Said he who lives behind a massive wall and 24/7 armed security. Inquiring minds are also left wondering, if the “builders of walls” sow fear and divide, what do the protectors of pedophiles promote?
Just askin’!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the mid-week edition with The Wrath of Trump: Part Ad Infinitum, Ad Nauseam, asCNBC reports via Drudge, The Donald has lashed out again:
Also last night, Twitter started buzzing about an old video of Harris talking about her decision to start prosecuting parents for the truancy of their children.
I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So, I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy. Well, this was a little controversial in San Francisco! (laughs) Frankly, my staff went bananas. They were very concerned, at the time, we didn’t know at the time whether I was going to have an opponent in my reelection race. I said, look I’m done. This is a serious issue, and I’ve got a little political capital, and I’m going to spend some of it. And this is what we did. We recognized, as a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have a huge stick.(Who does she think she is: Willie Brown?!?)The school system has got a carrot.Let’s work in tandem around our collective objective and goal, which is to get those kids in school.
Maybe there’s something in the water out here in Indian Wells, but am I soft on crime if I think a situation of a student’s chronic truancy probably needs a social worker, and not the state AG or local DA threatening to put the parents in jail?How much teen truancy occurs with parental consent? How many parents of truant kids are dealing with some other significant issue — drug use, an absent parent, financial pressures, unusual working hours, or some other complication that enables the truancy? In the above video, Harris gleefully tells a story of a parent “freaking out” upon receiving the letter announcing the policy. Does that…sound like reassuring law-enforcement judgment to you?
We’re in an era during which we’re decriminalizing some drug offenses, repealing mandatory minimums, giving prosecutors and judges more discretion…and of course, Kamala Harris has never encountered an illegal immigrant she wanted to deport in a state full of sanctuary cities. But we’re going to throw parents of truant kids in prison?This is where we get tough and lock ‘em up?
“I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” That sounds really good as an applause line in a speech, but “crime” should not become a synonym for “something bad” or “something tragic” in the minds of prosecutors. Because not every bad situation can be resolved by putting somebody in jail — particularly putting parents in jail in order to resolve a family problem.
Wait, did someone mention asset forfeiture? In what the great VDH describes as the Progressive race to the bottom, a contest between Dimocratic presidential wanna-bes seeking to out-Socialist each other in the run-up to 2020, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson details the meaning behind Lizzie Warren’s latest proposal:
“…Revolutions do not set out to be awful. Not usually. They just end up that way.When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, many of them wanted to prohibit capital punishment, which they saw as a high-handed czarist institution. V. I. Lenin overruled them. “How can you make a revolution without executions?” he asked. The key to revolution in his mind — and in those of his revolutionary antecedents and descendants — was terror. “We shall return to terrorand to economic terror,” he promised, in a revolution of “unrestricted power based on force, not law.”
Senator Warren apparently has found her guiding spirit and has announced along with her presidential campaign a campaign of economic terror based on force, not law. Specifically, she has proposed to begin seizing a portion of the assets of some wealthy Americans, a course of action that the federal government has no constitutional power to undertake. The seizure of assets is a fundamentally different thing from the taxation of income, which itself took a constitutional amendment to implement. What Warren is proposing is essentially a federal version of the hated asset-forfeiture programs that have been so much abused by law-enforcement agencies — minus the allegation of criminal misconduct and made universal and annual.
The senator is in a bit of a panic: She hadn’t expected to face a challenge from her left in her quest for the Democratic nomination, but as her entire party lurches in a chávista direction, she has been forced to go one step farther lest she fall into the “moderate” class, whose members almost certainly will be slaughtered in the 2020 Democratic primary. And so she proposes this ridiculous and illegal course of action.
She may not be the radical she pretends to be, but Senator Warren has pretended to be a lot of things.A Cherokee, for one, which is good for a laugh, but perhaps not the worst of it. Her longing for fame — and money and power — is impossible to miss. She spent a period trying to launch a career as a writer of dopey self-help books (The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan!) and then tried on the costume of a Lou Dobbs-style populist China hawk, and even in her scourge-of-Wall-Street incarnation, she couldn’t help cribbing from Margaret Thatcher in pandering to Dobbs, then at CNN: “One of the problems with spending money in this way is that at some point we really do run out of money.” She boasted that her little bureaucratic fiefdom — the Congressional Oversight Panel — was called “COP.” Her “professor of color” act got her a couple of cushy academic postings and a net worth of a few million dollars. I covered her Senate race against Scott Brown and watched her doing a pretty poor impersonation of an Irish-American ward-heeler in Boston, clapping along awkwardly to “Charlie on the M.T.A.” like some animatronic Muldoon.If she has to pretend to be Hugo Chávez, it won’t be her first act of cultural appropriation. And the recipe book should be a hoot.
Funny thing about Senator Warren’s asset-forfeiture scheme. Like many similar proposals, it probably would not raise much revenue and might in fact leave the country as a whole economically worse off.And the people advising Senator Warren on that are perfectly content with that outcome, because, as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman argue in the case of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to radically increase income taxes, this is to be understood not as an economic question but as a moral one: It is simply morally obligatory to hurt wealthy people. “The point of high top marginal income tax rates is to constrain the immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches,” they write.
And who gets to decide what’s merited and what’s unmerited? What are the chances that, say, Senator Warren’s modest millions or her multimillion-dollar home are deemed “unmerited”?What decides, of course, is “unrestricted power based on force, not law,” because the law cannot substantially answer that kind of question but can only instead encode the desires of people with power, which is what Senator Warren is seeking more of.
Again, we have been here before.
When the socialist schemes of Joseph Stalin et al. foundered, they blamed the “kulaks,” i.e. those who had enjoyed the “unmerited accumulation of riches.” There was never any real definition of a “kulak.” Basically, if you had one cow and your neighbor had two, he was a kulak. Stalin announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” as a necessary precondition for the progress of his program, which was, like Kamala Harris, “for the people.” Dekulakization (раскулачивание) was responsible for the deaths of about 5 million subjects of the workers’ paradise. This was necessary, the socialists argued, because the kulaks dominated the political party system (“for the rich, wealth begets power,” Zucman writes), because expropriating their wealth was necessary to fund benefits for the people (“The affluent,” Saez and Zucman write, “can contribute more to the public coffers. And given the revenue needs of the country, it is necessary”), because the kulaks were hoarders (under the headline “Elizabeth Warren is trying to save capitalism from itself,” David Atkins of Washington Monthly decries the “artificial lack of resources caused by the looting and hoarding of the obscenely wealthy”), etc.
But do our modern progressives really propose to liquidate these “hoarders” as a class?
Saez and Zucman write hopefully of the prospect that high tax rates would make the class of people with larger incomes “largely disappear.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez declares it “immoral” that we have a “system that allows billionaires to exist.”(Is it any wonder some Dimocrats are floating the idea of sponsoring a primary opponent to this buffoon in 2020?!?) Marshall Steinbaum, the research director of the progressive Roosevelt Institute, wrote: “It’s increasingly clear that having wealthy people around is a luxury our society can no longer afford.”
And, so, here we are again: The kulaks must be liquidated as a class. But who is a kulak?
We might glean some insight into that from the progressives’ thinking in the recent free-speech debates, which goes something like this: “We’re all in favor of free speech, but Nazis should be chased from the public square, by violence if necessary, and we should harass their employers in order to ruin them financially.Also, everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi, including children wearing hats that I don’t like.”
You may not feel like a kulak. You may take comfort in hearing that only the “tippy-top” wealthiest people are to be expropriated in the name of social justice. Those children at Covington Catholic probably didn’t think they were Nazis a week ago, either.
History is short, if you look at it with the right kind of eyes. Some of you might want to consider looking from Zurich or Singapore.“
Hey, what’s 100,000,000 or 150,000,000 million dead compared with the realization of the ultimate Socialist utopia: Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité. The necessity for mass executions…
…notwithstanding.
Next up, writing at NRO, David French rightly wonders whether rumors of a rapprochement with as evil and repressive a regime as has ever existed signify…
“Yesterday afternoon brought some surprise news. American and Taliban negotiators have apparently “agreed in principle” to a “framework of a deal” with the Taliban, a deal that could ultimately lead to an American withdrawal after more than 17 years of war.
Could we be seeing an end to the “forever war”? Is peace (possibly) at hand?Or would a deal represent nothing more than a dangerous retreat by a dispirited nation in the face of emboldened and energized enemies?
To answer the question, let’s look at the details of the potential agreement.They’re admittedly sketchy, and a final deal could look better, but if we’re seeing the outlines of the Trump administration’s plan, we’re seeing the outlines of a desperate, gullible deal — one that will make America far less secure.
…even if the Americans reach the agreement outlined by their own negotiator, we would be entering into a fool’s bargain with a ruthless enemy. How would it be problematic? Let us count the ways…
…It’s vital to understand that peace does not necessarily require withdrawal. In fact, American troops have often been indispensable to keeping the peace after our worst wars. And as costly as those forward deployments are, they are far, far less costly than renewed combat.Keeping an American military force in Iraq in 2011 would have been far less costly than the city-destroying urban battles we’ve seen since America was forced to reengage in 2014. Keeping an American military force in South Korea has been far less costly than the likely catastrophe of a second Korean War.
No deal with the Taliban should depend on trusting the Taliban to defeat the terrorists who seek to strike us here at home.No deal with the Taliban should leave our allies at the mercy of the Taliban. If that means no deal with the Taliban, then so be it. If they want to commit to perpetual warfare, then they should understand that our nation has the will for perpetual self-defense.“
Sorry, but anyone who’d trust the Taliban to keep a promise shouldn’t be in a position of power in the first place.
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with the Francesco Quinn Memorial…
“…Reuters reported that Nepal’s Accident Investigation Commission said in a report that the pilot became “emotionally disturbed” during the flight because he thought that a female colleague questioned his ability as an instructor.
“This, together with the failure on the part of both the crew to follow the standard operating procedure at the critical stage of the flight, contributed to the loss of situational awareness,” the report said.
The report also said the pilot had been released from the Bangladesh Air Force in 1993 due to depression and was only allowed to fly civilian planes from 2002 after a detailed medical evaluation.
The flight crew and the controllers also lacked a clear understanding of each other when they communicated about the landing runway, the report said…”
Holy “Other than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”, Batman! Yet another reason, outside of British Airways, El Al or perhaps KLM, we’ll never fly a non-American carrier.
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