NO. NEXT QUESTION? If The GOP Wins The House Should They Try For Impeachment Revenge?
ROLLING BLACKOUTS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR CALIFORNIA, ANYMORE: With a near record cold spell, Texas power grid warns of rotating outages if electricity demand overwhelms supply.
THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL, I HAVE OTHERS:
STACY MCCAIN: N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech.
Liberals once insisted that the First Amendment protected everything from the right of Communists to teach in public schools to the right of pornographers to produce films of women getting gang-raped. If you wanted to burn the flag? Cool — the First Amendment protected that “free speech,” too, according to liberals.
Liberals are still in favor of Communism, flag-burning and pornography (some things never change), but the kind of First Amendment absolutism that once characterized liberalism (e.g., the ACLU insisting Nazis had a right to march through Jewish neighborhoods) is long gone.
Destroying anonymity on the Internet for bloggers who stray outside the prescribed lines of acceptable opinion was a project undertaken last year by Cade Metz of the New York Times when he decided to dox the proprietor of Star Slate Codex (SSC). When Metz contacted the (inarguably brilliant) blogger known as Scott Alexander, the SSC proprietor immediately shuttered the blog and put up a post explaining what the New York Times was doing, i.e., trying to destroy his private life in order to punish him for allowing free discussion on his site.
Why? Because Star Slate Codex had become influential among certain computer geeks and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
See, that’s the thing about Internet anonymity — you can create a blog or a Twitter account using a pseudonym to say whatever you want, and this probably won’t get you in trouble unless you are so good at it that you attract a following and having real influence on public opinion, in a way disapproved by the liberal Thought Police. People like Oliver Darcy of CNN work more or less full-time to dox conservatives, and this is to say nothing of the SPLC’s massive research staff, which specializes in what Laird Wilcox called the “links-and-ties” smear method.
Indeed.
WON’T THAT JUST ATTRACT MORE? To keep backyard animals safe from cats, offer more meat and play.
NEWS FROM THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX rolls last Starship off the assembly line ahead of “major upgrades.” “After an unusually long ~6 weeks of testing, SpaceX declared Starship SN8 ready for flight and ultimately pulled off a high-altitude launch that made it just a dozen or so seconds (~5%) away from a complete success – far further than anyone really expected. That surprising level of success appeared to lead SpaceX to reevaluate its plans and the strategic design of its test plans. . . . Ultimately, after Starship SN8’s spectacular success and last-second failure, SpaceX seemingly concluded that it was unlikely to need a full seven prototypes to achieve the first soft landing(s) and effectively killed Starships SN12, SN13, and SN14 in the cradle.”
IN MUST-WATCH CLIP, TRUMP ATTORNEY “MICHAEL VAN DER VEEN, CITIZEN” DESTROYS MEDIA:
[CBS News anchor Lana Zak] seemingly didn’t know what to say, and wanted to follow up on van der Veen’s assertion that the House managers doctored evidence.
To be clear for our viewers, what you’re talking about now is a checkmark that’s a verification on Twitter that did not exist on that particular tweet, a 2020 that should have actually read 2021, and the selective editing, you say, of the tapes. Is that how — is that the doctored evidence of what you’re speaking?
At that point, van der Veen is all of us when he lost it on her.
Wait, wait, wait, wait…that’s not enough for you? That’s not enough for you?
Zak indignantly jumped in to argue with him, not believing that he dared to question her.
It’s not okay to doctor a little bit of evidence. The media has to start telling the right story in this country. The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings, and as such, you’re asking questions now that are already set up with a fact pattern. I can’t believe you would ask me a question indicating that it’s alright just to doctor a little bit of evidence. There’s more stuff we uncovered that they doctored, to be frank with you, and maybe that will come out someday.
To be fair, accepting faked evidence from the government par for the course from the network that brought you Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley.
THE GROWNUPS ARE BACK IN WASHINGTON! Pelosi Crashes House Impeachment Managers Presser, Melts Down Over Acquittal and Blames McConnell.
THANKS, PRESIDENT TRUMP: U.S. Troops Go One Year Without A Combat Death in Afghanistan.
MARDI GRAS MADNESS: The mayor said come to New Orleans, then the parades were canceled.
For the first time since 1979, there are no parades rolling through the streets and no stories of craziness from the parade-goers this year. In 1979, the reason was a new mayor and a police department that didn’t want to be led by his newly appointed police chief. A police strike was involved and the krewe captains canceled the parades themselves rather than be used as a pawn in the strike negotiations. It was a political battle. Now it’s a health issue.
Up until now, Mayor LaToya Cantrell and other city officials have welcomed tourists and encouraged visitors to the city. The welcome came with a request to respect the restrictions in place due to the plague. However, there is criticism that city hall has done little to enforce the restrictions. With Mardi Gras rapidly approaching – next Tuesday, February 16 – the mayor is cracking down. On Saturday she issued new restrictions to remain in place for five days, from Feb. 12 through Fat Tuesday, besides the other Phase 2 restrictions already in place.
On Saturday the mayor announced that the city shut down four bars that were violating coronavirus restrictions. Calls were made to city hall, alerting officials to the bad behavior. This came one day after her administration will ban all bar services and limit access to popular streets in the final days of Carnival beginning late this week. The big day is coming and they have to get serious about public safety.
Making a hash of Mardi Gras during the pandemic seems to be what Cantrell does. Though unlike last year, she can’t blame the Bad Orange Man for whatever happens. Flashback to last March: “Just so we are clear, the Mayor of New Orleans is blaming the president for her not acting as the Mayor of New Orleans. The amazing part of her delusion is how she launches into a long diatribe about ‘leadership’, all while discussing something that transpired as a result of her lack of leadership.”
As I wrote back then, “Mardi Gras was on February 25, and the partying starts at least two weeks earlier in New Orleans, a period when Trump’s travel ban was still considered racist and xenophobic by the news media. Oh, and speaking of which: [Local] ‘Health official says risk of coronavirus in New Orleans is ‘very, very low’ but warns of flu cases,’ the New Orleans Gambit, part of the Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate group of publications, reported on February 26th.”
JOHN NOLTE: The Gloriously Inappropriate and Problematic Blues Brothers (1980).
We live in a literal Woke Police State run by Big Corporations. Ironically, this was something Hollywood frequently warned us about — and now Hollywood is one of our most fascist enforcers. McCarthyism and blacklists have returned with a vengeance.
Well, as the (soon-to-be-blacklisted) Python boys famously suggested, you should “always look at the bright side of life.”
So, yes, there are some benefits to Woke McCarthyism… First off, it’s kind of fun to feel like an outlaw just for daring to enjoy a movie. Secondly, we certainly live in interesting times. Finally, now that movies like Animal House and The Blues Brothers have become the forbidden, like all things forbidden, you cherish and enjoy them all the more.
The Blues Brothers was always a terrific movie, a legitimately great musical-comedy. It’s aged into something even more beautiful, though, and not just because of Woketardism.
You see, in the 41 years since its release, we’ve lost all the legends the movie paid such affectionate tribute to: Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker. They’re all gone now, and what a treat it is to watch them up on the screen strutting their magic. Each of their numbers, most especially Aretha’s “Think” and Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” is a total show-stopper. You can’t help but sit with a big grin on your face mixed with an ache in your heart.
Yes, Giants once walked the earth … including John Belushi.
Best of all, you can sense the reverence John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd (who co-wrote the script with director John Landis) have for these giants. Not only are they eager to introduce their idols to a new audience, but during their respective musical numbers, Aykroyd and Belushi stay almost entirely out of the way. They generously (and appropriately) allow their musical heroes to shine alone in the spotlight.
Both the movie and musical history are better for it.
It’s a massively bloated Hindenburg of a musical comedy, redeemed by the goodwill of its two SNL stars, their brilliant backing band, and the film’s stellar guest artists. And as Nolte writes, “because of all that goodness and good humor and colorblindness and ennobling of the human spirit, The Blues Brothers could never get made today — at least not without everyone involved getting blacklisted by today’s Woke Nazis.”
KATHY SHAIDLE ON THE 1966 ROCK HUDSON/JOHN FRANKENHEIMER FILM SECONDS:
Much has been written about the multiple subtexts of Seconds — the Hollywood “blacklist,” as well as Hudson’s then-secret (more or less) gay identity; the crazy “Brian Wilson connection”; the extraordinary lengths to which Wong Howe and Frankenheimer went to realize their vision: For one thing, to thin out a section of Grand Central Station to capture their opening shots, they hired a woman in a bikini to create a crowd-forming spectacle at the other side of the terminal.
And all these factors do indeed add invisible yet palpable depth to a film that is in and of itself a stunning feat of storytelling, acting and technical prowess.
Liberal fans of Seconds praise it as — you guessed it — a chilling condemnation of shallow materialistic American consumerism and conformity. Yet few of them mention that when Hamilton gets his twice in a lifetime opportunity to savor the idealized progressive lifestyle instead, he’s miserable then too. Actually more so.
In fact, coming out as it did in that pivotal year between the early Sixties New Frontier/Mad Men era, and the late Sixties of Woodstock and Manson, Seconds could just as easily be read as a critique of the then-nascent youth “drop out” counterculture.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A professor at the University of Iowa tweeted that certain academic fields, specifically the classics, should be “dismantled and burned” in order for “white supremacy to be smothered.”
You know, if they keep this up, people might start judging “white supremacy” by its enemies. Is that a good idea?
WELL, NOW THAT THE ELECTION’S OVER AND TRUMP’S OUT: Democrats in rebellion against Cuomo’s nursing-home coverup.
Related: Cuomo creates COVID-only homes — after thousands died.
BLOWBACK: Louisiana GOP censures Sen. Cassidy over impeachment vote to convict Trump. Unanimously. That was fast. “We condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the vote today by Sen. Cassidy to convict former President Trump. . . Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and President Trump has been acquitted of the impeachment charge filed against him.”
UPDATE: Not just Louisiana. Also fast.
REPORT: White House lawyers tell Meena Harris to stop using aunt Kamala to build brand.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ social-media-influencer niece has long used her aunt’s fame to boost her own personal brand — but now that Harris has entered the White House, aides have become increasingly concerned about the ethical implications of the promotional pattern, according to a report.
“Some things can’t be undone,” a White House official, speaking about niece Meena Harris, 36, on the condition of anonymity, told The Los Angeles Times.
“That being said: Behavior needs to change,” the official said of the niece Harris, whose ventures have reportedly become a sensitive issue in the newly formed Biden-Harris White House.
Isn’t that SOP for the Biden White House? Earlier: Biden brood already cashing in on Joe’s presidency.
MICHAEL BARONE: The Republican Party won’t fall apart this time either.
ROGER KIMBALL: Yes, Acquittal is Vindication. “The pandemonium at the Capitol was not the cause but merely the pretext for the unprecedented second impeachment by the U.S. Congress of a single individual.”
It was informative to see our rulers’ reaction when — after a long summer in which cities burned, businesses were destroyed, and people were beaten or murdered — just the tiniest taste of civil disorder came home to affect them.
Plus:
I think that an acquittal is a vindication. I know that there are some intermittently conservative organs that disagree. They believe, or at least they say, that Trump’s acquittal does not mean he was vindicated. The proposition that Donald Trump is in the wrong is an analytic truth for them. Like the proposition “all bachelors are unmarried,” they regard it as a necessary truth. It is something inarguable.
It is worth noting, however, that these are the same organs that couldn’t stop berating Trump—the most pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-prosperity, pro-middle class, and pro-American president in decades (maybe ever)—while he was president. And they are also the same organs that, come tomorrow, will be wringing their hands over Joe Biden’s pro-abortion, pro-China, pro-totalitarian attacks on American freedom and prosperity. They prefer whining to wielding power, I suspect, and actually seem to believe that an incompetent mannequin-like Mitt Romney is somehow more preferable as president than someone like Donald Trump.
And poor Peggy Noonan must be really unhappy.
No doubt. Also:
That touches on one of the two main reasons that the Democratic machine wheeled out their impeachment wheeze yet again. They are terrified of the voters—all those embryonic “domestic terrorists” Joe Biden’s Stasi is tracking—who, ignoring the wisdom of their betters, might actually get together and vote someone else like Donald Trump—if not the Bad Orange Man himself—into office again. That mustn’t happen.
They do seem really afraid, don’t they?
CHARGE THE DEMOCRATS AND MEDIA — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — WITH INCITEMENT: Lawyer says his home, family ‘under siege’ as retaliation for representing Trump in trial.
When prominent “White Shoe” law firms represented accused Al Qaeda members, for free, we were told that everyone deserves a defense. But lawyers representing Trump have been repeatedly mobbed.
Remember, though, it’s all about protecting “decency” and “our democracy” and our institutions from that bully Trump.
Earlier: Biden Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo Threatens Reporter: ‘I Will Destroy You.’
Joe Concha of The Hill tweets,”WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki announces the resignation of Deputy TJ Ducklo: ‘We are committed to striving every day to set the standard set by the president in treating others with dignity and respect.’ Note: Psaki was aware of the Palmeri harassment for 3 weeks and did nothing. Psaki, along with senior aide Anita Dunn, was made aware of Ducklo’s sexist tirade on Jan. 21. Only after the Vanity Fair story on Feb 12 did Psaki/the administration act because they had to. Without the VF story, nothing happens here. This accountability statement is laughable.”
I’m so old, I can remember last month when Biden claimed, “‘I will fire you on the spot’: President Joe Biden warned White House staff that disrespect would not be tolerated.”
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Cuomo Didn’t Protect Seniors From COVID-19. But it Was the Media That Covered it Up.
Things are not looking good for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. After receiving an Emmy “in recognition of his leadership” and writing a bestselling book called American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, the toll Cuomo’s leadership has taken is finally emerging. On Thursday, the New York Post broke the story that Melissa DeRosa, one of the governor’s top aides, apologized to Democratic lawmakers for fudging the number of nursing home deaths from COVID for fear of being investigated.
Such an investigation was long overdue. One of the biggest scandals of the pandemic has been the number of nursing home deaths in New York City, many of them possibly linked to a March 25 directive from the Cuomo administration forcing nursing homes to take in people even if they had tested positive for COVID-19. It would prove a death sentence for thousands of seniors. And to fend off an investigation, the Cuomo administration underestimated the number of nursing home deaths by 40%. The true number was 15,000, not 9,056.
But this isn’t just a government scandal. It’s a media scandal. For while the Cuomo administration was sentencing seniors to death, the media was busy fawning over Cuomo in a series of softball interviews, many of them conducted by his own brother.
Cuomo has been a television mainstay throughout the crisis, particularly on CNN where his brother, Chris Cuomo, is a host. But it wasn’t just his brother who fawned. A June interview with CNN’s Chris Cilizza provided Cuomo an opportunity to tout his performance while criticizing that of then-president Donald Trump and Republican governors who had not gone along with economy-crushing lockdowns. Cilizza was more than happy to assist.
Exit quote: “‘Obviously, I’ll never be objective. Obviously, I think you’re the best politician in the country,’ Chris Cuomo said during a June 24 brotherly interview.” Though as Markowicz notes, “This embarrassing lack of objectivity had spread well beyond family ties. Cuomo-love affected almost all of the governor’s coverage.” Read the whole thing.
GOODER AND HARDER: Gas up 18% since election, could surpass $4 under Biden.
RETURN TO NORMALCY:
● ISIS: We’re baaack!
● Houthis Bomb Airport in Saudi Arabia After Being Removed From Terror List by Biden Administration.
● Biden Makes History: First President in 40 Years to Punt on Contacting Israel.
● Biden Will Close the Guantanamo Bay Military Prison After ‘Robust Review’
● Nevertheless, Xi persisted.
GOOD ADVICE IN THIS ERA OF CENSORSHIP:
I BLAME RON DESANTIS: Will New York Lead the Way in Screwing Up School Reopening?
Related: New Biden K-12 Plan Will Cancel Sports For Nearly 83 Percent Of Counties.
Why, it’s as if “the president is abdicating his responsibility by outsourcing education to his benefactors in the unions, all while teenagers continue to take their lives, begging for help the Democrats are dragging their feet to provide.”
All of which is why: The GOP must hammer the Democrats on school reopenings.
DON SURBER TO NIKKI HALEY: Nikki, they still hate you and want you to die.
I see where Nikki Haley showed all the loyalty of a Mitt Romney as she dumped on Donald Trump. That’s the thanks he gets for appointing her ambassador to the UN, even though she virulently opposed his nomination in 2016.
How cute. She thinks this will endear her to the press.
That will never happen.
They hate her and want her to die.
Well, sure. She’s a Republican.
February 13, 2021
GRIFTERS UNDER PRESSURE: Maher To Schmidt: “Where Did The Other Money Go?”
INTERESTING BOOK ON ANTI-AGING: I am reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To and am finding the suggestions he makes to live longer very helpful. The book is a bit technical but his tips seem to boil down to taking NAD boosters in the morning along with Resveratrol, Vitamin D, K and 83 mg. of aspirin. He also skips a meal a day or has a very small one, lifts weights and jogs a bit and goes in a sauna at the gym before dunking into a cold pool. I guess one could live longer with this regimen (perhaps) but being cold and hungry doesn’t sound all that fun. If you have tried some of these techniques, have they worked for you?
DEMOCRATIC IMPEACHMENT CHAOS: Schumer blindsided by Democrat impeachment managers: He didn’t want to call witnesses in the trial.
UPDATE: From a friend.
TRUMP ACQUITTED, AND THE LINCOLN PROJECT IMPLODING ON THE SAME WEEKEND. Seems like an inflection point.
THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS BEEN AFTER SLATESTARCODEX FOR A WHILE:
But if you strike him down, he will only become more powerful than you can imagine.
Plus, a Fisking of the NYT article. “This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.” Only if you haven’t been reading them lately.
Plus: “The journalist involved hasn’t known about Slate Star Codex for three years, so this is undoubtedly the version he read, and he still chose to make this attack. I have 1,557 other posts worth of material he could have used, and the sentence he chose to go with was the one that was crossed out and included a plea for people to stop taking it out of context.”
Also: “I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: ‘Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.'”
MORE: You are writing about one of the most prolific and talented writers of our generation. How the hell do you not actually quote them? It’s kinda obvious, really.
IS THERE AN ANALOGY TO COLLEGE CAMPUSES? A Peculiar Side Effect of Prozac: Fish Swimming in Our Waste Lose Their Individuality.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: ACQUITTED:
Up next: the battle to define conservative politics as Biden faces a new world. . . .
The ancien regime needed a Blue Tsunami to effect a restoration. But they achieved a mild and perhaps doubtful electoral surf despite a maximum effort. The impeachment was a second chance at pursuit. Its failure means the populists will be back.
Trump and the Democratic leader’s age means a new cast of characters will be coming on for Season 2. The Blue failure to smash the populists means people are now refiguring the odds. Expect new political startups.
The reason why threats to go after Trump in court are pointless is because the Biden administration, like every incumbent, will soon be on the political defensive. New challenges are going to put Biden between the hard rock of the left and even more obdurate reality.
Hang on: It’s going to be fun.
NEWS YOU CAN USE THIS WEEKEND: N.C. station airs viewer’s gravy and sweet tea advice for driving in the snow:
NO, MR. RASKIN, WE DIDN’T GIVE YOU OUR SOVEREIGN POWERS: James Bovard, writing for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), points to something Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said during one of his numerous Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump:
“In his final pitch to senators on Thursday, Raskin included the usual hackneyed references to Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence. Then Raskin recited the first ‘We the People’ sentence of the preamble of the Constitution and declared: ‘You see what just happened? The sovereign power of the people … flowed right into Congress.’”
Maybe Raskin missed class that day at Harvard Law when the concepts of sovereignty and public servant were covered.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Did The Democrats “Tank” The Second Trump Trial?
IS IT IN COFFEE, TOO? Green tea compound aids tumor-suppressing, DNA-repairing protein.
TRUMP 2, IMPEACHMENT 0. The Democrats have converted impeachment from a measure of “high crimes and misdemeanors” to simply an indicator that the House of Representatives is controlled by the opposition party. Once again, people claiming to stand up in favor of institutions and traditions against Donald Trump have actually wrecked those institutions and traditions out of pique. This has done lasting damage to the Republic, and they don’t care. They never care.
As I told my twentysomething Con Law students, they have now lived through 75% of America’s presidential impeachments. Of course, if they were one year old, they would still have lived through 50%.
That’s not normal, and the source of the abnormality isn’t Trump.
UPDATE:
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: BEFORE INCITING RIOTS, KAMALA HARRIS JOKED ABOUT KILLING TRUMP, PENCE.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Practice Drawing From Concealment.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Yes, There’s a Safe Way to Have a Cannibalism Fetish. The Armie Hammer Story’s Not It.
QUESTION ASKED: What Happened to Officer Brian Sicknick?
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How much chocolate would you have to eat for it to kill you?
THE EMERGENT URBAN ANTI-PROGRESSIVISM:
Democrats have puzzled over why Biden did not perform as well in cities as expected, and conversely, why Trump seemed to overperform in them. Overall, Biden won major metro areas, but his slippage compared with Trump’s gains was notable.
Trump gained in every borough of New York City except Staten Island (where he was already a favorite) compared with 2016, recording a gain of 12 percentage points in his share of the total vote in the Bronx and 9 points in Queens. He improved his margin by more than 18 points in largely immigrant and working-class assembly districts encompassing Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights. New York City as a whole swung toward Trump by 7.6 points between 2016 and 2020, more than any single state swung in the election, as Trump picked up support in 58 of the city’s 65 assembly districts. Compared with 2016, he gained votes in cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, the latter of which gave Trump 5,000 more votes than in 2016 and Biden 1,000 fewer than Hillary Clinton won. As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has noted, even though Joe Biden won major metros as expected, closer scrutiny of a number of blue cities reveals blue doughnuts: As Democrats increased their command of the suburbs, their hold on inner cities weakened.
No one expected this, and there certainly isn’t much about Donald Trump’s policies on trade, immigration, tax cuts, or conservative judges that explains it. It seems obvious instead that in the age of COVID and violent protests, progressive cities overplayed their hand. When you ask your residents to pay too much for subpar housing, pledge to defund the police as crime soars, and force parents to do things they thought their taxes paid teachers to do, you shouldn’t be surprised at the backlash.
Read the whole thing.
RECALL GAVIN NEWSOM CAMPAIGN REACHES NEEDED 1.5 MILLION SIGNATURES.
A major upgrade could be in order for California: Grenell lays groundwork for California gubernatorial run.
GOODER AND HARDER: San Francisco supervisor says lack of tourists has criminals now targeting residents.
Flashback: San Francisco’s New Socialist, Soft On Crime D.A. Is The Last Thing The City Needs.
Why doesn’t San Francisco make it official and simply elect Bane to be their D.A.?
Related: Down south, Los Angeles County Deputy DA Filing Defamation Lawsuit Against DA George Gascon.
THIS IS PLAUSIBLE, SINCE YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM IS ALREADY PRIMED: One dose of COVID-19 vaccine may be good for recovered patients. Of course, it’s still not clear that people who’ve had it need to be vaccinated. I had an antibody test run and my levels were high.
BREAKING: Senate Votes To Hear Witnesses In Trump Trial.
Ted Cruz has some thoughts on potential witnesses:
UPDATE: Or not! Senate strikes deal, bypassing calling impeachment witnesses.
NEWS YOU CAN USE:
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I Sexted With A Bot To Quell Pandemic Loneliness.
To boldly go where Raj Koothrappali has gone before!
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The GOP must hammer the Democrats on school reopenings. “Republican members of Congress should be talking about nothing else. Not Donald Trump. Not impeachment. Not QAnon tweets. Nothing. It is clear that President Biden has abandoned the parents of schoolchildren who voted for him for a little peace and quiet coming from Washington, because that is who Joe Biden is and always has been.”
Related: Biden Administration Threw CDC Director Under The Bus After She Said Teachers Can Return To School.
More:
ROGER SIMON: The Democrats’ Chinese Communist Party Envy.
The key to our elites’ (hate the word but using it for convenience) riches and power is access to the giant Chinese market no matter how the CCP behaves.
This began with Kissinger and Nixon. The theory then, or the rationalization, was that if we opened to China, they would become like us.
Consequently, in the decades since, the U. S. government more or less looked away, doing little more than raising its eyebrows in UN conference rooms, as the CCP oppressed its minorities (If you can call millions of people minorities) in the Tibetan, Uyghur, Falun Gong, and Christian communities and simultaneously jailed, tortured and/or made life impossible for dissidents who evinced the slightest interest in democracy.
Even the horrors of Tiananmen were no more than a bump in the road. Just twelve years later China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization.
Only the uncouth orange-haired man dared to step in to stem this inevitable slide cum boondoggle for the elite. What a killjoy. Even Apple had to reconsider having all its iPhones made in China, at least for a while.
No wonder he has to be impeached—twice. And a third time if that becomes necessary. It’s not such a joke.
And you can be sure the same treatment will be given to Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida who appears to be a more sophisticated version of Trump who may know how to walk the walk more subtlety and successfully than the now former president.
In fact DeSantis already is being targeted, as our new administration is threatening to ban travel to Florida when his state—without lockdowns—fared far better against COVID than those that did like New York and New Jersey. Again—how very CCP.
What probably goes on somewhere in the head of the average liberal who once—it seems like decades ago—so ardently embraced civil liberties and the Bill of Rights is that the way of Communist China is the inevitable way of the future. As the digital empire grows and robots take over the work force, competing parties in a democratic republic will seem so old fashioned and just stand in the way of progress (read: getting rich).
Human freedom and liberty are passé 18th century ideas, the kind of thing that gets you banned on Twitter. Who needs it when the microchip in your sunglasses is telling you the right thing to do, what’s required of a “good citizen.”
When that infantile group of dumbbells invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6—calling that an “insurrection” was ludicrous; if you really wanted to overthrow the U. S. government you would do something that could have an effect, like bringing down the power grid—it was seized upon as an opportunity not only to smash Trump but to open the floodgates to a one-party system.
So what has happened to Nixon and Kissinger’s theory that the Chinese would become like us?
The reverse: We have become like them!
As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see, in a sort of prelude to what was to come the following year: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
BECAUSE DECENCY:
BIDENOMICS PROGRESSING SMOOTHLY: Economists Slam Biden Stimulus as ‘Economically Unjustified’ Plan That ‘Incentivizes Unemployment.’
Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
Yep. From Harvey Weinstein to Jeffrey Epstein to John Weaver, once it becomes public we hear that it was an “open secret” all along. Who was it secret from? Us. Not them. And who was keeping the secret? Everyone who knew but said and did nothing.
UPDATE: From the comments:
FIGHT THE POWER, STICK IT TO THE MAN: Prof defends music theory against white supremacist claims, then gets demoted. Now, he’s suing.
HMM: France wades into the South China Sea with a nuclear attack submarine. “China lays claim to nearly all of the South China Sea while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all also claim parts of the region, believed to hold valuable oil and gas deposits. . . . In geopolitical terms, given the patchwork of competing territorial claims, the South China Sea is not a zone to dive a nuclear submarine into without strategic reflection.”
It’s weird how the French seem to be stirring themselves all of a sudden, even as the Biden Administration establishes itself.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN VEILED THREATS: If Republican senators acquit Trump, they will own the violence that follows.
WOW, THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ONLY BEEN BACK IN POWER FOR A FEW WEEKS AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY GOING PRO-SLAVERY: Law school defends its right to remove mural depicting slaves being freed.
WELL, YES. THE DEMOCRATS’ AND MEDIA’S — BUT I REPEAT MYSELF — EFFORT TO MAKE ELECTION FRAUD CLAIMS SUDDENLY OUT OF BOUNDS IS RISIBLE: Majority agrees: Don’t punish Trump for election theft claims.
Flashback, November 2, 2020: Will your ballot be safe? Computer experts sound warnings on America’s voting machines.
All election systems are for the most part black boxes: proprietary software and hardware jealously guarded by the handful of companies selling them. But state reviews and court cases opening up DRE systems of all makes and models for examination have for years flagged problems.
In New Jersey in 2008, Princeton computer scientist Andrew Appel and a five-member team got a rare look under the hood of an AVC Advantage DRE, part of a lawsuit alleging DREs could not reliably count votes.
Among the findings: The system sometimes only seemed to record a vote. It sometimes did record a vote but seemed not to. It would take one screwdriver and seven minutes to insert a vote-stealing program. That kind of hack would probably be invisible, Appel concluded.
More than a decade later, Appel is still talking about DRE vulnerabilities. And although the New Jersey governor, citing COVID-19, has created a nearly all-mail election, 19 New Jersey counties still have their DRE equipment on hand for the next contest, according to state records.
Nationally, if the surge in absentee ballots has not decreased in-person voting, more than 14 million registered voters would be going Tuesday to polls that are equipped with DREs.
“The whole community of computer scientists is mystified why election officials will not listen to experts about technology but will listen to the vendors (selling and maintaining it),” said Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who examined that state’s system.
Plus: Democrats question election results: ‘We just trust the machines, and we shouldn’t.’
Matt Luceen didn’t vote for former President Donald Trump in 2020, but he came to Washington last week to protest President Biden’s inauguration, saying the election was flawed.
Mr. Luceen, a supporter of Sen. Bernard Sanders, said he toted signs that read “COUNT OUR VOTES BY HAND,” and “End the charade.”
“We don’t ever really put the paper into piles and count them by hand anymore,” the 34-year-old computer programmer said. “We just trust the machines, and we shouldn’t because we have documented proof that these machines are vulnerable.”
While Mr. Trump and his supporters have been explosively vocal about their distrust of the election system, discontent runs through a broad swath of voters from across the political spectrum.
In 2016, it was Democrats complaining that the election had been tainted by Russian interference. Two years later, the party complained that Stacey Abrams had been denied the Georgia governorship because of shenanigans with voting rolls.
Ms. Abrams never conceded, and Democrats — who took control of the U.S. House in those 2018 elections — made her cause a rallying cry, vowing to repair elections.
In 2020, it was Mr. Trump sowing complaints early and often.
And remember this? Democratic senators warned of potential ‘vote switching’ by Dominion voting machines prior to 2020 election.
In a December 2019 letter to Dominion Voting Systems, which has been mired in controversy after a human error involving its machines in Antrim County, Michigan, resulted in incorrect counts, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar and congressman Mark Pocan warned about reports of machines “switching votes,” “undisclosed vulnerabilities,” and “improbable” results that “threaten the integrity of our elections.”
“In 2018 alone, ‘voters in South Carolina [were] reporting machines that switched their votes after they’d inputted them, scanners [were] rejecting paper ballots in Missouri, and busted machines [were] causing long lines in Indiana,’” the letter reads. “In addition, researchers recently uncovered previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in “nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states.” And, just this year, after the Democratic candidate’s electronic tally showed he received 164 votes out of 55,000 cast in a Pennsylvania state judicial election in 2019, the county’s Republican chairwoman said, “nothing went right on Election Day. Everything went wrong. That’s a problem.”
The letter continued: “These problems threaten the integrity of our elections and demonstrate the importance of election systems that are strong, durable, and not vulnerable to attack.”
Dominion’s suing Rudy Giuliani, but not these Democrats. But an “unbiased” voting machine company that only sues Republicans has kind of blown its credibility already.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND THEIR SILENCE MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Biden Is Still Separating Families at the Border. Where Is the Media Outrage?
Chinese authorities refused to provide World Health Organization investigators with raw, personalized data on early Covid-19 cases that could help them determine how and when the coronavirus first began to spread in China, according to WHO investigators who described heated exchanges over the lack of detail.
The Chinese authorities turned down requests to provide such data on 174 cases of Covid-19 that they have identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. The investigators are part of a WHO team that this week completed a monthlong mission in China aimed at determining the origins of the pandemic.
Chinese officials and scientists provided their own extensive summaries and analysis of data on the cases, said the WHO team members. They also supplied aggregated data and analysis on retrospective searches through medical records in the months before the Wuhan outbreak was identified, saying that they had found no evidence of the virus.
But the WHO team wasn’t allowed to view the raw underlying data on those retrospective studies, which could allow them to conduct their own analysis on how early and how extensively the virus began to spread in China, the team members said. Member states typically provide such data—anonymized, but disaggregated so investigators can see all other relevant details on each case—as part of WHO investigations, said team members.
They’re hiding something, and we all have a pretty good idea what it is.
OUT ON A LIMB: Most GOP Voters Still Don’t Think Biden Was Elected Fairly.
That Time magazine article last week certainly didn’t do much to dissuade the cynicism of Trump’s supporters right now.
PANTS ‘EM. Democrats fear getting ‘caught with our pants down’ in 2022.
If you’re looking for a way to make a difference, start working on a 2022 campaign. And don’t let the “elections don’t matter” talk stop you. That’s just Dem propaganda designed to get you to stay home. A very small number of jurisdictions were responsible for all the problems in 2020, and in several of them a GOP legislature is going to change the laws to prevent a repeat. Those problems are very unlikely to affect your state or local elections.
IT BLAMES TRUMP, OF COURSE: “Report: 40% of US COVID deaths could have been avoided.”
What this Fox News article doesn’t point out is that the “experts” involved in this study–Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein–are the authors of a string of outlandish, highly politicized “studies.”
Jeff Jacoby wrote about their rent control study back in 1995. He quotes Woolhandler:
“‘If rent control vanishes, dozens will die,’ said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an internist at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School….
“‘One-third of our heart attack patients at Cambridge Hospital live in rent-controlled apartments. By allowing landlords to force them out, the governor and state Legislature are implementing the death penalty—a social policy sure to kill.’”
Jacoby also quotes Himmelstein:
“As doctors,” pronounces Dr. David Himmelstein, “we don’t have the power to change the law or get a person another apartment. But we do have the power to appeal to the moral consciousness of politicians as well as landlords.”
As Jacoby put it in 1995: “If only conservatives could be as sensitive and morally refined as Drs. Woolhandler and Himmelstein. Then they would realize how massive the death toll can be when liberals don’t get their way.”
Woolhandler and Himmelstein were also the authors (along with then Prof. Elizabeth Warren) of an over-hyped study of bankruptcy that wildly claimed that half of all bankruptcies stem from illness or injury. My response to that one is here.
It’s surprising to me how these folks manage to get so much attention for their work. But they definitely do.
CUOMO AIDE ADMITS THEY HID NURSING HOME DATA SO FEDS WOULDN’T FIND OUT:
Governor Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.
The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.
“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”
In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”
“And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call.
“Gotta hand it to Cuomo, ‘I covered up thousands of deaths to fight fascism’ is bold. But hey, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures right?”, one wag noted on Twitter.
Meanwhile, there is pouncing and seizing spotted by the DNC-MSM:
● Politico: Republicans Pounce! “Nearly every top Republican in the state pounced on the Post’s report, subjecting Cuomo to a barrage of criticism arguably unparalleled at any point during his decade in office.”
● The New York Times: “Condemnation was even louder from Republicans, who have seized on Mr. Cuomo’s performance on nursing homes — where more than 10,000 New Yorkers have died during the pandemic, but the state long stalled on releasing full data — as evidence of duplicity or even criminality.”
As Jim Treacher likes to say, “When Republicans screw up, that’s the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republicans’ reaction is the story.”
And speaking of screwing up:
However, Ed Morrissey asks: Are New York Democrats bailing out on Cuomo?
When only Republicans criticize a cover-up in a scandal involving thousands of deaths, the media can slough it off as pouncing. When Democrats join them in slamming Andrew Cuomo for his “betrayal,” suddenly it looks less like pouncing and more like a serious existential crisis. And that might very well be what Cuomo will shortly face:
Faster, please.
Flashback: America’s Newspaper of Record last May: CNN Praises Governor Cuomo For Killing Off The Elderly Since They Probably Would Have Voted For Trump.
WILLIAM JACOBSON: Exposing Critical Race Training in Higher Education.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. John Stossel: There Are No Socialist Success Stories. “Only capitalist countries create real wealth.”
Yeah, but the opportunities for graft — and even more vital, for self-importance and unchecked power — are so much less.
JIM GERAGHTY: The Icons of the Left Collapse.
What’s the theme that ties together Andrew Cuomo, the Lincoln Project, and California’s governing class? Since 2015 or so, a whole bunch of people who hated Donald Trump — and I am among those who believe the former president earned his animosity and scorn — chose to believe that anyone who stood in opposition to Trump had to be one of the good guys. A huge swath of the media world, elites across American society, and donors large and small, conflated political agreement in opposition to Trump with all other positive virtues. Outspoken opposition to Trump turned into an all-purpose badge of righteousness that many believed would outweigh or outshine any other issues or character flaws.
When a society adopts this kind of mentality, bad people recognize this. They pick up on the fact that certain views or opinions or labels can be used as moral get-out-of-jail-free cards. Why do you think so many self-identified feminist men keep turning out to be creeps when alone with a woman? Why do you think some billionaires describe themselves as socialist? Why do you think self-professed environmentalists keep taking private jets to climate-change conferences? Society has taught them that their viewpoint outweighs their actual behavior, actions, and in some cases, and how they treat other people.
Exit quote: “You made this bed, progressives. We tried to hold these guys accountable, but you wouldn’t listen to us. The only way we get better results is if you guys hold your own guys accountable.”
NEW YORK SUN: Impeaching the Voters:
The fact is that the Democrats are scared of a Trump comeback, and the House made no secret of it.
On the contrary, it warned in open Senate against acquitting Mr. Trump, because that would leave open the possibility that he could rebound and run for president again. That is what the Democrats’ long campaign for impeachment has been about from the start — fear of the voters. It seems that the Democrats are impeaching not so much the former president but the 74 million Americans who voted for him and, they fear, might yet do so again.
Better they should fear what comes in place of Trump, if they continue in this vein. You can declare war against 74 million people, but it may not go as planned.
Flashback:
THAT WAS ALWAYS THE GOAL, THEY JUST USED TO BE LESS OPEN ABOUT IT: Zaid Jilani: The Left Has Replaced Social Liberalism with Social Control.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE COVID TUNNEL: American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen tells Bill Walton there are multiple reasons to think the worst of the Covid crisis is behind us. For one thing, the decline in the present wave of “new cases” is happening across the country, not just in sections.
BTW, if you appreciate informal, substantive and intelligent conversations about the most important issues of the day, “The Bill Walton Show” will delight you. Like this one with Kerpen, Walton’s conversations are lengthy at just under 50 minutes, but in my experience always well-worth the invested time. And, no, this is not the former NBA star Bill Walton, but the Bill Walton who built Allied Capital.
FASTER, PLEASE: Synthetic ‘mini’ receptors block atherosclerosis.
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