Love Us "Suthner's." Things To Ponder. Bernie and Red Sheets. Noonan's Towel. Kim's Wipe. Bossie Could Be Right.

You got to love us "suthners.)


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Things to ponder!
Limit all US politicians to two terms:      

- One in office  

- One in prison

Apparently, Illinois already does this, and it seems to  work for them . 

        Only in America ... do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the  front.     Only in America ... do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, and a diet coke. 

 Only in America ... do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.  

Only in America ... do banks leave vault doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.     Only in America ... do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage. 
 Only in America ... do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.     Only in America ... do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.   

EVER WONDER ...  Why the sun lightens our hair, but darkens our skin?  

  Why can't women put on mascara with their mouth closed?

   Why don't you ever see the headline 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?     Why is 'abbreviated' such a long word?     Why is it that doctors call what they do 'practice'?  

 Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dish washing liquid made with    real lemons?  

   Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker? 
   Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?     Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food? 

 Why do they  sterilize the needle for lethal injections?  

   You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes?  Why don't they    make the entire plane out of that stuff?     Why don't sheep shrink when it rains? 

If con is the opposite of pro... is Congress the opposite of   progress?

If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?

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Governments that are Socialistic and Communistic have a special dis-regard for their citizens.   (See 1 ,1a and 1b below.)

However, Bernie was so taken with Russia he went there so he could  sleep on red sheets during his honeymoon. (See 1 below.)
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Even Peggy Noonan had to throw in the towel. Kim used it to wipe the egg off the faces of those in the mass media. (See 2 and 2a below.)

And:

This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 2b below.)

Finally:

The radical Democrat House Members  even lost their emolument case in the Federal District Court for lack of standing.
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When Bossie was here last February he told me Trump would win because of the increased number of black voters he would garner. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Nothing To See Here

The Chinese doctor who blew the whistle before the outbreak of a novel coronavirus died Thursday after becoming infected from the virus last month, CNN reported.

Li Wenliang’s death sparked anger and grief among China’s social media users, many of whom have been frustrated at the government’s handling of the outbreak that has killed more than 600 people in China, CBNC reported.

The doctor initially warned people about the new pathogen on Dec. 30 when he posted on social media that seven patients from a seafood market in Wuhan were diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and were quarantined in his hospital.

Wuhan authorities intercepted his post and held an emergency meeting the next day to determine the severity of the outbreak. They later warned the World Health Organization about the new virus.

Authorities, however, accused Li of “spreading rumors online” and “severely disrupting social order” for his post and ordered him to sign a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor.”

Since the outbreak, Chinese officials have been trying to control the flow of information as the number of cases increases, according to the New York Times.

The virus has infected more than 30,000 people globally, including the United States and Britain.
(1a and 1b)

China’s Hard Edge: The Leader of Beijing’s Muslim ...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-hard-edge-the-leader-of-beijings-muslim-crackdown...

Apr 07, 2019 · China’s Hard Edge: The Leader of Beijing’s Muslim Crackdown Gains Influence Chen Quanguo’s social-control methods in Xinjiang are spreading to other parts of China

And:

Web Preaches Jihad to China's Muslim Uighurs - WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/web-preaches-jihad-to-chinas-muslim-uighurs-1403663568

Web Preaches Jihad to China's Muslim Uighurs ... Militant Uighurs in China's west now appear to be using the Internet tactics of Mideast extremists to spread the ideology of violent jihadism to a ...

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2)

The Democrats’ Unserious Week

By Peggy Noonan

The fiasco in Iowa, the foolishness at the State of the Union—do they realize how bad they look?

Democrats, when they’re feeling alarmed or mischievous, will often say that Ronald Reagan would not recognize the current Republican Party. I usually respond that John F. Kennedy would not recognize the current Democratic Party, and would never succeed in it.

Both men represented different political eras but it’s forgotten that they were contemporaries, of the same generation, Reagan born in 1911 and JFK in 1917. They grew up in the same America in different circumstances, one rich, one poor, but with a shared national culture. By the 1950s, when JFK was established in the political system and Reagan readying to enter it, bodacious America had settled into its own dignity. It had a role in the world and needed to act the part. Both men valued certain public behaviors and the maintenance of a public face. It involved composure, coolness, a certain elegance and self-mastery. They felt they had to show competence and professionalism. They knew they were passing through history at an elevated level, and part of their job was to hold high its ways and traditions.

Their way is gone, maybe forever. Democrats blame this on Donald Trump, and in the area of historical consciousness he is, truly, a hopeless cause. But this week Democrats joined him in the pit.

Do they understand what a disaster this was for them? If Mr. Trump wins re-election, if in fact it isn’t close, it will be traceable to this first week in February.

Iowa made them look the one way a great party cannot afford to look: unserious. The lack of professionalism, the incompetence is the kind of thing that not only shocks a party but shadows it. They can’t run a tiny caucus in a tiny state but they want us to believe they can reinvent American health care? Monday night when the returns were supposed to be coming in, it was like the debut of ObamaCare when the website went down.

Iowa, which for almost half a century has had a special mystique, has lost it. It will never be first-in-the-nation again. The candidates, who worked so hard for so long, were denied their victory moment. Did the movers, operatives and networkers who were behind the app and the technology have any consciousness of what they were changing, of the history they were changing, if they failed? The professionals were detached from their own voters, and not invested enough to give them a functioning primary.

You know what Iowa really tells us? Anything can happen now—anything. Because rigor in politics is waning, the old disciplines are not holding, old responsibilities are being thrown off. It was a failure of competence by people who were just passing through and burnishing their personal brands.

What a disaster.

And what happened a day later in the House was just as bad.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi shattered tradition, making faces, muttering, shaking her head as the president delivered his State of the Union address. At the end she famously stood, tore the speech up and threw down the pieces.

“But he didn’t shake her hand.” So what? Her great calling card is she’s the sane one.

She introduced him rudely, without the usual encomiums. Oh, snap.

The classy lady was not classy. She forgot she has a higher responsibility than to her base, but—yes, how corny—to her country, the institution, the young who are watching and just getting a sense of how to behave in the world.

If she was compelled to show symbolic fealty to the “resistance” she should have taken it outside the chamber. That place is where Daniel Webster debated; she occupies the chair of Henry Clay and “Mr. Sam.”

And she set a template: Now in the future all House Speakers who face presidents from the opposing party at the State of the Union will have to be rude fools.

Remember those videos that used to be all over the internet, with members of the Korean congress punching each other in the face on the floor of the legislature? Man, we used to laugh. Now in the future that can be us.

This is how a great lady becomes just another hack.

Some progressive members refused to attend, or walked out during the speech—one said, without irony, that she was “triggered.” Those who came slouched angrily in their seats, looking down, refusing to rise for all the heroes in the balcony. Why do they think that is a good look?

Those who didn’t come were unprofessional, but it was also a practical failure. They abandoned the field and let the Congress of the United States look like one big, cheering, unified bastion of boisterous Republicans, with a few grim women dressed in white in the corner. That’s what you want America to see?

The speech itself was shrewd and its political targeting astute. There were the usual boasts: “The unemployment rate is the lowest in half a century”— but they had force in the aggregate. The policy that was emphasized (opportunity zones, expanded vocational education, neonatal research combined with a call to ban late-term abortions, expanded child credits) combined with the heroes in the balcony (a Border Patrol agent, a kid trying to get into a charter school, the brother of a victim of crime) was powerful and rich in inference.

More than ever, more showily, this was an aligning of the GOP, in persons and symbols, with “outsiders”—with those without officially sanctioned cultural cachet, with the minority, the regular, the working class. It was plain people versus fancy people—that is, versus snooty liberals and progressives who talk a good game about the little guy but don’t seem to like him much; who in their anger and sarcasm, in their constant censoriousness and characterological lack of courtesy, have managed to both punch above their political weight and make a poor impression on the national mind.

This was the president putting the Republican Party on the side of the nobodies of all colors as opposed to the somebodies. (Van Jones on CNN had it exactly right: Trump is going for black and Hispanic men, and the Democrats are foolish not to see it.) This is a realignment I have supported and a repositioning I have called for and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t please me to see it represented so effectively, and I very much regret that the president is a bad man and half mad because if he weren’t I’d be cheering.

Yes it was bread and circuses, and yes it was like a reality TV show. There should be a word for “I know I’m being manipulated but I am moved anyway.” We need that word because it is the essence of our entire media/entertainment/political culture. But if you weren’t moved by the mother of the baby born prematurely and the 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman there’s something wrong with you, and in your attempts to maintain a fair minded detachment you’ve become distanced from your fellow humans.

Republicans in the Reagan era used to say, and think, that we were the Main Street party, not the Wall Street one. In the three decades since, small-town America has fallen apart and Main Street disappeared into broken up, lonely, ex-urban places. Mr. Trump is saying he’s for the people who live there, in Main Street’s diaspora.

Whatever happens with him, that is the party’s future. Whatever happens with the Democrats they cannot afford another week like this.

2a) The State of the Democrats

The split between progressives and moderates could sink the party in November.

By Kimberley A Strassel

Donald Trump visited Congress this week to declare the state of the union “stronger than ever before.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded the evening by highlighting the state of the Democratic Party: Intensely—perhaps fatally—divided.

That’s the prism through which to view this week’s headlines: The Iowa debacle, Democrats’ State of the Union theatrics, the president’s impeachment acquittal. Division has coursed through Democratic politics for at least the past four years. The media tries hard to present this split as nothing more than the usual intraparty tension. It’s significantly deeper than that, and Democratic hopes for the 2020 election hinge on it.

The Iowa derailment didn’t begin Monday afternoon or even in the months leading up to the failure of the results-reporting app. This train went off the tracks right after the 2016 Democratic primary contest, as a bitter progressive wing of the party stewed over Bernie Sanders’s defeat. They accused the Democratic establishment of rigging the process for Hillary Clinton—starting with Iowa, where the results were close, and where Mr. Sanders’s supporters outright challenged the legitimacy of Mrs. Clinton’s victory.

Hoping for peace, and in the name of “transparency,” party officials adopted the wildly complicated system on display Monday. The delayed results continue to be riddled with errors, making the outcome even less credible than in 2016. Sanders allies are already crying foul. They’re also pointing to new Democratic National Committee rules for debates, and nominations for convention spots, as evidence that one side of the party is again trying to deny the other side a victory.

That there are two, extremely polarized sides is also the one clear takeaway from the Iowa muddle. While the Sanders and Pete Buttigieg campaigns argue over how many state-delegate equivalents can dance on the head of a pin, the bigger point is that they ended the final vote with near equal numbers. Overall, the two candidates unapologetically pushing Medicare for All (Bernie and Elizabeth Warren) took 47% of the final vote, while the three more “moderate” contenders (Mr. Buttigieg, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar) took 51%.

The chasm in the party has been on display particularly under Speaker Pelosi’s leadership. It brewed in the bitter spring fights over which wing got its way on how to sanction Rep. Ilhan Omar for anti-Semitic comments; which wing spoke for the party on climate and health care; which wing set its antigun agenda. And most consequentially, which wing won the day on impeachment. Mrs. Pelosi ultimately gave in to threats against her speakership and allowed her firebrands to serve as the face of the party in a weak and doomed impeachment proceeding.

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is basking in positive headlines after voting to convict, but the more immediately consequential votes remain those cast by Democratic moderates—who were sacrificed to the passions of Mrs. Pelosi’s liberal wing. Thirty-one House Democrats are on the ballot this year in districts won in 2016 by Mr. Trump—who has climbed to a personal-high 49% Gallup approval rating. Sen. Doug Jones (D., Ala.) voted to convict a president who won his state by 28 points last time around. Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) is facing uneven polling numbers. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) is spared an election this year but hasn’t helped his future election prospects.

Mrs. Pelosi’s speech-ripping at the State of the Union was designed to energize her Democratic troops after a demoralizing week. That this was necessary is also a consequence of the party’s split. Impeachment was designed to galvanize the base, and it has certainly jazzed some in the “resistance.” Yet there is evidence that it turned off potential Democratic voters. The Iowa caucus turnout numbers were mediocre at best, and an NBC News entrance poll showed a big dip in first-time attendees compared with 2016.

The split meanwhile works against the possibility that Democrats wise up and pursue a results-driven agenda. Furious liberals are already demanding a new round of Trump investigations, and rejecting any suggestion of big, bipartisan legislation. House moderates will want to prove they can get things done, but any small-ball achievements will be overshadowed by media-driven focus on yet new claims of Trump scandal.

It also works against a consensus Democratic nominee who might unite the party. New Democratic rules that award proportional delegates in each state (rather than a winner-take-all system) will discourage any front-runners from getting out. Party leaders are increasingly worried they are headed for a contested convention, where the progressive-establishment battle would reach fever pitch.
Such a showdown might settle if the differences in the final candidates came down to personality, or style. But that’s not this battle. Democrats are divided by generation, by geography, by cultural sensibilities, and by vastly differing policy agendas. Does the common Democratic desire to beat Mr. Trump overcome all that? Maybe. Based on the state of the Democratic Party right now, it’s far from a sure bet.

2b) My e-mail to Senator Romney. 
I voted for you when you ran against Ted Kennedy, again when you ran for governor, and once again when you ran for President. In all cases, I contributed both time and money…all of which I deeply regret. Your vote to impeach suggests that you feel Mr. Trump somehow betrayed his country. Well Mitt, Mr. Trump isn’t a Quisling…you are. And that’s how you will be remembered; that is if anyone bothers to think of you at all. Today, the Right doesn’t want you and the Left will soon ridicule you. You are a man rightfully alone.
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3) Trump’s Bid for the Black Vote

African-Americans were front-and-center at the State of the Union.

The Editorial Board

The media have focused on the Nancy Pelosi-Donald Trump feud on display at Tuesday’s State of the Union address. But for our money the most notable part of the evening, and perhaps the most politically consequential, was President Trump’s pitch for African-American support.

Progressives cast all Republican politicians as avatars of racial resentment, and Mr. Trump has sometimes made himself an easy target. He once trafficked in birther conspiracies about Barack Obama, and he botched the response to the Charlottesville white-supremacist march in 2017. Joe Biden dines out on this campaign theme in every speech

Yet Mr. Trump is working hard to defy this Democratic narrative, and good for him. The Trump campaign spent half of its $10 million Super Bowl ad-buy highlighting Mr. Trump’s commutation of a black woman’s life sentence for a drug offense. Then on Tuesday African Americans were front-and-center.

Some of Mr. Trump’s appeals were symbolic, such as recognizing 100-year-old Charles McGee, who served in the all-black Tuskegee Army Air Force unit in World War II, and his great-grandson, who wants to be an astronaut. He mentioned Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his

Beyond the inclusive tone, Mr. Trump emphasized policies that address real inequities in American life. Perhaps the most compelling was Mr. Trump’s extended brief for school choice. The quality of many urban government schools is a national disgrace, and African-American children suffer most.

Mr. Trump highlighted a black youngster whose “future was put further out of reach when Pennsylvania’s Governor vetoed legislation to expand school choice,” and he called for Congress to expand opportunities for scholarships to attend alternative schools.

This has become a sharp dividing line between the two parties, as Democrats have abandoned choice under pressure from unions. In 2018 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won a close race thanks to the votes of African-American women who supported him out of proportion to other GOP candidates. One likely cause was his school-choice platform. Mr. Trump should campaign around the country highlighting charter, private and parochial schools that help children of all races escape rotten union schools.

Mr. Trump also highlighted sentencing reform, which he signed into law over the objections of some on the right. The extent that black voters want to soften the criminal-justice system is sometimes exaggerated—they are often the victims of violent crime—yet nonviolent offenders are sometimes sentenced for longer than society requires to remain safe. Mr. Trump’s willingness to buck political convention on this issue is making a difference for young black men especially.

Then there are the “opportunity zone” tax incentives championed by GOP Senator Tim Scott aimed at funneling investment into low-income areas. Mr. Trump recognized a black man, Tony Rankins, who had turned his life around after prison and is a tradesman in an opportunity zone. We’re more skeptical of the overall economic impact of this tax incentive, but the late Jack Kemp would have approved of this attempt to bring capital to places where there hasn’t been enough.

Mr. Trump also hammered the dividends that faster economic growth is delivering for black Americans, with declining poverty and a near-record low jobless rate (5.9%). Prosperity tends to ease intergroup suspicion and hostility as everyone sees more opportunity.

Mr. Trump won about 8% of the black vote in 2016, and Beltway sages (including some conservatives who fancy themselves experts) sneer that he won’t do any better in 2020. But policy results matter, especially when they are accompanied by sincere and persistent outreach. In any case more two-party competition for black voters is good for the country.

When parties are racially sorted, conflicts are magnified. As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his great concurrence in Holder v. Hall, racial redistricting reduces “any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.” Democrats flog racial tensions to drive minority turnout, while Republicans ignore the black vote and stress white turnout.

Partisan identities are sticky, and perhaps Mr. Trump’s efforts won’t overcome the Democratic and media’s political stereotyping by race. But the GOP needs to try, and Mr. Trump deserves credit for doing so.

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