AT AMAZON, 12 Days Of Deals. New deals every day between now and 12/22. Check ’em out before they’re gone.
Also, deep discounts in Electronics.
Plus, today only: 50% off Remington Shaving Products.
And, also today only: 40% Or More Off Franklin Sports Team Youth Jersey Sets.
PUNISHMENT: IRS Is Big Loser in Government Funding Bill. “The 3.1% reduction in the budget of the Internal Revenue Service — bringing its funding below its 2008 level — comes amid Republican outrage over allegations IRS officials targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny of their filings for non-profit status.”
Related: Obama Justice Department Was Involved In IRS Targeting, Lerner Emails Reveal. When the GOP controls Congress next month, I hope they’ll do considerably more.
CHANGE: Gun-control advocates are seriously losing public opinion. Well, good. “What’s most striking in Pew’s new data is that views have shifted more in favor of gun rights since then among nearly every demographic group, including women, blacks, city-dwellers, parents, college graduates, millennials and independents. The two groups that haven’t budged? Hispanics and liberal Democrats. These numbers may capture the short memory of many Americans. But the long-term trend is undeniably grim for gun-control advocates, who seem to be losing ground even among their strongest traditional sympathizers.”
The turnaround on this over the past 20 years has been astonishing, and should serve as a lesson to people who think we can’t see a sea-change on a civil rights issue, even when the media is overwhelmingly opposed. In truth, after a few decades of ’60s induced hysteria, America is simply returning to its traditionally liberal attitudes toward guns, and weapons in general.
ROLL CALL: Senate GOP Wrestles With Whether to Undo the Nuclear Option.
Senate Democrats got rid of the filibuster last year for all nominations except Supreme Court nominees by reducing the threshold for breaking a filibuster to a simple majority. They did it using the nuclear option, which allowed them to essentially change Senate rules on a simple majority vote by overturning the ruling of the chair.
Republicans were livid because changes to Senate rules typically require a two-thirds majority.
But now that the genie is out of the bottle, some Republicans believe they should keep the nomination process as is.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, had been leading the charge in favor of leaving the issue alone, recently penning a couple of op-eds on the issue.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he agreed with Hatch, noting that he believes it was a mistake for Democrats to trigger the nuclear option.
If they don’t feel some pain, they’ll never learn.
WELL, THAT’S CERTAINLY TRUE: Jim Webb says Democratic Party has lost its way.
MORE COOL PRESS FOR MY SISTER-IN-LAW’S NOLLYLAND STARTUP: Entrepreneur creates new movie platform for Nigerian and African films. It’s cool tech and an underserved market. Here’s her website.
THE HILL: All Senate GOP staff going on ObamaCare. Note that the Dems aren’t interested. Know your place, peasants!
NOT VERY WELL: K.C. Johnson: How the Times Handled the Rape Report. While the Washington Post has been doing real shoe-leather reporting, the New York Times has engaged in shallow, slogan-affirming punditry disguised as reporting. In other words, pretty much what they did during the Duke Lacrosse case.
SO I GUESS SHE’S ONE OF THOSE ANARCHIST, TERRORIST, HOSTAGE-TAKING GOVERNMENT-SHUTDOWN TYPES NOW: Elizabeth Warren tells Democrats to oppose spending bill over Dodd-Frank change.
But remember: When Democrats Do It, It’s Not A Government Shutdown.
IT’S COME TO THIS: A College President Had to Apologize for Saying ‘All Lives Matter.’ “Smith College President Kathleen McCartney thought she was showing solidarity with students protesting racism and police brutality when she sent a campus-wide email with the subject line, “All Lives Matter.” But the anti-racism slogan popular with students is actually the more selective ‘black lives matter.’ . . . Students were furious and offended.”
When you reward people for being “furious and offended,” you get a lot more furious and offended people. Though why the knee-jerk emotions of callow undergraduates are treated as significant is beyond me.
SENS. MCCASKILL & GILLIBRAND SAY: The Facts May Change, But The Narrative Must Remain The Same:
Sen. Claire McCaskill said at the hearing she is “saddened and angry” about the “bad journalism” in the Rolling Stone article.
The article was a “setback for survivors in this country,” said McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. “This is not a crime where you have rampant false reporting and embellishment.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., echoed McCaskill’s concerns.
“Clearly we don’t know the facts of what happened or didn’t happen” in the alleged University of Virginia gang rape case, Gillibrand said. “But these facts have not changed: UVA has admitted that they have allowed students who have confessed to sexually assaulting another student to remain on campus.”
“I refuse to let this one story become an excuse for Congress not to fix a broken system,” Gillibrand said.
Actually, we now have a pretty good idea what didn’t happen, which is everything that was reported in the now-exploded Rolling Stone article. It’s not clear that anyone was raped, and certainly the lurid gang-rape-on-broken-glass scenario can be pretty much ruled out. It’s not clear that a fraternity was involved at all.
What is clear is that Gillibrand and McCaskill leaped on this storyline when it looked good, and are now backpedaling. And Gillibrand also hung her hat on the Erdely military-rape story, which I predict won’t hold up well under investigation either.
I’d also like to know how much coordination there was among folks at UVA — Emily Renda worked in UVA President Teresa Sullivan’s office, and on the White House “It’s On Us” campus rape group, and I believe was the one who told Erdely about Jackie’s case — and Rolling Stone, and the White House, and Sens. Gillibrand and McCaskill. Perhaps someone will ask them, or submit a FOIA request to the White House and a state FOIA to President Sullivan’s office. Conveniently, McCaskill and Gillibrand aren’t subject to FOIA, but that doesn’t stop intrepid reporters from asking them.
I’d also be interested in hearing from reporters themselves: Was the White House pushing this story?
FROM RICHARD BRADLEY, WHO BROKE THE UVA STORY OPEN FIRST: Some Thoughts on “Discrepancies.” “In short: This may be a situation where both the writer and the subject of the story have lied.”
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, PURELY A PRECAUTION: Treasury Department Seeking Survival Kits For Bank Employees; Emergency masks, solar blankets to be delivered to every major bank in the U.S. “It is not clear why the Treasury Department is ordering the kits. Contracts for survival kits are usually made for the military, or law enforcement such as the FBI.”
YEAH, WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE IT SUCKS: I’m an Obama supporter. But Obamacare has hurt my family. “Obamacare has been far more frustrating than I’d ever dreamed.” We tried to warn you, but they just called us racists.
JOURNALISM: “Earlier tonight, Boston.com published a piece suggesting Harvard Business School Professor Ben Edelman sent an email with racist overtones to Sichuan Garden. We cannot verify that Edelman, in fact, sent the email. We have taken the story down.”
HANNA ROSIN: The Washington Post Inches Closer to Calling the UVA Gang Rape Story a Fabrication.
Jackie has now given her friends two different names for the man she was with that night. Neither of them was in fact with her, ever dated her, or even knew her all that well. She appears to have invented a suitor, complete with fake text messages and a fake photo, which suggests a capacity for somewhat elaborate deception. Jackie, though, has not recanted her story. Her attorney would not answer questions for the Post’s story on Wednesday and has told reporters to stop contacting Jackie.
Here’s the most disturbing journalistic detail to emerge from the Post’s reporting: In the Rolling Stone story, Erdely says that she contacted Randall, but he declined to be interviewed, “citing his loyalty to his own frat.” Randall told the Post he was never contacted by Erdely and would have been happy to be interviewed.
That could mean one of two things: Jackie could have given Erdely fake contact information for Randall and then posed as Randall herself, sending the reporter that email in which he supposedly declined to participate in the story. Erdely also could have lied about trying to contact Randall. Rolling Stone might have hinted at this possibility in its “Note to Our Readers” when it referred to a “friend of Jackie’s (who we were told would not speak to Rolling Stone)” but later spoke to the Washington Post. That would take Erdely a big step beyond just being gullible and failing to check her facts, moving this piece in the direction of active wrongdoing.
People on Twitter are imagining all sorts of scenarios that might be true, but at this point, Occam’s Razor suggests that the whole thing was a hoax. Sure, it’s possible that Jackie was making up all sorts of stuff, but was then actually raped, and then subsequently changed her story many, many times. But at this point, all we know for sure is that everything she specifically told anyone seems to have turned out to be either clearly false, or extremely questionable — and mostly the former.
THERE SURE ARE A LOT OF WOMEN ON SOCIAL MEDIA telling white men to just shut up. It’s a sign of emotional weakness and intellectual insecurity.
AUSTIN BAY REMEMBERS the Battle of the Bulge.
THE MORE SOCIALISTIC THE COUNTRY, THE LESS FAITH IN THE FUTURE. Why aren’t there more babies? US fertility rate declines, economists baffled.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 36 Presidents Of Private Colleges Earn More than $1 Million. “The highest-paid leader was Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Ms. Jackson, who has regularly ranked in the top 25, earned just over $7.1-million, up from nearly $1.1-million in 2011.”
AT AMAZON, Holiday Deals in Automotive.
WOMEN IN TECH, AND THE WOMEN WHO SILENCE THEM: Milo Yiannopoulos wields his scalpel with cruel precision. “In Kane’s world, journalism is harassment, questioning is dissent, and dissent is unforgivable treachery of the noble struggle against heteropatriarchal oppression.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.