California to scale back $77 billion high-speed rail project: governor

If nothing else, Newsome appears to be pragmatic.

“…California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday the state will dramatically scale back a planned $77.3 billion high-speed rail project that has faced cost hikes, delays and management concerns, but will finish a smaller section of the line.

“Let’s be real. The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency,” Newsom said in his first State of the State Address to lawmakers on Tuesday.

“Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. (Los Angeles). I wish there were,” he said.

Newsom said the state will complete a 119-mile (191 km) high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield in the state’s Central Valley. In March 2018, the state forecast the costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned that the costs could be as much as $98.1 billion…”

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Merle Haggard, The Fighting Side of Me

https://youtu.be/QrLkMR7nUUI

Hilarious Political Headline of the Day (Or if Omar was a Republican…)

Former KKK Grand Wizard Defends Omar Tweets

We’re Failing Our Students, and It Hurts Us All

ILANA REDSTONE AKRESH:

“…Our universities are failing students by teaching them that there’s only one right way to understand our most vexing inequalities and social problems. This undoubtedly disproportionately affects students focusing their studies in the social sciences, but the near universality of cross-disciplinary general-education requirements (such that many students, regardless of their area of study, are required to take courses in the social sciences) suggests that almost no student is immune.

In sociology, for instance, we teach students about a wide range of social disparities. This entails conversations about the causes of those differences. Yet we do students an enormous disservice teaching them only about the possible structural causes of those disparities — aspects we can blame on the “system” or on “institutions.” Students learn, for example, that the gender pay gap is due to systemic labor-market discrimination against women and a devaluation of women’s work. These are likely contributing factors. But when pressed on the topic, most students can’t name a single additional factor that might contribute to the wage difference (such as variation between the sexes in job preferences or priorities).

I have had a chance to see this firsthand in an undergraduate course I am currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aptly, the course is called Social Problems. It is an intro-level course in the sociology department and serves as a gateway to the major. On the first day of class, I told students that I would be teaching from multiple political angles — i.e., from a “heterodox” perspective — an approach that would necessarily include conservative viewpoints that are likely heard less often in their other classes.

We’re now almost four weeks into the semester and it’s clear that these bright, engaged students are not being exposed to the range of perspectives that they will need in their lives after college. I expect that, in this regard, they resemble students at many other institutions across the country. They are led to believe that our most difficult problems have simple causes and that those causes are rooted in structural bias that the right policies will fix. In addition, they are taught that this is the only right way to view these challenges…”

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Political Headline of the Day (No. 2)

Ilhan Omar Apologizes for Jew Hatred, Promises to Make it Less Obvious

Quote of the Day

Robert A Heinlein:

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

IS GLOBAL WARMING THEORY SCIENTIFIC?

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…If you dispute the inflated and inconsistent claims of global warming alarmists, you are denounced as anti-science. You may even find yourself under investigation. But is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming actually a scientific theory at all?

A fundamental principle of science is that a theory, to have any significance, must be falsifiable. Science proceeds by proposing a hypothesis, and figuring out what the hypothesis implies. Scientists then make real-world observations to determine whether the theory’s implications do, in fact, obtain. They look for implications that are specific to the theory, so that, for example, it doesn’t work to say: If this theory is valid, the sky will be blue. Voila! Any theory can be consistent with countless facts, but if it implies a prediction that is falsified by observation, the theory is wrong. Period.

Also: a model is not evidence. A model is a theory. Whether the model is correct or not depends on its consistency with observation.

This is so elementary that it shouldn’t need to be explained. But apparently, America’s public schools are not teaching the scientific method. Otherwise, how to explain the Green New Deal?

The alarmists’ predictions of rapidly rising global temperatures have repeatedly failed to come true, which is why the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dramatically scaled back its predictions of future temperature increases a few years ago. Thus, the alarmists shifted to “climate change,” a hopelessly flexible concept that can be assigned to any untoward weather event.

When the polar vortex brought temperatures of 20 below zero to the Twin Cities last week, some alarmists–those who didn’t politely remain silent–assured us that bitter cold temperatures were caused by global warming, via the Arctic. This was only days after a climate “expert” testified before a Minnesota legislative committee that “scientists” no longer expect Duluth, Minnesota, to see temperatures colder than 10 degrees. At that moment, temperatures of -25 to -30 degrees were just outside the 10-day forecast for Duluth.

But being a global warming alarmist means never having to say you’re sorry. Why recant, when billions of government dollars continue to flow, no matter how many wrong predictions you make? So far, the leftist alarmists have had the last laugh: consistently wrong, but never in doubt. And still lavishly funded…”

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Political Headline of the Day

Dem. Rep. Al Green Blames Trump for Ralph Northam Scandal, Urges Impeachment. “Va. Gov.’s refusal to resign is a symptom of Trump’s bigotry, Congressman says.”

Best economic optimism in 16 years, 50% ‘better off’ under Trump

“…Public optimism in their personal economy has hit a 16-year high under President Trump, according to a new survey.

Some 69 percent told Gallup that they expect their personal finances to be even better next year, just shy of the record 71 percent when the internet boom was raging under former President Bill Clinton.

What’s more, the survey company said that 50 percent believe they are “better off” than just a year ago when the current economic surge was kicking in and when the White House coined the phrase “MAGAnomics.”

Gallup said that is the first time the level has reach 50 percent since 2007.

“Americans’ optimism about their personal finances has climbed to levels not seen in more than 16 years, with 69 percent now saying they expect to be financially better off ‘at this time next year,’” said Gallup.

The highlights:

69 percent expect their financial situation to improve over the next year.
Optimism about finances over the next year is almost at a record-high level.
50 percent say they are in better shape financially than a year ago.

The president has been touting the economy and stock market recently, and Republicans are urging him to continue with policies like deregulation that can continue to feed growth…”

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Gosnell: When Art Collides with Reality and Exposes the Truth

JOHN FUND:

“…Rarely has a new movie become available at a time when the news made its subject matter timelier and more appropriate. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer is the true story of a doctor who went to prison for life in 2013 for stabbing several infants he had delivered alive inside his hellhole of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. After being almost completely ignored by critics during its release last year, last week the movie went on sale in Walmart and on Amazon, where it is the No. 1 best-selling dramatic DVD. At the same time, infanticide became a key issue in major stories in Virginia and New York.

Last week, Virginia governor Ralph Northam became engulfed in a controversy over whether he had appeared in his medical-school yearbook in costume, either in blackface or in the white sheet and hat of a Ku Klux Klan member. The photo came to light because a medical-school classmate of Northam’s was appalled at the governor’s candid support for a bill that would remove many restrictions on late-term abortion. While the media outrage was largely directed at his alleged racist actions 35 years ago, the abortion bill was promptly killed in committee, hours after Northam had been overly honest in describing what the bill would allow.

When radio station WTOP asked the governor what would happen to a baby born alive during the last part of a pregnancy, Northam said:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

A few days before Governor Northam’s shocking remarks, New York’s new Democratic majorities in the state legislature stood and clapped as they passed the Reproductive Health Act, which removed restrictions on late-term abortions. The law took effect with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature on January 22. A week later, prosecutors in Queens dropped one of the criminal charges against Anthony Hobson, who stands accused of killing his girlfriend Jennifer Irigoyen, who was 20 weeks pregnant. They had initially included a charge of second-degree abortion (in addition to the murder of Irigoyen) but had to drop it because, as a spokesman for the Queens district attorney noted, the law removes abortion from the state’s criminal code and puts it into public-health law.

Gosnell director Nick Searcy wrote at TownHall that New York has now legalized almost everything that Gosnell and his aides did in Philadelphia: Gosnell was convicted of killing breathing infants who had already been born. It is now legal in New York to kill an infant who survives an abortion. Gosnell was convicted of allowing untrained and unlicensed medical personnel to perform abortions. It is now legal in New York for non-physicians or any “health professionals” to perform abortions. Gosnell was convicted of performing at least 21 late-term abortions past the legal limit of 24 weeks. It is now legal in New York to terminate a pregnancy up until the due date. In New York, there is no longer any such thing as a “late-term abortion.”…”

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Progressives Bearing Gifts

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

True Lies
Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.

Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.

Trump legitimately will be able to say of a 2020 opponent, “Candidate X wants over the next 10 years to junk your present car, to scrap your combine, to stop your jet travel, to ban your cruise ship, to take away your lawn mower and snow blower, to outlaw your snowmobiles and jet skis, to shut down the fracking industry, the heavy equipment manufacturing sector (I doubt there will be a replacement battery-powered Cat D-11), the pipeline and rail business, and to make every homeowner an indebted remodeler, refitting his house while for all his green trouble and expense he still will be paying more for solar and wind-generated electricity.

Trump can legitimately also say to an independent or swing voter, “You may not like my tweets, but you will really won’t like infanticide, a 70 percent income tax, a diluted Medicare for everyone including those who have never paid a dime into the system, open borders, and guaranteed incomes for all.”

In other words, for the all the NeverTrump hysteria over Trump’s “nationalist-populist agenda,” his record so far is so far arguably more Reaganesque than either of the Bush presidencies or what was likely to come from a McCain or Romney Administration…”

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John Roberts Let Politics Sway His Obamacare Ruling (Or How Judges Go Bad)

Christopher Jacobs:

“…A forthcoming book by reporter Joan Biskupic, who has covered the Supreme Court for decades, goes into detail on Roberts’ first defense of the health-care law—his ruling in the 2012 case of Nation Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. In a book review for The Atlantic, Michael O’Donnell includes the following precis of Biskupic’s reporting:

She writes that he initially voted with the four other conservatives to strike down the ACA, on the grounds that it went beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Likewise, he initially voted to uphold the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. But Roberts, who kept the opinion for himself to write, soon developed second thoughts.

Biskupic, who interviewed many of the justices for this book, including her subject, writes that Roberts said he felt ‘torn between his heart and his head.’ He harbored strong views on the limitations of congressional power, but hesitated to interject the Court into the ongoing health-insurance crisis. After trying unsuccessfully to find a middle way with Kennedy, who was ‘unusually firm’ and even ‘put off’ by the courtship, Roberts turned to the Court’s two moderate liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The threesome negotiated a compromise decision that upheld the ACA’s individual mandate under Congress’s taxing power, while striking down the Medicaid expansion.

On the day of the ruling in June 2012, Chris Cillizza, then writing for The Washington Post, claimed that Roberts’ opinion “made good on his pledge to referee the game, not play it.” But the story Biskupic tells, which confirms prior reporting by Jan Crawford published shortly after the ruling, contradicts Cillizza’s view entirely. Roberts’ entire approach to the case consisted of playing games—and highly political ones at that…”

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The John Dingell Era

Old Bathos:

“…In those days, I had a role as a lobbyist in various coalitions of trade groups as part of my legal practice. Lots of people in Washington had really wonderful jobs as lobbyists for several decades because liberals would faithfully introduce bad bills with enormous potential harm to business, the lobbyists would report that threat back to their employers and clients, trade associations and large firms would then pay them to defeat this threat. Then Dingell or some other titan would simply kill it anyway and the lobbyists could rack up another “victory,” steer contributions to the right people and stay flush. Clean Air amendment legislation routinely died in each Congress because Dingell faithfully represented the automakers and Byrd the coal industry. But anybody ‘working’ the issue could claim results.

Senior Democrats like Dingell racked up large contributions from business because by the 1980s Congress was largely designed to be an extortion racket. “Pay us to either kill what you don’t like or to insert protections for you in the bad bill we are about to pass or else.” Before 1986, high tax rates were part of a code festooned with countless arcane provisions to lessen the blow but only for paying customers. Enormous regulatory assaults were legislated but with hundreds of arcane provisions to protect those who stepped up and paid up.

If you were paying for protection, this was not a one time fee. Once your protections were enshrined in a paragraph or a sentence in legislation, there was the eternal threat of repeal or amendment so the payments had to continue.

Once I recall that all the reps in one coalition I worked with got a letter from Dingell’s AA which said: “The Chairman may lose interest in your issue if your support is not more forthcoming.” If you think of it as an invoice, it makes more sense…”

and

“…In defense of Dingell and the Democratic Party of that recent era, they were not nuts. They were close to small businesses and workers in their home districts, not rich white liberals in Malibu and Manhattan. They delivered. They were not impractical. John Dingell and his ilk knew not to kill the Golden Goose. They knew how to compromise and get things done when it was important–not always what one would prefer they do but it got done. Patriotism was bi-partisan. They were not ideologues and the other party was not evil, just wrong. And frankly, I would rather have a Congress that I could bribe rather than a majority of AOC-type ideologues…”

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The Perfect Graduate of Today’s Biased Colleges

ROGER L. SIMON:

“…In the immediate sense, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln. Her Green New Deal is as much dead in the water as it is brain dead and constitutes a fabulous talking point for the GOP to run on in 2020.

But there is a point of concern — and in the long run a more important one.

AOC represents the natural outgrowth of our extraordinarily biased higher educational system. She is its valedictorian, its Social Justice Summa Cum Laude. Give her the SJWPhD honoris causa and, while you’re at it, give the United States of America to China. They won’t have to fire a shot.

Think I exaggerate? Consider the level of writing and thinking in her Green Deal in whatever ever-changing iteration, with or without the banning of cow flatulence and air travel, and notwithstanding the guaranteed income for those unwilling to work. (Isn’t that already the case with internet trolls — but I digress?) This document, if one can call it that, resembles nothing more than the kind of swill presented to — and highly approved by — professors in today’s grievance-obsessed colleges, where Shakespeare and Milton are dismissed or rejected and actual thought (i.e., intellectual reasoning) is ridiculed as manifestations of “white privilege.”…”

and

“…That’s what I mean about the danger of our educational system. It’s not global warming that’s the problem, as the Green New Deal would have it (though its actual intention appears to have little to do with the environment and everything to do with promoting socialism). The real problem is our colleges (and earlier education, obviously) that are turning out the likes of AOC on an assembly line of the sort that drove Charlie Chaplin mad in Modern Times.

As I wrote elsewhere, only 20 percent of colleges have even one Republican on the faculty. Imagine the indoctrination that is going on. Imagine how much more attention is paid to Marx (and Marcuse and Gramsci, etc.) than to Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, let alone Aristotle, Aquinas, or even James Madison…”

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Merle Haggard, Big City

https://dai.ly/x2ml1ns

Low Flow

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