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| You're soaking in it! |
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| Hey hey hey! |
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| Big Merseyside is watching you |
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| Freedom of speech, just watch what you say |
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| What's it all about? Algorithm. |
Each cycle of hysteria demands another, as the race to the bottom has descended into which celebrity or politician can discover the most provocative — or crude — Trump expletive. “S***” and “f***” are now the ordinary vocabulary of angry Democratic politicos and officeholders. Are we reaching a point in the so-far-failed Resistance where little is left except abject violence in the manner of the Roman or French Revolution? The problem for Trump’s pop-culture foes is not whether to imagine or advocate killing the president. That’s a given. They just need to agree on the means of doing so: decapitation (Kathy Griffin), incineration (David Crosby), stabbing (the Shakespeare in the Park troupe), shooting (Snoop Dogg), explosives (Madonna), old-fashioned, Lincoln-style assassination (Johnny Depp), death by elevator (Kamala Harris), hanging (a CSU professor), or simple generic assassination (a Missouri state legislator).There's more:
After the prior era of hysteria, between 2005 and 2008, when books and docudramas staged the imagined assassination of George W. Bush, and celebrities like Michael Moore and activists such as Cindy Sheehan reduced Bush to the status of a war criminal, the Left in 2009 demanded a return to normal political discourse and comportment, with the election of Barack Obama. A newly contrite and apologetic America was abruptly worth believing in again. In 2009, the CIA and FBI suddenly were reinvented as hallowed agents of change.And there's more, with the next two words being the crucial ones:
Bush careerists, including Clapper and Brennan, were now damning the very counterterrorism practices that they once helped put in place, while offering Obama-like politically correct sermons on the benign nature of Islamism. Surveillance and jailing were appropriate punishments for suspected Obama apostates (ask James Rosen or Nkoula Basseley Nakoula). The IRS was weaponized for use against Obama’s ideological opponents. Suggestions that the president was unfit or worse became near treasonous. Unity was the new patriotism. The assumption was that Obama had ushered in a half-century of progressive norms, not that he so alienated the country that he birthed Donald Trump.Trump won because he wasn't part of the cabal. But in order for Trump to have any chance of curing the fever, we need to see something Hanson despairs we'll see:
We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.It is. I sense a long hot summer ahead. And, of course, hit the link.
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| In plain sight |
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| Off to Ohio to kick butt and take names |
The CD8 DFL had a very long convention on Saturday, After ten ballots, everyone promised to go to the primary.CD8 is pretty vast -- it extends from the far northern suburbs all the way to the Canadian border. But it's primarily a place where the local politicians that matter are from Duluth or the Iron Range. So, of course you'd want Alondra Cano to pick the candidate. Hit the link for more -- it's Mitch Berg, so you know it will be a fun read.
Nothing especially unusual htere.
The unusual thing? The DFL trucked a bunch of Latino activists from the Twin Cities to canvass for the Metro DFL’s chosen candidate.
A prominent regional journalist investigating crime, politics and the war in Syria has died following a fall from a window of his fourth-floor apartment in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city.Of course, the authorities aren't gonna admit to much:
Maxim Borodin, 32, was found by neighbours on the ground outside his apartment on Friday. He died in hospital two days later, without ever regaining consciousness.
Police say there were no signs of forced entry into his apartment, and the door was locked from the inside. But friends and colleagues have said they are suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his death.Locked from the inside proves nothing, but don't worry about that. It hadn't gone well for Mr. Borodin in recent months:
Mr Borodin was well-known for delving into Yekaterinburg’s criminal underworld. He was among those who broke the story of unreported deaths in the Kremlin’s shadow armies fighting in Syria. He also published investigations into Russia’s religious right, and the violent protests around “Matilda”, a supposedly blasphemous film depicting a love affair between Tsar Nicholas II and a young ballerina.
As one of only few investigative voices in the region, Mr Borodin often felt the brunt of official and criminal displeasure. Just two weeks ago, he was in intensive care with a major head injury. And in October, he was hit over the head with a metal pipe – that attack he linked to his work covering the Matilda protests.There are places where being a journalist is a dangerous job. It rarely is here, but it's worth remembering the price you pay for running afoul of those in charge in a place like Russia.
You’d be mistaken to think Harvey, Illinois has a unique pension crisis. It may be the first, and its problems may be the most severe, but the reality is the mess is everywhere, from East St. Louis to Rockford and from Quincy to Danville. A review of Illinois Department of Insurance pension data shows that Harvey could be just the start of a flood of garnishments across the state.If you're not familiar with Illniois, Harvey is in the southern suburbs of Chicago and desperately poor, while the other cities mentioned are scattered throughout Illinois. There's more:
Harvey made the news last year when an Illinois court ordered the municipality to hike its property taxes to properly fund the Harvey firefighter pension fund, which is just 22 percent funded.
Now, the state has stepped in on behalf of Harvey’s police pension fund. The state comptroller has begun garnishing the city’s tax revenues to make up what the municipality failed to contribute. In response, the city has announced that 40 public safety employees will be laid off.The linked article from Wirepoints goes into significant detail concerning the pension shortfalls that many cities in Illinois face. Of course, Illinois has gigantic pension problems at the state level as well:
Under state law, pensions that don’t receive required funding may demand the Illinois Comptroller intercept their municipality’s tax revenues. More than 400 police and fire pension funds, or 63 percent of Illinois’ 651 total downstate public safety funds, received less funding than what was required from their cities in 2016 – the most recent year for which statewide data is available.
Since the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in its May 2015 decision on Senate Bill 1 that pensions for current government workers can’t be modified, debate over pension reform has faded from view.I mention these things because Illinois isn't the only place where the wolf is at the door. In fact, you could look much closer to home:
But ignoring the problem won’t make it go away. In 2015, Illinois’ state pension debt reached a record $111 billion. Government-worker pensions already consume one-fourth of the state’s budget. And every day Illinois goes without a solution to its pension crisis, the state’s pension debt grows by over $20 million.
The state’s pension crisis threatens to burden taxpayers with massive, ever-escalating taxes to bail out a system that is simply not sustainable.
Bloomberg Markets recently released a bombshell of a story on Minnesota’s public-pension system. “New Math Deals Minnesota’s Pensions the Biggest Hit in the U.S.” It reported that “Minnesota’s debt to its workers’ retirement system has soared by $33.4 billion, or $6,000 for every resident, courtesy of accounting rules. The jump caused the finances of Minnesota’s pensions to erode more than any other state’s last year … .”Do you have 20 large lying around? No? Me neither. Very few people are talking about these issues. It's long past time we did.
Bloomberg has called attention to the fact that the financial stability of Minnesota pensions, relative to other states, has plummeted, and that even judged against its own standards, the system is in big trouble. The system admits to an $18 billion unfunded liability for state, local and school district employees. But the Bloomberg report puts our total unfunded liability at $108.9 billion. That’s more than $20,000 for every resident.
There’s an old maxim in marketing: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Likewise, no reader will take advice from a pundit who despises them.Right. And even David Brooks is starting to figure it out:
Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.Yep. That approach is going to be persuasive. There's more:
Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.
This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.
The main reason Trump won the presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their religious liberties are under threat. Trump understood the problems of large parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.My own NeverTrump stance was predicated on the belief that Trump didn't really care and that it was a put-on. As it turns out, I was wrong about that. The evidence mounts that his concerns are real and genuine. His solutions may not work, but that's a public policy debate, not a personal debate. And for the Left, it's always personal. And almost always ad hominem. I keep seeing college friends who are openly cheering for the old white men who supported Trump (no one else could have, natch) to die so they can have their imagined paradise. I know a lot of old white men who have spent their lives making sacrifices for their families and paying plenty of taxes to support the bien pensant class that would spit on them if given the opportunity. Trump may not succeed; the forces arrayed against him are powerful and persistent. But he wouldn't be in the position he is if the people who claim to be better were actually better.
Until somebody comes up with a better defense strategy, Trump and Trumpism will dominate. Voters are willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a president they think is basically on their side.
If you were a political strategist looking to make California a model of how America could change for the better, what would you do? First, the Republican party and the conservative movement that captured it essentially would have to be neutralized — completely discredited and marginalized to the sidelines of politics. California would have to get beyond dealing with crazy conservative ideologues who could not face up to the real world of facts and let go of outdated ideas already proven not to work. No bipartisan dealing with zealots, no trying to pry one brave soul from a ridiculous pledge of no new taxes. No, the whole party must be decisively beaten — so decisively that it would take at least a generation for the party to get back on its feet again. In California, that very mission was accomplished by the Democratic Party and the voting public. Now the state is totally run by Democrats. All statewide offices are controlled by Democrats, and both Houses of the Legislature have Democratic super-majorities.That's the vision they have. Do they get to impose it? Better decide now, while you still theoretically can. And you really ought to read the linked piece from Tom Leyden and Ruy Teixeira. They have a plan for your life and what you might want is irrelevant.
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| 3 in a row |
Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at Trump Tower, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?
KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging....
Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”
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| Nothing is delivered |
Earlier this year, Bill Kristol, editor at large at the Weekly Standard, tweeted ahead of the Super Bowl that it was too bad two Acela Corridor teams, the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, had to play their matchup “in the middle of nowhere.”Kristol has been busy sneering at nowhere for a long time now, as the author of the linked piece, Salena Zito, knows. For her part, Zito has been trying to understand all the nowheres that sent Donald Trump to the White House. She discusses one such place, Lost River, West Virginia, in her article:
It was a reference to the host city of Minneapolis’ location in the Midwest, far from the "civilized worlds" of Boston and Philadelphia – the assumption being that unless you are on the East Coast, your town’s sophistication and glamour could not live up to the modern amenities of a cosmopolitan city.
The tale of the enigmatic vanishing of a flowing river that seemingly disappears underground only to reappear elsewhere is the stuff that holds visitors or children spellbound as the tale of subterranean passages explain away the naming of this town.Zito's point is simple enough -- the people in these small towns haven't vanished, but they are rarely observed. In the past month or so, I've stopped in a few of these small towns -- Waverly, Minnesota, and Plainfield, Iowa. As we travel again later this month, I'll likely stop in a few more, perhaps in Indiana or Ohio. And we need to see the towns. Back to Zito:
Lost River is one of four unincorporated towns along West Virginia state route 259 that attracted America’s frontier families for its rich resources; surveyed by 16-year-old George Washington, this area has never had much population, never had the commerce to keep enough people here long enough to make it boom, but just long enough to make it stick with tourists.
Today, it attracts them in droves from Washington, D.C., and is considered a destination point for gay travelers. The population is still small, and career opportunities are limited. And like the river that vanishes and then reappears as part of a larger, more important river, its pattern is very much like the pattern of the lives of people living in Middle America.
In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the "middle of nowhere." This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.As regular readers of this feature know, I've been taking pictures for almost half a year now and posting them on social media, sometimes here. These places are worth noting, because they matter. It took me a long time to understand that Appleton, Wisconsin mattered, and I had to leave it to really understand why. Some people don't want to understand the places they avoid. Back to Zito:
Whether it is Tightwad, Mo., Mooresville, Ala., Hyder, Alaska, Oatman, Ariz., or right here in Lost River, W.Va., every place, large or small, depressed or thriving, or down to one mailbox on one lonely road, is somewhere.
We are all equals; we all contribute to the culture, diversity, dialect, and importance of this country. We build things, we serve in our communities, we serve in our military, we create families, businesses, and technology no matter where we are – we find a way to make each village and town and city a unique snapshot of this country.
It is an idea and an ideal that Hillary Clinton not only got wrong in the last election, but is still getting wrong; her remarks in India in March reinforced that.Letting go of contempt is difficult. I went all ad hominem on a high school kid in these pages not long ago. But I'm trying. As Zito makes clear, we all need to keep trying. Her piece is well worth your time, so read the whole thing.
"If you look at the map of the United States, there's all that red in the middle where Trump won," she said. "I win the coast, I win, you know, Illinois and Minnesota, places like that."
She went on to say that where she won, America is thriving: "I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So, I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, 'Make America Great Again,' was looking backwards."
Clinton is not the only person to hold that contempt. Many of her supporters have gone on to agree with her and to hold those same strident positions – and their condescension for half of the country has only deepened since November 2016.
Perhaps never in human history has the average man been bombarded with so many stories. Yet paradoxically, never has the public been in greater danger of strategic surprise. If it is caught at unawares, the reason for its blindness won't be lack of bandwidth but in all the things it imagined were important that weren't.Consider what we talk about these days. We've spent the better part of the previous month contemplating the deep thoughts of a pneumatic porn star and a pencil-necked high school opportunist. Apparently we're supposed to hate Cambridge Analytica, which 99% of Americans hadn't heard of before March 1, and yes, I'm part of that 99%. Meanwhile, the Pope is reported to have said that hell doesn't exist, EPA head Scott Pruitt spends too much money and too little money.
