AOC must think this announcement from Governor Newsom is really badly timed

The New Neo Posted on by

New California governor Newsom appears to be pulling the plug on California’s high-speed rail:

During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first State of the State speech Tuesday, he surprised listeners by announcing he would put the quest for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles championed by his predecessor far on the back burner.

Instead, Newsom offered a consolation prize: high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced.

“Let’s level about the high-speed rail,” Newsom said. “Let’s be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”

I wishes were fishes…

Again, you can see the emphasis on the aspiration of it all. But, at least for the moment, Newsom is letting that old dream-downer, reality, intervene.

Newsom isn’t abandoning high speed rail entirely, however—and after all, some of the proposed line has actually been built. He says:

“Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises… and lawsuits to show for it,” Newsom added, explaining he wouldn’t want to send the $3.5 billion in federal money the project has been granted back to the Trump administration.

But then—but then—the article ends with this:

By afternoon, however, Newsom’s office said that he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite his comments during his State of the State speech.

Is this a backtrack? Perhaps not exactly. I think what “fully committed” means is “fully committed in the aspirational sense—that is, he wishes we could do it, and he knows that a great many of the Democrats of California think he should be committed to trying.”

Looking for further explanation of the governor’s seeming reversal, I found this:

Governor Gavin Newsom’s office is clarifying statements made at Tuesday’s State of the State Address on California’s high-speed rail project.

The governor’s office confirms he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles…

Newsom said the project would cost too much and take too long. But his spokesman Nathan Click said he’s not walking away from it.

Some in the Bay Area believe the governor’s new approach isn’t derailing development.

“The idea is to keep the project going and to have the central valley connection from Bakersfield to Merced,” Bay Area Council President and CEO, Jim Wunderman said. “For a spine from which the rest of the system can grow.”

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s try it on a huge, nationwide scale. That’ll work.

Democrats on the Green New Deal: we didn’t really mean it…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and you Republicans are meanies for asking us to actually take a stand on this over-the-top and all-encompassing piece of socialist “aspirational” fantasy that our star ingenue AOC floated, revealing the far-leftist heart of today’s Democratic Party.

McConnell says he will call the Democrats’ bluff by bringing the GND to a vote in the Senate. Somehow, his Democratic counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi, doesn’t seem to be following suit on the proposal she referred to as the “Green Dream or whatever they call it.”

And Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, AOC’s co-sponsor of the bill, is stunned and angry that McConnell will be forcing the Democrats to actually vote on this monstrosity:

Before you laugh, or ask WFT?—or both—note that this Orwellian sort of thing—allowing us to vote on something we proposed is akin to silencing our voices—is not unusual on the left. That’s why Orwell became a household word, because he noted and described the phenomenon so well. There’s plenty Republicans do and say for which they can be criticized, but Orwellian speech is far more likely to be the province of the left.

The GND was so over-the-top and so very far left, so sweeping and so impossible, that one wonders why even AOC went so far. I wrote a previous post on the subject, in which I said:

Isn’t [the Green New Deal] very very extreme, so extreme it will alienate people? For the answer, just do what I did: spend a few hours reading MSM sites and seeing reactions from Democrats. It’s an education in how the GND is being responded to, and why the Democratic candidates have all hopped aboard the extremist green social justice jobs for everyone train.

Last night I watched a clip of some liberal spokesperson or other being quizzed by a conservative as to what she agreed with in the details of the GND. “Its spirit” was all she could come up with, but for her it was enough. She seemed embarrassed when asked about particulars and couldn’t endorse any, but she pooh-poohed—almost ridiculed—the need for details.

I doubt there are many Democratic politicians able to defend many (if any) of the GND manifesto’s specific provisions. And yet many have endorsed it…

This GND initiative is a counter to Trump, that troglodyte non-believer in AGW. The GND is not meant to be serious legislation for now, but to burnish the Democrats’ reputation as caring about climate change and the Republicans’ reputation for not caring. And the Democrats are counting on just about no one—except the right, and the far left—to read what’s actually in the GND.

So, the plan was to rally the leftist base, to rely on the MSM to cover for the extreme far leftist details, and to endorse the GND proposal’s spirit and contrast it to the supposedly anti-environmental spirit of the GOP. You can see evidence of that in Senator Markey’s tweet, in which he states this [emphasis mine]:

[McConnell] wants to silence your voice so Republicans don’t have to explain why they are climate change deniers. McConnell wants this to be the end, this is just the beginning.

In other words, we wanted you to notice the Republicans, not the craziness of our plan. And we still think there’s time to switch the emphasis over to that.

At this point, I think Markey has lost that battle. One reason was the extremity of the proposal and the fact that AOC spilled the beans on some of the details (such as getting rid of cow farts), which are risible. The second is that the right actually—bloggers and media and even some politicians like McConnell—have attacked this with ridicule, and the ridicule has stuck. Markey’s tweet—which probably sounded eminently reasonable to him, since he comes from the deep blue bubble of Massachusetts—is also risible, and I don’t think he even knows it.

But note Markey’s reference to the long game. I’ve often said the left takes the long view. And it’s always just the beginning; the fight must be fought anew every day.

[ADDENDUM: Ace points out this AP headline of art: “McConnell wields Green New Deal as bludgeon against Dems.” McConnell, cruel thug beating up innocent Democrats.]

9th Circuit rules that Trump can waive environmental constraints to build wall

The New Neo Posted on by

No, you’re not dreaming—the very liberal 9th Circuit ruled that a president has the power to expedite the building of a border wall by waiving certain environmental constraints:

From the ruling:

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which President Trump regularly likes to chide as too liberal, sided with him this time.

The judges said federal law gives the administration broad powers to waive any laws in order to get the wall built.

“In short, the plain text [of the law] grants DHS authority to construct the prototype, San Diego and Calexico projects,” the judges ruled.

This is based on a statute passed during the Clinton administration, back in the olden days when even Democrats seemed to favor a wall.

To what do we owe this decision, that seems to run in a pro-Trump direction? I am certainly no expert on this case or this issue, but I think the difference between the decision here and in so many other decisions by the 9th Circuit is that they are ruling on an issue governed by a statute whose language and intent are so very unequivocal that it would be a bridge too far even for the 9th Circuit to find a way to rule otherwise.

I’m still surprised, though.

Border deal?

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve heard a lot of deal rumors. This is what’s being reported lately, as the Friday deadline looms:

House and Senate negotiators late Monday struck a bipartisan deal “in principle” that would dodge a second partial government shutdown by providing President Trump $1.375 billion in funding for physical barriers along 55 miles of the Rio Grande Valley.

The accord, which must pass the House and Senate and receive the president’s signature, resolved a weekend impasse over illegal immigrant detentions.

By Monday night, both sides were claiming victory in the talks, although the exact details of the agreement weren’t yet clear, and two of the major claims seemed to contradict each other…

Much of the disagreement over what was decided seems to involve whether there is a possible cap on the number of detainees and/or beds for detainees.

And this amount of money for the wall is chump change. So far, whatever the actual deal involves, the Trump camp says he hasn’t decided whether to accept it or not.

One thing that might happen—and that might not be a bad idea—is for Trump to take the money, avoid the shutdown, and get more money from another source, as many say he legally could:

A week ago [written on 12/24/2018], the White House put out a call to federal agencies to look for “pots of money” in their existing budgets that could be cobbled together to pay for border wall construction. Immediately, Sen. John Thune, the Republican whip in the upper chamber, shot down the idea of shifting funds from executive departments to the border, saying, “I’m not a big fan of moving money.” Like it or not, there are sources of revenue in the executive branch that the president has authority to use without congressional approval.

There’s been a lot of discussion of Trump declaring a national emergency, which is a much more problematic way to go. I think if he can do it without that it would be a far better resolution. I’m assuming that this is what he’s working on—shut down the shutdown itself, and get moving on the solution.

I watched some of Trump’s El Paso speech yesterday

The New Neo Posted on by

Unusual for me to watch a speech. I happened to come across it while channel surfing, and I noticed a couple of things in particular.

The first is that Trump seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He loves this sort of speech, similar to his stump appearances, with the crowd yelling back at him and a lot of ad libs. This characteristic of real enjoyment isn’t quite as common in politicians as one might think. He’s relaxed up there.

Trump makes the audience have fun, too. In fact, he alluded to this in his speech when he said something like “Is there anything that’s more fun than a Trump rally?” and the crowd roared back its approval.

One of the specific things Trump said that struck me—and that might become some sort of recurrent theme in his 2020 campaign—was something like “Democrats have to stop being so angry.” Democrats would of course counter with “We have an awful lot to be angry about,” followed by a list of what they consider injustices and outrages committed by Trump and the GOP, or at least what they think they can convince you to consider injustices and outrages committed by Trump and the GOP.

But “Democrats=angry” would be an interesting approach by Trump, one that might be effective. One of the reasons people liked Reagan was that he was happy and upbeat. Trump remains happy and upbeat as well for the most part, despite all the challenges he’s experienced as president. The Democrats are many things, but upbeat is not generally one of them—although I actually think that Obama’s conveying an upbeat message is one of the things that attracted people in 2008 to the “hope and change” mantra, and one of the things that attracts people even today to none other than AOC, who conveys energetic and optimistic faith in her most preposterous and destructive policy proposals at the same time she conveys pessimism about a future without those proposals.

Erick Erickson, former NeverTrumper, has a change of heart

The New Neo Posted on by

Never say “never”?

Erickson writes:

This week in 2016, I declared I would be “Never Trump.” A friend suggested I use a hashtag that had started circulating on Twitter, i.e #NeverTrump. The piece exploded and pushed me into a whirlwind of coverage. Despite lots of pressure, protestors literally on my front porch, and harassment directed towards my family, I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. I voted third party.

Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like…

…In 2016, we knew who the Democrats were and were not sure of who Donald Trump was. Now we know both and I prefer this President to the alternative.

Trump’s approval rating hits 50+

The New Neo Posted on by

I actually don’t pay all that much attention to the ups and downs of approval ratings. People are fickle; they forget what happened last week and ask “what have you done for me lately?” And people are unfickle (yes, I know that’s not a word), and some will never desert their candidate no matter what (as Trump himself famously said).

Nevertheless I thought I’d point out that Trump’s approval numbers went up shortly after his SOTU speech. It doesn’t surprise me; the speech was excellent.

But the smallness of the bump doesn’t surprise me, either, because most people probably didn’t listen to it and most of those who did are probably already pretty set in their opinions of Trump.

Donald Trump’s job approval rating among likely U.S. voters hit 52 per cent on Monday in a daily tracking poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, the polling organization he uses most frequently to promote himself.

That number is his highest since March 6, 2017, less than seven weeks after he took office. It has been even longer since Trump’s ‘strongly approve’ and ‘strongly disapprove’ numbers weren’t under water. They were even at 39 per cent on Monday.

Can you imagine what his numbers might be if the press wasn’t engaged in a 24/7 effort to destroy him?

Friday is the deadline—the “looming deadline”—for the budget negotiations and possible shutdown. I don’t see a solution on the horizon, and if there’s another shutdown I’m unsure how it will go. The public tends to blame shutdowns on the Republicans no matter whether the current president is a Republican or not.

I’m also not sure whether Trump will be successful in his efforts to come up with alternative funding for the wall. But I do know that the left must be feeling quite frustrated at the moment at his rising poll numbers. Of course, they take the long view—the really long view—so they’ll keep their spirits up.

[NOTE: This isn’t really all that related, but I wanted to mention that I’ve spoken recently to two leftists I know (one a close friend and the other a bare acquaintance) who love, love, love AOC.]

Sandmann’s lawyer announces Nathan Phillips to be sued, despite his shallow pockets

The New Neo Posted on by

Good:

One of the attorneys representing Covington High School student Nick Sandmann and his parents confirmed to LifeSiteNews that Native American activist Nathan Phillips, and some of the others who have received notices from the attorneys, “will be sued.”

Lin Wood, an Atlanta-based lawyer, told LifeSite yesterday that Phillips’ “lies and false accusations” against Sandmann and the other Covington students are “well documented.”

They’re well-documented, all right. And most people—even many of those who’ve followed the story plenty closely—don’t know how extremely vicious Phillips was towards the boys, as I pointed out in this post. He repeatedly committed the malicious and purposeful character assassination of a bunch of high school students, and would have gotten away with it if the longer videos hadn’t surfaced.

He deserves to be sued, even though he almost certainly doesn’t have the money to pay. It’s important to set a precedent about defamation and its consequences—although perhaps the precedent set will be that, if you defame someone and you’re not rich, you won’t suffer much and you’ll get more than your 15 minutes of fame. I have little doubt that many leftist groups will fall all over themselves to provide good attorneys for Phillips.

Gladys Knight will survive

The New Neo Posted on by

Gladys Knight’s been in the news lately for her great rendition of the national anthem at the Superbowl, and for showing what a tool Don Lemon is:

That sent me on a stroll down YouTube memory lane in search of some Gladys Knight oldies. Among them I found a 1982 cover by Knight that I’d never heard before. In it, she’s singing a song made famous by Gloria Gaynor during disco’s heyday (1978), “I Will Survive.”

Gaynor’s version, the original and her most famous hit, was upbeat and had a distinct disco flavor. And although it had no backup singers and a simpler production than most disco numbers—or maybe because of those things—it was extraordinarily popular. Here’s Gaynor (and some funky skater; don’t know what’s up with that). The video has almost 60 million views, which is pretty darn good for an oldie:

Knight’s version is different. Very very different—although like Gaynor, she wears a fabulous sparkly gown, a sleeveless one this time. Knight’s version is much slower (up until the last minute, when she picks up the pace and becomes celebratory), and there’s an emphasis on acting out the lyrics. Knight’s telling a story—masterfully—and not just singing a song. And you believe her story, which is of survival over pain, a story that becomes more powerful over its course. Yes, perhaps she’s overacting, but it’s utterly convincing to me. Just watch her eyes as she says, “Oh no, not I!” at 1:30-1:34:

Brilliant.

[NOTE: The song became something of an anthem for women after being dumped or having other disappointments, but it was written by two men, Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris. It was Fekaris who wrote the bulk of the lyrics:

…Dino Fekaris revealed [the song] was about getting fired by Motown Records, where he was a staff writer.

He told Songfacts: “They let me go after almost seven years. I was an unemployed songwriter contemplating my fate. I turned the TV on, and there it was: a song I had written for a movie theme titled ‘Generation’ was playing right then (the song was performed by Rare Earth).

“I took that as an omen that things were going to work out for me. I remember jumping up and down on the bed saying, ‘I’m going to make it. I’m going to be a songwriter. I will survive!'”]

Sex on the decline around the world

The New Neo Posted on by

Sex is a strong drive in human beings for a reason: the life of the species depends on it. But in this age of what might seem like no-holds-barred sex, sex has lost its luster for an enormous number of people.

The phenomenon is extremely widespread, and particularly common in Asia:

The Atlantic recently described a “sex recession” in the United States and most western countries, with fewer people dating and even those in relationships getting intimate less often than in the past, while fewer enjoy regular bonds of any kind. Even ogling seems out of fashion, as the decline of Hooters suggests. The family may have been stressed by the “sexual revolution,” but the “sex recession” could ultimately erode the very existence of familialism in our time.

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015 this expanded to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry. This “sex recession” even impacts places like Hong Kong’s famous Wan Chai “red light” district, now being reinvented as an upscale hipster area as the sex trade plummets. China’s current generation of men are so socially disconnected that the Communist Party, and some private firms, now teach them how to date; similar attempts have been made, with apparently little effect, in Singapore.

The article goes on to explore many possible reasons; this seems to be one of those multiply-determined events. The ubiquity of online porn, the widespread availability of sex toys and robots, the imbalance between numbers of men and women in some countries (China, for example), the rise of social (virtual) media and concurrent fall in face-to-face social skills among young people, the higher cost-benefit ratio of raising children—they’re all part of the picture and discussed in the article.

But I want to add a few more:

(1) Feminism and leftism in general have played down the importance of family and procreation.

(2) There is a worldwide decline in testosterone, as well. Since testosterone (for both men and women) is the hormone fueling the sex drive, this must have some sort of dampening effect.

(3) Increasing obesity can reduce the sex drive as well—and I’m not talking about esthetics here, I’m talking about biological reasons.

(4) Men have become increasingly fearful of the increased risk of ruinous accusations from females as a result of sexual interactions that had appeared to the man to be consensual.

(5) When something like sex is forbidden or at least restricted, it can become more attractive: forbidden fruit. When all is allowed sexually, sex can seem to lose its value and appeal.

On that last point, I would like to recommend the closing chapter in Milan Kundera’s masterful The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The story is entitled “The Border.” Here’s an excerpt that appears towards the end, set on a nude beach (“Jan” is a man, by the way; Kundera is a Czech author), describing what Jan is imagining and thinking as he lies on the sand, nude. The excerpt can’t convey more than a glimpse of what the story itself conveys, but here it is anyway:

Jan remem­bered Daphnis. He is lying down, spellbound by Chloe’s nakedness, aroused but with no knowledge of what that arousal is summoning him to, so that the arousal is endless and unappeasable, limited and interminable. A great yearning gripped Jan’s heart, a desire to go back again. Back to that boy. Back to man’s begin­nings, to his own beginnings, to love’s beginnings. He desired desire. He desired the pounding of the heart. He desired to be lying beside Chloe unaware of fleshly love. Unaware of sexual climax. To transform himself into pure arousal, the mysterious, the incomprehensible and miraculous arousal of a man before a woman’s body. And he said out loud: “Daphnis!”

Jan’s friend and companion on the beach, a woman named Edwige, responds that “we need to go back to a time before Christianity crippled mankind. Is that what you mean?” This is a total misunderstanding of what Jan actually means, but he lets it slide. The story concludes:

…Edwige said [to a group of people on the beach]: “Jan was just saying that it’s Daphnis Island. I think he’s right.”

All of them were delighted by that stroke of inspiration, and a man with an extraordinary paunch developed the idea that Western civilization is going to perish and that humanity will finally be liberated from the enslaving burden of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These were phrases Jan had heard ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times before, and those few meters of beach soon turned into a lecture hall. The man spoke, all the others listened with interest, and their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand.

That was published in 1978, over forty years ago.