Archive for 2019

IF THEY TAKE MAIL OR INTERNET ORDERS, THEY’LL GET A LOT OF BUSINESS: Heaven has a wall: Grocery store ad mailer stirs controversy. “A family-owned Christian grocery store with several locations in Southeast Arkansas is dealing with backlash as customers argue a weekly ad mailer included a controversial political message.”

The SJW backlash doesn’t seem to bother them: “The company says it stands by the messages and plans to keep including them in the weekly mailers.”

OPEN THREAD: Make this one special.

BRAVE FIREFIGHTER KATY TUR CHEERLEADS FOR AOC’S GREEN NEW DEAL:

CHUCK TODD:

David, obviously the president’s team sees a reelection opening.

DAVID BRODY:

Oh yeah. I mean, it’s wide and it’s huge. And it’s a real big pothole, I think, Chuck, for the Democrats. Look, we know the polls. We’ve seen them. 35 percent of this country is conservative. 35 percent or so is moderate. 26 percent or so liberal. But this is going in a far different direction. Even some of the polling shows that only I think it’s 19 percent– it’s an NBC poll actually, 19 percent think socialism is okay. These are Americans in this country. So the point is that Donald Trump sees this. He’s a master brander. And I believe this is a major, major pothole for Democrats coming, coming in 2020. Big time. Iceberg right ahead.

KATY TUR:

I’m not so sure about that. I mean, I think you have some, some real reporting out there from experts, not just analysts on television, but from actual experts, the U.N., from the, from Donald Trump’s own administration saying how dire this is. The U.N. said we have 12 years before complete disaster. You talk to the representative of the Marshall Islands, and he’s calling it what could amount to genocide if we allow things to go as they are. The reports aren’t just, “Hey, it’s going to get bad.” The reports are, “People will die. Millions and million, and millions of people will die.” And I think that there is an appetite among voters out there, especially Democratic voters and potentially swing voters, to say, “Hey, let’s do something about this now because it’s, it’s going to affect our future.”

Interesting, Tur’s use of the G-word. As Virginia Postrel once told C-Span’s Brian Lamb:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia–to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

Particularly when, as Kevin Williamson wrote today, “Field Marshal Sandy needs a great cause to which to attach herself, lest she return to being only Sandy, obscure and unhappy and of no consequence — or at least no consequence obvious enough for someone with her crippled understanding of what life is for.”

But if Tur actually believes that “The U.N. said we have 12 years before complete disaster,” will she help slow things down, even a little bit, by insisting that NBC drop its contracts with NASCAR and the NFL, and perhaps Hollywood itself to dramatically shrink its own massive carbon footprint? And if we really do only “have 12 years before complete disaster,” which decade is she referring to?

WELL, TWISTING YOUR WORDS TO FIT THEIR WORST FANTASIES IS A HALLMARK OF THE LEFT, BECAUSE THEY’RE AWFUL PEOPLE:

I’m seeing Trump getting trashed — “Twitter Lampoons Trump for Apparent Trail of Tears Joke Aimed at Elizabeth Warren” (Mediaite).

“The joke here is that the Trail of Tears was a genocide. Get it? Get it?”

I’ll just say 4 things:

1. Trump only wrote (yelled) “TRAIL.” He didn’t say “Trail of Tears.” His haters are zeroing in on the Trail of Tears and insisting that’s what he meant to refer to and that’s what he thought was funny to say. It seems to me that “trail” is a more general term and a term that relates to Native Americans. It’s that more general meaning that makes the specification “of Tears” understandable. It’s as if these anti-Trumpsters have never heard of the Great Trail or the Natchez Trace.

2. If Trump’s opponents really do feel empathy toward those who suffered in the Trail of Tears, why are they bringing it up to score political points? They’re taking something weighty and somber and throwing it around gleefully, because they think they got Trump. Is that a smirk I see on their face?

3. Trump got his opponents to repeat his tweet. They are making it viral, because they think they are hurting him, but they are spotlighting Elizabeth Warren’s worst problem and helping to insure that when we think about Elizabeth Warren, we think about her problematic use of the claim that she’s Native American.

4. The Trump antagonists are giving us another example of the harshness of the left’s demands. Whatever you say may be presented in the worst possible light. It seems that if anything can be portrayed as racist/sexist/homophobic, it will be, and you can be ruined in an instant in the America they have created and want to control. It’s scary.

And that, more than anything, is why you should vote for Trump.

But if we’re going to talk Trail-of-Tears genocide, note that it was perpetrated by a Democratic president, as was the internment of Japanese Americans behind barbed wire in World War Two. So if you want to avoid genocide, you should probably avoid Democratic presidents by . . . voting for Trump. Just sayin’ . . .

WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? But Is It Human?

Surely there’s some time between conception and being eligible to vote where we can draw a line.

GABRIEL MALOR: “This week we learned that blackface isn’t disqualifying for Democratic politicians, and plagiarism isn’t disqualifying for elite journalists.”

To be fair, we actually learned the latter in 2002:

The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, under fire for inappropriately copying several passages in a book she wrote in 1987, yesterday disclosed that her borrowings were far more extensive. In all, she said that in the same book she failed to acknowledge scores of quotations or close paraphrases from other authors.

Ms. Goodwin, one of the nation’s best-known historians and a frequent television commentator, admitted last month that she borrowed some passages in her book, ”The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” from three previous works. She also said that in 1987 her publisher, Simon & Schuster, paid to settle a legal claim by one author under a confidentiality agreement. Yesterday Ms. Goodwin said that since those revelations, her research assistants had found passages copied from several other books as well.

At her behest, she said, Simon & Schuster is taking the extraordinary s