Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 13

On this installment of Barney and Clyde, we bring you the weighty matters on the nation's plate this fortnight, including: HOW FREE IS AMERICA IN JULY 2020? - Silence=Violence, COVID-19 Lockdowns / mask mandates, Father Ted Rothrock of Carmel Indiana's cancelation
THEY REALLY SAID THAT?! - Is Trump trolling or is he the one being trolled? Also thoughts on last night's White House speach MAYBE SOMEDAY WE'LL TRY A FREE MARKET - WaPo writer Tracy Jan wonders why there's still so much inequity in Minneapolis after 50 years of Progressive leadership DON'T START ME TO TALKIN' - Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest regarding the Jeffery Epstein case All that, plus Space Force, Coca-Cola, obscure Mexican grocery items, and more!

Corporate America is rising to the task

Today's briefing has a different tone to it. I don't mean what Trump has had to say, although he stuck to facts more than usual. What I'm referring to is the group of corporate CEOs stepping to the podium in succession - heads of My Pillow, Jockey International, Procter & Gamble, United Technologies - to speak of what their firms are doing to reconfigure their manufacturing processes in order to make products needed to address this crisis.

This is America at its best. The Left loves to bash "corporate America," but as those who have thought it through a bit more understand, corporations are merely organizations comprised of various elements - investors, managers, engineers and shop-floor personnel - that come together to advance the human condition. They're human beings.

These people are doing things that are actually needed. They don't have time to own the libs or own the Trumpists or otherwise preen.

The record book will show that they did every last thing they could to stave off a fate for our nation no one wants to contemplate.

God is pleased with what they are doing.

Monday roundup

Great Allen Guezlo essay at Public Discourse on reconciling two views of America: creed and culture.

Pete Wehner at The Atlantic on how the GOP has been broken by Trump:

From a certain perspective, their timidity is understandable. They know that to publicly challenge Trump—to call out his ethical transgressions, cruelty, and indecency even as they support his policies—invites impassioned attacks from Trump supporters and, in some cases, a primary challenge. No one likes to be under attack, particularly by the base of one’s own party, and no one wants to lose a job.

Moreover, they will argue, they must defend the president in public so they can have influence in private. They have also convinced themselves that they are essential to the project of repairing the Republican Party post-Trump, and that this requires that they not be viewed as disloyal to Trump while he’s serving as president. “What good does it do to attack Trump?” they will ask. He won’t change his ways, and they will only weaken themselves in the process. (Many of them are happy to attack Trump in private conversations, citing, chapter and verse, things he has said or done that alarm them, showing that they both know better and are playing a cynical game.)

That, at least, is the story they tell themselves. Some of what they say is worth taking into account. But what they don’t tell themselves, probably because it would be too psychologically shattering, is that they have become fully complicit in a corrupt enterprise called the Trump presidency. (Romney is the rare exception.) They are defending actions they know are wrong and that, if they had been done by a Democratic president, they would be outraged by. More than that, they are validating Trump’s approach to politics—the hyper-aggression, the lawlessness, the mendacity, the shamelessness—and therefore guaranteeing imitators. It also happens that their influence on the president is far sm

aller than they tell themselves. They have made concession after concession after concession, justifying each one along the way. Then you look back at the road they’ve traveled, and it’s breathtaking. Donald Trump has changed them far more than they have changed Donald Trump.

Michael Strain, writing at Bloomberg, makes a point, focusing on economic policy, that LITD often makes in a broadly applied way: Yeah, we're facing a binary choice, and both options are rotten. That's especially so if the Dem candidate turns out to be Bernie Sanders.

For a presidential contender who makes her aversion to fossil fuels the centerpiece of her political life, Elizabeth Warren has some eye-opening connections to that industry:

So it’s worth noting that, for years, she and her husband reported modest income from natural-gas royalties in her native state of Oklahoma. Ms. Warren’s financial disclosure filed with the Senate in 2012 included $504 of income from “gas well royalty interests” in Latimer County. The next year it was $203. Drill a little deeper and the facts get even more interesting.

Ms. Warren’s campaign has posted 11 years of her tax returns, which show gas income from at least 2008. That year she filed jointly with her husband, Bruce Mann, who had $872 in royalties from gas wells in Oklahoma. There are smaller amounts—a few hundred dollars—reported over the next several tax returns, before the yearly earnings stop.

You might be thinking that we’re only talking about a few hundred dollars here and there, several years in the past, for someone who is a multimillionaire. What’s the big deal, right? Well, if you read on in the WSJ report, it goes deeper than what’s found on her tax returns. Property records show a 2011 sale of all the oil, gas and mineral rights for some of their property to none other than their own son, Alexander. (Keeping it in the family, I guess.)

The paper trail goes on further, including quite recent events. There’s a 2017 transfer of parcels of property in Hughes County, Oklahoma, including drilling rights, involving her son and three of her brothers. The agreements include the payment of royalties for any recovered resources. And those agreements were slated for three years, so they will still be in effect until at least this summer.

Paul Krause at The Imaginative Conservative says that revisiting Milton's Paradise Lost can broaden our sense of the full meaning of the term eros.

I seriously have not drawn a conclusion yet on this one. Was Nigel Farage's farewell address to the European Parliament, replete with Union Jack flag-waving, hours before Brexit became official, a gratuitous stunt that merely increased the sum total of yay-hoo-ism in the world, or was it the perfect outgoing message to send to Brussels? It sure brought out the pinched-face-schoolteacher in Parliament VP Mairead McGuinness. What do you all think?

 

Monday roundup

Britain native Louise Gorsuch, wife of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has written a magnificent short essay entitled "Why I Became An American Citizen." Don't worry, there's not a syllable of saccharine boilerplate in it. It's authentic, bits of it are funny, and the observations are keen.

Check out the before-and-after photos that show the transformation of a Los Angeles homeless camp after activist Scott Pressler and his team donned hazmat suits and removed 50 tons of garbage in nine hours.

This essay is actually from May 2018, but I came across it somewhere yesterday and it's far and away the most helpful, in terms of speaking to my biggest challenge as a faith-walk pilgrim, thing I've read in ages. It's by theology student Ethan Roe, and it's entitled "Is It Okay If I Don't Feel God?"

When Elizabeth Warren and her people use the term "accountable capitalism," understand that it is raw tyranny. One creepy thing to consider is that if she's - God forbid - in a position to implement it, she'll have the acquiescence of the Business Roundtable, which has already resolved that the long-standing understanding that a company's only responsibility is to show a profit to its shareholders has somehow been rendered obsolete.

Mass protests by Christians across Ethiopia to protest the spike in church burnings.

Tuesday roundup

Alan Dershowitz piece at The Hill entitled "Time To Tell the Truth About the Palestinian Issue." It's a refutation of a New York Times Sunday Review column entitled "Time To Break the Silence About Palerstine."

There is no silence to break. What must be broken is the double standard of those who elevate the Palestinian claims over those of the Kurds, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Chechens, the Tibetans, the Ukrainians, and many other more deserving groups who truly suffer from the silence of the academia, the media, and the iternational community. The United Nations devotes more of its time, money, and votes to the Palestinian issue than to the claims of all of these other oppressed groups combined.

The suffering of Palestinians, which does not compare to the suffering of many other groups, has been largely inflicted by themselves. They could have had a state, with no occupation, if they had accepted the Peale Commission Report of 1938, the United Nations Partition of 1947, the Camp David Summit deal of 2000, or the Ehud Olmert offer of 2008. They rejected all these offers, responding with violence and terrorism, because doing so would have required them to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, something they are unwilling to do even today.

Not just a state, but a vibrant, robust one:

Had the early Palestinian leadership, with the surrounding Arab states, not attacked Israel the moment it declared statehood, it would have a viable state with no refugees. Had Hamas used the resources it received when Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 to build schools and hospitals instead of using these resources to construct rocket launchers and terror tunnels, it could have become a “Singapore on the Sea” instead of the poverty stricken enclave the Palestinian leadership turned it into.

He dismantles a number of egregious assertions she makes about how Palestinians inside Israel live. A definite red-the-whole-thing piece.

Speaking of refutations, Maria Bartiromo obliterates AOC's 70-percent taxation idea:

Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, however, isn’t convinced or amused by Ocasio-Cortez’s complete lack of common sense and her economic naivete. Appearing on ox News on Tuesday from the World Economic Forum, Bartiromo began ripping apart Ocasio-Cortez’s frail economic plan like a wolf on a deer carcass.

“What is that going to do to the economy if you make it so economically difficult for the highest earners?” Bartiromo said. “Let me just point out that according to Tax Foundation, the top 10 percent of earners already pay almost 80 percent of all taxes.”

Bartiromoro said it all reminds her of something New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio said recently about all the wealth being in the wrong hands, to which the Fox Business host proceeded to tear apart the idea that the rich are somehow horrific, greedy people who use their money only for evil as people like Ocasio-Cortez like to insinuate.

“What exactly is the wrong hands?” Bartiromo said. “Is the wrong hands Ken Langone — the billionaire that gave $100 billion NYU medical school so that NYU could give out free medical school educations? Or maybe it it’s in Steve Schwarzman‘s hands — who just gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the New York Public Library, so that people can have access to new technology in the library? Or maybe it’s someone like David Koch, or someone who has given so much to medical schools?”

Bartiromo wondered allowed about what would happen to all of this charitable giving by the rich should all of their taxes be raised to such absurd levels.

“You have to wonder what those billionaires would do with their money if the first thing they have to do is give 70 percent of it to the government,” Bartiromo said. “And let’s talk about productivity for a second — a whole ‘nother conversation. Are you going to work incredibly hard with the belief that you can earn great success, and you can get better and more wealth? Are you going to work really hard if you know that, at a point, you’ll have to give it all to the government? I don’t think so. So those comments, to me, seem quite naive.” 

The Supreme Court does the right thing. Our military is no place for experimenting with putting mentally ill people in stressful situations on which our national security hinges:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender people while court challenges continue.
The high court split 5-4 in allowing the plan to take effect, with the court’s five conservatives greenlighting it and its four liberal members saying they would not have.

Have you stopped to wonder who would be filling Brett Kavanaugh's  old position? Hopefully, this lady:

If you are uninitiated about Neomi Rao, chances are you’ll get to hear her name quite often very soon. Rao, the Republican pick to replace the old seat of judge––now Justice––Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is suddenly under scrutiny by “liberal advocacy groups” for her college writings.

The Freedom-Haters' specific gripes?

So, what are Rao’s “appalling views”? USA Today cites some of them. Rao, a fine judicial mind even in her early years, seems to be quite poised and evenhanded for a college kid. She advocates for a single national identity instead of hyphenated Americans, because that is the only way to build up real solidarity, through healthy civic nationalism instead of individualism and appealing to tribal identity.

Rao wrote: “multiculturalists…separate and classify everyone according to race, gender and sexual orientation. Those who reject their assigned categories are called names: So-called conforming blacks are called ‘oreos’ by members of their own community, conservatives become ‘fascists.’ Preaching tolerance, multiculturalists seldom practice it…”

Her strongest words were against egalitarianism, and on advocating prudence. On charges of sexual assault, she wrote: “Unless someone made her drinks undetectably strong or forced them down her throat, a woman, like a man, decides when and how much to drink. And if she drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice…implying that a drunk woman has no control of her actions, but that a drunk man does strips women of all moral responsibility.” 

Quoting Camille Paglia, Rao wrote something considered poison in the current climate, that there is currently a “dangerous feminist idealism which teaches women that they are equal. Women believe falsely that they should be able to go anywhere with anyone.” Needless to say, the reactions to these have been swift from liberal publications, which are increasingly indistinguishable from activism blogs.

Sociologist and public intellectual Nathan Glazer passed away recently at the age of 95. Here is an essay he wrote for Commentary in 1976 about how the United States is the only country that has tied its national values to its foreign policy.

 In England, France, Germany, Japan, or India, only the Right speaks of national values and insists that they be made significant in the shaping of policy. In America, however, liberals as well as conservatives are given to asserting that national values should affect foreign policy. I think there is one important reason for this: in the United States when we speak of national values, there is no implication of a primordial past, lost to memory, no suggestion that our values arise from race, blood, and soil. To speak of American values is to speak—still, and for most people—of founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers—known to all, clearly available, existing in the full light of history, and propounding what have by now become universal values, whether or not they are realized in practice. 

 To really become an American is to embrace those principles. It's why this country stands as a symbol to so many around the world in a way that other countries do not.

 

An encapsulation of the UN's overall worthlessness

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has a piece at NRO today on the idiotic UN report on poverty in our country.

The report demonstrates the collective cluelessness that arises when an international body is formed that gives equal weight to scum regimes and sane, grown-up countries trying to live by humane values and achieve the various forms of advancement that make their societies livable.

ast month, the United Nations released a report about poverty in America. A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. His report was harshly critical, condemning America for “punish[ing] those who are not in employment,” among other farcical notions.

Everyone knows there is poverty in America. Thousands of public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government attempt to address poverty, as they should. Thousands more nonprofit, charitable, and religious organizations honorably dedicate themselves to fighting poverty in our country.

Think about how this self-congratulatory assemblage of tyrants and grandstanders has chosen to spend its time, money and human energy:

 It is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to spend its scarce resources — more of which come from the United States than from any other country — studying poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, a country where the vast majority is not in poverty, and where public and private-sector social safety nets are firmly in place to help those who are.

Instead, the U.N. might have studied poverty in the Congo, where 60 percent of the entire population lacks the basics of food and electricity. Or Burundi, where the typical annual income is $280. Or Venezuela, where narco-state dictators have driven a once prosperous country into the ground with an inflation rate over 25,000 percent, and where diseases that were once thought eliminated are now reappearing. 

When there are many dozens of countries where poverty consumes most of the population, and where corrupt governments deliberately make the problem much worse, why would the U.N. study poverty in America? The answer is politics.

Take a closer look at what the U.N. report says we should do about poverty. It reads like a socialist political manifesto of higher taxes, government-run health care, and “decriminaliz[ing] being poor” (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor). 

The report also distorts and misrepresents the facts about poverty in America in ways that a biased political opponent might. For example, it states that 18.5 million Americans live in “extreme poverty” and 5.3 million live in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty.” In fact, these numbers fail to incorporate the vast majority of welfare assistance provided to low-income households, such as food stamps, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits. The report also exaggerates poverty by excluding pension and Social Security assets from its calculations. The truth is that America’s median household income has hit record highs. Wages have risen faster under President Trump for low- and middle- income earners than for high earners. And for the first time on record America now has more job openings than unemployed workers.

The best way for the US to proceed on any policy matter, from North Korea to African poverty to Iran-Arab tensions, is to ignore the UN. Leave it completely out of the proceedings. As an entity with  a mission distinct from that of any of the countries comprising it - well, that's not exactly correct; its mission hews pretty closely to those of, say, Venezuela, Iran and Russia -  it has not and cannot have any idea what a nation-state like the United States is all about. Its input is of absolutely no value.