YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Rob Lowe’s Joke About Elizabeth Warren Isn’t Racist, Because She’s Not Native American.
Archive for 2019
February 11, 2019
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Governor Blackface Brags about His Moral Compass and Explains How It’s All Our Fault.
When Virginia governor Ralph Northam agreed to his first print interview since his flaming dumpster fire of a press conference, he required the Washington Post to not post audio or a transcript of the entire interview, and the paper assented. (I thought democracy died in darkness.) Why does Governor Blackface think he’s in a position to make demands?
In the Post interview, Northam spoke as if the citizens of his state had done something terrible, and needed to make amends:
“It’s obvious from what happened this week that we still have a lot of work to do. There are still some very deep wounds in Virginia, and especially in the area of equity,” he said. “There are ongoing inequities to access to things like education, health care, mortgages, capital, entrepreneurship. And so this has been a real, I think, an awakening for Virginia. It has really raised the level of awareness for racial issues in Virginia. And so we’re ready to learn from our mistakes.”
What’s this “we” stuff? Northam added that he would take action to ensure that others would not be as insensitive as he had been: “First of all what I plan to do . . . is to make sure that we have sensitivity training — in our Cabinet, in our agencies. I also plan to reach out to our colleges and universities and talk about sensitivity training. Even into the K through 12 age range, that’s very important.”
Governor, Virginia’s kindergarteners are not the problem. You are.
Then Northam did a televised interview with CBS News, and declared, “Virginia needs someone that can heal. There’s no better person to do that than a doctor. Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass. And that’s why I’m not going anywhere.”
You don’t get to brag about your moral compass when you’re in this situation.
In addition to all of the Oprah-approved language when a well-known leftist seeks media redemption — all that “healing” and “empathy” and “sensitivity,” historically, when a political lefty has screwed up royally, academia and the media have always given him an out on the basis that his crime or mistake is a collective failing among all Americans:
FDR’s decision to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II? America’s shame… JFK’s death in 1963, by a lone Capital-C Communist? America’s collective racist shame. In 2004, John Kerry tried to pass the buck on the Vietnam War from LBJ to Nixon. And on and on.
It was also a frequent tactic of former President Obama, as the late Charles Krauthammer perceptively noted in mid-2009, after Obama’s infamous “beer summit” with Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Joe Biden:
It was a classic example of the Obama style. Here, he starts out by making the mistake — he accuses the cops of acting stupidly. It’s an instinctive sort of a prejudice against the cops and in favor of a professor. If you’re a professor like him, if you live in academia the way he did, it’s sort of an instinctual response. He realized immediately it’s a mistake and what he does is he tries to act the philosopher or a king and he rises above it and he says, “and now we’re going to teach the nation,” whereas he was the one who made the mistake.
It’s the same way with the Philadelphia race speech [in 2008]. It was discovered of course in the campaign that he had had a gaffe of 20 years by being in the church of a raving racist, Jeremiah Wright. And then [Obama] gives a speech which essentially scolds everyone, including his own grandmother, of latent racism — except himself — and he rises above it. He says [it’s] “a teachable moment,” and he gives his speech that had the liberals feeling thrills up their leg and comparing it to Lincoln at Cooper Union. It’s a clever pose but I think it wears thin. [Obama] makes mistakes like others. They’re [the] usual instinctive liberal mistakes, and then he pretends that he’s going to now teach us about this. I found it slightly annoying and I wonder if the rest of the nation over time won’t also slightly annoying.
As with Obama before him, Northam has dramatically accelerated the process of casting off his personal guilt onto the populous at large. Though unlike Obama, Northam lacks the undying love of the DNC-MSM, which is why he’s running a much more personally high stakes game in the hopes that this tactic will save his hide.
At least as of today, it likely will — CBS is certainly going all-in to protect him, as a Hill headline this morning notes: “CBS’s Gayle King: Black people in Virginia don’t believe Northam is a racist.”
King’s comments come as a Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted last week found 47 percent of Virginia residents surveyed want Northam to resign, while the same percentage want him to stay.
Of the African-Americans surveyed in that poll, 58 percent said that they prefer Northam remain in office while 37 percent said they think he should resign. Forty-eight percent of white residents surveyed said they wanted Northam to resign, with 46 percent stating a preference to stay.
And as this Vanity Fair headline asks today, “Could [Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s] Sexual Assault Scandal Save Ralph Northam?”
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Does Sunlight Through Glass Provide Adequate Vitamin D?
I BLAME THE DEMOCRATS’ CULTURE OF HATE: Dozens of bullet holes found in Ohio synagogue.
ANTI-SEMITISM UPDATE: Ilhan Omar Apologizes.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Shooting to Stop: Caliber Considerations for Self-Defense.
AT AMAZON, save big on Wheels and Tires.
LINUS PAULING CALL YOUR OFFICE: Vitamin C breakthrough: The key to controlling Type 2 diabetes and blood pressure could be in your cupboard. “Deakin University researchers have found 500 milligrams of vitamin C daily can lower elevated blood sugar levels in people with the condition. In a landmark trial that’s been a decade in the making, participants had a 36 per cent drop in their blood sugar spikes after meals. And one of the lead researchers, associate professor Glenn Wadley, told Ross and John their studies also found the vitamin intake helped lower blood pressure.”
It’ll be interesting to see if this replicates.
FREEDOM OF THE SEAS: U.S. destroyers sail in disputed South China Sea amid trade tensions.
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: ‘Recycled socialism’: Trace the history of AOC & the Dems’ ‘Green New Deal’ in this jaw-dropping thread.
While conservative tweeter Rich Weinstein has traced the phrase back British lefties in 2008, Obama in 2009, and Jill Stein in 2012, the concept ultimately stems from early “Progressive” philosopher William James’ 1906 Stanford lecture on “the moral equivalent of war.” Ever since, as Jonah Goldberg wrote on Thursday, “the agenda of 20th-century liberalism has been an exercise in trying to decouple the benefits of war from the bloody bits.” The result is has been a continuing effort by the left to make “Everyone a Conscript.”
CONFIRMED: Washington Post ranking editors quashed VA Lt. Governor Fairfax sexual assault story.
Democracy dies in darkness, but Democrats die in sunlight, apparently.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Drinking beer before switching to wine does not prevent hangover.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK:
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Google And Facebook Worsen Media Bias.
After the news industry laid off some 2,100 workers from Vice, Gannett, McClatchy, BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blamed “tech monopolies” that have no “incentive to disseminate high-quality, true information.” President Trump blames the press itself: “Fake News and bad journalism have caused a big downturn.”
While these diagnoses of journalism’s ills appear contradictory, both stem from the same root. Allowing a few platforms to control financing and distribution exacerbates the groupthink Mr. Trump rails against.
More than two-thirds of Americans get news from social media. Google and Facebook control a large majority of the digital advertising market that used to be a major source of revenue for the news industry. Tech companies have leveraged their control of news distribution to entrench their advertising dominance. Facebook’s Instant Articles publishes the full text of an article in the platform and shares ad revenue with the publisher. Google punishes publications that raise revenue through subscriptions rather than advertising by downgrading search results of paywalled sites that don’t provide free clicks. Google loosened its restrictions after criticism from publishers and threats of European antitrust enforcement, but it also introduced a “Subscribe With Google” service. . . .
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that power in America is control of the means of communication. Mr. Trump—who has also accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of political bias—should be more concerned about the concentrated power of Big Tech than any news outlet.
While antitrust law focuses on economic effects, the Supreme Court said in Red Lion Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission (1969) that it also complements the First Amendment’s “uninhibited marketplace of ideas,” which does not “countenance monopolization of that market.” The antidote to media bias isn’t schadenfreude over a few publications’ travails but antitrust policies to ensure news outlets across the political spectrum can be independent of Silicon Valley.
Related: Donald Trump must bust Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt.
OH: Impeachment Push for Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax Slows Down. “Lawmaker who had vowed to launch proceedings says he isn’t ready to start that process in the House of Delegates.”
“There has been an enormous amount of sincere and thoughtful feedback which has led to additional conversations that need to take place before anything is filed,” Delegate Patrick Hope, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter early Monday morning.
Democratic legislators in Virginia circulated Sunday afternoon a draft resolution to start impeachment proceedings against Mr. Fairfax.
Mr. Fairfax, the 39-year-old Democrat and former federal prosecutor, has denied the two allegations of sexual assault against him, one from 2000 and the other from 2004. He called over the weekend for a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe. He said encounters with both of his accusers were consensual.
“The Lt. Governor is aggressively exploring options for a thorough, independent, and impartial investigation of these allegations. We hope, for example, that the FBI will show a willingness to investigate,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Fairfax said Sunday. “He believes that an inherently political process is not the most likely path for learning the truth.”
If you’re wondering why Hope is backing down, Liz Sheld has that for you.
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Mother Arrested, Spends Seven Hours In Jail For Calling Transgender A Man.
HORMONAL BIRTH CONTROL’S IMPACTS REMAIN LITTLE-UNDERSTOOD: Can the Pill Affect How Women Recognize Emotions in Others? “Their research, published today (Feb. 11) in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that women on the pill mislabeled the emotion on someone’s face 10 percent more often than participants who weren’t on the pill.”
PAULA BOLYARD: Grammy Attendees Go Wild for Michelle Obama During Cameo Appearance. “The glittery former first lady was given a royal welcome by the Hollywood elites.”
She’s closing in on a “Run All the Candidates!” tag.
FORMER NEVERTRUMPER ERICK ERICKSON: I’ll Be Voting for President Trump and Vice President Pence in 2020. “I will vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And, to be clear, it will not be just because of what the other side offers, but also because of what the Trump-Pence team has done. They’ve earned my vote.”
Trump supporters, if they’re smart, will welcome these voters into the fold.