FUNNY, UNTIL I SAW HIS PICTURE AT TPM, I DIDN’T REALIZE HE WAS BLACK: Ohio Judge Refuses To Marry Same-Sex Couple. That didn’t show up in the other reporting I’ve seen.
Archive for 2015
July 10, 2015
MEH. THEY’VE TURNED INTO MSNBC-WITH-ATHLETES ANYWAY. ESPN Tightens Its Belt as Pressure on It Mounts.
July 9, 2015
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Vanity Fair: The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave? If you’re a Jew, and you’re wondering if it’s time to leave, then it’s probably past time. “Last December, Créteil endured the brutal case of a 19-year-old woman whose apartment, which she shared with her boyfriend, was broken into. One of her assailants allegedly said, ‘You must have cash here because you are Jews.’ They then gang-raped her.”
WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHES WORLD’S LONGEST #HUMBLEBRAG: I tried to escape my privilege with low-wage work. Instead I came face to face with it.
SO IF HILLARY IS ELECTED, HUMA ABEDIN WILL HAVE A BEDROOM AT THE WHITE HOUSE. The real question is, will Bill?
RIP KENNY STABLER, who certainly helped make the ’70s more fun:
Ken #Stabler, #Raiders and #Tide QB, dies of colon cancer http://t.co/EGiBghLW1s via @washtimes
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) July 10, 2015
FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Snow lingers into summer in winter-weary Boston.
CIRCUS CIRCUS: WELCOME TO AMERICA’S REALITY CLOWN SHOW:
This has nothing to do with political solutions and everything to do with entertainment factor; this is the culture we as a people chose when we went to the voting booth in November of 2008. We decided showmanship, stage-fainting, snake oil and promises of ocean level decreases were more important than substantive policy ideas and solutions. We elected a President based on what Hollywood studios and corporate branding experts told us, and those same people haven’t stopped giving us their opinion in the form of tweets or slogans written on hands ever since. Conservatives, desperate to join a culture that has all but decided to pass them by (or force them out completely), aren’t so much looking for an articulate salesman to get them back in the conversation as they are looking for an indestructible tank to bust through the wall and take it instantly by force.
The talk-radio powered part of that base thinks they’ve found it in Trump.
Read the whole thing.
DEMOCRATS ARE SOCIALISTS, IF YOU BELIEVE BERNIE-MANIA, Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post today. But didn’t the Post itself confirm this at the start of the Obama administration, back when the paper still published Newsweek?
THE WHITEST PRIVILEGE: “The American’s Left’s blond-haired, blue-eyed fantasyland,” as charted by By Kevin D. Williamson:
The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.”
Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”
Read the whole thing.
UNEXPECTEDLY: NEW YORK TIMES KEEPING TED CRUZ’S NEW BOOK OFF ITS BESTSELLER LIST, DESPITE FIRST WEEK SALES THAT WOULD PUT HIM AT #3:
This week, HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, sent a letter to The New York Times inquiring about Cruz’s omission from the list, sources with knowledge of the situation said. The Times responded by telling HarperCollins that the book did not meet their criteria for inclusion.
“We have uniform standards that we apply to our best seller list, which includes an analysis of book sales that goes beyond simply the number of books sold,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explained when asked about the omission. “This book didn’t meet that standard this week.”
Asked to specify those standards, Murphy replied: “Our goal is that the list reflect authentic best sellers, so we look at and analyze not just numbers, but patterns of sales for every book.”
Back in 2008, Roger Kimball, the publisher of Encounter Books (and my colleague at PJM), decided he had enough of those “standards,” and publicly called the NYT on their Pinch of BS:
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company’s Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has “studiously” ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn’t think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a “wake-up call” to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a “moderate left-wing opportunist” responsible for perpetuating the “travesty” that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of “press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion” and “metrosexual lifestyle stuff,” Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun’s phone call for comment.)
When he was named the editor of the Times Book Review in 2004, many believed that Mr. Tanenhaus would be sympathetic to the intellectual right, Mr. Kimball noted, citing Mr. Tanenhaus’s well-received biography of Whittaker Chambers. And yet, throughout his tenure as the head of the Sunday books section, Mr. Kimball charged, Mr. Tanenhaus has assigned those few conservative books the paper has covered to reviewers who seem to have their own axes to grind, and who appear to have little interest in giving the books an objective reading.
“It’s not that the reviews are critical,” Mr. Kimball said. “It’s that they’re sophomoric and uninformed” and seldom rise above the level of the “ideological hatchet-job.”
In early 2009, at the peak of the left’s “We Are Socialists Now” shiny Obama unicorn fever, Tanenhaus, then still editor of the Times’ book review section, infamously published a thin screed titled The Death of Conservatism. About five minutes later, the Tea Party emerged, and by the end of 2010, thanks in large part to the all-Democrat Obamacare bill, the GOP recaptured the House, in 2014 the Senate, and currently 31 states have Republican governors and the GOP controls numerous state legislatures.
Will the GOP take back the White House in 2016? Not if the Times can help it — and they’re doing everything they can to prevent it.
WHOLE FOODS CEO: ECONOMIC FREEDOM HAS LIFTED HUMANITY OUT OF THE DIRT: Curiously though, his primary customers are hell-bent on returning humanity to that primitive state as quickly as they can.
WELCOME TO THE PAPERLESS SOCIETY:
● This just in: Greek newspapers running out of paper.
● Venezuela Reaches the Final Stage of Socialism: No Toilet Paper.
Somehow, I don’t think this quite what the futurists of the 1960s meant when they promised us the 21st century would be a paperless society.
YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BLOG:
I tried to create a comprehensive list of every lie Hillary has told reporters to their face since March. https://t.co/WGbxtFbQ4M
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) July 9, 2015
THE PRICE OF LAWLESSNESS: Victor Davis Hanson cogently argues that the dwindling respect for the rule of law marks the demise of the U.S.:
Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics such as the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.
Far more dangerous are institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency, and creeping neglect of existing laws. All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government, and see corruption as a business model.
Even obeying so-called minor laws counts. It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also a country that cooks its books and lies to its creditors. Everything from littering to speeding seems negotiable in Athens in a way not true of Munich, Zurich, or London. . . .
Americans, too, should worry about these age-old symptoms of internal decay.
The frightening thing about disgraced IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner’s knowledge of selective audits of groups on the basis of their politics is not just that she seemed to ignore it, but that she seemingly assumed no one would find out, or perhaps even mind. . . .
Ultimately, no nation can continue to thrive if its government refuses to enforce its own laws. Liberal “sanctuary cities” such as San Francisco choose to ignore immigration laws. Imagine the outcry if a town in Utah or Montana arbitrarily declared that federal affirmative action or gay marriage laws were null and void within its municipal borders.
Indeed. Every time I read a story on Greece, I can’t help but think of Classical Greece in its glory, which became glorious, in part, because of its strong respect for the rule of law, most notably the development of Solonic, Platonic, and Socratic notions of law. Modern Greece is just a shadow of its ancient cousin, devolved to a country of entitled, whiny wards of the state who cannot pay their debts, and refuse to sacrifice in order to do so. Greece has become corrupt, and its laws or contracts mean only what the Greeks say they mean at the moment, and no more.
Sound familiar? The Obama Administration has been utterly brazen in its contempt for the rule of law. But hey, a majority of Americans voted for Obama twice, knowing full well (or they should have, it they’d paid only a modicum of attention) that he was promising them a “fundamental transformation” of America. Well, it’s here.
EVEN IN USING THE WORD DOUBLETHINK IT IS NECESSARY TO EXERCISE DOUBLETHINK. “For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth:”
I honestly do not understand the culture of rich/famous people speaking engagements. I understand it's relatively easy money, and lucrative
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 9, 2015
Hayes: Why do you rob banks?
Willie Sutton: That's where the money is.
Hayes: I honestly do not understand. https://t.co/4mUIoX2iJF— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 9, 2015
I dunno — Chris seems like a reasonably intelligent guy. I know he “honestly does not understand” this topic, but he seems to have all of the cognitive skills necessary to find an answer, if only his ideology would permit it.
REPORT: ‘VETTED MODERATE’ FREE SYRIAN ARMY FIGHTING ALONGSIDE AL-QAEDA, ISLAMIC STATE AGAINST ASSAD REGIME: “What vetting system was the Obama administration using when they supposedly vetted the Syrian rebel groups that are now fighting with al-Nusra and ISIS? Will anyone inside the administration be held accountable for this debacle? Is anyone in Congress paying attention?”
Well, I know how I’m betting on those last two questions.
BERNIE SANDERS IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S ID:
The other aspect of Sanders’ candidacy that is so interesting is the media’s coverage of it. Sure, he’s said a ton of nutty things that would make Todd Akin blush (e.g., claiming that cervical cancer is caused by an insufficient number of orgasms), but the lack of coverage of those remarks is not what I’m talking about. As Stephen Miller has noted on Twitter, what’s interesting is that while reporters at his events will regularly tweet about the size of his crowds or energy of his supporters, they rarely mention the substance of his remarks. Why that is so is unclear. Is it because he’s saying things that make Democrats look strange, or is it because he’s saying things that make Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton look bad? I suspect it’s a combination of both. Either way, the disproportionate amount of media coverage given to Trump vs. Sanders is instructive of how many reporters view their roles: as amplifiers of Republican nonsense and silencers/explainers of Democratic nuttery.
Would you want to be the Democrat operative with a byline or a microphone telling your audience that according to hot presidential candidate Sanders, the real unemployment rate under the president you worked so hard to elect is at 10.5 percent?
Which isn’t to say that the GOP doesn’t have its own Monster from the ID, of course.
A BIT PRICEY FOR ME: Owner Was a Rolling Stone: Keith Richards’s Shag-tastic Bentley Up for Sale. I do recall Tony Sanchez recounting that Richards ran into a brick wall with it once, leaving the wall quite damaged and the Bentley uncompromised. They don’t build ’em like that anymore.