Duh

 

What the Polls Say: RFK Jr. Hurting Biden, Helping Trump

Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine

That would be a fabulous way for Trump to waste his second term, just like the first

 

Will a 2nd Trump Presidency Try To Repeal Obamacare?

Jonathan Chait, NY Mag

 

Whatever he wastes it on, waste he will.

Everyone forgets that the Russians-tampering-with-voting-machines lunacy began in the Hillary camp in 2016, not in the Trump camp in 2020

 The group ... believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ... the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee. 

Here. 

Hillary lost because blacks didn't turn out in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.  She underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states.

The Russians didn't put the stink on her campaign.

She did that all by herself.

 

Rod Dreher goes hunting a confederacy of dunces, bags prey from The Week, National Review, Religion News Service, The New Republic, Reason, NYMag, and Vox

 

Adam Tooze's maternal grandparents were both commies, and the grandfather Arthur Wynn wasn't exposed as a Soviet spy until 2009, eight years after his death

Assiduously avoided here in "The Cult of Adam Tooze":

Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn published research on poverty and family policy and together wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his word processor one night after Peggy had gone to bed; he was making a list of things to do.

 

Employment discrimination against the old: More than 50% over 50 get fired, almost all end up in low-wage jobs from then on

Sudden and harrowing downward mobility:

According to the Urban Institute, more than half of all workers over 50 in the U.S. eventually lose their jobs involuntarily, and 90 percent of those workers get consigned to lower-paying work for the rest of their careers.

I'm sick of headlines from Democrats claiming to defend the republic when they're out to destroy it

Like this one from the prince of liars Andrew Sullivan, the spokesman for the freak zone of democracy, not republicanism: Can the Republic Strike Back?

They don't care about the republic. If Democrats had their way, all the bulwarks of the republic would be gone already: the electoral college, the US Senate, the Supreme Court, borders, citizen-only-voting, law and order, the presumption of innocence, and on and on. They'd replace it all with a two-headed monster of populism, a country led only by the US House and a popularly-elected president, creatures of the mob. 

The rest of the republic has to go, and its defender, Donald Trump:

Congress has real power. The press can’t get his tax returns. Congress can. The press can’t truly discover the depth of the corruption in his administration. Congress can. The press can’t publicly cross-examine Cabinet members, order functionaries to answer questions, kill proposed legislation, and air everything where it should be aired — on Capitol Hill. ...

One-party rule has strained this democracy. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and demographics have given us a government actively indifferent and even hostile to half the country. That single party has now taken firm control of the Supreme Court as well. It will very likely retain control of the Senate in January. Capturing the House is the only way the republic can strike back.

John Brennan is the Democrats' self-admitted communist, James Comey is the Republicans'

Mr. Comey Goes To Washington (New York Magazine, 20 October 2003):

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

This nitwit from New Jersey thinks he can be president

Story here.

Trump beat Hillary in Ohio's 12th District 53% to 42% in 2016, Republicans barely held on to it yesterday

Last October yesterday's result was hardly thinkable:

Map makes Republicans strong favorites to retain Pat Tiberi's 12th Ohio congressional district

Total nonfarm employment has come a long way in Ohio, especially overperforming quite recently in vaulting well past the 5.6 million mark.

You'd think the voters had been more grateful yesterday, but like Hillary energizing Trump supporters by calling them deplorables, Republican Troy Balderson managed to get out the Democrat vote for his opponent by insulting part of his own district, in Franklin County.

All politics is local.

Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

Laugh of the Day: Good Lord, Jeeves, that QAnon thingy where people think a top government agent is speaking to them through 4chan has made it to one of my own family

Aunt Agatha, sir? Say it isn't so.

Story here.

"Wisdom in discourse with her loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shews." -- John Milton

Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers' (and Leonard Bernstein's) great deflator, is dead

From the obituary, here:

“Do Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled on crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at the very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?,” Mr. Wolfe wrote, outraging liberals and Panthers alike.

When a Time reporter asked a minister for the Black Panthers to comment on the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s account, he said, “You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?”

I'm sure that's included in the obit for a reason.

Obamas' gay artist Kehinde Wiley uses four to ten assistants in Beijing to produce art cheaper, admits some of his paintings are complete frauds

Kinda like the former president himself, wouldn't you say?

Here:

The spectacle is always carefully staged, particularly with “the boys,” which can sell for more than $100,000. “There are certain ground rules,” says Wiley. Eight to ten paintings per show. Men, usually. Street casting: Wiley goes out with a team to recruit young men as models. Back in the studio, they leaf through art-history books, and the subject gets to decide which old-style work he wants to be portrayed as. He poses for photos, and the photos become templates for full-size paintings, which Wiley produces with his assistants in New York, Dakar, and Beijing.

Or not. In many cases, Wiley acknowledges, none of that official process—the street casting, the selection of poses from art books, the painting based on those ­poses—happens at all. “The clothing, sometimes completely made up,” he says. “The models themselves, brought in from a fashion agency.” And in at least one case, the “boy” is in fact a girl. “Oftentimes, if there’s a show of ten paintings, four of them will be complete frauds.”

Meanwhile the transnational Max Boot is upset that the Boy Scouts love Trump, hate Hillary

Very telling, that.

He must read WaPo tweeter Jenna Johnson here, and NY Magazine here, which omit references to the loud sustained boos by Boy Scouts for Obama but focus instead on the boos for Hillary.

Well, they emphasize what's important to them. Since they are Clinton advocates and Trump opponents and want to make the story a story about Trump's inappropriate partisanship, the fact that Trump was contrasting himself with his predecessor, not Hillary, has to be ignored.

Most stories have been about the boos for Obama.

Here is Boot:

At one point he actually had the boys booing Clinton, a former secretary of State, former first lady and the first female major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history. This is an offense not only against good taste but also against the Boy Scout rule forbidding any political activities in uniform.

Rebecca Traister imagines Hillary supporters got out the vote for her, but they didn't: 5.1 million former Obama voters thought she wasn't worth it

Maybe she should blame Obama's base.

Here:

The peanut-butter gobblers are keen to unleash their righteous rightness, their furious convictions, on the Javits Center crowd — the wealthy donors, sure, but also Mothers of the Movement, the reproductive rights and women’s leaders, the thousands of supporters who had canvassed and phone-banked and gotten out the vote and driven souls to the polls. ... [T]he objects of the vitriol from the left, dirtbag and otherwise, are the hardworking heart of the Democratic Party, now the resistance: the grandmothers who left their houses every morning to get out the vote; the people who took buses and carloads of volunteers to knock on doors and ring buzzers and make endless phone calls; the Black Lives Matter activists who protest the killing of their children and targeting of their communities; the women and men who provide reproductive-health access, even as the government works to roll back that access; the abortion rights and gay rights and criminal justice reform advocates who didn’t write off Hillary Clinton, but instead asked her to be better.

New York Magazine Spells Just Fine. Real Clear Markets? Not So Much.

From The Cover Of New York Magazine Showing Two Manhattans

See it here.

h/t Zero Hedge

More On Santorum's Weaselly 'My Wife Wrote It' Excuse: Isn't He Now An Admitted Plagiarist?

From Dan Amira at New York Magazine here:

George Stephanopoulos brought up a controversial passage from Santorum's 2005 book, It Takes a Family, in which Santorum contends, "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Santorum insisted to Stephanopoulos that he isn't saying women shouldn't work, only that there's nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, if that's what they choose. The explanation wasn't new; Santorum has been asked about that quote many times. What was new was that this time, Santorum added that, oh, by the way, "that section of the book was co-written, if you want to be honest about it, by my wife." ...

You also have to wonder why Santorum is only now bringing up his wife's co-authorship of that controversial passage. When the book initially came out, in 2005, Santorum was constantly on TV defending this very same "radical feminists" quote. But, curiously, he never mentioned that his wife helped to write it, according to a search of Nexis transcripts — not in a July 25 interview on Hannity and Colmes, or in a Today show interview that same morning, or a July 27 interview on Hardball, or a July 28 interview on CNN's American Morning, or a July 31 interview once with ABC's This Week (deja vu!), or an August 5 interview with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC.

More recently, Santorum was asked about this very same passage during a May 2011 Fox News presidential debate in South Carolina, and again, he neglected to credit his wife.

A failure to provide proper attribution for someone else's words in order to make them appear to be your own is called plagiarism.