The current regime is no less awful than the Trump era

 I hope that the developments of the last few days are putting to rest this nauseatingly ridiculous notion that conservatives who can't and never could stand Trump or the cult that surrounds him should "work with" Joe Biden. He's not some moderate foil to his party's leftist tilt. He's prominently part of it.

Consider what happened earlier today. The Senate confirmed one of his least qualified, most rabidly radical nominees, Xavier Becerra, to head Health and Human Services. 

He's a disaster coming out of the gate:

Becerra is an awful selection, considerably worse than Tanden. As I noted here, Becerra has no experience working at HHS, no medical background, and has never been chief executive of a state or any entity other than an attorney general’s shop.

How Becerra can be considered qualified to run HHS is beyond me. It may also be beyond Sen. Collins. She has noted his lack of relevant credentials.

Becerra is also terrible on policy. Becerra is a progressive activist whose experience in health and human services consists mainly in bullying nuns. As Rich Lowry reminds us, Becerra “went out of his way to target an exemption [from the Obamacare mandate] for the Little Sisters of the Poor.” His lawsuit against them “is still caught up in the courts even after it got rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.”

Becerra. . .chose to pursue this litigation even though it is completely meritless; even though it would, if successful, punish nuns who simply want to carry out their calling to care for the indigent elderly; and even though only ideological zealots intolerant of moral views different from their own can take any pleasure in its continuation.

What a guy. And what a “moderate” Biden is for nominating him.

The Little Sisters of the Poor litigation isn’t the only manifestation of Becerra’s extremism and bullying. The editors of National Review cite others:

In 2017, Becerra filed felony charges against the pro-life activists and citizen-journalists who had gone undercover to expose Planned Parenthood’s gruesome practice of selling the body parts of aborted babies to biotech companies. Becerra had not gone after animal-rights activists for similar investigative tactics. In response to Becerra’s actions, one writer at the left-wing magazine Mother Jones called the Planned Parenthood videos “a legitimate investigation, and no level of government should be in the business of chilling it.” Becerra was rebuked by the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times for his “disturbing overreach.”

In 2018, Becerra and the State of California were smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case NIFLA v. Becerra over a state law forcing pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion.

In 2019, Becerra aggressively opposed the merger of two religiously affiliated hospital chains in California because the resulting consolidated chain could reduce access to both abortion and gender-reassignment surgeries.

In 2020, Becerra was rebuked for his zealous defense of a California law requiring abortion coverage in insurance plans offered by churches. The Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that California’s abortion mandate violated a federal law known as the Weldon amendment, which prohibits federal funding of states and localities that force health providers and insurers to participate in or cover abortion. Becerra refused to comply.

Between Becerra’s lack of relevant experience and his pro-abortion extremism, it may be possible to pick up 51 “no” votes on his nomination.

Let’s hope so. I agree with Yuval Levin:

Even in normal times, when maybe there could be some kind of excuse for treating such an important job as a sop to the radical activist wing of the president’s party, Becerra would be an especially inflammatory choice. And these are not normal times. 

We are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and the secretary of HHS should be more experienced with the department and its work and with the issues involved, and should not be a figure who will enflame the kinds of fears that will undermine the trust of large swaths of the country in the government’s actions, guidance, and priorities.

And Vanita Gupta is not far behind: 

Ordinarily, senators should defer to the president on executive-branch appointments. But Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta is too radical to merit such deference. 

Gupta, nominated by President Biden to be associate attorney general, is a radical on criminal justice and race. She has been an avid participant in the morally corrupt mutual back-scratching known as third-party settlements. She has made vicious partisan comments that give ample reason to believe she will politicize the Justice Department. 

The third-ranking official at the DOJ has vast operational power behind the scenes, whereas his or her two superiors serve more as the public face of the administration. 

Gupta began her legal career with direct funding from the left-wing Soros Foundation. For most of her career, she has demonstrated animus against police and evinces a conviction that this nation’s institutions, law enforcement and otherwise, are inherently racist. She advocates a huge role for the Department of Justice in interfering with local policing. She is asking for confirmation despite recent comments of a notably objectionable nature, despite having demanded rejection of judicial nominee Ryan Bounds for (mildly) “insensitive” comments he made against “multiculturalism” when he was a university student a full quarter of a century ago.

By the standard she applied to Bounds, Gupta clearly fails the test of reasonable nonpartisanship.

As the associate attorney general, Gupta would advise on matters relating to law enforcement and would oversee the Community Oriented Policing Services. Yet her antipathy toward criminal justicelives loudly within her. She supports an almost complete gutting of the 1994 federal “crime bill” that played a large role in reducing street crime. She has repeatedly said that almost all police departments are guilty of “institutional racism [that] has infected [them] at every level and stage of the game,” and she advocates significant reductions in police funding and the forced closure of numerous jails and prisons. 

Gupta wants almost all bail requirements eliminated. She would abolish almost all mandatory minimum prison sentences, even for repeat offenders, and set a maximum criminal sentence, except in extremely rare circumstances, of 20 years.

If the only objections to Gupta involved her stances on criminal justice, one might yet defer to the president’s privilege of appointing people who share his policy preferences, even if they significantly contradict his own long record on those issues. Senators, perhaps, could give her the benefit of the doubt even on rather radical positions in just one area.

Yet Gupta is radical, truly radical, on racial issues. Just last summer, she testified to Congress that “structural racism is a feature of every American institution” and that every single American is guilty of “implicit bias,” especially regarding race. Indeed, she was so proud of making these accusations that she boasted about them in a series of tweets. Yet, piling evasion on top of her racial obsessions, she repeatedly equivocated last week when asked probing questions about these views by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Gupta combines the worst sort of radical racial views with an antipathy toward law enforcement in a particularly objectionable way. In 2005, while already a major player in civil rights law, she wrote a law review article — a serious piece by a professional, not some off-the-cuff statement from a college kid — in which she argued for a widespread adoption of “critical race lawyering.” She described this overtly race-focused approach like this: 

“Critical race theory, as an analytical tool, helps us understand that underneath the insidious veneer of such code words and mottos as ‘the rule of law,’ ‘colorblindness,’ 'equal justice for all,’ and ‘equal protection,’ the law is contingent upon the social and political realities of inequality and racial power.” 

“The very systems” in place in this new millennium, she wrote, are responsible for “maintaining the subordination of people of color.”

This wasn’t in 1955, mind you, before Congress passed two civil rights acts. This wasn’t in 1974, when cities across the country broke out in major discord over forced busing. This was in modern-day America, after protections against racism and redress for racist actions had long been enshrined in law.

Biden has explicitly said the the Equality Act, which the House passed last month and is currently being deliberating in the Senate, is a priority of his.

Attempts to quell unease about this bill include the arguments that it can't affect school curricula, that it preserves religious freedom, that it's irrelevant to abortion, that it upholds Title IX, that it won't affect parental rights, that the SCOTUS Bostock v. Clayton County decision necessitates this law, that doctors won't be forced to perform sex-change surgery or prescribe hormones to achieve that. It's all lies.

It's the greatest danger to religious liberty to date, it's the most pro-abortion bill Congress has ever considered, and it puts guys who are calling themselves females in the same locker rooms and shelters as actual females.

Only some 70 to 80 percent of the blame for these grotesque disfigurings of Western civilization can be placed on Biden and the Democrats, though. Republicans insisted on sticking with a loudmouth narcissist whose sloppily arrived-at worldview and word-salad-and-insult means of expressing it left no room for anyone with a serious understanding of the magnitude of what progressives are doing to our culture and nation to gain political traction.

Alas, we have to proceed from where we are. Conservatism has little official power at present. It may be that things have to get even more bizarre and evil before there's a general recognition that we're headed toward an unforgiving precipice. 

 

 

 

 

Thursday roundup

Hans von Spakovsky at PJ Media reports on two universities, Colorado and Cincinnati, that are not going to comply with Betsy DeVos's rescinding of Obama's 2011 guidelines for standards required for turning a sexual-misconduct accusation into a conviction.  Those "standards" flew in the face of the basic right of an accused person to face his accuser. Would you send your kid to either of these schools knowing this?

 . . . the University of Colorado has refused to adopt [the new guidelines], announcing instead that it will stick to the discredited Obama-era rules.

The university’s Title IX coordinator, Valerie Simons, claimed their procedures provide accused students with a “prompt, equitable and fair process.” What Simons considers “equitable” and “fair” is a process, according to the school’s “Process and Procedures 2017-2018,” that does not allow the accused student to cross-examine the accuser or witnesses or allow his lawyer “to participate instead of the … respondent.”

A student doesn’t even get access to all of the evidence against him. His access is limited to a “Written Evidence Summary” prepared by a university official, leaving the student at the mercy of what university officials such as Valerie Simons consider relevant to the case. The university procedures don’t meet the most basic due process requirements as outlined in recommendations made by the American College of Trial Lawyers in a white paper the organization published on how to conduct campus sexual assault investigations.

The University of Cincinnati, meanwhile, has just lost a case that should scare any prospective students. In John Doe v. University of Cincinnati, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction issued against the university to prevent it from suspending a student for two years. The student, John Doe, had sex with Jane Roe at his apartment after meeting on Tinder and having communicated for several weeks. Three weeks later, Roe complained that Doe had sexually assaulted her. 

The University of Cincinnati’s rules are similar to those of the University of Colorado. Doe had no opportunity to question Roe, because she didn’t bother to show up for the campus tribunal’s hearing. He couldn’t even question any witnesses directly; an accused student can only submit written questions to the tribunal, which then decides whether the questions are “relevant and whether they will be posed to the witness.” Witnesses don’t even have to attend the hearing; they can just submit a notarized statement.
The only evidence in the case was the statements of John Doe and Jane Roe that directly contradicted each other.

Despite the lack of evidence and Roe’s failure to even appear, the university found Doe “responsible” for sexually assaulting Roe “based upon her previous hearsay statements to investigators.” Doe was suspended for two years. 

Fortunately, a federal district court judge ruled that Doe's basic rights as an accused person had been violated.

Of course, to broaden this to a cultural perspective, none of this would be an issue if these people would keep their pants zipped until marriage, or at least until they were committed to a steady sweetheart.

Kevin Williamson at NRO gives Mike Pence a swift kick in the tail end over the report that Pence's chief of staff, Nick Ayers, intends to "purge" Republican federal office-holders who aren't sufficiently on board with DJT's "agenda."

Poor Mike Pence. It’s not like his reputation was ever going to recover from his abject, boot-licking performance as Donald Trump’s vice president, but this is the sort of thinking that comes from his chief of staff? To say that Pence has not exhibited exemplary judgment over the past year and a half or so would be generous. Some people will endure any degradation to stand close to power, however fleeting.

Ouch!

And, of course, the piece includes the kind of exposure of Trump's fundamental emptiness that Williamson is uniquely equipped to provide:

Republicans have not rallied behind the Trump agenda because there isn’t anything to rally behind. The Trump movement is a one part personality cult and one part group-therapy session. It isn’t politics — it’s a nervous breakdown inside the Republican party.

And this:

Say this for Donald Trump: He has been successful at one thing — bringing American politics down to his level. It’s asinine, childish, and emotionally incontinent, but that is where he is comfortable. One recalls the proverbial advice about wrestling a pig: You both get dirty, but the pig likes it. 

The Vegas shooter's girlfriend still has some more 'splainin' to do. 

The Washington Examiner has a rather eye-opening report:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin reportedly have forged a "suicide pact" in which all three members of President Trump's Cabinet would leave if one of them becomes a target of the president.

Speaking of people getting much-needed tail-end-kickings, David Harsanyi at The Federalist administers  one to Bret Stephens of the New York Times over perhaps the most idiotic - and overtly freedom-hating - opinion column of the last thousand years. And Stephens is ostensibly a conservative.

“I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment,” writes The New York Times’ new-ish conservative columnist Bret Stephens today. Referring as a fetish to an inalienable right that has a longer and deeper historyamong English-speaking people than the right to free speech or the right to freedom of religion is an excellent indicator that someone probably hasn’t given the issue serious thought. Or maybe he’s just looking for hits. (Congrats.)

I mean, Stephens isn’t contending Americans shouldn’t own five AR-15s. He’s arguing that the state should be able to come to your house and take away your revolver or your shotgun or even your matchlock musket. Stephens might as well have written “Eww, guns take them away!” and left it that, but instead he offers debunked arguments and misleading statements that are likely borne out of the frustration of knowing his position is untenable.

"Fetish."
 Let that one sink in.

Um, where's the controversial part?

As the range of "acceptable" opinion in post-American discourse narrows, this imminently qualified fellow is no doubt going to come in for some contention regarding his blunt style of expressing his views:

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue defended Sam Clovis, who has been nominated as undersecretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics, vowing to do “everything” he can to get Clovis confirmed despite the White House adviser’s controversial blog posts and past statements.

In a 2012 blog post, Clovis, national co-chairman of President Trump’s campaign, criticized President Obama’s “Dreams of My Father” autobiography.

“At worst, it is a total fabrication that is focused on shaping a narrative based on racial oppression and awakening that probably is only manifested through his play acting. We know so little about his early life, over which, to be fair, he had little control. However, beginning with his teen years, we find a person who indulged in self-destructive behavior,” he wrote.

In another blog post from 2012, Clovis referred to former Attorney General Eric Holder as a “racist bigot.”

“He is a racist bigot who cannot see beyond his own hateful, willful and despicable world view. As such, his administration of his duties hurts all Americans and makes us all much less safe. He is supposed to be the chief law enforcement officer in the United States, defending the Constitution and all the laws of the land, but he is selective in what he does or has his people do and appears to have no intention of supporting the Constitution,” he wrote.

Clovis took issue with use of the term “climate change” during a radio interview in 2013, saying it “implies” that progressives “are going to figure out a way” to somehow create the “ideal climate” and “perfect weather.”

“I'm so skeptical on all of this because the science is – people – a lot of people out there including our friend, know your buddy, Al Gore keeps saying this is settled science. I'm not sure this is settled science. I'm not sure that we're really looking at anything understanding – what we have to examine is how the language changes and when you start to go away from 'global warming' to 'climate change' this goes right into the heart of progressive thinking,” he said.

Clovis also called former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) mentally ill for arguing that the Tea Party movement does not believe in government.
“I think he's mentally ill. Anybody that thinks that, how uninformed is that? This is the leader of the United States Senate. How uninformed is he? Oh my word,” he said.

Perdue said he’s “not familiar” with all of Clovis’ previous comments but that “dredging up” the past is an “attempt by the opposition in delaying and smearing any candidate that the Trump administration puts in.” 

The only thing I might take issue with is the characterization of Holder as a "racist bigot." English major that I am, I'm rather big on accurate use of terms. Racism is the belief that some race is inferior in some given set of abilities necessary to functioning well in society to other races. Holder doesn't seem to be a racist or even a bigot, but rather a race agitator, per his "my people" remark at the 2011 hearing on the Black Panther case, or his 2014 speech at a Missouri community college in the wake of the Ferguson situation that he came there as attorney general but also "as a black man."

But Clovis is not basically wrong about that, and certainly not wrong about the climate matter.

Oh, one more thing I'd take issue with is PJ Media writer Nicholas Ballasy's use of the term "controversial."

Look for the leftist media to make as big a deal as possible out of his non-scientist status, but also look for Sonny Perdue to effectively address the matter:

A reporter asked Perdue if Trump should have picked Clovis, a non-scientist, for a scientific research position at USDA.

“Would the administration be better served if he was in a different job?” Perdue was asked.

“A scientist is not necessarily a technical type of person. This is a management of our research and education portfolio within the USDA and I think again any academician understands the scientific methods, as he does, and his interest is more in the economic aspect, which is certainly part of agriculture success as well. So I don’t necessarily buy the condition that you have to be one to manage that field and guide and direct our research capabilities,” Perdue responded.

“This person that’s undersecretary of REE [research, education and economics] is not going to be doing basic or applied research – that’s not what the job calls for,” he added. “Frankly, it manages our grant proposals and our relationships with our land grant universities as well as our agricultural research services to make sure that our American producers are receiving the best-applied research they can through an extension service delivering them the best product they can. I think that’s one of the successes we’ve had and I think we’ll continue to see continued success with Sam Clovis as the undersecretary for REE.”

 As long as we're saddled with a Department of Agriculture, let's staff it with plain-speaking, highly intelligent people like Clovis.

Thursday roundup

This attempt by the cornered animals on the Left to string up Jeff Sessions rings more hollow than any political stunt in the last several decades. Then-Senator Sessions met - on the occasion other than the brief social cordiality at the Heritage Foundation event - with Russian ambassador Kislyak in Sessions's capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senators not necessarily on that committee have acknowledged meeting with Russian diplomats - Joe Manchin and Clair McCaskill, to name two.

Much hay is being made over the transcript of Sessions's answer to Al Franken in testimony, in which Sessions, in response to a question about meeting with Kislyak even as Russian cyber-mischief was becoming public knowledge, says his conversation with the ambassador was not in his capacity as a surrogate.

Andrew McCarthy clarifies the dynamic involved in the exchange:

It is fair enough for critics to maintain that Sessions should have been clearer. But if we consider this matter not as a political dispute but a potential perjury prosecution, then the burden was on Franken, not Sessions, to be clearer. The witness’s obligation, as a matter of perjury law, is to refrain from willfully providing testimony that is both false and intended to deceive the tribunal. The burden is on the questioner to remove all doubt or ambiguity by asking exacting follow-up questions.

You may be thinking: Sessions should have added, “When I said I had ‘no communications,’ I meant ‘no communications in the role of a Trump surrogate discussing campaign business’; I did not mean that I’ve never spoken to a Russian official.” It’s only natural to see it that way. But that is not how it works if we are considering a charge of perjury. In those circumstances, it was up to Franken to clarify matters, by asking a follow-up along the lines of, “To be clear, I am asking you whether you’ve had any contact whatsoever with Russian officials during the campaign, whether as a Trump surrogate, in your capacity as a U.S. senator, or under any other circumstances.”

So, was Sessions’s testimony inaccurate? Sure, especially taken out of context. But was it perjurious? Not even close. The context, established by Franken’s questioning, elucidates that when Sessions denied communications with Russians, he was denying that he had spoken with Russian officials as a Trump surrogate, particularly in any relation to the misconduct described in the dossier. 

It seems that Yemen raid did indeed provide us with much vital knowledge of how the jihadists there - arguably the world's most dangerous - operate:

 Well, well, well… what do we have here? CNN is reporting that the controversial raid in Yemen last month did infact yield leads on Al Qaeda operatives. The raid which has received significant media attention as Donald Trump’s detractors have questioned the operation, which resulted in the death of Ryan Owens, a Navy SEAL. 

The US is working to locate and monitor hundreds of people, or “contacts,” found as part of the intelligence retrieved during the raid last month in Yemen targeting an al Qaeda affiliate, several US officials told CNN.

The sources said some of these people are believed to be in the West but not in the United States.
This raid on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula site has become controversial following the death of Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, whose father has demanded an investigation into the approval and execution of the January operation.

It’s been reported that laptops, hard drives and other materials were seized during the operation. However Democrats and their allies in the Media have called into question the necessity and success of the raid. President Trump honored Ryan Owens’ widow during the joint sessions address to Congress on Tuesday.

Rick Perry is confirmed as Energy Secretary.


Tensions increase between Malaysia and North Korea in the wake of Kim Jong Nam's assassination by VX.

Debra Heine at PJ Media lists the most disgusting and / or ridiculous Freedom-Hater reactions to DJT's SOTU address. There its content, including screenshots of tweets, underneath each one, but here are the reactions themselves:

1. A former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama volunteer said SEAL widow Carryn Owens looked like "an idiot"

2. Failed novelist Ben Rhodes chided President Trump for using the term "radical Islamic terrorism"

3. Sore loser Sally Kohn issued a "reminder" about the irrelevant popular vote

4. Keith Olbermanm had a crazed, unhinged, Godwin's law-smashing rant

5. Democrat congresswomen wore white "in a show of unity" in honor of women’s suffrage

6. "Anti-Racism Strategist" Tariq Nasheed insulted CNN's Van Jones with a racist tweet because Jones said something complimentary about President Trump

7. On MSNBC's Hardball, Bill Maher slammed the president for honoring Carryn Owens, the widow of fallen Navy SEAL Ryan Owens

The Navy has a growing problem with female pregnant deployed sailors needing to be reassigned to shore duty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The one thing the new bunch is getting right: the cabinet

Tom Price confirmed as HHS secretary.

And, as has become customary, Elizabeth Warren had to contribute some cornered-animal screeching to the proceedings, which we will spare you.

The sum-total impact of the confirmation hearings

There have been some deliciously telling moments from several of them, have there not?

Betsy DeVos's answer to Bernie Sanders about the efficacy of a policy of making public universities tuition-free, in which she said that while that was an "interesting idea," we must remember that nothing is actually free.

James Mattis's response to a question about people with unorthodox sex lives in the military being made to feel validated, in which he said that his one and only concern was making sure that the United States had a fighting force of such lethality that it could defeat any threat.

Mike Pompeo's responso to Kamala Harris's idiotic line of questioning, embedded within a preening diatribe, about his views on "climate change," in which he said that his focus would be on his agency finding out what America's enemies didn't want it to know.

Scott Pruitt's forthright assertions that he looks askance at the federal waiver that lets California have tighter car emission standards than the nation as a whole.

In each case and in all the others, it is clear that the Freedom-Haters are in full cornered animal mode.

It's not just the specific scenarios they have posed to the appointees.

They know their era has come to an end, that this is a shift of historic proportions, like 1824, or 1960, or 1932, or 1980.

One way to put it is that they speak of these people heading departments and agencies that they would actually like to see dismantled as if it's a bad thing.

Readers of this site know I am no fan of Squirrel-Hair. A scroll-through of posts in the "Donald Trump" category makes that quite clear.

But the one thing he has got right so far is these picks.

Whoever has his ear about this needs to stick real close to him.

The three factors shaping the era we're now embarking upon

The avalanche of developments this week has been particularly intense, has it not?

The discrediting of Buzzfeed for trumpeting the dossier compiled by that private British intelligence firm, Squirrel-Hair's wild press conference, Senate confirmation hearings for cabinet appointees, the Most Equal Comrade's farewell speech, the last-minute overturning by the MEC regime of the longstanding wet foot-dry foot policy for Cuban refugees.

With regard to the confirmation hearings, it seems to me that they serve as an encapsulation of our current political dynamic. Dem lawmakers basically use their questioning opportunities as a stage for agonized howling, for cornered-animal baring of teeth. Probably the clearest example of that is Kamala Harris of California asking CIA-head appointee Mike Pompeo about his past statements on "climate change." Talk about an angle of inquiry completely irrelevant to the proceedings at hand! But before she let him respond, she announced to the world what a tiresome twit she is by reciting the thoroughly discredited claim that 97 percent of the world's scientific authorities are certain that the global climate is in some kind of trouble due to human activity. Pompeo responded courteously and effectively, but Harris having got her two cents in will be the point of obsession for much of the chattering class.

Ditto the exchange between HUD-head appointee Ben Carson and Elizabeth Warren. From what orifice did she pull her question - couched in oh-so-cordial language about how she really understands his earnest desire to run a tight ship; she really does - about how he would make sure no grant money from his department would end up in the Trump family's pockets?

Then there is Cory Booker, who had the gall, not only to vaguely and without substantiation, hint that Jeff Sessions holds callous disregard for certain demographics in American society, but to invoke Selma, for crying out loud - mere months after cosponsoring a bill with Sessions awarding the Selma marchers the Congressional Gold Medal and saying he was "blessed and honored" by the collaboration.

With regard to the more directly Squirrel-Hair-related developments, such as the setting up of a trust for his business dealings to deflect any hint of conflicts of interest, or the business about his attorney having been in California when the "intelligence report" claimed he was meeting with a Russian operative in Prague, or the dustup involving Buzzfeed, CNN and golden showers, the shakeout seems to be that the "journalistic community" in post-America is discredited to an even greater degree than it had been.

Which is not to say that S-H comes off looking like some noble figure. Most definitely not, as evidenced by the latest Quinnipiac poll. His jackassery was on full display at his presser, as it was in such tweets as that regarding Schwarzenegger's Apprentice ratings, in which he made a third-person referral to himself as "the ratings machine, DJT."

Upshot of it all: This is unfolding just about the way I foresaw it once November 8 made the way forward a done deal:

• Conservatism, while it has the obstacle of the juvenile aspects of S-H's personality to deal with, has its best opportunity in decades to inform public policy.
• The Left will employ ever more venomous - and insane - tactics in mounting a resistance to that, and 
• Squirrel-Hair will be an embarrassment on a regular basis.

And, barring the introduction of some entirely unforeseen development into the mix (always a possibility in this jagged reality we inhabit), that is the table setting for the era now upon us.

Mattis and Squirrel-Hair: not exactly on the same page re: staffing the Defense Department

You ought to read this whole piece by Streiff at RedState just because the way he sets the table for his main point - talking about how patronage worked in such environments as early-20th century Jewish neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, or 19th-century appointments to juicy positions in the British Royal Navy, as well as his own experience some years ago in the Pentagon. It's just really great writing.

But his gist is this:

This is what is playing out now in the Department of Defense where Secretary of Defense-designee James Mattis is locked in a battle of wills with the Trump transition team.

The honeymoon seems to be ending between retired Gen. James N. Mattis and Donald Trump’s transition team amid an increasingly acrimonious dispute over who will get top jobs in the Defense Department — and who gets to make those decisions.

With only two weeks left before Inauguration Day and days before Mattis’s Senate confirmation hearing, most major Pentagon civilian positions remain unfilled. Behind the scenes, Mattis has been rejecting large numbers of candidates offered by the transition team for several top posts, two sources close to the transition said. The dispute over personnel appointments is contributing to a tenser relationship between Mattis and the transition officials, which could set the stage for turf wars between the Pentagon and the White House in the coming Trump administration.
…
Initially, both Mattis and the Trump team intended to engage in a collaborative process whereby Mattis would be given significant influence and participation in selecting top Pentagon appointees.

But the arrangement started going south only two weeks later when Mattis had to learn from the news media that Trump had selected Vincent Viola, a billionaire Army veteran, to be secretary of the Army, one source close to the transition said.

“Mattis was furious,” said the source. “It made him suspicious of the transition team, and things devolved from there.”

Service secretaries represent potential alternate power centers inside the Defense Department, and Mattis as defense secretary has an interest in having secretaries who are loyal to him and don’t have independent relationships with the White House.

What Mattis is doing is shrewd and he’s also one of the very few cabinet secretaries who can pull this off and make it stick.

Trump has invested a lot personal capital in appointing Mattis to be SecDef. As you know, in order for Mattis to be confirmed Congress must pass a special law waiving the provision of Title 10 US Code that requires a commissioned officer of the regular component of any service have been retired or separated for at least seven years before serving as SecDef. This gives Mattis immense leverage. The political drama of Mattis simply walking away over the White House not letting him appoint subordinates would be immense.

If Mattis is able to bludgeon the administration into giving him his choice of subordinates, he might very well be a truly transformative Defense Secretary. If I were betting on who wins this fight I know my money would be on Mattis. 

I could see this happening in some other departments as well. Conservatives are generally enthusiastic about DJT's cabinet picks, but that's because Mr. Rudderless is choosing principled people. We shall now see how it goes when they want to act on their principles and that comes up against the new president's notions of who ought to be where in government.

We need to hear more about how Tillerson sees Russia's clearly expansionist aims

Tom Rogan has an article at NRO that is worth your while. The overall gist is ostensibly the five results he foresees from the fall of Aleppo, and I'll enumerate them for you in a moment. But it seems to me that what he is really trying to impress upon the reader is how Putin views this development.

In fact, let's start with Rogan's prediction number five:

Finally, Putin will use Aleppo’s capture to damage U.S. foreign policy. His intentions are already clear. After all, in English-news propaganda outlets such as RT, the Russians are proudly rejecting American demands that Sunni rebels be given safe passage out of Aleppo. It’s Obama vs. Putin 101. Unwilling to pressure Russia, Obama is simply ignored by Putin. Through this public display of American impotence, Putin asserts his grand strategy in the Middle East. In the Middle East, where influence is defined by fear and by perceptions of power, Putin is seizing influence and control over American allies.

In early October 2015, President Obama claimed that “an attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work.”

Aleppo’s rubble has proved Obama wrong. His misjudgment has come at a heavy cost. In the lacerated lungs and starved stomachs of 200,000 Syrian civilians, American credibility has turned to ashes. In its place, Putin’s KGB phoenix is rising. 

Here are the others. I offer them because they all relate to this last one:

 First off, Syria’s Sunni-dominated rebellion will no longer be national campaign — it will become a collection of geographically limited ones. Apart from two sparsely populated central areas, the moderate rebels will hold only pockets of southeastern and northeastern Syria. At that point, unable to move between different battlefields, they’ll be highly vulnerable to axis operations . . . 

Second, al-Qaeda-linked organizations, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), and other Salafi-Jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham will grow stronger. The axis claim that capturing Aleppo will weaken extremist groups, but the opposite is true . . .

Third, and as an extension, when Aleppo falls, we’ll see expanded external support for the extremists, notably from the Sunni monarchies. Led by the House of Saud, the Sunni kingdoms view Assad thru the lens of sectarian hatred. That view is formed partly by Assad’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunnis, but also by his alliance with Shia-revolutionary Iran. After Aleppo, expect the monarchies to increase funding, perhaps through proxies, for groups such as JFS and al-Qaeda . . . 

Fourth, the Assad axis will escalate operations in Syria’s western, rebel-held Idlib governate. Idlib is critical to the rebellion’s existence because the rebels control areas along a roughly 50-mile border with Turkey. That border is the rebels supply aorta. But after Aleppo falls, the axis will push hard against Idlib border settlements, such as Ad Dana in the east, and Jisr ash-Shugur in the west. They know that as the border goes, so goes the rebellion . . . 

So the Russian bear sees a great strategic advantage shaping up on the Syrian chessboard.

Which brings us to the subject of DJT's likely choice of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. The reasoning seems, to seasoned observers, to be that, as the head of not only the world's biggest energy company, one with world-wide reach, but a business organization with annual revenues exceeding those of many nation-states,  he has developed a great deal of savvy in terms of dealing with the heads of state in all regions of the world.

Russia gets mentioned a lot in this regard. Tillers and Putin have been negotiating partners since 1999. 

In the late 1990s, when serving as a vice president for Exxon’s Russian unit, Tillerson helped revive a $17 billion oil development in a remote region east of Moscow that’d been stalled by bureaucratic inaction for most of a decade.

The project, which tapped a cluster of oil discoveries beneath the ice-choked seas off Russia’s Far East, became a crown jewel in Exxon’s global portfolio, pumping hundreds of millions of barrels of crude since the first wells came online in 2005. The achievement burnished a resume already chock-full of successes helping direct Exxon’s forays in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

“Russia made his career,” said Joseph Pratt, a University of Houston oil-industry historian, in a 2015 interview. Tillerson’s success in turbulent late ’90s Russia “really impressed” Exxon’s leadership team at corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas.

But is there a trail of position papers, any newspaper columns or pieces for major opinion journals from which we can glean just how he views Russia in recent years - say, since the seizure of Crimea, or the incursion into Ukraine, or rumblings of Russian government involvement in hacking misadventures?

Unlike the Trump cabinet picks so far, this one is being met with some reservation, particularly in the body that will have to sign on to the appointment:

Some senators, who must confirm Tillerson if he’s nominated, are balking. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said in an interview on Fox News that Tillerson’s past relationship with Putin “is a matter of concern to me.” Fellow Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, who sits on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, wrote on Twitter that “being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for” from a secretary of state.

Marco Rubio in particular is someone whose guiding principles, and his adherence to them, garner my respect. (McCain, not so much. Talk about hit-and-miss. In this case, though, he is on the side of prudence.)

I hope there's a lot of conversation about this today, given the speed at which President-elect Get-'Er-Done likes to move on these matters. The next Secretary of State's job is going to entail facing grave dangers, not just doing deals.

Yet another great appointment

Free-market proponent and outspoken opponent of the minimum wage and Leviathan's regulatory zeal Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurant Holdings, parent company of the Hardees and Carl's' Jr. chains, as Secretary of Labor.

And once again, the Left is squealing like a stuck pig.

And once again, it exemplifies the enigmatic behavior of a president-elect who is apparently able to bounce from protectionism and crony capitalism to defense of the free market without blinking an eye.

Somebody has made clear this message to Squirrel-Hair: "You can do what you want on Twitter or at Trump Tower, but don't mess up the cabinet appointments."

Senate Freedom-Haters come to regret their circa-2013 tactics

They thought their worldview was, going forward, the default position of the country, and so they didn't give a thought to Republicans prevailing when they nuked the filibuster. And now they're getting their knuckles bent backwards and dropping to their knees:

Senate Democrats are eager to make Donald Trump pay a political price for nominating staunch conservatives to fill out his Cabinet, hoping to exact revenge for the GOP's stubborn opposition to President Barack Obama's nominees.

But there is little they can do about it -- and some top Democrats are now coming to regret it.

That's because Senate Democrats muscled through an unprecedented rules change in 2013 to weaken the power of the minority party to filibuster Cabinet-level appointees and most judicial nominees, now setting the threshold at 51 votes -- rather than 60 -- to overcome tactics aimed at derailing nominations.

With the Senate GOP poised to hold 52 seats next Congress, some Democrats now say they should have thought twice before making the rules change -- known on Capitol Hill as the "nuclear option."

"I do regret that," said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat who voted for the rules change three years ago. "I frankly think many of us will regret that in this Congress because it would have been a terrific speed bump, potential emergency break, to have in our system to slow down nominees."

With their power weakened, Democrats are weighing how to make life difficult for the Senate GOP. 

They are planning on making the fight over Rep. Tom Price's nomination to lead the Health and Human Services Department a proxy war over the GOP's plans to to dramatically overhaul Medicare. They want to turn Steven Mnuchin's nomination to lead the Treasury into a battle over regulating Wall Street. And they want to make Sen. Jeff Sessions answer for his hard-line stands on civil rights issues and against comprehensive immigration reform. 

Senate Democrats plan to make speeches and mount objections to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's efforts to quickly schedule votes to confirm much of Trump's Cabinet by the time he is inaugurated in January. Under the rules, they could delay votes from taking place for a few days at a time, temporarily slowing down the Trump agenda.

But they ultimately won't be able to stop those nominees -- unless Republicans defect and join the Democratic opposition. And that fact has begun to grate at Democrats, who have complained bitterly at Republicans' stands against Obama's nominees -- most notably their unprecedented refusal to even give the President's Supreme Court choice, Merrick Garland, a hearing.

Some Democrats realize they've made life harder for themselves.

"In specific circumstances, we may regret that we can't block a nomination," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut. "But I think that the American people want action, and they want the process to work. And they want the folks whom they have elected to actually do the job and get stuff done."

One person who seems to be having buyer's remorse over the change in filibuster rules: Sen. Chuck Schumer, the incoming Democratic leader. Schumer told The Washington Post last month that he privately lobbied Senate Democrats in 2013 to maintain the 60-vote threshold for Cabinet-level nominees, but: "I didn't prevail."

Asked twice at a news conference last week, Schumer declined to say if he thought invoking the nuclear option was a mistake. He instead sharply criticized Price's views on Medicare, and said, "That's all I'm going to say."

Michael Barone notes that the Left's collapse here is in the context of a worldwide shift:

Britain's Conservatives, returned to government in 2010, are in a commanding position over a left-lurching Labour party. France's Socialist president, with single-digit approval, declined to run for a second term. European social democratic parties have been hemorrhaging votes, and got walloped in Sunday's Italian referendum. In Latin America and Asia, the left is declining or on the defensive.

Overall history is not bending toward happy acceptance of ever-larger government at home. Nor toward submersion of national powers and identities into large and inherently undemocratic international organizations. The nation-state remains the focus of most peoples' loyalties, and in a time of economic and cultural diffusion, as Yuval Levin argues in his recent book The Fractured Republic, big government policies designed for an age of centralization have become increasingly dysfunctional.

So the Left retreats into myopia and nostalgia. Since it is an ideology primarily based on feelings anyway, it is the natural recourse to attempt to relive the heady days of the 1965 - 2010 period, when it felt so good to be a part of the "revolution," the "counterculture," the force for "fundamental transformation."

But, while we're talking about feelings, a huge swath of the populace felt differently. They saw their freedom and their prospects for a bright future dwindling markedly.

So to the F-Hers in the Senate, and to the formerly mainstream media, and to the identity-politics jackboots gripping the throats of America's educational system, I say, come on over to our side. Let yourself be mugged by reality! You'll wonder what took you so long.

 

Wednesday roundup

Caroline Glick says that the appointments of Flynn and Mattis show that the new administration is serious about deep-sixing the Iran nuke "agreement," and also about being a real friend to Israel.

Don't believe the hooey you're coming across in some of these Obama-era-in-retrospect pieces about how the Most Equal Comrade and his nomenklatura have bequeathed a humming economy to the incoming bunch. What they've left are the fruits of planned decline:

Now they tell us.

A new report on the economy finds that productivity growth is at a 50-year low and that much of the positive talk about the nation's financial situation in the last election, much of it coming from the administration, was a lie.

The report from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and Gallup finds that for many, the economy is in reverse despite claims that there is an active recovery ongoing, complete with new jobs.

Just one example: Wages peaked 17 years ago, in 1999.

"Conventional wisdom — as reported in many major newspapers and media — tells us the U.S. economy is 'recovering.' Well-meaning economists, academics and government officials use the term 'recovery' when discussing the economy, implying that growth is getting stronger. The study finds there is no recovery. Since 2007, U.S. GDP per capita growth has been 1," according to Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton.

"As this report makes clear," added Council President Deborah Wince-Smith, "productivity growth is in a serious multi-decade-long slump that is dangerously close to stalling completely." 

The executive summary hits the worst of the news.

"The people are right. The economy is not working well. But the problems did not start with the Great Recession. For decades, the nation's income, measured as GDP, has barely grown overall; on a per capita basis, median household income peaked in 1999; the subjective general health status of Americans has declined, even adjusting for the aging population; disability rates are higher; learning has stagnated; fewer new businesses are being launched; more workers are involuntarily stuck in part-time jobs or out of the labor force entirely; and the income ranks of grown children are no less tied to the income ranks of their parents," said the report titled No Recovery — An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline.

Angela Merkel continues to get a clue about the shifting mood in Europe. Now she's calling for a burqua ban. 

Joy Pullman at The Federalist lists the first seven things Betsy DeVoss should do as Education Secretary: reverse the Most Equal Comrade's illegal actions, refuse to enforce vague statutes, bring in a whip-smart legal team, do a bureaucracy audit, audit the department's data handling, create a plan to eliminate her department, and refuse to preside over a federal vouchers program.

Some bracing plain speaking from Dennis Prager on Squirrel-Hair's supposed misogyny:

The evidence supports charges of insensitivity, boorishness, crassness, immaturity, and verbal impulsivity. But not misogyny.

Take the most infamous of the alleged proofs of Mr. Trump’s misogyny, his comments secretly recorded in 2005 in a private conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women] — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything.”

Why does that demonstrate misogyny? How is that hatred of women?

It’s crass, juvenile, sexually aggressive, improper, etc., etc. But in what way does it demonstrate hatred of women?

It doesn’t.

Us guys are capable of holding our female counterparts in multidimensional regard:

If sexually objectifying women makes men haters of women, then gay men hate men — because gay men sexually objectify men in exactly the same way that heterosexual men objectify women.

If you have a problem with this — and I can understand why people do — you need to take it up with God or Darwin. But this is how male sexual nature works — it objectifies the object of its sexual attraction — male or female.

The good news is that every healthy male is capable of both respecting women and sexually objectifying them.

Even Donald Trump.

As Leslie Gore observed, that's the way boys are.

Now, this looks like a very good pick

Put this one in the getting-one-right column:

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) has been the tip of the Congressional spear in the battle against the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) for the past six years.

Today, President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the agency that over-sees and administers Obamacare. (WaPo)

As HHS secretary, Price would be the incoming administration’s point person for dismantling the sprawling 2010 health-care law, which candidate Trump promised to start dismantling on his first day in the Oval Office. The 62-year-old lawmaker, who represents a wealthy suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it. The GOP-led House has voted five dozen times to eliminate all or part of the ACA but has never had a chance of accomplishing its goal as long as President Obama has been in the White House.

As many Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, wavered in their attitudes towards Trump during his campaign, Price was a devoted foot soldier. In May, he organized a joint statement by nine GOP House committee chairs, pledging loyalty to Trump and calling on “all Americans to support him.”

Price has been far from “all talk and no substance” when it comes to calling to repeal Obamacare. In fact, as Chairman of the Budget Committee Price has proposed various “Repeal and Replace” bills that have stalled with President Obama’s veto pen looming at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In fact, as recently as May 2015 Price put for the “Empowering Patients First Act” which would have provided more free-market solutions to the skyrocketing costs of health insurance, and health care.

“Under Obamacare, the American people are paying more for health care and getting less – less access, less quality, and fewer choices. The status quo and its defenders are empowering Washington and harming patients and doctors. With real, patient-centered reforms we can build a more innovative and responsive health care system – one that empowers patients and ensures they and their doctor have the freedom to make health care decisions without bureaucratic interference or influence.

“The Empowering Patients First Act puts patients, families and doctors in charge by focusing on the principles of affordability, accessibility, quality, innovation, choices and responsiveness. Those principles form the foundation of the solutions in H.R. 2300 – solutions including individual health pools and expanded health savings accounts, tax credits for the purchase of coverage and lawsuit abuse reforms to reduce the costly practice of defensive medicine. The solutions in the Empowering Patients First Act will get Washington out of the way while protecting and strengthening the doctor-patient relationship.”

I think movement on the health-care front is going to be immediate and exciting next year.