Archive for 2019

BREAKING: BIG ELECTION UPSET IN AUSTRALIA: “Already I’m seeing the left blame their defeat on Rupert Murdoch. But maybe the ‘message to the world’ should be that climate change is not a vote winner. Let’s see whether this augurs any change in the left’s fanaticism for the ‘green nude eel’ here at home, not to mention the upcoming European parliamentary elections, and a prospective general election in Britain.”

STANLEY BLACK & DECKER INVESTING $90M TO SHIFT MORE CRAFTSMAN PRODUCTION BACK TO U.S.: “Stanley Black & Decker announced on Wednesday that it was investing $90 million in a plant in Texas – a move aimed at continuing its effort to shift production of a range of Craftsman products back to the U.S. The new 425,000-square-foot facility will be located in Fort Worth, where tools ranging from sockets, ratchets, wrenches to general sets will be produced.”

GOD BLESS AMERICA:

The song is a kind of prayer, asking for God’s blessing and guidance, while giving thanks for the beauty and sweetness of this our continental home. Those surrounding oceans were not wide enough to prevent world war from finding America again. And through World War II, as it had through the Great Depression, Kate Smith’s voice “cheered her countrymen through the darkest days,” to quote the Los Angeles Times’s obituary of her. She traveled more than 500,000 miles to entertain troops and sold more War Bonds than any other show-business figure—$600 million worth in the course of the war.

But in the 21st Century gratitude has gone out of style, along with all sense of proportion. Of the almost 3,000 songs she recorded, and the 1,000 or so she herself introduced, the P.C. detectives have found two that must be condemned for indulging racial stereotypes. Fine. Yet somehow as a result, the New York Yankees have tossed her classic version of “God Bless America,” which they used to play in the seventh-inning stretch. They believe in “erring on the side of sensitivity,” they explained.

The Philadelphia Flyers have banned the patriotic tune from the beginning of their hockey games, where they put it (supplanting “The Star-Spangled Banner,” incidentally) decades ago in a desperate quest for victory. When they played it, they tended to win. After Miss Smith sang it in person, they won the Stanley Cup in 1974, and repeated in 1975. The grateful Flyers erected a statue to her outside their arena. The ungrateful Flyers have now removed her statue.

It’s not as though she ever donned blackface or a Klan robe, offenses which we know would shame even the most hardened Democratic politicians into instantly resigning their office.

Heh — Ralph Northam could not be reached for comment.

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: NYT Sees Fascism in Europe: ‘Nihilism,’ ‘Meanness,’ Opposing Food Cops.

As George Orwell wrote in 1944, “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

ATTACKS ON SCHOOLS AREN’T NEW: On this day in 1927, at approximately 8:45 a.m., in Bath, Michigan, Andrew Kehoe, a 55-year-old school board treasurer, remotely detonated the dynamite he had hidden in the basement of the Bath Consolidated School. The explosion killed 38, mostly elementary schoolchildren. Little bodies were torn apart.

Frantic parents converged on the school, searching through the rubble for their children. Many lost more than one child.

Kehoe was on a rampage. Earlier that day he had blown up his own house and farm. And at some time earlier that day or the day before he had murdered his wife Nellie.

The rampage ended about a half hour after the school explosion when Kehoe drove back to the school grounds. After beckoning to the school superintendent to come near, he detonated the dynamite in his truck. The resulting explosion killed Kehoe himself, the superintendent, two other adults and eight-year-old Cleo Clayton, who had survived the school explosion.

I have a hard time asking why Kehoe acted as he did. It seems like a senseless question. The best that the townspeople could say was that Kehoe had always been a difficult man and that lately he had been angered by his defeat in the election for township clerk. Oh … and he was upset by a recent tax increase.

He was a loon … just like the rash of more recent killers.

BOLD, INDEPENDENT LEADERSHIP: Buttigieg Backs Out Of Dave Rubin Interview After Media Backlash.

As Rubin tweets, “My invite for @PeteButtigieg remains. If he caves to Media Matters, Vox and HuffPo that isn’t a good sign for a presidential candidate. Doing what’s right often means standing up to the mob.”

To be fair, I can certainly understand why Democratic Party operatives with bylines want to limit Buttigieg’s exposure to interviewers: “Buttigieg compared Christianity to radical Islam on Friday during a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt.”

Buttigieg made the remarks when Hewitt asked him which form of Islamic extremism he thought posed the greatest overall threat.

“Do you find Iranians’ variant of Shia extremism to be more dangerous to the world than the Sunni variant that we see in the Taliban and perhaps in Hamas and some of the more radical elements of Wahhabism?” Hewitt asked.

“Well, you know, not unlike Christianity when it is motivating someone to do something extreme,” Buttigieg responded. “It can have a thousand different flavors.”

Deplorable, as Hillary would say.

‘I HATE ALL OF YOU’: JUNO WRITER REGRETS THAT HER MOVIE WAS PRO-LIFE.

Chiu writes that “having her breakout movie be associated with antiabortion messaging is a regret that has troubled [Diablo Cody] for years.”

And who could blame her? You try sleeping at night with all those live babies haunting your conscience.

“In a way I feel like I had a responsibility to maybe be more explicitly pro-choice, and I wasn’t,” Cody said during a Planned Parenthood benefit event in 2017 marking the film’s 10th anniversary, Vanity Fair reported. “I think I took the right to choose for granted at the time.”

“I didn’t think it was ever going to get made,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking as an activist. I wasn’t thinking politically at all.”

And if we take no other lesson from this sad story, let it be that — a good progressive is always an activist. She thinks politically 100% of the time and is always on guard against incursions of normal human feeling and thought.

According to Chiu, Cody quickly saw the error of her ways when she got “A letter from her Catholic high school thanking her for “writing a pro-life movie,” she said, describing it as the “most horrifying thing.” The piece added:

“I was like, I … hate all of you, and I’m as pro-choice as a person can possibly be,” she said.

“I … hate all of you.” Clearly, Cody’s once again a progressive in good standing.

Why is leftism such a cesspit of oikophobia?

THE NEW GREEN SERFDOM: The Green New Deal is a path to a more militarized and authoritarian society.

Much has rightly been made of the Green New Deal’s fuzzy-headed utopianism and its impossible goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero in 10 years. But we should also pay close attention to the plan’s authoritarian impulses, particularly in light of its historical inspirations: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the command economy he established during the Second World War.

If proponents of the Green New Deal are serious—and there’s no reason to doubt them*—then they’re proposing a return to a militaristic America where Uncle Sam’s heavy hand intervenes in all aspects of life, curtailing individual freedom in pursuit of their collectivist goals. And like the planners of the Roosevelt years, their intentions are clear and grandiose: They want the power to regiment a society of nearly 330 million people in pursuit of a pipe dream they liken to a war for survival.

Well yes, the moral equivalent of war has been the unifying philosophy of the left for over a century, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in a February article titled “Everyone a Conscript.” “[E]ver since the philosopher William James gave his lecture ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ in 1906, the agenda of 20th-century liberalism has been an exercise in trying to decouple the benefits of war from the bloody bits.”

To be fair, there’s good reason to doubt how serious AOC is: So AOC Was Just Kidding When She Said We Only Have 12 Years Left?

ARSON SUSPECTED IN THREE FIRES AT JEWISH CENTERS: “Fires at Jewish centers in Massachusetts were deliberately set, authorities now believe. Two were an hour apart, and two struck one house the same week.”

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Fran Lebowitz Apologizes After Telling Bill Maher U.S. Should Give Donald Trump To Saudis Who Killed Khashoggi. “Lebowitz said she regrets that ‘everyone misinterpreted’ her comment onb Bill Maher’s Real Time Friday night, when she suggested the U.S. turn President Donald Trump ‘over to the Saudis, his buddies – the same Saudis who got rid of that reporter. Maybe they could do the same for him,’ she told Maher, who had asked if she favored impeaching the president.”

Flashback: From “Kill Bush” to #AssassinateTrump: The return of assassination fascination.