Friday roundup

 There used to be a frequent commenter here at LITD who, when Supreme Court rulings like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges would come up, would chime in with some variant on "stare decisis, baby!" to which I'd respond by bringing up Dredd Scott or Plessey v. Ferguson, and a stalemate would ensue. For anyone interested in a sound contemplation of the concept, I recommend an essay at Law & Liberty by Marc O. DiGirolami entitled "Integrating Originalism and Stare Decisis." The author says that judges should heed the guidance of a "legal thread connecting a long and lasting line of cases," but also take heed of instances when their gut tells them that evil is afoot.

Peter Heck at The Resurgent on the latest degree to which Jen Hatmaker has departed from sound Christian doctrine:

[W]hat strikes me . . . is why someone like Hatmaker, who is so infatuated with gaining earthly audiences and inviting the thunderous applause of men that she willfully invents her own religion, is so stubborn in her desire to rebrand her humanist idolatry as Christianity.

If she wasn’t, this wouldn’t be a column worth writing. If she wasn’t, her Facebook meanderings would be indistinguishable from, and no more noteworthy than, the vast majority of posts made by the world for the world. But Hatmaker is intent not only on identifying herself as a Christian, but misleading whoever will pay attention to her that her mind is a better barometer for real faith than the teachings of Christ’s church.

The post-American public's estimation of the sports world is underwater:

The sports industry now has a negative image, on balance, among Americans as a whole, with 30% viewing it positively and 40% negatively, for a -10 net-positive score. This contrasts with the +20 net positive image it enjoyed in 2019, when 45% viewed it positively and 25% negatively.

This slide in the sports industry's image comes as professional and college leagues are struggling, and not always successfully, to maintain regular schedules and playing seasons amid the pandemic. Professional football, baseball and basketball games have also become focal points for public displays of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

While it's not clear how much the various challenges and controversies swirling around the industry are each responsible for its slide in popularity, it is notable that sports has lost more support from Republicans and independents than from Democrats. In fact, Democrats' view of the sports industry has not changed significantly in the past year, while Republicans' has slipped from a +11 net-positive score in 2019 to a net -35 today, and independents' from +26 to -10.

I know that in some quarters Ben Sasse has come in for castigation for not seeming to maintain the fierce opposition to the Very Stable Genius on display in his legendary February 2016 open letter to Trump supporters , but I've never lost faith in him. There are a great many Republican legislators, state and federal, who I have watched with dismay suffocate their principles to climb aboard the Trump train, but I'm confident Ben has never done so. More than that, he acts on his principles in concrete ways, such as with his latest proposal:

Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) called to repeal the 17th Amendment on Tuesday, which would eliminate the requirement that U.S. senators be elected by popular votes.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Make the Senate Great Again,” Sasse called for an end to the amendment, among other changes to the Senate “aimed at promoting debate, not ending it.”

He also recommended abolishing standing committees, requiring senators to show up for debates, implementing 12-year term limits, and requiring senators to live together in dorms when in Washington.

“What would the Founding Fathers think of America if they came back to life?” Sasse wrote. “Their eyes would surely bug out first at our technology and wealth. But I suspect they’d also be stunned by the deformed structure of our government. The Congress they envisioned is all but dead. The Senate in particular is supposed to be the place where Americans hammer out our biggest challenges with debate. That hasn’t happened for decades—and the rot is bipartisan.”

Love this paragraph:

“Different states bring different solutions to the table, and that ought to be reflected in the Senate’s national debate,” he wrote. “The old saying used to be that all politics is local, but today—thanks to the internet, 24/7 cable news and a cottage industry dedicated to political addiction—politics is polarized and national. That would change if state legislatures had direct control over who serves in the Senate.”

A Chinese pharmaceutical company that is ultimately state-owned has been injecting thousands of people with experimental COVID-19 vaccines before Phase 3 clinical trials are completed. 

Dave Boucher and Todd Spangler at the Detroit Free Press enumerate the wild claims the VSG made at last night's rally about the auto industry in Michigan:

President Donald Trump made wildly inaccurate claims at a rally outside Saginaw on Thursday night, suggesting he has revitalized auto manufacturing in the state when it actually lost jobs even before coronavirus hit in March.

"We brought you a lot of car plants, we brought you a lot ... and we’re going to bring you a lot more," Trump began his speech at MBS International Airport in Freeland.

But only one new major assembly facility, a Jeep plant on Detroit's east side, has been announced during Trump's term, while General Motors underwent a divisive 40-day strike last year and announced the idling of four U.S. plants, including two in Michigan. One of those, Detroit-Hamtramck, has since been revived and is being retooled to build electric cars and SUVs. Warren transmission was revived most recently to make face masks, though its future is uncertain.

Navya, a French shuttle maker, announced it could employ 50 or so people at a plant in Saline, said Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry, labor and economics with the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor; Waymo, which makes self-driving cars, said last year it would employ 100 people at an assembly plant in Detroit and could someday expand that number to 400.

That's hardly a signal of a vast resurgence. Trump has also apparently made similar exaggerated claims in other campaign stops, with the Washington Post saying he has been "bragging about imaginary auto plants."

His signature foul mouth and his signature transactional framing of the case for his reelection were on display:

At another point in the wide-ranging speech, Trump repeated, "You better vote for me, I got you so many damn car plants."

Over 10 percent of Oregon residents have been told to flee the fires scorching their state. 

Wednesday roundup

I tried to see Jeff Flake as a guy who acted smartly on his principles, I really did. He started out his legislative stint as a House member with a laudable voting record. Even after things began getting shaky when he moved to the Senate, I held out hope. Then came his book, Conscience of a Conservative (an unfortunate title; couldn't he have come up with something that didn't cause confusion  given the precedent of Barry Goldwater's book of the same name?). His enlisting of Bob Dole and John McCain as his examples of principled Republicans was nearly the last straw for me.

Well, the last straw is now upon us: Flake has written an albeit symbolic $100 check to Roy Moore's opponent, fetal-American-death-relishing monster Doug Jones. While Hot Air's Allapundit, in the piece to which I've linked, devotes much space to the hypocrisy of Moore fans, there's no way to spin this favorably. Flake is now dead to me. He needs to just slink out of public life and find something obscure to do that doesn't throw any more monkey wrenches into the nation's politics.

I'd love to find out that this whole series of tweets compiled in this HuffPo piece is a conspiracy of parody, but unless we find out that that is the case, this is just a case of cultural-rot perpetuation by a bunch of dweebs with no idea how to productively contribute to society:

On Saturday, HuffPost published a hit job on a 53-year-old movie, based on nothing more than unthinking animus (a.k.a. "bigotry") toward a popular children's tale. HuffPost accused the film of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every sort of bigotry — not realizing that the movie actually condemns these attitudes toward "misfits."

The HuffPost video featured a montage of tweets attacking the 1964 film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- and attacking the movie's "sins." It concluded with a tweet from user Cass Martino: "Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable."

As usual, the cultural-vibrancy-haters have no sense of historical context:

What "Rudolph" presents as vindication, HuffPost decides to view as oppression. In this context, no amount of praise for formerly "marginalized" people is enough to make up for the original marginalization. The validation of having bullies apologize is nothing to these SJWs. The whole system has to be upended.
In short, these SJWs have ruined an uplifting children's tale by imposing their view of ultimate societal upheaval on a story about "misfit toys." Rather than watching the film and understanding the message as it was intended, these liberal Scrooges cherry-picked the worst parts of the film, divorced them from context, and yelled, "Bigotry! Racism, Homophobia!" (As they do for the Constitution, American history, and often Donald Trump.)
Had they taken a second to think about the movie in its context, they would have realized that the 1964 film was a cartoon version of a song written in 1949. The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was adapted from a popular children's book.
It tells a story of a reindeer being born "different" — with the shiny, red, glowing nose. Despite bullying (a constant feature of childhood in any era), Rudolph goes on to prove himself by saving Christmas with his beacon-light nose. He receives the ultimate vindication, "You'll go down in history [like George Washington]!"

The movie adapted the song, and because it was doing so, the film had to show various forms of bullying. But the bullying was not the point — the vindication was the point. The moral was to teach both bullies and kids who were bullied that being different can be a good thing, and that bullying is wrong. 

In other words, it was a social justice warrior movie, long before there were social justice warriors — or rather, it was what social justice warriors should be.

John Stossel on how far the New York Times has sunk.

The main point of Ben Shapiro's latest NRO piece - that "we've stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and begun to think of ourselves as subjects" - is important, but so is the instance he uses to substantiate it: the Conyers dynasty in Detroit:

The city of Detroit shall not go without a Conyers. The Old Man appointed his son, 27-year-old John Conyers III, to run in his stead. Conyers III was a longtime defender of his father: “It’s very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true.” Unfortunately, a few years back, Conyers III also tweeted about his dad’s penchant for the ladies: “My dad is a f***ing player and reckless as hell! He just got at this doods wife super low-key.”

Yeah.

John will run against grand-nephew and state senator Ian Conyers in an internecine war that could end with John locking Ian up in the Tower of London and then having him assassinated, if history holds true to form.

Then there's Mrs. Conyers:

The king’s queen, Monica, served on the Detroit City Council — before she was convicted of bribery for taking cash in exchange for voting on a $47 million waste contract. The king mysteriously reversed his opposition to that project; according to Judicial Watch, in 2009 “Conyers even wrote the federal government a letter supporting the plan and pushing for the permit transfers required for the hazardous waste injection well in the city of Romulus, Michigan. The letter, addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained that ‘many things had changed’ in favor of the project since he stood in opposition to it.” 

Great piece by humorist Robert Cormack at Medium on the self-sabotage that aspiring writers who don't like to read impose on themselves.

Another huge and destructive fire ripping through the Lost Angeles area. Pray.

DJT's mixed-bag week (so far)

There is his doubling down on the exhortation for - who, exactly? the FCC? - to yank NBC's "license." What kinds of licenses do networks have? I understand that it's a straightforward arrangement for individual stations, but how would this work at the network level?

Which led to Senator Ben Sasse asking on Twitter if DJT was recanting the vow he took last January to uphold the Constitution - and, by inference, the First Amendment.

Some have suggested that Sasse lowers himself getting preoccupied with this. Others say that he distinguishes himself by being the first and, so far, only Senator to step forward and express alarm at how far Trump has pushed the envelope on this.

What we do know is that Squirrel-Hair's slavish toady Sean Hannity now says that he regrets ever having supported Sasse.

Then there are divergent views - within the conservative pundit-sphere - on whether that NBC report was a complete fabrication or just a fairly factual account laced with the inevitable left-leaning spin.

The above-linked Red State piece by strieff flat-out calls it false:

I say blatantly false because Secretary of Defense James Mattis said it was false and I don’t think Mattis needs or wants any job bad enough to burn down a reputation he has built over four decades (some here though will disagree and have done so).

But at Commentary, Noah Rothman  takes a starkly opposite view:

Contrary to the president’s protestations and a denial by Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the report is compelling and thoroughly sourced. That’s the problem.

According to NBC’s report, to which five reporters contributed and which was sourced to “three officials who were in the room,” Trump wants more nuclear warheads. Trump was confronted with a graphic that demonstrated how the United States nuclear warhead stockpile had declined since 1967—when, at its height, the U.S. had more than 32,000 nuclear warheads. Today, by contrast, the U.S. has only 7,000 weapons, approximately 4,000 of which are deployable. The president then reportedly “indicated” he wanted to see a much bigger stockpile.

Would we have to get inside the general's head to ascertain exactly what's true and false, or can corroboration or denial from one of the other officials in the room ever be expected to become public?

Then there is the tweet telling Puerto Rico that FEMA won't be on the ground forever and, by the way, there's still the endemic mismanagement and corruption to be dealt with. This, while the island is still 80 percent without power and huge numbers of citizens don't have clean water.

Here's one from the excellent-policy-highly-questionable-way-of-implementing-it file: Yes, it's great that health insurance plans will now be able to be purchased across state lines, but doing it by executive order perpetuates the extra-Constitutional murkiness that we didn't like when the Most Equal Comrade did it.

Now, I doubt if this one originated within DJT's very good brain, but someone did the right thing big-time by orchestrating the US pullout from UNESCO. One less front within the utterly worthless UN on which we have to have any ties to anti-Israel bias.

This is the ongoing benefit of not having voted for the guy: I don't have to own any of the cringe-inducing stuff, but can heartily applaud the good policy moves.

It took mere hours for the Left to politicize the Las Vegas shooting

I've seen several vomitings on Facebook depicting it as "white terrorism."

Here's what a top CBS executive said about it:

A top legal executive at CBS, Hayley Geftman-Gold, is in hot water after she reacted to horrifying events in Las Vegas by posting on Facebook that she was "not even sympathetic" to shooting victims because "country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” Geftman-Gold wrote on the social media platform, ostensibly referring to Congressional action in the wake of Sandy Hook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

Hillary Clinton wants to make it about the NRA, and also shows off her ignorance about guns by talking about silencers. 

As of this writing, we know damn little about the particulars. Paddock's own brother has no idea as to what the motivation could be. Authorities aren't telling us yet what kinds of guns were in the hotel room.

This comes on the heels of yet another weekend of flag-disrespect and identity politics in the nation's NFL stadiums, as well as the multiple layers of sad and ridiculous developments in Puerto Rico.

In each case, there are people doing the right thing. Las Vegas residence giving blood. People tuning out the NFL. Good folks from FEMA and private-relief organizations just going about the task of rebuilding Puerto Rico.

But they are operating in a thoroughly poisoned atmosphere.


The devil is indeed prowling our land looking for souls to devour, and finding them.

In 2017 post-America, even the complete devastation of Puerto Rico has to get politicized

You want to knock their heads together and yell, "Grow up!"

There's a strong case to be made for giving San Juan mayor Yulin Cruz the benefit of the doubt regarding her rant the other day. She's up to her eyeballs in crises. You could even cut her some slack knowing her politics and ideological leanings. In the 2016 presidential race, she supported Clinton for a while and then switched to the Sanders camp, so she's never been a fan of the guy who won.

But more facts are coming to light. The pallets of supplies behind her in her rant aren't getting to the places that need them because of a lack of truck drivers. That's her issue to deal with. Then we discover that FEMA has invited her to its base of operations in Puerto Rico several times and she has not responded.

The mayor of nearby Guaynabo says he and other mayors are participating in FEMA briefings.

So it seems pretty clear she's grandstanding, and exacerbating her constituents' suffering in the process.

But it was wrong for Trump to take the bait and go on his Twitter tirade yesterday morning.

His thin skin and pettiness were on full display. His front-and-center concern expressed in his tweets, that she had been praising his efforts and then turned abruptly and attacked him, could not have been more ill-timed.

It's pretty pathetic that two of the most public faces of the response to what Maria did to Puerto Rico are behaving like badly brought-up seventh graders, and giving their equally juvenile political bases fodder for their self-righteous poses as well.

But that's how brittle, how arid, how devoid of graciousness and humility the societal climate is in post-America now.

To the extent there are any heroes in this story, we're not hearing about them because they're busy digging through rubble, handing out water bottles and first-aid kits and clearing downed power lines to preen before a drama-hungry public.

Puerto Rico

You may not have much in the way of material resources or time, but you can pray.

This is an island with a population of over 3 million and it has no electricity.

It's heartening to see the aid pouring in, but this is going to be a long, painful slog.

This is the kind of situation that provides us an opportunity to grow spiritually.

Just remember Puerto Rico whenever you pray.

It's a reminder that real suffering goes on in this broken world, and it's there that we see His face.

Wednesday morning roundup

I tend to agree with this NRO editorial that Rand Paul ought to come around on the Graham-Cassidy bill. I might not have taken this position at any number of points earlier this year, but Congress is clearly exhausted by the successive efforts to actually repeal the "A"CA, and this legislation does, to employ a hackneyed phrase, move the needle, albeit not by a whole lot.

A true replacement of Obamacare would be better than Graham-Cassidy, but Graham-Cassidy is still much better than Obamacare. It abolishes the individual and employer mandates, caps per capita spending on Medicaid, blocks federal funds from going to insurance plans that cover abortion, and lets interested states attain freedom from some of Obamacare’s regulations. Some of those states could use that freedom to create markets in which people outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-based coverage would finally be enabled to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic-insurance policies.

The senator’s objections to the bill amount to a case for improving it, perhaps in a conference committee after it passes the Senate. They do not amount to a case for voting it down. The bill goes farther in the right direction than the “skinny repeal” bill for which Paul voted earlier this summer. That bill abolished only the individual and employer mandates.

Jason Riley at the WSJ does a great job of taking down race polemicist Ta-Nehisi Coates. Would excerpt some of it, but apparently my reading of it a while ago was my one free article before the paywall kicked in. If you aren't a subscriber, you'll do well to make this your free article as well.

Prayers for Puerto Rico. Maria is one mean bitch.

Modern post-American adolescents aren't getting it on or imbibing the juice or weed at the rate of even their recent forebears, but they aren't getting jobs or driver's licenses at the same rate, either.

A new study shows that computer models are a worthless way to draw conclusions about the global climate.

Ted Cruz was right: the Sandy bill was full of pork

I like the way Ben Domenech at The Federalist starts right out heading off Chris Cillizza's screed at the pass. Then he goes on to explain - well, let's just give the floor to Ben:

Chris Cillizza, the Clown Prince of Fake News noted for his blue-framed glasses and his inability to deal with criticism, has rolled out another conventional wisdom claim that deserves debunking but should not require it given its utter departure from the facts. Headline: “Why Chris Christie is right. And Ted Cruz is wrong.”  The subject, as you may imagine, is the debate raging between a vindictive soon to be jobless Chris Christie, having played the part of Salacious B. Crumb in 2016 to no avail, and Cruz, who is having to justify to the press why he voted against the Sandy relief bill when Texas will clearly be in need of something even more sizable to rebuild after Harvey.

The truth, despite Cillizza’s claim, is that the Sandy bill contained everything but funding for a traffic study in Fort Lee. Here’s an easy way to tell whether a bill primarily contains emergency spending: the spending is right now. It’s an emergency. Here’s a way to tell when it isn’t: when the spending is directed at things that have nothing to do with said emergency, and are instead funding things years into the future. The Sandy relief measure was an example of the latter.

Here’s the CBO score. Note when the bulk of money was actually expected to be spent. According to CBO’s outlay tables, 24 billion dollars of the allocated funds weren’t expected to be spent until 2016 or after. The hurricane, for reference, was in 2012. And according to CBO, nearly 4 billion of the spending in that bill didn’t even pretend to be for emergencies: 3.459 billion was actually designated as non-emergency spending.

The bill itself is here.  Its summary is here. Cruz’s statement at the time on the Sandy bill is here.   And the Roll Call vote is here. Here is a Heritage report about the bill at the time. Here is fiscal hawk Tom Coburn on the problems with emergency disaster bills. And here are some things you will find if you read all of these, including specific spending in the Sandy relief bill that has nothing to do with emergency needs or any relation to disaster relief:

16,000,000,000 dollars for Community Development Block Grants (11 billion higher than HUD was requesting at the time)
600,000,000 for State and Tribal Assistance Grants under the EPA
348,000,000 for “construction” for the National Park Service
100,000,000 for Head Start
50,000,000 for the Historic Preservation Fund at the NPS
45,000,000 for upgrades to NOAA aircraft
22,000,000 for upgrading NOAA weather equipment
50,000,000 for “construction” for Fish and Wildlife Services
24,000,000 for the Defense Working Capital Fund
10,000,000 to Small Business Administration to plus up grants to organizations seeking to participate in disaster relief
4,400,000 for “capital improvement” to the Forestry Service
3,000,000 for oil spill research
2,000,000 for the Smithsonian’s famously leaky roofs.
1,000,000 for new cars for the DEA.
1,000,000 to the Legal Services Corporation.

There’s more than that, but this seems to be the most obvious examples. Consider this question: even today, five years removed from Sandy, how much of these billions of dollars in appropriated taxpayer money remains to be spent? And if there is significant money, would Governor Christie support repurposing those funds for immediate and direct disaster relief for the people suffering and dying right now in Houston? If not, why not? Or will he even admit such money exists?

The core point here is the same as in the social media memes / taunts that have been causing dustups lately: the one that shows the guy in the big cowboy hat praising the Lord that an angel has been sent to rescue him from the floodwaters - there's a Gadsden flag thrown in for good measure - and a FEMA person in a rescue boat saying, "Actually, we're from the federal government," and the one that says, "Everybody okay with using socialism to clean up after Harvey? OR shall we let the free market take care of things? Askin' for a friend." The vulgar implication in such memes is that there is a big role for the federal government to play in society and the lives of the citizens that comprise it generally speaking. They're advocating statism.

In a Facebook tangle I got involved in, the guy who put up that second meme didn't try to deny it. He said that's exactly what it was saying, and went on to coin - or perpetuate; I don't know that he came up with it - a phrase: "What's your #personalHarvey?"

Talk about an elastic concept. How far shall we stretch that one?

Actually, the private sector has been rocking the recovery effort in Texas:

• Gallery Furniture, a Houston-based chain store, opened two of its nearby locations to residents seeking shelter.
• HEB Grocery, which has more than 150 stores in Texas, sent its mobile kitchens to Houston to provide meals, pharmacy services, and ATMs.
• Wal-Mart is delivering nearly 800 truckloads of supplies to the region. It says it plans to send another 1,700 next week.
• KL Outdoor in Michigan is paying the shipping costs to send 2,000 kayaks to the region. Bass Pro is providing 80 boats.
• Duracell is sending out free batteries to anyone impacted by the storm.
• Anheuser-Busch InBev has sent more than 155,000 cans of drinking water.
• Airbnb activated its disaster response program, called “Urgent Accommodations,” which lets evacuees find lodging, with all service fees waived. Those with rooms to spare can use Airbnb to offer their space for free.
• Mobile carriers are issuing waivers and credits to customers in the area.
• The owner of the Kansas-based Vapebar sent a truck load of diapers, nonperishable food, telling a local news channel that ” a lot of bad things are happening down there right now and we need to help them out.”
• Volunteer Houston launched the Virtual Volunteer Reception Center on Monday, which lets those who want to help get matched with relief organizations and agencies.
• A multitude of businesses are donating large sums of money for relief efforts, including Aetna, Amazon, Boeing, Caterpillar, Wells Fargo, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Lowe’s.
• Waffle House has become an indicator of how bad a weather disaster is because the restaurant chain is so determined to keep operating in the worst conditions.

One more thing about the Facebook tangle: I mentioned how humbling and gratifying it was to see the GoFundMe account I set up for my stepson, whose house burned down in the spring, fill right up with contributions. Another commenter, who aligned with this "personal-Harvey" idea  said that when she lost her house, there was no crowdsourcing. I responded, "The advent of crowdsourcing is a perfect example of the beauty of the free market. Someone sees a need in society and applies human ingenuity to address it - and makes a profit!" The commenter I was responding to disappeared from the thread.

At first glance it may seem distasteful to bring politics into the Harvey situation, but it's there

Streiff at Red State points out the difference between Governor Abbott's warning and Houston mayor Sylvester Turner's, um, advice. On Friday, Abbott told Texans, "Even if an evacuation order hasn't been issued by your local official, if you're in an area between Corpus Christi and Houston, you strongly need to consider evacuating."

Then the mayor started sending out tweets about repositioning furniture, the Mayweather-McGregor fight, and a little break in the rain after 3 inches.

Streiff gets uncomfortably real at this point:

There is no nice way of putting this. Houston in a Democrat stronghold and the urge to make Greg Abbott look like an idiot was just too big of a temptation to resist. Perhaps the fiasco of the Hurricane Rita evacuation caused the leadership in Houston to miscalculate. Even so, there was no defensible reason for the mayor and his minion to go public and contradict some very sound advice and put lives at risk, both of citizens who did not evacuate and of first responders who will be called upon to try and rescue them. There were all sorts of options available to the Houston mayor short of pooh-poohing the imminent arrival of a major storm. For instance, he could have agreed with Abbott and emphasized that there was no evacuation order or he could have ordered the mandatory evacuation of areas that were known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Will there be consequences for this? Probably not. Democrats don’t vote Democrats out of office for corruption and incompetence. Take a look at any major US city you wish if you desire evidence.

What is predictable is that by Tuesday, the Houston mayor will be slamming state and federal response to the disaster and no one in the media is going to look twice at how the catastrophe happened.

Just putting this out there as something that will bring clarity to all the after-the-fact discussion.

The Sandy post

Longtime LITD readers know I don't devote much space to natural disasters.  The basic reason is that they are a given, an inevitable part of the landscape, an element of the parameters on the human condition.  Besides, how do you convey the "Our-prayers-go-out-to-all-those-affected-my-weren't-some-records-for-water-surge-broken-consider-sending-a-check-to-the-Red-Cross" message without sounding mind-numbingly trite?

I don't dwell on natural disasters for the same reason I don't dwell on plane crashes or interstate car pile-ups.  They tell us nothing about how human will is shaping history, and that is where the rubber really hits the road for our species.  Up and down the east coast, good people will work tirelessly to get power back on, get food and medical supplies where they're needed, and get debris cleared away.  And the fate of Western civilization will still hinge on next Tuesday.

Like so much else, this big storm is one more momentary claim on our attention as the biggest picture of all looms before us.  Misfortune befalls the residents of free and prosperous nations and those oppressed by despotic regimes alike.  The key is to do all one can - relentlessly - to grant more human beings a life in the first circumstance and consign ever-fewer to life in the second.

That said, it's really windy in central Indiana this morning.

The regime's scumbag tactics just keep getting stinkier

The Labor Department may not release October jobs stats before the election.  Sandy-related complications, doncha know.

This is foul.  Coming as it does on the heels of the possibly treasonous handling of the Benghazi debacle, the nation is finally getting the clear picture of what the Most Equal Comrade, his henchmen and the Freedom-Hatred Party generally are about that so many of us have spent years attempting to convey.

And there are still people who are enthusiastically voting for this chunk of dog vomit. I know some of them.  It's going to be difficult to ever speak to them again.

Lord of Hosts, author of space and time and all that fill them, redeemer of souls, please keep hatred for Barack Hussein Obama out of my heart.  As difficult as it is to admit, I am no more deserving of Your mercy than he is.

And please end the curse of his presidency on this wayward nation.  Restore us to uprightness, that we may once again be humankind's beacon.

The obligatory Irene post

Yawn.

Another inconsequential hurricane that sputters and comes apart upon coming ashore.

May all the flooded roads and downed power lines get fixed quickly.

Seriously, I don't mean to sound flip, but the big story here - and even that has been covered ad nauseum elsewhere - is that our postmodern 24-hour-news-cycle reporting media have a vested interest in making anything they possibly can into the story of the century and milking it until the cows come home (couldn't resist).

Well, you might say, how are Drudge and Breitbart and even a rightie blogger such as myself exempt from the charge that they are driven by cheap zeal for the eye-popping headline?

I'll confess that even truly big-deal natural disasters and accidents such as plane crashes (that are caused by mechanical failures, as distinguished from those caused by jihadists) only hold my interest for so long.  Unless there are larger trends or principles to be gleaned from them, they quickly devolve into ain't-that-awful voyeurism or, worse, excuses to wallow in feeeeeeelings. Toward the end of his CNN run, Larry King used to relish opportunities to line up guests who'd been through an ain't-that-awful experience and spend his entire hour asking them "What were you feeling when . . . "

Now, the stuff that, say, Drudge generally considers radar-worthy is of a different sort.  It has an ideological charge.  It is chosen for the front page because it has good guys and bad guys.  It has implications for freedom, prosperity, the prospects for common sense.  Statistically necessary occurences in which no human will was a factor come and go.  Virtue and vision and their opposites, on the other hand, create ripple effects in our civilization for good or ill.  They have ongoing impact.  And the most savvy of those who bring us the real stories know they are helping us, citizens who wish to be not only informed but truly sharp and guided by core principles, to cultivate an instant sense of what such a story is likely to mean.

Back to Irene, there is that ridiculous series of photographs of the MEC holding forth at his "command center," but that is by definition a forgettable by-product of the whole episode as well.