CPAC: We Are Here

Posted on | February 26, 2020 | Comments Off on CPAC: We Are Here

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia
My brother Kirby and I checked into our hotel here about 6:30, loaded everything up from the car and stopped in the lobby bar for a beverage. We are staying here in Alexandria — about 2 miles across the river from National Harbor, site of CPAC 2020 — because the hotels near the conference are either filled up or charging $450 a night, which is crazy. Upon checking in here, we discovered there’s a $20 per night fee to park the car, which means an extra $60 for our three nights here before we re-locate Saturday over to the Gaylord, where John Hoge has reserved a room where we’ll be doing a special episode of The Other Podcast.

Kirby is here as a photographer, and if you’ll follow his Instagram account, you should get excellent photos this week capturing the scene at CPAC with substantially better quality than I get using my notorious Barbie Cam. Meanwhile, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle has this preview:

American Conservative Union (ACU) chairman Matt Schlapp told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview ahead of the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that this year’s conference will focus on exposing and explaining the contrast between the rising socialist left inside the Democrat Party and a renewed and energized GOP under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
“We believe that CPAC 2020 is unique because we believe the starting gun goes off for the presidential campaign,” Schlapp told Breitbart News late last week. “The Saturday of CPAC is the Saturday of the South Carolina primary. We’ll have a much clearer idea of the Democratic presidential race. We believe that presidential race is reflected in our theme ‘America Versus Socialism.’”
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) rises through the ranks of the Democrat Party to become the delegate leader—before this year’s CPAC, he has won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, the first-ever candidate in either party to do so in a presidential primary process—the focus of rising socialism on the left is becoming clearer. Democrats are in panic mode as Sanders surges heading into South Carolina’s primaries, and next week’s Super Tuesday contests, but on the other side of the aisle President Trump and a cleaned up and newly unified Republican Party are on the march as this election year kicks off. Gone are the likes of former House Speaker Paul Ryan, and uninvited from CPAC this year are the handful of globalist establishment Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).
Schlapp said this year’s CPAC theme, “America Versus Socialism,” offers a contrast between Trump’s renewed and refreshed GOP and the rising socialist left taking over the Democrat Party that “couldn’t be clearer.” . . .

Read the whole thing. We’ve got to run over to the Gaylord to pick up our credentials. The media check-in closes at 8:30 and I’ve got a midnight deadline for an American Spectator column.

Category: CPAC

The Backlash of ‘Hate’

Posted on | February 26, 2020 | Comments Off on The Backlash of ‘Hate’

For several months, here and at The American Spectator, I have occasionally addressed the theme of “hate” — how Democrats insist that racism or “white nationalism” or some other species of bigotry explains opposition to the liberal agenda in the Trump era. If you are a white male heterosexual Christian, you are are by definition guilty of “hate,” according to the Left’s intersectional logic of “social justice.”

The ordinary person’s instinctive reaction to such an accusation is to feel insulted: How dare you? If you are a decent, law-abiding citizen, intelligent and reasonably well-educated, being accused of bigotry, merely because you vote Republican, is probably going to make you angry. What are the consequences of that anger? Political analyst Jake Novak offers some insights:

For all the policy differences and political minutiae Democrats delve into when criticizing President Trump, the most enduring attacks on Trump from the Democratic establishment remain accusations that Trump is supporting white supremacy and is controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
These are over-the-top accusations, and it’s hard to accept that even most elected Democrats actually believe them. But pushing that message on America for the last three-plus years comes at a price for both sides.
For the Democrats, the price is becoming clear: it’s made moderate presidential candidates look less viable than ever.
Think about it: if you really believe the president is a traitor and supporting violent plots against non-white Americans, is this really the time to support mainstream Democrat or Republican candidates?
Sanders may be a career politician, but he’s never been a mainstream politician. His persona and political brand fits much better into the current Democratic narrative that we’re living in desperate times.
Establishment Democrats are reaping what they sowed.
As a result, it’s looking more and more like Sanders has unstoppable momentum going into the Super Tuesday primaries and beyond.

Read the whole thing. I’ve got to get packed up and head down to CPAC. Thanks to everyone who contributed to make this trip possible.

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump, Racism

Democrats Engage in Angry Shouting Match in Charleston, South Carolina

Posted on | February 26, 2020 | Comments Off on Democrats Engage in Angry Shouting Match in Charleston, South Carolina

The worst debate in the history of American politics:

The CBS News moderators came under fire on social media Tuesday as the Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina grew heated, with crosstalk often drowning them out.
Meghan McCain compared the debate’s atmosphere to the contentious discussions she faces on “The View,” saying, “these moderators need to get this under control.” . . .
Former Vice President Joe Biden in particular spoke over moderators attempting to cut him off on several occasions, insisting, “I am not out of time. You spoke over time, and I’m going to talk” and later asking, “Can we just speak up when we want to? Is that the idea?”
Later, as Biden attempted to break in again, moderator Gayle King quipped, “I promise, Mr. Vice President, we are going to get to you,” with Biden responding, “You keep promising me that, but you never get to me.”

30 straight seconds of every Democratic candidate talking over each other… sometimes all at once! #DemDebate #DemDebate2020 pic.twitter.com/CETQ0G0gjQ

— MRCTV.org (@mrctv) February 26, 2020

Some commentators declared that Joe Biden had his strongest debate performance to date, but what I noticed was he kept shouting at the top of his lungs, as if being loud was whole point — aerobic shouting. Meanwhile, almost everyone directed their fire at Bernie Sanders, except Elizabeth Warren, who spent much of the night attacking Mike Bloomberg, who isn’t even on the ballot in South Carolina. Jim Geraghty might have explained that strategy best:

In general, the debate was a colossal waste of time, and time is the valuable commodity that Democrats can’t afford to waste now:

Time is running out for the Democratic Party and, by this time next week, it will probably be too late for them to turn back. More than a third of the delegates to their national convention will be chosen next Tuesday, when 14 states including California and Texas hold their primaries. One the one hand, this means that the party’s agonizing struggle over its 2020 presidential nomination may soon be effectively over. On the other hand, if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders claims a decisive victory next Tuesday — which now seems likely — the “Anybody But Bernie” faction of the party will be pushed to increasingly desperate measures in their efforts to deny him the nomination. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

Category: Bernie Sanders, Debates, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, South Carolina

In The Mailbox: 02.25.2020

Posted on | February 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: COVID-19 On An Air Canada Flight
EBL: Hunters – A Review
Twitchy: SecEd Betsy DeVos Pwns AOC For Being A Flaming Hypocrite Over Public Charter Schools
Louder With Crowder: Lesbian YouTuber Announces She’s Leaving The Crazy Left In Awesome Rant

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #136 – The Hospitality Episode
American Conservative: Cuomo & The Urbanites Are Squeezing Rural NY To Death
American Greatness: Pete Buttigieg Encourages 9-Year-Old Boy To Come Out As Gay
American Thinker: The Rebranding Of Socialism As “Democratic Socialism”
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Plastics News
Babalu Blog: Miami To Sponsor Anti-Communism Concert
BattleSwarm: The Twitter Primary For February 2020
Cafe Hayek: On Comparative Advantage
Camp Of The Saints: Francis I, Long Marcher
CDR Salamander: Smart Power Doing Smart Things In Africa
Da Tech Guy: I Oppose Trump’s Commutation Of Blagojevich’s Sentence, also, Let’s Dump Recycling
Don Surber: Guns, Not Socialism, Are Why Mini-Mike Is Mad At Bernie
First Street Journal: Your Fault – Climate Change Could Be Catastrophic National Security Threat
The Geller Report: NC Muslima Attacks Air Marshal, Threatens To Stab Everyone On Plane, also, Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Tests Positive For Coronavirus After Regime Tells Everyone Not To Panic
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, CPAC Ahead
Hollywood In Toto: Seven Awkward Questions The Press Should Ask Mark Ruffalo, also, Weinstein’s Fall Remains A Stain On Entertainment Journalism
JustOneMinute: Late Night Corona Watch, also, Get Bernie
Legal Insurrection: 9th Circuit Upholds Trump Admin Rule Stripping Funding For Abortions, also, Biden In SC – “I’m A Democratic Candidate For The U.S. Senate”
Megan McArdle: #NeverTrumpers Are Giving Advice To #PleaseNotBernie Democrats. It Won’t Help.
The PanAm Post: No, Fidel Castro Didn’t Improve Education Or Health Care In Cuba
Power Line: How Dumb Are America’s College Students? also, Joe Biden Remembers
Shark Tank: Congressional Candidate Jessi Melton Wages “War On Porn”
Shot In The Dark: Let The Record Show
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Bernie Tax!
The Political Hat: Reproductive Freedom vs. Reproductive Justice
This Ain’t Hell: Michael Lee Langford – Not A Green Beret, also, How To Get Rid Of Trump
Victory Girls: Miami Plans Anti-Communism Concert In Response To Bernie’s Support Of Castro
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Judges Association Tells Members Meeting Wasn’t Called To Discuss Trump Intervention In Stone Sentencing
Weasel Zippers: Alveda King Praises President Trump In Black History Month Message, also, Biden’s Gaffe-Tastic Day In SC
Mark Steyn: The Warmographic Novelist Who Got #CO-Tooed, also, Beware Of The Meme

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

AOC: Girl-Crush of the Bernie Bros

Posted on | February 25, 2020 | Comments Off on AOC: Girl-Crush of the Bernie Bros

New York Post columnist Miranda Devine argues that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “was [Bernie] Sanders’ secret weapon in Nevada, wooing the crucial Latino voters who propelled him to victory, and injecting much-needed ethnic, gender and age diversity into his campaign. Without her, he’s just another grouchy old lefty howling into the wind.”

Having a young Latina surrogate — too young to remember all the brutal Marxist-Leninist regimes for which the old lefty is so nostalgic — is helpful to the Sanders campaign. It certainly helps in states like Nevada and California where Latinos are now a majority of K-12 students. The fact that young people are the most enthusiastic supporters of the septuagenarian socialist is simply the triumph of hope over experience.

Selling obsolete economic fantasies to young people is the kind of scam with which no reputable person would wish to be associated, and Jonathan Chait is sounding the alarm about Bernie:

At the heart of Sanders’s campaign is a hard-core socialist vanguard which is indifferent to the Democratic Party except as a potential vessel for the Bernie revolution. Their calculation is perfectly rational. Even if Sanders is likely to lose, the small chance of success is worth the risk to a party they don’t care for to begin with. What is odd is watching rationalizations take hold among a much larger group of progressives who very much do care about denying Trump a second term, and who have explained away the risks of a Sanders nomination with a series of fallacies.
The first of those is a confusion over what it means to predict an outcome. “The truth is we are all clueless about what voters want or will accept,” argues conventional-wisdom-monger Jim VandeHei, in a signal of how deeply the anti-probabilistic fallacy has spread. It is true that there is uncertainty attached to every outcome. The talking heads who guarantee Sanders will lose are wrong — any nominee might win, and in a polarized electorate, both parties have a floor of support that gives even the most toxic candidate a fighting chance. In 2016, Trump was the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but he squeaked into office because everything broke just right for him. It could happen for Bernie, too.

Exactly. Intelligent liberals like Chait see the most likely scenario — Bernie leading Democrats into the wilderness, like Jeremy Corbyn did to Labour in the U.K. — while others are trying to argue that maybe Bernie can beat the odds the way Trump did in 2016. But the two big problems with that argument are that (a) a major reason Trump won was because Hillary represented the hated “establishment insiders,” and (b) Trump is an incumbent, running on a record of remarkable success. This doesn’t mean that Trump is a shoo-in for re-election in November, but it does mean that he is less vulnerable to a populist challenge.

There is a certain logic to the pro-Sanders argument: Trump won with right-wing populism, therefore Democrats should counter by running a left-wing populist. As logical as that seems, however, it neither expands the potential base of Democratic voters, nor does it address Trump’s real vulnerability, i.e., his brusque demeanor, which is offensive to the bourgeois sensibilities of the suburban middle class. What Democrats really needed in 2020 was a candidate who promised to restore the norms of respectable public discourse. Such a candidate would not necessarily be “moderate” in terms of policy, but he would speak in a calm and soothing way — polite and boring, the way nice politicians do.

Bernie Sanders is not a nice politician, and the belief that a grumpy old socialist is the ideal candidate against Trump — well, this is an untested hypothesis. Now that Sanders had emerged as the front-runner, his Democratic rivals are ganging up against him:

Joe Biden’s campaign is airing a new digital ad in South Carolina accusing Bernie Sanders of trying to undermine Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection by threatening to primary him. Pete Buttigieg was on TV in South Carolina hitting Sanders over health care and Mike Bloomberg targeted Sanders’ past gun votes.
“When it comes to building on Barack Obama’s legacy, Bernie Sanders just can’t be trusted,” the Biden ad, first obtained by POLITICO, warns.
The fusillade targeting Sanders on the eve of a Democratic debate in the fourth early state of South Carolina marked the latest turn in a Democratic primary that now has a decisive frontrunner. Each of the candidates, competing for a fraction of the moderate vote, are attempting to blunt the Vermont senator’s momentum coming off a landslide win in Nevada. . . .
Bloomberg, who will not appear on a ballot in South Carolina, is attempting to slow Sanders’ surge as the billionaire businessman is poised to face his first test in Super Tuesday states.
Bloomberg unleashed his own 90-second video spot saying Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 with the support of the National Rifle Association.
Ominous music plays in the background and subtitles read: “Bernie voted with the NRA and opposed federal background checks.”
The ad cited Sanders’ opposition to a background check bill in the 1990s and votes in the early 2000s against allowing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, issues that aligned with the NRA’s stance.

It can be predicted that, just as last week’s Nevada debate turned into a gang beatdown on Bloomberg, tonight’s debate in South Carolina will become a gang beatdown on Bernie Sanders. The problem is that Sanders has a hard-core base — somewhere between 20% and 30% of Democratic primary voters — that will not abandon him for any reason.

So the seven Democrats on the debate stage, including billionaire Tom Steyer, are all competing for the same anti-Bernie vote. This will continue into next week’s Super Tuesday primaries and there is no good way this ends for Democrats. Either (a) Bernie gets the nomination, and faces a high probability of catastrophic defeat in November, or (b) Democrats somehow cheat Bernie out of the nomination, thereby alienating 20%-30% of their own party’s base.

The best hope for Democrats, honestly, is a global coronavirus pandemic.

Category: Bernie Sanders, Election

College Students Who Can’t Think

Posted on | February 25, 2020 | 2 Comments

Ed Driscoll calls attention to the latest campus appearance by Heather Mac Donald, who spoke at Colgate University ($72,585 a year, including room and board) where she was accosted by disruptive protesters.

Mac Donald, who has degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Stanford, was at Colgate to speak about her most recent book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. It seems, however, that the protesters wanted to talk about rape. Mac Donald has written critically about the mythical “epidemic” of campus rape, pointing out the fraudulence of the claim that 1-in-5 female college students become victims of rape during their undergraduate years. This widely cited statistic is a wild exaggeration, based on misleading surveys (rather than actual reports of assaults), and simply will not withstand critical scrutiny. Attempts to speak factually about this issue, however, are rendered impossible by the emotional investment that activists have made in a certain set of assumptions about “rape culture.” Consider this scene at Colgate:

Perhaps the most tense moment of the evening took place when a woman took the mic to ask about campus rape culture . . .
“In 2008 you wrote an article called ‘The Campus Rape Myth’ where you decided to claim that rape could be attributed to ‘sluttish behavior’ and that it’s women’s fault for getting drunk,” the question began amid applause, cheers and moans of shock from the surrounding audience, mostly students dressed head to toe in black to protest the scholar’s visit and views.
“You also said in a 2019 interview with the Hoover Institution that ‘all college-aged women can avoid 100 percent of so-called campus rape,’” Mac Donald’s questioner continued in an impassioned tone before dropping her bombshell:
“As someone who has been assaulted on this campus, do you believe that I am at fault?!”

Of course, this heckler deliberately distorted Mac Donald’s argument, but the point is she plays the “My Experience” Card. Obviously, it’s absurd to expect Heather Mac Donald to know anything about this person’s experience, and thus demand that Mac Donald pass judgment on her case. This declaration — “I am a victim of assault” — is intended as a trump card, to silence dissent and end discussion.

THIS IS NOT HOW ARGUMENTS WORK.

A single personal anecdote does not refute a general statement.

What Heather Mac Donald is talking about is, first of all, the prevalence of rape — how often does it happen on college campuses? Her contention is that the “1-in-5” claim is a gross exaggeration, and this cannot be refuted by one person saying, “I am a victim of sexual assault.” Mac Donald’s second contention, made in her 2008 article “The Campus Rape Myth,” is that claims of an “epidemic” of sexual assault are rooted in a “booze-fueled hookup culture.” That is to say, in a climate where drunkenness and promiscuity are tolerated, many college girls will have sexual encounters that they subsequently regret. The collective sense of shame and resentment emerging from this “hookup culture” has been harnessed by activists to justify a variety of programs and policies, based on exaggerated claims about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus.

In her 2008, Mac Donald easily debunked the “1-in-5” statistic, and she replicated that debunking in her appearance at Colgate:

“Let’s put that number in perspective,” she said. “… Our most violent city, Detroit, when you look at all four of the FBI’s violent index felonies — that includes murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — all four of those combined gets you a violent felony rate of 2 percent. So 20 to 25 percent [of campus rape victims] is a catastrophe.”
She continued that such a “sexual holocaust,” if it were really going on, would prompt a stampede of women away from college campuses, yet the opposite is true, females are now the majority on them.

Exactly so. Feminists have fostered an irrational fear based on bogus statistics, claiming that rape is more common on university campuses than in America’s most crime-ridden inner cities. When the falsehood of these claims is demonstrated, activists respond with hysterical outbursts intended to silence the voices of truth-telling critics. No intelligent person could possibly believe that women are more endangered on the Colgate campus in tranquil Madison County, N.Y., than in the slums of Detroit, Baltimore, or St. Louis, and yet that is what the “1-in-5” statistic implies.

College students have lost the ability to think. The emotional protests at elite schools like Colgate show that students are incapable of weighing evidence and discerning between truth and fiction. Instead of making arguments based on facts and logic, students can only chant slogans and engage in fascist-style bullying tactics to silence opponents.

Given this proof that irrationality has become common on university campuses, is anyone surprised that Bernie Sanders gets his highest level of support among college students and recent graduates?

Category: Education

Rule 5 Monday: Annabella Sciorra

Posted on | February 24, 2020 | 2 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

It seems somewhat appropriate to turn our spotlight on Annabella Sciorra, since she was one of the major witnesses against show biz rapist Harvey Weinstein. She’s probably best known for her role as Gloria Trillo on The Sopranos, but she’s also appeared in a whole slew of other movies & TV shows since her debut in True Love.