I’m not sure what Touré [Neblett] does now. He had his own show on MSNBC before they gave the axe to a number of shows featuring blacks. Now he sits around and wonders what white culture is. Didn’t he rush to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture’s exhibit on “whiteness” and white culture? That pretty well spelled it out. According to the Smithsonian, white culture is characterized by individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, and more. One of the stated goals in Black Lives Matter’s manifesto was to “disrupt” the nuclear family.
The chart may be gone, but, the message from the Smithsonian still stands, Byron York wrote in July of 2020: “Minus the chart, the ‘whiteness’ page on the museum’s website remains the same, including a video from another diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility. It includes a discussion of ‘white dominant culture’ without the specific references to individualism, hard work, objectivity, etc., that the chart included.”
Fortunately, one man can save them — and that man is Travis Bickle! “The idea had been growing in my brain for some time: TRUE force. All the king’s men cannot put it back together again:”
Although Travis wore Mohawks, not masks when he was getting ready to move in for the kill:
DeNiro wears a large mask walking outside years post-Covid only to take it off while speaking while surrounded by other people. Ludicrous speed already reached this week. https://t.co/dqouU6iZ50
The Denver Police Department has launched a new program that will have drones respond to 911 calls instead of cops.
The law enforcement agency that was recently defunded by millions to pay for migrants is now launching its own drone program, along with other Colorado police departments.
Robert White, the former chief of The Denver Police Department originally disagreed with the use of drones in 2013 and in 2018, the agency’s only drone was shelved.
Now, the department is planning on using a $100,000 grant from the Denver Police Foundation to start the program. Denver police plan to buy several drones with that money, and begin their drone program within six to 12 months.
Phil Gonshak, director of the department’s Strategic Initiatives Bureau told The Denver Post: ‘It’s beginning to lift off.’
‘The long-term scope of what we are trying to do is drones as first responders,’ he added.
‘Basically, having stations on top of each one of our districts so we can respond with drones to critical needs or emergencies that arise throughout the city.’
The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, based in Centennial, Colorado, has been using the robotic flying devices since 2017.
‘This really is the future of law enforcement at some point, whether we like it or not,’ Sgt. Jeremiah Gates, who leads the drone unit at the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, said.
I’m so old, I can remember when Robocop was touted as “the future of law enforcement” – and he got far better results than these drones likely will.
The principal architect of the Tories’ demolition is [Boris] Johnson. Born in New York City with some notable Turkish ancestry, BoJo is the very model of a modern Briton: witty, quippy, raffish, well-read, part-foreign, and an absolute toff who panicked at the arrival of Covid and abandoned all pretenses of governing as a conservative from that moment on. He flouted his own Covid strictures and threw himself headlong into the economic stupidity of “climate change,” from which Britain has yet to emerge and certainly will not under Starmer. Johnson could debate, but he couldn’t lead. Just as the two Bushes squandered the post-Cold War legacy of Ronald Reagan, so did Johnson and the Tory ragamuffins who flanked him put paid to the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher.
As Harold Wilson, another Labour prime minister, once said, a week is a long time in politics, but so also can just a few years vanish in the blink of an eye: just ask Boris Johnson. With his victory in World War II, Churchill was shown the door by an unsentimental electorate. Now, 80 years later, his entire party may be about to get the boot, and it only need look in the mirror to understand why.
Exit quote: “Despite the Tories’ promise to address the issue of economic migration, the situation has only gotten worse in the decade since that article in The Guardian was published, and their repeated failure (despite the Brexit victory) to do so has left them on the edge of political purdah.”
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas hosted five “affinity” graduation events, for Asian and Pacific American, “Latinx,” Native American, African American, and LGBTQ-identifying students this May.
“Please join us for our Affinity Graduations sponsored by Student Diversity Programs; which include APMIE, Latinx, Lavender, and Native Convocation,” the school advertised.
“We strive to serve a diverse student population, elevating and affirming their identities through an intersectional framework that champions student success,” the office’s mission statement declares.
The office recognizes “Identity Months & Weeks” throughout the year, including “LatinX Heritage Month,” “Womxn’s HerStory Month,” and “Multiracial and Multiethnic Awareness Week.”
The University of Nevada, Reno also offered segregated graduations from May 8 to May 13, including a “Lavender” ceremony for LGBTQ-identifying students, an “Indigenous Graduate Celebration,” and a “Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Graduate Celebration.”
The University of Nevada assures me that yes, these events are separate, but they’re all totally equal.
The Conservative Party has said it would bring back mandatory national service if it wins the general election.
It said 18-year-olds would have a choice of either joining the military full-time for 12 months, or volunteering one weekend every month carrying out a community service.
The party is proposing a Royal Commission to consider the details but would plan for the first teenagers to take part in September 2025.
The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.
Under the plans, young people could choose a full-time placement in the armed forces or UK cyber defence, learning about logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations.
Their other option would be to volunteer one weekend per month — or 25 days per year — in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
In response, NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford writes at the above link:
Sunak wants to bring back the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic, does he? The spirit of an overmighty state, hysterical overreaction, and petty denunciations.
If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.
It’s worth adding that national service has, for good reasons (individual liberty and all that), played a very small part in British tradition, existing for only two periods in its history. The first was 1916–19, when having entered (unwisely) into a voluntary war in 1914, it ran out of volunteers to fight it. The second time was 1939–60, understandably enough, at least, during the Second World War but decreasingly so thereafter. The last conscript was discharged in 1963, ridiculously late.
The Tory party, the party of lockdowns, net zero, penal taxation, and social-media censorship has already shown itself to be a party, like its rivals even further to the left, of the authoritarian state. Now we have this. . . .
* * * * * * * *
Sunak has, of course, now made it easier for the coming Labour government to introduce some sort of (voluntary) eco corps or the like. But then thinking ahead is not his strongest point.
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
As Stuttaford noted above, “If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.” Since he doesn’t, in response, Tom Slater, the editor the conservative-themed Spiked Website in England is concise: Bring on the bloodbath.
UPDATE: UK Tories: Life Imitates Art. “Seriously, Tories? You’re now lifting campaign ideas from 35-year old episodes of Yes, Prime Minister? Will it really be ‘the Grand Design’ for real?”
“The Labour Party will be terrible in office, but the Tory Party deserves to lose,” Steve Hayward writes.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in the head at a public event in Tucson, Ariz., Saturday, said in a March interview the heated political rhetoric surrounding the healthcare reform debate could have “consequences.”
Giffords, whose Tucson office was vandalized after she voted in favor of healthcare reform last March, discussed the matter in an appearance on MSNBC. She is currently in critical condition, but doctors are optimistic.
Some Democrats have responded to the shooting, in which five people were killed including a federal judge, by targetinginflammatory rhetoric that they said could encourage violent behavior.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said, “America must not tolerate violence or inflammatory rhetoric that incites political violence.”
The presumptive Republican nominee was booed when he told those at the Libertarian Party convention to “combine” with his campaign. He also pledged to place a Libertarian in his cabinet and senior posts. Trump received just six write-in votes in the first round of voting, and the Libertarian Party chair said the former president was ineligible to be the party’s nominee.
“We cannot give Crooked Joe Biden four more years,” Trump said, adding that the party should join forces with his campaign.
“Only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your three percent every four years,” Trump said.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon that even if he were selected as the Libertarian Party’s nominee, he couldn’t accept it since he is set to be nominated by the Republican Party in July.
“Regardless, I believe I will get a Majority of the Libertarian Votes,” he added. “‘Junior’ Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, who’s destroyed everything he’s touched, especially in New York and New England, and in particular, as it relates to the Cost and Practicality of Energy. He’s not a Libertarian. Only a FOOL would vote for him!”
RFK Jr. is himself a former Democrat, of course — and a progressive one, at that. He has a long history of energy and climate activism completely contrary to the limited government ethos of libertarianism. He previously called the National Rifle Association a “terrorist group”, although he does support the second amendment. He said the Koch brothers should be prosecuted for treason on environmentalist grounds. He also supports student loan debt forgiveness and affirmative action, both liberal stances.
Nevertheless, after RFK Jr. formally left the Democratic Party in October 2023 — opting to face-off against President Joe Biden in the general election rather than the primaries — widespread speculation ensued that he might seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination. Last summer, he attended FreedomFest, an annual gathering of libertarians, and emphasised his involvement in issues that matter to us: most notably, the federal government’s efforts to suppress dissenting speech on social media, particularly relating to Covid-19.
Indeed, RFK Jr.’s contrarian views on Covid-19 policies like mandates, lockdowns, and the vaccines themselves have made him a target of social media censors, who were often pressured by government agents to take down provocative speech. (The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether these actions violated the First Amendment in Murthy v. Missouri.) Many of the underlying views are themselves attractive to libertarians; one need not agree with everything RFK Jr. has said about vaccines to nevertheless admire his opposition to making them compulsory.
It was RFK Jr.’s opposition to mandates and lockdowns that first drew the attention of some libertarians. When I spoke with her in June 2023, McArdle was optimistic that his views on the pandemic had “stirred an awakening within him, causing him to reconsider many of his other political stances.”
Following the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel, RFK Jr. expressed unqualified support for the US continuing to send aid to Israel, a stance that alienated many libertarians, who do not believe American taxpayers should be required to fund foreign wars. Support for RFK Jr. among rank-and-file LP members now appears lukewarm at best; at a California Libertarian Party convention in February, Kennedy garnered just one vote in the straw poll.
What’s happening in schools, where the “toxic trends of whiteness” are being taught to young children, is one example, and in the book Bowles writes about a four-day “toxic whiteness” workshop she attended in 2021, where she listens to various white people self-flagellate about how their very existence “perpetuates whiteness” and how shameful that is.
“Because I really don’t think it’s healthy to tell young kids that they are white, and that their whiteness has enormous [negative] meaning,” she says, citing the “white traits” that controversial critical race theorists such as Robin DiAngelo insist exist. “It’s also just so reductive, this reification of race, and I think a lot of it is very counterproductive.” Neither is it helpful “for people to be constantly reminded of their supposed ancestors’ crimes,” she points out.
Another example of small factions having an outsized impact is what is happening at her alma mater, Columbia University, right now, and campuses across the US. “It’s the soldiers of a movement who are extremely effective at public shaming and dominating the conversation,” she says. “But it’s not the majority of people at these places.”
There were always protests when Bowles was at Columbia, she says. “And I think it’s great when college kids protest. It’s awesome – in general. But these protests? They’ve obviously got out of control. You’ve had the kids trapping janitors in the buildings and it has clearly escalated beyond a simple college demonstration.” So, at this point, what should be happening? “At this point you say, ‘this crosses the line and we’re going to call the police in on this situation.’ I honestly don’t think that’s crazy! And it’s especially clear cut at public universities, like, say, UCLA. Because when you have students taking over swathes of campus and saying: ‘Jewish students can’t walk down this path anymore’ – well, that’s illegal. So you have to call the cops.”
I tell her how Rishi Sunak called the leaders of Britain’s top universities to Downing Street earlier this month and insisted a “zero tolerance” approach to anti-Semitism be taken on campus. Has Biden been clear enough on this? Bowles pulls a face. “No. I don’t think so. And it’s beyond what we’re seeing at the universities. We’re in a dark moment in that particular story.”
When she asks me whether I’ve seen more anti-Semitism in the US or the UK, I have to be honest and say that although there has obviously been a clear escalation here since Oct 7, I personally noticed a marked rise in America from the start of the pandemic.
“It’s very worrisome watching the rhetoric,” she murmurs. And it didn’t come out of nowhere. Bowles is sure of this because she didn’t ignore Antifa, even when her NYT colleagues told her it was “a nothing burger”, “a non-story”. And when she flew to Seattle where the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone group had occupied six blocks of the city, she found young men with guns on their laps guarding their “autonomous zone”; she saw looting and anarchy.
“What Antifa brought in those years was the idea that violence could be part of the conversation. That a little bit of tension in the air and the possibility of violence was a good thing for protests. Now, we’re seeing that attitude, which was so fringe, normalised in a way that is so dangerous. In these protests on college campuses, we’re seeing the threat of violence woven in proudly. Now, I think it’s fine to call for war if you want to call for war, but let’s be clear: if you’re doing this, you’re not anti-war, you’re pro-war.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defended the Biden administration’s push to build half a million electric vehicle (EV) charging stations along U.S. highways by 2030 after being questioned about how just eight have been built since President Biden signed the legislation two years ago.
Buttigieg appeared Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” where he tried to ease doubts about reaching Biden’s goal of 500,000 chargers by the end of the decade when asked why it wasn’t happening more quickly.
“Now, in order to do a charger, it’s more than just plugging a small device into the ground,” the secretary said. “There’s utility work, and this is also really a new category of federal investment. But we’ve been working with each of the 50 states.”
“Seven or eight, though?” host Margaret Brennan said with a laugh.
“Again, by 2030, 500,000 chargers,” Buttigieg said. “And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built.”
WATCH: CBS’s Margaret Brennan laughs in Pete Buttigieg’s face when he is unable to explain why only 7 or 8 electric vehicle charging stations have been built despite the Biden admin spending $7.5 BILLION to build chargers. pic.twitter.com/BmFK17Dk5O
COVID restrictions were INSANE and there were a lot of people during the time that stood up and yelled about it from the get-go. Many of us even yelled beginning with 15 days to slow the spread. Many took a cautious approach to the government closing down businesses and did not really begin getting upset until it was way past the 15 days and some places were allowed to be open and others were not.
We know going back to that time when our government overlords were literally deciding who gets to keep their livelihoods and who does not is hard to do, but we think it is a necessity. It is a necessity so we can remember it and make sure it NEVER happens again. We have some really great news on that front. Remember Atilis Gym in New Jersey? They opened despite the restrictions put in place by the Garden State. They have had a MAJOR VICTORY! ALL 80 counts have been dropped! *Chant USA USA USA!*
More like this, please.
PROGRESS OF A SORT: Eric Adams: “New York City’s beaches are our French Riviera.”
If Hieronymus Bosch ran a holiday resort, it would look like St. Tropez in the summer. It’s the same all the way along the coast from Marseilles to Menton. The rocky hillsides are swathed in concrete. The roads are jammed with preposterous sports cars and Germans in camper vans. The harbors are slick with oil and other fragrant discharges from the yachts in the bay. The harborside restaurants are extortionate and smell of drains. In Nice and Monaco, the surviving Belle Époque mansions are dwarfed by glass towers. This is the Côte d’Azur, the French Riviera: a sweaty panorama of organized crime, municipal corruption, tax-dodging, drug-smuggling, money-laundering, compulsive gambling, and gratuitous thong-wearing. I went last summer and had a great time.
The locals joke that Nice gets its name from “Ni ici, ni là“: “Neither here nor there,” neither French nor Italian, a living city and a stage set for a dream. That is what the visitors want, a break from reality on a cosmopolitan shore between the mountains and the sea. They come to escape life, as once, when the Riviera was an al fresco hospital for tuberculosis patients, they came to escape death. The English invented the French Riviera as a home away from home in the 19th century. The Americans reinvented it in the early 20th as a sophisticated alternative to home. The Germans only knocked it about a bit. The French destroyed it as the Venetians destroyed Venice, by catering to the world’s dreams and desires.
Jonathan Miles’s The Once Upon a Time World is the story of the making and remaking of the Riviera. It would be tidy to speak of its “unmaking,” but that has not yet happened and probably never will. A coast of malarial fishing villages and busy ports became an exclusive resort for the rich, then a glamorous gambler’s paradise with artist colonies on its fringes, then the world’s beach in the Jet Age when being a movie star was worth the trouble, and latterly a money laundry for oligarchs. But the view remains unchanged, and so the Riviera will go on forever, like a Disney cruise that has slipped into the Bermuda Triangle.
But New York’s mayor is making progress; I’m so old, I can remember back in March when Adams claimed that New Yorkers thought of their city as the “Port-Au-Prince of America,” a comparison that must have been a first for virtually all residents of Fun City.
TRUMP: “Only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your three percent every four years.”
I sort of apologize to the more libertarian-leaning folks reading this, but only sort of. It’s all in good fun.
Long story short, showing up to face people who don’t like you is much more impressive than only speaking to adoring crowds. Trump isn’t going to lose a single vote because of the boos at the LNC, and by the end of his speech, he had drawn another important distinction with Biden. That’s a win.
Most people don’t want diversity hires responsible for life-and-death matters. But new investigative reporting shows that the anti-meritocratic ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has even infiltrated some medical schools — to disastrous results.
These revelations come from the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium, who just published a remarkable exposé on the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school. It alleges that the university has systemically violated laws prohibiting race-based admission and held applicants of different races to wildly different standards, all in an effort to boost diversity, while instead producing incompetent and unqualified doctors.
Based on conversations with many people inside the admissions office and the medical school, Sibarium recounts how things have gone drastically wrong ever since the appointment of DEI-obsessed Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero in June 2020.
“Faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed,” he reports.
One former member of the admissions team told the WashingtonFree Beacon that this approach has turned the institution into a “failed medical school,” concluding, “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”
Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature have not shied away from doubling down on their green energy crusade, enshrining in law mandates that 60% of the state’s electricity generation be renewable by 2030 and a staggering 90% by 2035. However, the glaring irony lies in the fact that many of these politicians will be long gone and termed out of office by the time these mandates become a reality, conveniently avoiding any accountability for the unattainable goals they set.
Meanwhile, nuclear energy, a proven and reliable zero-emission source, has been relegated to the back burner, shunned by the environmentalists who have the full attention of the majority party. Nuclear energy’s share of electricity generation has dwindled to a mere 8%. Even more frustrating, hydroelectric power, a historically dependable and cost-effective source, has been left to wither, with dams either languishing or being shuttered entirely.
In a desperate bid to try to please everyone, lawmakers thought it would be a good idea to propose a solution to base electricity bills on income. This quick fix is like putting a Band-Aid on a massive wound. It is not dealing with the problems causing our electricity bills to skyrocket: there’s not enough power to go around, and we are relying too much on expensive renewable energy sources. This half-baked solution might make things worse, creating even more shortages and higher prices, making people feel there is no point in trying to save energy if their costs are going to continue to rise.
While PG&E certainly bears culpability for its deferred maintenance and negligence in improving transmission lines, the lion’s share of the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the state itself, which has crafted a regulatory framework that prioritizes renewables at the expense of reliability. By neglecting nuclear, hydroelectric, and gas-powered plants, California has effectively sacrificed its energy stability on the altar of green energy ideology.
It is time for California’s leaders to wake up from their green energy fantasy and refocus their efforts on restoring reliable sources like dams, nuclear facilities, and gas plants. This reckless green energy experiment has only served to drive prices skyward, squander taxpayer dollars, and leave consumers in the dark —literally and figuratively. It is time to put pragmatism ahead of ideology and prioritize affordability and reliability in our energy policy for the betterment of all Californians.
Good luck turning the Titanic around. California has been pursuing its green fantasies ever since Jerry Brown replaced Gov. Reagan in 1975, and as a result imports 26% of the energy it needs. (And has for some time; City Journal ran the headline “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism” back in 2008.)
No wonder Steve Hayward recently dubbed the state “The North Korea of the USA.” As he wrote, “Never mind the social tyranny the state has attempted to impose, such as strict vaccine mandates, legal sanctions for anyone who dissents from transgender ideology or uses the wrong pronoun, and attempted legal penalties for any physicians who dissent from official Covid ideology. Stick with just economics.”
Anyway, the sycophants at Deadline are in a tough spot with Furiosa. The prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road earned great reviews, opened on the perfect weekend for a blockbuster, and with no competition in its action lane. What’s more, it’s based on a successful franchise and Warner’s promoted the living hell out of it. So how does Deadline explain away this breathtaking failure? How does Deadline write around the truth of how stupid it is to make a girl the star of a movie called Mad Max?
In the Sycophancy Hall of Fame, this delicious piece of credibility-selling will earn a wing all its own:
Despite more movies in the marketplace, we’re still feeling the aftermath of the strikes. How is that? Many aren’t in the habit of moviegoing yet[.]
Many aren’t in the habit of moviegoing yet.
How far up Hollywood’s ass does one have to be to come up with a sentence like that?
Previously, these gerbils blamed the faltering box office on a lack of wide releases caused by the strike. That was easily proved a lie by comparing the number of pre- and post-strike wide releases. Turns out there is no lack of product. So now we’re being told the strike somehow took people out of the moviegoing habit.
What!?
Well, then, why were Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Dune 2 so successful? Why is Deadpool & Wolverine about to blow the doors off the box office?
Sorry, sycophants… The problem is not the three-years-gone pandemic, it is not the strike, it is not that people kicked their moviegoing habit, and it is not a lack of product. The problem is…
The product.
With very rare exceptions, the product sucks.
And when you put a girl in a Mad Max movie, all the gushing reviews cease to matter because we can smell the affirmative action a mile away, and we know that movie reviewers, just like the corporate news media, cannot be trusted.
South Park’s “Panderverse” episode last year was only so-so as actual entertainment, but simply by making fun of the Kathleen Kennedy-style formula (“Put a chick in it! Make her gay! Make it lame!”), how much did that spell the death knell for this Hollywood cycle? (See also: the original Star Warsending Hollywood’s 1970s obsession with dark European-inspired existentialism.) If Hollywood in 2024 does indeed wish its customers to return to “the habit of moviegoing,” then the industry has to decide if it wants to make product that entertains, or if it wishes to keep sermonizing. Because the latter formula, in the era of social media, when fans can quickly find out if the film is worth watching, or contains what Nolte once dubbed “the liberal sucker punch”), has run its course.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
What has happened in the last century and a quarter to make anyone think Democrats aren't a war party? They've definitely been a diehard war party at least since WW1 forward. https://t.co/MKOqfkqssl
“It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it’s not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World 11 or World I or the war in Korea—all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”
Mr. Speakes was asked to inquire why the candidate would have denied using the phrase.
A few moments later, Mr. Speakes returned and said:
“He said you have to look in context at the whole thing. He did not recall this specific quote.”
He also quoted Mr. Dole as having repeated that “If it’s fair to blame Ford for Watergate, then it’s fair to blame the Democrats for the wars.”
Only two Democrats (and no Republicans) voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Lyndon Johnson used as his license to send up to 550,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam. But by 1968, opposition to that war was welling up, primarily but not entirely within the Democratic party. LBJ was opposed for renomination by antiwar Eugene McCarthy and dropped out of the race. In 1972, Democrats nominated the dovish George McGovern. For nearly half a century, they have been the party less supportive of military intervention.
Not that Republicans have invariably supported it. Ronald Reagan aided the Nicaraguan Contras and intervened in Grenada but withdrew from Lebanon. He built up the military but didn’t find much occasion to use it. George H. W. Bush got approval from the United Nations before asking Congress to authorize the Gulf War. George W. Bush sought U.N. approval for Iraq, too.
Democrats remained obsessed with Vietnam. Their speeches opposing Contra aid and the Gulf and Iraq wars were full of arguments more relevant to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution than to the issue at hand. Some Democrats disagreed. Bill Clinton used force (without U.N. approval) in Serbia and Kosovo. Almost all Democrats supported intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11.
But almost all congressional Democrats tried to stop George W. Bush’s successful surge strategy in Iraq. Hillary Clinton found cause to question the veracity of General David Petraeus. The surge came too late to salvage the reputation of the Iraq War. Polls now show majorities think the war was a mistake. Most Republican politicians seem disinclined to suggest we should intervene anywhere else.
World problems loom: North Korea, Iran, Syria, North Africa. Barack Obama may choose to respond militarily. He has just beefed up missile defense in response to North Korea. If he follows up on his threat to attack Iran’s nuclear program, we could have a 2016 presidential race in which Republican Rand Paul criticizes military action and Democrat Hillary Clinton defends it.
That would be a political turnabout as stark as the one in the 1960s. Could it happen?
Trump reportedly told oil industry executives this week that he will immediately approve all of their projects and expand drilling should he win in November.
In 2021, as Steve spotted, Rolling Stone “reported” that ‘Joe Manchin Just Cooked the Planet,’ which would mean that it’s far too late for Trump and the oil companies to do much more harm. Besides, how can we all still be here, after Dan Rather’s predictions for the hellscape that planet earth would become, presumably, by about, err, 1992:
If you want to achieve absolute power over decades it helps to have as your anchor a catastrophe that never happens but is always around the corner.
— Trainee Orange Pill Dispensary Manager (@RB3475) May 25, 2024
But does Jann Wenner still own his private plane? I’m sure he’ll appreciate the fuel being much cheaper — as will everyone else outside of Biden’s handlers and other Green Nude Eel aficionados. Speaking of which, what’s all this talk about cheap gas? Didn’t AOC just spin this same news as Trump making gas much more expensive — something that she herself still wants, assuming she’s still onboard with her passion play of 2019?
ITEM 1: NBC reported, “Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Thursday called a special session for the state’s Legislature to get President Joe Biden on the ballot this November, saying his patience has run out with his fellow Republicans who appear less than inclined to offer a legislative fix for a timing problem with the Democrat convention.”
Democrats refuse to obey the law but somehow Republicans are to blame.
DeWine is a reminder to pick up some shrimp at Captain D’s tonight.
ITEM 2: Biden sent condolences on the death of Iran’s president.
How different a city looks without scaffolds! My eyes popped over main drags such as Market, Broad and Walnut streets without the ground-level eyesores that make most every block at home appear shabby. Even Park Avenue, Broadway and Wall Street look as if bombs had fallen on them.
Philadelphia’s near-absence of bike lanes recalled the era when our own streets and sidewalks functioned as they were meant to: streets for motor vehicles, sidewalks for people on foot.
Philadelphia has about 20 miles of bike lanes; New York, its government in thrall to environmental zanies and cycle-advocacy bullies who shout down opponents, has more than 650 miles of them.
Philly motorists are spared the havoc wrought by the lanes in the form of congestion-breeding narrow streets and of cars forced to park in the middle of streets in order to create “protected” bike lanes.
But the greatest benefit is to people on foot. It took me three days to grasp that I could cross an intersection without a wrong-way cyclist bearing down on me, and to stroll sidewalks without fear of being sideswiped by heedless, law-breaking jerks on wheels — the norm from The Bronx to the Battery.
I was in Manhattan the week before last; my first trip there since 2019. With all of the bicyclists and e-scooters wreaking havoc at intersections, the city reminded me of Saigon as depicted in the 2008 Top Gear Vietnam special. But in communist Vietnam, cars are only now slowly arriving to displace the scooters. Over the last 20-30 years New Yorkers, led by the obsessions of former mayor Mike Bloomberg, have voluntarily ceded their city to what P.J. O’Rourke once dubbed “The Bicycle Menace,” aka “this dreadful peril on our roads.”
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