NRO's The Corner: Obamacare ‘like a house on fire’ with more flammable parts yet to come

http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/05/fables-continued.html

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/no-poor-people-dont-inherit-lot-money

debunking another Williamson item

uh

n October 2012, just as presidential campaigning had reached fever pitch, I was raking leaves in the front yard of my northern-Virginia home when I noticed a pack of volunteers clad in “Romney 2012” T-shirts canvassing the neighborhood door to door, engaging residents and drumming up support for their candidate. When my house was next in line, I set aside the rake and started down the driveway toward the group. They walked right past me without so much as a friendly smile or neighborly “Hello.” How curious.

Returning to my yardwork, I watched as they dutifully stopped at my neighbor’s house and deposited campaign materials at the front door. And then the band made its merry way down the road. As a black guy, I couldn’t really fault the group’s practical decision. After all, why spend time and campaign resources on me when nine in ten blacks routinely vote for the Democratic presidential nominee and when the nation’s first black president was seeking reelection?

But as an American, I was furious. The message this group conveyed was that my vote — the right to cast it was one of many rights of citizenship I spent a career in the military protecting — was not worth pursuing. The snub meant they were unable or unwilling to make a case for their candidate because I had a different appearance. So much for party outreach. Perhaps I’m being too sensitive about this. To see bigotry in a run-of-the-mill slight is to buy into the prevalent but lazy narrative that the Republican party is racially intolerant — a parlor game of zero interest to me

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426146/republican-party-black-voters

It's actually not a hysterical article, but I can't get past the first three paragraphs.

I like that he dismisses the notion that the Republican party is racially intolerant as a parlor game and then spends the next two paragraphs fleshing out ways in which the Republican party is racially intolerant.

I'm not saying it was racist aliens, but it was racist aliens.

the cognitive dissonance that guy must process on a daily basis is incredible

This is OTM though:

Everything the Republican party needs to know about the African-American electorate is bound in this one truism: Once civil-rights protections are guaranteed, African Americans will feel free to vote in accordance with their varied economic and social interests.

meanwhile, american conservatism has a new favorite sheriff:

https://twitter.com/SheriffClarke/status/659197285172166657

Once civil-rights protections are guaranteed

bit of a ways to go on this one, let me check and see which party is obstructing progress on this point...

tbf the essay is a gentle way of saying that without actually saying it and sending them into an impregnable huff, but whole thing could prob also be reprinted under "quixotic"

Clarke frequently appears at public events on horseback wearing a cowboy hat. Among his controversial remarks were his assertions that Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele had “penis envy” and must have been on heroin when crafting the county budget.[3] In 2015, at an NRA event, he, according to Miranda Blue of Right Wing Watch, proposed redesigning the Great Seal of the United States to include a semi-automatic rifle. [4]

It's a thin ledge to walk, and he walks it pretty well, but I imagine his eye started twitching pretty hard when he had to write "As it turns out, many of these laws have made voting more difficult for many blacks."

Roy Edroso points out this juxtaposition: https://twitter.com/edroso/status/659369112674660352

jonah: "one could argue" that Ben Carson is "even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama."

'arguments were made'

white guys arguing over how black a black guy is, what could go wrong

oh ffs

why do I even look at this thread

^^ hardly a surprise coming from the same folks who would argue that Clarence Thomas is more authentically African-American than Barack Obama and who think this means something to someone other than white conservatives trying to score debating points.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_11/how_can_national_review_fairly058492.php

National Review writers dislike of Trump hurting their role in creating feel-good inside a bubble "debates"

What Nail Salons Can Teach Us About Immigration Enforcement
by Reihan Salam November 6, 2015 5:03 PM

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

that dude's basically gladwell run thru a heritage foundation filter

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426810/white-working-class-death-rate

by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON November 10, 2015 4:00 AM @VDHANSON Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don’t rate in the eyes of our elites.

trappers?

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.sodahead.com%2Fpolls%2F003231079%2F4959385724_trapper1_answer_5_xlarge.png&f=1

maybe they meant rappers

snappin and trappin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew1WBwh3zgo

he also calls TNC a middle-class careerist

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/rol

seems like at least some trappers are doing okay in today's economy

I'm not going to post David French's responses to the Mizzou resignations.

I’ve now read a couple of columns on Obama’s anger — how he gets riled up at Republicans, and at reporters, if they ask him even slightly discomforting questions. Longtime readers have heard me say this before, but they will bear with me again: During the ’08 debates, versus McCain, Obama said that America was the greatest country on earth. He said it in the tone of a hostage being forced to make a false statement by his captors. He might as well have been blinking T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code. You could almost hear Axelrod saying to him, before the debate, “You have to say that America is the greatest country in the world.” In any event, it was perfectly clear that the candidate’s heart wasn’t in it. Contrast this with his passion in the 2012 campaign when he went on his “You didn’t build that” riff. It might as well have been Reverend Wright, workin’ up a sweat. Obama performed the riff with all the conviction, heart, and gusto possible. You can tell what he really believes in and what he doesn’t. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: If Obama and other Democrats could muster half the righteous indignation against the Jihad that they do against Fox News, Mitt Romney, and the Kochs, this country and the world would be far better off.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427338/obama-anger

What does "America is the greatest country in the world" even mean? Greatest at everything? In that case, we should sweep all the medals in the Olympics. Except we don't, so it couldn't mean that. Greatest at some things, but not others? Then we're just like every other country in the whole world. But then... that would be saying nothing. (Aha!)

do political leaders in other countries routinely claim that their countries are the greatest in the world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUNxdG_4DqI

What does "America is the greatest country in the world" even mean?

It means we should not look to the rest of the world for alternate ways of doing things when we can easily and comfortably regress into self-affirmation.

american exceptionalism is the GOPs Santa: they don't believe in it really but damned if they'll let anyone argue the point because WHAT IF THE CHILDREN HEAR

Kevin Williamson thinks he's so delicious:

by Kevin D. Williamson November 23, 2015 11:19 AM @kevinNR I spent part of the morning listening to the Michael Smerconish program (incidentally, now the most entertaining thing, certainly the most bearable thing, on political radio) and the subject was the controversy at Princeton over the fact that a school is named after that university’s and this nation’s former president, Woodrow Wilson. The complaint is that Wilson (Democrat, in case you’ve forgotten) was a racist, which is of course true: The father of American progressivism was an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan, among other things. This will come as no surprise to those of you who read Jonah Goldberg (which should be all of you). One of Smerconish’s callers wondered whether such ahistorical standards (Wilson’s opinions were horrifying, but they were not unusual for his time, nor unusual among progressives) would be applied to figures who were not white, male, American political leaders?

The obvious answer is: No.

I put before you the case of a man whose published works are full of ugly racial slurs — slurs that were considered offensive even at the time he was writing them — whose political activism was built on demands that the government create and reinforce legal distinctions between the “civilized” races and blacks, who was utterly indifferent toward modern slavery, who denounced blacks as “savages,” who in fact went so far as to demand the forcible relocation of blacks away from non-black communities as a matter of public sanitation, and who supported segregation in housing, education, and hospitals. Asked about apartheid in South Africa, he said: “We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do.” He held horrifying opinions about the Holocaust. His opinions about women were antediluvian. He participated in a campaign of anti-gay “sexual cleansing,” using the state to enforce traditional religious values. His personal life was thoroughly creepy in ways at least as bad as Thomas Jefferson’s. Which leaves us with the question: What new name are we going to choose for James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427504/naming-names-kevin-d-williamson

well:

Kevin Williamson Richard_Reed • 2 hours ago

If you're talking about Attenborough's movie, yes, it's hagiography. It's also a great movie, one of my favorites. I've often said that Oliver Stone's "Nixon" is probably the best movie ever made about American politics, so long as you don't make the mistake of thinking it is about the historical figure Richard M. Nixon. Same with "Gandhi."

More broadly, all of the heroes of the past had their defects: Gandhi, MLK, Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington, etc. My read on Lincoln, MLK, and Gandhi is that each of them was right about one big important thing, and that's what we remember them for, what we celebrate them for. And there's nothing wrong with that. I can't think of much good about Wilson, but the folks at Princeton didn't consult me on the question.

I need dlh in here

Donald Trump has Jacksonian appeal, sez Sparklepants.

except unlike trump andrew jackson has actually accomplished something in his life (without the help of inherited money from his parents, too)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUq2YJ1XAAAgovw.png

mmhmm

Somehow the fact that that was posted at 4 AM makes it even more hilarious.

Over at Bloomberg View, I go into the questions of what responsibility pro-lifers bear for the murders in Colorado Springs, what political movements generally have a responsibility to do to discourage violence, and how selectively the press covers these issues. Here I want to make a simple point about the political exploitation of these killings to discredit pro-lifers: I don’t think it’s going to work.

I think, that is, that most Americans are perfectly capable of distinguishing this murderer from peaceful pro-lifers and of seeing that, while pro-life activists, like any other kind of activists, sometimes say intemperate things, they are not responsible for these murders. That might change if these murders were followed up by others, so that we had a real pattern that people regularly saw in the news. But nothing like that has been happening in recent years. Look at this chart from the National Abortion Federation: There were 2 murders attributable to anti-abortion violence in 1998, one in 2009, and none in between or afterward–until now. That’s too many murders, of course, but thankfully we have seen no organized campaign of anti-abortion violence.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427787/politics-colorado-springs-murders-ramesh-ponnuru

There were 2 murders attributable to anti-abortion violence in 1998, one in 2009, and none in between or afterward–until now

lol judging from Joanie Crawford's twitter feed there's no way these numbers are right

here i want to make a simple point about the political exploitation of these killings to discredit ___________

Interesting how a lack of murders means there was no campaign of violence.

Obama’s ISIS Strategy Is No Better than the Allies Hiding Behind the Maginot Line in World War II

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

OH MAN

For the last seven years (give or take), I’ve had a slew of questions I’ve wanted to ask President Obama. I’ve never had an opportunity.

Anyways (as we say in the Midwest), here’s another one: Mr. President, you talk all the time about Islamophobia, and the danger of it, and the wrongness of it. Okay. But, in San Bernardino, a neighbor of those terrorists decided against reporting his suspicions to the authorities. The reason: He didn’t want to be accused of Islamophobia, racism, and all the rest of it.

Does that move you at all? Does that give you pause? Does that make you mutter, under your breath, “Damn”?

Okay, I’m not talking to the president anymore, I’m just blogging. Some years ago — I think it was 2002, 2003, in the early years of what we called the “War on Terror” — a colleague of mine exited a plane. Before it took off, I mean. He didn’t like what he saw — a group of men congregating and whispering.

He didn’t have enough to say something — remember that? “See something, say something” — but he did not feel comfortable remaining on the plane. He decided, for himself, that he would get off, and pay whatever he had to, for a later flight. His reasoning: “I may die, but I’m not going to die for political correctness.”

There are a lot of lousy ways to die. Political correctness must be one of the lousiest.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/428206/mr-president-jay-nordlinger