IN THE MAIL: The Mongoliad: Book One.
UPDATE: Reader Timothy Stone writes: “Great book. I’m midway through Book Three and the tension is building. So well researched I had to recently close my browser window when I, mistakenly, thought to look up the history of the Mongols’ campaign in Eastern Europe.”
BUT MCCAIN, SCHUMER WANT TO TRY AGAIN: Gun Control Backfires On Obama.
THE SAME GOVERNMENT POLICIES PRODUCING THE SAME RESULTS: Businesses Hightail It Out Of Argentina.
YA THINK? Enough Sympathy: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Not a Victim. “Pressure from an older brother is no excuse for murder.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Female High School Teacher Resigns After Being Charged With Raping Female Student. Oh, who am I kidding? These kinds of incidents only suggest a systemic problem if they happen in the Boy Scouts, or the Catholic Church. Otherwise they’re just isolated incidents, a few bad apples, waddyagonnado?
BETTER LATE TO THE STORY THAN NEVER, I GUESS: ‘Breitbart is smiling’: NYT vindicates Andrew Breitbart with major story on Pigford scandal.
AT AMAZON, Deals & Markdowns in Generators & Portable Power.
Also, today only: Save 25% on Ekobrew Refillable K-Cups.
BOSTON FOLLOWUP: Carjacking Victim Describes Harrowing Night.
COULD SHE BE THE MASTERMIND? PROBABLY MORE LIKE THE AGITATOR: Surprise! Psycho Mother of Boston Bombers Also on Terror Watch List.
Kind of a blow to Nina Burleigh’s sophomoric psychosexual theory, though. Burleigh, for those who have forgotten, is the reporter who said she’d be happy to give Bill Clinton a blowjob in thanks for his efforts to keep abortion legal. Form your own psychosexual theories if you wish. . . .
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: John Tierney: The Coming Revolution in Public Education.
GEORGE W. BUSH’S NUMBERS ARE UP: “You know why? Because he’s the farthest thing from Barack Obama.” “When Bush left office, his approval rating was down in the 20s to low 30s. Now it’s at 47%, which is what Obama’s is. That is amazing, and not sufficiently appreciated. Yes, we are a 50-50 nation, but Mr. Bush left office in foreign-policy and economic failure, even cataclysm. Yet he is essentially equal in the polls to the supposedly popular president.”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Brooklyn Law School to Permit Dismissal of Tenured Faculty for Lack of Collegiality or Poor Student Evaluations. I’m sure that there’s a Brooklyn-specific backstory to this, but it has to be read against the background of plummeting applications, especially to lower-tier-but-expensive schools like Brooklyn. Making it easier to get rid of faculty may be essential to their survival, enough so that they’re willing to take the inevitable hit in terms of recruiting.
MUGGED BY REALITY: After Boston, Obama can no longer ignore the global jihad.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Another Anti-Voucher Democrat, With Kids in the Best Private School. “So Terry McAuliffe, who has had four kids going to a roughly $30,000 per student tuition private school (perhaps there’s a sibling discount), opposes the use of vouchers to send poorer kids to private schools.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: IRS Releases College and University Tax Compliance Report. Note the high level of CEO compensation:
Average base salary: $448,981; median base salary, $363,943
Average total compensation: $561,135; median total compensation, $458,152.
Of course, it’s the swarms of vice-presidents, vice-chancellors, etc. who really run up the bill.
YOU CAN’T THINK CRITICALLY HERE! THIS IS A UNIVERSITY!
HOWIE CARR ON “PRIVACY:” “Suppose the marathon bombings had been committed by born-again Christian Tea Party members on the dole. Do you really think that Gov. Deval Patrick would be hanging on to those terrorists’ welfare files even tighter than he clutches Lt. Gov. Tim Murray’s state cellphone logs from the morning of Nov. 3, 2011? If these were “domestic” terrorists, I guarantee you Deval would have coughed up everything by now, up to and including whether they were getting on-the-arm brand-name or generic prescription drugs.”
FIVE SAD PICTURES FROM YESTERDAY’S ANTI-NRA MARCH: “A generous estimation of the crowd size would have been about 100 people, including members of the media.” Folks were tweeting that there were more members of the media than there were marchers.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: ‘Climate of Fear’? Obama’s ATF pick facing probe over retaliation claim.
NOT SO HOPEY-CHANGEY: One of the ‘humbling’ aspects of the job for President Obama may be how much his tenure resembles his predecessor’s. Waddya mean? He closed Guantanamo, and . . . oh, wait.
Related: More U.S. Troops Killed in Afghanistan Under Obama Than Under Bush.
[Sorry — had the date on that second link wrong before.]
SHAMING WORKS: Dem leaders won’t seek ObamaCare exemption.
WHY BOSTON IS BAD FOR IMMIGRATION — A LACK OF TRUST: “A major problem for those who want an immigration bill is lack of faith in government to do all the jobs it’s set itself well. People don’t trust it to be able to execute—to do, adequately, the thing it’s set itself to do in its big new laws. We always look at the motives and politics behind a big bill, and talk about that. But simple noncrisis execution—the ability to track and deal with a Tamerlan Tsarnaev, or to patrol and control a huge border—is a big reason why which people lack faith. Because, you know, they read the papers.”
And it seems that the more the government focuses on peripheral things, from banning big gulps to attacking “distracted driving” or taking over health care, the less it’s able to perform at the most basic traditional responsibilities of government.
BELLICOSE WOMEN UPDATE: US sailor thwarts Dubai bus driver rapist after putting him in strangehold with her thighs and then beating him into submission. “An off-duty US navy sailor wrestled a bus driver to the ground and beat him into submission after he attempted to rape her at knife point, a court heard yesterday. Prosecutors said that she knocked the knife from his hand, broke it in two, bit him in the hand, forced him to the ground and locked him between her thighs. The woman, 28, was on 24-hour shore leave in Dubai and was attacked as she returned to the port where she was based after a day shopping.”
THIS MAY HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH WHY GUN CONTROL FAILED: TV Ratings: ‘Duck Dynasty’ Tops ‘American Idol’ With Record-Breaking Finale.
As I’ve noted before, the American public is closer to the NRA than to Barack Obama.
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