Michelle Obama's Response Is Far Worse Than Saying Life Under Trump Is Without Hope: She Considers that Americans Are Kids in Need of a Father Figure for President

Charlie Spiering has watched Michelle Obama on the Oprah Winfrey Network and the Breitbart columnist does not seem to be much impressed:

Michelle Obama … she thinks her husband had been a calming voice for the country, comparing him to a parent calming a child that had bumped his head.

“I feel like Barack has been that for the nation, in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grownup in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, ‘Hey it’s going to be OK,’” she said.

The general response has usually been disbelief or mirth and merriment that the Apologizer-in-Chief's wife considers life under Donald Trump life without hope.

But what the former Michelle Robinson said is far worse—here are her actual words:

What do we give your kids if you can't give them hope? Y'know, our children respond to crises the way they see us respond. You know, it's like [a child] that bumps his head on the table, and they look up at you to figure out whether it hurts. And if you're, like, "oh my God, they're cryin'!", but if you're like "you know what, babe, it's okay, it's okay…"

And I feel that way about the nation, I feel that Barack has been that for the nation — in ways that people will come to appreciate. Having a grown-up in the White House who can say to you in times of crisis and turmoil, "Hey, it's going to be okay. Let's remember the good things that we have, let's look at the future, let's look at all the things that we are building." All of this is important for our kids to stay focused, and to feel like their work isn't in vain, that their lives aren't in vain… 

So the American public is not only "kids" but "our kids"; who need a father figure in the White House to stay focused and who need his benevolent intervention to prove that their work, and that their lives, are not in vain. Needless to say, this echoes her husband's contention that young Americans are "kids" until at least 26 (the age at which the "kids" can stay under their parents' health care) and quite possibly until far longer.

In fact, the wife has just said, effectively, that all citizens are children throughout their entire lives. Meaning only one thing: that, for their own good, Americans need 1) higher taxes and 2) more interventionist politicians to ride, like knights in shining armor and on white steeds, to their rescue, along with 3) more beneficent bureaucrats to intervene in their lives.

Note to both Obamas: No U.S. president is a father (or the mother) of the nation. Americans are not "kids" and Americans are not crybabies in need of a Che Guevara-like father figure to blow their noses. Americans live in a republic, founded 240 years ago by men who agreed with the Judeo-Christian assumption that all men are equal and all men are in fact grown-up adults, who, offhand, can be trusted to take care of their own lives and the vast majority of problems therein.

This is reflected in the Declaration of Independence (a message to the "you-didn't-build-that" — and won't be able to do so without our help — élites of George III), and, indeed, in every single line of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Update:

The Democrats' “political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.”

Not Much Concern Among Democrats in 2008 Over Foreign Interference in Presidential Elections, When Foreign Contributions Helped Obama Amass a War Chest Twice the Size of His Opponent

Funny.

I don't remind much of a concern among Democrats in 2008 over foreign interference in a presidential election, when the donkey party removed certain safety checks to donations, and it was alleged that foreign (i.e., illegal) contributions helped propel Barack Obama's war chest to the highest in history, indeed, the double of what his opponent (John McCain) had to spend…

Then, again, the same people who had cried bloody murder in 2004 when George W Bush had 10% more to spend than his opponent (John Kerry) — "See?! That proves it!! That America is not a democracy!!" — went mum four years later when the future apologizer-in-chief, as mentioned, had 50% more to spend than his opponent.

Funny, indeed…

Leftists fail to mention that what little illegal aliens do pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser says that her city can no longer continue to support out-of-towners at the city’s homeless shelters 

writes Benny Huang at Constitution.com.

“We have an obligation to serve our residents,” said the mayor. “But we cannot serve the entire region … We’re serving everybody else’s residents. We can’t serve our own. Our own residents are standing at the back of the line.” Last month she proposed a new policy that would require homeless people to prove their residency before being admitted to homeless shelters.

Proving residency can be quite tricky when a person does not have, um, a residence. Mayor Bowser demonstrated the absurdity of her proposal when she asked, “Do they have utilities? Do they have a lease? Do they have any way to demonstrate that they live here?” No, doofus. People who live under highway overpasses do not usually have leases or utility bills.

Bowser compounded the stupidity of her comments when she categorically refused to exclude illegal aliens. “Anybody, regardless of their immigration status, would have to demonstrate that they are a DC resident,” she said. So the city will gladly take in the poor from other countries, even those who are in the country illegally, just not people from outside the District. Yeah, that makes sense.
 
Despite the insanity of Mayor Bowser’s proposal, I can understand the bind she’s in. Budgets are, by definition, the apportionment of finite resources. She’s determined that the social services budget is overburdened and that she has to do something about it. She doesn’t want to slam the door in anyone’s face but unfortunately she must or there will be no social services for anyone.

Naturally, she isn’t willing to take the issue head on, pretending as she does that DC’s strained budget has nothing to do with the illegal aliens who have invaded the city. She’ll blame Virginians and Marylanders because they don’t have a grievance lobby to agitate on their behalf but she’ll never blame non-Americans. It doesn’t occur to her, I suppose, that people from other countries are also from out of town—really out of town.

To hear the Left tell it, the flood of immigration from the third world is a boon to the American economy. They don’t like to distinguish between the illegal and legal varieties of course, and they became incensed whenever anyone else does. Immigrants, they say, contribute to the economy and even pay taxes. They fail to mention however, that what little illegal aliens pay in taxes is dwarfed by what they cost the taxpayer both directly and indirectly.

Despite the fact that it’s illegal for them to collect welfare benefits, they do it nonetheless. They send their children to our public schools—some of whom are also illegal aliens and some of whom are anchor baby citizens. (Yes, I said anchor baby. Get over it.) They demand ESL programs. They displace other workers who then turn to public assistance for their daily bread. They commit all sorts of crime then make use of court-appointed interpreters and public defenders. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that enforcement is just too expensive. We’ve tried non-enforcement and it’s costing us out the butt.

My initial reaction toward Washington’s budgetary crisis is schadenfreude. Serves them right. Washington is a boastful “sanctuary city” located within a country that is for all practical purposes a sanctuary nation. Immigration enforcement is a joke and has been for quite a long time. If some big city Democrat mayor can’t make ends meet because of stupid policies that she supports then too bad for her. But of course it won’t be Muriel Bowser who suffers the most when there isn’t enough money to keep the homeless shelters open, it will be homeless Washingtonians.

I often wonder if the burdening of our social services by illegal aliens is in fact an intentional effort—a “conspiracy,” if you will—to bring the whole system down. Recall the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, first articulated in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine. Drs. Cloward and Piven were a married couple, both professors and sociologists, who argued that there just weren’t enough people on the welfare rolls and that those who were on the welfare rolls were only accessing a fraction of the benefits they were qualified for. They advocated a mass movement to enroll more people for the purpose of collapsing the system.

Why would they want to do that? I’ll let them tell you:

“A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.” 

The basic idea was to federalize all anti-poverty policy, to redistribute wealth, and to institute a minimum guaranteed income. It was a socialist’s dream.

From this 1966 article was born the so-called welfare rights movement. Activists combed the slums in search of people who weren’t receiving all of their benefits or any benefits at all. Welfare recipients marched for more handouts. A lot of time and energy that would have been better utilized looking for jobs was instead spent on organizing and making demands.

But the Cloward-Piven strategy showed a surprising lack of ambition. They were “thinking small,” confining their movement to poor Americans when in fact there was a bottomless well of impoverished people in our backyard. I’m speaking of Latin America, of course. Fifty years after the article was published it appears that the Left has overcome its provincialism. These days they’re trying to get Latin Americans here by the boatload and to care for their every need. And why stop there? There are plenty of poor people in exotic places like Somalia and Syria. Just keep importing more and more of the third world’s most desperate people until the system heaves and gives way under the strain. Then replace it with something a little more Venezuelan.

Is this the 21^st Century version of the Cloward-Piven strategy? In recent years I’ve asked myself that question with increasing frequency. Illegal immigration has swelled, states have granted drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to people who shouldn’t even be here in the first place, and “sanctuary cities” (lawless zones) are now commonplace. The center cannot hold—and that may be the point.

It’s schemes like this that remind me of just how dumb it is for anyone to vote Democrat, even poor people. Especially poor people. I’m sure this will be a tough sell but I believe that it serves the best interests of America’s poor to show the jackass party to the door. Why? Because the welfare system as we know is it unsustainable, burdened a little more everyday with illegal aliens, the children of illegal aliens, and people who are just trying to get over on the system. For people who really need those services the prospect of collapse ought to be frightening. They should be telling their elected officials to stop importing wards of the state but they never do. Perhaps they believe, as many poor people do, that there’s some rich guy out there who can and should be squeezed a little harder. But there isn’t a rich guy in the whole world who could keep our social services afloat in the long run even if the government seized every penny he owns. The answer isn’t more taxes it’s less spending.

But don’t Republicans want to slash social services? Not really. For as long as I’ve been observing politics, Republicans have generally favored the status quo, opposing Democrats’ attempt to expand social services while doing little or nothing to undo what’s already been done. … 

For people who really need those benefits it makes no sense to continue to vote for a party, the Democrats, that is wittingly or unwittingly crashing the system. The first victims of the coming implosion are those Americans who actually need the benefits that government will no longer be able to provide.

It used to be that we poked fun at the Chicken Littles; In the era of the drama queen, every "The sky is falling!" is taken as holy writ

Referring to the fact that The president-elect’s EPA head may not believe in climate change, a Trump Appointments article in The Economist is entitled A fox for the henhouse.

I respond as follows:

Not only do you assume that leftists alone take a "serious view of the environment", you have adopted the disparaging "denier" expression for their opponents as well ("A fox for the henhouse", December 10th).

There are those among us who have not failed to notice that, over the decades, the "coming ice age" of the 1970s morphed into "global warming" before such inconvenient phenomenons as freezing winters led — conveniently — to the coinage of a one-size-fits-all "climate change".

Like cartoonists around the world, your Kal has drawn GOP elephants mocking activists' fears even as they are forced to climb onto the rooftop of such buildings as the US Congress (soon to include the White House) because of the rising waters.

Think of Los Angeles and New York, of Aberdeen and Brighton, of Capetown and Sydney: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that in the past five weeks, the past five months, the past five years, and the past 50 years (even the past 500 years?), the oceans do not seem to have risen by as much as a single inch?

Thousands of The Economist readers are howling in outrage as they read this letter and as I go on to ask: So who are truly the irrational people here? Isn't science supposed to require the challengers of the status quo to prove their contention?

It used to be that we poked fun at the Chicken Littles and the other boys who cried wolf. In the era of the drama queen, every "The sky is falling!" is taken as holy writ, used to clobber clueless citizens (aka "racists", "deplorables", etc, not least… "deniers"), even as taxes are raised ever higher to increase the size of the administrative state so that politicians and bureaucrats alike can rush to our "rescue".

Hasn't it occurred to you that this snooty (not to mention self-serving) attitude is precisely what, over the past year, skeptical citizens have started to vote against?
Related: Disastrous Claims About Rising Sea Levels Run Into One (Un?)fortunate Fact

Related: Editorial Cartoons: Are They Humor or Are They Propaganda?

Related: Devotees of Science Versus Followers of Religion —
Are Only the Latter to Be Taken to Task for Their Alleged Superstitions?
(dispassionate in-depth chapter-length article
which examines the subject from all perspectives)

Related: Artists Unite: In this era of integrated information, we
are witnessing the most concerted attack on freedom in world history

Bloggers Feast at French Bistro Deep in the Heart o' Texas

Wonderful dinner with Instapundit's Ed Driscoll at Christina’s Bistro. Enjoyed the Southern/Texan hospitality to the utmost…

The U.S. must care more about whether it commands international respect than whether it is loved by international elites

Incredibly, the New York Times, or at least its international version, has given the left column of its front page to one Mark Moyar. The opinion piece penned by the director of the Center for Military and Diplomatic History at the Foreign Policy Initiative is entitled: The World Fears Trump’s America. That’s a Good Thing.

Among global elites, Donald J. Trump’s recent phone call with Taiwan’s president has induced fear on a scale seldom matched since Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. The Sydney Morning Herald warned that the phone call “risks provoking a cold war between the United States and China with potentially catastrophic economic and security implications.” The fright appears to confirm the narrative formed earlier this year by headlines like “Donald Trump Terrifies World Leaders.”

The fear is real. Mr. Trump has indeed terrified foreign leaders with his “America first” mantra, his promises to enlarge the American military and his tough talk on everything from the Islamic State to Air Force One. The good news is that his administration can turn this fear to the benefit of the United States.

During the last eight years, President Obama showed what happens when the world’s greatest power tries strenuously to avoid giving fright. He began his presidency with lofty vows to conciliate adversaries, defer to the opinions of other countries and reduce America’s military commitments. Consequently, he received rapturous applause in European capitals and a Nobel Peace Prize. In the real world of geopolitics, however, the results have been catastrophic.

Mr. Obama’s passivity in the face of provocations and his failure to enforce the “red line” in Syria led Russia, China and other adversaries to seek new gains at America’s expense. His promises to “end the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan satisfied the cosmopolitan chatterers of Stockholm, Paris and New York, but they deflated American allies in Baghdad and Kabul, and emboldened adversaries in Iran and Pakistan. So severe was the damage that he had to send troops back to Iraq in 2014, and had to abort his plans to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan before leaving office.

The Obama presidency is but the latest chapter in a post-1945 saga that has been dominated by international fear of the United States, or lack thereof. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea because Harry S. Truman’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s “defense perimeter” removed fears of intervention. By contrast, Dwight D. Eisenhower employed rhetorical threats and high military spending to fill the Communist powers with fear of nuclear Armageddon, an approach that kept the Communists from launching further invasions.

Lyndon B. Johnson tried to avert a major war in Vietnam by showing restraint, in expectation of North Vietnamese reciprocation. Hanoi responded by pouring troops into South Vietnam. Richard M. Nixon revived fears of the United States with his “madman theory,” whereby he took seemingly reckless actions to convince America’s enemies that he just might be crazy enough to do it. Those fears, and the caution they instilled in the Communist powers, dissipated when the Watergate Congress kicked the legs out from under South Vietnam. The world continued to live without fear of a strong America under Jimmy Carter, whose timidity caused nations to fall to Communism and the United States Embassy in Iran to fall to anti-American extremists.

In 1980, as in 2016, Americans elected someone who made clear his intent to put fear back in the nation’s enemies. Nowadays, even liberal Democrats applaud Reagan for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. Back in 1980, however, Reagan’s tough, nationalist stances on foreign policy aroused the same condemnation of “fearmongering” currently emanating from the world’s enlightened critics of Mr. Trump.

The trembling of the rest of the world does not ensure that American foreign policy will be successful. Like any other strategic advantage, it works only when properly exploited through sound strategic decisions. Tough talk must be used judiciously. As the Syrian red line debacle demonstrated, the White House should issue specific threats only when it is prepared to follow through on them.

In its diplomacy, the new administration must seek the proper balance between fear and more positive motivations like respect and admiration. Under Mr. Obama, and his like-minded predecessors, American foreign policy created plenty of fear among some of America’s allies — fear that the United States would let them down. The Trump administration will need to reverse those expectations, so that fear of the United States is once again stronger among enemies than friends.

At times, nevertheless, even allies ought to have cause to worry about White House decisions. They must know that the world’s most powerful nation is prepared to practice tough love if they take actions inconsistent with the strength of the United States or the stability of the international system. Without such worries, they are liable to keep doing as they have often done in recent years — skimping on military spending and international commitments in expectation that the Americans will reflexively pick up the slack.

As the world’s most powerful country, and the only one whose leadership can safeguard the world order, the United States must care more about whether it commands international respect than whether it is loved by international elites. The incoming administration appears poised to return the United States to this precept after an eight-year drought. Americans and America’s allies should be relieved. America’s enemies are right to be afraid.

Castro's totalitarianism generates less outrage than Trump’s tweets; with Fidel's death in Havana, the same media that openly congratulates itself for its lack of balance in covering Trump, suddenly turn sedate and nuanced

The left allows itself any number of rhetorical excesses about Donald Trump

notes George Neumayr at the American Spectator.

He is a “fascist,” a dangerous “strongman,” a “tyrant” in waiting, and so forth. But when an actual tyrant dies such as Fidel Castro the left quickly adopts more measured rhetoric. Its hysterical editorialists suddenly turn sedate. They urge people to see a reviled figure in perspective. Castro’s legacy is “divisive,” as the New Yorker hesitantly put it. “Cuba today is a dilapidated country, but its social and economic indicators are the envy of many of its neighbors.”

Casting about for a circumspect word to describe a mass murderer, Barack Obama hit upon “singular.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered the slightly more daring description “remarkable.” Pope Francis called him a “deceased dignitary,” in a telegram that the Vatican normally doesn’t send (it typically only sends telegrams for leaders who die while still in office, according to the Catholic press).

Careful not to mourn his death too obviously, the press peppered its stories with similarly evasive and hedging language: Castro was a “controversial” and “charismatic” figure who, in the laughably neutral words of the New York Times, “transformed Cuba.” Many newspapers made reference to his repression but didn’t want their readers to forget his “achievements” either, as if “free” access to crumbling hospitals balanced out his slaughtering of tens of thousands of people and displacing more than a million people. Under Castro, said the BBC, “Cuba registered some impressive domestic achievements. Good medical care was freely available for all, and Cuba’s infant mortality rates compared favorably with the most sophisticated societies on earth.”

The nods to his monstrous crimes by leftist pols, to the extent any came, were quick and breezy. British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn deserves first prize in this category: “For all his flaws, Castro’s support for Angola played a crucial role in bringing an end to Apartheid in South Africa and he will be remembered both as an internationalist and a champion of social justice.” In that “for all his flaws” lie how many murders?

Naturally, Donald Trump’s honest reaction to Castro’s death generated criticism for its “tone.” In the Washington Post, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called it “highly problematic.” This, of course, comes from the same media that now openly congratulates itself for its lack of balance in covering Trump. The other day, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour was pleading with her fellow journalists to abandon the sham pretense of objectivity and adopt the “Edward R. Murrow standard” for Trump. She believes in “being truthful, not neutral.” She will not stand idle during this “post-truth,” “post-values” age. She will “fight against normalization of the unacceptable.”

She conceives of journalism as a high priesthood that defines good and evil for the unenlightened masses. But not long after cheering her comments, journalists returned to their keyboards to normalize the evil of Castro with evasive pieces on his passing. Even Amanpour got into the act, interviewing international figures about the “unclear” legacy of Castro. She can find nuance in Castro but not in Trump.

Journalists who wouldn’t have survived a day in Castro’s Cuba treat Trump as an enemy of press freedom (for such grave offenses as not informing his press pool that he was going out to dinner). They gasp at Trump’s health care plans, while praising Castro’s hospitals. They freak out over Trump’s “Muslim ban,” while minimizing Castro’s suppression of religious freedom. They couldn’t have voted in Castro’s Cuba but demand a recount in America (Jill Stein called Castro a “symbol of the struggle for justice”).
 
After Trump won, the New Yorker’s David Remnick nearly fainted from fear. It was a “sickening event,” a “tragedy for the American republic,” and a victory for “authoritarianism” at home and abroad, he wrote. But Castro never elicited such breathless denunciations from his magazine. Castro was merely a “controversial” figure. His totalitarianism generated less outrage from it than Trump’s tweets.

Now the media, never too worried about the jingoism of Castro, is harrumphing over Trump’s flag-burning comments. It can forgive nationalism in foreign leaders but not its own.

Meanwhile, the press continues to push the storyline that Trump’s coming administration is causing the great and good of the world to tremble, a claim to which the American people rightly shrug, especially since many of these international luminaries appalled by Trump’s inauguration will soon turn up at Castro’s funeral.

At work the day after the election, a woman was SOBBING over the election, telling total strangers of her personal agony, as if others were obliged to offer her condolences

From a fellow who has been, shall we say, uh, a regular reader of No Pasarán for the past 12 years comes this piece of post-election news:

Coming up the elevator at work today [November 9], a woman was SOBBING over the election, telling total strangers of her personal agony, as if others were obliged to offer her condolences.  Its a cult.  What's worse is that most of the other floors in this building are occupied by political operators - whose living is derived by politics.

It's a cult with parasites living off of the productive part of society, in need of having their hurt feelings and connection to reality managed for them.

I also had to listen to people at work insist that this isn't a democracy because the popular vote doesn't rule the day.  It was said fishing for affirmation as some sort of salve 

I occasionally have to mention that I lived in east Germany which really was 'not a democracy', and that they have no idea what they're talking about.

Normally, I don't watch election coverage, but I did watch Steven Crowder watching the Young Turks, and it was pretty funny.

From the official Milo Yiannopoulos Facebook page

From the official Milo Yiannopoulos Facebook page (merci à Wynn):

The fag captured their flag.

Because It's France, That's Why: Populist Marine Le Pen Not Likely to Benefit from Brexit and the Trump Election

In France, the protest vote is less attractive now that the Americans and Brits have already pulled the trigger

write Jacques Lafitte and Denis MacShane in Politico (merci à HC).

The British and American press are full of alarm and excitement. After the triumph of the nationalist populism that swept Donald Trump into the White House and Britain out of Europe, the next big win in this new political era will be National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s election as France’s next president.

Two years ago we were accused of excessive pessimism and scaremongering because we said and wrote that Brexit would happen. Now we will no doubt be called naïve, wishful thinkers for saying the French won’t elect Le Pen.

The French love to do things differently. And more than anything, they hate to be told they will copy someone else, especially if that someone happens to be “Anglo-Saxon.”

In the early 1980s, when the United States and the U.K. embraced radical liberalism, the French embraced radical socialism. Today, France exports Thomas Piketty but remains immune to political input from across the Channel or Atlantic. Le Pen likes to claim she is the real brains behind Brexit and Trump. The suggestion that ideas may flow the other way would be preposterous.

The French Left turned the Third Way — a hollow slogan from the Blair-Clinton era — into an obscenity, in large part because it was coined outside France. Even François Mitterand’s open-minded prime minister Michel Rocard never referred to it.

Le Pen basked in the media spotlight after the Brits voted to leave the EU on June 23, but polls show she has not benefited from Brexit, not even in the short term. She is still stuck at 25-30 percent support, a remarkably similar level to the French Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the time, French communists wanted to shut the borders to foreign workers, attacked European integration as an American capitalist front, and called for the French state to take charge of the French economy. Sound familiar? Le Pen’s National Front agenda is eerily similar. 

Related: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or
Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

A Liberal Hillary Supporter in a Uber Car Prior to the 2016 Election Screaming Expletives During the Entire Trip

After the results on election day, a part-time Uber driver had this experience to share:

Last week [early November 2016] I had an Uber passenger, a young-ish female school teacher who asked me who I was voting for.  

I normally avoid the subject , but just came out and told her.

For the remainder of the ENTIRE TRIP she was screaming expletives.  I couldn't wait to get her to her destination and out of my car.  Raising your voice in a VW Golf is rather unpleasant, I might add.

She also seemed rather too obsessed with unconcenting sodomy to be regarded as mentally grounded for a sober person.

Really, I pity the children, even though she is one of them.

Ditching Electoral College would allow California to impose imperial rule on a colonial America

Ditching Electoral College would allow California to impose imperial rule on a colonial America

warns Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner (cheers to Instapundit's Stephen Green).

 … for the first time in the nation's history the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum.

 … Well, yeah, you might say. California has been called the Left Coast for quite a while. Just about everyone in Silicon Valley except Peter Thiel and in Hollywood except Pat Sajak supported Clinton. White middle class families have been pretty well priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic.

 … In the nine elections before that and after California passed New York to become the most populous state in 1963, the average of California's Democratic and Republican percentages was never more than 5 points off the national figures.

 … In this respect it resembles New York, the most populous state in every Census from 1820 to 1960. In elections 1856 to 1960, New York's Democratic and Republican percentages seldom varied more than 5 points from the national average.

 … The fact that New York voted much like the nation as a whole meant there were few elections when the popular vote winner lost in the Electoral College. In the two exceptions, 1876 and 1888, the popular vote winner was a New Yorker.

If California continues to occupy one extreme of the national political spectrum, there may well be more such splits. At least unless and until the Democratic Party figures it needs more to make a case with more appeal beyond California if it wants to win 270 electoral votes.

All of which prompts renewed arguments about the Electoral College. The case for abolishing it is simple: Every American's vote should count the same. But it won't happen. Two-thirds of each house of Congress and 38 of the 50 state legislatures will never go along.

The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers' fears that voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation. That largest state in 1787 was Virginia, home of four of the first five presidents. New York and California, by remaining closely in line with national opinion up through 1996, made the issue moot.

California's 21st century veer to the left makes it a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London's disdain for the "lesser breeds" it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.

A system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits: The press takes Trump literally, but not seriously; his supporters take Trump seriously, but not literally

 … we … missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on

writes one Will Rahn of CBS (thanks to The Federalist's Stella Morabito via Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds)

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

 … We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.

As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency.

 … There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.

Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.

 … We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process. 

In an interview with his TV station, CBS's Will Rahn mentions "a great observation from a reporter":

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally

is how USA Today's Noah C. Rothman quotes Salena Zito as writing about the Republicans' candidate in The Atlantic, as she distills

why Trump's appeal was so strong and why so many professionals missed it.

"But we are also slaves to this system“: Tailoring education, work habits, and aspirations, almost unconsciously, to state benefits

An Alissa Rubin article on France's social system on the front page of the International Herald Tribune a few years ago was pretty far-reaching for a New York Times journalist.

The pervasive presence of government in French life, from workplace rules to health and education benefits, is now the subject of a great debate as the nation grapples with whether it can sustain the post-World War II model of social democracy.

The spiraling costs of cradle-to-grave social welfare programs have all but exhausted the French government’s ability to raise the taxes necessary to pay for it all, creating growing political problems for President François Hollande, a Socialist. The nation’s capability to innovate and compete globally is being called into question, and investors are shying away from the layers of government regulation and high taxes.

But on the streets of this midsize city 325 miles southeast of Paris, the discussion is not abstract or even overtly political. Conversations here bring to life how many people, almost unconsciously, tailor their education, work habits and aspirations to benefits they see as intrinsic elements of their lives.

“You cannot take away guns from Americans, and in the same way you cannot take away social benefits from French people,” said Louis Paris, the 25-year-old son of a couple who live on the Rue Louis Braille, a typical neighborhood in St.-Étienne, which has deep working-class roots and historically has leaned Socialist.

“They won’t stand for it,” said Mr. Paris, who is unemployed and has been searching since leaving college for a full-time job that offers benefits. 

  … The median household income in the city is $25,000, about half the national figure for the United States and slightly lower than the average for France. But that figure does not capture how many things the government pays for here.

In France, most child care and higher education are paid for by the government, and are universally available, as is health care, three of the most costly elements in the budgets of most American families.

The cost of health care in France is embedded in the taxes imposed on workers and employers; workers make mandatory contributions worth about 10 percent of their paycheck to cover health insurance and a total of about 22 percent to pay for all their benefits.

 … The tension between the pressure for budget cuts and the deeply embedded nature of government programs is playing out in individual lives.

 … Just down the street, [Patrick Jouve], the owner of the game store Tapis Vert, or Green Carpet, believes that the reason the government is in such dire straits is that there are too many civil servants. Government spending accounts for about 56 percent of France’s gross domestic product, in contrast to 44 percent in Germany and 40 percent in the United States, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics arm.

“There are too many government functionaries,” Mr. Jouve said as he demonstrated magic tricks to a customer. Referring to the city officials who come to measure the dimensions of his storefront painting, he said, “They make up jobs for themselves.”

 … “The state has put in place a system,” said Salvatore Garaffa-Botta, a butcher and the deputy secretary of the largest union in St.-Étienne, the C.G.T. “But we are also slaves to this system.”

Obama’s disdain for his political opponents: Republicans now have the opportunity to pass the agenda they campaigned on in large part because the Obama progressives were so uncompromising and condescending to Americans beyond the coasts

Donald Trump’s victory is already inspiring reflection about the future of the Republican Party, and rightly so 

writes Wall Street Journal,

but Democrats don’t seem to be undertaking any similar introspection.

 … Too many liberals, and some conservatives, simply cannot imagine how great numbers of Americans think and perceive their own interests. Thus wrong opinions must be the result of cognitive limitations or character flaws. Mrs. Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables,” “irredeemable” and “not America,” as if there could be no other explanation.

These failures of empathy are also a staple of Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, with his moral lectures about who we are as Americans and the arc of history always bending toward—well, his point of view. For the President, and most prominent Democrats these days, opponents who debate policies and principles never do so in good faith.

For eight long years Mr. Obama’s belief that he holds the mandate of heaven has guided how he has used and abused presidential power. He was elected in 2008 on a message of hope and centrist unity, but he was soon ramming through 40 years of pent-up progressive priorities. Recall his famous 2009 brush-off of Republican Eric Cantor, who had proposed some bipartisan ideas for the stimulus: “Eric, I won.”

Democrats imposed ObamaCare on a straight partisan majority, though the polls showed there was no political consensus about a new entitlement among the oft-invoked, rarely consulted American people. National health care is no more popular today and is now misfiring in all the ways the critics predicted. The GOP was frozen out of all major economic decisions in 2009-10, and one price was the weak recovery that persists to this day.

Democrats did have a historic supermajority, but that wasn’t a mandate to do whatever they could get away with, and they lost a record 63 House seats in the midterms as punishment.

 … In his second term, Mr. Obama adopted his “pen and phone” strategy of executive rule to bypass Congress and avoid accountability. He unleashed the EPA to impose carbon cap and trade without basis in law. The Education Department rewrote Title IX to erode due process on campus. The Paris climate deal and Iran nuclear accord should have been submitted to the Senate as treaties for ratification.

 … Mr. Trump and Republicans … now have [the opportunity to pass the agenda they campaigned on] in large part because the Obama progressives were so uncompromising and condescending to Americans beyond the coasts. The tides of American politics mean Democrats will inevitably make a comeback, but that return will arrive stronger and maybe sooner if they learn the lessons of Mr. Obama’s disdain for his political opponents.

With the A380 Selling Badly, Airbus to Slash 1,000 Jobs Across Europe

As Airbus gets ready to cut 1,000 jobs among its European workforce, Le Monde's Guy Dutheil informs its readers that, because airlines are dissatisfied with the A380 (due to its high cost), built to compete with Boeing's 747 jumbo jet, its flagship is selling badly and the company is to slash its production by half.

Clap de fin programmée ou atterrissage en douceur pour l’A380 ? Le plus gros avion commercial du monde, chouchou des passagers, connaît des heures difficiles.

A la surprise générale, en juillet, en plein Salon aéronautique de Farnborough (Royaume-Uni), au moment où les avionneurs mesurent leur puissance à la longueur de leurs carnets de commandes, Fabrice Brégier, le PDG d’Airbus, annonçait un coup de frein dans la production des A380. L’entreprise veut la réduire de moitié. Dès 2018, il ne sortira plus des chaînes de montage qu’un seul exemplaire du superjumbo contre deux aujourd’hui. La raison en est simple : le navire amiral d’Airbus se vend peu ou mal.

A sa création, les cieux semblaient pourtant cléments pour le futur quadrimoteur. C’est le 18 décembre 2000 qu’Airbus frappe les trois coups de l’A380. Singapore Airlines devient alors la compagnie de lancement du nouvel avion. Selon ses vœux, le projet « 3XX », nom de code de l’appareil, se transforme officiellement en A380. Singapore Airlines a choisi le 8, un chiffre porte-bonheur en Asie. La mise en chantier du futur gros-porteur fait grand bruit.

In a twin article, Guy Dutheil writes:

C’est que, depuis des années déjà, [les compagnies aériennes] ne sont pas pleinement satisfaites par cet avion, qui, s’il est l’un des préférés des passagers, se révèle coûteux (son prix catalogue est de 428 millions de dollars).

Barack Obama's Legacy

Legacy
at Chris Muir's
Day By Day

Global Warming Comes to the Land of the Rising Sun — For the Earliest Time in Half a Century

Tokyo Sees First November Snow in Over 50 Years

The Wall Street Journal reports (video) that

Snow falls in Japan’s capital in November for the first time in 54 years, gracing residents on Thursday morning.

What Is Communism? One group of rich people siccing the bedraggled masses on another group of rich people

At first glance, Castro might not appear to be a typical Marxist revolutionary

writes Benny Huang.

He was, after all, the son of a wealthy landowner. His fair skin betrayed his Spanish ancestry which afforded him special status in a nation with a definite racial hierarchy. He studied at the best Catholic prep schools on the island and earned his juris doctorate in 1950. By any measure, Castro had a pretty good life in Fulgencio Batista’s pre-revolutionary Cuba. His two closest lieutenants, brother Raul and the Argentinian transplant Ernesto “Che” Guevara, were also well off.

Yet Castro was not as much of an anomaly as one might think. As long as Marxism has existed it has presented itself as the movement of the dispossessed despite the fact that the dispossessed have rarely been at its helm. Instead they have relied on a few class traitors such as the Castro brothers to lead them. There are exceptions of course—Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro isn’t lying when he speaks of his humble roots. He’s a former bus driver. If you want to know what a country run by a bus driver looks like, witness the mismanagement and scarcity of today’s Venezuela.

Still, it seems that Marxism has rarely ever been the bottom-up movement it was supposed to be. A closer look at Marxism throughout the centuries shows that it has often been the pastime of rich people who care, or think they care, about the poor. It frequently takes the form of a therapeutic exercise in wringing the guilt out of unearned wealth. Naturally, some people won’t see the problem with this. If a few rich kids want to take up arms alongside the peasantry, what’s wrong with that?

Well for starters, communist revolutions are bloody affairs. Poor people, many of whom really were dealt a lousy hand in life, rise up against the wealthy and slaughter them wholesale before taking everything they have. It’s murder and theft, plain and simple. Some people don’t see anything wrong with murder and theft so long as it’s poor people doing it to rich people, but I do.

 … it isn’t poor people slaughtering rich people—which would be bad enough—it’s one group of rich people siccing the bedraggled masses on another group of rich people. In most cases, and certainly in the case of the Castro brothers, the rich Marxist cadre end up even richer after the gentry’s property has been seized and divided. Then they lie about it lest anyone come to suspect that their motives were impure. Fidel Castro, for example, often claimed during his nearly 50-year dictatorship that he survived on about $43 a month and that he lived in a fisherman’s hut when in fact he was living high on the hog. Castro did nothing admirable; all he did was steal the wealth of his country by promising to give the peasantry a cut when all was said and done. The lion’s share went to him and his sidekicks, Raul and Che.

 … Despite Karl Marx’s mockery of the uncooperative Lumpenproletariat he was in fact the furthest thing from a working man. Marx was a wealthy lad whose parents paid for him to spend years at the university and to travel extensively. His mother, Henriette Marx, once wrote in a letter to a friend that “If only little Karl had made some capital instead of just writing about it.” When Marx could no longer mooch off his rich parents he moved on to mooching off his even richer friend Friedrich Engels, the son of a successful textile manufacturer. It’s said that Marx never set foot on a factory floor yet he really believed that he had valuable insight into the lives of working people. Any workers who didn’t agree with his assessment were dismissed as mere Lumpen (rags).

Ironically, it was Karl Marx’s economic background that allowed his ideas to flourish in mid-19^th Century Europe. If he had been one of the laborers he claimed to represent no one would have paid him any mind and none of his books would have been published. In all likelihood the term “Marxism” would not exist if Marx had not been a son of privilege wiling away his days in Paris and London, scribbling about the struggles of people he did not know and could not relate to.

Again, I don’t mean to imply that Marxists have never found any support among the proletariat they claim to support, but it does appear that nearly all Marxist leaders have been at least moderately wealthy by the standards of the time and place in which they lived. Vladimir Lenin, for example, was the son of an educated man who taught the children of the nobility at a prestigious academy. He became a committed communist while studying at Kazan University, a prospect that was simply inaccessible to average Russians.

John Reed, the founder of the forerunner to the Communist Party USA, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Reed was essentially a ne’er-do-well who somehow managed to get into Harvard despite poor academic performance. He later settled in New York’s Greenwich Village and hobnobbed with the celebrities of his time. Reed travelled widely in Europe. In 1917, he trekked to St. Petersburg to witness the events of the October Revolution and fell in love with the ideals of the new communist state. He quickly wrote “Ten Days that Shook the World,” his account of the Bolshevik rise to power.

It isn’t difficult to see why these people—the Castro Brothers, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Reed—might see wealth and the capitalist societies that produce it as wholly illegitimate. By sheer luck of the draw, they had been born rich while a great mass of other people had been born poor. Meritocracy was, in their estimation, a sham.

It’s this kind of guilt that seems to drive rich men to don jungle fatigues and line their enemies up for the firing squad. But don’t be fooled. These people are poseurs trying to garner some street cred by acting like they grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. To make matters worse they usually do it out of the basest motives—to make themselves even richer than they already are.

Wanted, Dead or Alive

Wanted, Dead or Alive
by Branco