MICHAEL WALSH: Austria Bans the Islamic Burqa. “The lands of Christendom and the West should follow suit.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
October 2, 2017
HIS SPEECHES: Antonin Scalia’s Less Well-Known Legacy.
Among Christopher’s favorite speeches is one called The Arts, delivered at The Julliard School in 2005. Appearing on a panel with historian David McCullough, opera singer Renee Fleming and composer Steven Sondheim, the justice opened this way: “Today’s program reads like some sort of weird IQ test: Which of the following is out of place? Diva, author, composer, lawyer?”
The crowd roared, even as Scalia acknowledged that when speaking of lawyers, or judges, “It is certainly true that the main business of the lawyer is to take the imagination, the mystery, the romance, the ambiguity, out of everything that he touches.”
Read the whole thing, and kudos to Nina Totenberg for a lovely writeup.
FEMA OFFICIAL: San Juan Mayor ‘Not Participating Substantially’ With Any Efforts of FEMA Field Office.
Who’s got time for that when the cameras are rolling and there’s a false narrative to peddle?
PORTABLE GRID: Tesla is Shipping Hundreds of Powerwall Batteries to Puerto Rico.
In a continued streak of goodwill during this year’s devastating hurricane season, Tesla has been shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Since the hurricane hit on 20 September, much of the U.S. territory has been left without power — about 97 percent, as of 27 September — hampering residents’ access to drinkable water, perishable food, and air conditioning. The island’s hospitals are struggling to keep generators running as diesel fuel dwindles.
Installed by employees in Puerto Rico, Tesla’s batteries could be paired with solar panels in order to store electricity for the territory, whose energy grid may need up to six months to be fully repaired. Several power banks have already arrived to the island, and more are en route.
The island ran up unsustainable debts while ignoring the condition of its antiquated power grid.
DEREK HUNTER: The Slow Death Of The NFL?
Since I wasn’t a rabid fan the NFL won’t really notice that I’m gone. But I’m not alone. Through my radio show, social media, and life I have heard from scores of people who are diehard fans, and they’re done too.
More importantly for the NFL and the players, they’re beyond angry. Lifelong fans feel betrayed. Anger fades with time, but the sting of betrayal lingers.
This was a foreseeable eventuality, akin to being hit by a train because you were playing on the tracks and refused to move.
The damage to the NFL began when Commissioner Roger Goodell chose to side with left-wing activists over the game in the hope of placating them and absolving himself from his failures to properly address domestic violence by some players.
Activist groups were vocal critics of slaps on the wrists for players abusing their wives or girlfriends. But left-wing activist groups don’t stop, ever. Even when something is (eventually) made right and harsher penalties were handed out. Because they can fundraise off of it and, equally as important to them, they hate professional sports.
Activist liberals always have hated sports, even when they use it. They hate competition – championing ending scorekeeping in youth sports – because there are winners and losers, and they hate meritocracy. If professional sports is anything it is a meritocracy. Only the best survive, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and all the other boxes liberals have created to divide people.
Professional sports has no time for any of that; there’s too much money in winning. And professional sports is a business.
At least it used to be.
If the NFL does die, it will die two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG? Republican strategists have come to the unnerving conclusion that no one in their party—not even Donald Trump—has absolute influence over the unruly populist movement that swept him into office.
At this point, Conant said, no one can predict how the roiling anger in the conservative electorate will manifest itself during next year’s midterms—but it’s unlikely it will subside anytime soon. “We need to be honest about the fact that there are some powerful people inside the Republican Party who have no interest in governing,” he told me. “They’re focused like a laser on decapitating the party’s leadership, and have no interest in growing the party’s base into a lasting majority.” The resulting dysfunction, he said, will only further inflame voters’ frustrations.
The dysfunction isn’t in the base — it’s in the elected Republicans who can’t or won’t do the things they were elected to do. If the GOP leadership doesn’t want angry voters, they should stop pissing them off.
RON PAUL: ‘There’s Way Too Much Bipartisanship’ in Washington.
It’s a good rule of thumb that most any legislation with a wide appeal to members of both parties is probably a very bad idea.
THAT’S RICH: Hezbollah says Israel pushing region to war.
EAGLES SAFETY MALCOLM JENKINS: What protesting NFL players like me want to do next.
Finally, an answer to the question, “What are they actually protesting, anyway?”
We are fighting to end the money-bail system by investing in community bail funds and advocating legislation that does away with money bail altogether.
We are fighting to pass clean-slate legislation in Pennsylvania to seal nonviolent misdemeanor records automatically after 10 years. We must provide opportunities for employment, housing, education, loans and voting. We should not disenfranchise a third of the population.
I’ve heard people say that my colleagues and I are un-American and unpatriotic. Well, we want to make America great. We want to help make our country safe and prosperous. We want a land of justice and equality. True patriotism is loving your country and countrymen enough to want to make it better.
If I’m reading this correctly, NFL players like Jenkins are fighting to “make America great” by making more Democrat voters. An easier approach — and one that wouldn’t involve destroying an entire football league — might be to combat the socialists taking over the party and adopting a more-centrist platform with a broader appeal.
But that’s much more difficult and not nearly as media-friendly as taking a knee during the national anthem.
FLASHBACK: ISIS Video Threatens Las Vegas, San Francisco, Shows Golden Gate and Skyscraper.
The Las Vegas shooter certainly doesn’t seem to fit the ISIS profile, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if people who supposedly just “snapped” take their inspiration, such as it is, from all kinds of places.
DUMB: Hundreds Injured in Catalonia as Spanish Police Attack Referendum Voters.
Instapundit’s own Austin Bay noted last week: “Current polls indicate Catalan voters will narrowly reject secession. However, ham-handed Spanish attempts to halt the referendum have sparked a pro-secession uptick.”
RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: Behind ‘Grassroots’ Campaigns Over Airbnb, Millions of Industry Dollars.
AirbnbWatch is an example of a hotel industry-funded effort that doesn’t look like one. Internal board meeting documents from the American Hotel & Lodging Association last year say the trade group “stood up” AirbnbWatch as a way of “gathering stories of short-term rental’s harms” and “highlighting Airbnb’s lack of transparency.”
Another AHLA document from August, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, outlines a communications strategy for the next year intended to create partnerships with “groups, think tanks and other credible voices to weigh in on this issue.”
On its website, AirbnbWatch advertises itself as a project of American Family Voices, a communications firm that wants to “fill gaps in the progressive movement.”
Mike Lux, a former Clinton administration staffer who is president of the group, said he has often opposed the hotel industry on wage and workplace issues, but “on this particular issue, they obviously are in alignment.”
“That’s what you do in politics,” he said.
Politicians legally proscribing entrepreneurial activity at the behest of established players who write fat checks to politicians? Yep, that’s what you do in politics.
QUESTION ASKED: Could America’s Socialists Become the Tea Party of the Left?
Inspired by the Vermont senator’s success at forcing left-wing ideas into the nomination battle, the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, has watched its dues-paying membership, which historically has hovered around 5,000, swell to 25,000. The DSA is still nowhere near the levels of the Socialist Party in 1920, when nearly a million people voted for Eugene Debs, but its members, too young to remember the Cold War, much less the “red scares” of the 1910s and 1950s, aren’t content to sit quietly on the political sidelines, perennially irrelevant in a system built to sustain two major parties.
They want to win. And to do it, socialists are dispensing with their penchant for symbolic protest votes and their principled disdain for an electoral process they believe can’t deliver meaningful change. Sanders’ ability to run well in primaries across the country, say new DSA members, proved that democratic socialism isn’t destined for the kind of third-party tokenism that bedevils the Green Party and World Workers Party, among others. And it has opened their minds to an electoral strategy that was until very recently considered heretical.
“The only viable electoral strategy is to work with the Democratic Party,” says Michael Kazin, the editor of leftist magazine Dissent. “There is no viable third party.”
Either the Democrats are electorally screwed or the country is politically screwed — or eventually, both.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Slaughter in Las Vegas and Much, Much More.
PRE-POSITIONING? Russia Denies Ukrainian Allegations It Left Troops In Belarus.
“As far as the Russian troops which took part in the joint strategic exercises, Zapad (West) 2017, they all returned to their permanent bases,” Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in an e-mailed statement late on September 30.
The denial came after Viktor Muzhenko, the Ukrainian military’s chief of staff, made the claim in a September 29 interview with Reuters that threatens to heighten tensions between Moscow and Kyiv, which have been locked in a standoff over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The Belarus border is closer and more conveniently located to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
JOHN KASICH: If GOP “can’t be fixed,” I can’t support it. “Kasich has been one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents within the party, and some point to him as a likely primary challenger in 2020. But Kasich seems to be toying with the idea of leaving the GOP entirely — though he said for now he remains committed to trying to change it from within.”
Kasich made a name for himself in the ’90s as one of Congress’s more libertarian-leaning Republicans. But his clashes with Trump and his platforms as a gubernatorial and presidential candidate, reveal that he has long since left aside his libertarian leanings.
Fans of the Old Kasich haven’t trusted him since he embraced Big Government, and he’s gone out of his way to make himself unwelcome in this new GOP. If he feels politically homeless, he probably doesn’t have anyone to blame but himself.
September 30, 2017
FAITH MOORE: New Study Blames Baby’s Colic on… Dads?
HEF DIDN’T CHANGE — LIBERALISM DID: Liberalism’s Hugh Hefner problem.
SARAH HOYT ASKS: Has Michelle Obama Ever Met A Human Woman?
I’ll admit I misread the headline on the first pass, and that take was even more unflattering.
September 29, 2017
SOUTH KOREAN DIPLOMAT: ‘Consequences Would be Devastating’ for World if Regional War Erupts.
Indeed it would be — for all the regional players. And the risks will only grow as Li’l Kim expands and improves his nuclear arsenal. That’s why it’s time for China to step up and take responsibility for its Frankenstein creation.