Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools

image from Amazon

Jeffrey Lord may have been fired from CNN for no good reason, but he continues to publish on various websites, including American Spectator. Yesterday, he posted his review of Tucker Carlson’s bestselling Ship of Fools. It’s a rave, and I am posting a few paragraphs, either for those who are interested in reading the book or those who want a short précis instead:  

A serious look at a serious American problem by a serious thinker

A truer examination of a serious American problem could not be had.

In his new book,  Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker Carlson gets to the heart of the seriously bad situation that confronts America.

Ship of Fools is, says the opening flap of the book, “the story of the new American elites, a group whose power and wealth has grown beyond imagination even as the rest of the country has withered. The people who run America now barely interact with it. They fly on their own planes, ski on their own mountains, watch sporting events from the stands in skyboxes. They have total contempt for you.”

In thumbnail, that could not possibly be a more accurate description of American elites, not to mention the reaction they produced: the election of Donald Trump. As someone who long ago left the precincts of Inside the Beltway Washington, D.C. to come home to the wilds of Central Pennsylvania, it was plain what was coming down the pike in November of 2016. This area was awash in Trump signs. They were everywhere, even hand-painted on the sides of barns. As it were, this was a sure sign of what Tucker describes this way:

Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.

Bingo.

Read the full review here.

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Election fraud, corruption, and jihad

image credit: huffingtonpost.com

Robert Spencer is a leading authority on Islamic jihad, and his column yesterday is about what’s going on with the Florida, Arizona, and probably a few other states with election results still not confirmed. He compares the corruption of our electoral systems to terrorism :

The theft of elections, even defying court orders to stop while the whole world is watching, is a new low in American politics, and testifies to the Left’s overriding lust for power. The Democrats have never recovered their equilibrium after losing to Donald Trump in 2016, and now appear to be willing to stop at nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to neutralize Trump and regain their hegemony.

. . .

The election fraud in Arizona and Florida is a continuation of the Kavanaugh hearings. Just as the outrageously false allegations of sexual assault and rape against Brett Kavanaugh did, the election fraud demonstrates that there is no low to which the Democrats will not stoop to gain and hold power. They will even affect a self-righteous mien of moral superiority while stooping.

The lesson that conservatives are meant to learn is not just that the Left will stop at nothing, but that the Left is unstoppable. Republicans and conservatives can vote for “drain the swamp” candidates all they want -- but the swamp will not be drained, as those candidates will not take office even if they win.

The intention is to intimidate and demoralize conservatives, induce them to give up and get out of this dirty game. This is, in a word, terrorism.

Read the full article here.

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Medicare For All and socialism

image credit: americanliberalreview.com

There has been any number of articles and analyses concerning the proposed “Medicare For All.” A recent on-line report can be found at Forbes here; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “dodges questions” on how to pay for it here (spoiler: she doesn’t know); and the NY Times explains what is good about the policy here (what a surprise!).

Yesterday, Justin Haskins published an accessible analysis at Townhall entitled “Socialists Won’t Rest Until We Have Single-Payer Health Care. We Must Stop Them.” The quote marks are there because that’s the title of the article, but they could be interpreted instead as scare quotes. Excerpts:

The 2018 midterms could someday be remembered as the beginning of the Democratic Party’s full embrace of creating a single-payer health care system in the United States. For the first time in American history, a large number of Democrats, many of whom identify as socialists, openly campaigned for the creation of a government-run health insurance model.

For instance, Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won 78 percent of the vote on Election Day, championed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “Medicare for All” proposal, calling it the “ethical, logical, and affordable path to ensuring no person goes without dignified healthcare.” According to Ocasio-Cortez, “Medicare for All will reduce the existing costs of healthcare (and make Medicare cheaper, too!) by allowing all people in the US to buy into a universal healthcare system.” 

Ocasio-Cortez says she supports a universal system that would include “full vision, dental, and mental healthcare - because we know that true healthcare is about the whole self, not just your yearly physical.”

The cost of enacting such a radical program would be astronomical. Researchers at the Mercatus Center say Sen. Sanders’ plan would cost $32.6 trillion in its first decade, and they note that even if Congress were to double taxes paid by individuals and corporations, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for the program. That should terrify you, especially since the U.S. government’s deficit for the 2018 fiscal year was $782 billion and the national debt now stands at a $21.7 trillion.

But as shocking as the price tag for single-payer health care would be, it pales in comparison to the numerous health care-related problems that would be created by such a model. For starters, the government has an absolutely terrible record of providing health care. One example is the Veterans Health Administration, which is run by the federal government. It routinely suffers from underfunding and long wait times, which has forced the agency to allow veterans to go elsewhere to receive care. As the Military Times notes, “About one-third of all VA medical appointments today are … conducted by physicians outside the department’s system.”

. . .

If the federal government can’t properly run the VA system or Medicaid—or even the Post Office—why does anyone think it could manage one of the largest industries in the United States today?

Much more about the VA, mortality rates, and other scary stats are here.

RELATED: Veterans in the greater Cleveland are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Via Breitbart:

The 10 worst cities for veterans included Ohio metros — Cleveland (#92) and Toledo (#95). California contributed San Bernardino (#94) and Fresno (#97). Also at the bottom of the pack were Philadelphia (#91), Baton Rouge (#93), Baltimore (#96), Memphis (#98), Newark (#99), and Detroit (#100).

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Morning or Mourning in America?

cartoon credit: politicalcorrectnessrunamok.blogspot.com

The recounts continue in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. More ballots are mysteriously popping out of closets, trunks of cars, magicians’ hats. Macron just insulted President Trump again. Etc., etc. Feeling worn down?

Sally Zelikovsky has something of a post-election pep talk at American Thinker. She concludes:

Warriors don’t retreat just as they are making inroads. We may not be fighting a kinetic war, but it is our destiny to fight this ideological war for the soul of this country.  It is just as vital and, in some ways harder, because the enemy is an internal hegemon--progressivism.  Fortunately, it no longer hides in the shadows.  

We see its face every day. It is tenacious, brazenly mendacious, ferocious, avaricious, ubiquitous; it is relentless and merciless. 

This is not a war with swords and guns, but of words and actions.  My father fought against NAFTA for 30 years.  Trump couldn’t have changed NAFTA without the efforts of people like Dad.  The president can’t do all he has to do in the next two years without us either.

The midterms were a mixed bag and left us feeling pretty lousy.  And it’s not over given the looming morass of election challenges.  We also face the exhausting reality that the left will not stop until they take down a president who has our back in a way I’ve never seen in a political leader, let alone a president. Are we going to let this happen? 

America’s conservatives are at a crossroads.  We can tack to the right and commit to a new “morning in America,” emboldened by the power we have as the People, by judges and representatives devoted to  conservatism, and a Senate majority that can punch back working in tandem with a fearless and indefatigable President.  Or, we can tack to the left, where we’d be “mourning in America” because we let the light go out on this beacon on a hill.

The full article is here.

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On the 100th anniversary of the end of WW1

In Flanders Fields

BY JOHN MCCRAE

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

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My gosh, the Browns won

Just when you think there is still time for them to lose, 

the Browns win over the Atlanta Falcons. 

image credit: onsizzle.com

On Veteran's Day

Veterans Day is a U.S. legal holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars, and Veterans Day 2018 occurs on Sunday, November 11. In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in World War I, then known as “the Great War.” Commemorated in many countries as Armistice Day the following year, November 11th became a federal holiday in the United States in 1938. In the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became known as Veterans Day.

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