Login
John and I found the protracted humiliation of Kevin McCarthy in connection with his election to be Speaker of the House a clown show. By contrast, Steve Hayward looked mostly on the bright side in “In re: Speaker McCarthy — dissents and concurrences.”
It is at least worth noting that the GOP majority is dissipating. The clown show set the stage for the shrinking of the small GOP House majority to a number asymptotically approaching zero.
It empowered Matt Gaetz to trigger the chain of events leading to McCarthy’s ouster from the Speaker’s chair. I decried that development in “Gaetz of Eden.” Has anyone asked Gaetz what good he did in sacking McCarthy?
McCarthy was deposed this past October. It seems like ancient history. McCarthy subsequently resigned his House seat effective December 31.
I have here in my hand a list of names. According to the list, among the Republicans getting out of Dodge with McCarthy are Reps. Bill Johnson (effective January 21), Ken Buck (effective yesterday), Mike Gallagher (effective April 19), and George Santos, whose departure was involuntary.
“Normally they’re trying to talk people out of [retiring],” one House Republican told Axios. “Now we’re at a point where we’re trying to talk them out of leaving early.” It may or may not be a portent of trouble for Speaker Johnson and it may or may not be a portent of the coming Democratic majority, but it’s not good.
We always hear a lot about the expense and difficulty of decommissioning nuclear power plants, but we seldom hear about the cost and difficulty of decommissioning wind mills, which only last half as long (if that much) as nuclear plants. Especially offshore wind, which is much more expensive to begin with. Here’s one estimate of the future problem:
JOHN adds: Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez posts his daily cartoons on Substack at the Michael Ramirez Newsletter. He is a conservative whose genius cannot be denied. Thus the Pulitzer. Readers can subscribe here.
Michael has also been writing weekly essays for his newsletter that I have posted in our Picks as each one was made freely accessible. Today Michael has posted an 18-minute video essay that is keyed to his recent cartoons on the Academy Awards. I found his remarks entertaining, interesting, and inspiring. He tells some inside stories and he talks about joining the protest at Columbia when he received his Pulitzer. He wraps up with a statement of his his core beliefs.
His is the voice of a free mind and a free man. I thought some readers might want to listen up.
Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)
Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents:
So Haiti is back in the news. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed the place! Or Colin Powell in the 1990s. Or something. How soon until Biden sends in American troops? Or lets 500,000 Haitians come to America?
Anyway, Haiti is in the state of nature right now, with gangs and mobs rampaging. And yet, as a smart left-leaning friend of mine (I do have a few of those—opposition research) points out, the murder rate in Haiti is lower than many American cities:
Our pal Mark Perry reminds is that today, March 12, is “Equal Pay Day” that falsely assumes how far into 2024 the typical woman has to work to earn what her alleged male counterpart earned in 2023. Funny how feminists never consider something like “Equal Job Safety” or “Job Risk” day (Mark proposes “Occupational Fatality Day”), because the data looks like this and the “gap” would take years, not months, to close:
Men are 11 times more likely to die on the job than women. A rather different kind of femme fatale.
Chaser, FWIW (also from Mark):
As mentioned here before, Democrats used to be fairly robust in their opposition to open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, as recently as the Clinton years. But then someone got the bright idea that since immigration had helped to flip California from a red state in presidential elections to a blue state across the board, imagine how much power Democrats could grasp if the California story was repeated across the entire country! (But don’t dare say “Replacement Theory,” because that’s raaaccisttt. Besides, it is a misnomer: it should be called “Replacement Fact.”)
Here’s what the shift in opinion looks like:
I am sure many readers have noticed how bike lanes are taking over American urban roadways, especially downtowns, often killing a lane for cars, and reducing streetside parking. And I almost never see anyone biking in the lanes. How did this come about? Has there been a massive populist campaign for bike lanes? Has “we need more bike lanes everywhere” been popping up in public opinion polls of top issues and citizen concern?
Of course not. It is an elite preoccupation, crammed down our throat by what I am calling Bike Lane Tyranny. At some point, many cities will reverse course and restore old car lanes. Though it may take a while.
It is the same mentality that has been certain that what America’s cities and suburbs need is more mass transit. Billions have been spent especially on rail lines (when busses would actually be more effective) that are lightly used. And here is the result:
As you may have heard, San Francisco voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed initiative measures to make policing easier and require drug testing for welfare. The horrors! Too bad they didn’t put reparations in the ballot, as I have a hunch how the vote would have turned out. In any case, even progressives, naturally slow learners, are finally figuring it out.
And I know everyone has seen San Francisco’s famous “poop map.” Equally important is the map of the number of businesses in the central core of the city that had enough of the madness. These are all the businesses and retail outlets that closed up and left downtown near Union Square the last three years. Most of the spaces they vacated are still empty.
The term “deaths of despair” has caught on in recent years, brought out into the mainstream from academic and specialized literature such as Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. And the problem of drug overdose deaths was already becoming an issue on the campaign trail as far back as the Obama years. And yet the problem has only gotten worse:
One of the central totems of the modern left and its women’s auxiliary (the feminist movement) is the alleged “wage gap” between men and women. You know the cliche—women only earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. This cliche has been exploded countless times, but it refuses to die because it retains endless utility for grievance-junkies who run the Democratic Party. You know the Biden White House will continue to deploy it.
Which makes Mark Perry’s annual analysis of White House salaries under Democrats so much fun:
Churchill remarked that “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” A similar thing can be said, apparently, for green energy—you can’t subsidize or tax-break yourself to a truly profitable business.
One fine sunny Sunday several years ago found me in Helsinki, Finland, where I spotted a rock bacd setting up in a square by a park, and I decided to linger for some free live music. Who knows—I could be catching the next Abba, or Eurovision Song Contest contestant. Well, it wasn’t any of those. What it was is kinda hard to describe. Best I could do at the time was a heavy metal version of a whale being tortured. And thus this chart makes some sense:
As we have noted repeatedly here, people are voting with the feet and moving from high crime/high tax blue states to low tax/low crime red states in increasing numbers. Alongside tax rates as a factor in higher economic growth in red states is that red states are more likely to be right-to-work states than blue states. This is not universally true; heavily unionized Michigan was a right-to-work for a decade, though that ended last week, thanks to Governor Wretched Whitmer’s fealty to unions. Anyway, here’s the data on the rates of job growth in right-to-work versus compulsory union states:
Yesterday we noted Trump’s rising strength among certain voting groups. How about by profession instead of ethnicity, gender, and the other usual things? Like professions perhaps? Everyone likes to say the political divide in America is between red states and blue states. But it looks like the division is more white versus blue when it comes to who is supporting Trump’s campaign—that is, white collar professionals against blue collar workers.
The Venice Biennale is one of the world’s biggest art shows. The show has a national focus:
Held since 1895 and considered the world’s top art event, the Venice Biennale, which starts in April, gives nations the chance to show off their best artists at national pavilions.
That is the hook for pro-mass muder artists to try to boot Israel out:
A petition to kick Israel out of the Venice Biennale art show because of the war in Gaza signed by more than 16,000 artists, curators and academics has been angrily dismissed as “shameful” by Italy’s arts minister.
More to come from the culture minister, a Giorgia Meloni appointee.
Signed by art world luminaries including Jesse Darling, the British Turner prize winner, the petition claims: “The Biennale is platforming a genocidal apartheid state. No death in Venice. No business as usual.”
“Platforming” is a sinister term that generally means failing to discriminate against. Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano pushed back:
The petition drew a furious response from Gennaro Sangiuliano, the Italian culture minister, who lambasted what he described as “a diktat from those who think they are the custodians of the truth, and who with anger and hatred try to threaten the freedom of thought and creative expression in a democratic nation like Italy”. He added: “The Biennale will always be a space of freedom, meeting and dialogue rather than censorship and intolerance. Culture is a bridge between people and nations, not a wall of division.”
Israel is to be represented at the Biennale by Ruth Patir, who is plenty far left by any normal standard. But that doesn’t cut any ice with anti-Semites.
This flap is a reminder that art isn’t what it used to be. As noted above, Britain’s Jesse Darling is apparently the most notable of the artists trying to ban Israel. Here he is with some of his art works:
Which prompts the question: is there a connection between bad art and bad politics? Mr. Darling is, on this question, a data point.
My pal Henry Olsen explains in his recent Telegraph column that Trump is underperforming his polls in recent contests, and appears to be stuck between a very solid floor and a rigid ceiling. Perhaps, but the Telegraph included this graphic, taken from recent Pew polls, that suggests a different picture:
To be fair, a generic Republican ought to be polling about 60 percent of the white vote, and that’s just where Trump is stuck. It would be a delicious irony if Trump wins in November through an increased share of minority votes. It will plunge Democrats into a crisis.
Right now the unaffordability of housing has become a national issue, and not just one for the two coasts. The fundamental reason for this is the spread of coastal-style over-regulation of housing to the interior states of “flyover country,” which had for decades mostly resisted the over-regulation of housing. Rising interest rates have something to do with this too. In any case, maybe another housing crash is in the works?
Miranda Devine addresses “The Smirnov turnoff” in today’s New York Post column “New election year means another Russiagate as Biden, Dems try to smear impeachment probe.” Devine is of course the invaluable historian of The Laptop From Hell and the Biden family business. Here is the opening of her column:
For the 2016 election, Democrats launched Russiagate 1.0: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax proven groundless by the Mueller investigation.
For the 2020 election, it was Russiagate 2.0. Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken prompted former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell to concoct the “Dirty 51” letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.
That lie justified censorship of The Post’s accurate stories from the laptop of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international influence peddling schemes.
Now that we’re heading into the 2024 election, we have Russiagate 3.0. Democrats pretend the impeachment inquiry has “utterly collapsed” because of the curious indictment last week of trusted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on false statement charges after he allegedly told his FBI handler that Hunter and Joe each had received a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians.
In a frantic effort to keep Smirnov in jail pre-trial, prosecutors for notorious Biden protector David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, used language ripped straight out of the Russiagate textbook: “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties [Joe] continues.”
Now Smirnov is being used as make-believe vindication of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the fake laptop letter to help Biden win the 2020 election.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer who claims to be a victim of the dubious “Havana syndrome,” pounced on the Smirnov story.
“It validates exactly what we were warning about,” he told NBC News. “The Russians were going to push this narrative of Hunter Biden and corruption, to hurt Joe Biden.”
No. Hunter’s “laptop from hell” was not Russian disinformation. It still isn’t. The FBI has had it in its possession since December 2019 and has authenticated it as real and valid for use in court.
The Dirty 51 are grasping at straws to try to justify their interference in the 2020 election. It wasn’t the Russians. It was Trump-deranged former CIA management who felt any means justified the ends if they could stop Trump winning a second term.
But now, as the laptop is augmented by whistleblower receipts and witness testimony, and as House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer unravels the complex web of corrupt foreign payments to the Biden family, the president’s praetorian guard is desperate. They are drowning in evidence of corruption while burbling, “There is no evidence!” Russia is all they have.
The joke is on Biden’s media handmaidens still pushing Joe Biden’s absurd lies.
No, the laptop is not a “Russian plant,” as he claimed. And, yes, Joe did talk to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”
Heck, he did a lot more than talk.
He made himself available for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, and pleasant chit chat on the speakerphone with Hunter’s foreign benefactors, all to oil the wheels of the family business — which was selling access to him, as he well knew.
“Look after my boy,” he told Kremlin-backed oligarch Elena Baturina and her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, when Hunter activated the speakerphone at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn called Romanoff on May 4, 2014.
They sure did. Just three months earlier, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the firm cofounded by Hunter, his “best friend in business” Devon Archer, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and Jimmy Bulger, nephew of mobster “Whitey” Bulger.
Devine has much more here.
According to the polls, the Tory Party over in Britain s heading for a wipeout at the hands of the Labour Party later this year, thereby squandering Boris Johnson’s record Tory landslide of 2019. Has there ever been a greater example of political malpractice in recent decades? There are lots of reasons for this dreadful scene (starting with Johnson’s own terrible handling of COVID and other unforced errors) which can be treated more fully on another occasion. Conservatives in America ought to pay close attention, however, and take some lessons perhaps.
For the moment, it is worth noting is that the Tory Party has especially lost ground among younger voters. Sound familiar? Actually, the Financial Times looked at cross-national survey data, and concludes that Britain’s Tories are an outlier (click to embiggen):
Affordable housing may have something to do with this:
Vaunce News 