Tag: Kevin Williamson
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Casualties Of Pestilence
Thousands of people have died of Covid19. Thousands more will likely die. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, snuffing out a human life of incalculable worth and immense potential. Well, all of them but one. One of the casualties is the “Green New Deal”, says Kevin Williamson, as people life with previews of…
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Stop Spending Money You Don’t Have, Dummy
That should be the title of this superb Kevin Williamson piece at National Review about the subject, of, well, not spending money you don’t have, and how Donald Trump, whatever his other found virtues, is really really bad at not doing that. So many pull quotes – and all have a theme: Stop spending money you…
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“Unexpected”
The Democrats will be holding their convention next year in Milwaukee. Kevin Williamson thinks that’s pretty appropriate, all in all. In response to a particularly stupid column by Paul Krugman a few years back, our friend Iowahawk shared an interesting discovery: Schools in progressive Wisconsin on average outperform the schools in low-spending, Republican Texas —…
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An Overlord Is An Overlord
Are the big online content providers – Google, Facebook, Netflix and the like – eroding free speech to make doing business internationally easier? Remember – while free markets will trend toward free speech, the Silicon Valley giants are not free markets; they are to their various corners of the ‘net at best industrious but regulation-made…
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Relax
The world isn’t coming to an end over politics. It’s not going to. Kevin WIlliamson, on how good things generally are – and why some parts of our society are having such a hard time accepting that. Especially those on the left who consider the way things are today an “emergency”. It’s a laden term:…
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On Latte Support?
Daniel McCarthy at American Spectator noticed the same thing about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that I do about every single “Protect” Minnesota rally; Where are you ends, and the participants, or almost exclusively upper middle class Caucasians. The few African-Americans there are either from Allied political groups there for the optics, or people like Senator…
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Our Idiot Judiciary
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The Court of Appeals released its opinion (unreported, but available on the court website) in Hockenson v. State. I find it troubling. I grant there’s a difference between having a fundamental right in the first instance, and petitioning to have that right restored after commission of a crime. But…
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The Moral Arc
There’s a quote attributed to Martin Luther King that President Obama liked to use a lot – “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. It’s an inspiring saying It’s also a platitude with no historical basis. Kevin Williamson paraphrased it and made it much more accurate: “the…
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The Second Bull Run Of The Second American Civil War
The Atlantic hired, and then fired, Kevin Williamson – perhaps America’s best political journalist, and one of the best interviewees I’ve ever had in a decade and a half of doing the NARN. Andrew McCarthy has thoughts on the subject. My thoughts? I’ve observed for years that one of the greatest side-effects of Urban Progressive Privilege…
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The Gray Wasteland
Kevin Williamson sums up a vast expanse of “suck” in re the NYTimes’ coverage of gun issues: he New York Times is uniquely bad on the subject of firearms. There are two ways to understand that sentence, and both apply: Among major news publications, the Timesregularly exhibits an unparalleled level of illiteracy on the subject of firearms, and it exhibits…
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The President Was Too Even-Handed About Charlottesville
Back in the eighties, I interviewed a group called the “Backroom Anarchist Center”. They were a bunch of dissipate university students who had a clubhouse in South Minneapolis, and used to roam about demonstrating against stuff – provided it was conservative stuff. I booked several of their leaders on my old KSTP show, which ran…
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Factoid To Remember
Fqctoid to remember the next time the Victim Disarmament / Safe Criminals movement starts jabbering about the “Gun Lobby”: Contrary to the ignorant assumptions that inform our political discourse, the NRA is a relatively small spender when it comes to campaign donations and lobbying, being at the moment the 460th-largest campaign donor and the 156th-highest-spending…
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Don’t Parc The Arc
I saw this on social media over the the last week or so – a quote from Martin Luther King…: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” …followed by a list of moral advances that’d seem to prove the proposition: 1776: Do we really need a king? 1863: Should…
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Before It Was Cool – Redux
Kevin Williamson: Americans can be — and often are — everything our critics say we are: impulsive, vulgar, oafish, clumsy, greedy, vain, belligerent, sanctimonious, hypocritical. But we are something else: a catalyst. We’ve had 241 years of hit-and-miss government, but imagine going back to 1776 with a prophecy that one day, in the not-too-distant future,…
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Verdict
Kevin Williamson’s conclusion on the Democrats’ seeming compulsion to inflict more Clintons on us, and themsellves, via Chelsea: …for Pete’s sake, stop it. Have a little self-respect, Democrats. Build Bill Clinton a statue or . . . whatever. Send him your daughters like a bunch of bone-in-the-nose primitives paying tribute to the tribal chieftain. But stop trying to inflict…
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TIme For Some Petty Partisanship
Kevin Williamson in National Review comes perilously close to my riff on people who think being “Moderate” is, itself, a good thing: Bipartisanship is desirable not because the best course is likely to be found at the midpoint between two extremes: The man who drinks to excess every day is a drunk, and so is…
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In The Footsteps Of Stalin, The Shadow Hecklers Stagger Through The Winter
A group of Obama supporters are planning to hold a “clap-a-thon” to, er, “honor” the outgoing President: “His legacy is one of kindness and grace,” according to Bejidé Davis, a 29-year-old New York lawyer who organized the clap-out. That opinion is not universally held, to say the least — the consequential policy innovations of President…
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Everything Old Is New Again
Kevin Williamson on the return of at least some old fashioned values among Democrats after the election of Donald Trump who, let’s forget, had more in common with Bernie Sanders than any other candidate on the ballot: The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their…
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The New Order
I’ll be the first to admit – I didn’t see last night coming. When I went on the air, I knew that Trump had to win North Carolina, Florida and Ohio to have a shot – even a long shot at the presidency. All three fell; North Carolina fairly quickly, Florida with a bit of suspense, and…
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Wages Of Hegemony
Kevin Williamson, by way of hammering both Clinton’s self-destructive take on national security and Donald Trump’s simplistic and wrong-headed one, points out a consequence of American military, cultural and social hegemony that eludes Big Left and some of the libertarians who, these days, are increasingly indistinguishable from the left: The American example has changed — forever — what…
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I’ll Swim Against The School
A lot of conservatives bag on the President pretty hard for his dedication to his golf game. Kevin Williamson says it’s a mistake, and I agree. There are two reasons. The first: There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour…
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Watch This
You’d do well to read this entire article by Kevin Williamson – about the real source of human achievement. Hint: its not politics, or politicians: Politics thrives on convincing us that things are worse than they are, telling us that we must live in fear of violence and misery if we do not elevate the…
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Stupid, Stupid Suburbanites!
If it’s Thursday, a bunch of the usual New Urbanist suspects have ginned up another “study” “proving” the “costs” of “sprawl”. Combining the the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S., he found, commuters pay more than $107 billion annually, which is about $1,400 per commuter, on average. Those are the dollar costs of the number of…