URLs du Jour

2022-09-12

  • And that's just the recent stuff. Mr. Ramirez notes a presidential selective memory.

    [Selective]

    Not mentioned in the cartoon is… well, a lot of things, but let's not forget the Democrat desire to partially repeal the First Amendment to allow the government to regulate political speech.

    The gas seems to have gone out of that particular baloon for now. Congressman Adam Schiff's proposed amendment seems to have gone nowhere.

    My own state's senior senator, Jeanne Shaheen, has had slightly more success with her version of the same thing. It has attracted 38 cosponsors, including my state's junior senator, Maggie Hassan.

    I note the "End Citizens United" group has rebranded itself as "American Promise". But they are as dishonest as Schiff, Shaheen, and Hassan. "Hey, we're not restricting free speech; we just want to make sure you can't spend any money to get your message out."

    If you want a single reason to vote against Maggie in November, that's it.


  • My state's primary is tomorrow. As a registered Republican, that means I'm getting one more day of junk mail. As an evening television watcher, it means another night of intelligence-insulting political ads.

    If there are any candidates who are presenting themselves with wit and humility, they are flying way below my radar.

    And even Democrats are in the act. Specifically, as the WSJ editorialists point out, the Democrats for MAGA Republicans.

    New Hampshire primary voters will go to the polls Tuesday, and Democrats are again running TV ads to help a Trumpy Republican candidate for Senate. President Biden is warning that ultra-MAGA Republicans threaten American democracy. Why won’t he tell his party to quit elevating them?

    The GOP’s mainstream Senate candidate is Chuck Morse, president of the New Hampshire state Senate. He’s endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu and the National Rifle Association. A Super Pac linked to Sen. Mitch McConnell is running ads hailing him as “one tough conservative.” Mr. Sununu knows how to win New Hampshire, and Mr. McConnell wants to retake the Senate. They know Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan is beatable.

    But Democrats are dumping money into New Hampshire to besmirch Mr. Morse as “another sleazy politician.” One ad says his campaign is run by lobbyists, one of whom once “worked for a Chinese company owned by a Communist Party official.” Also, the Chinese official knows a guy who was a dogsitter for Kevin Bacon, for those who recall that six-degree party game. Why run this attack ad in a primary?

    The answer is that Democrats want Republicans to pass over Mr. Morse and nominate Don Bolduc, who has a history of flirting with conspiracy theories. He told NH Journal in May last year that bad voting machines had tampered with the 2020 election results. “It’s not a fair process,” he said, “when a foreign company owns machines that count our votes.”

    We live in an … um, interesting state. Both my friends at Granite Grok and Chuck Schumer want Don Bolduc to win tomorrow.


  • Where are those electrons coming from, anyway? Bjørn Lomborg observes that Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One.

    We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?

    In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

    I note that Tesla has a Supercharger station in Seabrook, near the Walmart. Less than a crow-flies mile from NextEra Energy Seabrook Station. So there's a good chance some of your car's electrons are coming carbon-free.

    (Just kidding. I know that electricity doesn't work that way.)


  • Feel-good story of the day. Kevin D. Williamson on recent legal troubles: Steve Bannon’s Gravy Train Gets Derailed.

    I don’t mind people getting paid. But I mind the fraud. I mind the lies. I detest the sanctimony.

    And I’m also not a very big fan of the incompetence, either.

    If you’ll forgive me for noticing, these guys aren’t actually very good at this stuff. I follow this world pretty closely, and, best I can tell, far from becoming “the most talked about media narrative ever,” the false claims that Brian Kolfage wasn’t being paid for his work on behalf of Bannon’s nonprofit escaped public notice almost entirely. The only reason most people will ever remember Kolfage now is that he was a central player in this fraud case. These so-called masterminds and media manipulators talk about themselves as though they are a little platoon of Machiavellis, but they kind of suck at politics. They won a surprise victory in 2016, and then lost . . . everything: the House, the Senate, the presidency. Joe Biden is Hillary Rodham Clinton minus about 45 IQ points, and he unseated Donald Trump — an incumbent president — while campaigning mostly from home.

    It's NRPlus, like most of KDW's stuff. How about you unsubscribe from those streaming services you never watch, and improve your mind with an NRPlus subscription instead?


Last Modified 2024-01-30 7:22 AM EDT