OUCH: David Spade: Obamas too ‘thirsty’ for attention.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON BITTER CLINGERS 2.0:

Are we to believe that Obama’s dismal popularity and mostly failed legislative record were due to the innate prejudice and the fears of a vanishing white male electorate? If so, few presidents have entered office with such wide party majorities in both houses of Congress and impressive public approval ratings. In contrast, does Obama remember the poll ratings of the last white male president when he too left office? Was George W. Bush’s lower 37% approval rating as he neared the end of his tenure due to “who he was”? Did it thus likewise reflect an even greater prejudice against a white Christian southerner?

Does Obama believe that if he had balanced the budget, continued the prior war on terror against radical Islam, cut out the incoherent class-warfare rhetoric, kept peacekeepers in Iraq, enforced federal laws, avoided racially polarizing rhetoric, and sought to reform the tax code and entitlements rather than drive through Obamacare with prevarication and without a single Republican vote, his popularity ratings would now be at 43%?

If a white liberal president had compiled the same far-left record as Obama, would those in West Virginia have supported him solely because of his race? In contrast, had Obama pursued a policy of helping the poor of Appalachia by promoting clean coal technologies rather than promising to bankrupt the coal industry and to send electricity rates soaring, would he have been so disliked?

No other president has so consciously tried to divide the country by race since Woodrow Wilson.

Read the whole thing.

THE COCKROACH OF IDEOLOGIES: Socialism As A Species Of Fraud. “Only under socialism could Fidel Castro become the richest warlord, relative to his subjects’ wealth, in recorded history. (And that was the least of his sins.) Only under socialism could Maria Gabriela Chavez, daughter of socialist tribune of the people Hugo Chavez, beloved by the American left, waltz off with a $4 billion fortune. But then, she was a piker: Chavez’s Minister of the Treasury stashed $11 billion in Swiss bank accounts. Charles Ponzi’s mistake was that he should have gone into politics. He could have gone far as a socialist politician, and could have avoided prison.”

WAIT, I THOUGHT THIS WAS RACIST AND XENOPHOBIC: Democrat: Tighten social media screening of visa applicants.

A senior Democratic congressman is calling for stepped-up monitoring of social media accounts belonging to people coming into the country through various visa programs, in response to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

“We have to do a much better job monitoring the social media of those people, that’s what went wrong,” Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said in an interview airing Sunday with John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on New York’s AM-970.

Israel, a prominent member of President Obama’s own party, joined a bipartisan group that said the U.S. is not doing enough to scrutinize Twitter and Facebook for signs of imminent terror threats.

Indeed.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Clint Eastwood on GOP Field: “Any One of Them Would Be Better Than What We Got.”

And Clint’s empty-chair routine from the 2012 Republican Convention — roundly mocked by the usual bylined Democratic operatives of the press — now stands as the most dead-on and prophetic event of that entire campaign season.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD explains the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception, and why they’re not the same thing. A lot of people seem confused by this. Actually — and I’m just the kid of a former preacher who went to Sunday School, not some big expert on Christian theology — the amount of ignorance regarding basic Biblical points these days is astounding.

BALTIMORE AND THE RIOT IDEOLOGY, REBORN. At City Journal, Fred Siegel writes:

Mayor Rawlings-Blake called in Al Sharpton and fired police chief Anthony Batts, who had tried to upgrade the police department but became the fall guy for the mayor’s failings. Baltimore today is demarcated by white enclaves and by those African-American areas defined by the gangsta rap culture where, in a parody of the segregated South, honor is all and disrespect requires the “satisfaction” of personally delivered revenge. But while the streets have been ceded to thugs in those neighborhoods, it’s not politically acceptable in Baltimore to describe rioters in such terms. At the height of the protests, when the mayor announced that the National Guard would be deployed and a citywide curfew imposed, she also referred to the rioters as “thugs.” She was then forced to apologize for her candor, reclassifying the miscreants as “misguided young people.”

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, the crews and the gangsta rappers singing about the need to “Fuck the Police” are preferable to the cops. The cops, complains Coates, “lord over” young black men with “the moral authority of a protection racket.” There is a touch of truth in this. But, Coates goes on, the problem with the police “is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.” The solution, he implies, is a black population released from the ideals of the American dream and from the “false morality” of white Americans. For Coates, blacks can only be freed from racism after whites have been emancipated from capitalism.

A man, a city, a movement, and a moment have met: West Baltimore has, for the time being, been liberated from American morality. Let’s judge Coates’s vision on how that plays out.

Read the whole thing. If you’d like a sneak preview as to how “Coates’s vision” might play out, those last two paragraphs sound eerily reminiscent of some of the passages from Zev Chafets’ brilliant 1990 book Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit, including this quote from Arthur Johnson (1925-2011), at the time of Chafet’s book, the president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and a vice-president at Wayne State University:

“Detroit has helped nurture a new black mentality,” Johnson said, pounding his desk for emphasis. “More than any other city, blacks here make an issue of where you live. If you’re with us, you’ll find a place in the city.”Whites often say, in their own defense, that many middle-class blacks also leave the city at the first opportunity. I mentioned this to Johnson, but he waved it away. “The majority of the black middle class is here. We are engaged in the most determined, feverish effort to save Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is special. It’s the first major city in the United States to have taken on the symbols of a black city. It has elected a strong, powerful black mayor, powerful in both his personality and his office. Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.”

* * * * *

But [Coleman Young, Detroit’s Democrat mayor from 1974 to 1994] has done more than broaden access to the pork barrel. Under him, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there— showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy and the cult of personality. Detroit has even developed a quasi-official ideology that regards the pre– Young era as a time of white colonialism, ended by the 1967 insurrection and its aftermath. An official city publication describes the police department as having been “a hostile white army, entrusted by white authorities with the job of keeping nonwhites penned up in ghettoes.”

* * * * * * * *

[Ron] Hewitt is the planner for America’s sixth largest city, once the symbol of the country’s industrial power. But the old myths of the Arsenal of Democracy mean little to him. “As a people we have more soul, we are more spiritual than others,” he said. “Our technology will be tempered by that soul. If white folks could leave us alone and give us the resources, we could solve our own problems.”

That’s worked out perfectly fine for all concerned, right?

MAY 2016 BE BETTER: Was 2015 the best year yet for educational choice?

DECLINE AND FALL: French see their children add to ISIS ranks in Syria.

Valérie Aubry-Dumont got the news in a WhatsApp message from deep inside Islamic State territory. “Mom, you’re going to be a grandmother,” wrote her teenage daughter, Cléa.

When Aubry-Dumont last saw her daughter, Cléa was a 16-year-old girl attending Catholic school in a Paris suburb. After a breakup, Cléa met a young man online and within months the couple fled France to live in a stretch of northern Syria ruled by Islamic State.

“I wish Cléa never had children,” Aubry-Dumont, a child-care worker, says now that her grandson has been born. Her daughter talks some days of returning to France, Aubry-Dumont said, but is afraid of losing her baby if she tries to leave. “She is trapped.”

She chose poorly.

WITH SO MUCH STAR WARS IN THE AIR, A BLAST FROM THE PAST: Jimmy Williams (on the right) and I were the yearbook photographers; here’s our picture as artistically improved by a classmate. Nerdvana!

SHOULD AN INCONSEQUENTIAL YOUNG RULER WITH NO ACCOMPLISHMENTS GET THIS MUCH ATTENTION:  And for once I’m not talking about Obama.King Tut’s wet nurse may have been his sister: expert. (Oh, yeah, and “I am my own grandpa” might not be the best way to build a dynasty.  Just saying.)

TANSTAAFL:Spoiled students think gourmet school lunches are a right.

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE? Cleric denies ties to San Bernardino killers as phone records surface.

IT WOULD ONLY BE FAIR: VA GOP May Strip McAuliffe Of His Bodyguards Over Concealed Carry.

THE MESS THAT IS: Already Ending or Just Getting Started?  Well, I know where I place my bets.  Put your life vests on, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s about to get rough.

CARTER WAS ALWAYS A BEST CASE SCENARIO: Bitter Clingers 2.0.

SOME PEOPLE NEVER GROW UP THEY JUST STOP GETTING PIMPLES: Salon’s Insufferable Interminable Trolling.

IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO SELECT A SANE COMMANDER IN CHIEF: Silent, invisible, deadly: The weapon that could change warfare.

EVERYONE WANTS TO DANCE WITH THE PSYCHOPATH: Argentina’s disgusting attempt to whitewash Iran’s role in the ’94 Jewish center bombing.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: Carl Yastrzemski Ted Cruz Stats, Immigration and Context.

FIAT LUX: Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists.

BUT THEN WHAT ISN’T: David Cameron says climate change is to blame as ministers are accused of using global warming as an excuse for failures.

THE BETTER TO FORGET HIM: Hawaii declines to name vacant lot after Obama.

FORGET THE WAR, IT’S ALL ABOUT THE NARRATIVE: Administration, military aiming to improve anti-ISIS effort ‘narrative’.