Daily Digest |  |
- Crime and Violence Reign
- Inside the COVID Pork Bill
- Another depressing report from Georgia
- Tucker Carlson’s life lessons
- The news, Hilaria style
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 04:28 PM PST (John Hinderaker) In many American cities, law enforcement is in a state of collapse. A combination of anti-police activism, spineless politicians, and left-wing prosecutors has turned the streets over to violent criminals. Yesterday in Manhattan, a gang of 25 to 50 “youths” attacked a vehicle stopped at a light:
Law enforcement, under continuous attack from Mayor DeBlasio, who apparently has no problem with this sort of chaos, was nowhere in sight. Then we have the weird events in Fife, Washington, a suburb of Tacoma. A group of far-leftists has taken over a Travelodge motel and finally, at last word, are being cleared away by police. I won’t try to summarize, but My Northwest has the story. The Antifa-style activists have the usual delusions of grandeur:
If public officials, including prosecutors, have no problem with criminal violence, law enforcement is hopeless. As a result of the left-wing social forces that have been unleashed this year, violence in our cities has skyrocketed. Hans Bader has the numbers, relating specifically to murder:
Hans has chapter and verse at the link, but the bare numbers are eloquent. If you go woke, you may or may not go broke, but you are far more likely to get shot. Still, even worse than that is the lawless chaos that now governs the streets in many American cities. I can’t explain why voters stand for it, but apparently the short answer is liberalism.     |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 03:55 PM PST (Steven Hayward) Did you know that today is National Bacon Day? I didn’t—but then I tend to think that every day is national bacon day. Or at least ought to be. Maybe when Homer Simpson is president. In any case, our mind is on pork a lot at the moment because of the 5,593-page COVID relief and omnibus spending mashup Congress passed and President Trump reluctantly signed a couple days ago. There was much attention given to $10 million designated for “gender programs” in Pakistan, which sounds like a bad joke of some kind, but I got curious to see if this is literally in the bill as described, and guess what mom? Here it is on page 1497:
There is no further description of the nature of these “gender programs.” Is it going to be Judith Butler-style intersectionality? (From the looks of things, they hardly need our help on this subject.) That would be one way to get Pakistanis to hate us even more than they do already. There’s been some explanation that women in Pakistan are second-class citizens (at best), unable to own or inherit property, or open their own bank accounts without the co-signature of their husbands. Sort of like American women before 1970, according to legend—a regular Handmaid’s Tale. So I suppose this earmark may be intended to promote women’s equality in Pakistan. Good luck with that. How is it any of our business? I thought we are supposed to respect multicultural differences? I had read or heard somewhere that this part of the bill dealt with military assistance, but in fact this designation appears in Division K, Titles IV and IX, the parts of the bill that fund the State Department’s “international security assistance” programs and “emergency funding.” Which isn’t exactly buying guns or providing training so our allies can help kill our enemies. This appears separate from whatever the Pentagon may do under Division C of the bill, or the separate defense funding bill that Trump vetoed. As you scroll through more of Division K, you discover a lot of foreign aid, much of it highly micromanaged by the State Department (which means it was dreamed up by the State Department, and not by any member of Congress), and arguably much more egregious. Like this item for Jordan:
Okay, so Jordan is a steady ally, and a reasonable country by Middle East standards. But why do American taxpayers need to fork over $845 million to support Jordan’s general operating budget? Aid for Sri Lanka comes with three pages of conditions such as:
Apparently we have given Sri Lanka an old Coast Guard cutter, but now need to provide the funds to refurbish it, but only so long as the crew is “instructed in human rights.” In other words, full employment for U.S. foreign service officers (and their outside consultants). Who at least won’t be able to fly first class:
Well thank goodness for this. (Assuming anyone believes this.) Beyond the money involved and the presumption that the U.S. State Department should be trying to micromanage the governmental practices and social conditions of so many other countries with the lever of U.S. aid, this bill is a good glimpse into how the bureaucracy runs our government. All these neat programs, and the specific managerial language attached to them, are generated inside the agencies, and not by Congress, which merely rubber stamps this enormous program in the huge budget bills presented at the 11th hour every year. It is doubtful there is ever much congressional oversight or deliberation about these programs and targeted spending categories. This is the administrative state in action—a government that runs of itself.
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| Another depressing report from Georgia Posted: 30 Dec 2020 07:47 AM PST (Paul Mirengoff) Yesterday, I posted a report by a well-placed Republican source about the run-off elections in Georgia, his home state. I followed up with my source by asking two questions. First, are the attacks on Raphael Warnock’s leftism and the scandalous way he ran a camp resonating? Second, is the controversy over the stimulus bill a factor in the race? My source graciously answered both questions and provided a summation of the race, as he sees it: Warnock On Warnock's leftism, no it's not resonating. I think the term "socialist" and "radical" have been thrown around so often over the last few years, they have lost their bite. In my view, the campaigns and PACs are running an "inside baseball" campaign with messaging so specific (“court packing" and other terms most voters don't even understand) that voters don't know which way is up. Also, Warnock is warm and likable in his 30 second commercials. They literally have a commercial about how he loves puppies. It’s hard to label someone you think looks nice as Fidel Castro. The camp, his ex-wife on video saying he's a good actor, etc, are all likely washed out by the media's refusal to cover them. They are breathlessly obsessed over whether Loeffler will call Biden "President Elect", and not concerned with Warnock's scandals and America-hating ideology. Georgia has the highest black population in the country at 32%, so identity politics is also alive and well. Ossoff has a level of talent in that he is well spoken, but he also comes off as smug to me and others I have talked to. Perdue, for some reason, refused to debate him, so a few weeks ago Ossoff debated an empty podium—a strategic blunder in my view. Stimulus On my way to work this morning, I heard a fresh commercial about Warnock supporting stimulus and Loeffler "refusing to take a stand", so it's getting out there, but hard to know what's getting traction at this point. There are also billboards on the highways saying "Loeffler and Perdue stole from you and your family" referring to stimulus. Summation In the end, I think Georgia is a 50/50 state right now after massive population growth over the past 10 years. We know in 2018 those who had moved here in the previous 5 years voted 2-1 for Abrams. We have an absurdly generous film tax credit here, where we pay Hollywood 30 cents on the dollar to make movies here, and these policies, along with failing economies in blue states, have caused significant population growth. So, in a 50/50 state where some percentage of Republicans are refusing to vote because they think their vote won't count, it's not hard to figure out what will happen.   |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 06:21 AM PST (Scott Johnson) Watching Tucker Carlson’s December 19 speech to the assembled multitude at the Turning Point USA 2020 Student Action Summit in Palm Beach (video below), I thought of Michael Anton’s Claremont Review of Books essay/review “Tucker’s right.” Anton describes Carlson as “the de facto leader of the conservative movement—assuming any such thing can still be said to exist. He didn't seek the position. I doubt he wants it. He'd probably disclaim it, in fact. But the mantle settled on him nonetheless, partly by default, though it's more than that.” I recommend Anton’s essay in conjunction with Tucker’s life lessons for young fans. Via Ian Schwartz/RCP.   |
| Posted: 30 Dec 2020 04:48 AM PST (Scott Johnson) The ladies and gentlemen of Saturday Night Live gave us a preview of the hilarity of Hilaria Baldwin in a November 1990 sketch (video below, courtesy of reader David Lunde). In the sketch NBC News staff accent-uate the positive pronunciation of Spanish names and words while new economics correspondent Jimmy Smits struggles to bear with them. Over in today’s New York Post Andrea Peyser traces the “outing” of Hilaria as just another Anglo American oppressor in “Oh, Alec Baldwin, you must know more than you're letting on.” Surely there is a lesson or three here somewhere. Until we home in on it with certainty — preferably at some distance from Alec Baldwin — it would be a mistake to miss out on the opportunity to laugh at these people.   |
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