Archive for 2019
March 14, 2019
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: The Case For ‘Love Socialism.’ “Shall we tolerate this outrageous situation where some people monopolise the attention and attraction of the opposite sex (or the same sex – we, progressives, don’t judge) while the great majority fight for scraps? Surely, it is not just and it is not equitable that a small minority of those with an unearned privilege (the good looks) should lord it over the aesthetically poor masses.”
THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA: Trump Advances Changes to Unleash Ethanol Sales in Gasoline.
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! He’s in – Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke releases presidential campaign video.
Complete with his own final countdown! “This is our final chance. The scientists are unanimous that we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis. My gratitude for the young people who have stepped up to offer such a bold proposal.”
To be fair, that doomsday clock has sure been pushed backwards in recent years — I’m so old, I remember when Obama only had four years to save the earth.
AND THEN HE ANNOUNCED HE WAS RUNNING FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT: Vermont town swears in goat as new mayor — who immediately defecates.
Insert your “at least the goat isn’t totally full of ____” joke here.
WINNING: At a 10-year high, wage growth for American workers likely to keep accelerating.
As I keep saying, if Trump can continue to deliver on jobs and wages to the Obama-to-Trump voters who took a chance on him in 2016, it might make him almost unassailable in 2020.
DEPENDS ON WHETHER THEY’RE ACCUSING DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS. DUH. What Happens When Alleged Sexual Violence Victims Lie? Amber Heard and Asia Argento are at the forefront of Me Too whistleblowing. But how do we deal with stories emerging that cast doubt on their credibility?
BRUCE BAWER: A Dissident’s Testimony: Vladimir Bukovsky’s ‘Judgment in Moscow’ Now in English. “Is his message what America’s ‘useful idiots’ need to hear?”
If they could listen, the wouldn’t be useful and they might not be idiots.
ROGER SIMON: College Admissions Scandal Unmasks Hollywood Hypocrisy.
This week’s announcement of the extraordinary college admissions scandal — dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues” by the FBI officials who have been working on the investigation for years — was met by an equally extraordinary (and unique) silence from Hollywood.
It’s not surprising. The scandal has unmasked the entertainment capital’s liberalism as nothing before. The word hypocrisy only begins to encompass it. What we have before us is nothing less than child abuse — by the very people who, while exhibiting contempt for the great unwashed in “flyover country,” pontificate endlessly about every liberal cause known to woman or man.
What made these people, among the most privileged in our society, act this way? Did they not think that they were either teaching their children to lie or, almost as bad, plunging them into situations where they were doomed to fail? Or were they relying on the current spate of grade inflation to save the day for their underqualified offspring? . . .
Whatever the case, what accounts for this particularly repellent version of do what I say, not as I do? Is it just an insatiable desire for status by an insecure community, this time on the backs of their children?
Unfortunately, it’s more. In my book “Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown,” I likened the approach to social and political issues in Hollywood to the “mini-me” in an Austin Powers movie. The mini-me’s task is to make the most extreme liberal pronouncements in public on virtually any subject, virtue-signaling to its heart’s content, so it can be loved by all the world. Meanwhile, the “real me” gets to be as selfish as he or she wishes in private, demanding ever more money and power.
Hollywood is rampant with this excessive public moral posturing, which disguises often equally excessive private amorality or even immorality.
So is academia, of course.
ROBERT SPENCER: Ilhan Omar, Leader of the Democratic Party. “The anti-Semitic Congresswoman has hypnotized the Democrats, if not the world.”
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Austin City Limits:
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, asked staff writer Lawrence Wright to “explain Texas.” Why would Wright choose to live there? “I hope this book,” says Wright, “answers the question.” But the book—God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State—does not explain Texas. It does not even explain why Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker chooses to live in Texas, a question of limited interest. It is not, as it proposes to be, a meditation on the culture and politics of Texas and their influence on the wider American scene. It is an overflowing slop-bucket of ignorance, laziness, and snobbery in the shape of a book.
* * * * * * * *
Those errors come alongside some truly strange assertions. Wright complains that he knew no liberals and hardly any Democrats growing up in a state that was at the time almost uniformly Democratic and whose political foundation was New Deal liberalism. (I myself grew up not far from New Deal, Texas, surrounded by cotton farmers who would barely spit the word “Republican”—but then, I worked at 7-Eleven and think Buc-ee’s is pretty interesting, so I suppose I have unfair advantages.) Only four of Dallas’s 59 theoretically nonpartisan mayors have been Republicans, and none served before the 1980s. Rick Perry first held office as a Democrat (his CV does not emphasize his energetic support for the presidential campaign of Al Gore) and Texas did not go all meshuga Republican until the 1990s. The state didn’t have a Republican governor between Reconstruction and the Reagan era. If Wright didn’t know any Democrats, he wasn’t looking very hard.
Who does Wright think he is, Barack Obama?
BUT SOCIALISM OR SOMETHING: The U.S. Now Has More Millionaires Than Sweden Has People.
HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: Iowa State student government opposes freedom of association after learning it protects Christians.
JAY LENO: COMEDY WAS ‘EASIER’ WITH OBAMA AS PRESIDENT, WE ‘LIKED’ HIM.
Yes, that explains the lack of Hollywood comedy when Nixon and Reagan were president, and why Saturday Night Live was at its best when its bête noire, Gerald Ford was in office.
MAKE ARMS SALES GREAT AGAIN: Taiwan Mulls F-16 Viper Fighter Purchase From the US.
According to unconfirmed Taiwanese media reports, the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) had expressed interest in procuring up to 66 Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon Viper (V) Block 70 multirole combat aircraft. F-16V fighters are equipped with an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar system, upgraded avionics, and a high-volume, high-speed data bus, among other things.
Notably, Taiwan is in the process of upgrading its F-16 A/B fleet to the F-16V variant. The first four retrofitted F-16A/B fighters, upgraded by Taiwan’s state-owned Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC), were handed over to ROCAF at an airbase in Chiayi county in southwestern Taiwan in October 2018.
The program, codenamed Phoenix Rising Project, was launched in 2016 with the purpose of upgrading 144 ROCAF A/B Fighting Falcon combat aircraft to the F-16V configuration by 2023.
What I want to know is, what’s under those new bulges on each side of the top of the airframe?
(Photo courtesy of Lockheed-Martin.)
CAN STUDENTS DEMAND UNLAWFUL ACTION?: Students at Sarah Lawrence want, among other things, Professor Sam Abrams’ tenure reviewed by a panel that includes “at least three faculty members of color.” Given the horror this kind of de jure discrimination strikes in a civil libertarian (and should strike in anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of American history), many have written in to ask FIRE our position on student demands for such obviously illiberal measures. The answer is that FIRE would defend their right to make such demands despite our strong disagreement with them. But colleges are not free to give in to them, and FIRE will also defend faculty or students whose college targets them as a result.
THAT’S THE PROPER RESPONSE: Students ‘demand’ review of conservative prof’s tenure. College pres reminds them who’s in charge.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Oops! They did it to Manafort again and much, much more. “Short-lived Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was sentenced yesterday in Washington D.C., to an additional 3.5 years for a bunch of crimes unrelated to the RUSSIA collusion scandal.”
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Who Declared This To Be Crazy Week?
IT’S NOW THE NORM AMONG DEMOCRATS: Bernie Sanders staffer’s dual loyalty smear shows liberal anti-Semitism goes well beyond Ilhan Omar.
A spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was forced to apologize on Tuesday for spreading the idea that Jews had dual-loyalty, thus demonstrating that liberal anti-Semitism is not confined to the utterances of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
In the wake over the dustup caused by Omar’s remarks in which she lamented Jewish influence in politics which she said pushes people to declare their allegiance to a foreign government, many of her defenders argued her remarks didn’t have anything to do with Jews, and that really she was just talking about the influence on pro-Israel lobbying, just as she would any other special interest group.
But Belen Sisa, Sanders’ national deputy press secretary, left no doubt that she was questioning Jewish loyalty.
But if you question Ilhan Omar’s loyalty, you’re a bigot.