URLs du Jour

2021-11-18

  • In Maggie's dictionary "safety" comes after "selfie". Via the Washington Free Beacon:

    Yes, that's our state's junior Senator at the lower left. The article notes DC's rule requiring masking on "public transport." The WFB writer comments:

    [Minnesota Senator Tina] Smith's selfie clearly shows Sens. Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.), Angus King (I., Maine), John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.), Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.), and Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) refusing to abide by the rules. Perhaps they assumed that because they are white and powerful, they shouldn't have to follow the same rules that govern the lives of hardworking Americans, including the millions who rely on public transit for their livelihoods.

    It would make a good visual aid for a 2022 debate between Hassan and her opponent. "Senator, did you think masking rules were just for the peasants? Did you think there was a 'taking my picture' exception to the rules?"


  • Mister, we could use a man like Milton Friedman again. The other day, I noticed William McGurn resurrecting an April 2020 quote from a Joe Biden interview in Politico headlined (I am not making this up): Biden wants a new stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion.

    “I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,” Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

    Well, you can't say he didn't warn us. Milton Friedman died in 2006, but he apparently still haunts Biden's dreams.

    Basically nobody who thought inflation just might be a problem is running the show anymore. But, as Jeff Jacoby tells us: The inflation hawks have been right all along,

    FOR THE better part of a year, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has been warning that pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in the name of pandemic relief and economic stimulus was likely to have a dangerous side effect: reawakening the sleeping dragon of inflation.

    In a February column for The Washington Post, for example, Summers expressed concern about the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was then making its way through Congress and would soon be signed into law by President Biden. The measure authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments and provided 85 percent of American households with direct payments of $1,400 per person. That much stimulus, wrote Summers, was apt to "set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation."

    A month later, Summers warned again that Democrats were "taking substantial risks" by injecting such massive amounts of money into the economy.

    "I know the bathtub has been too empty," he said, "but ... think about what the capacity of the bathtub is and how much water we're trying to flow into it."

    Jeff goes on to describe how Biden's economic advisor, Jared Bernstein, and hack Paul Krugman pooh-poohed Summers' warning.

    And so here we are. Having fun yet?


  • And just a few decades later than Orwell predicted. Gerard Baker notes the nascent Ministry of Truth: Left-Leaning Media Seek a Misinformation Monopoly

    Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist. Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist. Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin. Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot. Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.” Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful. Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers. The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

    Which of these have you heard in the last five years? I doubt there’s an American with even the faintest interest in public events who wasn’t made aware of every one of these stories, didn’t have them repeatedly drummed into his head in the amplifying loop that connects agenda-driving traditional news organizations, culture-shaping digital sites, knowledge-delimiting search engines, and information-controlling social media platforms.

    It's only a short step to…


  • Princlples? We don't need no stinking principles! Glenn Greenwald, usually on the other side of the spectrum from the WSJ is similarly put out: Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles

    The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.

    That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O'Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O'Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI's targeting of O'Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.

    Greenwald makes an important point against those (like Dianne Feinstein) First Amendment press protections don't apply to people who "aren't real journalists". When any idiot can get their stories published where anyone in the Whole Wide World can see (and I'm living proof of that), the journalist/normal-person distinction is essentially defunct.


  • More on media malpractice… … from Bari Weiss, who dissects The Media's Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse.

    Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

    It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

    Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

    As I type, the Rittenhouse jury is out. I don't think he's a hero, I think he showed plenty of bad judgment, but illegal? I got reasonable doubt about that. But I didn't see what the jury saw.


Last Modified 2023-05-31 4:50 AM EDT