DANIEL GREENFIELD: The Reichstag Fire of the Democrats: A pretext for political terror. “There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.”
Archive for 2021
February 7, 2021
It’s as if a lot of Americans don’t care about their betters’ opinions.
“YOU SOLD OUT. YOU ALL GOT PLAYED.” What Do Never Trumpers Do Now That We Told Them To Screw Off? “Here’s the thing, Never Trumpers. You’re all horrible people. You’re making enemies lists compiled of former Trump administration officials because that’s not characteristically authoritarian at all, right? Your main hub appears to be co-founded by someone who is facing serious sexual misconduct allegations, predatory allegations to be exact, and most have already left the GOP anyway. We the Republican Party liked the lower taxes, the millions of jobs created, no wars, the Middle East peace agreements, the cutting of red tape, the reshaping of the judiciary, and the solidification of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court under Trump.”
UM, THAT WOULD BE MOST OF THE TIME: When The White House Can’t Handle The Truth.
JOSH BLACKMAN AND SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: New Evidence and Arguments About the Scope of the Impeachment Disqualification Clause: A Response to the House of Representatives’ Managers’ Trial Memorandum.
For more than a decade, Tillman has written that the phrase “Office . . . under the United States” reaches only appointed federal positions. In 2014, well before President Trump announced that he would run for the presidency, Tillman published a full-length article opining on the scope of the Impeachment Disqualification Clause, which uses the phrase “Office . . . under the United States.” And for the past four years, we have filed multiple amicus briefs and published several articles contending that the phrase “Office . . . under the United States” does not apply to the presidency, an elected federal official. In 2017, we addressed a frequently asked question about our taxonomy:
Under the [impeachment] disqualification clause, can Congress prospectively bar an impeached officer from being elected to Congress or to the presidency?
. . . [The Impeachment Disqualification Clause] grants Congress the power to prevent a convicted party from being appointed to a federal position, but does nothing to prevent a convicted party from being elected to the House, Senate or the presidency. . . .
The Senate may choose to impose disqualification. But, as a general matter, subsequent boards of election and independent courts will determine the scope of a Senate disqualification. This fact will remain true even if a Senate disqualification should expressly purport to bar the defendant from holding the presidency. Moreover, such a declaration would break with tradition. We are not aware of any prior Senate that specifically disqualified a convicted person from holding a specific position. Given the Senate’s few historical precedents with respect to disqualification, we were surprised that the House of Representatives’ Managers’ trial memorandum even addressed the scope of disqualification. Albeit, the memorandum devoted only a single footnote to this question.
Much more at the link, including this: “Assuming the legality of late impeachment in the current circumstances, House managers may be able to seek a conviction for its expressive function, and they can seek disqualification as a bar against Trump’s holding appointed federal positions in the future. The scope of Senate disqualification is a different issue. We have put forward our position over the course of more than a decade: the better view is that the Senate cannot bar Trump from running for and holding elected federal positions. Let the People decide.”
CONSERVATIVES ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR CONVERTS, LIBERALS ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR HERETICS: “Like Stalin’s regime during the Great Terror, the Party doesn’t fear heretics; it needs them, because its power is renewed by crushing them.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everything we know about Tom Brady’s extreme diet and fitness routines.
OPEN THREAD: Finish out the weekend in high style.
21ST CENTURY SPACE RACE: Mars ahead! China’s Tianwen-1 mission snaps 1st photo of Red Planet.
STACEY LENNOX: Democrats in the House Had a Group Therapy Session But They Need a Mirror. “It would be outstanding if this country had leaders who could act like adults rather than a bunch of coddled undergrads. It would be even better if they took responsibility for the deadly outcome of their rhetoric. The violence is happening in the communities they pretend to care about and killing mostly black and brown children. Until they do, they don’t deserve your respect. And they deserve your pity even less.”
IT’S A STRONG ONE: The Case for Boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.
IT’S COME TO THIS: German City Builds Solar Power Sleeping Pods to Keep Its Homeless Warm. “Germany, despite having a population size that’s roughly a quarter of the United States’, has a reported staggering 860,000 homeless inhabitants. This increase was mainly attributed to the nation’s generous policy pertaining to refugees, which accounts for a 150% increase since 2014.”
As Jim Geraghty tweeted in 2015:
MATT TAIBBI: “This is for you, Dad”: Interview with an Anonymous GameStop Investor. “The bailout and the pandemic just exposed how there are different sets of rules, not just for different types of investors, but different types of businesses. Your favorite sandwich shop? Closed. If you’ve got 200 of those sandwich shops? Open. If you had sufficient capital to lobby whatever your government is, you could get an exemption, but if you were a small-time business owner, you were out of luck, and that just made no sense to me.”
UPDATE: A friend writes: “Re Leighton Akio Woodhouse tweet: That’s giving MSM too much credit for actually being clever. I know these people. They aren’t that smart. They just got spun. #usefulidiots”
BRYAN PRESTON: LA Times Editor Has a Real Problem With Her Nice, Helpful Trump-Supporting Neighbors.
“Trumpites.” “Q fans.” They support blue lives (meaning, the police)! Why, that only describes 80 percent of the country! And she finishes the section with a racial flourish because the mainstream media and the left are literally obsessed with race. The author could have a side hustle writing unfunny political jokes for Samantha Bee.
The author of the above is Virginia Heffernan. She’s an opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times. She’s also protected her tweets, probably thanks to the due backlash this article has generated. Heffernan also hosts this, which is surely as pure and unbiased as the driven snow her nice neighbors plowed for her.
Should — can — this person fairly cover the news? Take a look at this.
Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free. The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities Tyre and Sidon probably don’t involve snowplows, but, like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own — the Shiite sick, elderly and hungry. They offer protection and hospitality and win loyalty that way. And they also demand devotion to their brutal, us-versus-them anti-Sunni cause. Some of us are family, the favors say; the rest are infidels.
This is deeply, almost insanely, unfair to about half the country. It’s certainly unfair to her neighbors, who we can presume support Israel against Hezbollah and have literally nothing in common with the terrorists. Just who is creating an “us-versus-them” here? The nice neighbor who helps out plowing the snow without checking your politics first, or the snooty writer who compares that person to a violent terrorist army backed by the totalitarian mullahs in Tehran? Which person in this is dehumanizing and othering someone?
Which one thought it was a smart take to go public with the virtue signaling?
This op-ed just may reveal the extent to which those who run the mainstream media hate the rest of us. They don’t merely oppose Trump supporters’ politics.
It’s hatred. Heffernan doesn’t view her neighbors as fellow countrymen.
Related: Marcy Kaptur’s warning:
Kaptur is the longest-serving woman in the current Congress.
She has also been in the U.S. House of Representatives longer than any woman has served there, in all of U.S. history.
She came to the Congress in 1983.
She is 74 and has been a Democrat her entire voting life.
You might think she is worth listening to.
As it happens, she has a message for her party: Wake up.
Wake up or you will lose the House in the next election and maybe not regain it for many years.
Wake up or you will lose the working class to the Republicans, for good.
It is already happening.
Ms. Kaptur points out that leadership in the House is dominated by members from the two coasts and from wealthy districts.
A political realignment is taking place. Rural America is already Republican and, more specifically, Trumpian. Now more and more working-class and working-poor Americans are leaving the Democratic Party and voting Republican. Why? Because they feel their plight, their reality, has at least been recognized by Donald Trump’s GOP.
Mind you, Ms. Kaptur thinks Donald Trump did nothing for these voters, and never seriously intended to. She also thinks he is psychologically “unbalanced.” But she recognizes what he recognized: what has happened to manufacturing and the working class in places like Toledo, Lorain, Lordstown and Youngstown, Wheeling, the Mon Valley, as well as parts of Greater Cleveland, and Buffalo, and large swaths of Greater Detroit.
This being the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, there’s nothing in there to indicate the role that Democratic Party operatives with bylines have played in making the working class feel unrecognized by smug leftists such as Heffernan. Not to mention the chilling effect of the language police at the New York Times, CNN’s doxx squad, and other elite media institutions.
(Incidentally, it’s fascinating that the media aren’t going with the usual “We are All Socialists Now,” “Forty Years of Democratic Party rule,” “The Death of Conservatism”-style headlines, unlike after Mr. Obama’s victory in 2008. As Glenn wrote in November, “For a guy who supposedly lost, Trump sure had a lot of coattails. And for a guy who supposedly won, Biden sure didn’t.”)
THE JOURNALISTIC TATTLETALE AND CENSORSHIP INDUSTRY SUFFERS SEVERAL WELL-DESERVED BLOWS:
The profound pathologies driving all of this were on full display on Saturday night as the result of a reckless and self-humiliating smear campaign by one of The New York Times’ star tech reporters, Taylor Lorenz. She falsely and very publicly accused Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen of having used the “slur” word “retarded” during a discussion about the Reddit/GameStop uprising.
Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she falsely maligned — was the victim.
But the details of what happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz falsely described took place on a relatively new audio app called “Clubhouse,” an invitation-only platform intended to allow for private, free-ranging group conversations. It has become popular among Silicon Valley executives and various media personalities (I was invited onto the app a few months ago but never attended or participated in any discussions). But as CNBC noted this week, “as the app has grown, people of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join,” and it “has carved out a niche among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.” Its free-speech ethos has also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of avoiding repressive online constraints.
These private chats have often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by invitation and other times by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor the discussions and then publish summaries. Often, the “reporting” consists of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.
Fulfilling her ignoble duties there, Lorenz announced on Twitter that Andreessen had said a bad word. During the discussion of the “Reddit Revolution,” she claimed, he used the word “retarded.” She then upped her tattling game by not only including this allegation but also the names and photos of those who were in the room at the time — thus exposing those who were guilty of the crime of failing to object to Andreessen’s Bad Word:
Besides the fact that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy someone’s reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything.
Numerous Clubhouse participants, including Kmele Foster, immediately documented that Lorenz had lied. The moderator of the discussion, Nait Jones, said that “Marc never used that word.” What actually happened was that Felicia Horowitz, a different participant in the discussion, had “explained that the Redditors call themselves ‘retard revolution’” and that was the only mention of that word.
Rather than apologizing and retracting, Lorenz thanked Jones for “clarifying,” and then emphasized how hurtful it is to use that word. She deleted the original tweet without comment, and then — with the smear fully realized — locked her account.
Besides the fact that a New York Times reporter recklessly tried to destroy someone’s reputation, what is wrong with this episode? Everything.
Read the whole thing. Exit quote:
But this is now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism. They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.
The Gray Lady’s Thought Police are really working overtime these days: It’s Official: Linguistic Intent No Longer Matters at The New York Times.
OLD AND BUSTED: Dead people voting for Democrats.
The New Hotness? Dead people being paid off for voting for Democrats! Government waste critic: Deceased will get stimulus checks under Biden $1.9T stimulus plan.
THE TRUTH BEHIND the Great Ammo Crisis.
THOUGHT CRIMINALS. THOUGHT CRIMINALS EVERYWHERE: You May Have Been Identified as an Extremist within the Ranks and Had No Idea.
BIDENOMICS OFF TO ROARING START:
Shot:
“We saw the jobs report. Only 6,000 private sector jobs will be created. And at that rate, it’s going to take ten years before we get to full employment. That’s not hyperbole,” Biden said, seated beside Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office during a meeting with House Democratic leadership.
—CNN, yesterday.
Chaser: Biden plans early legislation to offer legal status to 11 million immigrants without it.
—The Los Angeles Times, January 15th.
Hangover: Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
UPDATE: Biden Sets Stage For Largest Number of Refugee Admissions in Three Decades.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) criticized Biden’s announcement.
“Increasing the refugee admissions cap to its highest point in three decades will put American jobs and safety at risk during a pandemic,” he said. “We’re only one week into the Biden administration and its immigration policies are already putting Americans last.”
—CNS News, Thursday.
Exit question:
(Updated and bumped.)
DON SURBER: “Donald Trump’s best bet for now is to relax, enjoy his grandchildren, and golf with friends. That seems to be his plan. The president told Congress he will skip the impeachment trial. Surely even the angriest of loons in the Senate now realizes that a conviction and a ban on future candidacies will make him a martyr. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Related: Trump Moves Out of the White House and into Their Heads.
QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: When You Think of Joe Biden Is ‘Swagger’ Really the First Word That Comes to Mind?
Well, now that you mention it:
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t Believe the Hype About Hypersonic Missiles.
ROGER KIMBALL: These Interesting Times. From a torrent of executive orders to federal law enforcement agents acting like East Germans, the satirists are having a hard time keeping up.
Though America’s Newspaper of Record is still (slightly) ahead of the game:
