Read it.

Thus making it quite clear that the Paris agreement was not about climate so much as it was about corporate cronyism. (Goldman Sachs cares about climate change? Really? Really?)

Read it.

A Chicago pizzeria and bar is coming under fire for instituting an insanely complex “dress code” that some patrons are calling racist.

I’m a racist, you’re a racist, he’s a racist, she’s a racist, wouldn’t you like to be a racist too?

The Bottled Blonde, in Chicago’s upscale River North neighborhood, says it requires a “high standard of dress at all times” but especially at night, when the “casual neighborhood concept of restaurant & nightlife” turns into a nightclub. The list of banned items is practically two feet long, and includes everything from “beanies,” to “manpris,” to “athletic wear,” “jean jackets” and “men’s jewelry.”

Doesn’t leave much. Don Draper, maybe.

Immediately, the bar was excoriated by social media users as “racist,” with one hyperbolic Facebook commenter even calling the list evidence of a “new Jim Crow.” Another accused Bottled Blonde of contributing to the breakdown of the moral order across the country.

Read it.

According to a writer for The New Yorker, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have a hot new celebrity couple name.

A demonstration that The New Yorker has become shallower than a kiddie wading pool.

When William Shawn was running the magazine, none of his writers would have dared admit to knowing what a hot new celebrity couple name was, much less create one.

Read it.

It’s like watching a dog chase a ball.

The Antiplanner turns over a rock.

That well-known fake-news site, the New York Times, has once again published a report claiming that transit hubs are a “growing lure for developers.” The Times published a similar story eight years ago, and the Antiplanner quickly found that every single development mentioned in that story was subsidized with tax-increment financing (TIF) and other government support.

So has anything changed since then? Nope. The first development mentioned in the recent story by Times reporter Joe Gose is Assembly Row, in the Boston suburb of Somerville. Is it subsidized? Yes, with at least $25 million in TIF along with other state funds.

Read it.

Last week, President Trump proposed massive spending increases for Medicaid.

Of course, most of the media didn’t report it that way. They reported that the president’s proposal “slashes spending.” That he wants to cut “at least $610 billion” from Medicaid. That “Trump’s Budget Cuts Deeply Into Medicaid.” And so on.

That might be vaguely true in the Washington sense. It’s not at all true in the real-world sense.

…

Either way, the Medicaid budget is going to grow. But under Trump’s proposal, it would grow more slowly. This is how Democrats and the media can scream about supposedly savage “cuts” to the program.

Read it.

But they thought about it so hard they got a headache.

Read it.

An international journal was forced to apologize Thursday after it featured no black writers in its volume on the Black Lives Matter movement.

There is no escaping Identity Politics under the Narrative. Obviously only black people are qualified to talk about black issues (even though black people are perfectly qualified to talk about white people; nay, encouraged to do so).

Goodin added that the journal would take extra steps to avoid a mistake like this in the future. The journals will try to add two black editors to the editorial board, because the journal doesn’t have any.

Read it.

When you read it, of course, you discover that ‘the Hate’ means ‘stuff contrary to the Narrative’.

A more accurate title would have been ‘How Facebook Can Fight the Hate and Learn to Love Big Brother’.

Read it.

Tipper Gore will attend a June 8 fundraiser to support of Kathleen Murphy, a candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates. The fundraiser is being hosted at the home of Al and Claire Dwoskin in McLean, Va, according to an invitation obtained by the Free Beacon and published Tuesday. Tickets cost $250 and $2,500 to attend the fundraiser.

Al Dwoskin is the president and CEO of his own real estate development and management firm and the couple are major Democratic donors who support Bill and Hillary Clinton. The couple also runs a charitable foundation, which claimed ” there may be links between increased cases of reported autism and childhood vaccinations.”

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Pick somebody who thinks astrology is a science. Place your bets: Democrat or Republican?

Pick somebody who self-identifies as a ‘witch’. Place your bets: Democrat or Republican?

Pick somebody who has a ‘healing crystal’ dangling from the rear-view mirror. Place your bets: Democrat or Republican?

And yet they are The Party of Science. Reality says: Nuh-uh.

Read it.

Say, how did the Post start its story when Obama met Francis at the Vatican on March 27, 2014? Was he the “world’s moral counterpoint to the president’s abortion agenda”? Of course not.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Read it.

One of the very best analyses of the group dynamic of the Left came from Tom Bethell and Joe Sobran years ago, when they referred to the Left as “The Hive.” Like bees or ants, the Left simply goes into action in a coordinated and instinctual fashion, without need to meet and plan. Naturally the mainstream media is a chief nest of The Hive, and it buzzes constantly on behalf of liberalism.

Hence California’s Bee newspapers—the Sacramento Bee and the Fresno Bee (both long time McClatchy properties)—are appropriately named nodes of conventional liberalism. You could rightly think of them as the Bee Hive. Normally you’d never pay any attention to their house editorials. But the Fresno Bee editorial page over the weekend took note of the spectacle of the recent California Democratic Party convention and found it was even too much for them.

Read it.

Hey, it’s all about priorities … and The Narrative.

Read it.

When it comes to “news” which might discredit Donald Trump or a member of his family, the modus operandi for too many in the press is, “Tweet and report first, ask questions later (if at all).”

On Sunday, several media members couldn’t resist falsely tweeting that Ivanka Trump will somehow control $100 million pledged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to a World Bank fund for women entrepreneurs, thus dishonestly opening the door to utterly false parallels to the Clinton family-controlled Clinton Foundation.

Read it.

For 20 years these news organizations, along with CBS, NBC and ABC, were the only game in town. They served as gatekeepers of information, and as their newsrooms became more and more detached from the center of the country, consumers began to become detached from them.

And then along came the Internet. Not only were different sources now available, but news aggregators such as Drudge made it easy to find things giving everyone access to “alternative facts.”

The universe of information expanded, and it became clear that what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or the New York Times told consumers was not the whole story, and if you were a conservative (and a plurality of Americans self-identify as center right) you lost all trust in the mainstream media.

…

Read it.

During the 2016 presidential election, Bernie Sanders refused to answer questions about Venezuela during an interview with Univision. He claimed to not want to talk about it because he’s “focused on my campaign.” Many suggested a more plausible reason: Venezuela’s present economy is an example of what happens when a state implements Bernie Sanders-style social democracy.

Similarly, Pope Francis — who has taken the time to denounce pro-market ideologies for allegedly driving millions into poverty — seems uninterested in talking about the untrammeled impoverishment of Venezuela in recent years.

It doesn’t fit with the Narrative and therefore doesn’t exist.

Read it.

The death of Fox News founder Roger Ailes shocked fans of the network and the world of journalism Thursday morning. But many liberals, who despise his creating, took the opportunity of the man’s death to attack him and the network he created.

Read it.

More political violence from the Left. Yet Trump is supposedly the New Hitler.

Read it.

More Trump Derangement Syndrome. IT DOESN’T MATTER. The President is the Constitutional authority for all levels of classification and he can tell whoever he wants to whatever he wants to.

Steve Sailer fisks the New York Times.

Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the white exodus as a “triumph of racist social engineering,” and he is not wrong. Many white households moved to suburban towns precisely because black households were effectively excluded from them by real estate agents and mortgage brokers.

In the case of my liberal inlaws on the West Side of Chicago in 1968-1970, the culprits who ruined their dream of integration and finally drove them out were the black criminals who committed three felonies against their children.

To complicate the picture, few of them left personal accounts,

Uh, actually, lots and lots of the victims of black crime would love to tell you exactly what happened, but academia and the media haven’t been interested in hearing them.

and they may not have been able to articulate exactly why they moved. We are left reconstructing the pieces through careful detective work. In my own work, I have found that Poirot is often right: Each suspect wielded his own knife.

Of course, the word “crime” doesn’t appear in this op-ed.

Read it.

That certainly is how Democrats try to portray him. Trump firing Comey = Nixon firing Cox. Right? Wrong. But here is another one: With ‘tapes’ tweet, Trump evokes Nixon’s White House.

Trump is so busy jerking the chain of the DemLegHump Media that his arm must be really tired.

Read it.

Uh, Michelle, the kids are taking your ‘nutritious meals’ and throwing them in the trash, then going out for burgers and fries. They seem to think that your stuff is the ‘crap’.

Trump is in favor of kids (and their parents) making their own choices, rather than being dictated to by some Cloud Person soccer mom who hasn’t had to cook her own meals since she married the Magic Negro.

Read it.

‘Zero credibility’ with whom? Trump already has zero credibility with the DemLegHump Media; they’ve been calling him a liar since before Barack Obama was a Negro.

Trump has plenty of credibility with his supporters, who aren’t about to listen to a left-wing shill like Nicolle Wallace tell them who has ‘credibility’.

Sure sounds like wishful thinking on somebody’s part.

Read it.

None of these people ever really made it out of High School, psychologically. (Or whatever is the High School equivalent wherever this guy comes from.)

Read it.

Really, you can’t make this shit up. They actually pay people for this.

Read it.

Fortunately she does not appear to have reproduced, and so her defective genes will be eliminated from the gene pool.

Read it.

Hawaiians have been told by civil righs campaigners not to travel to Texas because of a controversial immigration law

More Persecution Derangement Syndrome from the Left.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the new law unfairly targets undocumented Mexican immigrants in the state.

‘Undocumented’ is the Newspeak euphemism for ‘illegal’. How is ‘targeting’ illegal migrants unfair? Not explained. It Just Is.

Lorella Praeli, ACLU director of immigration policy and campaigns, said the concern for Hawaiians was that many of them “fit the racial profile that the police in Texas will use to enforce Trump’s draconian deportation force”.

What ‘racial profile’? The one the ACLU assumes that will be applied. What evidence do they have that a ‘racial profile’ will be applied? None. It Just Is. (Remind me, when did ‘Mexican’ become a race? I must have missed it.)

“Hawai?i residents traveling to Texas need to be prepared for illegal harassment,” said Mateo Caballero, legal director of ACLU Hawaii, in a statement.

Don’t they mean ‘undocumented’ harassment? And if it’s according to a law, how is it ‘illegal’? Not explained. It Just Is.

And where are they getting this ‘racial profile’?

What ‘racial profile’ do Hawai’i residents like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison that doesn’t fit Greg Abbott, the Governor?

Are they talking about the many people of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean descent who reside in Hawi’i? Got news for you — THEY DON’T LOOK LIKE MEXICANS.

Are they talking about Native Hawai’ians? Well, (a) there are very few Native Hawai’ians left, and (b) such people have no reason to come to Texas. (Tell the truth – if you could afford to live in Hawai’i, would you come to Texas? The question answers itself.)

And what happens when these ‘non-white’ people from Hawai’i get asked for documentation? Are they afraid of being deported back to Hawai’i?

The absurdity of this whole schtick is obvious on its face.

Read it.

Fight who? About what?

Unless we can anticipate her entering the ring with a bunch of bacteria, ]the conclusion is inescapable that she ought to fight the socialist government-provided health care system, but as a Labour candidate I predict that she decide to ‘fight’ anything but that.

That ought to be the first questions asked about these tedious twonks who are always pledging to ‘fight for’ whichever Fashionable Victim Group they’re trying to hoodwink: Fight who? About what?

How many people will die because of Comey Firing Derangement Syndrome?

Will this qualify as a Pre-Existing Condition under the Obamacare-replacement bill?

Inquiring minds want to know….

Read it.

I had an interesting conversation last night with a fellow critic of President Trump’s. He was irritated that I had insisted that those watching the Comey situation remain “skeptical but not hysterical.” Now, he said, is “the time to be hysterical.” I’ve been trying to understand why he was so vexed, and I think I’ve worked it out: He has assumed — and built into his thinking — that there is a huge Russia scandal in the background of all this. And I haven’t. I certainly think it’s possible that this goes deeper, and I remain as mistrustful toward this administration as I ever was. But I’m not going to credit theories about Watergate-level conspiracies without evidence, and my friend is. That’s the line that divides us.

The problem is that the anti-Trumpers have their entire souls invested in the notion that Trump Is So Bad There Must Be A Skeleton Somewhere, so even though there is no evidence of anything that just means that they have to look harder. Because it’s got to be there, and what do you mean there’s no evidence? Are you incompetent or something? We know there’s something there, because it’s got to be there, it’s just got to, so get off your lazy white ass and find it!

The major difference between ‘progressives’ and Real People is that Real People believe it when they see it, and ‘progressives see it when they believe it. It’s ‘another Watergate’ because it has to be. Trump is the New Nixon because he has to be (just as he has to be the New Hitler). This is a Constitutional Crisis because it has to be. Trump is on his way to a dictatorship because he has to be. I keep waiting for some MSNBC report on how there are secret concentration camps going up inside Mar a Lago, you just can’t see them because Trump Is That Sneaky.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt; it’s the lifeblood of the looney Left. I’m running out of popcorn….

Check it out.

This amusing video illustrates a number of interesting wrinkles in re the DemLegHump media:

1. Colbert is surprised that his audience isn’t as up to date with the Democrat Narrative as he is; apparently the audience didn’t Get The Memo that Comey has instantly gone from Hillary Oppressor to Trump Victim. These Party Line changes can be hard to keep up with; I’m sure Stalin feels his pain.
2. Colbert’s automatic assumption that everybody who cheered is a Donald Trump fan, as if any actual Donald Trump fans waste their time watching Colbert.

I wonder whether any of the audience got sent for Re-Education. Wouldn’t surprise me.

UPDATE: Colbert isn’t the only looney out there — Olbermann Calls For Firing Comey, Then Wants To Impeach Trump When He Does

UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh is hurting himself laughing about this, and points out that ‘progressive’ talking heads are so disconnected from their audience that something like this was inevitable.

It’s tough being a ‘progressive’ — you don’t know whom to hate without a score card.

Read it.

New York Times, of course.

BLUF: America sucks, it’s all the fault of Republicans and Rich People (but not Democrat Rich People, who are all ‘woke’ and among the saints, and especially not Democrat elected officials, oh no!), women and minorities hardest hit, etc.

Read it.

Too late. Communists have been in charge of the Left Coast for the last thirty years.

I guess the press didn’t get the memo.

Read it.

Because nothing promotes diversity like waging jihad against the kufr.

Somebody ought to educate this mulatto concerning the role Muslims played in the African slave trade.

Read it.

Of course they do. ‘I won’t grow up!’ is the motto of the ‘progressive’ Left.

Read it.

So I guess we now have three ‘genders’: male, female, and Canadian.

Isn’t that special.

Read it.

It’s amazing what we can learn from literature. The Lost Boys didn’t stay in Neverland with Peter. Sure, they never grew up. They just became liberals in the midst of a perpetual tantrum. The Lost Girls, too, apparently. Even the most recent presidential candidate Hillary Clinton loudly proclaims she is, “part of the resistance.”

History teaches us that coups are staged by losers with a grievance. I’d keep an eye on AlGore.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

San Francisco, of course. The land of fruits and nuts.

Read it.

Apparently there was too much Science and not enough Narrative.

Read it.

And just as dopey.

Read it.

Stacy doesn’t understand the Narrative. Any motion in any direction by any UnColored person is a ‘white power gesture’, even if they don’t know it.

Read it.

I guess they can’t handle the truth.

On Friday (appearing in Saturday’s print edition), the New York Times published its first column by Bret Stephens, the former Wall Street Journal columnist recently hired as a “conservative” voice.

Let’s see how long it takes him to turn into another Brooks.

Its theme was that the political “hyperbole” about climate change doesn’t match the underlying science — even if one trusts the underlying science. That alone was enough to send journalists into unhinged and often profane orbit.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Read it.

As team Trump digs into taxing, spending and health-care reform, it’s learning a vital lesson of Washington. Once a government benefit is given, it can never be taken away. If young people have been overcharged by ObamaCare so middle-aged people can be undercharged, then the solution is to undercharge young people too. The taxpayer—usually visualized as a hedge fund manager—can always pay more.

Read it.

Wallflowers also don’t get attacked from behind. How much risk is that new ‘friend’ worth?

Some of us already have all the friends we care to have.

Read it.

Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Read it.

Poor iddle babies.

Read it.

It has become painfully clear in recent years that partisan gerrymandering is one of American democracy’s worst illnesses.

Painfully clear, perhaps, to people who write for Slate on ‘law and LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ issues’, but for rational adults, the worst illness is democracy itself — a system of government in which, as the classical definition has it, ‘51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%’. The key characteristic of American democracy is that it is constrained, viz. there are barriers in place to keep The Majority, no matter how overwhelming, from doing the dirty to minorities. This doesn’t always work well — ask Japanese-Americans who their favorite Democrat President is — but in normal times works much better than an unconstrained democracy might.

Although the Supreme Court held decades ago that the purpose of redistricting was to ensure “fair and effective representation for all citizens,” legislators often use the process to lock the minority party out of power.

Democracy itself locks the minority party out of power. (Funny how this complaint never surfaces when Democrats are in charge. Look at any big city and count how many Republicans are on the city council and try to say with a straight face that the minority party has any power.) For the ‘minority party’ to have any power directly undermines the essential nature of democracy.

Both Democrats and Republicans deploy partisan gerrymandering to dilute votes for their opponents, creating one-party rule and, arguably, greater polarization.

I just love that phrase, ‘dilute votes’, as if you can just add water to minority voters and watch them dissolve like dirt in the laundry. Whenever you see the phrase ‘dilute’ it indicates somebody trying to get power for a ‘minority’ that is greater than they would have under a strict democracy. Almost always this is a Democrat (the oxymoron party) complaining that Democrats don’t get to run things even when they lose elections. And if you want polarization, well, listen to a speech by Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warran or any BlackLives Matter demagogue and you’ll see where the polarization is coming from.

I won’t bother fisking the rest of this article (remember, they actually paid somebody to write this stuff), but just move on to discuss ‘gerrymandering’ in light of what one might call ‘democratic theory’. Most arguments against ‘gerrymandering’ take the form of ‘but it makes districts less competitive!’, as if this were some sort of electoral Olympics in which the horse-race aspect of an election has some special virtue. In truth, it does not. ‘Effective representation’ (see Supreme Court reference above) is all about having representatives who believe the same way as the person voting, and the less ‘competitive’ a district is, the more actual ‘effective representation’ that voter has. It is obvious to the most casual observer who doesn’t live in his parents’ basement that if a Representative gets 75% of the vote the voters of that district who are on the winning side (and that’s what democracy cares about, remember) are more effectively represented than in a district where the Representative only gets 51% of the vote.

Think about it. I’ll wait.

The more ‘competitive’ the election, the greater the proportion of voters whose ‘representation’ isn’t effective. That’s the bottom line. From the point of view of DEMOCRACY, the more ‘uncompetitive’ districts one has, the more ‘effective representation’ one gets.

Sure, it’s possible to construct an academic exercise where one way of redistricting an area gives the ‘minority party’ less power than they would have under a different way of redistricting, but if you look closely, these claims (like claims for global warming) always depend for their validity on the truth of some very strong assumptions about voter behavior (typically that all Republicans vote the same way and all Democrats vote the same way), assumptions that have no necessary connection to real-life voter behavior. And no one (that I’ve seen) has yet come up with an actual redistricting scheme that precisely fits that strong-assumption exercise.

The reason why you hear all of the DemLegHump media jaw on about ‘gerrymandering’ is because ‘noncompetitive’ districts are boring. Without a ‘horse race’, they have nothing on which to report. People who went to journalism school because they wanted to Make A Difference get really frustrated when everything they do to Make A Difference doesn’t matter, because the election is only going to go one way. That’s the real reason they don’t like ‘gerrymandering’.

Read it.

They don’t even pretend any more.

Read it.

My, what a surprise.