Elizabeth Warren's call to abolish the Electoral College is part of a pernicious pattern

Monica Showalter  "Unlike, say, Beto O'Rourke, who offers nothing upstairs, or Kamala Harris, who flits with the wind with regard to what she's in favor of, Elizabeth Warren is a Democratic presidential candidate with some specific ideas.

"And they're not good ones. 

"Here's what's probably her worst, from Twitter:

Elizabeth Warren

✔ @ewarren

Every vote matters. We need to get rid of the Electoral College so that presidential candidates have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote, not just those in battleground states. #WarrenTownHall

"It's a programmatic call from the worst of the Democratic electoral operatives' dream book: to wipe out the constitution and replace it with riggings for Democrats.  With Warren, it's now coming into the mainstream as a respectable idea.

"It's also awful, an idea clothed in the California-style slogan of "count all the votes," which is the rationale used for the open practice of ballot-harvesting there.  "Count all the votes."  "Every vote matters..."

"What it is is a bid to second-guess and smash up the wisdom of the founding fathers for the sole reason that Democrats don't like losing.  Call it the Democrat Pacifier for Permanent Power Act of 2020."

Save the Electoral College

CNN Brags About Winning Award For Much-Maligned Parkland Townhall. Dana Loesch Crushes Them.

Daily Wire

On Tuesday, CNN trumpeted that the network had won the Walter Cronkite Award, administered by USC’s Norman Lear Center and announced by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, for the Parkland Townhall in which NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was booed and even called a “murderer.”
. . . 
Loesch expressed her feelings in her typically blunt way on Twitter, while illuminating exactly what happened at the townhall:
. . . 

Verified account @DLoesch  tweeted:

Some interesting notes: CNN set this up like a WWE event. Purposefully. They allowed Scott Israel to take the stage before the cameras turned on and electioneer; he took that time (about 20 minutes) to start blaming law-abiding gun owners. Loesch tweeted later: After the broadcast ended, one of my detail had to stop a woman who rushed the stage to tackle me from behind. That is when Tapper asked me if I had an escort out. I am positive that CNN’s cameras, still operational, observed this and would like for them to release the footage.

California solar power plants ignite birds mid flight

WUWT

. . . ‘This project will fuel 140,000 California homes.’

At night? Not just birds on fire, that guys pants are on fire.

Reply

• Gary Wescom

  March 17, 2019 at 8:04 pm

  Yep, never an actual daily KWH output from the plant. Only its maximum capacity under optimum conditions.

  Reply
  • Greg

    March 18, 2019 at 2:01 am

    Note that the PR guy carefully avoids a reply which involves any scientific units, only answering with meaningless, unverifiable “California homes” units of measurement.

Stick a Fork in O’Rourke; "The boutique candidate will quickly get eaten up by the media"

. . . This man is a boob, a dolt. He is vulgar and ungrammatical, knows nothing, and makes no sense. He can’t keep his mouth shut for five seconds and he is wired like an early helicopter with a vertical rotor on its tail: he can’t gabble out his nonsense without waving his arms around." . . .

Ian Macfarlane

Conrad Black  "If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if nominated, might hold his shaggy legions back from holus-bolus embrace of the many suicide potions being offered to the Democratic contestants. To date, the most lethal intoxicants that have been extolled by some of the candidates are legalized infanticide, open borders, reparations to African and other minority Americans, nationalized health care, a fascistic and Luddite green policy, and top personal-tax rates above 70 per cent. So far, this cocktail, which is such an assault on the sanity of an electorate that it could reduce the Democrats to splinters, has scared off Michael Bloomberg, Sherrod Brown, and Hillary Clinton (though she is probably contemplating her legal future with some well-founded consternation too).

Townhall

"But another candidate-benefactor is also in sight, and so hyperactive and in his way irresistible that it is hard to get him out of your sight. Beto O’Rourke is stoking up one the great bonfires of modern political history; he is a phenomenon of these strange times so unique that no one could have imagined him. Even the Trump-hating media, desperate to find a Democrat who can win, in despair at the collapse of the impeachment bubble, demoralized and hung over from pelagic overconsumption of sour Kool Aid, are taking a break from their sacred mission to destroy Trump. They are not turning their swords into ploughshares, but some sort of quasi-Biblical grace of change is occurring. 

"All of the Democratic candidates and the entire political process are being taken over and occupied by the invasion of the whole public space by Robert Francis O’Rourke. No one has ever heard or seen anything like this candidate: a hyperactive limb-flailing imbecile, babbling compulsively in a torrent of extremist nonsense barely couched in comprehensible syntax. No idea is too stupid to be endorsed in terms of absolute finality: “If we do not abolish all fossil fuels within twelve years, everything on the planet will be dead. The scientists are 100 percent united on this. Just as Americans of the past had to fight at Normandy, we have to fight this now, and save our planet.” . . . (Emphasis added, TD)

Waging War against the Dead

Victor Davis Hanson

Destroying history will not make you feel good about the present.

Damage to a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Duke University’s Duke Chapel in Durham, N.C.

"The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.

"In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.

"In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed.

"The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.

"In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves — 154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states." . . .

‘Damn socialism, why are you chasing me?’ Chinese-Americans see ghost of communism in Democrats’ leftward turn

Washington Examiner

"When Saga Zhou first moved to the United States from China in 2009, she steered clear of politics. The Communist Party rules supreme in China, so most Chinese immigrants bring a built-in aversion to political involvement.

"But Zhou’s interest in politics was piqued as she began to see the American Left embracing policies that reminded her of those she’d fled in China.

"One such policy was the Left’s support for late-term abortion. When she lived in China, Zhou, like many young Chinese, didn’t consider abortion to be a big deal. But her view changed after moving to America, getting married, and bearing two children." . . .

“ 'Oh, when I saw the news, I cannot even open [the article],” Zhou said through tears. “It was really hard. I just felt something really strong into my chest. And then I said, ‘Let me adopt him, don’t kill him.'”

"The proposed law hit especially close to home for Zhou, whose mother became pregnant with her just as China’s government began implementing its brutal one-child policy.

"The policy prohibited most couples from having more than one child. Women who became pregnant with a second child were often forced to undergo sterilization; sometimes their babies were killed in the womb. Though she was her mother’s second child, Zhou escaped death because the one-child policy had not yet been implemented in her city." . . .

. . .  [George] Li believes the Republican Party is a natural fit for Chinese-Americans.

Traditional Chinese culture is conservative, he said, emphasizing hard work, independence, education, and family values.

He finds the Left’s obsession with political correctness maddening because it intimidates people into silence. “This intimidation is so bad for freedom of speech,” he said. “A lot of things I see in this country are very similar to what I saw in the Cultural Revolution era in China,” He calls political correctness a “form of cultural Marxism.” . . .

. . . "Benjamin Yu, also of Irvine, saw the Democratic Party moving toward socialism long before some of its members began embracing the term.

"Yu immigrated to the U.S. with his mother in the late 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Yu, then a U.S. Green Card holder, felt a “surge of patriotism,” prompting him to join the Army.

“ 'When something happens so close to you, it doesn’t matter if you are an American by legal status,” he said. “You get a sense that that’s your country. You feel part of the community.' ”  . . .

KOMO News’ special: Seattle is Dying

Hot Air

“People didn’t use to use the word embarrassing about Seattle, but they use it a lot now,” the narrator to a new KOMO News special titled “Seattle is Dying” says. The focus of the special is homelessness and the ways in which it has changed the city.

"There’s a section featuring angry residents of one area of the city who are screaming at their representatives for action. They want the tent cities managed and they’re tired of calling the police only to find out the police can arrest people but those same people will be back on the street, sometimes within hours.

"It also asked Seattle police officers to comment anonymously on what was happening and those responses are enlightening. One officer told KOMO, “People come here because it’s called Free-attle and they believe if they come here they will get free food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes and will be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right.”

"The special also addresses the reasons this is happening. One homeless woman named Melissa Burns tells KOMO, “I have not met anyone else on the street who is not in some phase of addiction, I mean of use, of serious use and I think that’s the starting point. You just have to address that.' ” . . .

Ten legit public policy questions to ask Ilhan Omar

Majid Mohammadi  "Every American citizen has the right to ask public policy questions from his lawmakers in the public sphere.  Lawmakers also have the right to answer or refuse.  Ms. Ilhan Omar is not an exception because she is a Muslim.  Our Congress is not a safe zone for Muslims or any other group.

"Here are my ten questions:"

1. Why don't you defend the rights of Muslim women in Somalia and other Muslim-majority countries?

2. Why don't you talk about the violation of women's rights by enforcing sharia in some Muslim nations?  Here is a list for you to fight while you are enjoying equal rights in the U.S.: female genital mutilation, male guardianship, child marriage, banning women from holding high-ranking judiciary and administrative positions, banning female singers' voices from the radio, television, and CDs and audiocassettes, segregation of the sexes and gender apartheid stretched to every aspect of public life, denial of the right to obtain custody of their children from certain ages if divorced, and considering women as half-human in court procedures.

3. In your ideal country, could women choose what to wear, where to go, and what to do?

4. Why don't you talk about religious oppression in Iran under the Islamist regime?  Is the Islamist regime legitimate?  What do you think about obligatory hijab in Iran?  If your Muslim comrades are in power in a city, a state, or the whole country, do you believe that you should obligate women to wear the hijab?  Is the hijab sharia-based or tradition, personal choice or family obligation?  Why don't you defend Iranian women who protest the obligatory hijab and are prosecuted?

5. If Palestinians are Muslims, and you feel obligated to defend their rights, why don't you speak about the rights of Muslims under authoritarian regimes in China (Uyghur), Russia (Chechnya), and Iran?  Who in our Congress should defend their rights?  Are you aware that Muslims' religious rights are violated by these regimes?

6. Do immigrants owe America something, or does America owe them because they moved here?  Should immigrants appreciate the generosity of the American people, who gave them refuge when they had to leave their parents' country, or they are victims of their new country?

7. If a married woman has committed adultery in a Muslim community in the U.S., do you believe that that woman should be stoned to death, or she is free to go?  What about honor killing?

8. Is interest forbidden (haraam) or legitimate?

9. Last week, a female Iranian lawyer was sentenced to 44 years in prison just because she did her job.  The E.U issued a statement and asked for an immediate review of her sentence.  Why are you and the Democratic Party silent about her case?

10. Why don't you as a Muslim who enjoys American freedom condemn the brutality of the Taliban, ISIS, and the Iranian Islamist government against women?  Do women have the right to be free?

Majid Mohammadi is an expert on Islam and the Middle East.  Iran's Islamist Regime in Shambles is one of his latest books.

The blame game of the Israel-hating troika  . . . "Ignoring the fact that New Yorkers who disapprove of her performance include not just Republicans, but Democrats and independents as well, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez thinks playing the race card will win back voters.  Like Omar and Tlaib, she refuses to take responsibility for her own actions, words, and failures.  This is fine, because if she continues to propose untenable legislation that will destroy the American way of life and value system while sounding like you know — a complete and total moron — maybe we will be rid of her in 2020 as well.

"One can only hope.  But in the meantime, this troika of ungrateful, entitled, ignorant Democrats should keep it up.  Perhaps they'll bring the entire party down with them.  One can only hope."