#WINNING: This year in judicial confirmations. ” No president in our history has ever placed this many judges on courts of appeals in his first three years. One-fourth of all circuit court of appeals judges were nominated by Trump. . . . If Trump is reelected next year, he will be able completely to transform the federal judiciary. If he isn’t, he won’t be.”
Archive for 2019
December 26, 2019
WHY ARE THE NEWS MEDIA SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTISEMITISM? Jewish weatherman sues Milwaukee television station for discrimination.
ADVERSARY TECHNOLOGY: Don’t Buy Ring Or Other Home Surveillance Devices For Anyone, Ever.
STRANGE DAYS HAVE FOUND US: Kanye West Is Preaching The Gospel, But Pope Francis Is Telling People Not To Evangelize.
THE DNC-MSM HAS LEARNED NOTHING, AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: Tom Brokaw hopes media (and FBI) ‘learned a lesson’ covering the Richard Jewell story after ‘the truth emerged’ (and people have thoughts).
The groups use Trump’s voice in robocalls asking for “an emergency contribution to the campaign” and use POTUS’ Twitter avatar on Facebook pages.
About 20 groups with names like “Latinos for the President” and “MAGA Coalition,” groups that are structured as PACs or political nonprofits, brought in $46.7 million between January 2017 and June 2019, Politico reports. The publication adds that most of the money comes from donors who give $200 or less.
Trump officials worry that the hundreds of unofficial pro-Trump boosters are sucking up funds that would otherwise contribute to Trump’s 2020 campaign. They also confuse the Trump campaign’s messaging to the public and make it harder to accumulate donors, Trump allies told Politico.
We saw similar nefarious groups piggybacking on the Tea Party movement, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of the same people were involved.
AT AMAZON, Shop Year-End Deals Galore.
MAY THE FOX BUTTERFIELD BE WITH YOU: “We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore,” columnist Tim Kreider opines in the New York Times:
Now that it’s one franchise among many, “Star Wars” seems timeless, but the original is very much a product of the 1970s: Mr. Lucas began writing it while American troops were still in Vietnam and Nixon was being consumed by his dark side. It’s remembered now as a proto-Reaganesque, reactionary backlash against the morally ambiguous cinema of the ’70s, but it’s also a countercultural, anti-fascist fable about shaggy young outsiders fighting a revolution against the faceless, armored henchmen of a military technocracy. The Empire is comfortably identified with our favorite movie enemies, the Nazis, which helps disguise the fact that they are also, metaphorically, the imperialist invaders of Vietnam, confident in their devastating firepower to crush an ill-equipped insurgency. This subtext got a lot less subtextual in “Return of the Jedi,” in which the occupiers’ superweapons are thwarted by the guerrilla tactics and crude booby-traps of a pretechnological people.
By the time James Cameron’s “Avatar” made this allegory painfully overt, it felt uncomfortably weird watching American audiences cheer fantasies of indigenous peoples defeating capitalist invaders bent on exploiting their resources, even as our own battle droids were blowing up insurgents in oil-rich Iraq. You could imagine Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh identifying with Luke blowing up the Death Star — plucky underdogs destroying symbols of invincible power with dollar-store equipment and an audacious, suicidal plan. How did we end up on the wrong side of this story?
How indeed? (And as Ted Franks of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute notes on Twitter, Kreider paraphrases “Comfortably Smug’s” classic take on Luke Skywalker as mass-murdering crypto-jihadi without credit.)
Or to put it another way:
(Classical reference in headline.)
IN THE MAIL: The Carnivore Diet.
BUT IF HILLARY JUMPED IN AND TOOK THE NOMINATION, I BET GABBARD WOULD: Tulsi Gabbard Furious After Yahoo Suggests She’s Seeking a ‘Spoiler Role’ as a Third-Party Candidate.
2019’S YEAR OF GLOBAL PROTESTS: This is a sampling — the list is by no means complete.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Second Kevin Spacey Accuser Dies. “Behn is the second of Spacey’s accusers to die before having an opportunity to see the legal process through. A massage therapist, who accused Spacey of sexual assaulting him in 2016, died of natural causes in October of this year. As a result, the Los Angeles County D.A. declined to pursue charges against Spacey as it related to the allegations.”
ANOTHER REMEMBRANCE OF THE BULGE: From a column written in December 2014, “A 14thCavalry Surgeon’s Battle of the Bulge.”
“I was in the 14th Cav,” he said. “You know where we were Dec. 16 (1944)?” Yes … Losheim Gap. He said: “I survived The Bulge.”
“Of course, it wasn’t really quiet,” Kreisle told me, after I read his letters and his tragic account of the Battle of the Bulge: “we thought we were close to winning the war. 14th Cav, in the Losheim Gap, scattered from Vielsalm (Belgium) to Germany (border). …We had the 106th Infantry Division on a flank — very green. On the German side, Sixth SS Panzer Army was assembling. We didn’t know it. Until December 16th.” Bulge “was a psychological about-face.”
A bit more:
Jim Kreisle’s Bulge was escaping under fire in an ambulance. “One sensed an atmosphere of suppressed panic,” he wrote. He commanded a surgeon’s retreat over forest trails, west from Herresbach — through snow, mud and sporadic artillery fire.
Heckuva story.
UGH: Notre Dame Rector: Fragile Cathedral Might Not Be Saved.
Monsignor Patrick Chauvet said restoration work isn’t likely to begin until 2021 — and described his “heartache” that Notre Dame couldn’t hold Christmas services this year, for the first time since the French Revolution.
“Today it is not out of danger,” he told The Associated Press on the sidelines of Christmas Eve midnight Mass in a nearby church. “It will be out of danger when we take out the remaining scaffolding.”
“Today we can say that there is maybe a 50% chance that it will be saved. There is also 50% chance of scaffolding falling onto the three vaults, so as you can see the building is still very fragile,” he said.
If it can’t be saved, it ought to be rebuilt. The question is whether modern France be trusted to rebuild it as-was.
GOT AN AMAZON GIFT CARD FOR CHRISTMAS? Use it right here!
CRITICS: THE 1619 PROJECT GETS THE FACTS WRONG.
Response: The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts.
PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT 2016: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
CNBC today: Trump stock market rally is far outpacing past US presidents.
This never gets old.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Israeli Student at Columbia Files First Violation of Title VI Lawsuit under Trump’s Executive Order.
IMPOSSIBLE, COUNTRIES CAN ONLY BE ANGRY AND DIVIDED WHEN THE RIGHT IS IN CHARGE: France, not Britain, is the real angry and divided nation.
AT AMAZON, DEAL OF THE DAY: Save up to 40 percent on a BodyBoss Home Gym 2.0.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Please Spay and Neuter Your Washington Post. “The Op-Ed by the Post’s editorial board is so foot-stompy that it reads as if it were composed in crayon on a wall while mommy wasn’t looking.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): More here from Jazz Shaw. “The new year is approaching and that’s widely taken as an opportunity for fresh beginnings and the hope that we might do better. So here’s a Christmas wish for the Washington Post editorial board. Do better next year.”
I’m not holding my breath on this one.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Seattle Progressives slam ‘problematic’ performance of ‘Mrs. Doubtfire.’
The Seattle Times and humorless Seattle activists believe the new 5th Avenue Theater production of “Mrs. Doubtfire” is “problematic” because a male character plays a woman. Some want it cancelled. It’s the latest Progressive woke brigade feigning outrage so they can tell you how inclusive they are and how evil you are.
The play is based on the hit Robin Williams movie about a divorced dad, named Daniel Hillard, who dresses as an elderly Scottish nanny in order to spend more time with his three children. It’s a classic comedy.
Though no Seattle Times writer is brave enough to put their name to the initial hot take, the piece declares the play is “problematic” in the headline. They take the position that “a man in a dress doesn’t cut it as a punch line in 2019 — not without serious and necessary conversations.” With that in mind, they connected with “five theater artists — some transgender, some queer” to get their takes before and after they saw the play.
I hadn’t expected the left’s cancel culture to come so quickly to anything associated with the late Robin Williams, but that’s where we’re at, as 2019 winds to a close — and given Robin Williams’ solid credentials as an unwavering San Francisco Democrat, “leftist autophagy,” indeed.