D-DAY PHOTOS: First comes a black and white from D-Day. An LCVP approaches Omaha Beach. In this second photo current U.S. Army Rangers scale the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in a ceremony commemorating the attack.
Archive for 2019
June 6, 2019
WE NEED SEVEN- OR EIGHT-FIGURE JUDGMENTS TO DISCOURAGE THIS SORT OF BEHAVIOR: Judge approves lawsuit against university for not telling accused student he could bring a lawyer.
Related: Michigan State ruined an innocent student’s life. He’s training to recover what it stole from him.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! Joe Biden Isn’t Alone in Support for Hyde Amendment. “The 2020 Democratic presidential field has largely jumped on the bandwagon of bashing Joe Biden for his support of the Hyde Amendment – following a flip flop over the past two weeks. However, many of them have also repeatedly voted in favor of the amendment themselves.”
THE HOUSING PRICE OF LEFTISM: Startup rents bunkbeds in San Francisco for $1,200 per month.
(Classical reference in headline.)
REPEAT AFTER ME: “There is no border crisis.”
I’d like to see an experiment where students are taught math from 1950s-era textbooks, with the results compared to modern teaching.
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Celebrate Toxic Masculinity on 75th Anniversary of D-Day. “Lee [Smith] asks the question, ‘What’s the difference between the Julian Assange and The New York Times, Washington Post or CNN?’ It’s a good question because all of those media outlets have published or broadcast highly classified material as Assange has been accused of doing. The media characters got Pulitzers, Assange got jail.”
IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE ABOUT D-DAY: Here.
KURT SCHLICHTER: California Is The Future The Liberal Elite Wants For You.
California has morphed from paradise into a garbage state run by garbage people for their own garbage benefit and amusement. The “garbage” part is literal – once the Sierra Nevada mountains symbolized the state; now, towering heaps of trash and human waste do. Welcome to what the Democrats want for all of America. Just watch your step. Literally.
If it were not for the climate, something the liberals in charge of my state have nothing to do with as much as they think they do, it would likely be a nearly empty desert once again. But the sun shines, the beach beckons and the palm trees sway over a population of morons who keep electing proggy fascists to run the place. Which they are doing, right into the ground.
Kevin Williamson succinctly wrote that Detroit’s fall to ruin is “a case of the parasite having outgrown the host.” But unlike the corpse of the once-vibrant Motor City, as Victor Davis Hanson has asked, “How, then, does California continue? Read on, but in a nutshell, natural and inherited wealth are so great on the coast that a destructive state government must work overtime to ruin what others wrought.”
But give them time.
LIEL LIEBOVITZ: Why Jews Should Pay Attention To The Recent Debate Rocking American Conservatism:
The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”
To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.
Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?
Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue.
Nope.
Plus: “The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale.”
That’s just the start of a long and informative — and for YouTube, quite damning — Twitter thread from Ford Fischer.
“SCORCHED EARTH:” Mueller’s Targets Speak Out.
FLIP, MEET FLOP: Biden Supported the Hyde Amendment Before He Opposed It (After Catching Flak From Other Candidates, Activists).
To be fair, Biden has been in politics for so many decades now that there might not be an issue left he hasn’t been on both sides of.
RECYCLING: America’s False Religion.
#RESIST: Commerce City Becomes Second Amendment Sanctuary City.
Two months after Gov. Jared Polis signed the state’s “red flag” gun bill into law, another Colorado community has declared itself a Second Amendment sanctuary city. Five members on the Commerce City Council voted for the resolution Tuesday night, two voted against and two abstained from the vote.
More than half of Colorado’s counties have adopted similar language which refuses to enforce the law that takes effect in January 2020, but most of those counties are in rural parts of the state that are Republican strongholds. Commerce City is the first city in the Denver metro area to adopt Second Amendment sanctuary status.
Commerce City is just playing by the Left’s rules.
JULIETTE OCHIENG: How Bad Is LA?
THE REAL REASON SOME BRITS DON’T LIKE TRUMP:
Trump-bashing isn’t a political stance — it’s a snooty mocking of white-trash America. To Brits who fancy themselves as cultured and sophisticated, Trump has become the ultimate white-trash symbol: an ill-speaking, junk-food-eating, language-coarsening dimwit of a man who has no right to meet out wonderful, pristine monarch or to walk a red carpet. Obama’s wars and authoritarianism were forgivable because he was so handsome and charming. Trump’s wars and authoritarianism, in contrast, are held up as threats to morality and decency because the kind of people who are most keen on Trump — rough and ugly Americans — are themselves seen as a threat to morality and decency.
What we saw in London was a massive display of one of the Western world’s ugliest prejudices — middle-class British disdain for gaudy Americana and tacky Yanks.
None dare call it oikophobia.
NEWS SO FAKE EVEN VOX IS BUSTING IT: A new book says married women are miserable. Don’t believe it. It’s a Naomi-Wolf level error.
READINESS: B-1 Lancer readiness is in the toilet, here’s why.
The state of the U.S. Air Force’s B-1B Lancer fleet is bad — really bad — and lawmakers on the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee want the service to come up with a plan to fix the problem.
The United States’ long-range strike capabilities “may be placed at increased risk by aging structural problems with the B-1,” according to the panel’s markup of HR 2500, the House’s version of the fiscal 2020 defense policy bill, released Monday. The Lancer isn’t getting the resources and attention necessary to improve its mission-capable rates.
The situation has gotten so bad, according to the subcommittee, that the number of B-1 aircraft that are fully mission-capable is now only in the single digits. What’s more, B-1 aircrew are being rerouted from flying the bomber to other aircraft, because there aren’t enough Lancers for their necessary training.
The last B-1 rolled off the assembly line in 1988.
THE “EXECUTIVE POWER” IN THE CONSTITUTION DOESN’T MEAN WHAT COURTS SAY IT DOES:
For more than two centuries, jurists and statesmen have intoned that “ours is a government of limited powers.” That proposition is the foundational principle of federal power. The Constitution did not grant Congress open-ended authority to regulate in the public interest. Instead, the Founders wrote a laundry list of highly specific legislative authorities. This enumeration strategy, the Supreme Court has explained, is why courts must carefully consider the national government’s legislative limits: “If no enumerated power authorizes Congress to pass a certain law, that law may not be enacted.” From this starting point comes the endless constitutional sparring over the scope of the powers to regulate commerce, to tax, to spend, and to enter into treaties—just to name a few. Almost everyone agrees that unless legislators can point to an affirmative grant of constitutional authority, Congress simply can’t act.
A funny thing happens, though, when it comes to the presidency. Suddenly you see hand-waving that would be laughed out of the room just about anywhere else.
Oh, I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of hand-waving in support of an absurdly-expanded view of the commerce power, for example. But this is right:
The constitutional text doesn’t actually authorize the president to do very much. It enumerates the veto, appointments, and pardon powers. It grants the president “the executive power” and the office of commander in chief. It authorizes the president to receive foreign ambassadors, demand reports from his subordinates, and deliver a State of the Union address. But aside from a few miscellaneous process authorities, that’s just about it.
I make this point every year when I teach Constitutional Law. But all the best people want a bigger government with a more powerful executive (except, sort of halfheartedly, when the “wrong” person is in the White House) and the courts, being by design made up from the ranks of “all the best people,” have gone along cheerfully.