DEMOCRATS: WE NEED MORE WHITE WORKING CLASS VOTERS. LET’S CALL THEM RACISTS AGAIN, THAT ALWAYS WORKS.
Related: “Woke White” Shaker Heights good but suspect, working class “Ethnically White” Parma bad. What makes it so racist and bad? “For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t.”
AYN RAND DIDN’T INTEND FOR THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: People are putting cannabis up their bums and vaginas to have better sex.
OPEN THREAD: I leave it in your competent hands.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Virginia Democratic Lawmakers Apologize for a Rush to Judgment on . . . Ralph Northam.
IF SHE STARTS ANOTHER TREND, IT WILL BE BAD NEWS FOR LAW SCHOOLS: Now she wants to be a lawyer: Kim Kardashian reveals she plans on taking the bar exam in 2022. “In an interview with Vogue magazine, the reality star, 38, said she was inspired to pursue law after working to grant Alice Marie Johnson clemency last year. Kim began a four year long apprenticeship at a San Francisco law firm last summer in order to prepare for the exam, and now studies 18 hours a week with two practicing attorneys. Though Kim did not attend college or law school, she is able to pursue her dream through an alternative path. ‘Reading the law’ allows people to take the bar by apprenticing through a practicing lawyer or judge.”
You can still do that in California, and I think a few other states. My favorite bit:
Overall, the concepts have been coming easily to Kim.
‘First year of law school, you have to cover three subjects: criminal law, torts, and contracts. To me, torts is the most confusing, contracts the most boring, and crim law I can do in my sleep. Took my first test, I got a 100. Super easy for me. The reading is what really gets me. It’s so time-consuming. The concepts I grasp in two seconds,’ she said.
Well, there you are.
NOW IT’S THE GOVERNMENT ACTING AS PIRATE: A History of Civil Asset Forfeiture in America: Pirates, Mob Bosses, and the War on Drugs.
SPACE: The Final Illusion?
TOM “I LOVE CHINA” FRIEDMAN has lost his last sane brain cell over Trump and Netanyahu.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO STEAL DIVIDENDS: Crazy! Ocasio-Cortez Claims Kirstjen Nielsen Stole Thousands Of Children.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S HORROR: INVASION OF THE FOX NEWS BODY SNATCHERS.
New York Magazine published an article on Tuesday by Luke O’Neil, writing from a very dark place. It’s titled “What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News” to the extent that it comes off as a parody of itself that could be called “Invasion of the Fox News Body Snatchers.” [Scary Hannity image is theirs.]
He tweeted “I asked a bunch of people how it felt watching their family members be stolen from them by Fox News over the years”. Read O’Neil’s sad but unintentionally hilarious tale of loved ones who supposedly became mind-numbed robots (or pod people) due to watching Fox News and I guarantee you will burst out laughing.
* * * * * * * * *
Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.
There was the one reader who wrote of his Puerto Rican uncle becoming a Fox News junkie, and turning on his own people, as he put it, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. “He was literally sitting in the dark and still defending Trump,” he said, which seemed a metaphor almost too on the nose. Hearing stories like that over and over again all weekend wasn’t pretty.
Hmmm… Could it have been because his uncle realized that a lot of the hurricane aide was mishandled by corrupt politicians on the island? Just to be aware of such well-known corruption qualifies you as a mindless Fox News pod person. Right, Luke?
The end of O’Neil’s piece is a classic case of projection:
Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. “Maybe he was always like this, but lacked the exhaust chamber to say out loud what he was thinking. I’ll never know,” one person told me. “It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”
Would that O’Neil took his own advice. As William F. Buckley wrote nearly 60 years ago, “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”
GOOD, ERIC, GET YOURSELF ALL TANGLED UP IN THIS SCANDAL: Eric Holder rebukes William Barr: It’s called ‘investigating’ not ‘spying.’ But when you’re engaged in illegal surveillance of a political candidate on behalf of the opposing political party, “spying” is the nicest word that comes to mind.
FINAL VERDICT: LIBERAL CONCEDES DEFEAT TO CONSERVATIVE IN WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT ELECTION: “I don’t know what this means for 2020, but if the Supreme Court election reflects a fired-up conservative Wisconsin base, the type that delivered victories for Scott Walker, then Democrats should be very worried.”
DISCIPLINED THOUGHT: Why Jeff Bezos makes Amazon execs read 6-page memos at the start of each meeting.
MAXINE WATERS GRILLS BIG BANK CEOS ABOUT STUDENT LOANS — WHICH WERE NATIONALIZED IN 2010. “Waters is the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee — the committee that regulates the banks.”
What could go wrong?
SAD: That Time When Mayor Pete Tore Houses Down In Low-Income Neighborhoods.
Interesting. Buttigieg is making a big deal that he’s part of a gay couple, but in inner-city neighborhoods, gay couples are usually at the front of gentrification waves, waves that are resented by those neighborhoods’ black and hispanic residents, so this may actually resonate.
TENNESSEE’S SO NICE, EVEN GEORGIA CONGRESSWOMEN WANT TO LIVE HERE FULL-TIME: GOP trolls ‘Georgia’ Dem over residency claims, gets her to accept gift basket at ‘real home’ in Tennessee.
EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Max Boot Is An Idiot.
Has anyone fallen farther, faster, than Boot since November of 2016?
FASTER, PLEASE: Wonder drugs kill zombie cells and prevent diseases making 100 the new 60. ““Most people don’t want to live to 130 and feel like they’re 130 but they wouldn’t mind living to 90 or 100 and feel like they’re 60. And now that can actually be achieved in animals.”
BARR CONFIRMS MULTIPLE INTEL AGENCIES IMPLICATED IN ANTI-TRUMP SPY OPERATION.
As Ari Fleischer tweets, “Today is the day the shoe moved to the other foot. This is a big deal. For two years, the media breathlessly covered, and acquiesced to, allegations against Trump, no matter how absurd. Now the allegations are against the Obama Admin. Why do I think the coverage will be different?”
‘MUSIC CITY’ DOESN’T WANT YOU MAKING MUSIC AT HOME: A Nashville producer challenges the city’s crazy ban on commercial home recording studios.
“Nashville is one of the few places remaining in the world where some of the very best musicians get together face to face to make music,” says Shaw, who has worked with recording artists ranging from Jack White to Wilco to Adele. “That’s why I wanted to be here and why I wanted to create a home studio.”
But for the last four years, the city of Nashville has been trying to shut that studio down.
In August 2015, Shaw received a letter from the Department of Codes and Building Inspection informing him that his studio was an unpermitted home business and was therefore illegal. Shaw was given two weeks to cease and desist his recording operations or else face daily fines of $50 and potentially be taken to court.
“My heart just dropped completely,” Shaw says. “For the next week I couldn’t even sleep, like what am I going to do? This is my entire life, this is my everything.”
After the letter came a phone call from a code enforcement officer, followed by a home inspection, and then a mounting series of demands from officials. Shaw was told to remove recording equipment from his house, strip his prices and address off his business’ website, and take videos of his studio recordings off his YouTube channel. Failure to comply would mean fines and possibly even jail time.
Shaw had violated an obscure provision in Nashville’s zoning code that bans home businesses from serving clients on site. The code effectively outlaws his studio and thousands of others like it in a city made famous for its music. As written, it may even prevent home studio owners from inviting fellow musicians into their homes.
Read the whole thing.
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