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STEVEN GREENHUT:
‘…Normal people apparently don’t make transportation decisions. “Two years after state lawmakers boosted the gas tax with a promise to improve California streets, some cities have raised the ire of drivers by spending millions of the new dollars on ‘road diet’ projects that reduce the number and size of lanes for motor vehicles,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.
In November, a majority of California voters opposed a repeal of those gas-tax hikes. People no doubt reasoned that even if they don’t like paying so much extra at the pump, they at least will see tangible improvements in their commutes. In fairness, the tax hike has funded many construction and maintenance projects, but it’s also funded these projects that seem designed to make our awful commutes even worse. It makes no sense.
S.B. 1 is a “landmark transportation investment to rebuild California by fixing neighborhood streets, freeways and bridges in communities across California and targeting funds toward transit and congested trade and commute corridor improvements,” according to the state of California website. That’s a fair description of how its backers described the controversial plan to skeptical taxpayers.
When did anyone ever say anything about “road diets”?
Actually, the law’s fine print promised to add bike lanes and improve road safety. Not many people figured that California cities would do this by building wider, protected bicycle routes and removing the number of traffic lanes in the process. In the city of Sacramento, near where I live, officials have used this strategy. It has turned downtown thoroughfares from a crowded rush-hour mess into total, gridlocked chaos. As humorist Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”…”
and
“…This is planned congestion—an extreme case of social engineering trumping traffic engineering. These officials, who want us to sit in traffic longer as a means to avoid accidents or frustrate us into taking the bus or rail, are using the recent tax boost to achieve these goals. Californians have been had, although many of us had issued warnings…”
From Glenn Reynolds:
IF I’M DONALD TRUMP, I CITE THIS ARTICLE AS PROOF THAT OPEN-IMMIGRATIONISTS ARE MOTIVATED BY HOSTILITY TO AMERICA AND THE WEST:
A Trump2020 campaign document, as it stands.
Is it really satire? It should read …Past Easily Spooked Progressive Possum.
Andrew Kerr:
Michael Barone:
“…“I’m amused,” Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ Jan Crawford, “by these people who make a living disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I’m going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods.”
He went on after further questions, “Well, the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do and I will.”
You don’t have to have been “in the business” for Barr’s nearly 50 years to understand what he means. Just flash back 13 years to June 2006 and read the New York Times’ revelations about the Swift bank procedures.
The Belgian-based Swift manages foreign currency transfers, and after 9/11, the CIA and Treasury conducted data searches to spot and ultimately stop terrorist financing. The Times’ story conceded that this program was successful in obstructing terrorist activity and it identified no abuses.
Top administration officials pleaded with the Times not to publish the story, and President George W. Bush said publication was “disgraceful.” Times editor Bill Keller’s justification: “the administration’s” — not the government’s, but the administration’s — “extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data … is a matter of public interest.”
In other words, the Times didn’t care much about weakening America’s fight against terrorism by disclosing classified information and revealing intelligence sources and methods. It was more interested in letting the sunshine in on a program which, to the best of its knowledge, had infringed no one’s rights.
Some called for prosecution of the Times for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalized the publication of classified information and was signed by President Woodrow Wilson two months after the U.S. entered World War I. But as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, the Espionage Act is over-broad and the government tends to over-classify information, including even newspaper articles.
Accordingly, successive administrations, up to and including George W. Bush’s, have declined to prosecute news media for publishing stories, including leaks of classified information, that seem clearly forbidden by the words of Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act.
Abandoning that precedent, perhaps surprisingly, was the administration of President Barack Obama, who described himself as “a strong believer in the First Amendment” and dismissed “stories about us cracking down on whistleblowers or whatnot” as “a really small sample.”
Actually, they were an unprecedentedly large number. James Risen, co-byliner on the Times’s original Swift story, wrote in December 2016 that the Obama administration “has prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.”
Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Associated Press phone records of AP trunk lines and 30 separate phones. It identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage Act leak case. The supposedly liberal and pro-First Amendment Obama administration was actively pursuing what the Columbia Journalism Review called “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations.”
It’s true that Obama did not emit as many tart words for the press in his eight years as president as Trump has in his two and a half. But Trump has come nowhere near to challenging Obama’s record as the president most inclined to sic law enforcement on the press since Woodrow Wilson himself. Liberal Democrats aren’t necessarily the best friends of press freedom.
Nor, it seems, are they necessarily friends of a citizen’s right of privacy or a candidate’s right to seek public office without government surveillance. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Barr made the point that government “spying” had occurred on the Trump campaign, Democrats and the press expressed horror. You’re not supposed to say “spying,” apparently, even though Democrats and media such as the Times have routinely used that word as a conveniently short and understandable synonym for government surveillance.
As Barr told Crawford, spying is appropriate if it’s “adequately predicated,” and it’s unclear whether the spying on the Trump campaign was. Certainly, the contents of the partisan and unverified Steele dossier would not have provided legitimate grounds on their own.
Barr is old enough to remember when liberals did not take government legal or intelligence agencies’ word that spying on an administration’s opponents was justified, when they did not attack those who questioned it as unpatriotic.
He may be amused that such doings are self-righteously justified today. But it’s good that he’s willing to ask questions most of the media do not want asked, to determine how the Obama law enforcement and intelligence agencies set about spying on the opposite party’s presidential campaign…”
Zachery Schmidt:
“…An investigation by Minnesota’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN-05) found she violated campaign finance laws dating back to when she served a single term in the State House of Representatives from 2016-2018.
But conservative Twitter quickly uncovered a more shocking detail in the report: she filed joint tax returns with a man she wasn’t married to. The report states that Omar filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Ahmed Hirsi, even though she was married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi from 2009-2017.
“One payment of $750 was made to De Leon & Nestor, LLC for obtaining immigration records and one payment of $1,500 was made to Frederick $ Rosen, Ltd. for services related to Mr. Hirsi’s and Rep. Omar’s filed joint tax returns of 2014 and 2015,” Thursday’s report states.
The Star Tribune, Minnesota’s most popular media outlet, picked up the story, but made no mention of the fact that Omar filed joint tax returns with Hirsi.
“Media has hid the truth about Ilhan Omar for three years. It’s about to ruin them all,” said PJ Media‘s David Steinberg, who explained the bombshell in a Twitter thread Thursday…”
Related:
S. L. A. MARSHALL:
Liel Leibovitz:
“…To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.
Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?
Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse…”
and
“…French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.
The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale…”
Kurt Schlichter:
“…California has morphed from paradise into a garbage state run by garbage people for their own garbage benefit and amusement. The “garbage” part is literal – once the Sierra Nevada mountains symbolized the state; now, towering heaps of trash and human waste do. Welcome to what the Democrats want for all of America. Just watch your step. Literally.
If it were not for the climate, something the liberals in charge of my state have nothing to do with as much as they think they do, it would likely be a nearly empty desert once again. But the sun shines, the beach beckons and the palm trees sway over a population of morons who keep electing proggy fascists to run the place. Which they are doing, right into the ground…”
and
“…And hate them Sacramento does, targeting Normals with petty and not so petty attacks, from bans on straws and gun grabs to the threat of lifting the Proposition 13 caps on property taxes that keep millions of retirees from being tossed out of their homes when their annual bills go up 4000%. What would that mean? Well, when that modest ranch style you bought for $100,000 in 1985 gets reassessed to its current $1,000,000 value (something Prop 13 prevents), and the 1% Prop 13 tax rate goes to 3% or 4%, your tax bill goes from $1,000 a year to $30,000-$40,000. Remember that retirement you worked for? Well, now it will all go to subsidize the deadbeat government workers and welfare cheats that the California Democrats really represent. “No, that’s crazy talk! That would never happen!”
Yeah? Just watch…”