PARENTING: “I’m Sick of Hearing ‘You’ve Got Your Hands Full!’”, Bethany Mandel writes at the new PJM Parenting Website. She says these days in response to “Boy, you have your hands full!” she’s started saying “Yeah, I do, thank G-d.”
Read the whole thing.
FUNNY, THE SAME KIND OF POLITICS ALWAYS PRODUCES THE SAME KIND OF RESULTS: What’s Really Happening in Puerto Rico? The commonwealth is facing a serious debt crisis that could result in default, but that’s only part of the problem.
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THE SADDEST THING ABOUT HILLARY’S EMAILS: Relax, you don’t have to pick just one, but emails reveal weak grasp of reality among global power players. We have the worst political class in American history, and most of the rest of the world isn’t doing so great either. And it is an embodiment of the Dunning Kruger effect.
ANOTHER WISCONSIN CONSERVATIVE BRINGS RETALIATION LAWSUIT: This time it’s Cindy Archer, a longtime aide to Governor Scott Walker, whose home was raided, SWAT-style, as part of an investigation witch hunt against conservatives in the state initiated by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.
Archer has filed her civil rights-First Amendment lawsuit against Chisholm in Wisconsin state court. Explaining her decision to file the suit in the Wall Street Journal, Archer reveals:
I was a close adviser to Scott Walker in the county executive’s office and then in the statehouse, but it never occurred to me that my own happiness would be collateral damage in a political vendetta.
Nothing could have prepared me for waking up to the shouts of men with battering rams announcing that they were about to break down my door on that morning in 2011. It was so unexpected and frightening that I ran down from my bedroom without clothes on. Panicked by the threatened show of force, I was then humiliated as officers outside the window yelled at me to get dressed and open up. I quickly retrieved clothing and dressed as I unlocked the door.
Agents with weapons drawn swarmed through every part of the house. They barged into the bathroom where my partner was showering. I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history.
After they left, I surveyed the damage. Drawers and closets had been ransacked. My deceased mother’s belongings were strewn across the floor. Neighbors gathered in small clusters at the end of their driveways and the press arrived in force.
What had prompted the raid? My guess: As an adviser to Gov. Walker, I had played a lead role in drafting and implementing public-employee labor reforms that would propel him to the national stage.
The governor’s reforms, commonly referred to as Act 10, prompted angry union protests. The reforms also enraged many politicians, including, as I would later find out, Mr. Chisholm and members of his staff. My ties to Gov. Walker and Act 10 made me a prime target for Mr. Chisholm’s campaign to intimidate anyone close to the governor.
In other words, I was targeted because of my politics—in plain violation of the First Amendment and federal civil-rights statutes.
Like so many Walker and union reform supporters who were targeted by Chisholm’s “John Doe” investigation, Archer was never charged with a crime. Her reputation has been irreparably damaged, and Archer states that she lost her job working for Walker because she was a target of the investigation:
I have also been subjected to derogatory headlines and made the butt of jokes on talk radio and anti-Walker websites about everything from my personal appearance to my sexual orientation and mental stability. Neighbors became distant and suspicious.
Worst of all, I have discovered that my demotion as Gov. Walker’s deputy director of administration, which came four weeks before the raid on my house, appears to have been engineered by the governor’s team after word reached them that I had been targeted by the district attorney. Subsequently, I have not been given any role in the administration that may bring public attention.
Archer is now working as the Chief Information Officer for the Wisconsin Public Defenders’ Office. Her lawsuit will provide a much needed opportunity to discover more information about the motive of Chisholm’s investigation, including what should be some very interesting depositions. A similar First Amendment retaliation lawsuit filed by Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth had early success in a federal trial court, but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the lawsuit dismissed due to its belief that the federal civil rights claims should be resolved by the Wisconsin state courts.
Now, with the Archer lawsuit, the facts can finally be discovered. I am hoping O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth consider refiling their lawsuit in Wisconsin state court, too. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
CHANGE: Europe rallies behind Merkel as Greeks hit breaking point.
Related: USA Today: No Tragedy If Greece Leaves The Eurozone. Actually, I’d say it’s no tragedy if everyone does. Plus, a larger lesson:
There are also some unsettling parallels between Greece and highly leveraged U.S. states, as well as the territory of Puerto Rico, which announced this week it could not make its current payment on $72 billion in debt.
While Puerto Rico might be a lost cause at this point, major states are not. They could put their financial houses in order if their governments just showed some spine. A demonstration of how little appetite there is for bailouts, even in liberal Europe, should send a clear message on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.
WHEN THE AVANT-GARDE BECOME GARDE: James Lileks spots the British magazine Standpoint ruminating on the pitiful status of modern art after well over a century of “épater le bourgeois,” or shocking the middle class:
The great oaks of Western art were burned to the ground. Today, radical artists are left scouring through the embers, still looking for last traces of life. Their primary target is now the taboo — the unspoken memory of a once-communal system of values. Tracey Emin shows us her unmade bed, strewn with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Damien Hirst suggests that the 9/11 hijackers “need congratulating”. Every last inherited standard — every last comfort — must be torn from us once and for all.
Lileks responds:
You might think “oh, so it’s going to be one of those. Quotes out of context for sensationalist effect, that’s your first clue: handwringing and over-exaggeration. It’s not that bad.
“The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.
It is a dangerous thing to suppress people’s desire to applaud the conceptual audacity of a terrorist attack. Well, Hirst is a modern artist of the first water, so you’d expect that. (The second water is tears. The first is urine.)
Read the whole thing.
Meanwhile, after three decades similarly built around shocking the bourgeois via pop culture, Mark Judge of Acculturated checks out the latest hackneyed song by Madonna Louise Ciccone and explores “Why Madonna is the New Pat Boone” — which is anything is a shot at the latter performer, as Judge writes:
Madonna, who is not adept at any musical instrument and has a weak voice, has been doing this for over three decades. Like Pat Boone, Madonna takes music based on African-American rhythms and dices it into digestible bites. Yet whereas Boone transitioned to gospel music when his pop star began to fade (and even, God help us, made a heavy metal album), Madonna’s formula has been unchanged since Reagan’s first term: She hires the hottest producers of dance music, writes some lyrics about self-empowerment and clubbing, adds some nudity or other obnoxious antinomian element, and cashes in.
Without her rosary wearing, her sex book, cussing on TV, or putting profanity in the mouths of children—which is tastefully featured in the first few seconds of “Bitch I’m Madonna”—Madonna Louise Ciccone would be playing the Howard Johnson’s in Paduka. What’s truly scandalous is that people are still buying it. She has been pushing these same buttons for so long that it has gone past repetitive and into a kind of altered consciousness of catatonic sameness. Madonna’s stunts are now like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, where a person is fated to live the exact same life not for eternity, but multiple eternities. Everything changes but the avant-garde.
As original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts once quipped as the edge was being sanded off that show during its first few seasons, “you can only be avant-garde for so long, before you become garde.”
Which incidentally, rather neatly sums up the last 35 years of that now-venerable television institution and its late-night spin-offs as well.
CAMPUS CULTURE: A Parent’s Perspective. “Apparently the only thing a women’s studies degree prepares one for is working for a university admissions office to promote that degree to other gullible students.”
DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER LAUGHTER? 5 Comedies to Get You Ready for Campaign 2016.
SAVE THAT FOR WHEN THERE’S A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT: Senate Republicans slam the door on scrapping the filibuster.
“DID PARKINSON’S DISEASE LOSE HITLER THE WAR? STUDY CLAIMS THE CONDITION MADE THE FUHRER RECKLESS AND VIOLENT.” Gee, I don’t think Hitler needed much help in that department, but do go on, London Daily Mail:
Parkinson’s can also cause a slow gait, bent posture and a dull stare, along with cognitive disorders such as a lack of imagination and a general apathy.
The researchers suggest that Hitler’s condition may have led him to attack Russia prematurely in 1941, according to a report in Discover.
A previous study claimed that Hitler’s decision to invade Russia, before defeating Britain on the western front, was a direct result of his failing health.
The study points to other bad decisions of Hitler’s such the failure to defend Normandy in 1944, alongside keeping his forces in Stalingrad in 1942.
They say this was the result of the dictator’s ‘volatile temperament’ which may have been aggravated by his Parkinson’s.
The study also goes on to suggest that Hitler’s lack of remorse and sympathy can be associated with his Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s disease let to Hitler attacking Russia in 1941? Umm, if you say so, but I would attribute the invasion of Russia far more to Hitler’s Germany not having sufficient naval power to implement Operation Sea Lion and invade England via the Channel, nor an air force powerful enough to take out the RAF. As historians Ian Kershaw and John Lukacs have each written, in 1941, what Hitler did have at that moment was the world’s most powerful land-based army, which he could maneuver via mechanized divisions into the Soviet Union. He assumed that with Russia out of the war, he could then pivot back and finish off England with the vast conquered resources of the Russian territory at his will, or England would be demoralized and sue for peace. (Victor Davis Hanson also tackled the question of why Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in one of his PJM columns a couple of years ago, and came to similar conclusions.)
It sounds like the “did Parkinson’s drive Hitler mad” theory is yet another example of those earlier theories explored by my one-time PJM colleague Ron Rosenbaum in his book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.
Besides being a terrific read, Rosenbaum’s book is sort of like mirror universe production of Citizen Kane — recording the attempts by American and German intellectuals to boil Hitler — and the causes of World War II — down to a single Rosebud-like explanation: Hitler had syphilis, he was unloved by his parents, had malformed genitalia, etc. Ultimately such efforts, as Rosenbaum writes, do little to explain the epoch-shattering events of the 1930s and ’40s, but like the cast of Citizen Kane, tell us far more about the people who conjure them up — and in many cases, their reasons why.
As Rosenbaum wrote in 2006, “the focus on Hitler’s alleged personal peculiarities de-historicizes the causes of the Holocaust; making it some kind of outgrowth of personal revenge and perversion rather the culmination of centuries of murderous anti-semitic hatred in Europe carried out by hundreds of thousands of…accomplices to Hitler. It de-politicizes the genocidal hatred in an utterly trivializing way.”
Chalk up yet another example.
JESSE WALKER: Whatever Happened To Jim Webb? The populist Democrat and his barely-visible campaign. At a guess, Hillary’s got some dirt on him.
PJTV’S TRIFECTA: A CHRISTIAN ARGUMENT FOR GETTING GOVERNMENT OUT OF MARRIAGE (video).
YOUR FINAL DOSE OF INSOMNIA THEATER: FREE SPEECH AND JAZZ – Check out this video of legendary critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff on the unique power of the First Amendment and his lifelong love of jazz.
IS ANYBODY SURPRISED? The Israel Defense Forces has just appointed a special team to plan a military strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Promising to “snap back” sanctions if Iran cheats is likely an empty threat, but Israel’s margin of error is zero.
After much soul-searching, I am filing a civil-rights lawsuit on Wednesday against Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. I fear his retaliation, given what I know of his methods, but the Chisholm campaign against me that began at dawn on Sept. 14, 2011, requires a legal response to discourage the prosecutor’s continued abuse of his office.
Some background: Mr. Chisholm launched his first round of investigations into the affairs of Scott Walker in May 2010, when he was serving as Milwaukee county executive and Mr. Walker’s office reported the disappearance of some charitable funds. Rather than seek out the perpetrator—whom Mr. Walker’s office had also identified—the district attorney’s crew turned its attention to Mr. Walker and his staff.
The investigation grew in size, scope and intensity as Mr. Walker rose in Wisconsin politics, eventually winning election as governor in 2011, reforming public-employee union laws and prevailing in recall elections. By that time, the investigation by Mr. Chisholm, a Democrat, had moved well beyond the matter of the missing funds, citing a grab bag of potential offenses as justification to vacuum up the internal communications of Mr. Walker’s aides, apparently for anything that could be used against the Republican governor.
I was a close adviser to Scott Walker in the county executive’s office and then in the statehouse, but it never occurred to me that my own happiness would be collateral damage in a political vendetta.
Nothing could have prepared me for waking up to the shouts of men with battering rams announcing that they were about to break down my door on that morning in 2011. It was so unexpected and frightening that I ran down from my bedroom without clothes on. Panicked by the threatened show of force, I was then humiliated as officers outside the window yelled at me to get dressed and open up. I quickly retrieved clothing and dressed as I unlocked the door.
Agents with weapons drawn swarmed through every part of the house. They barged into the bathroom where my partner was showering. I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history.
After they left, I surveyed the damage. Drawers and closets had been ransacked. My deceased mother’s belongings were strewn across the floor. Neighbors gathered in small clusters at the end of their driveways and the press arrived in force.
What had prompted the raid? My guess: As an adviser to Gov. Walker, I had played a lead role in drafting and implementing public-employee labor reforms that would propel him to the national stage.
This was a serious abuse of power for the most craven of political reasons. John Chisholm and his minions should end up broke, unemployable, and possibly in jail. As an example to the others.
SO I’M BACK. I was supposed to get back Monday evening, but my Delta jet returned from the runway on Grand Cayman with a bad flight computer. They couldn’t fix it, and I wound up spending an extra night on Cayman. Which wasn’t as good as it sounds because I spent a lot of time waiting in lines or in airport lounges. They flew us out Tuesday morning, and I was supposed to have a confirmed seat on the 3:15 flight for Knoxville, but when I got to Atlanta that confirmed seat had mysteriously become a standby seat on an oversold plane. Wound up renting a car and driving home, rather than risk taking a much later flight and, possibly, being stuck overnight in Atlanta. Thanks to the folks at the Holiday Inn Resort Grand Cayman, who put up about 200 stranded passengers on short notice and were quite hospitable. This wasn’t exactly Delta’s fault — you can’t fly with a bad flight computer — but I did feel that they ran us through too many unnecessary hoops and lines. (They bused us to the airport Tuesday at 5 am, but there was nobody at their ticket counter until 6:15, costing us about 200 hours of unnecessarily lost sleep in total. . . ) I found the counter people in Atlanta pretty much useless, but Delta Assist on Twitter helped me out by canceling my Atlanta-Knoxville leg and refunding that portion, which covered the rental car — a very reasonably priced ($122) Audi A4 from Sixt.
This is my second overnight stranding in a month, though, which makes me feel less cheerful about flying in general. Anyway, I’m tanned, rested, and ready. Thanks to my guestbloggers for doing an excellent job while I spent some much-needed time offline (and this seems like it was a good week to miss), and for helping out an additional day while I was stranded. I honestly think the blog’s better when they’re around, so after this bravura performance, I’ve invited them to drop by and put up a post whenever the mood strikes.
OBAMA: “IT’S BEEN A GOOD FEW DAYS FOR AMERICA“: President Obama takes to the Huffington Post to praise the Supreme Court for rewriting the laws and our Constitution, and to push his new agenda for higher wages:
This week, I’ll head to Wisconsin to discuss my plan to extend overtime protections to nearly 5 million workers in 2016, covering all salaried workers making up to about $50,400 next year. That’s good for workers who want fair pay, and it’s good for business owners who are already paying their employees what they deserve — since those who are doing right by their employees are undercut by competitors who aren’t.
That’s how America should do business. In this country, a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. That’s at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America.
Notice that the President does not articulate any arguments for growing the economy or ensuring that anyone has a job to begin with. It’s all so very European of him— high wages, high unemployment, high government unemployment benefits. How depressing.
THEY DIDN’T JUST TWEET A PHOTO: As Ed Driscoll reports below, when TSA flack Lisa Farbstein tweeted a photo of the contents of a passenger’s luggage–$75,000 in cash–with a snarky comment, the gratuitous invasion of privacy generated quite a bit of public backlash. But the story gets worse. The TSA took a photo, but other federal agents took the money. Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog reports:
In this case, the cash was seized by a federal agency, most likely the Drug Enforcement Agency, according to Richmond airport spokesman Troy Bell. “I don’t believe the person was issued a summons or a citation,” he said. “The traveler was allowed to continue on his way.”
No charges. No citation. No due process. Just perfectly legal theft.
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