LinkSwarm for December 16, 2016

December 16th, 2016

Next week come two joyous events: Christmas, and Donald Trump being confirmed President by the electoral college. The first is a time of family celebration, and the second means liberals can finally shut the hell up about their asinine cockamamie schemes to keep the duly-elect 45th President of the United States of America from taking office.

Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Speaking of the electoral college, publicity whore faithless elector Chris Suprun turns out to be a serial liar rather than a 9/11 first responder.
  • Linux guru Eric S. Raymond (who I’ve been on panels with at the odd science fiction event and such) has a long piece on the hard truths Democrats need to face to exit the political wilderness:

    First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

    County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

    Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

    Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

    Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.

    Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

    But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

    That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

    Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.

    First on his list of suggestions: Give up their suicidal gun control policies.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • The always pungent Jim Goad talks about how victimhood identity politics destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Still scratching their pointy heads over losing an election they were certain that history had preordained them to win, the Democrats are blaming everything except their own stupidity and arrogance.

    The intersectional house of cards has fallen. Every maladjusted minoritarian mini-tyrant in the country is freaking the frick out that their ragged, patchwork coalition of misfits is crumbing before their eyes. From coast to coast, every HIV-positive mulatto one-armed transgender lesbian midget is suddenly worried that Trump and his supporters in the heartland will become “normalized.”

    Huddled inside a rainbow-colored yet opaque bubble, it’s obvious that they have no idea what just hit them. Many overpaid and demonstrably clueless strategists seem to think that perchance they didn’t call people racists, sexists, homophobes, and Islamophobes enough. Maybe if they just verbally shat upon the stupid, uneducated, hateful, and soon-to-be-extinct white masses in flyover country who put Trump over the top, they could have shamed enough of these irredeemable rubes into voting for a party and an ideology that clearly hates their guts.

    Not for a moment does it seem to have occurred to them that maybe it’s not so wise to play aggressively hostile identity politics when your designated opponent is still the demographic majority.

    Listen up, dimwits: When you encourage racial pride in all groups except whites, you aren’t exactly making a case against “racism.” If you have even a semblance of a spine, sooner or later you’ll hear this nonstop sneering condescension about how you were born with a stain on your soul and say, “Hey, fuck you. I’ve done nothing wrong, but you’re really starting to bother me.”

    I suspect that for perhaps the majority of those who voted for Trump, it had nothing to do with the stupid, juvenile, leftist catchall excuse of “hatred.” If you really think extraordinarily complex social conflicts over power and resources can be explained by a dumb word such as “hatred,” I hate you.

    Instead, a large swath of voters grew so tired of being actively hated, they struck back and said “enough.” They didn’t “vote against their interests,” as is so often patronizingly alleged; they voted against the condescending, scolding, sheltered creampuffs who try to dictate their interests to them.

  • “NY Times Hires Reporter Who Sent Stories to Hillary Staffers for Approval.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • For all the lunatic leftist blather, Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that there’s no evidence Russians hacked voting machines. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Also, it wasn’t Russia that obtained Hillary’s emails, it was disgruntled Democratic insiders that gave them to Wikileaks.
  • And speaking of disgruntled Democratic insiders, some Clintonistas are only too happy to see the back of Huma Abedin. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lots of Democrats are pretty clear about the contempt they hold regular Americans in, but few are so stupid as to actually call America’s heartland “flyover country” in public.
  • “David Brock’s Media Matters Has Hidden $1,052,500 From The IRS Since 2010.”
  • In another entry in the “liberals keeping it classy” annals, a reporter tweets about Trump having sex with his own daughter.
  • Hillary Clinton didn’t win “America’s” vote, she won California’s:

    California voters are alone responsible for Clinton’s “win” in the popular vote. The latest tally shows Clinton up by about 2.8 or so million votes. She’s won California by nearly 4.3 million votes. So, take away California and the rest of the country starts to look like… well, it looks like the rest of the country. California is weird, but if that’s what the Democrats want to elect a president of, then the only thing you can really say to them is, “Congrats, you already have Jerry Brown.”

  • Scott Adams on dwindling liberal protests against Trump: “What are you doing that is more important than stopping Hitler?????????”
  • More on that Trump vs. Department of Energy dust-up. How long do you think that stonewall will last when Rick Perry is running the place? (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Along with the selection of Mad Dog Mattis for Secretary of Defense, the selection of Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor signals that Trump is tossing political correctness out of the Pentagon. Good.
  • How Trump can use the power of the purse to crack down on illegal alien sanctuary cities. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Get ready for more Scott Walkers as Republicans control 25 state capitals: tax cuts, pension reform, right to work, school choice.” (Usual WSJ hoops apply.)
  • Obama tries to create a new ethnic group for Democrats to pander to.
  • How an underachieving screwup from Plano named John Georgelas became Yahya Abu Hassan, a leader of the Islamic State.
  • Indian prime Minister Narendra Modi’s insane “demonitization” scheme continues to wreck India’s economy.

    The parched branches of big banks are still fortunate. For unexplained reasons the RBI has supplied almost no new cash at all to India’s hundreds of smaller rural co-operative banks or to its 93,000 agricultural credit unions, so keeping millions of farmers from deposits that total some $46bn. It has also banned these institutions from competing with “pukkah” banks in exchanging old bills for new. With no cash flowing, farmers cannot even seek help from informal networks that in normal times account for more credit in rural areas than formal institutions. And although India’s 641,000 villages house two-thirds of its people, they contain fewer than a fifth of its ATMs. These are being slowly modified to supply the new notes, which unhelpfully are smaller than old ones; for now most stand idle.

    Starved of cash, India’s rural economy is seizing up. A study by two economists at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research found that in the second week of the drought, deliveries of rice to rural wholesale markets were 61% below prior levels. Soyabeans were 77% down and maize 29%. Prices have also collapsed. In Bihar, Scroll’s reporters found desperate farmers selling cauliflower for 1 rupee ($0.01) a kilo, a twelfth of the prior price.

    It is not only farm incomes that are pinched. An investigation by Business Standard, a financial daily, found that virtually none of the estimated 8m piece workers who hand-roll bidis, a kind of cigarette, has been paid since the cash ban. Another Indian daily, the Hindu, reports that more than half of the 600-odd ceramics factories in the town of Morbi, a centre of the tile industry in the state of Gujarat, with a combined output worth some $3.5bn a year, have temporarily closed because they cannot pay workers. In Agra, the hub of Indian shoemaking, some firms are paying workers with supermarket coupons to keep them on the job.

    India’s wealthy few have servants to take their place in the still dismally long queues snaking outside banks, but the pain reaches even to the top. A dentist in a posh part of Delhi is shocked by a 70% fall in trade since the cash ban. “All my patients can pay with plastic so I assumed I was safe, but I guess people are just being careful about spending in general.” This does seem to be the case. A brokerage that surveys consumer-goods firms says November sales have fallen by 20-30% across the board. Property sales, which traditionally are made wholly or partly in cash, have plummeted even more.

    Small wonder that Fitch, a ratings agency, on November 29th cut its forecast for India’s GDP growth for the year to March 2017 from 7.4% to 6.9%. That is in line with most financial institutions’ trimmed estimates, although some economists think the damage could be even worse. “There will be no or negative growth for the next two quarters,” predicts one Delhi economist who prefers anonymity. “Consumer spending was the one thing really driving this economy, and now we are looking at a negative wealth-effect where people feel poorer and spend less.”

    Perhaps more embarrassingly for Mr Modi’s government, there are few signs that its harsh economic medicine is achieving the declared goal of flushing out vast hoards of undeclared wealth or “black” money. Officials had predicted that perhaps 20% of the pre-ban cash would not be deposited in banks, for fear of disclosure to the taxman. Yet within three weeks of the “demonetisation”—well before the deadline to dispose of old bills, December 30th—about two-thirds of the money had already found its way into “white” channels. Some of this is doubtless illicit: inspectors of Delhi’s bus system have found that the bulk of daily takings now mysteriously appears in the form of the banned bills, which public-sector firms can still deposit, rather than the usual small change. Reports from Maharashtra, in the centre of the country, suggest that brokers are offering to buy old notes with a face value of 10m rupees for 8.4m, suggesting that they have found ways of laundering them.

  • India’s Foxconn cell-phone factory has let 25% of its workforce go due to declining sales.
  • Speaking of phones, how long you have to work earn enough to buy an iPhone varies widely by country, from 24 hours in New York to 627 hours in Kiev, which is even more than Nairobi (468 hours).
  • Popping the liberal university bubble:

    When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

    We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological.

  • “In 2015: 4,454 men died on the job (92.4% of the total) compared to only 367 women (7.6% of the total). The ‘gender occupational fatality gap‘ in 2015 was again considerable — more than 12 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.”
  • Another day, another fake anti-Muslim “hate crime” exposed.
  • Llewellyn Rockwell of the Mises Institute explains Trump: “To get to where we want to go, the American political class has to be hit hard, and the media and the universities need to be exposed for the propaganda factories they are.”
  • Liberal women cutting off their long hair because of Trump. Says Instapundit: “Trump wins, and Democratic women respond by making themselves less attractive. Sorry, Democratic men!”
  • Formerly rich man forced to sublet his palatial digs to renters to make ends meet. Wait, did I say man? I meant The New York Times.
  • Pictures from an abandoned Russian military base above the arctic circle. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “City Of Chicago Working Around Clock To Clear 18 Inches Of Bullet Casings From Streets.”
  • Dripping Springs ISD stonewalls open records request over tranny bathrooms.
  • More on How Clinton Lost

    December 15th, 2016

    Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential race by rewriting the rule book. Conversely, Hillary Clinton seems to have lost the race by simply ignoring the same rule book.

    This Politico piece on how Hillary Clinton’s arrogant campaign lost Michigan is well worth it’s own link for the rich aroma of schadenfreude wafting off it:

    Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course.

    Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day.

    In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

    Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

    The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

    “I’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

    Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs.

    Rollins doesn’t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.

    “When you don’t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you’re going to have problems,” she said.

    From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she’d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn’t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they’d already ordered the ballots.

    “It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”

    Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.

    “There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”

    The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

    According to Hillary’s final FEC report, the Clinton campaign spent $576,402,561 on the race. Don’t think that printing campaign literature, sending volunteers door-to-door or mailing absentee ballots is cost-effective? Fine. But if you have half a billion dollars to spend you do it anyway. What else are you going to do with the money?

    Well, if you’re Clinton, you spend money running up the popular vote count in places where it doesn’t help get you electoral college votes:

    But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton’s campaign for use by the DNC — which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.

    And when regional offices tried to go to the DNC for help, they were refused because the Clinton campaign didn’t want them talking to the DNC:

    With Clinton’s team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn’t; they weren’t allowed to ask for help.

    State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. (“Welcome to DNC HQ,” read a blue and white sign behind the reception desk in Brooklyn that appeared after the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz just before the July convention).

    A presidential campaign taking over the party committee post-convention is standard, but what happened in 2016 was more intense than veterans remember. People at the DNC and in battleground states speak of angry, bitter calls that came in from Brooklyn whenever they caught wind of contact between them, adamant that only the campaign’s top brass could approve spending or tactical decisions.

    “Don’t touch them. Stay away,” one person on the other end of the call remembered Clinton campaign states director Marlon Marshall saying after hearing about a rogue conversation between a battleground operative and an official at the DNC. “You can’t be calling those people and making them think something is coming when nothing is.

    Mook himself made a number of those calls.

    To Brooklyn, this was the only way to shut down what they perceived early as an effort to undermine the campaign’s planning, DNC officials playing good cop as they made promises they couldn’t keep to friends in the states, took credit for moves Clinton’s staff already were making, or looked to dig up trouble to use against them later.

    So not only did the Clinton campaign have a thermocline of truth to keep unpleasant messages from reaching the top ranks, they created their own and then strengthened it out of turf defense, arrogance, paranoia, and ego.

    As in most of these Clinton 2016 autopsies, all the insider fingers seem to be pointing at campaign manager Robby Mook as the designated scapegoat for their collective failure. And I’m sure he had a hand. But the fact the Clinton campaign was an arrogant, out-of-touch operation reflected the presence of an arrogant, out-of-touch candidate at the very top of it.

    Read the whole thing.

    Aleppo Falls

    December 14th, 2016

    The Syrian city of Aleppo has fallen to pro-Assad forces. This was an all-but-inevitable result, given the Russian airpower backing Bashar Assad and the disorganized nature of the opposing forces and the desultory backing those forces received from the likes of Saudi Arabia and, intermittently, a feckless Obama Administration.

    The reduction of Aleppo had all the hallmarks of modern urban siege warfare: grinding, bloody and merciless. (Having advisors from a military with extensive institutional experience with it (Stalingrad, Grozny) probably helped Assad.) Many western observers wailed about the horror of it, evidently unaware either than this is the way modern urban warfare is fought, or that Bashar Assad’s father Hafez was every bit as ruthless in destroying Hama in 1982 as his son was in the investment of Aleppo. Endless heart-tugging pictures of bloody children aren’t going to change the ruthless nature of Middle East conflict, nor obscure the fact that America had no good options in Syria. Remember, there were no good sides in the Syrian civil war, and no faction worth backing.

    The wider Syrian civil war still grinds on, as does the war against the Islamic State and the wider Sunni-Shia conflict (never mind that Alawites are about as Shia as Lutherans are Jewish). If Obama’s goal was to engender a Sunni-Shia civil war throughout the Middle East (and there’s a grimly Machiavellian case to be made that this might be in the best long-term interests of the United States), he’s done a bang-up job. Otherwise Obama’s policy there (like the rest of the world) has been an unmitigated disaster. Foes like Iran and Russia feel contempt for us, while erstwhile allies like the Saudis (who are, indeed, scumbags, though preferable to whatever nightmare Islamic caliphate would replace them were they to fall) no longer trust us. (And indeed, have even less reason to do so now that Obama has cut off precision munitions sales to them over targeting policy in Yemen, a position both irrationally petulant and deeply ineffectual.)

    Those worried about the effect Donald Trump’s inexperience might have on our Middle East policy needn’t. How could he do worse?

    Corrupt Democrat Sentenced (No, Not Her)

    December 13th, 2016

    Remember Philadelphia Democratic congressman Chaka Fattah, who “used millions of dollars from nonprofits, some of them taxpayer-backed, to pay ex-staffers, friends, and their relatives“?

    Well, he’s been convicted and sentenced:

    Former Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison on federal corruption charges, including fraud, racketeering, and money laundering.

    Fattah, who represented several areas of Philadelphia in Congress, was convicted in June on 23 charges of corruption. His prison sentence will begin on Jan. 25

    Snip.

    Fattah’s case primarily stems from a failed mayoral bid in 2007 during which Fattah took an illegal $1 million contribution. He was also accused of misusing campaign funds to pay off his son’s college debts, funneling money through a fake nonprofit to pay a political strategist, and taking $27,000 in bribes from a fundraiser.

    The Philadelphia Democrat was elected to Congress in 1994 and only resigned his seat after he was convicted on the corruption charges in June.

    If only he had blamed it on “Russian hackers”…

    Trump To Tap Rick Perry For Secretary of Energy?

    December 13th, 2016

    So read the tea leaves:

    Donald Trump has selected Rick Perry to be energy secretary, according to two sources directly involved in the transition and selection process.

    He had been summoned to Trump Tower for a meeting Monday to discuss the position after having been contacted over the weekend. The meeting was only finalized on Sunday.

    The other contenders for the position were Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and Ray Washburne, a key Trump fundraiser, former RNC finance chair, restaurateur and investor in oil and gas operations.

    The piece goes on to note that Perry sits on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, which is involved in the North Dakota pipeline liberals are performing their current pipeline freakout over, then spends several paragraphs talking about that, because of course they did.

    Perry was an extraordinarily effective governor who made the mistake of running for President while hopped up on goofballs and never recovered from it. He constantly fought the EPA to keep Texas exempt from that agency’s more outlandish policies and was an outspoken advocate of fracking. He should be a very solid Secretary of Energy and, as a bonus, will probably become one of the Trump cabinet officials most hated by liberals.

    Trump’s cabinet picks so far seem both reasonable and salted with more movement conservatives than you might have guessed in, say, July. Trump also seems to be pursuing a “Team of Rivals” concept, selecting strong, well-known political figures over those from his own circles. Perry is a serious pick for a serious cabinet.

    Could Trump Actually Cut the Bureaucracy?

    December 12th, 2016

    One of the great conservative disappointments of my lifetime is how the federal government continues to overrun the landscape like kudzu no matter who occupies the White House. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, didn’t matter: the size and scope of the federal government always seemed to expand, never contract.

    Which is why it’s thrilling to find out that the incoming Trump Administration is asking questions about the staffing levels (not to mention details like funding levels and statutory authority) at the Department of Energy.

    The Trump Energy Department transition team sent the 74 question memo on Dec. 6. One question asked for a list of all department employees or contractors who have attended meetings on the social cost of carbon, a measurement federal agencies use to weigh the costs and benefits of new energy and environment regulations. Another asked for all publications employees at the DOE’s 17 national laboratories have written in the past three years.

    And the DOE is apparently alarmed at actually having to answer to elected officials. Poor babies.

    There’s been lots of talk about zeroing in on global warming advocates, but Borepatch noticed that many of the questions are all about the Benjamins:

    1. Can you provide a list of all boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and FACAs [Federal Advisory Committees] currently active at the Department? For each, can you please provide members, meeting schedules, and authority (statutory or otherwise) under which they were created?

    If I were at DOE, this first question would indeed set MY hair on fire. The easiest way to get rid of something is to show that it was not properly established … boom, it’s gone. As a businessman myself, this question shows me that the incoming people know their business, and that the first order of business is to jettison the useless lumber.

    6 The Department recently announced the issuance of $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for electric vehicles (and perhaps associated infrastructure). Can you provide a status on this effort?

    Oh, man, they are going for the jugular. Loan Program Office? If there is any place that the flies would gather, it’s around the honey … it’s good to see that they are looking at loan guarantees for electric vehicles, a $4.5 billion dollar boondoggle that the government should NOT be in. I call that program the “Elon Musk Retirement Fund”.

    Could a Trump Administration actually downsize the federal government? I don’t want to place too much weight on this strange emotion I tentatively identify as “hope,” especially since Trump isn’t a movement conservative and didn’t exactly make cutting Leviathan the centerpiece of his campaign. But maybe, just maybe, a man famous for firing people, backed up by full Republican control of congress, just might be able to take on the behemoth of ever-expanding bureaucracy…

    Update: It looks like Borepatch was quoting Watt’s Up With That and somehow fumbled the linkback for it. The Watt’s Up With That post has a lot more information and a rundown of all the DoE questions.

    ShoeOnHead on “Internalized Misogyny”

    December 11th, 2016

    ShoeOnHead seems to specialize in funny videos that Give Feminists The Business. Good for her.

    Here she goes off on “internalized misogyny,” along with a few other feminist bogeymen. “These people have an excuse and buzzword for everything. Anything to avoid any type of debate.”

    Taiwanese Animation on Trump’s Phone Call

    December 10th, 2016

    Best result of Donald Trump’s Taiwan phone call so far? The Taiwanese Animation of it:

    LinkSwarm for December 9, 2016

    December 9th, 2016

    The Dallas police and fireman pension fund has halted withdrawals of money to stop a pension run in order to keep the system (temporarily) solvent. Texas municipal pension debt is a big story with a lot of different ramifications and angles, and I need to do some research before I post, hopefully sometime next week.

    In the meantime, enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Why they voted for Trump:

    Working-class Americans have been mocked, maligned, and forgotten long enough. They are fed up and they went to the voting booth last week and said so.

    This election’s “red state” vote had little to do with racism or any phobias. The message we heard last week was, rather, a clear and simple plea from the average blue-collar, small-town mother and father for Washington and other big-city elites to stop belittling, disparaging and vilifying them and their families. It was their way of telling the “know-it-alls”; the politicians and pundits, to stop flying over and driving past their gutted factories and dying towns and pretending they don’t exist and do not matter. They simply wanted the “smarter and more educated” city folks to know that they are tired of insults and that the condescension needs to stop. They voted for Trump because someone finally appeared to care and listen.

    They voted for Trump because he seemed to get it. Finally, someone seemed to understand that the average guy: the plumber, the carpenter, the truck driver, the farmer — the good and decent family man from Dewey, Oklahoma, and from Hillsdale, Michigan — is the one who is now suffering from more cultural disrespect than perhaps anyone else in all the country.

    They voted for Trump because they’re sick and tired of being laughed at. They voted for Trump because they have, frankly, “had it” with being labeled intolerable by those who claim to be tolerant. They voted for Trump because they think it’s deplorable that they are the ones being called “deplorables.”They voted for Trump because they can’t turn on the TV, listen to the radio or read the news without some highbrow elitist in the mainstream media calling them “low-information,” “uneducated white males” who are too dumb to know what’s best for them and too stupid to see that Washington knows best. They voted for Trump because all they want is to have a job, get some respect, pick up a paycheck, go to church, raise their kids and be left alone.

    This is why. This is the explanation.

    Hate had nothing to do with it.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Kurt Schlichter: “The liberals are truly going nuts, and it’s beautiful.”

    They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.

    The only way you could further alienate these alienated voters is, I don’t know, making your DNC chairman some radical leftist, urban black Muslim who hates guns, loves Farrakhan and who parties with Middle Eastern scumbags who issue fatwas to kill those voters’ soldier sons and daughters. Now, that’s some real diversity, and the Dems should totally get right on it. But seriously, we could never dare to hope that the Democrats would be that stupid. Could we?

    And I had to laugh at this, even a little guiltily:

    Next up at bat is the hard-4 hedgehog that is anti-gun activist and alleged comedian Amy Schumer, another over-praised, over-hyped mediocrity who Tinseltown is trying to force down our throats like the fingers she clearly never forced down hers.

  • Speaking of liberals going nuts, this Washington Post piece about how Trump’s election stole one woman’s sexual desire is an exemplar of the “Middle Aged Feminist Talks About How She’s Very Upset With Politics While Narcissisticly Sharing The Tedious Minutia of Her Life” piece.
  • “Liberals have migrated beyond observable reality into fantasyland.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Liberals prove once again how sane and generous they are by suggesting to let Tennessee wildfire victims burn because they voted for Trump.
  • The collapse of the political left:

    The rejection was apparent in the 2010 and subsequent House elections; Republicans have now won House majorities in ten of the last 12 elections, leaving 2006 and 2008 as temporary aberrations. You didn’t hear Hillary Clinton campaign on the glories of Obamacare or the Iran nuclear deal, and her attack on “Trumped-up, trickle-down economics” didn’t strike any chords in the modest-income Midwest.

    Republican success has been even greater in governor and state legislature elections, to the point that Democrats hold governorships and legislative control only in California, Hawaii, Delaware and Rhode Island. After eight years of the Obama presidency, Democrats hold fewer elective offices than at any time since the 1920s.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Hey, maybe liberals should use persuasion rather than automatically label everyone who disagrees with them racist. (Hat tip: Will Shetterly.)
  • Clintonistas are still bitching about Bernie Sanders, saying his challenge to their beloved Queen fatally wounded her. You know, the way Trump having a dozen primary challengers kept him from becoming President.
  • Piers Morgan (I know) on how Donald Trump pwns the media. “Every time they throw their high-minded journalistic toys out of their strollers at one of his tweets, Trump wins.” (Hat Tip: Borepatch.)
  • Trump is blessed by having weak opponents: “How influential did the press expect to be? It ran against Trump in the election and lost. Why should anybody inclined to support the president-elect — roughly half the country, you may recall — pay attention now to a press that has said the usual rules don’t apply? Again, the more the opposition was cranked up, the less effective it became.”
  • Outgoing Vice President Joe Biden says he’s running for President in 2020. It’s not like he would have done worse than Hillary did this year…
  • ObamaCare in one graphic. One big, depressing graphic…
  • Reminder: That “97% of scientists agree than man is causing climate change” factoid is false.
  • Ties between Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist government and the Islamic State.
  • Are NGOs smuggling illegal aliens into Europe with the help of the EU?
  • With her poll ratings dropping, Angela Merkel suggests a burka ban. Such actions would be unnecessary if Merkel hadn’t brought the “refugee” crisis on in the first place.
  • Five Afghan “refugees” charged with raping a 15-year old boy in Sweden. Strangely enough, I don’t remember gay gang rapes of children in Sweden being in the news before the current wave of Islamic immigration…
  • Speaking of Afghan “refugees,” an EU official’s daughter was murdered by one.
  • What Trump’s Taiwan phone call means:

    When evaluating this unorthodox and, yes, risky move, one has to remember that it is China, not the United States, that has been rewriting the rules of engagement in the East and South China Sea. It is China that has been unilaterally asserting territorial claims against its neighbors, China asserting jurisdiction over international waters and air space, China failing to rein in the increasingly serious North Korean nuclear program. The power that is challenging the status quo in Asia is not the United States.

    (Hat tip: The Corner.)

  • Italy’s PM: Hey, give me near absolute power, because that’s never backfired on Italy before! Italy: Get stuffed!
  • In related news, actress Paola Saulino, who promised blow jobs for those who voted against the referendum, says she’s making good on her promise. What? You want pictures of Paola Saulino? Well, if you insist:

    And here are the dates for her “thank you” tour:

    I get the feeling the adoring crowds will make Black Friday look tame by comparison… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Now India is confiscating gold and jewelry from political enemies targets of corruption probes.
  • Canada wants to criminalize pronouns. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • If the New York Times wants to fight “fake news,” perhaps they should look in the mirror.
  • A guide to winning the media wars:

    We all know that independent websites taking Hillary to task on her very real and very deplorable track record of being a compulsive liar is what was truly decisive. The mainstream media knows this, which is why they haven’t actually been focusing on censoring provably fake news sites, but rather have been promoting an agenda to lump any non-establishment perspectives within the umbrella of “fake news” in order to destroy their competition and regain an upper hand in the national narrative. If those of us who value independent media want to thwart this nefarious plan, we need to fully understand what these cretins are up to.

  • 27-year male Clinton supporter hits 69 year old woman over the head with a chair. In his defense, he really does not look like the sharpest knife in the drawer:

    Or even the sharpest spoon…

  • More fake hate crimes.
  • The amnesty crowd is at it again.

    A DREAM Act 2.0 that addressed these problems — that prosecuted fraud, implemented enforcement, prevented downstream legal immigration, and focused much more narrowly on those who came very young — would possibly be something that even I, were I a congressman, might be able to vote for. But the lack of these elements is clear proof that the amnesty crowd isn’t interested in fixing the specific problem of a sympathetic but small group of people; rather, these young people are simply poster children who have been used for years to try to justify a general amnesty for all illegal aliens. And when the DREAM Act fails, as it will, Pedro Ramirez and his fellows will need to ask the pro-amnesty politicians and lobbying groups why they were sacrificed on the altar of “comprehensive immigration reform.”

  • Instapundit suggests downsizing imperial Washington:

    Donald Trump ran for president on the slogan “Make America Great Again!” And he’s also promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. But maybe the way to do that is to make Washington a little less great. Because as Washington has prospered over the last several decades — to the point where people are making Hunger Games comparisons — the rest of the country hasn’t done as well.

    So perhaps it’s time for a role-reversal. I propose that over the next several years, we transfer a lot of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, to parts of the country that aren’t doing so well economically. This would provide a boost to places like Buffalo, New York, or Quincy, Illinois, or Fresno, California, while getting federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bubble.

  • Delusional liberal in Time suggests that people not pay their taxes while Trump is president. So he wants to: A.) Starve the federal government of money, and B.) Put liberals in prison where they can’t vote. OK, but what’s the downside?
  • Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issues a stay of execution for an Alabama inmate. “Lawyers for Smith argue that although the jury rendered a verdict of life without parole, the trial court overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Smith to death.” Hmmm…
  • There’s a new cybersecurity commission report out. Guess what? It’s crap!
  • Black Workers’ Suit Accuses Job Agency of Favoring Hispanic Applicants.” Also: “He added that the staff of the MVP office in Cicero ‘was mainly Mexicans’ and that the employees were not welcoming toward African-American job seekers.” Also: “The vast majority of Hispanic job applicants served by MVP were in the United States illegally.” Note: The agency in question is not the Democratic Party, or the federal government… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Speaking of racial discrimination lawsuits in hiring, CNN is being sued for just that. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Armor car robbery ringleader killed in Houston, accomplices arrested. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Recovering from a devastating spinal injury via power lifting. (Ht tip: Instapundit.)
  • Marxist vegan diner closes. “Ultimately, the restaurant’s popularity among social justice warriors proved unable to sustain its rickety business model.”
  • Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash – New York Times – December 8 1941.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Noted without comment: The @EvilMopacATX twitter feed.
  • Ex-Astronaut John Glenn Dead at 95

    December 8th, 2016

    Astronaut John Glenn, the first American in space, has died at age 95.

    Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, and later a four-term U.S. senator from Ohio, died Thursday at the Ohio State Cancer Center. He was 95.

    Glenn became a hero in World War II and Korea, flying an astounding 149 combat missions in the two conflicts. He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions and an Air Medal with 18 clusters. In Korea, he downed three Russian MIGs in air-to-air combat during the last nine days of that war. Ted Williams was sometimes his wing man.

    He was, at that time, just another American who had served his country. But after the war, he heard about the space program, an outrageous idea of risk and service open to military test pilots. Of course, he was interested. After rigorous and competitive testing Glenn was chosen as one of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts.

    On April 8, 1959, Glenn was introduced at a press conference with Scott Carpenter, Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Alan B. Shepard, Jr., L. Gordon Cooper, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, and Donald “Deke” Slayton as the country’s Project Mercury astronauts. Glenn, who was the last surviving member of the group, a wore a bow tie.

    To understand why John Glenn became so important in America, it is important to remember how badly the United States was losing the space race in the early 1960s. The Soviet Union had pulled ahead in this Cold War battle when it launched Sputnik, the first man-made object to be placed into orbit. It then made a mockery of the American program by sending the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Then the Soviets sent a second cosmonaut into orbit.

    So all of America was watching at 9:47 in the morning on Feb. 20, 1962. Sitting in the cramped quarters of the Friendship 7 spacecraft, Glenn took off from Cape Canaveral. Scott Carpenter, the backup astronaut for the mission, famously said: “Godspeed, John Glenn.”

    Astronaut Glenn climbed into space, circled the globe three times, and then dropped down into the Atlantic Ocean. The flight took all of 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds, but it changed the space race and restored American pride.

    Later in life Glenn would be elected to the senate as a moderate Democrat, back when there were such things, and would vote in favor of Gramm-Rudman. He would lose the 1984 Democratic Presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, and later be involved in the Savings and Loan scandal as part of the “Keating 5.” The best that could be said about his political career is that he was far from the worst Democratic Senator during his four terms.