Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 4, 2018
REP. KEITH ELLISON TO SECDEF JAMES MATTIS: Investigate White Supremacists in the Military.
OVER AT HOT MIC: The Sad Decline of Jennifer Rubin.
REUEL MARC GERECHT: The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd. “It is less an arms-control agreement than cover for American inaction.”
With Iran, Obama certainly appeared to have a cause, something beyond just avoiding a fight. The Islamic Republic for Obama, and Secretary of State John Kerry, too, appeared to be a left-wing “realist” dream, offering a progressive version of Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China. The many debilitating weaknesses of the JCPOA—for one thing, the strategic and moral absurdity of paying, via sanctions relief, for Iranian imperialism in the Middle East so we can have a short surcease to the mullahs’ quest for the bomb—stem directly from Obama’s paralyzing fear of war, as well as his aspiration for a Middle Eastern détente.
The suggestion that going to war with the clerical regime is too high a price to pay to stop the mullahs from acquiring nuclear weapons (which is what’s implied by defending the limited, temporary utility of the JCPOA) is downright odd. Obama was, in theory, willing to do just that in the nuclear negotiations. In theory, when he uttered the mantra that “all options are on the table,” Obama was—to borrow from La Rochefoucauld—giving the homage that hypocrisy pays to virtue. The nuclear deal wasn’t just “far from ideal”: It is the hinge of America’s downsizing in the region, the guarantor of a decent interval before nuclear proliferation comes to the Middle East.
It was always about downsizing American power, prestige, and influence.
Plus:
Obama’s “wishful thinking” about the region was never more fully on display than when he speculated that his nuclear agreement with Tehran ought to allow the Iranians and the Saudis time to learn “to share” the region.
Heckuva job, Barry.
FIRST IN FLIGHT FROM FISCAL SANITY: North Carolina Medicaid Scandal Broadens on Dem. Gov. Cooper’s Watch.
The political backstory to this tale begins with Cooper surprising the pollsters and his opponent — incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory — in November 2016 by winning a narrow victory. Through deft sleight-of-hand, and taking advantage of a quirk in state law, Cooper arranged an early swearing-in for himself just minutes after midnight on January 1, 2017. That legerdemain allowed Cooper just 12 days laterto appoint Cohen, at the time Obama’s Chief Operating Officer of Medicaid, to head the North Carolina DHHS before Barack Obama left office.
Thus was set the stage for the Cooper Administration to bring to a screeching halt what had been one of his predecessor’s top priorities — rolling back years of reckless spending by North Carolina Democrats. One of McCrory’s main targets had been Medicaid spending in the state; which had come to swallow nearly $15 billion of North Carolina’s $23 billion annual budget.
The runaway Medicaid spending had placed North Carolina in a financial bind, with little cash for anything else. Thus, in 2015 McCrory and the Republican state legislature passed a law that would limit Medicaid spending, remove management of the program from the state Health Secretary and contract it out to private companies, and prohibit further expansion of the program; all steps permitted under federal law.
As soon as Cooper had himself sworn in early, he immediately submitted a request to the Obama Administration to illegally expand Medicaid and maintain government control of the program.
Read the whole thing.
FAKE NEWS: NRA to host company with ties to sanctioned Russians at annual convention.
But as David Harsanyi noted on Twitter, “By this standard, every big company in America has ties to Russia — including every tech giant and every car company. They admit there’s nothing illegal about it in the fourth graph.”
But, hey, anything to flesh out the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA narrative.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Your Culture is My Underpants.
It’s always in the last place you look.
KANYE WEST: Why Liberals Are So Freaked About Him.
MONICA SHOWALTER: Democrats’ worst nightmare about Kanye West just came true.
The shift in black opinion represents a major break in the cultural firewall that has kept black people from embracing the Republican Party and left them taken for granted by Democrats. Do Democrats pay any attention to widespread black views on gay marriage or transgenderism, for example? Do they pay any attention to whether black teenagers need jobs and how calls for minimum wage hikes shut them out of the market? Do Democrats pay any attention to how gun-free zones facilitate violence in black neighborhoods in places such as Chicago? Do they pay any attention to how illegal immigration has driven down the wages of black unskilled workers? Not in the least: The only thing they ask themselves is where else black people can go – and well, now they have their answer, because Kanye opened that door.
Kanye’s own bad experiences with self-centered, rude Democrats such as President Obama, as well as his pleasant experiences with President Trump, probably had much to do with his own epiphany, as did his concern about the sufferings of black people by violence in Chicago. But it wasn’t just a loud endorsement of President Trump that went on with his series of tweets. He not only broke the barrier to blacks supporting Republicans, but did two other things to change perceptions. He made a massive series of tweets about the importance of “love” and how he is centering his life on “love” (and talking like that takes a lot of courage), and he tweeted a lot about thinking freely. Both of these things went a long way to breaking the perception among blacks and others that Republicans are hateful and that Republicans are narrow-minded.
There’s nothing more narrow-minded than identity politics, which is the modern version of Marx’s false consciousness, which is a gussied up version of “You’re just stupid if you don’t agree with me.”
RELIGION OF PEACE: ‘Go to Hell!’ Egypt Responds to French Call to Revise Koran. “Sarkozy and 300 other French notables asked them to remove the commands to murder.”
To be fair though, I wouldn’t expect Christian leaders to take seriously any Muslim call to rewrite parts of the Bible.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Media Is Killing the Democratic Party.
Reports from the front lines of the Democrat-Media Complex:
What the Democratic Party has not recognized is that Trump’s legal dramas, though good for ratings, have done little to benefit the political opposition. On the contrary: President Trump’s approval rating has been on the upswing. He stands at 44 percent approval in the Real Clear Politics average, his highest rating in a year. That number might well be slightly higher, given the existence of “Shy Trump Voters” who are afraid of the stigma attached to approving of the president.
Meanwhile, since December, the Democratic advantage on the congressional generic ballot has been cut in half, from plus 13 points to plus 6.5 points. In a new survey, pollsters for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund, while optimistic about Democratic chances in the fall, nonetheless concede that the party’s “momentum has stalled in the last few months.”
Why? Well, the most obvious answer is the economy, with its strong job market and positive wage growth. One could also say that voters like peacemakers, and so have embraced President Trump’s desire to meet with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Both explanations sound reasonable to me.
But I would also suggest another one: The American electorate has not changed fundamentally in the decades since the Clinton presidency, when in the words of the late Jeffrey Bell it held a “bifurcated view” that separated the man from his policies. And as long as the policies seemed to be working, the man’s opponents found themselves wrapped around the axle of personal disgust, waiting in frustration for voters to recognize and repudiate defects of character that were all too plain to see.
Kurt Schlichter was right: They don’t like playing under the new rules they made.
SWAMPLAND: Trump’s Appointees Pledged Not to Lobby After They Leave. Now They’re Lobbying.
Glenn’s revolving-door surtax — now with bipartisan appeal!
#THEMTOO: No 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Panel Says Amid Sexual Abuse Scandal. “The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature said on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of not naming a laureate this year — not because of a shortage of deserving writers, but because of the infighting and public outrage that have engulfed the group over a sexual abuse scandal.”
Our political and cultural betters are anything but.
So if Crown Prince Bin Salman is serious about introducing pluralism to his country — and there’s no denying it now — this one big and in-your-Wahhabi-face way of going about it.
FASCISM IS THE NEW ANTIFASCISM: L.A. Antifa Group Hangs Trump in Effigy, Calls for ‘Revolutionary Violence’ Against ‘the Capitalist State.’ “We must carry out military actions against the enemies of the people!”
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Kanye West banned from radio station over recent comments.
OOPS: Twitter Tells Users To Change Passwords After Discovering Glitch.
The company says it fixed the bug and there is no indication of a breach or misuse.
Still, it’s urging its 330 million users to change their passwords as a precaution.
The issue appeared through a bug in Twitter’s password hashing. It’s a standard security practice for companies to encrypt passwords to store on its internal servers. So if your password is “12345” — which we highly recommend against — it wouldn’t show up on the website’s database as “12345,” but rather a random mix of numbers and letters representing each character.
Twitter said it stored encrypted passwords using a hashing algorithm called bcrypt. But the social network had stored the password in plain-text before it was encrypted. Twitter said this happened because of a bug. The company did not respond to a request for comment to clarify what the bug was.
If you’re still on Twitter, here are instructions for changing your password.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Wiretaps, Pen Registers, and Much, Much More.
BLUE WAVE? Poll Shows Republicans Could Pick Up 9 Senate Seats.
According to new Morning Consult polls, Democrats are in serious trouble in Senate races across the country. Republicans have serious leads in West Virginia, where incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin trails by 14 points; North Dakota, where incumbent Democrat Heidi Heitkamp trails by 8; Indiana, where incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly trails by 5; Missouri, where incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill trails by 5; Montana, where incumbent Democrat Jon Tester trails by 5; Florida, where incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson is locked in a near-deadlock with Rick Scott; and Pennsylvania and Ohio, where incumbent Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each, plus Virginia, where Tim Kaine leads by just 3 on the generic ballot. In the best-case scenario for Republicans, then, they could win up to nine additional Senate seats.
The polls are similarly shoddy in the House of Representatives for Democrats. The RealClearPolitics poll average for the generic ballot has Democrats up 6.7 percent, but the polls are all over the place.
I’ll repeat Glenn’s advice: Spend less time on the internet, and more time volunteering for a local campaign.
HMM: U.S. Air Force Leaders Are Deliberately Slow-Rolling A-10 Refurbishment.
In a victory for supporters of the battle-proven A-10 close air support aircraft, Congress provided the necessary seed money to extend the fleet’s lifespan for at least another decade in its last spending bill. The U.S. Air Force had announced in 2017 that 110 A-10s were in danger of being retired because their wings were rapidly approaching the end of their useful service life.
The seed money is not as clear-cut a victory as many have supposed, however. The $103 million Congress appropriated for the A-10 re-winging project will only produce four new pairs of wings and it will likely take six years before new wings are installed on any operational A-10s. These funds will mainly be used to start up an entirely new production line.
The Air Force claims it needs all this money and time to get competitive bids to start up the new wing production line. All the while, the men and women serving in combat for the next six years badly need to be able to count on an A-10 force that is not shrinking rapidly due to a failure to replace worn out wings.
Air Force procurement hasn’t exactly been aiming high in recent years.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: In Venezuela, inflation quadruples to 18,000 percent in two months, with no end in sight.
The 17,968 percent rate registered at the end of April already surpassed the 13,864 percent rate predicted by the International Monetary Fund for all of 2018.
“What we’re seeing at this point is a giant jump in inflation,” Steve Hanke, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and one of the world’s top experts on inflation, told el Nuevo Herald.
“And it could go much higher than what we’re seeing today,” added Hanke, who calculated the 17,968 percent figure. He keeps a daily record of inflation in Venezuela.
The only thing socialists never run out of is zeroes — oh, and excuses.
BLUE (HAIR) WAVE: Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden Lead in 2020 New Hampshire Poll.