The perfect clown for a toilet paper

Here's former labor secretary Robert Reich making an ass of himself in Newsweek: "Congress should be ready to arrest Attorney General William Barr if he defies subpoena."

I'll take "Things that will never happen" for $1000, Alex.  Typical for the failed newsweekly, Reich's prose is dumbed down into staccato bullet points that are mostly lies:

In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: No questioning the Attorney General about the Mueller Report.

Barr is literally appearing before a Senate committee tomorrow morning where Democrats will have more than enough opportunity to ask about the Mueller report and keep the Russian hoax alive.  The Attorney General had accepted an invitation to a House hearing but then Jerrold Nadler decided that Congressional counsel would grill the AG for an hour and Barr took a pass.

Scratch a liberal, find a tyrant

Five Thirty Eight: "Political Confessional: I Think Private Schools Should Be Banned."

This interview as such an over-the-top example of an liberal imposing a worldview on everybody else - after she had received the benefit she condemns - I almost thought it was a parody.  Seriously, though, I went from outrage to laughter. 

Ladies and gentlemen: CNN's media reporter

Brian Stelter: "Can you picture Donald Trump on 'The View.'  Hard to imagine."

Frank Luntz: "He's been on 18 times."

The fishing expedition continues

Bookworm Room: "Will “Unprecedented Obstruction of Congress” Become The New Democrat Meme?"  "This is not thwarting oversight, it is Kabuki theater with Democrats and the NYT both with starring roles." 

What'd you do?

Reason Online: "California Politicians Hiked Gas Tax, Now Demand Investigation Into State's $4 Per Gallon Gas Prices."

But good intentions

Issues and Insights: "CBO Report: 1.4 Million Lost Health Insurance Since 2016 — And Obamacare Is To Blame."  "All of the increase in the uninsured over the past two years — all of it — is the result of the massive rate increases Obamacare’s mandates and regulations caused. According to the Health and Human Services Dept., premiums in the individual insurance market doubled from 2013 to 2017. They shot up again in 2018."

Out of the park

First career home run for new Red Sox player Michael Chavis.  I have to see if they got the ball back.

Update - Yeah, he got the ball with the help of Dustin Pedroia.

Day 1: Biden lies

Althouse: "Biden's announcement video is anchored in a demonstrable lie."  "I could not finish watching that video. I tried, but I couldn't force myself. It's utterly toxic bilge.  If Biden does not come forward and retract this video and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President."

More from Twitchy.

Messiah complex

Twitchy: "Joe Biden tells donors world leaders are begging him to run and save the world."

There's a reason this guy has fallen short the last two times he ran: the reason is Joe Biden.

The press will learn nothing from the Russiagate fiasco

Commentary from Rolling Stone (!!!) via Instapundit.

Oh Bernie

Babylon Bee: "Bernie Sanders Vows To Round Up Remaining ISIS Members, Allow Them To Vote."

Fake news roundup

Brietbart: "Top 51 fake news 'bombshells' the media spread."

Evergreen headline: "Social Security going broke"

Hot Air: "Social Security Will Be Unable To Pay Full Benefits By 2035."

Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget tells the NY Times, “That fact that we now can’t guarantee full benefits to current retirees is completely unacceptable, and it should be cause enough for every policymaker to rally around solutions to restore solvency to those programs.”

This will be my less-than-yearly reminder that if Washington took incremental steps to fix this long-known problem, Americans could adjust to the changes.  But instead we'll just wait until the Titanic hits the iceberg and then scramble for the lifeboats.

Pepe Silvia!

Federalist: "The Collusion Dream Is Dead But The Conspiracy Lives On" - "Our political, intelligence, and media elites sold us this crazy story and promised the American people the proof that never came."

Put down the Kool-Aid

Report in haste, corrections on page 12

Federalist: "7 Ways The Mueller Report Exposed The Media’s ‘Bombshell’ Fake News Stories" - "When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, some of the conclusions debunked many misleading, and anonymously sourced, conspiracy theories."

Regrets, she's had a few

Twitchy: "NYTs Maggie Haberman now regrets not giving ‘more weight’ to what Dems/media mocked Romney about in 2012."

Yeah, we know why Romney's your hero now.

Bravo, Putin, bravo

Ace: "Ohhhh: New York Times Reports That It's Very Possible the Entire Steele Dossier Was Itself Kremlin Disinformation."

Remember how we were told that Russian interference in the election was an attempt to tear America apart with Facebook ads of Satan arm-wrestling Jesus?  It turns out the real con was to dupe oh-so-willing dupes in the media to roll out this two-year charade.  Guess who got played.

Democracy dies in darkness, yo

6 headlines, none mentioning the most important finding: No collusion. https://t.co/y3s2MikD2I

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) April 19, 2019

Trump exonerated

Powerline: "The Mueller report: early returns"

One of the Democrats’ basic problems is that “attempting” to obstruct the investigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Trump had really wanted to obstruct the investigation, he could simply have terminated it. And Mueller acknowledges that the administration fully cooperated with the investigation in every way. So the “attempts to obstruct” come down to Trump expressing outrage at the fact that a baseless, partisan investigation was hampering his administration. Arguably Trump should have brought the Mueller farce to an end, but he didn’t.

Nothingburger yesterday, nothingburger today, nothingburger tomorrow.

The heckler's veto wins again

Reason Online: "Middlebury College Cancels Speech by Polish Politician-Academic." 

We'll get to that minor detail later

Federalist: "At Fox Town Hall, Bernie Sanders Still Can’t Explain How He’s Paying For ‘Medicare For All’." 

Bernie on Fox News for town hall meeting

Ya gotta give the guy props for showing up on Fox News when the other Democrats run scared.  It was clearly a friendly crowd and Sanders couldn't help but take some gratuitous shots at Fox.  That aside, his performance was lackluster - if not bizarre - for a guy who's been in politics for so long.

Shorter Sanders:
1) An issue is raised
2) Bernie: "I'll tell you what I wouldn't do.  I wouldn't do whatever Trump's doing on this issue."
3) Yeah, so what would you do as President?
4) Bernie: Complete nutcase answer

The immigration question was completely predictable and his big idea was better tents.  On the Green New Deal, Martha MacCallum asked a very good question about why it eschews nuclear power which is a reliable energy source that produces no greenhouse gases.  Bernie just deflected with some weird story about how Burlington, Vermont converted to all renewable energy (mostly from burning wood).  On Medicare for All, he just lied about the cost and the ability to see any doctor you want.  His closing statement was essentially "do you want lots of stuff paid for by somebody else?"

The crowd did.

Crybullies in action

National Review: "To Defend Ilhan Omar, Democrats Use Identity Politics as a Shield."  "The Democrats and media cannot have it both ways. They cannot work diligently to elevate Omar’s voice and then rule out of bounds attacks against the person they’ve elevated — especially when her own words are often hateful and cruel."

Notre Dame

Today I learned that the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus at the crucifixion is one of the most cherished relics held at Notre Dame cathedral.

Update - Saved!

Won't somebody defend this poor, anti-semitic victim?

Commentary: "Ilhan Omar, Con Artist - She's got a feel for her dupes."  "You see? She’s just an all-loving, rage-filled, anti-Semitic victim of prejudice."

Skipping a beat

This video was so engaging:

It's never enough

Let's see: Massachusetts legalized the lottery and, more recently, marijuana and casinos.  But we need more money.  Hot Air: "MA Rolls Out Literal Millionaires Tax."

The Massachusetts constitution dictates that everybody pays the same state tax rate, so the constitution needs to be amended.  But, ya know, "other people's money."

Related - The Atlantic: "What on Earth is wrong with Connecticut?"

Doubling down on stupidity

Man, this broad is dim.  Red State: "AOC Challenges Dan Crenshaw Over 9/11 With The Hottest Of All Hot Takes, It Doesn’t Go Well."

It's impossible to penetrate AOC's armor of self-regard.  She cares - oh so deeply - and the only route to salvation is to support huge government programs.

Ladies and gentlemen, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee

Maxine Waters appears to not know that the government nationalized students loans 10 years ago despite chairing a committee that regulates the banks...? pic.twitter.com/9cqA1dv962

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) April 10, 2019

Good review of Barr's testimony

This was supposed to be a budget meeting but, of course, it turned to Russia!  Via Ace: "Most Important Take-Aways from AG Barr's Testimony This Morning."  This one is good:

5, when Democrats whined that there's no way that a human could read 300-400 pages of a report (much of which was merely transcripts of testimony which can be skimmed) in a few days, he rebutted that he already knew the general contours of the report because he had been given a preliminary briefing on the findings of no collusion, no obstruction on March 5th.

So Saint Mueller gave Barr a heads-up on the non-charges, allowed Barr to use his conclusions in the summary memo, and is helping with the redactions.

That's how deep the conspiracy goes.

The original race-baiter

Federalist: "Why Are Democrats Kissing The Ring Of Al Sharpton?" - "Many of the same Democrat hopefuls who boycotted AIPAC last month could be found pandering to the infamous race-baiter this week."

As I've written before, I grew up in the New York area (northern NJ) right around the time that Sharpton was pushing the Tawana Brawley hoax.  F that guy.

Throwing shade

Nancy Pelosi follows Obama's lead.  Hot Air: "Pelosi Knocks ‘People With A Lot Of Twitter Followers’ Who Don’t Have The Votes To Pass Anything." 

Varsity blues for the limousine liberals

You rarely see begging like this from Rod Dreher in "The joy of schadenfreude":

Please, please, please read the whole thing. You have to treat yourself. The friend who sent me the link said that he and his wife were taking turns reading parts of it aloud to each other. It’s that good.

He's referring to this article by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic called "They had it coming" which is a great double-meaning title referring to the evident guilt of parents who cheated to get their kids into elite colleges and their overweening sense of entitlement:

Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.

And, as the article reveals, anything but ASU.  This paragraph sums up the mindset:

These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA.

That's what makes this scandal so delicious.  The self-righteous types who make sartorial choices inspired by Hillary Clinton and now (probably) donate to Elizabeth "The system is rigged!" Warren are the ones doing the rigging.

It's all too much

Too much government power, that is.  David French: "The Trump era should make libertarians of us all."

Now the Democratic war against Donald Trump has exposed yet another bad law. Congress can investigate your finances — no matter who you are — for any reason or no reason at all. The fact that Trump is the man currently under the microscope should in no way lessen our objection to such an atrocious policy. Bad laws don’t become good just because they’re used to target people you happen to dislike.

How you like that expanded executive power now?

With Beto in Iowa

Via Powerline, a first-hand report of a Beto campaign stop in Iowa.

Have the Democrats learned nothing from the nuclear option?

It's now widely acknowledged by all of Washington that when Harry Reid triggered the nuclear option on judicial nominees, all bets were off.  Here's the New York Times celebrating the "return to democracy":

Republicans warned that the rule change could haunt the Democrats if they lost the White House and the Senate.

And that's how you got Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and (soon) Amy Coney Barrett.  Now they want Trump's tax returns because...they want them.  Hot Air: "Trump Lawyer Sends Letter To Treasury: You Shouldn’t Hand Over His Tax Returns To House Democrats."

A strong letter, worth reading in full. There are legal arguments made and precedents cited but at the heart of it is a simple prudential question:

Why should Congress be able to use the IRS to gather dirt on its political enemies?

As the article explains, the same law that allows Congress the power to look at anybody's tax return also applies to the President.  Do Democrats really want to unleash the Kraken of Trump directing the IRS to look into the Democrats' dirty laundry?  You know that's exactly what he'll do, Lois Lerner-style.

Jussie to Chicago: drop dead

Fox News: "Jussie Smollett won't reimburse Chicago's investigation costs; city vows civil suit."

Given the last deal, Chicago will be lucky to get a pack of gum.

Getting the pill

This is interesting.  Hit and Run: "Over-the-Counter Birth Control Bill Launched by Senate Republicans" - "It would fast-track FDA review of applications to free the pill from prescriptions and let people use health savings accounts for non-Rx drugs."

The government needs your $$$

Zero Hedge: "Breathtakingly Terrible Idea": Top Democrat Proposes Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains."  "According to the WSJ, the top Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee has proposed taxing unrealized gains in investment assets every year at the same rates as other income, offering not only an idea that would transform how the U.S. taxes the wealthiest people, but a solid reason for those same people to get the hell out of America." 

Moving the goalposts (again) on the Mueller report

In today's NY Times, House Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler wrote that, darn it, we've waited long enough and the entire unabridged Mueller report must be released, post-haste.  Jim Geraghty has some thoughts: "Chairman Nadler’s Cynical Argument."

In his letter to Congress, Attorney General William Barr specifically cited Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which provides that government attorneys and the jurors themselves, among others, “must not disclose a matter occurring before the grand jury.” Barr didn’t make this rule up, it’s not obscure or optional, and Nadler knows darn well about its importance. Barr stated in a letter to Nadler and the judiciary committee that the special counsel’s office is assisting in identifying portions that are grand-jury testimony or relate to ongoing investigations or prosecutions.

But because the Democrats prefer a narrative of a sinister cover-up, Nadler just averts his eyes and pretends the rules on grand jury testimony don’t exist.

Here's my theory: the Democrats have seen a leaked copy of the Mueller report and they know it's a huge nothingburger.  But they've been selling this hoax for two years so what recourse to they have?  Simple: set up the narrative that the real conspiracy can be found in the redacted sections, the ones that have to be removed by law.

Fun with chyrons

Rachel Maddow: AG Barr is going through the Mueller report by himself!

MSNBC: Don't listen to Rachel.  She cray-cray.