SNOWFALLS ARE A THING OF A THE PAST: Se7°en. “Take a look at the temperature on Monday: 7°F. Not 37, not 27, but 7°F. That wouldn’t be the coldest Austin day on record, but it would be the coldest this century and the coldest since it hit 4°F in 1989.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
February 11, 2021
JEFF BEZOS CAN AFFORD A LOT OF MOVING TRUCKS: Jeff Bezos would owe $2B a year under proposed Washington wealth tax.
Washington state lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year that would impose a 1% levy on “extraordinary” intangible financial assets including cash, stocks, publicly traded options, futures contracts, pension funds and bonds, but not income.
“Asking the state’s poorest residents to pay six times more in taxes, as a share of their income, than the state’s highest income households, including some of the wealthiest individuals in the world, is unconscionable,” the proposal said.
Legislators estimate the tax would raise about $2.5 billion in new revenue.
Easy call: It won’t.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE MIGHT HAVE TO BE PERMANENTLY RETIRED: Google, Facebook tell SCOTUS it should be harder for you to sue them. “The argument boils down to ‘if you don’t know we messed up, it can’t hurt you’.”
EVERYONE IS A CONSERVATIVE ABOUT WHAT THEY KNOW BEST: Amazon Hired Koch-Backed Anti-Union Consultant to Fight Alabama Warehouse Organizing. “The head of the Center for Independent Employees is paid $3,200 per day to thwart what could become Amazon’s first unionized facility in the U.S.”
“SHUT UP,” THEY EXPLAINED: Twitter confirms Trump’s ban is permanent, even if he runs again in 2024.
Trump tweeted his way to the White House once, and Jack Dorsey and the rest of the antisocial media mafia are for damned sure not going to let that happen again.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood Sold Its Soul to China … Now What? “China may no longer need U.S. movies to entertain its populace. The L.A. Times reports Chinese-made films dominated the country’s 2020 box office charts. The highest ranking U.S. film, “Tenet,” came in at number 11… it looks like China won’t be saving as many U.S. blockbusters as it had in the past. An already reeling Hollywood will have to find new ways to balance its ledgers as the theater industry tries to come back from the crippling pandemic.”
Get woke, go broke — and do read the whole thing, in which Christian collected years’ worth of Hollywood kowtowing to the CCP in one convenient column.
I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT COMMUNIST TIME TRAVELERS UNTIL TOMORROW: China Swears It Isn’t Building a Time Machine.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: In a Just World Democrats Would Pay for Impeachment Lies. “The Democrats want to think they’re on the moral high horse right now. In reality, they’re all mucking about neck-deep in the stable dung. I would like to say that they are embarrassing themselves but none of them have any self awareness, so they can’t be embarrassed.”
CHARLES LIPSON: The Political Logic of the Trump Trial.
Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.
With all or almost all Democrats supporting Mr. Trump’s conviction, the president will be pressed to declare his position. Whether Mr. Biden speaks out or not, he signaled his position when he refused to dissuade Mrs. Pelosi from transmitting the House’s article of impeachment to the Senate. The speaker wouldn’t have done so over the new president’s opposition.
As the trial unfolds, Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (who has begged off from presiding over the trial) will try to keep a low profile while avoiding any criticism of this party-line effort to denounce and convict Mr. Trump. That tacit approval will be universally applauded by Democrats and their media allies. But it leaves Mr. Biden facing backward, avenging grievances from the Trump years, not forward, advancing his own program. Partisan revenge is hard to reconcile with bipartisan restoration.
Presuming Democrats were ever interested in such a thing, of course.
February 10, 2021
2022 PREVIEW: Is Rep. Marcy Kaptur the Dems’ Canary in the Coal Mine? “Kaptur isn’t a fan of Donald Trump by any stretch of imagination, but she is pointing out that he tapped into something big. More importantly, she tells the Post-Gazette that her party is ignoring Trump’s appeal to her voters in Ohio and the broader working-class.”
INSTITUTIONALIZED FAILURE: 2020 Election Fiasco Favored Democrats, So Now Congress Is Working To Make Sloppiness Permanent. “A new congressional bill seeks to grant Democrats the power to overhaul state election processes and impose new regulations on political advertisements and donors, granting Congress ‘ultimate supervisory power over federal elections’.”
They must think the GOP will never take Congress back.
LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT: Uh Oh… Dem Impeachment Manager Tried to Block Electoral College Votes in 2017
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Utah Axes Gun-Permit Requirement. “Governor Spencer Cox (R.) will sign legislation into law this week to eliminate the permit requirement, his spokeswoman told the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday. The act will allow any law-abiding person over the age of 21 to carry a gun under his or her clothes while in the state.”
AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME? Immodest Proposal: Tax The Homeless. “Want to pitch a tent under a state overpass? Fine. then you can pay $10 a night for the privilege. That’s still cheaper than renting an apartment, but no longer free, and it helps to offset the considerable expense of cleaning up those homeless camps. But contrast, designated homeless areas like Camp RATT in East Austin would remain free, theoretically providing incentives for the homeless to take up legal residence elsewhere.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: ‘This is Sparta’ but not in a good way, helot. “The idea of a global elite ruling over the world for its own good is a gratifying one until you realize you may be canceled from inclusion.”
Which is a given, since the Left’s favorite meal is eating its own.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: New York Times Has Used the N-Word 6,481 Times.
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is it time for the New York Times to cancel itself due to its systemic racism?
Answer: Yes, yes it is.
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- Marco Rubio, gun-grabber?
- “Breastfeeding” and “mother” have been removed from the Newspeak dictionary
- Anderson Cooper compares Capitol Riot to Rawndan Genocide, inanity ensures
Bonus Sanity: Judging by their tweets, hardly anyone doesn’t regret voting for Biden.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
WELL, YES: ‘Transition’ Treatment Harms Kids, Veteran Psychiatrist at UK Gender Identity Clinic Says.
Children “have been very seriously damaged” in receiving treatment at the United Kingdom’s premier gender identity facility, a former psychiatrist there says in a bombshell interview.
Dr. David Bell faced disciplinary action after writing an internal report in 2018 raising concerns about procedures at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the U.K.’s sole “Gender Identity Development Service.”
After working with Tavistock and Portman for 24 years as a consultant psychiatrist, Bell recently retired. In the interview with London-based Channel 4 News, he speaks openly about his observations about giving children puberty blockers, treating every girl with a gender or sexual issue as “conversion therapy,” and politicizing support for transgender children.
Right away, Bell isn’t shy about relating the concerns of parents and others about Tavistock’s treatment plans.
It’s politically-motivated, high-tech barbarism to do this to children — a clinical version of female genital mutilation.
PRIVACY: I’ve used DuckDuckGo as my search engine for a year, and here’s what I learned. “If you want the best search results, then use Google. If you want excellent search results that aren’t used to target you with better ads, use DuckDuckGo. For me, I’ve decided that protecting my privacy is a worthy trade-off for slightly worse search results. I still generally find what I am looking for when searching.”
When I first switched to DuckDuckGo — and it’s been years — I would use Bing as a fallback when DDG couldn’t find what I needed, and Google as a tertiary search engine when even Bing failed.
But I couldn’t honestly tell you the last time I needed to resort even to Bing.
SUBSIDIZE ALL THE THINGS! Electric bikes in the U.S. could soon get a 30 percent federal tax credit.