.”
That’s where SJW culture sends you.
VIRGINIA TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) learned of sexual assault allegation against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D-VA) a year ago from the accuser: Aides.
Scott survived his own sexual harassment allegation in December of 2017.
Related: “Virginia politics is now something of a political suicide pact or Mexican standoff. In order to ensure Virginia House speaker Kirk Cox, a Republican, doesn’t become the next governor, Democrats must keep at least one of them, which means all three will probably survive.”
LIFE UNDER LATE SOCIALISM: Venezuela-Colombia Bridge Blocked to Keep Out Humanitarian Aid. “President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime seems to be serious about its threat to block humanitarian aid from entering Venezuela. On the Venezuelan side of an unused bridge to Colombia, freight containers have been positioned across the road and security forces have been put in place behind them. That border crossing has become the focal point of the effort by Juan Guaido, the lawmaker trying to oust Maduro with the backing of the U.S. and other countries, to get aid into the country to help starving Venezuelans and further undermine Maduro’s grip on power.”
Maduro’s last grip on power is the last resort of socialists — the power to determine who starves and who gets fed. He can’t let go of that.
LONGEVITY: Facing Up To A Four-Generation Society. “A profound but mostly unrecognized demographic and economic trend is unfolding around the world right now. The average human life span is growing enough that for the first time in recorded history, four generations can routinely expect to be alive at the same time.”
WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS AND BLACKFACE? And now we have the 10th liberal celebrity with a blackface problem.
