UNEXPECTEDLY: America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s.

The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it’s the 1980s is the city assessor’s office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk. City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can’t be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can’t display all the basic information for a given property on one screen. The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup “doesn’t reflect business needs now,” says the city’s assessor, Carmen Chu.

San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology*, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S.

Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.

As Kevin Williamson wrote during the disastrous Obamacare rollout, “We choose not between Marx and Adam Smith but between the DMV and the Apple store:”

I can walk out of the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, which sees more visitors per day than any DMV office, with a couple thousand dollars’ worth of electronics without ever having to stand in line, much less fill out paperwork. When I found myself in need of an unexpectedly large sum of cash while out of the country a couple of years ago, one telephone call to American Express, lasting less than ten minutes, was all it took. Services such as Seamless and OpenTable have greatly simplified all sorts of commercial transactions, and services such as Uber have begun to disrupt longstanding cartels and monopolies on taxi services and other conveniences. Some services even make dealing with the government easier, such as the concealed-carry apps that use GPS to let you know whether you’re legally packing.

And Leviathan is not happy about that.

Fortunately, beginning in 2016, Democratic operatives with bylines advised out of work coalminers to learn to code, before receiving similar advice from former readers in more recent times. Hopefully all of the efforts of these nascent software engineers will eventually begin to pay off to bring urban governmental software into the 1990s.

* Now who’s being naive, Kay? When I lived in Silicon Valley, the numerous power outages were a reminder that the businesses trying to bring you the 21st century were reliant upon a power grid that, thanks to the NIMBY nature of Bay Area leftists, hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s heyday of Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad.

FASTER, PLEASE: A Simple Blood Test Is as Effective as a Biopsy in Detecting Lung Cancer Mutations.

NORTH KOREA SUMMIT: My quick take is that Kim sensed Trump had political weakness at home due to the Cohen hearing, and bet that Trump couldn’t afford to walk away from a bad deal. He chose… poorly

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Here’s why you shouldn’t cremate radioactive dead people.

MRS GRUNDY IS EVERYWHERE: Homeowner’s Association Fines Resident After Car Leaves Penis-Shaped Outline in Snowy Lot.

NAME THAT PARTY, VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW EDITION: CBS, NBC Drop Partisan ID as Latest Racial Gaffe Engulfs Virginia Democrats.

Now that it’s clear that none of top three Virginia Democrats engulfed in scandal will be resigning voluntarily, CBS and NBC have stepped up the effort to clean up their racial gaffes. During a tour of the governor’s mansion last week, First Lady Pamela Northam handed cotton to an African American child and asked her to “imagine” what it would be like to be a slave. CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today on Thursday covered the latest revelation, but skipped the fact that First Lady Pamela Northam, her husband and the state’s other top leaders are, in fact, all Democrats.

On CBS, co-host Gayle King found the whole thing “sad” and lamented how people are so “hypersensitive” about race these days. Assuring her co-hosts and viewers that Mrs. Northam meant no harm, King lamented, “When I saw the story, it made me kind of sad. I think she’s giving a tour, she’s trying to put history in context.”

Curiously, CBS seems rather unwilling to put this into context: Ralph Northam’s family owned at least 84 slaves.

Exit quote from King: “Again, we weren’t there, but I can’t imagine that she would have been that insensitive to this young person who was there. It made me sad. I think we are so quick to jump on things now. Everybody’s super and hypersensitive when it comes to racial issues in particular.”

That’s nice. So when does the DNC-MSM apologize for smearing Rick Perry over a rock?

AT AMAZON, save big on Pet Supplies.

UGH: ‘Emotional support animal’ mauls 5-year-old girl at Portland airport, $1.1 million lawsuit says.

ASIA: What You Need to Know About the South China Sea, the World’s Next Hot Spot.

SARAH HOYT: The Flaw In Flawless. “Perfectionism should be classified as a disability. It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than miss-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has.”

Yes.

NEOMI RAO CLEARS JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: “According to my sources, Rao failed to assuage this concern during an initial private meeting with Hawley. However, when they met a second time, shortly before today’s vote, Rao must have talked more expansively about the writings that concerned Sen. Hawley. In any event, Hawley says he came away from the discussion satisfied that, as he put it, Rao believes the meaning of the Constitution is ‘fixed.’”

NEWS FROM CAYMAN: Kiteboarders battle ferocious seas in ocean crossing. “‘My body is broken,’ Andre Slabbert acknowledged after completing a grueling ocean crossing, kitesurfing through 18-foot swells to win the race from Little to Grand Cayman. Mr. Slabbert, 33, led the field in the Estera Little Grand Race 2019, setting a new record for the distance at five-and-a-half-hours.”

IT’S CERTAINLY NO WAY TO COOL THINGS OFF: Pakistan may have violated Geneva Conventions after posting video of captured pilot.

DISPATCHES FROM TRUDEAUPIA: Justin Trudeau dodges calls to resign amid former attorney general’s allegations in bribery scandal.

Earlier: “Compare this to the nothingburger that was Cohen’s testimony.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Here Are The Eight Republicans Who Voted For House Democrats’ Gun Control Bill.

USAA UPDATE: I understand that a member of the CEO’s personal staff has gotten in touch with my student Chris Davis, whose insurance troubles I blogged about yesterday, so I assume everything will be addressed. I’ll let you know if there’s further news.

MICHAEL BARONE: Democrats getting out on dangerously left-wing limb.

Support for legal abortion has been a Democratic staple for years, but Democrats have recently moved left to pass laws allowing it up to nine months. They did so successfully in New York and unsuccessfully in Virginia, after Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam suggested it would apply even after birth.

That’s an unpopular position, to say the least. Polls for years have shown majority support for legalizing abortion in the first trimester and prohibiting it in the third. But all six Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate voted against the bill introduced by Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., requiring medical care for babies actually born alive after failed abortions.

Did this extreme position affect public opinion? A February Marist poll showed equal numbers, 47 percent, calling themselves pro-life and pro-choice, a sharp change from January’s 55 to 38 percent pro-choice advantage. Maybe this poll is an outlier, but maybe the sudden placement of the spotlight on ninth-month abortions has actually changed opinion.

An overwhelmingly pro-choice press has long covered for Democrats, refusing to explain that the “health of the mother” exception to abortion bans means (because “health” includes mental health) abortion on demand. Predictably, CNN and MSNBC ignored the Sasse bill vote and media like Politico provided spectacularly biased accounts.

But liberal media doesn’t have a monopoly on megaphones any more, and Trump has shown himself capable of using invective, ridicule, and also serious argument to attack extreme positions, as he did Hillary Clinton’s on abortion. He has no compunction about raging impolitely against what liberals insist is politically correct.

Democratic presidential candidates, perhaps isolated in liberal cocoons, don’t seem to understand their vulnerability on issues like reparations, ninth-month abortions, and the Green New Deal. They assume their media friends can rescue them. But what if they can’t?

“Safe, legal, and rare” was a good general election stance. “Kill babies after birth if the woman doesn’t want to be a mother” not so much.

IT’S COLLUSION I TELL YOU: US Cyber Command took Russian trolls offline during midterms.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Following record snowfall, people in Northern Arizona digging out the snow.

(Classical reference in headline.)

JAMES SIMPSON: Ilhan Omar: Poster Child for the Red-Green Axis. “Stop ignoring this virulently anti-Semitic, anti-American coalition of subversives.”

SMASH ALL THE STATUES! AIRBRUSH ALL THE HISTORY! John Wayne: The New Confederate Statue.

The Great Purge of 20th Century Mass Culture continues apace. As Mark Steyn has warned, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.”

ROGER SIMON: Dems Reelect Trump by Staging Partisan Cohen Hearing during Nuke Negotiations.

Or as CNN attempted to explain it to their viewer:

As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “Through the Looking Glass.”

PATRICK POOLE: NBC News Reporter Caught Lying about Michael Cohen Testimony on Trump and WikiLeaks. “Misrepresentations and outright lies are about all they have left.”