Aloha 🐆🐆🐆 @MONDAYSWIMWEAR pic.twitter.com/valiPSZdf9
— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) February 27, 2019
Morning ✨ pic.twitter.com/fPbUNE5w2K
— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 12, 2019
The magic hour ✨ New @MONDAYSWIMWEAR coming soon pic.twitter.com/DKFKjv5Pwv
— Devin Brugman (@devinbrugman) March 14, 2019
I decided to take a break from writing "Newman!" jokes on Twitter & instead write a real piece about Biden, & how he embodies so many of the wrong choices made by a Democratic party in retreat for the past 50 years. "Newman!" jokes will recommence shortly: https://t.co/SD8cURvDL0— Rebecca Traister (@rtraister) March 29, 2019
It’s still three months before the first Democratic debate, nearly a year before Super Tuesday, and he hasn’t even declared yet, but poll after presidential poll continues to show 76-year-old former vice-president Joe Biden leading an enormous, diverse, and talented Democratic field.Keep reading.
It’s almost poetically appropriate. Biden carries himself with the confidence of a winner, despite not having won, or even come close to winning, either of the previous presidential primaries he’s entered. He is the guy whose self-assured conviction that his authority will protect him from rebuke has always preceded him into any room, whose confident sense of his own entitlement repels potential objection like Gore-Tex repels rain. He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.
For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.
Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural. In an attempt to win back That Guy, Joe Biden has himself, so very often, been That Guy.
Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.
Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, 18 years after Brown v. Board of Education, less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and just three years after the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education would actually force many schools to fulfill the promise of integration put forth by Brown. Biden took office less than three weeks before Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court and a couple of years before the term “sexual harassment” would be coined by Lin Farley.
It was a period of intense partisan realignment, in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and early ’70s, in which the American left was nervously coalescing around the interests and increased liberties of racial minorities and women, the populations who were forming what would be the most reliable part of its base.
The right, meanwhile, was sucking strength from a backlash against disruptive social movements, growing fat and drunk on the language of piety and family values that would undergird its ultraconservative defense of the old power structures, self-righteously fueling up for the Reagan era. Republicans had, for the foreseeable future, won white men — America’s original citizens, the ones around whom our narratives and priorities are calibrated.
Rather than lean into an energetic defense of the values of liberty, equality, and inclusion that might define their role against the racist and anti-feminist backlash of the era, the Democratic Party appeared anxious to distance itself from being the feminized “mommy party,” and shunt to the side — rather than vigorously advocate for — the priorities of women, especially poor women, and people of color.
The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections. Those Guys soothed; Those Guys were familiar; Those Guys enjoyed their own power and wanted to reassure everyone that it wasn’t really going to be so dramatically reapportioned.
A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion. Biden was one of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary to vote for the 1982 Hatch Amendment, which would have effectively nullified Roe by turning abortion rights back to federal and state legislatures. At the time, he expressed concern about whether he had “a right to impose” his anti-abortion views on the nation. Then he went ahead and imposed those views anyway.
Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion.
Biden’s stances against women’s full reproductive freedom have been key to how he has proudly presented himself to the public. Even in the years since he has officially become pro-choice, he’s retained the sensibility first reflected in his comments about how women shouldn’t be wholly in charge of their own decisions, writing in his 2007 memoir that even though he’d vote against a constitutional amendment barring abortion, “I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion.” His is the language of restrictive authority dressed up as avuncular protectionism.
Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.
In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities...
Too big? #boobs #tits @ChetsAnAsshole pic.twitter.com/q8e1GPxnuL
— Big Breast Pics (@BigBreastPics) March 29, 2019
“Camus’s rejection of Marxism, and his doubts about the likely outcome of post-colonial revolutionary movements, were unpopular, principled, and lonely positions.” https://t.co/SKo3RWEecv— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) March 27, 2019
Today, it is not unusual to see Albert Camus celebrated as the debonair existentialist — the handsome hero of the French Resistance, a great novelist, and a fine philosopher. But this reputation was only recently acquired. For much of his life, and in the years since his untimely death in 1960 aged just 46, Camus was deeply unfashionable among France’s leading intellectuals. In many quarters, he remains so.Still more.
Camus came to widespread attention in 1942 with his publication of his novella The Stranger and a philosophical essay entitled “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The Stranger portrays a solitary passionless man wandering through a world without pattern or purpose. “The Myth of Sisyphus” grapples with the question, “Why not commit suicide?” Camus argued that we should not, but he finds little evidence of a justified purpose for human beings. If we cannot prove that some choices are better than others, he concludes, we can at least dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of experience. The austerity and boldness of these two works struck Camus’s contemporaries as remarkable and, within a short time, he became known as “the philosopher of the absurd,” and befriended France’s leading intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Camus did not take up arms in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, but during the war he was the editor of the underground newspaper of the Resistance, Combat. This job involved great personal risk and he would almost certainly have been imprisoned and shot, either by the Nazis or their French collaborators, had his role been uncovered. When the war ended, Camus gazed at the devastation of Europe and reflected. Over the subsequent years, his writing would change significantly as humanism and anti-totalitarianism became increasingly central to his thinking. His 1947 allegorical novel The Plague depicts not a solitary, alienated man, but a group of people struggling together against a plague in a small Algerian city. Here, human beings are willing to confront the absurdity of the universe, but they remain compassionate nonetheless, and strive to be kind and to care for each other. Then, in 1951, Camus published The Man in Revolt (later published in translation as The Rebel). Horrified by the crimes of Stalin and by the apologetics for his regime published by some of the Western Left’s most influential intellectuals, Camus sought to understand the justification of mass murder. It is a rich book, and not easily summarized, but two of Camus’s arguments proved particularly antagonizing to his peers.
First, Camus argued that commitment to a single, distant purpose endangers us all. The struggle for a perfect society in the future leads to as ruthless consequentialism that allows us to sacrifice countless people in the present. This fear is what led him to describe Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” The faith of the Marxist in the promise of utopia, he observed, is every bit as powerful and irrational as that of the religious fanatic.
Second, Camus defended the proposition, explicitly denied by Marxists and Existentialists, that there exists a universal “human nature”—traits shared by all people, from which we can infer what is better or worse for all people and common ground upon which to form social bonds. Sartre, on the other hand, argued that we are the product of our choices and nothing more. Simone de Beauvoir summarized the Marxist view as her peers understood it: “There is no authentic human essence to be realized, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organized wholeness to be achieved. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.”
From his universalist humanism and skepticism about utopian ideologies, Camus developed an ethics in Man in Revolt that rejected revolution. Instead, Camus argued that moral progress arises from a rejection of injustice by people united in their recognition of that injustice. This kind of “revolt” is more restrained than the revolutionary impulse and shows mesure—it recognizes and respects human nature, attempts to improve things now, and accepts no limits on free speech and expression. When revolt is combined with the misguided belief that history has some unifying purpose and that human beings can be reshaped in the manner of wet clay, it declines into revolution. Revolution is unrestrained, it is démesure, and it leads inevitably to violence and cruelty.
Sartre and Beauvoir edited the leading French intellectual journal of their day, Les Temps Moderne, and they invited the activist and philosopher Francis Jeanson to review The Man in Revolt. The result was scathing. Jeanson’s article was mostly a series of ad hominem attacks which made no attempt to interpret Camus’s text charitably. Camus’s sins were clear: he had attacked Marxism, he had attacked revolution, and he had attacked the idea that human beings were infinitely malleable. For this, he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary.
Sartre then published an open letter addressed to Camus, that began, “Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it.” Most of Sartre’s letter ignores the arguments in The Man in Revolt, and concentrates instead on itemizing Camus’s alleged personal failings, including the accusation that he was bourgeois. Camus did not respond to this criticism, because he did not see it as important. After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say. But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life. Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.
Beauvoir’s attack on Camus was perhaps the most vicious of all...
New Year's Day
U2
7:17am
Dani California
Red Hot Chili Peppers
7:13am
Down Under
Men At Work
7:09am
We Belong
Pat Benatar
7:06am
Plush
Stone Temple Pilots
6:54am
Africa
Toto
6:50am
Eye Of The Tiger
Survivor
6:46am
Feel It Still
Portugal The Man
6:44am
Cold As Ice
FOREIGNER
6:40am
Rio
Duran Duran
6:36am
Lithium
NIRVANA
6:23am
Don't You Forget About Me
Simple Minds
6:19am
Edge Of Seventeen
Stevie Nicks
6:19am
I was highly amused at reading this article: "Poll: 38 percent say Ocasio-Cortez 'villain' in New York losing Amazon HQ deal."RTWT.
Apparently, New Yorkers are so badly educated that they didn’t understand the side effects of electing socialists.
You see, electing socialists always results in businesses moving away, disappearing, or never setting up in your town at all.
There are reasons for this, reasons usually tied in with how socialists view the world.
For instance, they don’t understand where money/wealth comes from.
It used to be, for old-time Marxists, that money was created by labor. That notion is crazy enough, since you can labor long and hard and not create anything of value. (See, for instance, my 13-year apprenticeship in writing commercially viable fiction.) Or you can do very little labor and create something of great value. (C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles were written in a freakishly short time for many writers.)
But Marxism has come a long way, baby, by becoming the politics of choice of spoiled upper-class darlings who have never done any work in their lives.
To them – judging by my kids' school books, my leftist colleagues' vagaries and, yes, Alexandria Occasional Cortex’s eructation – wealth is something that just exists, kind of free-form. It can be stolen and hoarded, but not actually created in any sense of the word.
This is why socialists are convinced that we stole our wealth from the sh**holes of the world. (No, seriously. My kids’ history and geography books all said this.) Also, it’s why poor Occasional Cortex, whom no one ever accused of an overabundance of brains, thought that she was saving the people of New York money by chasing Amazon away...
Why Doesn't AOC Want to Vote on the Green New Deal?https://t.co/vlrYjH3ewN
— PJ Media (@PJMedia_com) March 25, 2019
The GOP’s whole game of wasting votes in Congress to target others “on the record”, for leg they have no intent to pass, is a disgrace.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 23, 2019
Stop wasting the American peoples’ time + learn to govern. Our jobs aren’t for campaigning, & that’s exactly what these bluff-votes are for. https://t.co/ELzpQhlezo
This is the @townhallcom column that I've waited two years to write ...💥🇺🇸
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) March 25, 2019
And that you waited two years to read !💥
Trump Russia Collusion Treason Was All Just Another Elite Lie 🐿🐀🌽🍆😂https://t.co/ZzevNhVtl9 pic.twitter.com/ySO59eWWB6
The Mueller report dropped and the liberal elite experienced the kind of intense, agonizing disappointment usually reserved for a Fredocon’s bride on her wedding night.More.
It’s important to remember exactly what nonsense the elite liars were trying to stuff down our throats, because in the aftermath of their humiliation they are busy trying to hide it via their goalpost-shifting three card monte act. Behold their original assertion:
Donald Trump was a willing agent of Vladimir Putin actively acting in concert with Russia to betray the United States and steal the election!
Wow. Those of us who are neither shameless liars nor blithering idiots – or, such as my congressjerk Ted Lieu, both – never bought into this transparently ridiculous notion. But the Democrats, their slobbering media suck-ups, and their conservagimp submissives did, or at least pretended to. Why? Because the dumpster fire ruling class they represent was outraged that we, the People, rejected its divine right to govern us when we chose a brash, pugnacious outsider over their designated monarch to-be, Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit.
This sham investigation was not anything like the administration of justice. It was part of, as people say but we’ve stopped being shocked when we hear it, a soft coup. It was a deliberate attempt by the powerful to use the levers of government to eliminate a threat to the ruling class’s hold on political power by manufacturing a false narrative with the active assistance of those in government and media whose whole job is to prevent these sorts of fascist shenanigans.
The damage to our country is hard to calculate right now. It will take a while to fully appreciate how this betrayal by our alleged betters has undermined the foundations of our Republic. But the signs are ominous. Normal people, those of us who build, feed, fuel and defend this country, have been awakened to the utterly incompetent and thoroughly venal nature of what Instapundit Glenn Reynolds correctly identifies as the U.S. franchise of a useless trans-national elite that prioritizes its own power and perks over the welfare of those is purportedly serves.
We’re woke now. We see that the people we’ve been electing – the people they allow us to elect – are really all the same. Only the labels are different, but the objective – their own money and influence – is identical. Except for Trump, who neither respects the elite nor plays by its shabby rules. And that’s why they threw away any pretens of honesty, integrity or respect for the rule of law to drive him out of the Oval Office they covet.
Let’s briefly touch on all the lives ruined on the way to this flaccid finale, especially the people swopped up in the search for a crime, any crime, in the neighborhood of the Bad Orange Man...
President Trump and congressional Republicans went on offense Monday by calling for new investigations into what they claim was political bias behind special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe, even as they heralded its conclusion exonerating Trump of colluding with Russia during the 2016 campaign.More.
Democrats, meanwhile, found themselves walking a political tightrope between pressing for further scrutiny into whether the president obstructed justice — a question left explicitly unanswered by Mueller — without appearing overzealous or overly focused on impeachment.
Trump’s response to the Mueller report was another example of the president’s ability to ignore the contradictions of his own actions and statements, and spin a narrative that paints him as both winner and victim.
After saying for months that Mueller was biased due to personal conflicts and describing the entire probe as a Democratic-inspired hoax and witch hunt, Trump has embraced its conclusions as legitimate and said Monday that Mueller acted “honorably” and that the investigation “was 100% the way it should’ve been.”
At the same time, however, he — and other Republicans — called for investigations into the investigators themselves. Though there are risks in undermining the credibility of a Republican-led process that cleared him of collusion, Trump nevertheless described unnamed people involved in the probe as “evil” and said they should now be “looked at.”
“What they did — it was a false narrative, it was a terrible thing,” Trump said. “We can never let this happen to another president again.”
For Trump, the past few days have unfolded as among the most satisfying of his presidency. First, he was cleared by Mueller of collusion with Russia; on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Trump’s support for Israel to Cyrus the Great; and then attorney Michael Avenatti, one of Trump’s loudest adversaries, was arrested for extortion and bank fraud.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who golfed with Trump in Florida over the weekend, said Monday that the president is “probably stronger today than at any time [in his] presidency. The cloud has been removed.”
Like Trump, Graham called for new investigations, as seemingly unlikely as they may be. He wants another special counsel to review what he called “the other side of the story,” including how the Justice Department approved surveillance of Trump campaign official Carter Page.
Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, listed several former intelligence and law enforcement officials who he claimed may have exaggerated evidence of conspiracy to initiate wiretaps in the Justice Department probe...
Joy Corrigan Big Cleavage and Nipple Pokies - https://t.co/WwHxPOjixS - pic.twitter.com/uQgwr7C8b7— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) March 25, 2019
