Category Archives: culture

“SALT and School Taxes”

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That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal Notable and Quotable.  The excerpt cited a Bloomberg piece (link in the N&Q) in which that piece’s author, Sahil Kapur, went on at length about how the tax reform and rate reduction bill currently on offer in the Congress will hurt the poor, over-taxed citizens of New Jersey and the State’s education capacity.  Because for the children.

How cynical.

If Kapur and others of his ilk don’t like New Jersey’s high taxes (or New York’s, or California’s, or Illinois’) or how those revenues are allocated, they should stop looking for Federal handouts and get to work on their State governments. After all, it’s Kapur and his fellows, and the rest of the citizens in those States, who’ve been busily electing those overtax and misspend governments.

It’s also true enough that some of those States send more of their citizens’ tax money to the Feds for redistribution than they get back from the Feds, but that just emphasizes the need to put an end to such redistribution of OPM.  It has nothing to do with whether the SALT tax distorting deduction should be preserved.

Bannon, the Republican Party, and Candidates

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Gerald Seib is on the right track in his piece in The Wall Street Journal, but he’s wide of the mark.

Tuesday’s Senate race in Alabama represented an attempt by the president and Mr [Steve] Bannon, his foremost political strategist, to show that they weren’t only in control of the party but could use their rebellious, antiestablishment message to drive their new version of the GOP to victory.

Yes and no.  No, because as Seib seems to have forgotten, President Donald Trump pushed for the temporary (and establishment) incumbent, Luther Strange, in the Republican primary because Strange was the candidate he thought would win the runoff.  Trump only late in the runoff openly backed Moore when if became apparent that Moore was going to lose to Jones.

He’s right about Bannon, though:

Mr Bannon’s pledge to field and fund nationalist, rabble-rousing Republicans to challenge a whole series of Republican senators up for re-election next year

That comment was about how much Republicans need worry about Bannon in the coming primaries and general elections, but that’s what Bannon has been doing all along: putting up rabble-rousers who fit his claimed brand of conservatism without regard to whether these persons actually could win a general election.

As with Roy Moore and the candidates he backed in last month’s Virginia contests, Bannon carefully chooses ideological purity, his purity, over electability.  Of course he knew what the results of that would be.  Bannon is doing the Progressive-Democratic Party’s dirty work; he’s not at all pushing for Conservatism in our Congress.

In the end, the thing hinges on practical politics, on what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) has said many times: it’s necessary to nominate candidates that actually can win elections.  If the candidate loses his election contest, it doesn’t matter how pure or impure his conservatism or his character.  He won’t have a voice in the legislature.  And neither will conservatism.

There’s an additional lesson here that the Republican Party and its candidates need to learn and act on, starting right damn now.  The Alabama runoff emphasized what the Progressive-Democratic Party did during last year’s general election and what they did sub rosa all through their guy’s Presidency: character assassination and smear works as a tactic.  With Jones’ win, the Republican Party needs to be ready to handle smears that will be generated against all of their candidates—every single one of them—in 2018 and 2020 and beyond.

Wrong or Incompetent?

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Howard Kurtz had a piece up this week decrying the NLMSM’s performance with its “reporting.”

With one blunder after another over the last 10 days, the press is on a losing streak that is starting to take a toll on its collective credibility.

In two cases of…error…the pseudo-reporters got dates critically wrong.  One involved a claim, confirmed by two other “news” outlets, that Donald Trump, Jr, had received a decryption key to some collusion-related, Wikileaks-held emails prior to their release.

But the collusion allegation collapsed when it turned out the email was actually sent 10 days later, when the hacked DNC material had already been made public.

Another outlet suspended its star reporter (notice that: they didn’t fire him) over another missed date.

His original report said Trump had ordered Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians during the campaign, which suggests collusion. But Trump actually directed Flynn to do so during the transition, as president-elect, when such diplomatic outreach would be routine….

Both of those instances relied on carefully anonymous sources, and in both of those cases the imitation reporters knew through their own sources that those dates were at best suspect and likely wrong.

The press’ losing streak is “starting to take a toll on its collective credibility?”  No, the press has had no credibility for a very long time; the current losing streak is only corroborating that.

Kurtz’ problem in assessing all of this is that he’s a man who knows no other business than what passes for modern journalism.  He’s been steeped in an industry that used have a simple, fundamental requirement: that the use of anonymous sources had to have, in the same article, corroboration by at least two on-the-record sources.  Instead, Kurtz’ business has made the conscious decision to walk away from that standard and, instead, to rely solely on carefully unidentified, deliberately anonymous sources.  As a result, we readers cannot assess the reliability of the sources and so of the articles; we cannot even determine whether those sources exist or the claims made are just manufactured rumors.

Wrong or incompetent, Trump asks in one of his ubiquitous tweets.  I say dishonest.  And Kurtz, raised as he’s been in a whorehouse, knows no other and is unable to see either the amorality or the dishonesty of his fellow residents.

Safe Spaces and Timidity

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Antonia Okofor is an advocate for empowering women, and she argues that the 2nd Amendment is a valuable tool in the empowerment.

She was scheduled to speak at two Liberal (note: not Liberal Arts—they’ve long ago lost that breadth) colleges, Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke.

Hampshire College canceled Okofor’s engagement on short notice—two hours’ notice—claiming that her speech was “too controversial.”  Then the place thought better of its excuse and claimed the trivial technicality of a student application not being complete as the premise for canceling.  This is nonsense: if that had been the reason, school management would have said so in the first place.  On the other hand, the lack of dotted i’s and crossed t’s would have been just as indefensible as an excuse.  This is fear, instead, fear of a better argument.

Mount Holyoke “allowed” Okofor’s speech to proceed, but here the pupils displayed their own timidity.  Their “angst” was centered on the horror of “the idea that women’s rights and safety is being linked with their right to bear arms.”  Empower women, sure, but only in terms of the power of others to protect them.  The Holyoke pupils’ solution was to set up a separate “safe space” where their own Precious Ones could go to hide from such uncomfortable subjects.

We feel that creating a deliberately separate space for conversation rather than holding a direct act of protest will be a more productive action for us without fueling the messaging of the Right.

Because actual participation would require determination and positive action.  Because actual participation would require the effort of rational thought and debate instead of the comfort of inchoate feelings and ducking away.

This is the pseudo-education that our children are getting at Liberal not-Arts places like these two.

When I Get Around to It

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) announced on the Senate floor—where, among other things, nothing he said would be actionable in a court of law—that he would resign from the Senate as a result of the plethora of women’s accusations of him sexually abusing and assaulting them.

When will he resign?  When he feels like it (my words).  In the coming weeks (his words).

Franken also said he appreciated the

irony that I am leaving while a man who bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who preyed on young girls runs for Senate with the full support of his party

With a couple minor details that give the lie to everything Franken says.  We have hard evidence of Franken’s assaults, and we have his confessions, and we have in his own words what he thinks about his own apologies.  What we have on Franken’s tape is Trump’s bragging about the ability to assault women, not about any actual assaults.  Franken knows this.  Franken also knows full well that Ray Moore, the candidate he was afraid to name, has been accused, but there’s no evidence of wrong-doing—only the unseemliness of a 30-year-old man dating teenaged girls, after first asking and receiving the parents’ permission.

The Progressive-Democratic Party members of the Senate (and of the House, come to that) know this, full well, too.  We’ll see in short order how soon or far away that Party’s leadership thinks “in the coming weeks” should really be.