URLs du Jour

2021-12-27

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

  • And it's the most tedious war ever. Kevin D. Williamson has the news not appearing in your local paper: The Snoot Party Goes to War. And it's war against Senator Manchin, and his state of West Virginia.

    Senator Manchin’s willingness to break with his party makes him, for the moment, the most powerful man in Washington after the maître d’ at le Diplomate. (Somewhere in the Senate, there must be at least one Republican who is smart enough to realize that he could be the most powerful man in Washington, after the maître d’ at le Diplomate, if he were willing to do the same.) It also makes him the man Democrats hate most — at the moment, anyway; Democratic hatred is an urgent and plastic thing.

    But like the unhappy worker who cannot face off against his overbearing boss and so instead goes home to yell at his wife and kick the dog (as Sigmund Freud once had it), progressives from Hollywood to Washington to whatever abandoned gopher hole Robert Reich calls home have decided to lay into the people of West Virginia. As Isaac Schorr already has reported here, the noted political philosopher Bette Midler and her friends at Occupy Democrats denounced West Virginians as illiterates (the Mountain State has a higher literacy rate than New York, California, or New Jersey), Ilhan Omar suggested that Senator Manchin’s vote is the result of corruption — a serious charge for which she should be made to answer — and Reich offered this indictment: “Let me remind you that a full quarter of West Virginians 65 and older have no natural teeth.” Toothless hillbillies — who doesn’t love a classic? In fact, the share of West Virginians over 65 without any remaining teeth is not far off from the national average; the state’s slightly elevated rate of geriatric toothlessness is almost certainly due to the fact that it has a large population of people over 75 (who have a very high rate of total tooth loss), being the nation’s third-most-elderly state. But facts don’t matter much when you’ve worked up a good head of hate-steam.

    I know as well as anybody that poor, rural, white America has its problems. But I do not believe for one hot second that Ilhan Omar or Robert Reich knows one damned thing about them, or cares to learn. Why would they? Senator Manchin is about as far to the political left as today’s West Virginia is going to go. Owsley County, Ky., home of the poorest white people in America, is overwhelmingly Republican, and Donald Trump got eight times as many votes as Joe Biden did there in 2020 — Trump did slightly better in San Francisco than Biden did in Owsley County. There’s a little factoid to meditate upon.

    It's an NRPLUS article, so fair use, etc. You really should subscribe; KDW's reporting alone is worth the price.


  • As Buck Murdock once said… irony can be … pretty ironic sometimes, and I like how this is playing out, according to the Daily Wire. Elon Musk Slams Senator Warren Over Taxes: ‘If You Could Die By Irony, She Would Be Dead’

    Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk slammed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) during an interview with The Babylon Bee last week following his recent Twitter spat with her over taxes.

    “She struck first,” Musk said. “Obviously. She called me a freeloader and a grifter who doesn’t pay taxes, basically. And I’m literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year, ever.”

    “And she doesn’t pay taxes, basically at all. And her salary is paid for by the taxpayer, like me,” Musk continued. “If you could die by irony, she would be dead. If irony could kill.”

    I assume the FBI is already investigating Musk for this "death threat."


  • Betteridge's Law of Headlines… applies to Eric Boehm's article at Reason: Does Joe Biden Know Why Delaware Is Home to So Many Corporations?

    As Biden put it [last month] in Baltimore, Build Back Better was intended to "build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out…where everybody is better off."

    "You know, I'm tired of this trickle-down economy stuff," the president continued. "I come from Delaware—just across the line up here—and, you know, we have more corporations in Delaware than every other state in the nation combined. And so, I understand big business."

    There's just one tiny bit of context missing from Biden's argument: Delaware, which is home to more than half the businesses in the Fortune 500, didn't become America's top destination for corporate headquarters by raising taxes on the businesses that operate there. The state is famous for its favorable tax laws, including no sales tax, no corporate income tax on revenue earned outside of Delaware, and no corporate income tax on investment earnings. (It's not all about taxes; the state also has a unique legal system that confers some advantages on businesses headquartered there.)

    Letting private people make their own decisions on how to handle their money and property is uniformly derided by progressives as "trickle down" economics.

    But wouldn't giving more money to the government in the hope that some of that cash filters down to hoi polloi… isn't that trickle-down?


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:42 PM EDT