“We need to spend trillions more to reduce inflation” is an … interesting perspective, one that’ll be popular with Biden’s progressive base and no one else. If we take his advice and the newly passed spending package doesn’t ease inflation, I assume the left’s recommendation will be to pass a few trillion more on top of that and see if that does it. I wonder, though, if Sleepy Joe is privately hoping that the Manchin blocks the reconciliation bill, sparing him and his party the consequences from further upward pressure on prices.
I say give it a try
It's bound to help in the midterms, D operatives. Go for it.
Through the looking glass
I've been calling the Rittenhouse prosecution Kafkaesque, but Power Line's take is on point, too:
George Floyd found himself being choked by a police officer because he tried to pass counterfeit currency and then violently resisted arrest. At the officer’s trial, Floyd’s criminal behavior didn’t matter in assessing the officer’s conduct once he had Floyd under control.
Why, then, does it matter how Rittenhouse got to the point where he had to shoot the three guys who threatened him with lethal force? He’s not being tried for trespassing on a riot.
It strikes me that with this trial (but not only with this trial), we are through the looking glass. Let’s hope the Rittenhouse jury helps pull us back to the right side of it.That's it, right there. The prosecution's theory is felony trespass on the good kind of riot.
A Beautiful Woman
Not just physically, either. That's a fine and beautiful sentiment.
Governments fail sometimes. That's ok. Citizens step up, because it all really belongs to us. A government that fails can be replaced, by citizens. If you don't like that, governments, don't fail.
Veterans' Day
I especially extend greetings to those of you who fought in Afghanistan, so ignobly abandoned this year. It has been long obvious that our strategy in Afghanistan was fatally flawed, but that does not excuse the reckless and heedless way in which the retreat was managed. It could have been better, and it is not your fault that it was not.
Yet wherever you fought, and however it ended, remember Conan's prayer. When next we fight, let it be in a great cause and for a good end. Fortuna audaces iuvat.
That about sums it up
Ace's succinct summary is exactly what I this afternoon. My mouth hung open throughout:
This series of questions:
Rosenbaum only chased you and tried to take your gun.
The guy who kicked you only stomped you in your face.
Huber only hit you in the head with a skateboard used as a club.
And now: Grosskreutz only pointed a handgun at you.
You had an AR-15 and should have just absorbed all these attacks because it is the only Real Weapon at the scene.
He actually said, Jump-Kick guy only used one foot, not a weapon.
Earlier: "Before Rosenbaum ambushed you, why were you running down the street in the first place?" Um, I got a call asking me to go help put out a fire there that the rioters had just started. "Yes, but what was your hurry?" It was like the old joke, "Where's the fire?" At one point, if I understood correctly, the prosecutor was blaming Rittenhouse for antagonizing the rioters by putting out their fires. Who did he think he was, "taking it upon himself" to put out fires instead of calling 911? Rittenhouse never blew up; he was simply dumbfounded, seemingly unable to understand how anyone could even ask these things. What is an 18-year-old thinking about the madhouse he has been plunged into, where rioters aren't initiating altercations, it's the citizens who spoil their fun by putting out their virtuous fires?
If you've ever watched a courtroom drama on TV and thought, "Oh, come on. People don't really get to say things like that," you were wrong.
Just before the lunch break, the defense threatened to file a motion for a mistrial with prejudice to retrial, on the ground of the prosecutor's bad faith in trying to sneak in two different kinds of excluded evidence and argument. The prosecutor tried to argue that somehow under the circumstances he had acted in good faith. The judge snapped, "I don't believe you." Nevertheless, the judge hasn't ruled on the motion. Apparently the trial will resume next Monday.
Burn the witch
Winsome Sears is nothing but a white supremacist tool of the patriarchy. She thinks her own actions have something to do with the way her life turns out, which is an insult to aspiring victims everywhere:
I am a heartbeat away from the governorship, in case anything happens to the governor. How are you going to tell me I am a victim? And I didn’t do anything special to get here, except stay in school and study. I took advantage of the opportunities available here in America.
Hmm....
Via TexasGirl https://twitter.com/PatriotSkyrific/status/1458076574788489221?s=20
Eric Hines
I ain't noways woke
The new wokeness: stop saying "woke." They figured out it wasn't polling well. It's one of them dang wedge issues that the GOP drives between them and their former voters, which if you think about it is very unfair and not nice, also a dogwhistle.
I remember in mid-2020 when they figured out riots weren't polling well. Abruptly, riots disappeared from the news, if not immediately from the streets. Well, riots going away is never a bad thing, even if they're mostly peaceful.
You know what else doesn't poll well? Enabling voter fraud. I realize there's no such thing as voter fraud.
New park
This is exciting: an enormous ranch that includes much of the Guadalupe Delta is going under conservation, to be a state park at some point. It's 17,000 acres, which is over 26 square miles. It includes the old site of Indianola, the 19th century settlement that was wiped off the face of the earth by two catastrophic hurricanes. Indianola was just north of what is now Port O'Connor.
For context, the red dot in the map below is us, and the dark green shows existing wildlife conservation areas, including the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (whooping crane refuge) and parkland along the barrier islands.
This is the way I like to see it done. The family that owned the huge Powderhorn Ranch voluntarily sold it at a below-market price to a consortium of donors. Lots of the money did come from the BP oilspill guilt money. The spill frankly didn't hurt us down here, but the settlement has been very, very good to our part of the coast.
Anyway, this didn't get done because a lot of people got used to the Powderhorn Ranch being wild and started imagining that they had the right to force the owners to leave it undeveloped. It got done because the owners made a gift of their own bounty, because they preferred to see it wild than to make a fortune developing it. Not that much of it was what you would call prime development land, but the inland part, near State Highway 35, might have been someday.
Here is what the beautiful swamp looks like, in a still from this good short video:
Clintons all the way down
I continue my hunt for stories that make sense of the mind-numbingly wheels-within-wheels developments in the Russia hoax, especially with the recent arrest of Igor Danchenko. From now on the Steele Dossier should be known as the Clinton Dossier, though the NYT Dossier might be as good. This Powerline report is good, as is the National Review summary it links to. In conclusion,
Although we have become inured to it, the degradation and corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice should retain the ability to shock. The transformation of the press into the eager tool of these agencies for the rankest of purposes must be included in reckoning the deep meaning of the Danchenko case . . . .Seriously, they want to topple a U.S. President, and the go-to guy is named Igor? Who writes these B-list scripts?
Self-defense
I've spent the last few hours watching testimony in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. I'm starting to wonder whether the defense will make a successful motion for a directed verdict at the close of the state's case. Once self-defense is alleged, it is the state's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that one or more of the four exceptions to the self-defense doctrine applies. Not only is it hard to imagine a reasonable jury getting beyond a reasonable doubt on any of them, I'm not sure I can see that the state has put on even a scintilla of evidence. The state's witnesses are if anything supporting the defense's case. It makes you wonder if the state was unable to find any rioters willing to testify, from among the rag-tag, hostile, erratic group caught on the Daily Caller's video that night. Instead, the prosecutor is stuck with witnesses who are at worst neutral to Rittenhouse, if not positively sympathetic. To make matters worse, they have detailed memories, they know what they saw and what the basis is for their perceptions and judgments, and they come across as highly credible.
All it will take is one sensible juror with a backbone to end this nightmare for Rittenhouse. The defendant appears to have been lucky enough to draw a judge with good sense and a strong grasp of the rules of evidence.
More Cooking: Frybread
This NYT article is on frybread, a kind of bread that is made by Native Americans. The central dynamic of the article is that it is both a deeply meaningful cuisine embraced by many because of the beloved family members who made it a particular way; and also because it comes out of their traditions of shared suffering; but also that it is often rejected by activists because it is not in fact a traditional Native American food at all. It is a food that was developed after the United States government removed many of them from their lands and traditional foodways, one that they had to figure out from whatever dry good supplies the government put in their box.
Southerners will notice many parallels with our own cornbread debate. Also a few with our debate about biscuits, e.g., everyone's grandmother made the best ones and no one else does it quite right. Mine made them with bacon grease from yesterday's bacon, and served them with today's bacon, from which she reserved the grease for tomorrow's biscuits. She had a little tin she'd pour the hot grease into as she served the bacon, and tomorrow if you got up to watch her cook she'd scoop grease right back out of it to mix with the flour, baking powder, salt, and milk.
Cornbread, though, is where the big regional issue arises. Ask a Southerner if cornbread should be sweet, for example. There are passionate differences, but they really come down to questions about what kinds of materials were available in the very hard times either on the frontier or, later for the Deep South, after the Civil War. Appalachian Southerners deny that sweetness is at all appropriate, because sugar was not to be had in the hard times. Deep South Southerners, especially Black Southerners, insist that it is only proper if it is a bit sweet -- because sugar cane was relatively easy to come by in the wetter, hotter regions further South. Cotton grew better there also, which is why the black population came to know that particular kind of cornbread rather than the dry sort served in the mountains.
But of course this kind of hardship is where what I was just calling an essential cultural food develops. It is, I gather, why the Jews still eat certain foods at certain holidays -- in memory of hard times, some of them thousands of years ago.
There's a place over on the Cherokee reservation that serves frybread with chili, chili being another food whose proper composition is hotly debated. The Eastern Band of Cherokee will have learned this frybread some other way, since they were never removed (in spite of significant efforts by the Federal government). I haven't had the stuff, so I don't know how either their frybread or their chili will sort along the debatable lines, but I will have to ride over and try it sometime.
$449K per illegal immigrant, tops
The WH handlers clarify the President's meaning when he said the WSJ story about paying illegal immigrants $450K apiece for pain and suffering was "garbage."
I consider this a $1 billion contribution in kind to the GOP 2022 campaign fund.
Cooking, High and Low
My wife and I were having a conversation yesterday about food, and how there is a strange disconnect between Americans and the French about which French dishes associated with country folk and common folk are a kind of 'high cuisine.' This is of course an accident of history, associated with the mid-century popularity of noted early special operator and famous cook Julia Child. Child was of course capable of cooking the 'highest' French dishes, having fallen in love with French cuisine after the war and arranging to become fully trained in the best schools. But she taught Americans a lot of common dishes as well, blurring the lines between the stuff that the French thought of as 'high' and 'low' so that the Americans came to see French cooking as a kind of high cooking per se.
However, it occurs to me that it is often the country folk dishes -- the lowest of the low cuisine -- that ends up being recognized as the essential dish of that nationality. For Scots it is of course the Haggis; the Mexican national dish is mole that is made of various chilis and seeds, particularly served over turkey, and originally concoctions as much designed to try to preserve meats as to flavor them. You can all doubtless think of your own favorite examples of this.
Yet then I thought of my time in China, where the 'essential' dish is surely Peking Duck -- a 'high' cuisine if ever there was one. The rural dishes sometimes make the running, like Sichuan cookery (my personal favorite of Chinese regional cuisines) or Hunan. The class hierarchy is better preserved there, though, even in spite of decades of Maoist leveling aimed at culture and class.
Is this a feature of democratic revolutions in the West (certainly including Mexico and the United States, but also France and the United Kingdom)? Or is something else at work, do you think?
Good excuse for an exit ramp from a policy that's killing them at the ballot box
And good news anyway, even if it is cynically appropriated: Pfizer seeks FDA approval for a COVID treatment pill that's even more effective, and a lot cheaper and easier, than monoclonal antibodies.
Now if they can just resist the temptation to lie about the treatment's pros and cons and to make the treatment mandatory.
We'll do better next time
"Bottom line is, we simply came up short. The votes in the key 3 a.m. demographic just weren’t there.”
Also, I can't get over the NJ trucker who upset the state senate president with a shoestring campaign. Not that anything untoward would ever happen in a state like NJ, but you have to think that if anyone had noticed what was going on they might have prepared a little package of extra ballots. As the joke goes, though, they probably were printed in China and got hung up on a container ship.
It's not vulgar, but it COULD have been
Lovely embedded cartoon about people borrowing trouble melting down over an inoffensive word that reminds them of something else that they'd like to be offended by, if only they could catch someone saying it out loud instead of simply understanding that they're probably thinking it really, really hard.
"I can't keep up with you kids and your crazy vulgarity."
“Lost,” You Say?
The FBI claims it lost high quality video of the Rittenhouse shootings.
[Defense attorney] Richards reportedly said it is “preposterous” that the FBI allegedly lost the footage. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor, then told [Judge] Schroeder in regard to the FBI’s plane footage, that “the federal government is not under our control.”
Boy, that’s the truth.
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