Culture critic: Anti-Feminism at Halftime
Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s Super Bowl halftime performance was supposedly about “celebrating their Latino heritage and empowering women” — but The Washington Examiner’s Madeline Fry blasts it as “completely inappropriate for children and the Super Bowl.” It was “oversexualized” — but “the message it sent to young viewers” was “even worse.” Millions of kids saw Shakira and J-Lo “grinding on other performers and dancing on a stripper pole,” with J-Lo’s “11-year-old daughter on stage with her” and “a children’s ensemble” joining in. Yes, “children have probably seen far worse” on social media, but “that’s no reason to normalize hyper-sexualization of content aimed at children.” Teaching young girls to “look up to icons who act like strippers” isn’t “empowerment” — it’s “self-objectification.”
Impeach watch: How Dems Lost the War
NBC host Chuck Todd recently asked guests if supporters of President Trump “just want to be lied to” — which, Jonathan Turley sighs at The Hill, only goes to show how the media love to “maintain that fools dwell only in Republican red states.” Yet it was foolish House Democrats who insisted on “a vote by Christmas” and provided “the narrowest grounds and thinnest record for trial” before then “waiting more than a month to submit articles of impeachment to the Senate.” Yet rather than acknowledge the House’s “catastrophic blunder,” the media “suggested that it was all some grand and brilliant scheme.” The real “hard truth” is that “House Democrats lost this case the minute they rushed an impeachment vote, and they knew it.”
Race for the White House: Mr. Progressive
Like Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg has “a plan” for everything, observes National Review’s Kevin Williamson — except that Bloomberg actually has “a pretty good record for bringing those plans to fruition,” with his “wildly successful career in business” and three terms as mayor, during which “murder rates went down, and high-school-graduation rates went up.” He is what Warren “pretends to be”: a “creature of data, measurement and cold-eyed assessment of political, economic and institutional realities” — the “kind of guy progressives and independents always say they want.” Yet Dems are pushing aside the “problem-solving realist with a strong, non-hypothetical record in the real world” for the hard-left professor. It’s more proof that “Donald Trump is, if nothing else, lucky in his opponents.”
Conservative: The Impeach Show’s Finale
“The season finale of congressional Democrats’ sham impeachment reality show will not take place until Wednesday’s vote to acquit President Trump,” David Avella notes at Fox News, but Trump’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday may be “the ‘must-watch’ episode.” While “the bulk of Trump’s speech” will likely “focus on his accomplishments and goals for a second term,” he may well use “his time in front of the country” to “lay out his defense against the sham House impeachment” — to an audience larger than any “episode of the impeachment charade.” Democrats may well be “planning a Season 2” to impeachment, but Trump can “use the stage to clearly and unequivocally” bring it to a close.
Urbanist: California’s Lost Housing Chance
At City Journal, Phillip Sprincin laments the recent defeat of a California Senate bill that could have alleviated the Golden State’s acute housing shortage. Among other measures, the law would “have removed local control over zoning for many areas of the state — including those near transit lines, ferries and major bus routes, as well as high-income areas with lots of jobs, such as Silicon Valley — and required that midrise and medium-density apartment buildings be permitted there, regardless of what the local government wanted.” It was a common-sense solution to the supply problem at the heart of the crisis: Since the explosion of NIMBY restrictions in the early 1990s, California has emerged “dead last in the US for the ratio of homes to households.” The lost opportunity is a dead shame, because “lack of housing is killing California.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari
