“John Dingell, a former Michigan Democratic congressman who served nearly 60 years in office, wrote Tuesday that the Senate and electoral college should be abolished because of the “disproportionate influence” they award to smaller and less-populated states.
Dingell, whose wife Debbie now holds his Detroit seat, added that the “worst” reason for the decline of American politics is the “Trumpist mindset.” “These jacka–es who see deep state conspiracies in every part of government are the minority of a minority,” he wrote in “The Atlantic.”
He said other reasons for America’s decline included Ronald Reagan’s “folksy” assertion that the government is “not here to help” and the multiple wars that have been waged since the 92-year-old initially took office in 1958.
He called for the elimination of money in political campaigns, suggesting that they be publicly funded, and called for automatic voter registration at age 18 that would also be free of “voter ID, residency tests [or] impediments of any kind.”
In calling for the abolition of the U.S. Senate as it is composed today, he noted how the Great Compromise that formed the two houses — one on a more republican (sic) basis that gave each state two votes, and another on a democratic (sic) construction that allowed the population to determine representation — was supposed to balance the wants of a state like Rhode Island against a larger, more populated state.
Dingell said Wyoming as a whole has fewer people than his single congressional district in the Detroit area. “With my own eyes, I’ve watched in horror and increasing anger as that imbalance in power has become the primary cause of our national legislative paralysis,” he said…”
Old John, who likely hasn’t seen straight for decades, surely put the “Dingell” in Dingellberry, just as the city which adjoins his old congressional district put the “sh*t” in “sh*thole”.
Then there’s this from the former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the GOP:
“…Love said the Republican Party’s lack of diversity is a problem. The congresswoman said the GOP would benefit from deploying its small but talented pool of nonwhite members to lead on issues — especially issues important to minority communities. But neither the White House nor the congressional leadership has done so, instead hoarding power among the usual players.
For example, Love wondered why Trump and the administration did not use her, particularly for outreach to African-Americans or as a part of immigration negotiations that started and stalled multiple times over the past two years.
“I don’t know. I would have really liked to have helped them do that and I get the sense that the president didn’t utilize me to help,” Love said when asked if the White House was doing enough to court African-American voters. Love said that she met with the president after it was reported that he used the term “shithole countries” to describe poor countries with significant immigrant communities in the U.S., imploring him to have her at the table for high-level immigration talks.
“I said: ‘Look! I can help you! When you’re talking immigration, you should probably have me in the room instead of trying to negotiate with Dick Durbin and Bob Goodlatte.’“
As a former city council member and mayor of Saratoga Springs, UT (2017 pop. 29,608), not to mention two-term Congresswoman, we must admit, Love was far more qualified for “high-level” negotiations of any kind than was Barack Hussein Obama as President…which ain’t sayin’ much!
Here’s our point. At 92, we know John’s old, but he’s looking to retrade a deal made well before even he darkened the halls of the House. And though we understand his desire to make voter fraud even easier for a party which has already honed it to a science, along with the enshrinement of hereditary House seats, even the doddering Dingell knows the odds of any of his dreams being realized are the same as Trump giving up tweeting.
But he’s old; and more importantly, he’s an old Dimocrat. Meaning after he took office on December 13, 1955 (36 days after we were born!), Dingell’s Dimocrats enjoyed unbroken control of the House for 40 years, the longest any party’s been so dominant. Is it any wonder Dingell views dissent and/or differing views as “national legislative paralysis”?!? His experience has rendered him incapable of engaging in honest, meaningful debate, preferring instead legislation by Dimocratic decree.
Mia Love, on the other hand is, at least for now, Republican…and young (again, at least for now!). And being young, she fell victim to a fault particularly common to those her age and younger…though it’s not uncommon in those some number of years…
…her elder:
She came to believe her status as a big fish in a very small pond somehow conferred upon her wisdom and skills beyond her years and experience. She confused luck with skill. And she also, quite curiously, failed to consider (i) support of permanent residence for “Dreamers”, (ii) joining with Democrats in an attempt to force immigration-related legislation to a floor vote in the House, and (iii) denouncing, in continuance of Obama’s policy before them, the Trump Administration’s separation of children from their criminally-trespassing parents, might put her at odds not only with a majority of her constituents, but with the policies of her President on the very issues to which she believed her skin color qualified her.
To our point: borrowing from the thoughts of Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde respectively, wrinkles don’t necessarily denote wisdom, and we’re no longer young enough to know everything.
By the way, Mia, Haiti is a sh*thole country, the sh*tiest sh*thole in the Western Hemisphere.
Though in fairness, certain portions of Central America would, were there a contest, give Haiti some serious competition.
This in no way makes Haiti’s hard-working, law abiding citizens sh*theads, an observation with which Donald Trump would have agreed, even if he’d made the “sh*thole” comment in the first place.
WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING FOR THIS NEWS BULLETIN:
What an incredible coincidence; that’s the same deal Mueller’s bosom buddy…
…Jim Comey got Hillary!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off our mid-week edition with an item from NRO: Kevin Williamson’s take on the dire danger presented by the insidious infection of Political Correctness in social media entitled…
“…The old belief that names confer a special power crops up in the religions, legends, and folklore of cultures around the world, from ancient Greece to the Ozarks, from Judaism to the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin to Turandot. Secret names known only to close family members and kept hidden from strangers have been a feature of social life among West Africans and Native Americans, among others. That the ancient belief in the magical power of names has made its way to Silicon Valley, which is full of highly logical men and women of science who also are sometimes vegan reiki practitioners, is no great surprise.
Nor is the authoritarianism attached to it.
Writing in the New York Times, Parker Malloy offers the pristinely Orwellian argument that the prohibition of speech is a necessary condition for free speech: “Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.” I am not quite sure those sentences mean what Malloy means (reject the legitimacy, I think)…
…and things get worse from there.Deadnaming and misgendering, Malloy writes, are a way to force the trans advocate into “a debate over my own existence. I know many trans people who feel the same. If this isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is. Aside from the harm it does to trans people, it also impedes the free flow of ideas and debate, in the same way that conservatives often accuse student protesters of shutting down speech on college campuses.”
If we could for a moment tighten up and focus on the question of what words actually mean, this is a group of common English words put into an order that doesn’t add up to anything sensible: Nobody is denying that Parker Malloy exists. Nobody, to my knowledge, is denying that trans people exist. We are once again ill served by an excess of metaphor and a refusal to look at the thing itself.
(Set aside the other obvious little bit of intellectually dishonest rhetorical base-stealing: Black-masked hoodlumsaren’t shutting down conservative speech on college campuses with unwanted pronouns — they are using violence.)
The actual debate is elsewhere. It is, in short: If a biologically male person identifies very strongly with the female sex, endeavors to live life as a woman, etc., in what sense, exactly, is that person a woman? (Feel free to reverse the sexes, though the radical feminists don’t get nearly as excited about the other kind of trans person.)If you were to take a tissue sample from that person and send it to a laboratory for analysis, the results would indicate a male. If archaeologists were to discover the bones of a similar trans person who died in a cave 5,000 years ago, they would identify that skeleton as male.Etc.There are some people — some of them social conservatives, many of them radical feminists — who believe that matters: socially, politically, and medically. It matters even to people who wish to be kind, to treat people with tolerance and respect, and to allow them to organize their own lives in the way they think best.
But tolerance is an idea in ill-favor among our illiberal liberals.True believers will endure no nonconformity.
The unspoken proposition is that the trans person is a member of the opposite sex in a metaphysical sense; what we used to call sex-change operations and now are expected to call “gender-confirmation therapies” is an attempt to make the physical reality conform to some extent with the metaphysical intuition, to bend the objective to the subjective. This necessarily creates a sense of identity that is, as Malloy indicates, fragile.
Turning from the intended to the (perhaps) unintended consequences of Progressivism, writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman wonders…
Will New York City Kill an Amazon Competitor?
Tiny rival to Bezos pleads: ‘Just Leave Me Alone.’
Some readers may be tempted to think that the following story could only come from the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, but it’s actually a news report in the New York Times.
On Monday Corey Kilgannon reported for our crosstown rival that a regulatory regime designed to preserve historic landmarks is on the brink of destroying one of them:
Since it opened in 1927, the Strand bookstore has managed to survive by beating back the many challenges — soaring rents, book superstores, Amazon, e-books — that have doomed scores of independent bookshops in Manhattan.
With its “18 Miles of Books” slogan, film appearances and celebrity customers, the bibliophile’s haven has become a cultural landmark.
Now New York City wants to make it official by declaring the Strand’s building, at the corner of Broadway and 12th Street in Greenwich Village, a city landmark.
There’s only one problem: the Strand does not want the designation.
It seems that Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the bookstore and its building, fears that her business may not survive government protection. The Times report added:
Like many building owners in New York, Ms. Wyden argues that the increased restrictions and regulations required of landmarked buildings can be cumbersome and drive up renovation and maintenance costs.
“By landmarking the Strand, you can also destroy a piece of New York history,” she said.
In the process, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s landmarks preservation commission can become a living monument to inflexible and unreasonable civic governance. One is also tempted to call the threatened extinction of the Strand a monument to unintended consequences, but it’s possible the preservationists simply care more about the building than about the people who need to make a living in it.
The situation is not hopeless.This afternoon television station WABCreportsthat the buildingcrats have allowed at least a temporary stay of execution:
New York City on Tuesday postponed a decision on whether to grant landmark status to an iconic bookstore — a designation the owner adamantly says she does not want.
Nancy Bass Wyden, whose family as [sic] owned The Strand in Greenwich Village for 91 years, spoke at the landmarks preservation hearing.
“The richest man in America, who’s a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies,” she said, referring to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ deal to bring a headquarters to Queens. “I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate.Just leave me alone.”
Mr. Bezos probably had no idea when he accepted the generous tax breaks from New York pols to locate another Amazon headquarters in the city that they might also do him the courtesy of eliminating one of his small competitors.
The preservation crowd is giving a whole new meaning to the term protection racket. At least the mob wants its victims to stay in business so they can keep paying.
Now Nancy Bass Wyden knows how the owners of Hobby Lobby, Masterpiece Cakeshop and innumerable other Christian-owned businesses feel.
And in the Environmental Moment, the WSJ relates the reality behind the Paris tax riots:
“France’s violent Yellow Vest protests are now about many domestic concerns, but it’s no accident that the trigger was a fuel-tax hike. Nothing reveals the disconnect between ordinary voters and an aloof political class more than carbon taxation…”
Particularly in a country which generates the vast majority of its electricity in emission-free nuclear power plants!
Turning now to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with two more sordid stories straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter. In examining Exhibit “A”, see if you can identify a key detail missing from law enforcement’s descriptions of the perps:
“A Maryland woman was stabbed to death Saturday after she rolled down her car window to give money to a woman who was holding a sign that read, “Please help me feed my baby,” police said. Jacquelyn Smith, 52, was killed around 12:30 a.m. Saturday while she was in her automobile with two other relatives in Baltimore after attending a family gathering, FOX Baltimore reported.
…After Smith rolled down her window, an unidentified man approached their vehicle to thank her for her kindness, police said.The man then allegedly tried to steal Smith’s wallet, leading to a struggle before he plunged a knife into her chest. The man and woman fled the scene and Smith’s family rushed the 52-year-old to the hospital, where she later died.
The attacker was described as a man in his 30s, about 6 feet tall with a goatee. The woman, who appeared to be in her 20s, was about 5 feet, 4 inches tall and was last seen wearing a brown jacket. Anyone with information is urged to call Baltimore police at 410-396-2221 or Metro Crime Stoppers at 1-866-7lockup.”
There are three possibilities for the rather…incomplete…descriptions: Charm City authorities (1) didn’t want to prejudice potential witnesses by revealing the killers’ race; (2) assumed their race was a given; or, (3) felt emphasizing the obvious would unfairly tarnish the entire Black community.
“…Windi C. Thomas, 44, of Erie, faces 18-to-36 years in prison after pleading guilty to third-degree murder Monday. Her sentencing is slated for Dec. 21.
Thomas admitted to killing Keeno Butler, 44, last March — partially by lying on top of him. She weighs about 300 pounds while Butler weighed about 120 pounds. During the incident on March 18, Butler was cut with a knife before being hit in the head with a table leg.
His death was “ruled a homicide caused by respiratory insufficiency secondary to blunt force trauma to the neck and thoracic compression, exacerbated by blunt force trauma to the head,” an affidavit stated…”
Which just goes to prove the wisdom of that old adage, “Once you go fat, you may end up flat!”
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