MSNBC PANEL: PELOSI ‘KNOWS EXACTLY WHERE TO…PLUNGE THE KNIFE.’

Heidi Przybyla, NBC News National Political Reporter, praised Pelosi’s use of “toddler language” along the lines of “when you eat your peas and squash, I’ll be happy to talk with you about dessert.” Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press shared the excitement of his female co-panelists, romanticizing how Pelosi “trolls him and she knows his soft spots. She knows exactly where to…plunge the knife time and time again.”

I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s forceful condemnation of such eliminationist rhetoric.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Cory Booker tells supporter who wanted him to punch Trump,  ‘Black guys like us, we don’t get away with that.’

“I go to these meetings sometimes – I talk a lot about this one, the time where a guy comes up to me in the beginning before I spoke and he says to me, ‘I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.’ And I looked at him and I go, ‘sir, that’s a felony,’” Booker said laughingly in audio of his remarks provided to The Hill, before adding, “and black guys like us we don’t get away with that. We don’t get away with that.”

I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s condemnation of Booker’s tolerance of eliminationist rhetoric.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: New York Times now printing fantasies of President Trump being assassinated with help of Secret Service.

I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s forceful condemnation of this eliminationist rhetoric.

‘A CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION MASQUERADING AS A POLITICAL PARTY’ is how Michael Walsh, writing in the guise of his leftwing alter-ego, David Kahane, has described the Democratic party on occasion. And the New York Times, its house organ, concurs! In an article yesterday titled “Democrats: Do Not Surrender the Judiciary,” the Gray Lady’s editorial board has a modest plan for their party:

With Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.

This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue.

“I’m confused on if 1. Anyone on The NY Times Ed Board has seen The Godfather or if 2. They have and are suggesting starting a murderous mob war to prevent a SCOTUS pick,” Stephen Miller asks. “Because THIS is what happens when you go to the mattresses,” Twitchy adds:

I’m old enough to remember when the left wanted gun-related metaphors to be considered the equivalent of the N-word; now they’re ready to launch mob wars and put horses’ heads into beds. I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s condemnation of his own newspaper’s eliminationist rhetoric.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Eric Holder tells GOP, ‘You want to have a knife fight, we’re gonna do it.’

I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s stern denunciation of this eliminationist rhetoric.

“UNEXPECTEDLY,” AFTER AN EIGHT YEAR ABSENCE, ASSASSINATION PORN IS BACK. NYT Reporter: Thumbs Up for ‘Trenchant Satire’ ‘To Kill the President’, Excuses Lefty Hate.

Michelle Malkin needs to update her Assassination Chic archives. Also, I eagerly await Paul Krugman denouncing his fellow Timesman for approving such eliminationist rhetoric.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: “There are plenty of images NYT could have used for this headline that didn’t involve Stephen Miller’s head on a spike. This is just in seriously bad taste, imagine if Breitbart or another more conservative outlet had posted an image of say Valerie Jarrett’s head on a spike.”

You stay classy, New York Times — and I eagerly await Timesman Paul Krugman’s furious condemnation of this eliminationist imagery.

Related: New York Times writer Jacob Bernstein apologizes for referring to Melania Trump as a ‘hooker.’

GOOD LORD: Featured Women’s March Speaker Once Kidnapped, Raped and Tortured Man to Death.

Convicted felon Donna Hylton, who once was a member of a group that kidnapped, raped and tortured an elderly man to the point of death, was a featured speaker at Saturday’s pro-abortion and anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington.

Yup, seriously.

As reported by The Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson on Thursday night: “Hylton, along with three men and three other women, kidnapped 62-year-old real-estate broker Thomas Vigliarolo and held him for ransom, before eventually killing him. As noted in a 1995 Psychology Today article, when asked about forcibly sodomizing the victim with a three foot steel pole, one of Hylton’s accomplices replied: ‘He was a homo anyway.'”

“I couldn’t believe this girl who was so intelligent and nice-looking could be so unemotional about what she was telling me she and her friends had done. They’d squeezed the victim’s testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him,” said New York City Detective William Spurling, speaking of Hylton.

The felon/feminist hero apparently attempted to collect ransom money for the man after he had passed.

Hylton was released from prison in 2012, and Rosario Dawson has been cast to play her in a biopic titled “A Little Piece of Light.”

IF WE CAN’T HAVE SMOD, HE’S THE NEXT BEST THING: CNN Compares Donald Trump to ‘Death Star.’

Remember, this is the same network that once got the vapors over its guests using a word like “crosshairs.” But now comparing Trump to a planetary killing machine* is perfectly fine.

Related: “New York Times columnist Ross Douthat apologized for joking about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign ending in an assassination attempt.”

Paul Krugman, always on the lookout for “eliminationist rhetoric,” call your office.

* To be fair, one that’s on the side of the angels, but still.

MIZZOU AND THE MASTER OF OUR UNIVERSE: “Ironic his name is Wolfe. The incidents surrounding University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe’s resignation following protests of racial insensitivity on campus might as well be plot points in a novel by Tom Wolfe. They are certainly as funny,” Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon: 

The graduate student on hunger strike against oppression is the son of a millionaire railroad executive. The administrators who gave in to the radicals’ demands did so not out of sympathy or solidarity but out of fear of a football strike. The professor who called for “muscle” to help her expel a reporter from a protest held a “courtesy post” in the department of journalism. The details of the saga—including, and I am not making this up, a “poop swastika”—read like a missing chapter of Wolfe’s 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.

I don’t know if he invented it, but it was through Tom Wolfe’s 1973 anthology The New Journalism that I discovered the phrase “Muggeridge’s Law,” named after British author Malcolm Muggeridge. As Wolfe wrote, “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.”

And that’s happened to Wolfe as well. As he noted a couple of years after Bonfire of the Vanities was published in the fall of 1987, Al Sharpton, who became notorious almost concurrently with Bonfire’s release for ginning up the Tawana Brawley fable makes Bonfire’s fictitious press-hungry shakedown artist Rev. Bacon look like “a little divinity student” in comparison.

Similarly, having reread 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons a few months ago, I was struck by how its nonstop sex and booze debauchery now almost reads like the good ol’ days of “higher learning,” in comparison to the past couple of years. Not the least of which, the false rape accusations by Rolling Stone, followed concurrently by Emma Sulkowicz wandering around the Columbia campus with a mattress — all the way to graduation! — before releasing her own sex tape; a real life walking self-satire Wolfe would have never dared to have dreamed up.

Charlotte also contains this mock “Who’s Who”-style biography on one of that novel’s fictitious professors, which helps to describe one aspect of today’s college craziness:

Victor Ransome Starling (U.S.), Laureate, Biological Sciences, 1997. A twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor of psychology at Dupont University, Starling conducted an experiment in 1983 in which he and an assistant surgically removed the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter deep within the brain that controls emotions in the higher mammals, from thirty cats. It was well known that the procedure caused animals to veer helplessly from one inappropriate affect to another, boredom where there should be fear, cringing where there should be preening, sexual arousal where there was nothing that would stimulate an intact animal. But Starling’s amygdalectomized cats had gone into a state of sexual arousal hypermanic in the extreme. Cats attempted copulation with such frenzy, a cat mounted on another cat would be in turn mounted by a third cat, and that one by yet another, and so on, creating tandems (colloq., “daisy chains”) as long as ten feet.

As Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell wrote in “Love in the Age of Neuroscience,” their review of I Am Charlotte Simmons in the New Atlantis in 2005:

The setting of I Am Charlotte Simmons is truly “postmodern” — a world dominated by Nietzsche and neuroscience, a world which has jettisoned the moral imagination of the past. Not only is God dead, but so is reason, once understood as the characteristic that distinguishes man from the rest of nature. We now understand ourselves by studying the behavior of other animals, rather than understanding the behavior of other animals in light of human reason and human difference. We learn that it is embarrassing for any educated person to be considered religious or even moral. Darwin’s key insight that man is just another animal, now updated with the tools and discoveries of modern biology, has liberated us from two Kingdoms of Darkness. Post-faith and post-reason, we can now turn to neuroscience to understand the human condition, a path that leads to or simply ratifies the governing nihilism of the students, both the ambitious and apathetic alike.

And the rush to nihilism really has been this week’s leitmotif hasn’t it? Welcome to “A New Age of Antiquity,” as John O’Sullivan of National Review dubbed the 21st century, based upon his perceptive reading of Back to Blood, Wolfe’s most recent novel.

DRUG WAR UPDATE: How The DEA Ditched An Informant.

The case is SGS-92-X003 v. United States, with the plaintiff identified only by her DEA informant number. Around the agency, however, she wasn’t called SGS-92. She was known as the Princess.

Over a four-year period in the 1990s, the Princess traveled repeatedly to Colombia at the behest of the DEA, and brought in solid information. Her work also took her elsewhere in Latin America and Europe. Then, in 1995, she was kidnapped by one of the drug cartels, and held for three and a half months until a ransom was paid. (The source of the ransom isn’t clear.)

So far, just another infiltration gone bad. It happens. But here is where the case grows particularly dismaying — and how it wound up in court. According to the Princess, it was the DEA’s repeated bungling that essentially blew her cover. Then, after her release, she developed a chronic medical condition that would require increasingly expensive care. The DEA refused to help out. She therefore brought an action claiming breach of contract. In particular, she argued that the DEA, in hiring her as an informant, had agreed to protect her.

It broke that promise.

The opinion is well worth reading, and many of the details are appalling. In 1994, the Princess returned from Colombia with a handwritten note from one drug dealer to another, warning that the Princess worked for the DEA. She turned it over to her handlers. The agency sent her back anyway. On her next trip, she was warned by a source that there were many dealers who would no longer meet with her. The agency sent her back anyway.

The state is not your friend, even when you work for it.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama: The Myth Of The Master Strategist:

Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, “He meant to do that.”

And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. “Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle,” proclaimed then–New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It’s an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish — because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody ever likes to admit they were suckered.

But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he’s stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama’s goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to make Bashar Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that’s nice. . . .

This is not a matter open to fair-minded dispute, never mind partisan disagreement. Even the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius agree that the rollout of Obamacare has been a “debacle” (Sebelius’s word). Revelations in the press and in congressional hearings show that the administration was warned prior to both the shutdown and the Obamacare debut that Healthcare.gov was as ready to go live as a kid’s make-believe refrigerator-box submarine is ready to explore the ocean depths.

If Obama were a chess master — or even a fairly adept checkers novice — he would have known that when you’re not ready to do something incredibly important, it’s best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (three months? six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn’t have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and “extreme” the GOP was being.

Publicly he’d say he was paying a ransom to “kidnappers” and “hostage takers.” He’d denounce Republicans for delaying precious insurance coverage for sick kids and frail oldsters just to score partisan and ideological points.

But privately, ah, privately, the master strategist would be stroking his proverbial white cat — or, in reality, his hypoallergenic black dog — while breathing a sigh of relief that he bought himself some time to fix his woefully mangled health-care reform.

Obviously he wouldn’t want to delay Obamacare. But that decision was out of his hands due to his administration’s incompetence. The only choice before him was whether he would get the blame for the delay or if the Republicans would.

Why Obama didn’t do this and why it didn’t occur to him are good questions. Hubris obviously played a role, as it does in nearly everything this White House does. But the best answer is he didn’t know how terrible things were over at HHS. In other words, the chess master didn’t even know what pieces he had on the board, which is usually not something we associate with chess masters.

As I have noted in the past, despite various people’s repeated insistence on his genius, there’s not much actual evidence that Obama is especially bright. While evidence to the contrary keeps piling up. . . .

BOGUS TEA PARTY VIDEO EDITS at The Daily Show.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS A BIG SUV / FUEL ECONOMY / CAFE ROUNDUP: Read the whole thing, as it’s link-rich and informative.

A few points worth making here. First, the SUV craze isn’t solely the result of car-buyers being idiots. It’s in no small part an artifact of government regulation. Andrew Sullivan, in a post that Tom links, notes that people used to just toss the kids in the back of the station wagon (at least I hope that’s what he means by the “trunk.”) Do that now, and you’d practically be charged with child abuse. (Accusing SUV owners of treason is a bit, er, excitable, too.)

Now you have to strap them into car seats until they’re quite large. This produces demands for more room, DVD players, etc., to keep them amused, and the like. What’s more, station wagons — at least the big ones that Andrew invokes — were actually casualties of the CAFE standards and other regulations; car makers switched to SUVs to give people the station-wagon-like room while getting to treat the vehicles like trucks for purposes of safety and economy rules. The government didn’t have to set things up that way, but it did, and the result was predictable if unintended. (Also, the ability of self-employed people to deduct high-gross-weight vehicles on more favorable terms plays a big role). [LATER: A subsequent post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog blames the “Bush tax cuts” for this, but actually I believe this policy predates Bush — and it was tightened up (somewhat) in 2004, though it was loosened for a bit before that, I think.]

I lack the religious opposition to SUVs that many have, but I don’t want one. When I bought the Passat wagon over 6 years ago, gas was less than a dollar. I drove a lot of SUVs, and wasn’t thrilled by their truck-like driving and lousy mileage. The newer ones drive better, but $2.50/gallon gas hasn’t done anything to make the lousy mileage more tasteful.

And I’m not terribly happy with the offerings right now. The Passat is still OK, but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth and I’d like to replace it in a year or two, depending on how it does. I enjoy looking at cars, and I’ve looked at minivans — roomy, but dull, and with mileage that only looks good next to SUVs — various “crossover” SUVs (I visited the Knoxville Infiniti dealer and looked at an FX35; it was cool, but pricey, and actually smaller inside than the Passat. The salesman was really pleasant and knowledgeable, though.) and the small crop of wagons out there (the Jaguar Estate is perhaps the ugliest car I’ve seen since the Vega). I want to look at the Toyota Highlander hybrid, but I haven’t yet.

A salesman at Harper VW told me that there was actually a TDI version of the Passat wagon on sale last year that got 38 mpg on the highway, but it’s not offered any more, which seems like bad timing. Or why not a station-wagon version of the Accord hybrid? I’d like to see car makers bring out more vehicles like that — and if gas prices stay this high, they probably will. That would suit me.

UPDATE: Michael Wenberg emails:

You and Andrew have a point about SUVs, but he in particular forgets that some people actually “need” big rigs. As much as I’d like to, I can’t pull 2 tons of hay with my 1987 VW Cabriolet. Same with the horse trailer. And we’re not alone. Out here in the rural west, trucks and SUVs are even more common than the big coastal urban areas. I’m sorry, but just because we happen to own two horses doesn’t make me a closet supporter of Islamo terrorists. We can certainly do more with our energy policy than just give tax breaks, but pummeling SUV owners because they take advantage of moronic tax policies seems to be a wrong way to go about it.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Johnathan Pearce has more thoughts.

Meanwhile, reader Bob Whitehead emails:

I’ve been saying this about car seats and seat belts laws causing SUV’s popularity for three years now to all the liberals I know in Jackson Mississippi and keep getting blank stares in the process. Maybe since they don’t have kids they don’t get it. Don’t forget the passenger-side airbag effect as well, keeping older kids in the backseats with their siblings deep into the tween years. The bottom line is–if you have more than two children, you HAVE to drive an SUV or minivan.

Yes, the airbag issue is a real one.

MORE: A reader notes that the VW.com website lets you build a TDI Passat wagon, so maybe they’re still available after all, despite what I was told. Or maybe the website’s out of date.

Meanwhile, reader Paul Milenkovic emails:

I don’t know whom to blame on this one, but Ford is making a fuel-efficient “crossover-SUV” big station-wagon like thing called the Freestyle in my home town of Chicago, and Ford can’t seem to sell very many.

It is styled like its big brother the Explorer, it has the chassis from a Volvo XC-90, it has the same EPA mileage ratings as a Taurus, and it has gotten top marks in the both the Federal and IIHS crash tests. It has the same 3 litre motor as a Taurus but coupled to a gas-saving transmission that allows this motor to move a substantially bigger and heavier vehicle. That transmission called a CVT works on a similar principle as a hybrid car in that the gasoline engine is operated under more fuel efficient load conditions, but I guess it hasn’t been marketed with the “democracy, whiskey, sexy” hype of the hybrid.

The 3 litre engine and CVT transmission don’t have enough oomph to haul a horse trailer, but then how many soccer mom’s board horses? What gets to me is that every self-styled automotive expert who has reviewed this car whines “not enough power!” or “don’t buy until they come out with the 3.5 litre!” The 0-60 numbers are competitive with other vehicles out there, but the CVT transmission doesn’t give the feel of shift points like you are making progress accelerating the car. If this drive train were called a “hybrid”, everyone would be saying how virtuous it is to drive such a car but since it is simply a gas engine and a fancy transmission, all of the car pundits are complaining.

On one hand the punditocracy is complaining about $3 gasoline and wasteful habits and evil SUV’s, and on the other these same people are writing about how the Freestyle is way underpowered and these things are parked all over dealer lots.

In fact, Ford has reportedly discontinued it, though reportedly there will still be a Mercury version in 2007. Here’s a review of the Freestyle from Popular Mechanics.

Reader Francisco Moreno, meanwhile, sends this article from Car and Driver on why diesels are hard to come by:

The trouble with diesels in the U.S. is at the tailpipe. They can’t pass the emissions regs that go into effect in California this year and phase in across the country over the next four years. This may surprise those who’ve seen or sniffed the exhaust coming out of the latest passenger-car diesels—it looks and smells as clean as that of a gas engine to the naked eye or nose. The diesel combustion process, in which the air-fuel mixture is ignited not by a spark plug but by the high temperature and pressure created by a high compression ratio, is naturally clean in terms of carbon moNOXide, hydrocarbons, and other organic gases, so those standards are easily met. But those high temperatures and pressures result in oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and particulate matter—the soot your Olds diesel belched—that are very difficult to clean up, and the new standards apply equally to all fuels. No more special dispensation for diesel.

New technologies may fix that, but many manufacturers are giving up. Finally, Wall Street lawyer-turned Red State soccer mom Jane Meynardie emails on the airbag issue:

One used to be able to put a child below the age (and size) of 12 in the front seat, but can’t do that anymore without risking death by airbag. That means if one has four children, or three children any one of whom has a friend who likes to tag along, one must have a third row of seats (or at least one of those nasty pop-up seats in the cargo area). My one monster-size SUV in which I ferry my 3 boys and their buddies uses less gas than the two vehicles I (and my husband or hired chauffeur)would have to manage if I didn’t have it.

Indeed.

MORE STILL: Ted Nolan thinks we worry too much about safety:

When I was young, and there were no interstates between Columbia SC and Fernandina Beach FL, my parents would prepare the car for the trip by putting a big sheet of plywood across the back seat. This covered the hump, and with blankets spread over it, made a dandy play area for my sister and me to loll and squirm about for the 8 hour drive. If we got tired of that, we could lay down in the shelf between the back seat and the back window. The car may have had seat belts in the front; certainly no one ever used them.

The operative assumption was that my parents were good drivers and they would trust themselves to keep us safe. I think we lost something very important when we lost that presumption. . . . I think sometimes that if we knew where things would end up, we might have gone a different way even though every step seemed to make sense at the time.

I’m a big believer in seat belts, myself, but I take the point. And reader Julie Kelleher Stacy emails:

I hate to email you and take up your time, but this SUV issue strikes very close to home for me. Some people who live in the Northeast, like Andrew (whom I haven’t read in a year), don’t realize that some people in red states own or work on ranches, or work on large government properties, and have kids or guests, and really need these things. Northeasterners sometimes have no concept of how big and diverse this country really is. (By the way, your readers Mr Wenberg and Mr Whitehead have very good points, and I agree with them completely.)

For example, I present my annual childhood summer vacation. Every summer in my childhood of the ’60’s and early seventies was spent at the Big Bend area ranch that has been in our family since the 1880’s. I guess my parents should have had the the foresight in the 50’s to downsize and leave a small footprint on the earth by having fewer kids and selling off my mom’s share of the ranch. But no— instead I was afflicted with the existence of three siblings and a large ranch to help manage. (All working Trans-Pecos ranches have to be large. It takes on average 50 acres to sustain one cow/calf.)

So our parents would stuff all us kids, plus the dog, into the old Buick station wagon (what’s a seatbelt?), drive 350 miles west to the turnoff from the highway (did I mention that Texas is big?), and slowly limp up the several miles to the house. We would park the old Buick in the driveway for the next month, because it couldn’t hack the roads. So instead we would use the ranch pickup for all of our driving. Double cabs did not exist, so it was three people in the cab with a big stick shift between the legs of the child in the middle, and the other kids and dog in the bed of the truck. We even drove 20 miles to town like this to get groceries and library books (no sat dishes back then), at 70 MPH once we hit the highway. I loved riding in the back. We had no idea how dangerous this was, and now it’s illegal in many areas.

When the ranch started buying some early SUVs, first a Wagoneer and then a Suburban, what I liked best was the rear AC units, seemingly heaven-sent. More important was this: SUVs provided ranch families the means to transport humans INSIDE the vehicle, with seatbelts, a huge leap forward in safety for family transportation.

So I intensely resent this demonization of an inanimate object that has so greatly enhanced the safety and comfort of rural families. This is a huge, wealthy, diverse country, with room for people with all kinds of lifestyles. Do I wish SUVs got better gas mileage? HELL YES. I think, hope, and pray that markets and technology will take care of this in time. Faster please.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails along these lines. See also this post from Greg Ransom, and here’s an interesting tidbit on the front-seat airbag problem:

I’d like to point out, though, that we purchased a brand new minivan (a Mercury Monterey) a couple of weeks ago, and it doesn’t have the problem. If the passenger seatbelt latches, and it thinks that it’s an adult-sized amount of weight, it turns the airbag on. If it latches, but the weight is too low, it determines that it might be a child, so it turns off the airbag.

That makes sense, but I didn’t know it was available. That’s a good thing, though it would be even more useful in smaller vehicles, for obvious reasons.