ROGER SIMON: Google Does Evil to Patrick Moore.
As Moore himself tweets, the Wayback Machine still lists him on a 2007 page labeled “The Founders of Greenpeace,” before Greenpeace’s own airbrush team went to work.
Archive for 2019
March 18, 2019
THIS: Raise Your Own Damn Taxes! “They don’t really want to pay more taxes. They want to raise your taxes.”
HORNETS OVER CALIFORNIA AND A WASP IN MAINE: A two-fer. The F/A-18Es were aloft on March 12, 2019. Why? To have their picture taken. (Hey, pilots need flight hours.) The USS Wasp photo dates from 1942. The carrier was anchored in Casco Bay, Maine. A the caption notes, you can see SB2U and F4F aircraft on its flight deck.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: GOP chairman sues school district for indoctrination, helping to organize gun control protests.
WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO SPIN SOCIALISM’S ABJECT FAILURES: US sanctions hurting Venezuela’s most vulnerable.
Take Alfredo Felix for example. The 60-year-old suffers from diabetes and needs dialysis three times a week. But the power outages of the past few days have been difficult for people like him.
“Because of the blackout I couldn’t do my dialysis and I felt dizzy and weak. I don’t know what is going to happen in this country. Sometimes I feel we are at a point of no return,” he says with tears in his eyes.
The acute shortage of medicines has added to the misery of patients like Felix.
Venezuela’s cash-strapped government is struggling with an economic crisis that has forced the country to reduce imports. This combined with hyperinflation is making it difficult for people to buy or even find the medication they need. Hospitals are struggling to find basic items to help those in need.
The situation is difficult for the Venezuelan government. Most economists say United States sanctions were implemented four years ago when the damage to the economy was already done.
“The first sanctions that prevented Venezuela from negotiating its debt came after Venezuela already had one of the highest risks in the world and the risk was because of the drop in oil prices and with a government that did not want to modify its budget or the controls on exchange rate,” said Ronald Balza an economist in the capital, Caracas.
“Venezuela continued spending when it already owed billions of dollars in debt,” said Balza.
As to how Venezuela found itself in such a difficult position remains a mystery.
BLUE ON BLUE: Beto O’Rourke Is the Candidate For Vapid Morons.
O’Rourke is careful to pay homage to progressive icons, crediting Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with advancing the national conversation on health care and consumer protections, but sells himself as something slightly different: a youthful uniter, willing to listen and learn from the most recalcitrant right-wing voters and work with Republicans. “If I bring something to this,” he says, “I think it is my ability to listen to people, to help bring people together to do something that is thought to be impossible.
“My sense is, following some success that I had in Congress, and working with Republicans to actually get things signed into law, including both President Obama and President Trump’s administrations, that I may have an ability to work with people who think differently than I do, come to a different conclusion that I’ve come to on a given issue, and yet find enough common ground to do something better than what we have right now.”
If you finish that passage and think you’ve just read something positive about a Democratic presidential candidate, then—to warp the old Jeff Foxworthy bit—you might be Beto O’Rourke’s constituency.
If, on the other hand, you shuddered in something like horror, get ready for a nightmarish year of watching this candidate attract the most superficial, issue-ignorant, aesthetically inclined simpletons disguised as thoughtful voters.
It’s easy to forget just how much Progressives hate everybody.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Whiteness continues to be a crucial problem in our English department.’
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump’s a white nationalist redux and much, much more. “So predictable. This time, the shooter who I will not name cited Trump in his manifesto giving the left more ammunition for their favorite issue. The gunman wanted the media to go after the individuals he singled out in his rantings and the media has delivered right on cue! They always take the bait.”
It’s “RUSSIA!” all over again.
WEIRD HOW OFTEN “MULTICULTURALISM” EQUATES TO RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM: A map displayed during a Georgia middle school’s “Multicultural Night” that replaced the entire state of Israel with Palestine has drawn condemnation from parents and the school district.
“APPEARS TO BE A TERRORIST ATTACK:” Man opens fire on train in Utrecht.
THIS AIN’T NO PARTY: Thousands believed still inside last IS pocket.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have been trying to flush jihadists from their last desert holdout in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border since January.
At the time, Mazloum Kobani, the SDF’s top commander, estimated that the operation would take one month.
Thousands of men, women and children, as well as suspected jihadists, have poured out of Baghouz in recent weeks.
The numbers have baffled the SDF and prompted them to pause the operation several times.
SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told a news conference Sunday that according to the latest group that quit the pocket, “an estimated 5,000 people” are still holed up inside.
He cautioned, however, that the SDF has not been able to verify that figure.
Those fleeing the enclave have previously reported widely inconsistent figures on the number of people still inside, ranging from thousands to a few hundred.
Gabriel said there was no clear timeline for the end of the operation, but estimated that it may take several more days before IS is driven from its last pocket.
The real tragedy is that none of this would have been necessary if Obama hadn’t dismissed ISIS as “the jayvee” when the group was still small enough to be dealt with quickly.
HMM: Pollster Zogby: Trump ‘will be hard to beat’ in 2020.
This week’s White House Report Card finds President Trump under fire from some in his own party over his national emergency declaration to build the wall but a step ahead of the crowd of Democrats hoping to unseat him in the 2020 election.
Democratic pollster John Zogby, who weekly grades the president along with conservative analyst Jed Babbin, said that while Trump continues to struggle in the polls, the Democrats aren’t offering a credible alternative.
“Trump will be hard to beat,” he said in his grade comments. He noted that the president isn’t polling well in the states he shocked Hillary Clinton in 2016, but that doesn’t mean he’s in trouble of losing.
“He is not polling well in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. When did he ever? But you gotta beat him with something,” said Zogby.
Something? The Democrats have a whole freaking clown car full of candidates.
BETO O’ROURKE’S Gafftastic Day.
UPDATE: Congrats to Rick Moran at PJ for the Drudge headline link.
TIME FOR JEXODUS: Jewish voters are furious at Dems’ defense of Ilhan Omar. “The party I thought cared about me seems to disregard me when it comes to my Jewish identity.”
Yeah, they never actually cared.
We find this pattern across numerous issues. And taken as a whole, it reveals something about the United States in the Trump era: The country is not divided by racial conflict, but by conflict over racial ideology. This is a crucial difference — and it is also grounds for optimism.
Race pertains to communities defined by ancestry and physical appearance. Racial ideology turns instead on race as a political idea. Questions like “Should Northam resign?” or “Is the wall racist?” divide voters today by ideology far more than race. “White” is a description of a person’s race, whereas feelings about whether whites are privileged or whether diversity makes the country stronger are part of a person’s racial ideology.
Liberal whites — not minorities — are setting the tone on these issues.
Since 2012, white liberals have moved considerably left on questions related to race, reflecting both a campus- and online-driven cultural awakening that has accelerated in response to Mr. Trump. On the American National Election Study’s scale measuring how respondents feel about a group — white liberals are warmer toward minorities than their own racial group. . . . For example, support for immigration among Democrats has broadly risen, but that rise is much more pronounced for white Democrats than for black Democrats. . . .
Yet Trump voters rate minorities relatively warmly. Racial ideology rather than race accounts for their differences with white Democrats: White Republicans reject affirmative action, the notion of white privilege and the idea that racial discrimination continues to hold minorities back.
Minorities again rank in between on many of these measures. When it comes to “microaggression” statements such as “America is a colorblind society” or “You are so articulate,” few blacks and Hispanics find these offensive while more liberal whites do.
So basically, most of the racial conflict in today’s America comes from white liberals wanting to feel good about themselves.
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! As the Dem Field Grows, Stacey Abrams Weighs a Bid.
IT’S THE PLAYBOOK: SOCIALISTS USE CONTROL OF SCARCE RESOURCES TO MAINTAIN POWER: ‘It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to Coerce Venezuela Voters.
A 65-year-old patient with heart failure entered his clinic — and urgently needed oxygen, he said. The tanks sat in another room at the ready, he recalled.
But he said his Cuban and Venezuelan superiors told him to use the oxygen as a political weapon instead: Not for medical emergencies that day, but to be doled out closer to the election, part of a national strategy to compel patients to vote for the government.
May 20, 2018, was nearing, he said, and the message was clear: Mr. Maduro needed to win, at any cost.
“There was oxygen, but they didn’t let me use it,” said Dr. Arias, who defected from the Cuban government’s medical program late last year and now lives in Chile. “We had to leave it for the election.”
To maintain their hold over Venezuela, Mr. Maduro and his supporters have often used the nation’s economic collapse to their advantage, dangling food before hungry voters, promising extra subsidies if he won, and demanding that people present identification cards tied to government rations when they came to the polls.
But participants in the schemes say Mr. Maduro and his supporters have deployed another tool as well: Cuba’s international medical corps.
This totally won’t happen here if we give the Democrats the power they want.
CLOSED COURSE, BAKED DRIVER: Colorado marijuana and driving study: Volunteers get paid to get high.
“The goal is to better understand impaired driving so that we can prevent impaired driving,” said Ashley Brooks-Russell, an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
She is co-directing a study to find out how marijuana affects people who use it every day, people who use it once or twice a week and people who don’t use it at all.
“We know that certain drugs really deteriorate people’s performance behind the wheel. Alcohol is the classic example for that,” said Micahel Kosnett, an Associate Clinical Professor and Medical Toxicologist who is co-directing the study. “Our understanding of how cannabis affects driving is less well developed.”
Oh, I think we understand it well enough.
YES: Plan To Retire USS Truman Early Makes No Sense, Which Is Why The Navy Doesn’t Really Want To Do It.
So why would the sea service propose a move that will reduce the number of carriers to ten for decades to come? The reason is that it was under pressure from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to free up money for other activities, especially development of unmanned warships and other advanced weapons deemed necessary to cope with the growing military power of China. Skipping Truman’s mid-life refueling and complex overhaul would save billions of dollars, not to mention the billions of dollars in additional savings over 20+ years that comes from operating one less carrier.
However, here’s what gets lost in the bargain. The number of carriers that can be kept forward-deployed in places like the Persian Gulf on a typical day falls to three, and all the remaining carriers get overworked—so they wear out sooner. It was not so long ago that trying to meet all the demands of U.S. combatant commanders with only ten carriers resulted in half the carriers stuck in maintenance due to over-use. Just because you cut the number of carriers doesn’t mean you cut U.S. overseas commitments.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
RICK MORAN: Meghan McCain to Trump: ‘No One Will Ever Love You the Way They Loved My Dad.’ “Ms. McCain has a high opinion of her father. Many of the rest of us — not so much.”
“Loved” isn’t a word I hear associated very often with McCain, if that.