Archive for 2019

BERNIE LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN WITH VOW OF ‘WINNING NOT JUST AN ELECTION, BUT TRANSFORMING OUR COUNTRY.’

Didn’t America undergo enough fundamental transformation from 2009 through 2016? Apparently not, according to Bernie:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) officially kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign today by resurrecting a pledge to defeat not just President Trump but “Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry, and a corrupt campaign finance system.”

The fossil fuel industry? Bernie’s one of their best customers: “In the two years following the presidential election, Sanders continued his frequent private jet travel, spending at least $342,000 on the flights.”

COMPETITION: ABA Grants Full Accreditation To Duncan Law School In Knoxville. See, some of my colleagues don’t like the idea that they’re graduating lawyers who’ll compete with our grads. But from a more selfish standpoint, they’re also competing to employ law professors. . . .

CLOWARD-PIVEN OR AND BUST! New York’s progressives will send us back to ‘70’s financial ruin at this rate.

In his 1980 classic, “The Cost of Good Intentions,” author Charles Morris chronicled how New York liberals spent the city into disaster. Free housing, college tuition, health care and welfare skyrocketed until a fiscal crisis ended the binge. As the city nearly went bankrupt, crime soared and families and businesses fled.

Liberals have been replaced by progressives but no matter what they call themselves, a new generation of New York pols are ignoring history as they tax and spend at astronomical levels.

This time, there isn’t any excuse about good intentions. Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo both want to be president, and they are recklessly turning New York into a leftist lab experiment to get national attention for themselves. Their party controls both the City Council and the state Legislature.

The result is a slow-motion disaster, with years of excessive tax and fee hikes making the city and many suburbs prohibitively expensive to govern and unaffordable for residents and employers.

And speaking of a return to New York’s bad old days: Despite City’s Positive Outlook On Crime Numbers, NYPD Reports Murders & Rapes Soaring In 2019.

(Classical reference in headline.)

NBC ENTERING RERUN SEASON EARLY THIS YEAR: Days before his death, Wallace Broecker, “the ‘grandfather’ of climate science,” urged scientists to consider deploying a last-ditch solar shield to stop global warming:

It was time for humankind and the world’s scientific community to begin to seriously study more extreme solutions to the climate crisis, Broecker said. That included creating a massive solar shield in the Earth’s atmosphere, a tactic known variously as “geoengineering,” “the sulfur solution,” “solar radiation management” and the “Pinatubo Strategy.”

Funny, that’s what John Holdren, former President Obama’s “science” “czar” urged in April of 2009:

In a November 2008 cover story, Time magazine described Mr. Obama’s incoming administration, which was obsessed with radical environmentalism (at least a vehicle for crony corporatism) as “the New New Deal.” It was dubbed the “Green New Deal” by the EU Observer in March of 2009. That year, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Given all of the talk a decade later in 2019 of this year’s “Green New Deal,” will anyone ask former members of Obama’s administration why they had such a failure of nerve, when environmentalists were using the same grim talk about mankind’s future – or the lack thereof – as today? (We know that no current Democrat be reminded of all of the earlier doomsday prognostications — just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their feigned amnesia makes perfect sense.)

CHANGE: John Bolton: ‘We’re not afraid to use the word Monroe Doctrine.’

“In this administration, we’re not afraid to use the word Monroe Doctrine. This is a country in our hemisphere. It’s been the objective of American presidents going back to Ronald Reagan to have a completely democratic hemisphere,” Bolton told [CNN’s Jake] Tapper. “I mentioned at the end of last year that we’re looking at the talk of tyranny. Part of the problem in Venezuela is the heavy Cuban presence. 20,000 to 25,000 Cuban security officials by reports that have been in the public. But this is the sort of thing that we find unacceptable and that’s why we’re pursuing these policies.”

Flashback: John Kerry: “The Monroe Doctrine Is Over.”

Slate, November 19, 2013.

TRUE: Howie Carr: Smirking media bias against GOP couldn’t be clearer.

Have you ever noticed how differently Republicans are treated in the media than Democrats?

Every newsroom in the country used to have what was called the “AP Stylebook” to use in writing news stories.

Now you need two AP stylebooks, one for Democrats, about whom seldom is heard a discouraging word, and a second for the GOP, with a hundred different pejoratives.

Two parties, two vocabularies. One positive, one negative — very bad, evil in fact.

Consider the testimony by Michael Cohen last week in front of various Congressional committees.

For example, since he worked for Donald Trump, Cohen was described about a million times as a “fixer.” Democrats, on the other hand, have lawyers.

To prevent the release of embarrassing information, Democrats’ lawyers negotiate NDA’s — nondisclosure agreements. Republican fixers’ NDAs are “hush money,” or “bribes.”

Hillary Clinton paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat operatives who then bought or made up false Russian dirt on Trump — that was opposition research. Republicans, on the other hand, “collude!”

Republicans lie, Democrats misspeak.

Democrats plan, Republicans scheme.

Republicans hire lobbyists, Democrats use advocates. Republicans employ operatives or hired guns, Democrats prefer community activists.

If a Democrat changes his or her position on an issue, they have evolved … grown. Republicans “flip-flop.”

Whenever an unfamiliar politician is ensnared in some scandal, you naturally wonder which party he or she is a member of. If the “embattled” pol is a Republican, affiliation is usually noted in the headline, or at the very latest in the first paragraph.

If, however, you reach the third paragraph of the story without his party being identified, you can be absolutely certain you are reading about a Democrat miscreant.

Likewise, accusers are handled differently depending on who exactly they’re accusing. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was almost derailed by the not particularly credible “Dr.” Christine Blasey Ford. One of the women who’s accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of Virginia of sexual assault likewise has a Ph.D., but how often does the alt-left media refer to “Dr. Vanessa Tyson.” Fairfax, you see, is a Democrat.

Was Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime ever referred to as “alleged?” Of course not. But all the real, documented, videotaped attacks on conservatives — invariably they are alleged, or “according to police reports.”

Yep. Plus: “No wonder half of America is beyond smirking at the alt-left media’s agitprop on behalf of the Democrats. The deplorables aren’t smirking anymore, they’re sneering.”

NICK GILLESPIE: Trump just might have won the 2020 election yesterday.

It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today’s speech, Trump has mostly ditched the “American Carnage” rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. “We have people in Congress right now who hate our country,” he said. “We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad.”

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. “We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare,” he averred at one point. “Now you have a president who finally standing up for America.” The future, he said “does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country.” That’s a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

Well, one step at a time.

Related: Holman Jenkins: The Media Will Re-Elect Trump. “The answer, of course, is pundit vanity: Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy because writers opposing him then are very important people.”

AND, MOSTLY, EMBARRASSED THEMSELVES. BUT WITH EVAN MCMULLIN AND BILL KRISTOL AS STANDARD BEARERS, IT WAS INEVITABLE: Book: Never Trumpers have ‘failed.’