SPEAKING OF OFFENSIVE PHOTOS OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS INDULGING RACISM:
I assume Northam’s photo was meant to be a joke, though in very poor taste. Obama is smiling, but I don’t think it’s a joke.
Meanwhile, the standards on past indiscretions confuse me. If we had had a picture of Ted Kennedy driving a car off a bridge and leaving his passenger to die while he planned a cover up, would he have had to resign?
THE SUPPLY OF “SOCIAL JUSTICE” PRODUCTS EXCEEDS THE DEMAND: LOL: Only five students taking SDSU’s women’s, gender studies minor.
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J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS ON Defending Virginia Governor Ralph ‘KKK’ Northam.
We still don’t know: did Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dress up in Klan garb, or is he the fellow in blackface? One thing we do know is that if photos of any Republican surfaced wearing either, they would have already resigned five or six times.
Ask former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. . . .
Ralph Northam declared war on white supremacists in 2018. In 1984, he may have been dressing like one. . . .
In his extraordinary statements on pre- and post-birth abortion, Northam has secured his defense. Who needs mercy and charity when he’s already all-in on the NARAL agenda? Political ideology masquerading as forgiveness will carry Northam through with Virginia Democrats.
Three cheers for reproductive justice. It’s such an intoxicating theology for Democrats that it may even absolve blackface and KKK garb.
Both United States senators from Virginia have announced their support for Northam. Just a few days ago, old photos of Florida Secretary of State Mike Ertel in blackface emerged and Ertel was gone before the cock crowed.
I think he’s toast. But I’m kind of hoping he sticks around, just to see what Trump will say about him in the State of the Union.
Related: Social Media As Social Disease.
HARSH, BUT FAIR:
This is bad for the Democrats, but CNN is trying to help:
More on that here: CNN Chyron Labels Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam a Republican.
UPDATE: But of course:
Jen Rubin never fails to come through.
DO TELL: Party of no: Once opposed, Democrats now back wars just to thwart Trump.
Watching the so-called “Peace Movement” dry up and blow away as soon as Barack Obama was elected was very instructional.
PRESIDENTS AND THEIR GENERALS PODCAST: A special edition of StrategyTalk, spurred by Jim Mattis’ resignation.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY COULDN’T EVEN DO THAT. Matthew Continetti: The Democrats Lose Their Minds.
On Monday, in a townhall organized by CNN, Kamala Harris endorsed a Medicare-for-All plan that would “eliminate”—her word—private insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer-provided health insurance covers “approximately 152 million nonelderly people in total.” A poll last year by America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP) found that 71 percent of Americans were satisfied with their employer’s plan. Most Americans have health insurance, and most Americans are pretty happy with their insurance. Too bad: Kamala Harris says it’s time to “move on.”
Harris’s rival, Elizabeth Warren, has endorsed a tax of 2 percent on assets above $50 million and 3 percent on assets above $1 billion. Now, Warren would like to raise taxes on incomes, capital gains, dividends, and corporations, too. That’s just for starters. A wealth tax of the sort she has proposed—a government claw-back of property in order to make real a subjective standard of equality—would be unique in American history. It might even be unconstitutional. But hey, why worry about that when you can indulge in some light court packing?
The brightest star in the Democratic Party is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC. The other week, in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, AOC said, “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” Don’t worry, “It’s not to say someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral people.” AOC’s complaint is with the “system” that “allows” Gates and Buffet—and Schultz and Bezos and George Lucas and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest—”to exist.” Presumably, then, Gates and Buffet are safe, existentially speaking. But the “system” of relatively free enterprise that allowed them to grow rich—and finance or innovate remarkable advances in technology and productivity that have benefited the world—should be altered drastically. Hence AOC’s call for a 70-percent marginal tax rate—backed by the same genius from Berkeley who designed Warren’s expropriation of wealth—to help pay for the “Green New Deal” that will give us “a 100% greenhouse gas neutral power generation system, decarbonizing industry and agriculture and more.” Currently, 17 percent of American energy is renewable. The scale of coercion required for such a transformation would brighten any Jacobin’s day. Don’t think too hard about the details of the proposal, though. AOC says there isn’t time to worry about cost, implementation, and unanticipated consequences. “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she told Coates. Nice while it lasted, I suppose.
AOC also has a message for Schultz, who has been the recipient of sustained, ferocious, and panicked attacks from members of his former party outraged that a moderate billionaire might spoil their plans for replacing Trump with an unreconstructed left-winger. “Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for president that they need to ‘work their way up’ or that ‘maybe they should start with city council first’? ” she Tweeted. Well, plenty of people do tell them that—I seem to recall a lack of government experience being an issue in the most recent presidential election—but if anyone has “worked his way up,” from the poorhouse to being the first in his family to graduate from college to turning a coffee shop at the Pike Place market into the global behemoth that is Starbucks, it’s Howard Schultz. I’d even go as far to say that Schultz’s company has done more for its low-wage workers than the corniest socialist dreams of AOC.
Let’s see … what else happened in the busy world of crazy … excuse me while I flip through my files … Ah yes, there was congresswoman Ilhan Omar, parroting the Kremlin-Havana-Tehran line on the democratic uprising in Venezuela, calling it “a U.S. backed coup.” A few days later, Omar, a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement whom the Democrats have awarded with a place on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said she “almost chuckles” because “we still uphold” the Jewish State of Israel “as a democracy in the Middle East.” I chuckle—and begin seriously to worry—that someone who cannot distinguish between tyranny in Latin America and democracy in the Middle East commands such acclaim and receives such attention. Omar has former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in her corner. When Omar dismissed Congressman Lee Zeldin’s criticism of her views by Tweeting, “Don’t mind him, he is just waking up to the reality of having Muslim women as colleagues who know how to stand up to bullies!”, Jarrett replied, “Shake him up!” Zeldin is a Jewish Republican.
Trump has been the Great Clarifier.
BRIDGING THE BERM: An Armored Vehicle-Launched Bridge (AVLB) extends out and over a tank berm during an exercise at Ft. Irwin, California.
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Typhus Epidemic Worsens in Los Angeles. “Greenwood believes she contracted typhus from fleas in her office at City Hall East. Fleas often live on rats, which congregate in the many heaps of trash that are visible across the city of LA, and are a breeding ground for typhus. ‘There are rats in City Hall and City Hall East,’ Greenwood added. ‘There are enormous rats and their tails are as long as their bodies.'”
CHANGE: USA Powerlifting bans all trans women from competing as women. I sense a growing pushback on the whole trans thing.
See also: Andrew Sullivan: The Nature of Sex.
The core disagreement, it seems to me, is whether a trans woman is right to say that she has always been a woman, was born female, and is indistinguishable from and interchangeable with biological women. That’s the current claim reflected in the Equality Act. But is it true that when Caitlyn Jenner was in the 1976 Olympics men’s decathlon, she was competing as a woman, indistinguishable from any other woman? Contemporary orthodoxy insists that she was indeed competing as a woman, and erases any distinction between a trans woman and a woman. Similarly, public high-school girls track or wrestling teams would have to include female-identifying biological males — even if they keep winning all the trophies, and even if the unfairness is staring you in the face.
Most of us, however, intuitively find this argument hard to swallow entirely. We may accept that Caitlyn Jenner, who came out as a woman in 2015, always understood herself as a woman, and see this psychological conviction as sincere and to be respected. But we also see a difference between someone who lived her life as a man for decades, under the full influence of male chromosomes and testosterone, and who was socially accepted as male and then transitioned … and a woman to whom none of those apply. It is highly doubtful that a non-trans woman could have successfully competed against men in athletics in the Olympic decathlon, no less. Whether you look at this biologically (hormones and genitals matter) or socially (Jenner was not subjected to sexism as a man for most of her life), there is a difference. If there weren’t, would the concept of “trans” even exist?
Like I said.
TOM MAGUIRE LOOKS AT the Top US Marginal Tax Rate Over Time.
THAT’S THE SPIRIT: Freedom Caucus plots with GOP leaders to cause Dem misery.
RON BAILEY LOOKS AT Global Poverty Decline Denialism.
Some gloomsters perversely refuse to acknowledge when a glass is even half empty, especially when doing so cuts against their ideological sensitivities. One ploy is to pour the data into a bigger glass and hope that no one notices. London School of Economics anthropologist Jason Hickel has given us a near-perfect example of this sort of sleight-of-hand in Guardian column headlined “Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong.”
At this month’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davis, Gates cited data that show the proportion of people living in extreme poverty declining from 94 percent in 1820 to only 10 percent today. “The claim is simple and compelling,” asserts Hickel. “And it’s completely wrong.”
Actually, it’s Hickel who gets it entirely wrong. . . .
So what do the “real data” on poverty tell us? Starting with that $1.90-per-day measurement, the level of extreme poverty fell from 42.2 percent of the world’s population in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. In 1981, 1.9 billion people lived on less than $1.90 per day; in 2018, the number was around 660 million.
Don’t like that metric? The World Bank has adopted two additional poverty threshold measures at $3.20 and $5.50 per day per person. They too are falling.
Lefties need poor people, which is why they never actually do anything useful about eliminating poverty. It also explains their bitter hatred of the middle class.
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It was a sort of sick unintended symbolism that the Parkland school shooting happened on Valentine’s Day. That an act so evil could occur on a day that is dedicated to the celebration of love. Horrified, I asked “How could this possibly happened?” Especially after multiple reports and investigations uncovered that the Parkland tragedy was fully preventable.
Suddenly it hit me like a brick. Liberals claim to love the young. “Think of the children!” is one of their favorite rallying cries.
And yet, it was a liberal School Board that failed to protect the children at Parkland.
It was a liberal Sheriff Office that failed to protect the children at Parkland.
It was an liberal (Obama appointed) Judge who ruled that the authorities didn’t have the obligation to protect the children at Parkland.
The kids at Parkland were simply not safe under the protection of Broward’s liberal district.
Liberals always claim to love and care about the young more than the conservatives, and yet liberals are the ones that are the most predatory against the young.
Read the whole thing.
LIVE-BLOGGING DEVELOPMENTS IN THE NORTHAM CASE.
NOTHING GOOD’S GOING TO COME FROM WEARING A “SMASH THE PATRIARCHY AND CHILL” T-SHIRT: Left-wing activist shot by police had posted ‘time to start killing pigs’ online.
SOME DEMOCRATS MOUNT DESPERATE COMPARISONS:
Also, Kavanaugh was a teenager in high school, not a 25 year old medical student. Even if you think the charges against Kavanaugh were true (they weren’t) that still makes Northam’s case (which is true) much, much worse.
OPEN THREAD: The weekend starts here.
GOOD NEWS FOR DRUG COMPANIES: Nearly Half of Americans Have Some Form of Heart Disease. “Dr. Mariell Jessup, chief science and medical officer at the American Heart Association, said much of the increase in the prevalence of heart disease may be attributed to the stricter guidelines defining high blood pressure, which the group enforced in 2017 along with the American College of Cardiology. Hypertension is now defined as readings of 130/80mm Hg or higher, when previously it had been set at 140/90mm Hg. The researchers applied the new guidelines to the 2016 data and modeled prevalence rates.”
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