Archive for 2025
January 31, 2025
SCOTT PINSKER: Would Trump WIN by Letting Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard LOSE?
Right now, the Democrats don’t have a brand. Nor do they have a go-to brand ambassador — someone who exemplifies what the Democrats value and stand for. The 2024 election essentially eviscerated the Biden, Obama, Harris, Clinton(s), Schumer, and Pelosi power cabal that had ruled the Democratic Party with an iron fist since the early 1990s.
It’s gotten so bad that some Democrats are even calling for a “rebranding” of their “toxic” image.
My proposal: Instead of letting the Democrats rebrand themselves on THEIR terms, the Republicans should rebrand them on OUR terms.
And it’s easier than you think. Because the Democrats are so devoid of ideas, leadership, and direction, their “default setting” is to oppose whatever Trump supports.
Including his cabinet appointments.
If the Democrats kill the nominations of Gabbard and Kennedy, it brands them as ideological fanatics who won’t tolerate internal dissent.
It’s clever and does have merit. Nevertheless, Trump strikes me as less of a “win by losing” guy than a “win by winning” guy.
ED MORRISSEY: DNC: Learn a Lesson? Nous?
If diversity is their greatest strength, then why did that argument lose to a presidential candidate whom the electorate had never ever viewed with a net-favorable rating before the election? They ran explicitly on that message, and practically no other positive argument for Harris. The Democrats’ main message was that Trump was a Nazifasciststinkybottom and his supporters were “garbage,” and that as a black woman, Harris was owed support from the voters.
Maybe they should have run a Native American instead? Is that the argument here?
No one is “demonizing diversity” either, which is the same kind of strawman argument that also failed in the election. No one opposes diversity, but they are opposed to making diversity the top priority and only criterion. Americans have grown tired of being called racists and bigots for prioritizing merit and accomplishment, and of being told that they can only atone by electing Democrats — and even then, atonement is impossible. Americans elected Barack Obama twice, and yet the same raaaaaacisssst argument persists when Democrats lose.
Lest readers consider that an exaggeration, here’s how ‘journalist’ Jonathan Capehart framed it at the DNC meeting:
So the DNC plans to double down on the “you’re a racist/misogynist/transphobe unless you vote for us” marketing campaign. No other reason for Harris’ defeat comes to mind among DNC members and meeting attendees — not her lack of visibility in the media, her refusal to discuss policy, or her incoherent word salads that clearly demonstrated just how far out of her depth Harris was as VP and nominee.
And that’s the easy lesson. Democrats can jettison Harris easily, and likely will, as a terrible candidate, because she so clearly is. That would allow for a rationalization that their policies were not the problem. They can’t claim that both the candidate and the policies were good, though, because then how did Trump get elected and win all of the swing states with a net-negative favorability?
Fortunately, the Democrats’ cool, rational response to the reelection of Donald Trump should allow them to quickly snap back from their current morass:
And:
It will be interesting to see how much Trump calling out Jeffries both amplifies the story and causes the DNC-MSM to reflexively back his call for violence in the era of BLM and Luigi Mangione.
As Jon Gabriel wrote last year: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD (METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING):
🚨 UPDATE: The White House has just called on Hakeem Jeffries to APOLOGIZE for his threat of violence this morning. https://t.co/0TAoczBfb8 pic.twitter.com/WOOwCb9K3c
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 31, 2025
Get the DOJ on him for incitement.
HMM: The Case for “Avalanche Decoupling” From China.
Punishing Beijing for unprovoked aggression would be essential to maintaining U.S. credibility and leverage, but it would have to be balanced with U.S. interests. These include preserving macroeconomic and financial stability, dollar hegemony, and a functional and rules-based international trading system, as well as breaking U.S. and allied dependence on the Chinese market. Even in an extreme crisis scenario—for example, if Beijing attacked U.S. bases in East Asia during an invasion of Taiwan—attempting a total and immediate economic decoupling from China would be a costly and dangerous gamble. It would subordinate all other U.S. interests to a punishment strategy that might not even work.
But there is another option. Rather than threatening economic Armageddon if China crossed U.S. redlines in East Asia, Washington could offer an affirmative vision for how the international economic system can evolve to protect the vital interests of the United States, its allies, and third countries. This vision should include a U.S.-led allied agenda to protect economic security in peacetime, as well as a contingency plan to broaden and accelerate that program during and after a potential crisis of Chinese aggression.
The plan is “avalanche decoupling.” If Beijing crossed one of Washington’s redlines, the United States could work with its allies to manage the resulting global financial crisis, reshore critical supply chains away from China as fast as possible, and trigger a ratcheting trade policy to unlink noncritical supply chains over the longer term. The plan would also initiate the creation of an Economic Security Cooperation Board, a new institution with membership open to all countries except rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and of course China.
Certainly, something to consider. The post-WWII rules-based system has largely served us well but inviting in countries — like Communist China and Putin-era Russia — who had no interest in playing by those rules was a mistake Western elites should pay dearly for, but won’t.
OLD AND BUSTED: BBC Announcers Uniformly Speaking in the Received Pronunciation Accent.
The New Hotness? BBC Webpages in Pidgin English! Wetin dey happen? The BBC’s Pidgin news site is a huge deal.
It’s real and spectacular:
FASTER, PLEASE: First steps taken toward developing interstellar lightsails.
THIS IS THE WAY: Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics writes, “what you’re increasingly seeing is a frontal assault on the institutions that buttress the left:
So in Trump’s first term, using a (pretty shaky, imo) interpretation of the 1st Amendment, we established you can’t kick a reporter out for his bias. The Right’s response now is “ok, fine, we’ll just flood the press corps with new right-of-center podcasters and bloggers. Give your statue of liberty speech in a room full of Alex Berensons and catturds and see how it goes over.”
You saw trickles of it with academia with moves on tenure in WI, but it’s a war in FL. “You won’t voluntarily diversify your faculty ideologically? We’ll do it for you, and in a far more severe way in the other direction.”
“And the diversity apparatus that we think is a cloak for hiring a bunch of far-left professors? That’s simply gone.”
“We can’t fire unfriendly civil servants? Fine, but we’re not going to roll over either. We’re going to make life as miserable for them as possible and give them every possible incentive to leave.”
Much more like this, please.
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED; Ventilation in hospitals could cause viruses to spread further, study suggests.
THIS FEELS CORRECT:
I think I've figured it out.
I've been watching the US confirmation hearings and something very deep has shifted.
It's more than just the kinds of people being appointed, it's bigger than a 'vibe shift'… but I couldn't figure out what it was.
It's the revolution eating it's…
— Topher Field (@TopherField) January 30, 2025
Full text:
I think I’ve figured it out.
I’ve been watching the US confirmation hearings and something very deep has shifted.
It’s more than just the kinds of people being appointed, it’s bigger than a ‘vibe shift’… but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
It’s the revolution eating it’s own.
Even Democrats are having their eyes opened as they watch their heros from the last few decades try to tear down the people who COULD have made the Democrats great again… People who SHOULD have been their next generation of Democratic heros.
RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard stand out as great examples, and long time Democrat power brokers like Bernie Sanders are trying every trick to destroy them, every weapon, all the things that USED to work, and it’s blowing up in their faces.
The Revolutionary Old Guard are trying to eat their own children, and are being devoured by them instead.
These senate confirmation hearings are highlighting the fact that MAGA is actually a unity movement, with the best of the Republicans AND the best of the Democrats, taking the country forward together and leaving the decrepit old guard behind.
Unity movements eventually fall apart over fundamental disagreements. But in the meantime, having the best of both parties agreeing on needed reforms can lead to fundamental improvements. It’s a once-in-a-generation — once-in-a-century? — opportunity, and Trump and his team are taking advantage.
ARMOND WHITE: Review: The Day of the Locust — a Prophecy of Hollywood’s Conflagration.
Today’s burning of Los Angeles has been met without a sense of fatalism. (At least Public Enemy’s jocular 1990 rap — “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!” — parodied the disingenuous civil rights movie Mississippi Burning.) Contemporary Hollywood progressives believe that “climate change” explains and excuses everything, so there’s never a need for political remorse. This attitude reflects and degrades West’s vision. The climax of Schlesinger’s film depicts a Hollywood red-carpet, klieg-light movie premiere that turns apocalyptic. It looks like a prediction of Millennial self-sacrifice — a Left Coast version of J6-style as if deliberately manufactured by TMZ, the tabloid TV show that dabbles in performative political commentary.
[Nathanael] West’s hellfire-and-locust symbolism parodied biblical judgment, but such shame no longer applies to current secular permissiveness or the progressive ideology in Marxist writer Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990), famous for its subversive condemnation of Los Angeles’s capitalist elitism. Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust doesn’t do justice to West’s paranoia, yet its remoteness captures the liberal Hollywood apathy that no longer identifies with American domesticity and sees its own working class as existing merely to perpetuate ruling-class superiority. Schlesinger’s joke about the doomed, obsolete 13-letter Hollywoodland sign hints at the self-hatred that now pervades the Anglosphere and suggests that the immolation starts from the inside.
Come for the leftist self-hatred, stay for Donald Sutherland as – and I’m not joking – Homer Simpson!
WELL, YES:
No shit they were lying.
It's China. https://t.co/nazeZwjxHf
— RBe (@RBPundit) January 31, 2025
Might want to look into who shorted Nvidia before the announcement.
A MAN WITH A PLAN:
Reducing the federal deficit from $2T to $1T in FY2026 requires cutting an average of ~$4B/day in projected 2026 spending from now to Sept 30.
That would still result in a ~$1T deficit, but economic growth should be able to match that number, which would mean no inflation in…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2025
More:
Before even getting to timed scripts, the number of government jobs that could be replaced simply with a mouse macro is astounding!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2025
I don’t doubt he’s wrong on either count. Milei showed the way, we just have to follow.
VDH: Mexico — Friend, Enemy, Neutral, or Something Else?
After four years of Biden’s appeasement, Mexico seems to assume that it has a sovereign right to encourage the flight of millions of its own impoverished citizens illegally into the U.S. and further assumes that it can fast-track millions of Latin Americans through its territory and across our border.
Mexico either cannot or will not address the billions of dollars of raw fentanyl products shipped in—mostly from China—and then processed for export to the U.S. by its cartels across a nonexistent border.
Mexico seems to have little concern that some 75,000 Americans on average die from mostly Mexican-imported fentanyl each year—more deaths in just the last decade than all the Americans killed in action during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Who then is our friend, and who is our enemy?
This appalling death toll is in part due to the deliberate efforts of the cartels to mask fentanyl as less deadly narcotics or camouflage the poison by lacing it into counterfeit prescription drugs.
Mexico encourages its expatriate illegal aliens to send back some $63 billion per year in remittances.
Change the incentives. One way to do that is to tax the hell out of remittances.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: TurboTax Deluxe 2024 Tax Software. #CommissionEarned
CALIFORNIA CONTINUES TO BE BATTERED BY GLOBAL WARMING: La Jolla, Mission Valley and Rancho Bernardo fires started in homeless encampments.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE: The Resistance Attempts a Coup at USAID and It Doesn’t Go Well.
The director of employee and labor relations at the US Agency for International Development has been placed on administrative leave after a stunning refusal to follow directions given by President Trump’s transition team.
Tuesday, acting USAID Administrator Jason Gray ordered nearly 60 senior bureaucrats placed on indefinite administrative leave for taking actions to evade Trump’s executive orders; see Trump Suspends As Many As 60 Senior Bureaucrats for Trying to Evade His Executive Orders – RedState. In a memo, Gray said, “We have identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people.“ As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions.”
That was not the end of the drama at USAID.
It was also not the end of the winning.
ADMINISTRATIVE BLOAT: New research identifies more than 1,100 DEI-related jobs at University of Michigan.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘I don’t give a f**k if you have a right to be here’: leftist tries to shut down conservative students.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is actively recruiting workers who suffer “severe intellectual” disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website.
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” the FAA’s website states. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
The initiative is part of the FAA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, which says “diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.” The FAA’s website shows the agency’s guidelines on diversity hiring were last updated on March 23, 2022.
The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation, is a government agency charged with regulating civil aviation and employs roughly 45,000 people.
We still don’t know exactly what caused Wednesday night’s fatal collision. But making it a priority to hire people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities for life-and-death positions is going to result in tragedy sooner rather than later.