Fiorina sounds tough on immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of blogosphere commenters saying that Trump is the only Republican with a strong policy on illegal immigration. I’ve also seen a lot of people saying they don’t know Carly Fiorina’s position and would like to hear it.

So I thought I’d offer the following video of Fiorina, where I think she’s quite forceful on the subject:

By the way, this is not a new position of hers, post-Trump; you can see here that she had the same position prior to his announcing his candidacy (see also this).

When I wrote a post about Fiorina at Legal Insurrection a little while back, and offered a link to that video, a commenter there replied this way:

Tough? The only *tough* position on illegal immigration would include prison time for the Managers who hire illegals”¦

But you’ll *never* see *that*.

Well, get ready to see it. Note also that this Fiorina video is not recent; it is from her Senate race in California in 2010. That’s a time and place where the stance she expresses could not have been all that popular (proven by the fact that this clip was actually an ad run against Fiorina by the Democrats):

Now, that’s tough.

[NOTE: To refresh your memory, here’s Trump’s position, which seems rather incoherent but essentially the same as the one Fiorina expresses in that first clip. So far I haven’t found any evidence of Trump addressing the issue she deals with in the second clip.]

What a difference a few years make: Trump, then and now

The New Neo Posted on by

In the 2012 election there was a not insignificant amount of ire towards the GOP coming from the GOP base. But in the years since, that anger and frustration has reached a fever pitch.

This may account for odd changes such as the fact that Mark Levin excoriated Trump in this clip from 2011, but now doesn’t sing the same tune although the facts he sets out here have not changed in the least (it’s the topmost clip on the page, the one that’s 12:01 minutes long; I can’t figure out a way to embed it).

You can hear lots of fascinating stuff there. Trump likes Nancy Pelosi (5:14). He wanted her to impeach George W. Bush (5:25), because he says Bush lied about WMDs. At 6:27 he speculates that it would be hard to even imagine a worse president than Bush. At 7:26 you hear Trump saying President Bush is evil. He then contrasts Obama (who at the time he was speaking had been elected but not inaugurated), saying that Obama has:

…a chance to go down as a great president…I think he’s going to lead through consensus. It’s not just going to be just a bull run like Bush did—he just did whatever the hell he wanted—go into a country and attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, and just do it because he wanted to do it.

Here’s one more clip. In it, Trump has high praise for Hillary Clinton (it’s from 2007, when she was running for president) and sounds as though he was at least thinking of voting for her if she had been nominated:

This man isn’t just not a conservative. He often sounds like a liberal Democrat. Those of you who are supporting Trump, do these clips change your mind at all? Is it really that much fun to give the finger to the GOP, when it’s yourself (and the country) you might be screwing?

More on Ta-Nehisi Coates

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: If you don’t know who Ta-Nehisi Coates is and what I think of his work, please see this. I decided to add the following for further clarification.]

When I read this quote from Coates, it seemed to me to provide a basic psychological clue as to what might be going on with him:

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns…

When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done””he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice””“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit.

Coates appears to be saying that violence at the hands of his father and at the hands of the world got all mixed up in Coates’ mind—explicitly mixed up and linked, I might add, when his father would say, “Either I can beat him, or the police.” The larger message was that he would always get beaten at someone’s hands, either parental hands or public official hands via the police, and that his father attributed his own violence towards his son as originating from and being intended to forestall that official violence. His father was claiming that the private violence the father doled out to son was administered to prevent the public violence, both at the hands of the police and by the son or daughter who might be wanting to act in a criminal manner out in the larger and very dangerous world.

I think that Coates is describing some sort of powerful emotional (and also physical) trap that he got caught in early on, as a child, and has never gotten out of. The way it goes is this: I am a small powerless boy, my father whips me, my father loves me, he says he whips me so the others won’t, therefore they are causing my father to hurt me, it is their fault not my father’s, the world is a dangerous and violent place, how can I ever be safe?

See also this:

Coates added that experiences during his childhood in Baltimore in the 1970s made him realize the material differences between many blacks and whites in America. The vast majority of white Americans had a childhood that was free of violence, he said. Coates said that while growing up, he made every decision based on his concerns for his own physical safety.

Whether or not Coates is correct about the “vast majority of whites” and their exposure to violence, I think we can safely say that he’s generally right in terms of the neighborhoods white people are more likely to live in versus the neighborhoods that poorer black people are more likely to live in.

Fear is the motivator. The pen, and Coates’ facility with words, turn the tables and make the man who was once the frightened little boy strong, enabling him to have some power against the white people he believes created and motivated both the black people and the police of whom he was (and is?) so afraid.

The end of religious freedom in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

I agree with this article by David Harsanyi:

Not only does the court now apparently hold the power to bore into the souls of shopkeeps to establish that their religious objections aren’t authentic, but it can also decide when their prejudice is. It makes the risible assertion that any theological problem with gay marriage is really just “opposition” to the existence of gay Americans””whatever that means:

“Specifically, Masterpiece asserts that its refusal to create the cake was “because of” its opposition to same-sex marriage, not because of its opposition to their sexual orientation. We conclude that the act of same-sex marriage is closely correlated to Craig’s and Mullins’ sexual orientation, and therefore, the ALJ did not err when he found that Masterpiece’s refusal to create a wedding cake for Craig and Mullins was “because of” their sexual orientation, in violation of CADA.”

A person may have gay friends and relatives”“they may even love their fellow gay Americans”“but if they decline to participate in a same-sex wedding for theological reasons, the court wants us to assume they could only be motivated by bigotry.

In any event, I’m sure there will be an appeal. But since most Americans are fine with gay marriage and simultaneously put off by unpleasant (and in this case, deceptive) words like “discrimination” and “prejudice,” the courts”“nearly always driven by the vagaries of public opinion”“will find a way to force all to comply. This will go for any other businesses even tangentially related to weddings, such as food catering, music, and so on. And the crusade will accelerate until the legal lynch mob gets to religious institutions. No doubt advocates will work backwards to come up with a great legal rationalization for all of it.

Indeed.

With one caveat, however. Harsanyi is correct that courts are driven (in part, anyway) by “the vagaries of public opinion.” But they are also driven by ideology. In the same-sex marriage battle, the courts have been ahead of the public in being pro-same-sex marriage. The most recent poll (February 2015) I was able to find on the matter in a quick search says that the majority of Americans favor a religious exemption like the one the baker in the Masterpiece case was requesting, so here the courts appear to be leading (or opposing) rather than following public opinion.

What do liberals think of Hillary’s email problems?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s DaTechGuy:

…[M]any political scandals involve complicated rules and laws that the American people either do not understand or have no interest in understanding that’s why a clever pol with the media behind them can usually get away with things.

This scandal however involves things that most Americans work with every day. They don’t need it explained to them, which is why when the American people see Hillary lawyering up or try to explain away this scandal, they understand she is lying to their faces.

That makes sense. But if my small sample of four (the number of liberals I’ve discussed this issue with so far) is any indication, although he may be right that this is something with which Americans are familiar, I think he’s wrong in his conclusions if he thinks this matters to most liberals. Unfortunately.

First let me set the scene. I’ve said many times that I try not to talk politics any more with the many liberals I know, because it tends to be extremely counter-productive. However, there are a few exceptions. There are some people with whom I do have political discussions on a fairly regular basis, although not very often. One of the four was in this category. The other three were involved in a political discussion about something else, and I happened to be there and got involved in it. Then to change the subject (and because I was curious) I asked what they thought about Clinton’s emails.

One of those three stated at the outset that Hillary was way too moderate for her and she was a Sanders supporter anyway. Another shrugged and said that Hillary was being framed by Republicans who were always making stuff up about her and were out to get her. I asked her what she would think, however, if the charges turned out to be true, and she answered that everybody does it and it’s no big deal. When I asked her if she worried about national security considerations, she didn’t seem to think that was any big deal or anything unusual. She then explained that she herself has two email addresses, one for work and one for personal use, and sometimes she makes an error and sends something official on her personal email. She was likening Hillary’s actions to her own—just a careless, understandable error. When I pointed out that Hillary had a much higher level of responsibility, she didn’t seem to think so, or if so it just didn’t concern her.

That’s when the third person spoke up. She said the emails did bother her. She works in a highly responsible job that involves a certain amount of confidentiality as well, and she said she is not allowed to make such an error and knows that it is a very serious one. She further said that until now she’s always considered Hillary Clinton to be a very intelligent woman, and therefore she’s having trouble explaining this as a mere lapse. She said that this means that either Hillary actually isn’t all that intelligent after all, or if she is then this was done purposely through arrogance or for some other unacceptable reason.

I’m not sure how much that last person’s viewpoint matters in terms of the election, because she was also nodding when the others were praising Bernie Sanders. So my guess is that she’d happily vote for him instead of Hillary both in a primary and in the general. But that’s just a guess, because I was already so exhausted from the conversation that I couldn’t bear to press them on what they liked so much about Sanders.

The fourth person was someone with whom I had a separate conversation. He stated that he did not care about it, that he would vote for Hillary because he believed that whatever she would do as president would be better than any Republican (he cannot stand Republicans for a number of reasons, and has for years).

So we have one out of four who even seems to care about the emails or find them the least bit alarming. Not a great record, and I bet it’s representative.

[NOTE: And please don’t start telling me to shun these people. Several of them are not such very good friends and they are people I rarely see, so that’s not a problem. But several of them are people extremely close and dear to me and I would never break those bonds.]

[ADDENDUM: Of course, there’s always the possibility that Hillary will be charged with a felony:

By transmitting the server’s contents to a third-party (Platte River), she may well have committed a felony. As of now, Clinton’s best defense is that she only passively received classified e-mails ”” as opposed to having sent, forwarded, or deleted them ”” and that she is thus not in violation of USC 18 793(f). But if she handed over a server full of classified information and then actively copied that information onto computers owned by a commercial provider ”” a clear violation of both the “communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated” and “fails to deliver” clauses in USC 18 793(e) ”” that defense becomes horribly moot.

However, I don’t think that Hillary will ever be charged as long as Democrats control the executive branch.]

[ADDENDUM II: And then there’s the fact that Hillary as president would be highly susceptible to blackmail.]

Some prescient comments here predicting Obama’s course of tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then while searching for something on the blog I come across an old thread and start reading, including the comments.

Thus, this post. Obama’s campaign year was 2008 and then of course his election, while early 2009 represented the first months of the Obama administration. If we’re trying to recall exactly what we said and how we felt back then, memory can play tricks. So I thought it would be an instructive exercise for me to post some of those comments and illustrate some of what was being said on this blog.

Here’s one by a commenter who used to be very active here, “southern james,” written about a week before the election of 2008. It turns out that not only is he describing the 2008 election, but also the 2012 one and beyond (including some conversations I’ve had with people recently):

…“The One” isn’t going to be swept into office by “far leftists” (of course he’ll get a huge assist)…

But of the millions upon millions who vote for this disaster, the HUGE ENORMOUS and vast majority of them are going to be well meaning, uncomplicated souls, who are not particularly educated; who don’t follow politics very much; who never read political blogs; what little daily news they do glean comes from short pops of CNN or CBS or ABC or NBC…

And they have been oblivious to all the non-stop, 24/7 propaganda that has been pounded into their heads. For example, they see Sarah get mocked and ridiculed on the comedy channels and late night talk shows and SNL”¦and they see biased edited snippets of her stumbling through a hostile interview filled with questions a Dem would never get challenged with”¦and so I overhear my secretaries say”¦”she doesn’t seem too smart, does she””¦..(and they haven’t been exposed to Biden AT ALL!)”¦”¦and then”¦ “Now Obama, HE just SEEMS so calm and smart, and you know ”“ we need a change from Bush, and people say McCain is a lot like Bush.” (without even realizing where they have been hearing that”¦”¦over and over and over and over again)

They do not understand what “Socialism” or “Marxism” even is ”“ just that it has always sounded kind of icky ”“ wasn’t that back, like, in you know, Russia or whatever?? ”“ “But, then Ed from the loading dock was talking to Lois, our receptionist the other day, and he really follows this politics stuff you know”¦ and HE was sayin, ”˜if someone is in the Army that’s socialism, and so is the Post Office, so this is just some McCain thing to scare people about Obama’, and so, you know, like, I don’t see what is so bad about 95% of us getting a tax cut ”“ hardly anybody makes over $250,000 anyhow and they can afford it. And anyway, we need a change and we need to end that war, and who wants more of Bush anyway! This economy is all his fault, right? And I’ve heard that McCain is just like Bush, and that Sarah ”“ she’s kind of scary because she just doesn’t seem too smart ”“ and my cousin Dan said she thinks Dinosaurs walked on the earth with humans!! Can you believe it?!!”

It is really that simplistic and basic. People on sites like THIS, think deeply and thoughtfully”¦”¦But “The One” is going to get tens of millions of votes from perfectly nice ignoramuses like my two secretaries, or the guy who bags your groceries, or changes your oil, whose political discussions are at about the level I just illustrated above.

I’m not saying most of the voters on the other side are not the exact same way. I’m saying, you have to appeal to simplistic gut emotions.

In fact, you might want to read the entire thread that comment came from. I was surprised at how prescient and insightful many of the comments were, even way back then. The post isn’t half-bad, either.

Here’s a comment from “FredHJr,” who needs no introduction to most of the readers here. It was made in March of 2009, two months into Obama’s tenure as president:

THE core of Obama support is the under-30 voter, urban, and single female. The cities and the universities are solidly supportive of him.

Never underestimate the power of large numbers of kids who are indoctrinated, poorly educated (even if they have degrees or on their way to getting them), and lacking in a lot of life experience. ACORN really signed these people up big time. Also, ACORN did massive work in the ghettos of minorities and illegal immigrants.

It was not the economy that did in George Bush and his party. Why? Because Obama’s popularity was already solid long before the economy was even on the radar screen. It was the war. The very day after 9/11 the Left was already hard at work building the anti-war coalitions, and on college and university campuses this was already up and running. Then, the MSM went to work on George Bush and his party, selling the alternate reality. Everything else, which was substantial, was ancillary to that major theme: the war. Guantanamo, “torture,” electronic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, etc. No effort was spared to create an atmosphere where George Bush and his party were made to look buffoonish or criminal. In truth, sometimes George Bush did make mistakes and he was especially wrong on the issue of illegal immigration. Thus, you had a considerable minority of Republicans who already were inclined to simply not vote.

I have a hard time assigning malevolent motives to most of the kids. However, to most of their teachers and professors I have an easy time assigning malevolent motives, simply because I got to know that culture very, very well and noted their revolutionary intent.

Antonio Gramsci really did have the right blueprint. Lenin and Stalin did not. By the time Andropov and Gorbachev were true disciples of Gramsci, it was too late for the Soviet Union. But Gramsci’s work has been an astounding success.

About a week later I wrote the following (it was April Fools’ Day, but the post and the comments were very serious):

Although I remain open to evidence to the contrary, for now my working hypothesis is that Obama is a man of the Left, that he is insufficiently devoted to the age-old American idea of liberty but is instead a committed statist, and that the mind-numbing pace of his change is deliberate and has been effective so far…

…[Obama] knows that those [voters] more in the middle will not be noticing much, until the deeds are done. And he is counting on them to look away and hope for the best. The question is whether his pace is fast enough, and whether they will catch on””and whether they will then understand what is happening, or care. Or will the predictions of the Grand Inquisitor come to pass in this country, as they have in so many others?

From “Roy Lofquist” on April 1, 2009:

Nobody has mentioned one of the most blatant and disturbing of his power grabs ”“ the appointment of Czars and commissions. These take powers that are normally lodged in the Cabinet, which is subject to Senate confirmation, and given to his own selected people.

Senator Byrd sent a letter to Obama complaining specifically about this, proclaiming that this looked like an attempt to subvert the Congress’ overview authority.

Oh, I bet Obama really paid attention to that letter—not. It was probably a relief to him when Byrd died about a year later, however.

The following comment by “southern james” is great; he writes about recognizing Cuba, and thinks it will happen in Obama’s second term. Well, Obama waited till the 2014 elections, but nevertheless I would say touché, southern james!:

The blistering pace of new sh”“t cooked up out of thin air, thrown out on virtually a daily basis just won’t let up. This morning’s misdirection “look ”“ over there!!” is an announcement that it APPEARS that fully open travel and open relations with Cuba is suddenly, for some unknown and unexplained reason, going to be pushed and pushed hard, to happen NOW.

NOW! Not after a period of measured and well thought-out, intelligent debate and consideration. But”¦right now. Crammed down our throats. Intantly. Like the stimulus bill.

Why isn’t anyone in the main stream press asking “Why?” or “Why Now,” with everything else on our plates? What’s the rush? Can this topic not wait until we have G-20, N Korea, General Motors, etc, etc, etc, issues resolved?

So it happens”¦unless”¦there is a whole lot of outcry. And then”¦.it gets quietly withdrawn. For now. For the moment. But the waters get tested ”“ the concept gets floated ”“ and notes are taken on how to approach it again next year, or the year after, or perhaps right after the re-election. And, just as when the idea of making Vets pay for their own medical care for their injuries idea went “poof” ”“ as far as Pravda arm of the Obama Admin is concerned (aka the MSM) ”“ it never occurred at all.

Can you even begin to imagine the flurry of sh”“t that will get done via executive orders/pardons, etc., when (if?) this guy finally becomes a lame duck? It will make Bill Clintons actions like the Marc Rich et al nonsense look like a Siesta in comparison.

I really don’t WANT to get all paranoid, and become a conservative version of those left wing moonbats who were convinced that Bush/Rove/Cheney only went to Iraq to enrich their oil buddies; 911 was “an inside job”; the Neocons are going to impose a christianist theocracy, etc. I’m fighting it. I’m fighting it hard. But I’m starting to lose.

Yes, we’ve been talking about this stuff for a long, long time. And although it’s scant comfort—and Cassandra-like, it hasn’t done a particle of good in terms of preventing any of it from happening—this is a blog, and this is what we do. Recognizing the problem of who the left is and the actions it’s taking and why is the first step, after all.

Here’s another psychopath who hired hit men to murder her parents

The New Neo Posted on by

The extremely sad and horrifying story of how Jennifer Pan, a Canadian woman whose parents hailed from Vietnam and who had huge dreams for her academic success and pressured her to achieve it, came to hire three hit men to murder them is told as though it’s a tragedy of “tiger parenting” gone wrong:

Bich and Hann had raised Jennifer and her brother, Felix, to believe in the supreme importance of academic success, and they restricted their activities to ensure nothing less. Pan, whose high school life included numerous extracurricular activities, like figure skating, piano, martial arts and swimming, in addition to long nights studying, was forbidden from attending parties of any kind. Dating was out of the question. In their Markham home, they had trophy cases displaying Pan’s many awards.

When Pan’s parents learned that all of their efforts had been for naught [and she had been deceiving them for many years about her grades and status as a college student when in fact she had failed to graduate high school], they placed further restrictions on their now-adult daughter. No more cellphone. No more laptop. No more clandestine dates with her boyfriend, Daniel Wong.

While she eventually gained more freedom, Pan stayed angry. She thought about how much better her life would be without her parents. And so, with Daniel’s help, she plotted to kill the two people who had made her life like “house arrest.”

The scene described in Toronto Life and earlier in the trial is gruesome. In a planned murder disguised to look like a robbery gone awry, Pan played the part of helpless witness as three hired hit men, David Mylvaganam, Lenford Crawford and allegedly Eric Carty, fatally shot her mother and severely wounded her father. She called 911, distraught, to bolster the illusion.

This story sounds like it has to do with parental pressure. But if you look back at the post I recently wrote about the patterns shown by psychopathic children who murder (or try to murder) their parents, Jennifer Pan fits the template very well. She seems to have a knack for deception and had been expertly practicing it long before the plan to murder, faking grades in high school, and creating a complex web of evidence that she was attending college for four years when she actually was not. It was when her parents found out, and tried to impose consequences and restrictions on her as a result, that her plan to murder them seems to have been hatched.

This article written by a former classmate of Pan’s relates incident upon incident of Pan’s deception and later cold-blooded violence, a veritable blueprint of teen and young adult psychopathy, but the author remains sympathetic to Pan. She ascribes emotions to Pan of “inadequacy, self-doubt and shame,” but offers little evidence of any of these except to say that Pan made “little horizontal cuts on her forearms,” but doesn’t say who saw these cuts or how she knows this happened.

But to me the best indication of Pan as psychopath rather than abused child who had no recourse is that when the murders occurred she was 24 years old, and had a boyfriend. They could certainly have gone out and lived on their own at that point, but chose not to. What’s more, here’s the classic “psychopathic teen who kills parents” story, a sort of smoking gun:

According to the police, it was at this point that Daniel and Jennifer, who were back in contact and exchanging daily flirty texts, devised an even more sinister plan: they’d hire a hit on Bich and Hann, collect the estate””Jennifer’s portion totalling about $500,000””and live together, unencumbered by her meddling parents. Daniel gave Jennifer a spare iPhone and SIM card, and connected her with an acquaintance named Lenford Crawford, whom he called Homeboy. Jennifer asked what the going rate was for a contract killing. Crawford said it was $20,000, but for a friend of Daniel’s it could be done for $10,000. Jennifer was careful to use her iPhone for crime-related conversations and her Samsung phone for everything else.

This is not a portrait of a child who is abused for years, has no way out, and who snaps. This is something else entirely.

The description of the killings, and Jennifer Pan’s part in them, makes very chilling reading—and includes the sadly ironic fact that Jennifer’s mother, who thought it was a home invasion and thought Jennifer was threatened as well, pleaded desperately with the killers to spare her daughter.

Pan’s father lived, despite being shot in the head. Here’s one small part of how Jennifer’s involvement in the crime came to be known:

By November 12, Hann [Jennifer’s father] had woken up from his three-day induced coma. He had a broken bone near his eye, bullet fragments lodged in his face that doctors couldn’t remove and a shattered neck bone””the bullet had grazed the carotid artery. Remarkably, he remembered everything, including two troubling details: he recalled seeing his daughter chatting softly””“like a friend,” he said””with one of the intruders, and that her arms were not tied behind her back while she was being led around the house.

When confronted with the fact that the police strongly suspected she was involved, Jennifer’s reaction was also very typical of a psychopath: she was “hunched over and sobbing, ask[ing] repeatedly, ‘But what happens to me?’”

Stories like this make terrible reading. No doubt Pan’s parents were not ideal, but most parents are not ideal and most children don’t hire hit men to kill their parents and live high off the hog on the insurance money. That is the province of the psychopath, and we do ourselves no good when we make excuses, blame the parents, or fail to see a pattern.

Once again…

The New Neo Posted on by

…we have Ksenia Parkhatskaya (see yesterday’s post if you don’t know who I’m talking about).

This dance has a completely different tone than the ones I posted yesterday, and therefore it spotlights her versatility. Although it’s not the sort of style I tend to like—too sexually obvious—I am incredibly impressed with her concentration that never flags, her complete and very serious commitment to her choreography, and most particularly the fact that this woman possesses joints and sinews and muscles in her back and arms that the rest of us can only dream of.

Take a look at what I mean:

The forgotten ones

The New Neo Posted on by

Quick: name all seventeen Republican contenders.

Whom do you leave out? I leave out Gilmore, who barely has gotten in, as well as Graham and Pataki (yes, had to look them all up). Sorry Jindal; you’re a good man, but I tend to forget you, as well. Santorum, too. In the beginning Perry was more of a presence, but now he’s faded into the woodwork. And Kashich doesn’t register for me.

That’s seven. I listed my seven before I read this article at The Hill which lists seven, because I was curious whether it would up being the same seven. It is for the most part, with one difference: the author says Rand Paul and I say Kasich.

I disagree about Paul because I think he’ll have a bit more staying power as the only libertarian choice, or at least the designated libertarian choice, and the heir apparent to his father Ron who had such die-hard supporters. But to me he looked and sounded like a peevish imp at the debate.

I think the more interesting question is: who will be the last three or four standing? A long time ago I would have said Walker, Cruz, Rubio, and Bush, in no particular order. Now I’d have to add Trump, and perhaps Fiorina or even Carson. Which of those will fade first? That’s a difficult one to answer, so I won’t even try.

My first choice for a long time was Walker. I’m still fine with him, but I don’t think he’s my first choice any more. Now it’s between Cruz and Fiorina.

They All Laughed—and danced

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a video (with subtitles) of an interesting Russian entertainer named Ksenia Parkhatskaya, performing on a Ukrainian TV show. She starts out giggling—and gets practically everyone else giggling, too—but don’t let that fool you. She a good singer, with no Russian accent at all, and an astounding and amusing dancer, in a style all her own.

Did I write that Ksenia dances “in a style all her own”? Actually, it’s a style that’s a bit reminiscent of some of the 1920s dances of Josephine Baker, a black American woman who took Paris by storm with her risque act (some of it far more daring than the following videos) and a 1000-watt smile:

In an interesting circular US/Russia history, the song the Russian woman chose to sing, “They All Laughed,” is by George Gershwin, whose parents came from Russia and Lithuania. It was written for the movie “Shall We Dance,” with Astaire and Rogers, in which Fred played an American dancer who (back in the days when American and British dancers liked to give themselves Russian names) gave himself the Russian-sounding name “Petrov.” Here is the scene where the song and the dance occurs:

[NOTE: If you go to Ksenia’s website, you’ll find a lot more information, and many more videos of her dancing in highly varied styles. Note this performance by Ksenia as a chicken (start watching around 3:25), which also harks back to certain moments in that first video of Josephine Baker, the one where she’s dancing with her shadow—particularly 1:20-1:26 in the Baker video, and at 2:00 where Baker notices the audience and tries to cover up.]