Wednesday roundup

Looks like Squirrel-Hair is going to take the bait with regard to the perennial Israel-Palestinian conundrum. The temptation to apply his self-perceived dealmaking skills is apparently too great to resist. And isn't the use of the term "losers" to describe jihadists just the perfect S-H-esque touch?


I have never liked Sean Hannity. This goes back way before the emergence of Trump as a focus of punditry. I just thought his polemical chops were abysmal. Jabbing his finger in the air and shouting, "Why don't you and your liberal friends ever . . . " I remember when he grieved over the passing of his dog of many years on his radio show, and his mentioning the dog's name. I thought to myself, he's the kind of guy who would name his dog Snowball. But he's really exposed the full extent of his third-tier-at-best approach with this pursuit of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, despite opposition not only from Rich's family, but from Fox News as well.

The Manchester Ariana Grande concert bombing was probably not a lone wolf operation.

The two money paragraphs from Kevin Williamson's NRO piece on the Mulvaney budget proposal:

Here’s the situation: About 80 percent of federal spending is consumed by five things: 1. National defense; 2. Social Security; 3. Medicare; 4. Medicaid and other related health-care benefits; 5. Interest on the debt. President Trump wants to increase spending on defense by about 10 percent while shielding Social Security and Medicare from cuts. Short of a default, he doesn’t have any choice but to pay the interest on the debt. So that leaves things pretty tight.

And:

In the real world, we need genuine tax reform that is something close to revenue-neutral, significant entitlement reforms that will be politically unpopular, and defense spending that is flat or slightly lower. Nobody wants that eat-your-spinach budget, but the sooner we get serious about fiscal responsibility, the less painful reform will be. Incompetence

Incompetent or agenda-driven? CNN publishes a story about a magnanimous taxi driver giving people free rides away from the above-mentioned Manchester terror-attack scene. Only problem: the headline describes him as a Muslim, but the dude was a Sikh.