YouTube shooter was Iranian refugee, follower of Baha'i faith

The LA Times reports here:

Aghdam entered the country as a refugee roughly two decades ago, a family member said. In one of her videos, she said she was born in Urmia, Iran — where she and other members of her Baha'i faith face discrimination — and that her family had spent a year and a half in Turkey.

Trump plays hardball with China, latest threatened tariffs impossible to match

Bloomberg reports here:

President urges levies on $100 billion more of Chinese goods . . . Were China to want to match Trump’s latest threat, it wouldn’t have enough American goods imports to target. It could take other measures like curbing package tours or student transfers to the U.S., or hamper American companies operating in China.

And just like that The Atlantic fires Kevin Williamson

Reportedly, here, after learning that Williamson advocates that women who abort their babies should be hung for homicide.

Sounds more like a convenient "discovery" after The Atlantic realized it had made a mistake hiring him in the first place. One almost gets the feeling that Williamson was set up.

Meanwhile The Atlantic tolerates women who actually kill their unborn children, but not someone who merely thinks that's a capital offense.

John Gray identifies the apocalyptic faith animating Antifa

Here, in The Times Literary Supplement:

The hyper-liberal demand that public spaces be purged of symbols of past oppression continues a post-Cold War fantasy of the end of history.

Adam Winkler: The British colonies in America were created and governed by corporations

Discussed here at TNR as if this were news to them:

Winkler’s approach is different from the outset. He does not see corporate behemoths as a deviation from the ideal of a land of small entrepreneurs. Nor does he see the corporate form—the structure that allows a business entity to have a degree of independence from those individuals who found it—as inherently menacing. The British colonies, he points out, were settled by private organizations such as the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company, entities that had stockholders and were governed by charters—essentially, by corporations. “Democracy and constitutionalism,” as he puts it, “were intimately tied up with the corporation from the very beginning.”

Kevin Williamson laments the passing of classical liberalism, the soil in which libertarians got rich

Well, at least we finally know whose side Kevin is really on. His own. 

Here:

[L]ibertarianism has benefited from the fact that American elites are notably more libertarian in their views than is the median American voter. That dynamic was explored by the economist Bryan Caplan under a typically bold title (“Why Is Democracy Tolerable?”) with a typically needling conclusion: “Democracies listen to the relatively libertarian rich far more than they listen to the absolutely statist non-rich … Democracy as we know it is bad enough. Democracy that really listened to all the people would be an authoritarian nightmare.” ...

[T]he United States is for the moment left with two authoritarian populist parties and no political home for classical liberalism at all.

Coulter after The Oval: I don't think we're getting The Wall

Here:

COULTER: . . . I said you're not doing what you promised to do.

Where's the end of NAFTA? Where's the wall? Where are the deportations? What are you doing talking about the DREAMers?

CARR: To which he responded? 

COULTER: [Does Trump impersonation] I appointed Gorsuch.

That's all we're getting.

Winnie Mandela, vicious animal, meets her maker at 81

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for March 2018

Max temp 56, Mean Max temp 66

Min temp 17, Mean Min temp 7

Av temp 34.3, Mean Av temp 34

Precip 1.16, Mean precip 2.45

Snowfall 4.9, Mean snowfall 9.1, Snowfall season to date 71.7, Mean Snowfall season to date 63.6

Heating Degree Days 943, Mean HDD 955, HDD Season to date 5599, HDD Mean Season to date 5850

Using HDD, the cool season to date has been 4.29% warmer than the mean.

Trump blames Mexico, our own laws and his powerlessness, the Limbaugh Theorem in action

“opposing everything that’s happening, even the things he is causing to happen. He is on a perpetual campaign.”

Laugh of the Day: Snow for Easter

Snow for Christmas

snow for Easter

livin' in Michigan

frosts my keister

Maybe David Hogg would be accepted by more colleges if he learned how to write the English language

The redundant "only" is also indicative.

Treated I bad did they.

You sound like Yoda.

A gypsy detects a fascist in David Hogg

Trump promised The Wall, celebrates a fence

Story here.

Trannies for Kevin Williamson: National Review thinks Ta-Nehisi Coates' favorable opinion of Kevin Williamson is a good thing

David French, here:

If Ta-Nehisi Coates can see the virtues of his work, then perhaps there’s room for you [progressives] to open your minds. National Review’s loss is The Atlantic’s gain, but even more importantly, the marketplace of ideas benefits from his transition.

Coulter at Columbia: I knew Trump was a shallow, lazy ignoramus, and I didn't care

At a debate with Mickey Kaus.

Story here.

Trump lazy? Now you've gone too far, Ann Coulter, too far!

National Review's Kevin Williamson looks left and heads to The Atlantic

Where Kevin and his sneering elitism will find a larger audience. Slate's Jordan Weissmann pretends not to get it: "Above all else, Williamson is something fairly rare in U.S. media: an explicit, unrepentant elitist."

After three revisions, 4Q2017 real GDP still comes up short at 2.9% annualized

That's up from 2.5% in the second estimate, but still down from 3.2% in 3Q.

That means that despite the holiday shopping season and all the expenditures of hurricane recovery, the economy still slowed down in the fourth quarter of last year. It should have been the best quarter yet if the economy were truly on the upswing.

To make matters worse, 1Q2018 is shaping up to be a horrible 1.8%.

BBC calls convicted, mostly Pakistani, grooming gang 'Oxford Men', which ought to outrage the elite university's graduates everywhere

Laugh of the Day, Stormy Daniels edition: If you want Trump to screw you repeatedly, you have to be one of his voters