IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR JOE, YOU AIN’T BLACK: Liberals Accuse Cornel West, a Black Man, of ‘Stealing Votes’ From Biden.
Archive for 2023
August 8, 2023
SMARTER THAN A FULL-ON EV: Lexus Announces Plug-In Hybrid RX 450h+ for 2024.
CHANGE? FTC to hold ‘last rites’ meeting before likely Amazon suit. “The move is the clearest sign yet that FTC Chair Lina Khan intends to soon file an antitrust suit against Amazon. The meeting will be a so-called ‘last rites’ meeting that generally precedes a lawsuit.”
DO TELL: Jack Goldsmith: The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences.
The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor. Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-serving legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington. Going forward, these practices will likely be disputed in the language of, and amid demands for, special counsels, indictments and grand juries…. Watergate deluded us into thinking that independent counsels of various stripes could vindicate the rule of law and bring national closure in response to abuses by senior officials in office. Every relevant experience since then — from the discredited independent counsel era (1978-99) through the controversial and unsatisfactory Mueller investigation — proves otherwise. And national dissensus is more corrosive today than in the 1990s, and worse even than when Mr. Mueller was at work….”
The message of the Trump prosecution is Thou Shall Not Challenge The Establishment. If you do, the rules and conventions go out the window and they do whatever dirty things they can to you. And the usual promoters of “decency,” “civility,” and “rule of law” will back them out of class interest and tribal loyalty.
Does this mean that our government — and media/academic establishment, but I repeat myself — is deeply, perhaps hopelessly corrupt and fundamentally illegitimate? Yeah, probably.
And if only there had been some sort of warning about the downsides of this sort of lawfare.
HOW IT STARTED: Maura Healey Not Opposed To Making Massachusetts A Sanctuary State.
—New Boston Post, October 5th.
How it’s going: Massachusetts governor declares emergency over immigrants: ‘This is a national issue.’
—The Washington Examiner, today.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.
IS IT CAUSED BY OVEREXPOSURE TO WOKE NONSENSE? Stanford Researchers Discover New Subtype of Depression.
CRISES BY DESIGN: ‘Bidenomics’ Has Been A Disaster.
By the time the “American Rescue Plan” was passed, there was already too much money chasing too few goods. Tons of people warned about the consequences of dumping more money into the economy. Even when inflation began inching up, Biden dismissed it — “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” he said. Democrats, of course, wanted to cram through a $5 trillion progressive agenda spending bill. So when inflation became a big non-transitory political problem, the Biden administration began arguing that more spending would help ease inflation.
Again, the vital to remember about “Bidenomics” is that it makes absolutely zero sense.
Only after inflation became a political issue did the Democrats rename “Build Back Better” the “Inflation Reduction Act.” It still contained all the historic spending, corporate welfare, price-fixing, and tax hikes, but, more importantly, it also still had absolutely nothing to do with mitigating inflation.
Let’s not forget that “Bidenomics” also helped initiate the highest gas prices in history. The president signed a slew of executive orders pausing government leases on public lands, shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, and stymieing drilling in the Gulf of Mexico over concocted “social cost of carbon” externalities, among other restrictions. Despite the uncertainty of the post-pandemic economy, all of this was done in the first weeks of his administration.
Gooder, and harder, America: The ghost of Milton Friedman is haunting President Biden.
Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: FDA offers tips on tattoo removal.
OUT ON A LIMB: Yes, David Brooks, You Are the “Bad Guys.”
Dear Mr. Brooks,
Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.
Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.
Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.
Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.
I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time – that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.
As Steve Hayward asks at Power Line: Why Are the “Baddies” So Bad?
David proves unable to break from his class. The people in his class are vicious and evil. Full stop. We can see already a critical mass of elitists who will censor and even enforce lockdowns by force if the law didn’t stand in their way even a little bit. Elite institutions are a large part of the cause of this; they deserve to be destroyed right down to their foundations. The inherent presumption of “progressivism” is that their “expertise,” based on infallible “science,” can guide us to a better future. As Oakeshott warned, “the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.” Good luck getting the Harvard faculty—or the New York Times editorial page—to ponder this problem for a nanosecond. This is why the “baddies” are so bad (hat tip to Mitchell & Webb below). Until that presumption is overturned, nothing will meaningfully change. Does Harvard realize that a majority of the nation would celebrate if the entire campus burned to the ground?
Exit quote:
BOOK OF THE DAY: How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything–Yes, Anything! #CommissionEarned
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP, ELECTION DENIER: Georgia GOP Chair Reminds Us of When The Dems Tried to Block an Election in the Peach State.
MARK JUDGE: From The Fabulous Baker Boys to Barbie: The ‘privileged victims’ of the Left.
In his 1979 work The Culture of Narcissism, social scientist Christopher Lasch argued that the human personality had transformed over the course of the later 20th century. We have gone from a generally well-adjusted people to a society full of rage and resentment. Lasch argued that in the healthy development of infants, it is crucial that children experience the reduction of feelings of omnipotence and helplessness, the kind of imbalance that has our culture seeing women as simultaneously goddesses who can do it all and totally helpless if they receive a slight insult. Lasch argued that parents, community, and “transitional objects” — toys such as Barbie dolls, games, pets — introduce the concept of limits. Barbie is supposed to make children feel less godlike.
Resentment might feel good, but, despite what Barbie says, it’s not a good plan for happiness.
Read the whole thing.
DECOUPLING: Chinese Exports Fall at Steepest Pace Since February 2020.
China’s exports to the rest of the world tumbled in July, adding to the challenges for the world’s second-largest economy and offering fresh evidence that a drying up of Western demand is hurting Beijing’s attempts to rekindle growth.
After a short-lived rebound in the spring, goods exports from China resumed a long-term slide that dates to October last year, when consumers in Western developed countries began shifting their spending away from buying furniture and electronic gadgets, and instead diverted it toward services such as entertainment and dining out.
Worsening geopolitical tensions between Beijing and the U.S.-led West have also prompted some Western manufacturers to reduce their reliance on China’s supply chain, which in turn is expected to erode trade ties between the two sides.
…
Compared with those of a year earlier, China’s exports to the U.S. and European Union plunged by more than 20% each last month. There was a lone bright spot: Chinese shipments to Russia soared in July, calculations from the customs data show.
Russia is a poor substitute for the entire West.
IN NORTH CAROLINA? SEE GOV. SCOTT WALKER AT THE MARTIN CENTER’S 20TH ANNIVERSARY GALA, SEPTEMBER 21. The teachers’ unions and universities still hate him, so you know he’ll be worth hearing from on education reform.
COLD WAR II: The United States’ Quantum Talent Shortage Is a National Security Vulnerability. “Given its potential for economic growth as well as military advantage, QIST has become a central battleground of U.S.-China competition. Neither country maintains a decisive advantage across all three QIST subfields. The United States leads in the development of quantum computing and quantum sensing—but Beijing is catching up. China is ahead of the United States in the development of quantum communications technologies and holds the highest number of total quantum technology patents, indicating that it could soon erode the United States’ advantages.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Don’t cry for Megan Rapinoe and humiliated USWNT – they’re a bunch of unpatriotic losers.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Joe Biden’s Personal Brand Is ‘Squeaky Clean,’ and I’m the Pope of Persia.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Commercial Real Estate Turmoil Worsens As Office Delinquencies Accelerate. “Trepp data found the delinquency rate rose 51 basis points to 4.41% last month — the highest level since December 2021. Office delinquencies increased by 46 basis points to 4.96% — up more than 350 basis points since the end of 2022. The deterioration in the office segment is intensifying at an alarmingly rapid pace.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Scott Pace: Why lunar exploration must be of enduring national interest.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Commie Sad Grandma Hillary Clinton Is Even Drunker Than We Thought. “Granny Maojackets has — in my opinion — never been the picture of emotional health and stability. I thought that long before Donald Trump became the man who saved a grateful nation from her presidency and subsequently took up permanent residence as the monster under her bed. She’s more drunkenly weird now than ever.”