WELL, THEY’RE BUYING NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES’ CALHOUNIAN HISTORY OF RACE: Blue States Come Out for States’ Rights.
Archive for 2022
January 6, 2022
SMALL SIGNS OF SANITY IN CALIFORNIA: Liberal Beverly Hills votes to recall DA George Gascón for eliminating bail and dropping charges for many crimes after wealthy enclave is rocked by robberies, including home invasion where Jacqueline Avant was shot dead.
Note though that, “The city council’s 5-0 vote in favor of a resolution demanding Gascón’s recall is not legally binding, but expresses the wealthy enclave’s fury over his policies as crime soars in the area.”
As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
THE BEST JANUARY 6 ANALYSIS YOU’LL FIND ANYWHERE TODAY: Joseph Hanneman is a veteran Wisconsin-based journalist, now working for The Epoch Times. His analysis of what really/may have/certainly didn’t happened a year ago today is copiously documented, rigorously detailed and penetrating, especially with regard to the credible evidence that the role of federal agents in the day’s events very much needs to be publicly, objectively and thoroughly investigated in order for the American people to know the full truth.
THIS ASSUMES HE CAN REMEMBER IT: Oops, I Bet Biden Wishes He Could Delete This Tweet.
PUNDITS: VIRGINIA SNOW HIGHWAY BACKUP UNDERSCORES NEED FOR TRAINS.
In the wake of the massive 32-hour traffic jam in Virginia this week, we’ve seen a fair bit of commentary from folks arguing that the whole snafu underscores the need for more train service throughout the United States.
With that in mind, let’s check in to see how the trains are doing.
Not well at all.
WELL, BYE: And then there were 25: House Dems swarming for the exits. “At 67, [Rep. Brenda] Lawrence is practically a youngster in comparison to House Democrats’ senior leadership, all three of whom are in their eighties. At only four terms, her colleagues must have expected her to keep working her way up the leadership ladder, too. The only reason this isn’t a surprise is because twenty-four of Lawrence’s fellow House Democrats have already hit the egresses before her — and it looks like more of them will follow suit.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
#JOURNALISM: Liberals Pounce on Snowstorm Traffic Disaster in Virginia to Blame Glenn Youngkin, Who Hasn’t Been Sworn in Yet. “Just consider this a preview of how the left will behave once Youngkin is actually sworn in and becomes governor.”
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: New York Times Offers Stunning Report on Left-Wing Racial Fundraising. “This is the largest amount of philanthropy ever spent on one cause in such a short period — probably by a factor of 10.”
#RESISTANCE: A reader sends this from Charlotte:
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California extends mask mandate through Feb. 15 amid surge of COVID-19 cases.
JOEL KOTKIN: AMERICA’S CLASS WAR IS JUST BEGINNING. “The biggest loser in early twenty first century America has been the working class. With the exception of wage gains made during the first three years of the Trump Administration, this class has seen its real income decline. Today, wages are rising again, but inflation is reducing real incomes, and leaving more Americans, particularly the poorest 50 percent, struggling to make ends meet. The pandemic lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have pummeled low-income workers and made more vulnerable those living in crowded housing. Under lockdown the working class could not retreat, like the laptop class, to their computer screens. . . . In our pandemic apartheid almost 40 percent of those Americans making under $40,000 a year lost their jobs in the first few months. Some 44 percent of Black households and 61 percent of Latino household, notes Pew, during the first year of the pandemic suffered a job loss or pay cut, compared to 38 percent of whites. ‘Lockdown fanatics,’ thunders the widely circulated ‘labor populist’ blog The Bellows, ‘have helped manufacture consent for a brutal reorganization of labor that will plunge millions of people into serfdom.'”
Plus: “The working class may have suffered the most in the past decades, but the angriest class in America may be the small business and property-owning class that long stood as a critical part of our national ethos.”
Flashback: America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz. “Lockdowns — where the laptop class stays home while working-class people bring them stuff — were enacted in many states. States that had them did no better, and often worse, than states that did not. This became obvious early but resulted in no change of policy. . . . So is it fair to call the overclass response to the pandemic a failure? Well, certainly not for the overclass, whose members are richer, more powerful and more secure in their positions than a year ago. For America? Well, that’s another story.”
Related: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.
HOW’S THAT PERMANENT DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY COMING ALONG? Pollster Scott Rasmussen Says Democrats Are Getting Demographics All Wrong. “Democrats want to present this notion of persons of color, that they are all the same. It is not a coalition that exists in the real world. And when you appeal to a Hispanic voter who thinks they’re White, trying to make their life in America, and you say ‘fighting for civil rights,’ it doesn’t connect. There have always been divisions in America. They’re just divisions we don’t recognize after the 20th century. People from Poland, Italy, Ireland, were not considered White. Jews were not acceptable. [In the] 19th century, and actually much of the 20th, Catholics were not accepted.”
PLEASE OBSERVE ASHLI BABBITT REMEMBRANCE DAY in a dignified, somber fashion.
YES, JANUARY 6 IS A BIG DEAL: This was the day in history, just to pick one momentous example of the many cited by Issues & Insights, that George Washington married Mary Dandridge Custis in 1759. And January 6, 1540, was also the day Henry VIII married wife number four, Ann of Cleves.
Other notable January 6 milestones include, from the entertainment world, the debut in 1973 on ABC of “Schoolhouse Rock” and in 1975 on NBC of “Wheel of Fortune” with Vanna White and that other person, Slapjack, or whatever.
And yes, a year ago today, a large crowd of thoughtless fools waving signs and shouting slogans a few of whom may actually have believed, overcame a clearly unprepared, untrained U.S. Capitol Police force, penetrated the U.S. Capitol, forced a temporary suspension of Congress certifying the 2020 presidential election results, and did an estimated $1.5 million worth of damage in an historic building full of priceless paintings, statutes, architecture and memories.
By the evening, order was restored, Congress resumed its business and democracy survived. As a noted advocacy group endlessly said some years ago on behalf of a president facing impeachment, participants in today’s political theatricals should realize that it’s past time to “Move On.”
UPDATE: My goodness, I have stirred up a hornet’s nest here. Just to be clear, here’s why I linked to the I & I editorial – Today’s “memorials” will be non-stop lying by Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/MSM talking heads claiming that January 6, 2021, was an attempted coup staged to install a fascist junta run by a bunch of Far-Right Extremists bent on keeping Donald Trump in the Oval Office. If that’s what you think was the aim of the protestors at the Capitol that day, I can assure you that Schumer/Pelosi/Biden/MSM are eagerly cheering you on. Maybe you should think about that.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: DeSantis Derangement Syndrome a Boon for Florida GOP. “We’ve all been witnessing the spectacle of the leftist panic porn crowd admitting that we here in Knuckle-Dragging Land have been right about everything all throughout the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu plague. OK, they’re not actually admitting that, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a conservative position on Covid that hasn’t been co-opted by the leftist ‘experts’ in the last two weeks.”
JOHN PODHORETZ: Alvin Bragg’s psychotic policies are a gift to the GOP.
Indeed, the growing GOP advantage on criminal-justice issues was one of the three pillars of its spectacular rise over the three decades following the 1964 election (the others being the economy and foreign policy), in which LBJ won 61 percent of the vote while Democrats emerged with a 155-member majority in the House and 69 of the Senate’s 100 seats.
What Alvin Bragg has done here must be seen in conjunction with the “Defund the police” and “decarceration” activists who have dominated the Democratic Party’s discourse on criminal justice for the past two years.
Bragg’s memo is the most radical manifestation of the “progressive prosecutor” movement — the systematic effort on the left to elect activists for social justice rather than defenders of the right of ordinary citizens to live unmolested by crime.
Other such prosecutors — Chesa Boudin, now facing a recall election in San Francisco, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — laid the groundwork. But Bragg is the DA in the most important borough in the most important city in the United States, and if he has his way, the 1974 movie “Death Wish” will soon seem like today’s newscast rather than a piquant period piece.
And this is why he is such a gift to the GOP. Every Republican candidate at every level for every office in the United States can and will cite Bragg’s memo as a vanguard document of the Democratic Party.
“Today, it’s Manhattan,” they’ll say. “Tomorrow, it’s Springfield.” The psychotic ideas unfolding in the Big Apple now will be dominating the Biden Justice Department in short order, they’ll say.
As Tom Cotton wrote last month: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
SURPRISING NO ONE: The launch of NASA’s titanic SLS rocket slips toward summer 2022. They call SLS the “Senate Launch System” because it exists solely to satisfy the pork-appetites of key senators.
FEDS CHASING FEDS: DHS, FBI are tracking online posts promoting a violent Jan. 6 reunion on Capitol Hill.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): From last night’s open thread:
Plus, a flashback: The FBI has lost the plot. “The FBI is similarly domesticated. Its number is increasingly part of the shapeless swamp that controls our lives. Its actions are, seen from afar, often ridiculous. But that does not mean they are not also malevolent. That’s an important point: that the ridiculous often easily cohabits with the vile. Hence the dawn raids, the summary incarcerations, the identification of people they disagree with as ‘domestic extremists’, ‘terrorists’, etc.”
SPACE: Amazon helps develop Alexa-like Callisto system for Artemis moon mission.
Blue Origin working on engines would be better.
EMORY LAW JOURNAL: Today, there are two more stories about the Emory Law Journal‘s refusal to publish an invited piece by my colleague Larry Alexander:
Jonathan Turley: “Emory editors objected to Alexander saying that racism is not a problem today. As noted, I disagree with this view. However, I am not sure how the editors expect him to add citation to his own viewpoint. Would they demand a citation from an academic who wrote ‘Racism is a problem today’?”
Robby Soave: “Readers can take a look at the essay and judge for yourselves. Speaking only for myself, I have a hard time agreeing that the language is insensitive and objectifying. Alexander does indeed refer to “black” and “blacks,” but also refers to “white” and “whites.” He invokes criminality and heredity merely to set the matter aside entirely. And his views on whether racism is an important issue today are certainly relevant to his rejection of Perry’s philosophy.”
ANN COULTER: The Great Epstein Cover-up, Part I.
The jury’s courageous delivery last week of five “guilty” verdicts against Epstein’s pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a sort of reverse jury nullification. The U.S. attorney’s office — the prosecution — did everything it could to get an acquittal, but the jurors defied them.
As for media coverage, did you even know that the FBI found Epstein’s cache of sex tapes labeled “(name of underage girl) + (name of VIP)” — and then lost them?
Immediately after Epstein’s arrest at Teterboro Airport in July 2019, the FBI executed a search warrant on his New York mansion. Following a daylong search, agents discovered a hidden safe in the closet of a fifth-floor dressing room, used a saw to break into it, and found an enormous collection of photos of naked girls, and CDs of the girls apparently having sex with influential men.
Then, the agents left — abandoning the photos and CDs, with Epstein’s employees free to wander about the place. As Kelly Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the search, explained during Maxwell’s trial, they only had a warrant to search the house, but not to remove evidence — evidence at the heart of the entire sex trafficking scheme.
It didn’t occur to Maguire to leave a single agent behind to guard the CDs? How about the intern who just gets coffee?
You’ll never guess what happened next.
The FBI, you say? Ray Epps, call your office!