Archive for 2015
January 13, 2015
ALL YOUR TAX NEEDS IN ONE LOCATION, at Amazon’s Tax Central.
PENSION TSUNAMI UPDATE: Why the Coming Pension Bomb Will Destroy Your City and State.
THE WAPO IS WORRIED: Far right in Europe sees opportunity after wave of terror in France. If the people you regard as savory refuse to address obvious problems, then people that you regard as unsavory will step forward.
UPDATE: Farage: ‘We Must Stand Up For Our Judeo-Christian Culture.’ Things like that matter to voters more than they matter to elites. It’s unsurprising that, in a democracy, someone would step forward to address that.
ASHE SCHOW: More evidence colleges are bad at adjudicating sexual assault: Accuser lawsuits.
Men who claim they were falsely accused of rape have been suing their universities for perceived injustices. Now women are filing strikingly similar lawsuits.
A female student at Virginia’s Bridgewater College claims in a civil lawsuit that the college improperly handled her sexual assault accusation. The woman claims Bridgewater didn’t follow Title IX (a federal law provision that has been interpreted to require colleges adjudicate sexual assault) or its own sexual misconduct policy in her case. The woman also claims in her lawsuit that the school failed to properly investigate the sexual assault, provide her with written notification of the school’s review, or inform her of on-campus resources for accusers.
Across the country, a University of Oregon student has filed a lawsuit claiming the school failed to properly investigate her claim in order to protect its basketball team. She claims to have been gang raped by three basketball players (who have in turn claimed the sex was consensual) and that the university violated her Title IX rights.
Her case is a bit different in that she faults the university for allowing one of the men she accused of raping her to transfer to the school from Providence College following earlier allegations of sexual misconduct. The UO student claims the university shouldn’t have enrolled the student because of the prior allegations against him.
Of course, accusations do not equal guilt. No criminal charges have been filed against the student for lack of evidence. The man’s life should not be over just because someone accused him of sexual assault (especially if there’s a lack of proof). However, the women’s allegations in each case sound eerily similar to what men have been claiming in their lawsuits – namely that schools appear to selectively follow Title IX requirements and their own policies and fail to conduct proper investigations.
Well, that’s because they do, which is why criminal matters should be left to the police and courts.
CHANGE: ‘Downton Abbey’ Gets a Radio.
THE STRONG HORSE: Democrats Shocked by Giffords Aide’s Decision to Join McSally Staff.
C.J. Karamargin isn’t the first congressional staffer to cross the partisan aisle, but some Democrats are shocked this former staffer to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is working for the new Republican congresswoman in Arizona’s 2nd District.
On Jan. 9, in a hiring coup, freshman GOP Rep. Martha E. McSally announced Karamargin as her new district director. Karamargin was communications director for Giffords at the time of the Tucson shootings before handling media relations for Pima Community College. The timing of the hiring — just one day after the four-year anniversary of the Tucson tragedy — also gnawed at still-raw wounds among Giffords’ allies.
“Yeah, that’s pretty poor timing,” said a Democratic source who hadn’t heard about the hiring until contacted by The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report/Roll Call. “It’s sad. But I’m bitter, I know.”
Related: Democratic Committee Assignments Less Than a Zero-Sum Game.
The House Democrats undeniably remain the fourth and smallest wheel in the congressional machine. And they’re still struggling to apply enough internal political grease to get their pieces of the legislative engine out of neutral.
The party now has its smallest share of House seats in almost nine decades — just 188, or 43 percent. In reality, its disadvantage is even more pronounced. That’s because Republicans have stuck with the custom that the party in control claims more than its fair share of the seats on committees, where the bulk of the chamber’s policy battles are effectively won or lost.
It’s easy to see the difficulties as Democratic leadership fills all the shrunken number of slots available to them, a prerequisite for the panels to begin the year’s workaday business of conducting hearings and marking up bills.
I think the GOP should be as generous to them as the Dems were to the GOP when they were in charge.
GALLERY: Cuba Before The Commies Ruined It.
WELL, YES: White House: ‘It’s fair to say’ we were wrong on Paris unity rally.
The White House erred in not sending a higher-profile representative to this weekend’s solidarity march in France following a terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper, press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
“It’s fair to say we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” Earnest told reporters at the White House.
“Had the circumstances been a little bit different, I think the president himself would have liked to be there,” Earnest added. . . .
The White House would not discuss whether it considered sending the president at any point.
Earnest said he did not know why Attorney General Eric Holder, who was in Paris earlier Sunday for a series of high-level counterterrorism meetings, was unable to stay to attend the march. He also said he did not know what the president, who remained at the White House throughout the day, did with his time.
Earnest did say that the decision not to send a higher-profile administration official was made on the staff level, and Obama did not personally decide not to send someone of a higher profile.
So, Valerie Jarrett, then.
RAND SIMBERG: The Spaceship That Almost Landed.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Tuscaloosa police charge 23-year-old high school teacher with sexual relationship with student. “Sgt. Brent Blankley, a spokesman for the police department, said investigators from the juvenile division were alerted early this week by the Tuscaloosa City School System of a troubling relationship between a student and teacher at Bryant High School.”
Related: Student-teacher sex: Are more female teachers being charged?
January 12, 2015
BYRON YORK: Obama’s Paris snub wasn’t an oversight.
Then came the unity march. No, it was not essential that Obama himself attend. But there’s no doubt he should have sent Vice President Joe Biden — why is there a VP, if not to go to big foreign events? — or at least Secretary of State John Kerry.
Even as the march wound its way through Paris, the White House sent out yet another sign of its unseriousness. On Sunday morning, the press office announced the president will host a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” on Feb. 18. The plan is to bring together “social service providers, including education administrators, mental health professionals, and religious leaders, with law enforcement agencies to address violent extremism as part of the broader mandate of community safety and crime prevention.”
As the world watched images of black-clad, AK-47-wielding terrorists killing Parisians, Obama proposed to meet the threat with social service providers.
So when the president chose not to attend the Paris march, nor to send the Vice President or Secretary of State, the problem wasn’t a tin-ear sense of public relations. It was Obama’s actual attitude toward the terror threat facing not only Europe but the United States. We’ve dealt with the big stuff, Obama has declared, now let’s move on.
It sounded good — until the bullets started flying.
Well, it sounded good to some.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UVA Phi Psi Chapter Submits To New ‘Safety’ Rules Based On Crime It Didn’t Commit. “No apology for putting these guys through this. No apology for suspending the entire Greek system because of an unfounded accusation in a now-discredited magazine. No apology for the vandalism of the Phi Psi house. Just: ‘You’re welcome. Now, here are the new rules you will follow, as punishment for your imaginary crimes.'”
JOURNALISM: Amanda Lang tried to sabotage a CBC story that scandalized RBC, who paid her. “Last month CANADALAND reported that Amanda Lang took lucrative speaking jobs from insurance companies and then gave them positive news coverage on CBC TV. That was nothing. Multiple sources within CBC News have revealed to CANADALAND, under condition of anonymity, a shocking campaign Amanda Lang undertook in 2013 to sabotage a major story reported by her colleague, investigative reporter Kathy Tomlinson.”
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Also, optimize your laundry!
Plus, deals on juicers.
GERMANY: 25,000 attend German anti-Islam march, but counter-protests bigger. What are the comparative growth rates?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Multicultural Suicide.
WELL, THAT’S NOT HOW WE ROLL HERE AT INSTAPUNDIT:
And I like the new cover. Punch back twice as hard!
UPDATE: The New York Times is also afraid to publish this, even though they published a long story.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Robert Crumb has thoughts.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Coyotes In Manhattan.
AT AMAZON, organize your kitchen.
THOUGHTS ON very advanced aliens. “Very advanced aliens should not be either generically friendly or generically hostile to outsiders. Instead they should be very good at making their friendship or hostility appropriately context-dependent. That is, aliens should be very good at figuring out when and in what precise way being friendly or hostile will best achieve their ends. Such strategies should be far subtler than simple-minded ethnocentrism, family-loyalty, or xenophobia. Instead such aliens would ask themselves in great and careful detail, what exactly could humans eventually do to help or hurt them?”