CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Bill Clinton’s foundation cashed in as Sweden lobbied Hillary on sanctions.
Archive for 2015
June 3, 2015
June 2, 2015
UP THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE, OUT WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR: So, let’s go . . . fly a drone.
BECAUSE “RAPE CULTURE” IS A LIE, AND BECAUSE “SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS” ALWAYS LIE: Radley Balko: Why do high-profile campus rape stories keep falling apart? “The anti-campus rape activists often claim that false accusations of sexual assault are practically nonexistent. . . . But that so many of the accusations that they themselves have chosen as emblems of the cause have been proved false or debatable suggests that they’re either wrong about the frequency of false accusations or that the movement itself has had some extraordinarily bad luck.” Yeah, I know which way to bet on that one.
THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS EDITORIALIZES: “Madness has been unleashed on college campuses — not by drunken frat boys but by the White House.”
THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: The next wave of “body diversity”: Disabled by choice. “People like Jason have been classified as ‘transabled’ — feeling like imposters in their bodies, their arms and legs in full working order.”
KATRINA ON THE HUDSON: The horror stories of New Jersey’s Sandy relief program.
SO LATELY IT’S JUST ONE YOU’RE-SO-PARANOID ITEM FROM THE 1990S TURNING OUT TO BE TRUE AFTER ANOTHER: FBI flying surveillance aircraft over US cities; planes traced to fake companies. “The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned. The planes’ surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge’s approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found. . . . U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services. Even basic aspects of the program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general.”
KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! Clinton rally in N.Y. forces out children’s event, jeopardizes blood drive: ‘It’s just tone-deaf.’
Well, you know, the ears go with age.
ASHE SCHOW: California’s sexual re-education camps are coming soon. “Not content to redefine consent to mean asking permission before every step of the sexual process, California is now on the path to teaching high school students the proper way to have sex — because human nature is now wrong.”
UM, NO–I MEAN, JUST NO: Obama told David Axelrod,”I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.” Can we get some serious psychotherapy for this guy? I’m pretty sure Obamacare would cover it, right?
WHY ARE SO MANY BLACK DEMOCRATS TRANSPHOBIC? Marc Lamont Hill: Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover celebrates cis/Eurocentric standards of beauty. I guess the rampant homophobia that black Democrats demonstrated in successfully backing California’s Proposition 8 should have been a tipoff.
AT LEAST THEY HAVE A BRAIN, WHICH IS MORE THAN I CAN SAY FOR HER: New York Magazine’s Annie Lowrey tells MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that she wants GOP presidential candidates to “unleash their lizard brains” during the debates. Her full comment is even worse:
“Even in terms of getting a better bread and circus type ludicrous production, which as a journalist is all that I care about, I just want chaos, anarchy, racist comments, sexist comments, I want, I want the worst of these people, I want them to, like, unleash their lizard brains.”
Yeah, that seems like reasonable, objective journalistic analysis. I’m sure Ms. Lowrey wants Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates to also make racist, sexist comments that unleash their lizard brains, too.
SO MY UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT OUT OF NEWARK WAS CANCELLED SUNDAY NIGHT, they put us on a Delta flight out of La Guardia Monday morning, and said our bags would be sent to Knoxville. They’re still not here, and nobody at United or Delta seems to be interested in helping us. It’s really pathetic.
UPDATE: Okay, so after a day and a half of useless interactions with websites and call centers, we just got in the car and went to the airport, where the friendly Delta guy (Tony was his name) took us in hand, went over to United and looked our bags up, and informed us that they were (as we had kind of hoped, though United wouldn’t tell us) coming in on the 9:15 nonstop from Newark. Sure enough, there they were, no worse for wear. And just in the nick of time, as the Insta-Daughter leaves for her internship tomorrow and needed a lot of the stuff that was in her bag.
AL SENATE VOTES TO END MARRIAGE LICENSES: The Alabama Senate has voted 22-3 to scrap the State’s issuance of all marriage licenses. The bill, SB 377, would transform marriage into a contract, rather than a license, and would not require a marriage ceremony to be valid.
The purpose? Presumably, by taking the State out of the business of issuing marriage “licenses,” marriage would just become another private contractual undertaking, and any Supreme Court ruling that, under the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses, States must issue marriage “licenses” to same-sex couples would not bind the State of Alabama, which would no longer be in the marriage license business, as a technical, formal matter.
But this seems a bit silly, since SB 377 says, “Effective July 1, 2015, the only requirement to be married in this state shall be for parties who are otherwise legally authorized to be married to enter into a contract of marriage as provided herein.” It then lists the required form of the contract. But the key question is who is “legally authorized to be married”? Presumably, the State of Alabama would continue to specify this (and has, pursuant to a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man, one woman). And also presumably, the Alabama Senate did not intend to authorize contractual marriage among multiple persons (polygamy) or among closely related individuals (incest).
Whatever the purpose, the measure now moves to the Alabama house for consideration. Stay tuned.
MEET THE MAN TRYING TO GET RID OF “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” IN THE SUPREME COURT.
Predictably, Talking Points Memo isn’t enthused. But really, limiting the pool to eligible voters and not counting illegals for purposes of redistricting isn’t really a challenge to the logic of Baker v. Carr, but rather an application of that logic. So casting this as an effort to undo one-man-one-vote is a bit shaky.
But given the way in which small urban enclaves exercise total control over such states as Illinois, California, and New York, perhaps the equal-protection analysis in Baker v. Carr needs to be tempered with the Republican Form Of Government considerations contained in the Guaranty Clause, which would recognize the right of different communities to have more of a voice in their own governance rather than being ruled from afar. Thus, the real critique here has to do with not trying to overturn Baker.
BRING BACK DDT: New Tactics for Battling Head Lice.