“PLEASE ENJOY THIS PRESS RELEASE:” New York Times Celebrates Kamala Stepdaughter as ‘Breakout Star’ Model.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s all rigged.
Archive for 2021
January 31, 2021
WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS PLANTED LAND MINES IN WEST VIRGINIA?
Enter [Kamala] Harris and what one of my Democratic sources called a “ham-handed” interview on local West Virginia television Thursday. It was clearly meant to up the pressure on Manchin to support Biden’s package, but it only antagonized him. “I couldn’t believe it,” Manchin said in a video that went viral Saturday. “No one called me [about it]. … We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward … but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together, what was done.”
I’m told Manchin also conveyed his displeasure privately to senior White House officials late last week. Another head-scratcher in all this: Harris isn’t exactly popular in West Virginia. And in the interview, she referred to “abandoned land mines” instead of “abandoned mine lands” in West Virginia, a slip-up sure to cause eye rolls in the state.
And out of the state as well, though it looks like she’s settling in nicely with team gaffe-o-matic.
THERE ARE SO MANY CASES TO BE MADE: The Conservative Case Against the Boomers.
BETTER THEM THAN US: Iran expects first batch of Russian vaccine by Feb 4.
IS BIDEN BANNING “FARTING COWS AND AIRPLANES?” BIG, IF TRUE: Green New Deal Architect AOC Takes Credit for Biden’s Climate Boondoggle.
HIGHER EDUCATION TODAY: Chaired Professor Resigns From Kansas Law Faculty After Withholding Student Grades In Overload Pay Dispute. “Valdez, who is Latina, calls KU’s actions ‘pure and simple retaliation’ and discrimination.”
I’m sure she’ll be a fine and evenhanded District Attorney.
QUESTION ASKED: Is karma coming calling for Killer Cuomo?
WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF HARASSMENT? 21 Men Accuse Lincoln Project Co-Founder of Online Harassment.
To their credit, a “senior advisor” to the Lincoln Party has responded to the above New York Times article with an articulate, carefully worded, highly-nuanced statement:
THE EXCITING LIFE OF REINDEER LICHENS: Reindeer lichens reproduce sexually far more than scientists thought.
HOW CAN WE MISS YOU, IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY? Howie Carr: John Kerry’s back, in all of his tone-deaf glory.
“I had the pleasure of driving down to the inauguration in an electric car, a Tesla, back down to Washington and back to the United — to to ah Massachusetts uh and it was great. I loved it.”
A Tesla! America’s Gigolo has come a long way from his on-the-arm Buick, compliments of Bob Brest. Does Tesla have a dealership on the Lynnway like Bob Brest did?
Funny, though, how Kerry almost blurts out that D.C. isn’t really America (not that Massachusetts is these days either; it’s more like East Germany, or maybe Hoxha’s Albania).
By the way, Washington is 439 miles from Boston. Top range for one of those coal-fired Teslas is about 400 miles, and cold weather reduces it further.
Did anyone see Liveshot recharging his Tesla’s lithium batteries at, say, the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike while he partook of a snack with the hoi polloi at the local Pizza Hut or Quizno’s?
“Can I get me a recharge here?”
Dementia Joe Biden’s incoherence appears to be contagious, and at the press conference the 77-year-old Kerry seemed to have been infected. All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“And we don’t have to have uh you know the the burning of a fuel uh which uh uh clearly contributes to a scientifically-arrived-at conclusion about the warming of the planet and the dangers to this planet. This is so logical uh I I don’t understand the opposition. I don’t think there’s any gain in it politically.”
What’s a few hundred thousand jobs, not to mention tossing away the national security provided by not being dependent on foreign energy sources?
Even Kerry had to acknowledge that he’s on a fool’s errand.
“We could go to zero (emissions) tomorrow,” he admitted, “and the problem isn’t solved.”
But who cares? The important thing is that as “climate czar,” Kerry will likely be flying around on his own publicly funded jet, in place of his second wife’s aging Flying Squirrel. And he’ll get motorcades. He’s already pontificating again about how he was “deeply involved in the Paris negotiations” and how significant “the Montreal protocols” are.
I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Scandinavian Heavy Metal Sumo Knitting and the Death of Non-Conformity.
Joe Biden recently nominated Dr. Rachel Levine to become the first transsexual something-or-other to serve as federal something-or-other in the Department of Health and Human Services. GLAAD praised this courageous choice by President Biden, pointing out that 19% of trans-sexuals have no health insurance. Which obviously explains Mr. Biden’s selection of Dr. Levine. I mean, there you go.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that he’s less interested in transsexual health insurance than he is in the perception of diversity in his administration, which these days, has become much more complex than having a certain percentage of blacks in every photo-op.
I don’t know. It’s complicated.
I’m not sure anybody on the left plans past next week. But if they do, I wonder where they see this going? What will a diverse presidential cabinet look like in 10 years? 20 years? Once David Bowie is president, who the heck do you nominate as Assistant Something-or-Other in the Department of Health and Human Services?
And at what point do people just lose interest in all this, jaded from decades of increasingly earnest efforts at ridiculous insincerity? Will we return to the ’80s, when such people would earn a roll of the eyes rather than a presidential cabinet appointment?
Read the whole thing.
“DESPISED:” The Left and the Working Class.
George Bernard Shaw, though a Fabian socialist, brushed aside anyone who called him a “friend of the working classes.” He scoffed that he “had no other feeling for the working classes than an intense desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people.” A century ago Britain’s Labour Party brought together the Fabians (who supplied the policy wonks) and the trade unions (who supplied the voters). The party had been founded to give working people a voice in politics, but gradually control passed to the university-educated, who were internationalist, technocratic and supremely confident that they could plan the future.
Then came two awful shocks. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, the Remainers won the affluent vote, but the working classes carried the Leavers to victory. And in the 2019 parliamentary election, the Tories swept depressed factory towns that had heretofore been safe for Labour. “You can’t trust the people,” snorted novelist Howard Jacobson. That’s what happens when the rabble are “given this new confidence in their own opinions.”
Paul Embery might be called a populist in America, but a more accurate label is “left conservative.” A firefighter, union official and lifelong Labour activist, he writes for the resolutely unorthodox webpaper UnHerd. And in “Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class,” he suggests that Bernard Shaw’s enormous condescension is now the dominant ideology of the progressive intelligentsia, which embraces every subcategory of identity politics except class identity. The endless squabbling among fractious identity groups “serves only to fragment the working class and undermine what should be the primary goal of developing common bonds and building the maximum unity required to defend its interests.” Somehow, “inclusivity” doesn’t include the workers.
Mr. Embery protests that the British tradition of vigorous debate—deeply rooted in union halls and worker-education classes as well as in Parliament—has given way to “echo chambers, ‘safe spaces’ and draconian hate legislation, all of which serve the purpose of suppressing unwelcome opinions and enforcing an official orthodoxy.” Arguably the stifling began when Tony Blair told the Labour Party that globalization was not open to discussion: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” . . .
Uncontrolled immigration displaces low-pay workers or depresses their wages. Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn calculated that immigration may grow the national economy in the long run, but new jobs created always lag behind new entrants into the labor market. Those hurt most are often immigrants who arrived earlier (which may explain why 60% of U.K. migrants and their children want to reduce immigration, and why so many Hispanics voted for Donald Trump ). Brexit was supported by about a third of nonwhite voters, who noticed that, under EU policy, Poles could more easily enter Britain than Jamaicans.
You probably won’t agree with all of Mr. Embery’s policy prescriptions, but he will force you to think outside your usual political grooves. “Despised” makes a compelling case that “global governance” is radically incompatible with democracy, civil liberties and broadly shared prosperity. Supranational agencies like the EU inevitably concentrate power in unresponsive bureaucracies and concentrate wealth in multinational corporations. The left should have resisted their rise, but conservatives too were slow to recognize that globalization subverted everything they valued: traditional communities, patriotism, religious faith, stable families, unintrusive government and personal freedom. Mr. Embery’s goal is to build a society where citizens no longer feel like colonial subjects in their own country. He reminds us that the British exited the EU due to “the desire for self-government and sovereignty”—the same reason that the Irish and the Indians exited the British Empire.
Indeed. People want those things here, too.
RUSS SMITH: Payday Publishers — The future of journalism is right under your nose.
Lots of journalists, I’d guess, saw the unintentional rib-tickler Guardian story last Saturday about the down-for-the-count Rolling Stone offering “thought leaders” to publish in its pages—for a fee of $2000. Man, that takes “sponsored content” (RS owner Penske Media Corporation took pains to note that these “sold” articles would be labeled as such, in order to differentiate them from the other stories, which, as always, might be viewed as free ads) to a new level! I’ve no idea what success the magazine will have in attracting “big names”—pardon, “thought leaders”—to the last-ditch revenue gambit, but it’s not much of a draw. After all, who reads Rolling Stone in 2021?
(An early subscriber, a year after Jann Wenner launched RS in 1967, I couldn’t wait for the new issue to arrive, up until about 1974. When the magazine moved from San Francisco to New York in 1976, and shamelessly sucked up to the Jimmy Carter campaign, blowing Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, I moved to sporadic reading; by 1985, when Spin was far more vital in critiquing music and pop culture, I stopped reading almost completely, occasionally picking up a copy at newsstands, like RS a vestige of the 20th century.)
My friend and colleague Crispin Sartwell touched on this subject in September 2019, disparaging the daily ghost-written op-ed columns in major newspapers. (He jokingly added that such promotional drivel was depriving real writers—like him!—from landing on once-prestigious pages.) Sartwell ticked off the names of politicians or celebrities whose byline was attached to anodyne, agenda-driven essays that added little to the publications: people like Jane Fonda, Rahm Emanuel, Lindsey Graham, Leon Panetta, Cindy McCain, Liz Cheney, Rashida Tlaib, Mitch McConnell, James Comey and on and on and on. He wrote: “Even if your own columnists fail… that doesn’t mean that you should allow your newspaper to be directly annexed to someone’s political career or publicity machine.”
I’d wager if Crispin were to re-visit the subject today, he’d come to the same conclusion as me: in the near-future—as I noted, Rolling Stone matters little, but its gimmick will have ramifications—ghost-written articles by politicians/celebrities will be for sale, and labeled as such. I’m not sure why a newspaper like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or New York Times would want to foul their editorial pages with such drivel, but a buck’s a buck. This is modern “journalism” and it’s getting worse not at annual pace, but monthly.
As always, life imitates Monty Python: “The BBC wishes to deny rumors that it is going into liquidation. Mrs. Kelly, who owns the flat where they live, has said that they can stay on till the end of the month, and we’ve just heard that Huw Weldon’s watch has been accepted by the London Electricity Board and transmissions for this evening can be continued as planned.”
KURT SCHLICHTER: Stop the Third Party Insanity. “Ditching the GOP is a bad idea born of justifiable frustration, and we need to stop being emotional and start being ruthless in our campaign to retake this country from these liberal establishment aspiring fascists. A third party is not the way. It is a bad idea, one that is technically impractical and which is strategically inept. It will lead to disaster. And the Democrats know it, which is why they love this third party palaver. The only thing that makes the tooting likes of Eric Swalwell coo in delight harder than some mediocre Chi Com honeypot is the thought of us conservatives committing ritual suicide by splitting our half of the country in two because some of the 50 percent of Americans in our camp are insufferable sissies.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: The ‘QAnon Shaman’ Just Flipped on Trump.
Related: “Jake Angeli, shamanic practitioner, leads the crowd in a yell before the march in solidarity with climate activism groups across the country to the Arizona State Capitol Building Friday, September 20, 2019.”
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: White House Punts on Condemning BDS Movement.
IT’S SATIRE – FOR NOW: Blue Check Homes. “Get a Verified Blue Badge on your home. The blue verified badge on your house lets people outside know that you’re an authentic public figure. To receive the blue check crest, there must be someone authentic and notable actively living in the house.”
THE CRUSHING OF DISSENT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Colleges investigate community members for attending pro-Trump protest.
SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB: As Tom Brady Reaches His 10th Super Bowl, Does Inequality Still Bother You?
CAN’T STOP THE SIGNAL: Defiant Redditors buy Times Square billboard as GameStop stock saga rages.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Black Student Union demands segregated safe spaces ‘on and off campus.’
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Hasn’t Cancel Culture Come for Alec Baldwin? “It’s almost as if Cancel Culture exists solely to punish those the hard Left want erased, not create a kinder, gentler world.”