Quick takes on four matters currently on the nation's plate

 Elon Musk/Twitter - With staff ranging from comms people to critical systems engineers bailing by the thousands and by the hour, one is seeing a lot of been-nice-mutually-following-you-here-here-are-my other-social-media-platform-addresses tweets. 

Some are arguing that the Musk takeover is exactly what was needed at Twitter, that it was just classic fat-trimming. But he set about steering the company toward the most toxic organizational culture he could have. He sure got a decisive response to his if-you're-on-board-with-our-new-hardcore-work-pace-respond-by-5 PM ultimatum. 

I've just really had it with arrogant rich guys swaggering into business situations and upending everything just to stroke their own egos. The world needs less bullying, not more. 

Ukraine - Within a week, the country went from the jubilation of liberating Kherson to experiencing the most sustained missile attack from Russia since the invasion began. With a moment of hair-raising drama for the West, with the missile explosion in Poland. Zelensky is still insisting that the circumstances of that aren't decisively determined, but I think that's because he, quite understandably, is inclined to smell the hint of a threat in any development. Let us hope Western support for this valuable ally doesn't waver.

Trump's announcement - The actual event in the gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom was underwhelming. All the photos I've seem of him stepping off the stage afterward show him scowling. What's up with that? 

From the better-late-than-never file, some evangelical leaders who have supported the Very Stable Genius are considering that it was a bad bet.  

Donors are bailing.

Ivanka telling her dad that she's not going anywhere near this 2024 campaign is an interesting development. She's long struck me as far less prone to ate-up-edness than her brothers - the ones with the same mother as her. 

It's not 2016 anymore. 

The new House majority's intentions - Oh, sheesh. It hasn't taken any time at all for incoming committee chairs to signal plans to launch investigations, with Hunter Biden first and foremost among them. Look, it's no secret that Hunter's been an unsavory character. His laptop is an undeniably juicy piece of electronics. But with inflation still raging, crime out of control in way too many cities, a southern border more porous than ever, and with questions about how involved - or not - the federal government should be in eduction surrounding that issue's red-hot current status, this looks like a squandering of a ripe opportunity. One does hear House Pubs speaking of working to steer energy policy in a common-sense direction and some other initiatives that have actual relevance to national wellbeing, but they are sullied by this zeal for investigations.

Respect for Marriage Act - Dems' bundling of interracial marriage with same-sex "marriage" allowed them to be disingenuous about situations like that of Mitch McConnell, who voted against it, even as he's married to a Chinese woman. Saw what you did there.

There's a supremely dismaying piece at Christianity Today that takes the hey-we-just-have-to-acknowledge-that-this-is-now-the-lay-of-the-land attitude that I decried in a recent Precipice post. One v can be so into what is that one decides that what should be is not worth pursuing. And I have to wonder why new CT editor Russell Moore was cool with running a piece that asserts that "in a morally pluralistic society, a few concession yield a win for the common good." That's tacitly granting that the United States is a fundamentally different country from what it was fifteen years ago. 

The basic architecture of the universe is apparent not only in the way human families have formed over the course of our history's species, but in the sexual behavior of every other species defined by the male-female dichotomy. We are trying to define what is beyond our capacity to define. It will not end well. 

Saturday roundup

Doug Bandow has a piece at The National Interest entitled "German Politics: From Boring and Stable to Unpredictable." The main point is that the two parties that have been by far the major players since the late 1940s, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (well, there was that 1946 - 1989 period during which the eastern portion had as its for-all-intents-and-purposes exclusive party the Socialist Unity Party) have waned markedly in influence and a number of more populist groups have been on the rise. This was really brought home in Merkel's recent failed attempt to forge a grand coalition.

Germany is one of those countries that has actually been a series of nation-states, from the days of the Holy Roman Empire through the entity known as Prussia through the North German Federation, the empire of the Kaiser days, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the side-by-side German nation-states of the above-mentioned period, and the current iteration. Memorable leaders have held sway during these periods, including Frederic the Great, The first and second Wilhelms, Bismarck, the monstrous Adolph Hitler. Since his end in a Berlin bunker, the succession of leaders has been - well, somewhat boring and stable. But through it all, there has been a readily identifiable culture, one that at times has contributed some of the greatest music and literature to the world, and seen the development of a number of social-science disciplines that have come to modern prominence.

Because of the lack of political continuity, however, the rest of Europe has always had good reason to be wary of what Germany was up to. Are we entering such a period now? Also, what effect is the recent influx of immigrants having on the cultural continuity?


Ivanka Trump is taking her own entourage to the Global Entrepreneurial Summit in India, and it doesn't include any high-level State Department people.

Yesterday, I linked to two pieces by Erick Erickson in which he talks about staying put in central Georgia rather than moving to the Acela Corridor and how it's impacted his career. David French at NRO today takes the context out a level, looking at the change in the tone of Erickson's polemics as his faith has deepened and assumed central importance in his life:

Erickson built his early reputation as a fearless conservative firebrand. His language could be lacerating, his devotion to the conservative cause seemed absolute, and he was on no one’s short list of cultural peacemakers.

But life happens. No, that’s not correct; God happens. Christians are familiar with the concepts of justification and sanctification. Justification is the moment when God — through His Son’s atoning sacrifice — declares a man righteous in His sight. Sanctification is the lifelong process of spirit battling flesh, of the redeemed man’s journey to holiness. In other words, it means that we change, and God uses many different instruments to accomplish that change.

Indeed. As I said yesterday, when God positions himself front and center in one's waking consciousness, One starts looking at the basics of how one is treating other people.

This is the question before me as an opinion writer as well: how to stand unwaveringly for principles one knows to be good, right and true without copping an attitude.


The other day, I put up a post entitled "Someone Please Take Away His Phone." The particular cringe-inducing Twitter snit Trump was engaged in at that time was with LaVar Ball. Well, no one has heeded my imploring. The national embarrassment president has now geared up for his annual Twitter tussle with Time magazine over whether he'll be named Man of the Year. Only Squirrel-Hair could have the world's most powerful position and still have the world's most fragile ego. "Probably is no good." A comprehensive archive of his he-really-tweeted-that outbursts would be quite a read.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line says that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may actually be the Trump cabinet member getting the most - and most conservative - things accomplished. Fronts on which this can be seen include voting rights, immigration and identity-politics issues.

Thursday roundup

Ben Shapiro has a horrifying piece on just how far post-American society has deteriorated:

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a piece by Jack Turban, a research fellow at the Yale School of Medicine. Turban says that doctors should begin applying puberty blockers to children who identify as transgender as early as possible. That's because, according to him, "it has become clear that if we support these children in their transgender identities instead of trying to change them, they thrive instead of struggling with anxiety and depression."

Turban uses as his example one 14-year-old girl named Hannah who was born a boy named Jonah. Turban glows: "Hannah is using a puberty-blocking implant and getting ready to embark on the path of developing a female body by starting estrogen. Ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice. New data has now made it the protocol for thousands of American children."

Ten years ago, doctors weren't embracing politically correct insanity as medicine.

By now you probably know about the 21,600-pound GBU-43 bomb - the most powerful in the US arsenal after our nuclear arsenal - that was dropped on an ISIS tunnel system in Afghanistan.

Good piece in Commentary by Noah Rothman entitled "Don't Call Trump's Pivot 'Centrist.'" He's made several moves that have confounded his water-carriers lately, but the more noteworthy development is how the Bannon camp-vs-Kushner camp dynamic is playing out:

Increasingly, Trump’s agenda is being defined as beholden to “centrists” Jared and Ivanka. Kushner leads an influential group of “centrist financiers,” according to the Washington Post. He heads a “centrist faction” that has emerged ascendant, Axios reported. Kushner exerted his influence at the paper he owned, the New York Observer, to ensure “centrist” editorial coverage, the New Yorker averred.

This is a misleading descriptor. Only in political media could you describe two gentry urban liberals as “centrist” and get away with it.

If Trump desires positive reinforcement from the press, elites, and Beltway fixers with whom he is surrounded, ordering uncostly military strikes on a genocidal dictator isn’t the only way to go about it. There is no surer pathway to a “legacy achievement” than the pursuit of big-ticket legislation. And Trump’s new closest advisors are just the couple to guide the president’s evolution in this more liberal direction.

Kushner has been described as a typical Manhattan Democrat by friends and has even hosted fundraisers for prominent Democratic politicians. Leaks in the press regarding their influence over this president have routinely highlighted their ability to convince Trump to pursue liberal agenda items, like reserving his judgment on the Paris climate agreement. Ivanka Trump has proposed a new entitlement in the form of a $500 billion maternity leave program that amounts to an expansion of unemployment benefits to new mothers—a program that would induce businesses to abandon their own maternity programs and offload that burden onto the federal government. If this is what we call “centrist” now, we are in the midst of a crisis of linguistic imprecision.

The threat to conservatism posed by the nationalist populism of Steve Bannon was that, by assuming control of the GOP, he could transform the philosophy of small government into an ideological muddle that endorses big spending and government interventionism with a hefty dose of ethnic anxiety. The same threat exists if Trump becomes a conduit through which his daughter and son-in-law can exert their influence over presidential policy. Trump’s support for a $1 trillion infrastructure program purchased entirely on credit is no more conservative than the creation of a new entitlement program. The principled right is bound by ideology to confront and oppose both initiatives, even if that’s an exhausting proposition. Conservatives thus need to gird themselves for the struggle to preserve the definition of conservatism once again, albeit from a new threat.

We could have had Ted.

Interesting piece at PJ Media on a survey taken in the UK that shows that a significant percentage of "Christians" don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus or in life after death. Author Daniel J. Phillips sets things straight:

 . . . one has the perilous liberty of insisting that Christ did not bodily rise from the grave, or one can admit that Christ did. Anyone may do either.

However, if one chooses the first option, he must let go of any claim to be a Christian. And if he claims to be a Christian, he must let go of the first option. How can I say that? Because I’ve read 1 Corinthians 15 and taken it seriously. Affirming the bodily resurrection of Jesus is definitional for Christian faith.

Why do people pretend otherwise? I’ve never seen the appeal in claiming to be something you aren’t. I wasn’t a Christian for the first part of my life. I knew it, and I didn’t want anyone to be mistaken. Now that I am a Christian, I don’t want anyone to believe that I’m an atheist, or a Mormon, or a Roman Catholic, or a Hindu. I’m not going to try to say, “Well, I’m really an atheist, but I believe in God and everything the Bible says.” Or “I’m really a Roman Catholic, but I look to Jesus alone for salvation, by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, as I learn from Scripture alone.” And so on. Why pretend to be what you aren’t?

There are literally no real benefits to a false claim to Christian faith. A false claim not only does not erase sins, it adds to them. It provides no reason to hope for Heaven, or God’s acceptance or love. In fact, it inoculates one to the real saving message of the Gospel, since one imagines he’s already checked that box – which he hasn’t. All such a person has to look forward to is hearing the words Jesus warns us He’ll say to “many” in the last day: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23). They are all certain they’re “in” – saved, OK with God – and they’re all wrong.

So why do people who in major ways do not sync with the Biblical description of a Christian become so emotional when anyone suggests that they drop the label, as they have already dropped the beliefs and/or practices inherent in the label?

The facts are simple enough: atheists do not believe in God, Muslims do not eat pork, and Christians admit that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

Otherwise, we might as well eliminate the words hypocrite, delusion and deception also. 

The jackboot-snowflakes at Notre Dame say they'll feel "unsafe," doncha know, if Vice President Mike Pence comes to give the commencement address next month.

 

 

Thursday roundup

Allahpundit at Hot Air on Ivanka becoming an official government employee:

What inspired Ivanka to make the leap from informal advisor to formal employee? It was probably the letter sent today by Elizabeth Warren and Tom Carper to the Office of Government Ethics wondering how Trump would “voluntarily” comply with ethics rules she wasn’t technically bound by. With Democrats sniffing around and the White House facing a needless distraction, they decided to resolve the ethics ambiguity by bringing her aboard as an official assistant. As for how she’ll reconcile her business interest under the trust with her government duties, a clause in the trust gives her the option to veto a deal the company is working on because it conflicts with her White House role or to recuse herself from any official White House business that might affect the company. It’ll be interesting to see how she decides which option to choose in a given case. Is it a simple matter of preferring recusal if the deal her company’s pursuing is lucrative enough? 

I think a formal role is for the best because, let’s face it, she’s going to go on operating as a de facto formal advisor, replete with sitting in on meetings with Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abe, no matter what. Better to at least have her under an umbrella of federal ethics rules than in that previous gray zone. With Ivanka now an official White House presence and Jared Kushner being given more and more responsibility, from overseeing the Israeli/Palestinian peace process(!) to heading up a new agency designed to streamline the federal government(!!), the two of them are quite probably the most powerful couple in the world. That’s why the standard critique flying around on Twitter this afternoon — “how would Republicans feel if President Hillary gave Chelsea a role like this?!” — doesn’t quite work. Kushner and Ivanka have considerably more power than Chelsea Clinton would have had in a Clinton administration even under the most pessimistic scenarios. And as John Zieglerpoints out, at least Chelsea would be acting according to her mother’s vision. The Kushners are more liberal than the average Trump fan is, on everything from climate change to federal maternity-leave policies.

Exit question: Would Ivanka be a feminist hero if her name were Ivanka Clinton?

Kevin Williamson at NRO on how the carried-interest provision in our tax code is not a "loophole":

If you open a dry-cleaner business and your rich uncle invests $20,000 in the project to get you started, the profit you realize 20 years later when you sell your successful chain of cleaners is treated as a long-term capital gain for tax purposes, in spite of the fact that you didn’t have any of your own money at risk. You didn’t invest money: You invested time, work, knowledge, and innovation, and you bore the opportunity costs for all the other things you might have done with your time and labor. You are every bit as much of an investor as is a guy who buys 20 shares of GM and parks them in his retirement account for 20 years. More of one, some might say.

Opposition to carried interest is, like everything hat motivates the Left, driven by envy and other feeeeeelings:

The broader discussion about taxes and fairness and — odious phrase — “social justice” is a waste of time. Taxes are not an instrument of justice: They are an instrument of revenue. The federal government requires x dollars to do the things we demand of it, and the only end of tax policy should be raising those dollars in a way that causes as little economic disruption as possible and invades our privacy as little as possible. At the moment, our model is lots of disruption and maximal invasion of privacy — and all of it handled by the incompetent, corrupt, politicized agents of the Internal Revenue Service.

Those are the tax-code problems we should be addressing. Instead, we are addressing some unhappy Americans’ envy and resentment. That isn’t tax policy — it’s psychotherapy.

And it’s bad medicine.

This is really happening: Twitter derision of Mike Pence for saying he won't eat dinner alone with any woman who is not his wife.

 

Layer upon layer - the Ivanka / Nordstrom / Conway / Chaffetz edition

Ivanka, who in fact no longer actively manages the brand of fashion merchandise bearing her name, is, in fact, a left-leaner on a number of issues, such as paid family leave and making LGBT people employed by government feel "comfortable."

No matter, at least not to the Nordstrom chain, which pulled all products bearing her name from its stores.

Then Kellyanne Conway stepped in it this morning on Fox & Friends by urging viewers to go out and buy Ivanka-brand merchandise.

Not just poor judgement, but a legal no-no that has now come to the attention of the House Oversight Committee, bringing Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cummings into common cause:

The two top lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee are joining forces to request an Office of Government Ethics review of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway urging TV viewers to buy Ivanka Trump's merchandise. 

A spokesperson for the Oversight Committee's top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), confirmed Thursday that Cummings and Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) would jointly send a letter requesting the ethics review.

Chaffetz said Conway's remarks on Fox & Friends" were "clearly over the line" and "unacceptable," according to The Associated Press.

The wild and wooly West Wing of the Squirrel-Hair era knows how to kick up a dust storm.

Friday roundup

Why do the Russian hacking activities during the just-concluded US election cycle seem so focused on one party? The other party had a better email filter.

Important Megan McArdle column at Bloomberg arguing that the Trump transition teams's request to see records of any climate conferences Department of Energy staffers have attended is a bad move that needs to be backed away from, but that the Left is on very shaky ground getting incensed about it, given its harassment of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This chick is going to be trouble:

Initially Ivanka was going to operate outside the administration, managing the family businesses with her brothers once Trump himself withdrew from them. Then it looked like she wouldn’t be on the business side after all but would join her father and husband in the new administration somewhere. That developed further with news that she’d be getting space in the East Wing that typically goes to the First Lady, supporting the theory that Ivanka will be taking on the public duties of FLOTUS more than Melania Trump will. And now here’s the IJ Review with news that Ivanka’s already out in front on legislation, dialing up congressional Republicans to lobby for legislation on one of her pet causes, creating tax incentives — and a new entitlement — related to child care.

In short, in the span of about six weeks, she’s gone from someone who wouldn’t be involved in government to maybe the most influential “First Lady” on policy matters since, er, Hillary Clinton. Come to think of it, they’re both liberals and they’re both from New York. Maybe someday Ivanka too will blaze a trail to the Senate and eventually to her party’s presidential nomination, only to lose the election to Kanye West or some other rich guy who thought it’d be fun to run and beat the political nerds at their own game.

Sarah Chamberlain, the president and CEO of the center-right organization Republican Main Street Partnership, told Independent Journal Review that Ivanka Trump has been calling Republican members of Congress since her father’s victory last month.

“She’s calling some to talk about the child care provisions,” Chamberlain said. “It’s gonna be a big issue for her.”…

“I think she’s hoping to [play a large role in the administration]. It did come out she’s gonna have an office in the East Wing and actually I think she’s gonna be a great addition. I think she was a huge help in getting her father elected.”

In case you’ve forgotten, Trump’s Ivanka-crafted child-care plan caused a ripple among the three conservatives left in the party when he announced it in September, as it guarantees six weeks of paid maternity leave for new mothers. Under the plan, if your employer won’t cover the cost of that, Uncle Sam will. The expense to taxpayers will, supposedly, be offset by eliminating fraud from the federal unemployment insurance program, but ridding programs of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is a classic lip-service panacea for new federal spending. Americans like the idea of paid family leave, though, even if they’re uncertain about exactly who should pay for it. With Trump pushing Republicans to get onboard with taxpayer funding and Democrats already sure to back a new entitlement, it’s a cinch that a majority will support letting the feds handle it before too long. If Trump can get the right to rethink Vladimir Putin, he can get them to rethink paid maternity leave. And we’ve already learned a lesson from the Carrier deal: If a policy is popular, whether or not it sets a bad precedent is of secondary concern.

On the other hand, this is another great appointment:

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will nominate attorney David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel, selecting an envoy who supports Israeli settlements and other changes to U.S. policies in the region. Friedman said he looked forward to carrying out his duties from "the U.S. embassy in Israel's eternal capital, Jerusalem," even though the embassy is in Tel Aviv.

Trump, like some of his predecessors, has vowed to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, a politically charged act that would anger Palestinians who want east Jerusalem as part of their sovereign territory. The move would also distance the U.S. from most of the international community, including its closest allies in Western Europe and the Arab world.

The president-elect said Friedman would "maintain the special relationship" between the U.S. and Israel.

But the announcement sparked anger from liberal Jewish groups. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, called nominating Friedman "reckless," citing his support for settlements and his questioning of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

The statement doesn't detail how Friedman could work in Jerusalem. However, Trump advisers have insisted in recent days that the president-elect will follow through on his call for moving the embassy.

"He has made that promise," Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told reporters Thursday. "I can guarantee you, just generally, he's a man who is going to accomplish many things very quickly." 

The gracious way to respond to Yasmin Seweid's hate-crime hoax would be to allow for the possibility that she is deeply troubled. Short of that, the only conclusion to draw is that it's pretty damn crummy to accuse a fictional group of guys of shouting Trump's name, telling her "You don't belong here" and pulling off her hijab.  Right up there with "hands up don't shoot" and the antics of mattress girl.