MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: Here’s How Biden is Abusing His ‘Emergency Powers’ to Grow the Welfare State.
Archive for 2022
July 16, 2022
A RARE APPEARANCE DURING THE DAY (PROVING I’M NOT A VAMPIRE*): TANSTAAFL, DAY 16 — THE LAST DAY — ALL STRESSFUL THINGS MUST COME TO AN END. FREE PICTURE AND MY FAVORITE BATS.
No, you don’t have to donate, but there’s a free sf picture some of you might want. (HOW do I know what you might want?)
And thank heavens this is the final day. No more for a year. (Which is why I chose to do it once a year, rather than have a permanent can rattle.)
*Yeah, yeah, maybe I’m a daywalker. Wouldn’t you like to know?
ANDREW SULLIVAN: THE SKEPTIC’S CASE FOR RON DESANTIS. At Hot Air, John Sexton writes:
Andrew Sullivan doesn’t exactly sound eager to support Gov. DeSantis’ possible bid for the White House in 2024, but he does tick through the arguments against him and suggests that given a choice between what we have now and a return of Donald Trump, DeSantis may in fact be the best choice.
So get real: If you really believe that Trump remains a unique threat to constitutional democracy in America, you need to consider the possibility that, at this point, a Republican is probably your best bet.
One stands out, and it’s Ron DeSantis, the popular governor of Florida. And yet so many Never Trumpers, right and left, have instantly become Never DeSanters, calling him a terrifyingly competent clone of the thug with the bad hair. He’s “Trump 2.0” but even “more dangerous than Trump,” says Dean Obeidallah. “He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump,” argues a fascism scholar.
“DeSantis has decided to try to outflank Trump, to out-Trump Trump,” worries Michael Tomasky. He’s a clone of Viktor Orbán, says Vox, and on some issues, “DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.”Then there’s Max Boot: “Just because DeSantis is smarter than Trump doesn’t mean that he is any less dangerous. In fact, he might be an even bigger threat for that very reason.”…
I don’t really have a solid grasp of his core character, and I have to remain a skeptic on this, but his steadfastness and independence of mind under Covid was encouraging. He served his country in Iraq. He works hard. He is a devoted family man. In all this, he is not just not-Trump. He is his opposite…
DeSantis sure isn’t my dream candidate. But the currently viable alternative — we must always remember — is a nightmare.
Personally I was never a never Trumper. In fact, I voted for him but I won’t be voting for him again. I won’t go into my reasons except for this one: He’s too damn old to run again. Yes, I know he’s not Joe Biden but in two years he’ll be 78-years-old, which means if he won he’d be 82 in his final year in office. No one knows what that would look like and I don’t think the GOP should make the same mistake the Democrats made with Biden, especially when there’s a candidate who is currently 43 years old and who lacks all of Trump’s considerable baggage.
If DeSantis is the GOP front-runner in 2024, it will be fun to read Andrew’s reason for bailing on him:
● “Kerry may be the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time.”
—Sullivan in the London Sunday Times, July 25th, 2004.
● Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.
—Sullivan in the Atlantic, December 1st, 2007.
● The Conservative Case For Obama – Again.
—Sullivan on his Daily Dish blog, July 30th, 2012.
● Andrew Sullivan slams Clinton even as he intends to vote for her, his first vote as a citizen.
—The Daily Kos, October 25th, 2016.
● Healing From The Center Out: Joe Biden, a president for all Americans, period.
—Sullivan on his Weekly Dish Substack, October 30th, 2020.
OUT: EDUCATION. IN: INDOCTRINATION. How Universities Weaponize Freshman Orientation.
“THE PAIN IS THE POINT:” Katie Pavlich spots Pete Buttigieg proving the Biden admin’s ‘doing this to you on purpose:’ Buttigieg just bragged that high gas prices are pushing Americans to electric vehicles. Now you know why the Biden Administration refuses to unleash American energy.
“BESMIRCHMENT DERBY:” Jefferson is out at Monticello.
Monticello has gone woke, write Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine in the New York Post. Tours of Thomas Jefferson’s home stress slavery as part of a campaign to “balance the historical record.”
“The tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man,” Stephen Owen of Enochville, NC, wrote on Facebook.
“People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute, told The Post. His guide was “surly and dismissive” about Jefferson’s accomplishments.
And Ford’s Theatre would like you to forget the single most important moment that happened there and/or its unfortunate choices in hiring actors:
UPDATE: Founding father James Madison sidelined by woke history in his own home. “The globalist billionaire who funded the woke transformation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello paid for a similar overhaul of James Madison’s house — where the author of the US Constitution has been shoved into a supporting role, while slavery and racism take center stage. No American flags fly at Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in rural Virginia, and not a single display focuses on the life and accomplishments of America’s foremost political philosopher, who created our three-branch federal system of government, wrote the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and served two terms as president.”
(Updated and bumped.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Podcast: Everything You Know About Watergate Is Wrong, Part 1.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post Changes Fareed Zakaria Headline Instructing Democrats to ‘Forget Pronouns’ after Twitter Backlash.
The Washington Post changed the headline of an opinion piece by Fareed Zakaria after facing intense backlash on Twitter over the suggestion that Democrats should “Forget Pronouns.”
The article was first posted on Thursday with the headline, “Forget Pronouns: Democrats need to become the party of building things,” and Zakaria shared the article on Twitter with the commentary that getting “stuff done” is “a lot more important to most Americans than using the right pronouns.”
Zakaria’s message was widely criticized, with many emphasizing the importance of respecting pronouns and paying attention to the needs of transgender people. Chasten Buttigieg, husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, wrote, “It is wildly inappropriate to instruct Democrats to toss aside an entire group of Americans in order to win.”
Oh, I think that’s already happening, Chasten: Hispanic Voters on the Move.
Josh Kraushaar has left National Journal for Axios. Yesterday Axios flagged Kraushaar’s reading of the demographic shifts reflected in the latest New York Times/Siena College Poll: “Democrats now have a bigger advantage among white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters…”
Today on Axios Kraushaar writes under his own byline in “The great realignment.” The key data point is among Hispanic voters: “Democrats are statistically tied with Republicans among Hispanics on the generic congressional ballot…Dems held a 47-point edge with Hispanics during the 2018 midterms.”
Not coincidentally: Ruy Teixeira, Author of ‘The Emerging Democratic Majority,’ Quits CAP over Its Obsession with Identity Politics.
Meanwhile, back at Twitter’s Fareed-freakout:
UPDATE: Why a Lefty Scholar Is Bolting from His Liberal Think Tank to Find Refuge with Conservatives.
(Updated and bumped.)
HOW DO I GET A SMALLPOX VAX? U.S. orders another 2.5 million doses of Bavarian Nordic’s monkeypox vaccine.
GOODER AND HARDER, L.A.: Los Angeles County poised to return to mask mandates once again.
Related: VDH on Gavin Newsom’s Weird Idea of ‘Freedom.’
In a run-up to what is likely to be a 2024 presidential bid, California Governor Gavin Newsom hit upon the bizarre idea of boasting in commercials that California is America’s true “free” state.
Part of his ad campaign is to attack Florida — currently run by Newsom’s possible rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Yet, with the most burdensome regulations and high tax rates, Newsom’s California is arguably the most unfree state in the union.
In return for these steep costs, the state’s public institutions, infrastructure, and services are among the country’s worst.
California’s once-vaunted freeway system is near the bottom of all state comparisons. California’s Highway 99, which runs the length of the Central Valley, is one of the deadliest roads in America based on miles driven.
Over half the nation’s homeless crowd the state’s major cities. One-third of America’s welfare recipients have flooded into the state. A fifth of the resident population lives below the poverty line. Well over a quarter of Golden State residents were not born in the United States.
California public school test scores consistently fall among the bottom 10 states. San Francisco has the highest per capita property crime rate in the country.
The recently recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and his soon-to-be recalled Los Angeles counterpart George Gascon have nearly ruined their cities. Both are iconic of multibillionaire George Soros’ nationwide efforts to undermine the entire criminal justice system.
State residents are not free to drive safely because of their decrepit freeways. They are not free from filthy and toxic sidewalks or dangerous physical assault in their major cities.
Public school children are not free to enjoy competitive educations. San Franciscans are not free to park their cars without fearing that they will be vandalized or stolen.
The destruction of these freedoms is in direct proportion to the confiscatory taxes that the state collects — the highest bracket of income and gasoline rates in the nation, among the highest sales taxes, and property taxes that soar due to inflated assessments in spite of a 1978 state constitutional amendment.
Currently, California faces brownouts due to the longstanding, deliberate curtailment of electrical generation plants.
Yosemite’s historic redwood forest is currently threatened with what are now customary California summer conflagrations.
The destructive, dirty forest fires reflect a deliberate state policy of not gleaning the forests of dead trees, but rather letting the flammable debris serve as “natural” fodder for bugs and birds.
The state has not built a major reservoir in nearly 40 years.
There’s more, to which Zero Hedge’s social media writer responded with, “Hello police? We’d like to report a murder…”
MARK JUDGE: Adolf Hitler Thought More Like Nancy Pelosi Than Donald Trump.
The best book on Hitler’s religious beliefs is Hitler’s Religion: the Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich by Richard Weikart. After reading it one gets the idea that Hitler would have sided much more with the modern abortion movement than the pro-life cause.
Hitler was a pantheist who believed in the survival of the fittest and that the strong can bully and wipe out the weak. “Pantheism is the idea that all of nature is God,” Weikart, a history professor at California State University, explained to me in an interview. “Because Hitler thought that nature was God, he thought that following the laws of nature was doing the divine will.”
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, nature is a creation of God, not God himself. According to Weikart, Hitler believed that God is found in the power of nature — particularly the violent Darwinian struggle for survival. “Hitler thought that destroying people he thought of as weak or inferior was in perfect accordance with what nature does,” Weikart said. “After all, in nature, animals get killed, and certain species go extinct. Hitler thought the same thing should go on in human society because he thought certain races were inferior to others. So he thought destroying them was a good thing.”
This view is much more aligned with the ideas of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, than those of anyone in the GOP.
Atheists Love to Lie About This
Despite this evidence, Weikart says, the idea that Hitler was a Christian still pops up in Progressive arguments and on atheist websites. “One of the reasons they argue that Hitler was a Christian is that they are atheists or agnostics and want to bash Christianity. They’re wanting to show the evils of Christianity, so making Christianity responsible for the Holocaust meets their idea about Christianity representing all the evils in the world.”
The left has always gotten away with Nazi-Republican comparisons because understanding Hitler’s religion has been a complicated task. The German dictator often spoke about what religious beliefs he did not accept, but never clearly stated which ones he did. He rejected not only Christianity, but also atheism, mysticism, occultism, and neo-paganism.
Flashback to the No Pasaran blog in 2012: 卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the “Religion” of National Socialism.
Or as author Dave Shiflett quipped in 2002 in National Review, “A shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity.”
Incidentally, the left’s ongoing mind viruses are a reminder of something Glenn wrote in 2017, linking to a Rod Dreher post titled “The Storm Before the Storm,” “The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.”
STACY MCCAIN: Historic Thoughts on ‘Our Democracy.’ “In the ensuing 233 years, many Americans have lost their fear of a tyrannical authority. Indeed, some of our ‘elite’ seem to love such authority, which they hope to control for their own tyrannical purposes, and these elites have lately gotten into the habit of using the phrase ‘our democracy’ as if there were a consensus agreement in favor of the nebulous concept this phrase is meant to express. Specifically, the elites who endlessly blather on about ‘our democracy’ claim that it is threatened by Donald Trump and his supporters, so that ‘our democracy’ can only be safe if 74 million voters are effectively disenfranchised. In other words, ‘our democracy’ requires the suppression of dissent, which certainly is not what most Americans think of as democracy.”
When Democrats talk about “our democracy,” what they really mean is their democracy. Your votes don’t count.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Shark NV356E S2 Navigator Lift-Away Professional Upright Vacuum. #CommissionEarned
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 takedown of Roe v. Wade on Friday set off a Krakatoa of hatred not seen from the Left since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016. As California’s Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis demonstrates, Trump Derangement Syndrome now joins forces with Thomas Derangement Syndrome.
“Who is Clarence Thomas? Is he my Saudi Arabian father who’s going to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body, with my life?” said Kounalakis in a television appearance. “Be prepared to live in defiance of these six people,” Kounalakis added, “who think that they have the right to tell you what you can do with their [sic] bodies.”
As the California Globe noted, of the six justices voting in the majority, Kounalakis named only Clarence Thomas, the only African American, and the only one suddenly branded a “Saudi Arabian father.” All across America, people of all faiths and races might wonder what California’s lieutenant governor is all about.
Read the whole thing.
OLD AND BUSTED: Florida Man.
The New Hotness? Oklahoma Man! Oklahoma man accused of killing fisherman out of fear of being eaten by Bigfoot, authorities say.
HIGHER EDUCATION CHOOSES SIDES: Most universities issue pro-abortion statements.
YES, YES THEY DO:
BE PREPARED: Belkin Power Strip Surge Protector with 8 AC Multiple Outlets. #CommissionEarned
MATT TAIBBI: Move over ACLU, FIRE is the New Champion of Free Speech.
After years of planning, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, better known as FIRE, announced a major expansion Monday, moving “beyond college campuses to protect free speech — for all Americans.”
FIRE was the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, who co-authored the 1999 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. To the modern reader the book reads like a collection of eccentric cases of students and teachers caught up in speech code issues, most (but not all) being conservative.
To take just one of countless nut-bar examples, Kors and Silverglate told the story of a professor in San Bernardino reprimanded for violating sexual harassment policies because, among other things, “he assigns provocative essays such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal,” as the court case later put it. This was apparently the “cannibalism” portion of the accusation that he delved into such subjects as “obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children.”
The book triggered such an overwhelming number of responses from other faculty members and students that the pair decided to set up an organization to defend people who found themselves in tricky speech controversies on campuses. They soon found they had plenty of work and, by 2022, enough of a mandate to expand beyond colleges and universities into America at large. According to FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff, as quoted in a Politico story, the group has already raised over $28 million toward a $75 million “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”
As noted in another story I put out today, FIRE will be doing a lot of stepping into a role semi-vacated by the American Civil Liberties Union. I spoke with Nico Perrino of FIRE, producer and co-director of the excellent documentary about former ACLU chief Ira Glasser (see review here), to ask what the expansion would entail[.]
Back in 2003, the late Steven Den Beste compared the ACLU with Amnesty International, after the latter forgot its original mission (remember those “to freedom!” ads that ran on MTV in the 1980s?) over how its members (read: fundraisers) viewed the Iraq War:
It’s not going too far to say that many of Amnesty International’s members have approximately as strongly negative of feelings now about America and George Bush as the ACLU’s members had about the Nazis when the ACLU defended them in Skokie.
The ACLU made the principled decision and weathered the downturn in contributions. When condemnation of Iraq didn’t make AI look as if it was aligning with America, Amnesty International was willing to try to shine a spotlight on the abuses there. But now AI has suddenly gone silent. The abuses against the citizens of Iraq have not stopped; indeed they’ve gotten worse. In addition to ongoing violent repression of Iraq’s civilian population, various Iraqi military and para-military units have been directly violating the Geneva Convention by, for instance, abusing the white flag of truce, and by using protected humanitarian facilities to hold military equipment, and by using “human shields” in combat, and by directly firing at refugees, and in numerous other ways.
And what we’re seeing is that AI seems unwilling to make more than oblique mention of these things, while at the same time explicitly condemning the US for what are at best minor transgressions by comparison. Why is it more important to strongly focus attention on “censorship” while ignoring mass slaughter of refugees?
In retrospect, Conquest’s second law of politics (“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”) dictates that it was only a matter of time before the ACLU would similarly lose the thread.
And lose it they have, big-time: ACLU helped draft article at heart of Depp v Heard case for $3.5m donation, court hears.
And then there was this show-stopping moment: Bad news from the ACLU: Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t woke enough.
IT’S SUPPOSED TO DOCK THIS MORNING: Dragon capsule launches on SpaceX’s 25th cargo mission to the space station.