AFTER MONTHS OF TRUMP 24/7 COVERAGE, FOX NEWS IS OFFENDED BY ED HENRY’S BEHAVIOR.
Related: Laura Ingraham to caller worried about Trump’s moral failings: Reagan was divorced, right? “‘This clip is incredible,’ says Philip Klein, ‘for anybody who listened to conservative talk radio during the Clinton era.’”
EVEN A FLATWORM IS SMART ENOUGH TO TURN AWAY FROM PAIN: French Socialists Aren’t Feeling the Bern.
France’s Socialist government, having concluded that socialist labor legislation is stifling job growth and propping up the unemployment rate, is enacting pro-business economic reforms over the objections of more left-wing members of the party. . . .
Valls’ decision is part of a long-running trend: For decades, the decline of the blue social model has been pushing many European countries, including ones we think of as social democracies, to abandon some of the more statist features of their economic agendas. Policies that worked relatively well in closed, stable, national economies of the mid-20th century fail to deliver in the open, dynamic economies of the 21st—and even center-left governments are forced to adapt to this reality once they take power.
But the fact that the changes had to be forced through by executive decree also highlights the challenges facing democratic governance on both sides of the Atlantic. Executive power in the U.S. has steadily expanded in the last two administrations, in part because of political rancor and Congressional gridlock. Most European governments have been able to avoid this outcome because Parliamentary systems are more conducive to building temporary political majorities. But as their countries continue to grapple with economic headwinds and social upheaval, it may be that Parliamentary systems, too, will start to show signs of decay.
President Trump will no doubt dispense with gridlock, declare that “I won,” and proceed to govern with a pen and a phone.
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech.
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GOOD GUY WITH A GUN STOPS BAD GUY: Off-Duty Sheriff’s Deputy Who Shot Suspect In Taunton Stabbings Hailed As Hero.
THIS JUST IN: CANDIDATE’S ONLY CHANCE IS TO BEST OPPONENT.
Harry Truman, call your office. You too, LBJ and your media surrogates.
RELAX, GUYS, WE’RE HEADING INTO ANOTHER “RECOVERY SUMMER!” Obama Presides Over the Feeblest Post-WWII Recovery. “It is now certain that President Obama will be the only U.S. president in history that did not deliver a single calendar year of 3.0%+ economic growth, and the fourth-worst in history in terms of average RGDP growth while in office.” If he were a Republican, the press coverage would be nonstop Grapes Of Wrath stuff. Instead, it’s all about the joys of staycations and funemployment, while only a few cranks talk about how seniors are suffering.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Thomas Sowell on “Dry Rot in Academia.”
Read the whole thing.
NEW YORK TIMES: Should You Be Worried About Facebook’s Ability To Shape The News? Of Course You Should.
Yet few Americans think of Facebook as a powerful media organization, one that can alter events in the real world. When blowhards rant about the mainstream media, they do not usually mean Facebook, the mainstreamiest of all social networks. That’s because Facebook operates under a veneer of empiricism. Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of fair-and-balanced human beings.
None of that is true. This week, Facebook rushed to deny a report in Gizmodo that said the team in charge of its “trending” news list routinely suppressed conservative points of view. Last month, Gizmodo also reported that Facebook employees asked Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, if the company had a responsibility to “help prevent President Trump in 2017.” Facebook denied it would ever try to manipulate elections.
Even if you believe that Facebook isn’t monkeying with the trending list or actively trying to swing the vote, the reports serve as timely reminders of the ever-increasing potential dangers of Facebook’s hold on the news. . . .
The question isn’t whether Facebook has outsize power to shape the world — of course it does, and of course you should worry about that power. If it wanted to, Facebook could try to sway elections, favor certain policies, or just make you feel a certain way about the world, as it once proved it could do in an experiment devised to measure how emotions spread online.
Related: Could Facebook Swing An Election?
SOCIALISM IN ALL ITS GLORY: Venezuela Unleashes Tanks as 4 Killed, 1,200 Arrested. With empty store shelves and no toilet paper.
DISPATCHES FROM THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS: Obama’s Lawsuit Against North Carolina Isn’t About Civil Rights. It’s About Crushing Dissent.
Crushing dissent, politics as domestic warfare and a useful media distraction for a failed presidency. Obama’s war on bathrooms has it all.
THE KIDS AT VOX ATTEMPT A WAGE-GAP “EXPLAINER,” AND IT’S PREDICTABLY AWFUL. Ashe Schow Explains Why.
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE HE’S A SOCIALIST AND SOCIALISM ENRICHES THE POWERFUL AND WELL-CONNECTED, NOT THE POOR: Bernie Sanders’s plans have surprisingly small benefits for America’s poorest people.
AS THEY SAY, SJWs ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN: Oxford SJW on Wronged Waitress: “Frankly, Her Feelings Are Irrelevant.” The waitress in question, meanwhile, is a superior human being:
In an interview she said: “Oxford isn’t a place where racists from South Africa are fit to go. It’s a privilege to be there. He is far more privileged than me.”
Schultz said she earns around $1 an hour, meaning that it would take her around 50 years to earn enough to fund Qwabe’s lavish scholarship.
But she insisted she shouldn’t “lose everything” despite being “a bit of an idiot”.
On the other hand, examples need to be made.
OPERATION CHAOS COMES TO APPALACHIA: Donald Trump Supporters Boost Bernie Sanders in West Virginia.
A third of those who voted in West Virginia’s Democratic primary say they plan to back Trump in November, according to NBC News exit polls. Sanders won those voters by a wide margin.
In fact, 39 percent of Sanders voters said they would vote for Trump over Sanders in the fall. For Clinton, nine percent of her voters say they plan to come out for Trump in the general election.
West Virginia has an open primary, meaning independents can vote in the Democratic contest. With the GOP nomination wrapped up, it’s possible mischievous Trump supporters sought to damage Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, by voting for Sanders.
SOME FREE-SPEECH GOOD NEWS FROM EMORY: Emory University Open Expression committee opinion on Trump chalkings, ‘Mein Trumpf’ poster and other matters.
HMM: Mitch McConnell: Trump Is Underestimated.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) predicted Tuesday that Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, will be more competitive in November than many political analysts expect.
McConnell told reporters he is buoyed by a new Quinnipiac poll showing Trump within a few points of Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, three crucial battlegrounds.
“It looks to me like at the beginning of the race, Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio look pretty competitive,” he said.
The Quinnipiac survey, conducted from April 27 to May 8, showed Trump leading Clinton by four points in Ohio, and trailing the former first lady by only one point in Florida and Pennsylvania.
McConnell told reporters at the end of last year that he saw it as extremely important the eventual GOP nominee for president be able to win in such so-called purple states. At the time, his comments were interpreted as indicating a preference for more mainstream candidates such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
McConnell said he is looking forward to meeting with Trump Thursday morning at the National Senatorial Campaign Committee, near the Capitol.
“I think most of my members believe he’s won the nomination the old fashioned way, he got more votes than anybody else and we respect the voices of the Republican primary voters across the country and we’ll sit down and talk about the way forward,” he said.
He declined, however, to say what specific points he would bring up with the candidate.
When things suck economically — and they do, and ordinary people know it’s worse than the official happy-face story — old fashioned Democratic populist messages sell, and that’s what Trump’s selling.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: This is the BBC calling — from 622 A.D.
ELDERLY SOCIALIST CANDIDATE CONFUSED BY HOW GOVERNMENT LEGISLATION HARMS SMALL BUSINESS:
Hillary Clinton was stunned Monday when a small business owner told her that the cost of her health insurance had increased nearly two fold.
“A $400 increase, assuming you didn’t have some terrible healthcare event, which it doesn’t sound like you did,” Clinton said at a campaign event in Virginia. “I don’t understand.”
The voter told Clinton that her health insurance plan had a rigid income cut-off that was preventing her from qualifying for subsidies.
“I have seen our health insurance for my own family go up $500 a month in the last two years,” the voter said. “We went from $400-something to $900-something … we’re just fighting to keep benefits for ourselves.”
The woman said that she was also finding it difficult to provide benefits for her employees.
“The thought of being able to provide benefits to your employees is almost secondary. Yet, to keep your employees happy, that’s a question that comes across my desk all the time,” she said.
Clinton offered numerous solutions but avoided addressing the source of the problem.
“What you’re saying is one of the real worries that we’re facing with the cost of health insurance because the costs are going up in a lot of markets. Not all, but many markets,” Clinton said. “I think that the Affordable Care Act is a big step forward for the vast majority of Americans, but we have to look at out of pocket costs, copays, deductibles, premiums.”
Clinton said that income cut-offs should be relaxed and that health insurance companies should be forced to explain why they are raising prices.
But she was still dumbfounded by the price hike.
“What could have possibly raised your costs $400?” Clinton said. “We’ve gotta pick that apart and really make sure we understand it.”
Any decade now she’ll figure it out — or not. As Hillary sniffed in 1993 when told that HillaryCare could bankrupt small businesses, “I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America.”
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF “WHAT IF THIS HAD BEEN BUSH,” PART XXXVIII: Charlie Rose and President’s Speechwriters Laugh About ObamaCare Lie:
CHARLIE ROSE: My point is do you have equal impact on serious speeches? Because it’s about style, use of language, etcetera?
JON LOVETT, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: I really like, I was very — the joke speeches is the most fun part of this. But the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think. Health care, economic speeches.
JON FAVREAU, FORMER OBAMA SPEECH WRITER: Lovett wrote the line about “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.”
LOVETT: How dare you!
[laughter]
LOVETT: And you know what? It’s still true! No.
Obamacare was originally hatched at the start of 2007 by Favreau and Robert Gibbs, who would later go on to be Obama’s first press secretary, as a way to run to Hillary’s left. Or as Allahpundit wrote in 2013, “Even the transformation of American health care is but a subplot to Hopenchange image-making:”
Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA [in January 2007], when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.
Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?…
“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.”…
The candidate jumped at it. He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?
Once in office, Obama was caught on video at least 35 times saying “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” arguably the biggest lie ever told by an American president; one that even the leftwing “Politifact” Website was forced to declare the “lie of the year” for 2013.
And these three are yucking it up this week, even as millions of Americans lost their healthcare plans.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s fabulist Middle East guru recently bragged to the New York Times how easy it is to manipulate his party’s operatives with bylines because “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Neither do the people feeding them their material; Favreau was the speechwriter who put the dreaded phrase “Peace in our time” into the teleprompter of President Chamberlain’s second inaugural speech.
Incidentally, here’s Favreau, circa 2008, standing to the left of a photo of potentially the next president of the United States, as a friend offers her a beer.
BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID. Democratic focus groups reveal warning signs about Donald Trump’s economic message. “Focus groups of swing voters have picked up some warning signs for Democrats about Donald Trump’s general election candidacy: While those swing voters are willing to see Trump as a risky, divisive figure, they are not yet prepared to believe the Dem argument that Trump’s policy proposals would benefit the rich, a senior Democratic strategist who has been directly involved in extensive focus groups tells me. . . . Trump has a very simple economic message: The elites have screwed you with trade deals that have sucked jobs out of the country. He’d bring them roaring back by kicking the asses of other countries, international bureaucrats and elites, CEOs who ship jobs overseas, and immigrants who are eating out of American workers’ lunch buckets.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN NEWSPAPER CORRECTIONS: PIMPING FOR PARADISE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES.
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