HERE WE GO AGAIN: House ‘Flipping’ Skyrockets, Sparks Concern Over a Housing Bubble.
Archive for 2016
March 3, 2016
THAT’S FINE, BUT MY QUESTION IS, WHEN WILL HILLARY CALL OUT THE RACISTS IN HER PARTY’S MEDIA? House Dem blasts NBC over Melissa Harris-Perry departure.
Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) took to the House floor on Wednesday to suggest NBC has a racial diversity problem in the wake of host Melissa Harris-Perry’s departure from MSNBC.
Gutiérrez said Harris-Perry’s exit after the network pre-empted her show for two consecutive weekends reflected a larger issue at hand. He linked the controversy to the lack of racial minorities among Oscar acting nominees for the second year in a row.
“When NBC has a bad year when it comes to race, or when the Oscars have a couple of bad years when it comes to people of color, these are moments to talk about,” Gutiérrez said while standing next to a poster that read “#NBCsoWhite,” a play on this year’s “OscarsSoWhite” hashtag.
In addition to Harris-Perry, Jose Diaz-Balart’s weekday morning show on MSNBC has been preempted for 2016 presidential campaign coverage, and Alex Wagner will not be getting a planned show.
“I’m sad to see her go,” Gutiérrez said, referring to Harris-Perry. “But I’m even sadder because I don’t think these are isolated cases.”
Why are Democrat-run industries such cesspits of racism?
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED! Record-Breaking Gun Sales Continue Through February: Tenth month in a row to set a record. “This year is a continuation of a record-setting trend, which began in 2015.”
MAYBE, BUT TIME IS RUNNING OUT FOR IT TO COALESCE: Three Reasons a ‘Cruzio’ Ticket Needs to Happen.
Related: As Neo-Neocon writes, “I think that the GOP must indeed unite around Cruz now. But if so, someone needs to get the message to Rubio and his backers, and good luck with that.”
Speaking of which, Allahpundit spots “War: Rubio staffer rips Sean Hannity, Hannity rips reporter.”
Which brings us to, as John Podhoretz writes, “The GOP Crackup, For Good or Bad.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE, ALAS. Republican Elites Are Frightened by Their Own Base.
HUH. JUST A FEW DAYS AGO HE WAS JOKING ABOUT MURDERING HIM. Lindsey Graham Proposes Rallying Around Ted Cruz.
I’M BEGINNING TO THINK THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS NEEDS MORE ADULT SUPERVISION:
March 2, 2016
WHO FIRED MELISSA CLICK? THE CUSTOMER BASE:
This assault on the First Amendment rights of a student journalist — by a professor of communications, no less — was the straw that broke the campus’s back. The people of Missouri launched a protest of their own against the school’s handling of the protests. In January, it was reported that student applications had dropped 5 percent in the three months following the protests. Compared with last year, the state’s flagship university has received 914 fewer applications. Worse, the Columbia campus is suffering a 7.7 percent drop in high-scoring SAT and ACT applicants, and out-of-state applications are down 25 percent from last year.
The loss of out-of-state students hits the school’s bottom line especially hard. UM currently charges in-state students an annual tuition of $9,433, while out-of-state students pay more than two and a half times that amount — $24,460.
And then the other shoe dropped: Last week, UM announced that new pledges and donations in December — a key month for university fundraising — fell $6 million, a decrease of roughly 31 percent. Only the Columbia branch, where the protests took place, suffered these losses. No other UM branch experienced declines.
Entirely coincidental and unrelated: New Mizzou boss gives student protesters tough-love message.
The man hired to help ease racial tensions at University of Missouri had tough love for the African-American activists who led fierce demonstrations there last fall, telling them late last week he has no intention of caving in to their demands.
Interim Vice Chancellor Chuck Henson, whose portfolio includes inclusion, diversity and equity, wrote a letter to Concerned Student 1950 Thursday, telling the group to stop making demands and work with the school to make things better.
“If you sincerely want better relationships, the time for demands, threats and arbitrary deadlines is over — you don’t need them,” Henson wrote.
Demands from the group, which takes its name from the 1950 admission of the school’s first black student, Gus Ridgel, include an “academic bankruptcy program” in which students could delete one bad semester’s grades from their records, according to The College Fix. Other demands include the hiring of more black faculty, $250,000 to expand the Black Cultural Center with a “Liberation House,” and a statue of civil rights activist Lloyd Gaines in the Carnahan Quadrangle.
Henson invited group members to meet him, but said many of the demands are neither realistic nor legal. Hiring faculty or staff or admitting minority students to meet quotas could violate state and federal law, he said.
Schools will have to start standing up to the crybullies because it’s bad for business. It would have been better, of course, if they’d done it all along out of principle.
YEP: How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump: By assailing sensible conservatives as sexists, racists, and imbeciles, they paved the way for a jackass who embodies their worst fears. Trump’s campaign is driven by backlash against PC. “Note, for example, how Trump turned the incident in which Black Lives Matter activists humiliated Sen. Bernie Sanders to his own advantage. He didn’t bother drawing partisan lines or going after Sanders. Trump and his supporters couldn’t care less about any of that, and Trump until that point almost had almost never mentioned Sanders. Instead, he made it clear that he’d never allow himself to be shut down by a mob. That, for his loyalists, was the money shot, especially when Trump pretty much dared BLM to disrupt a Trump event, in effect inviting them for an ass-kicking. A lot of people loved that shtick, because they want to see someone—literally, anyone—stand up to groups like BLM, even if it’s in defense of poor Bernie, because they worry that they’re next for that kind of treatment. . . . The point remains that this is happening not because of an overly rightist GOP, but because American liberals, complacently turning away from the excesses of the left and eviscerating their own moderate wing, have damaged the two-party system to the point that an unhinged billionaire demagogue is raking in support from people who are now more afraid of leftists controlling the Justice Department than they are of Putin or ISIS.”
Choose the form of your destructor.
AT AMAZON, take 30% off Contemporary Jewelry.
THE PRESS IS IMPERVIOUS TO IRONY: TO FLEE DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA, YOU WILL NEED THE RIGHT DOCUMENTS.
WELL, WELL: Justice Dept. grants immunity to staffer who set up Clinton email server.
The Justice Department has granted immunity to the former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email server, a sign the FBI investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing is progressing.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.
As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents will likely want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said.
The inquiry comes against a sensitive political backdrop in which Clinton is the favorite to secure the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Plus, this comment:
UPDATE: And this one:
THOMAS SOWELL: Trump could spell “the point of no return.”
The “Super Tuesday” primaries may be a turning point for America — and quite possibly a turn for the worse. After seven long years of domestic disasters and increasing international dangers, the next President of the United States will need extraordinary wisdom, maturity, depth of knowledge and personal character to rescue America.
Instead, if the polls are an indication, what we may get is someone with the opposite of all these things, a glib egomaniac with a checkered record in business and no track record at all in government — Donald Trump.
If so, the downward trajectory of America over the past seven years may well continue on into the future, to the point of no return….
Trump’s acting like a bull in a china shop may appeal to some voters but, in the world as it is, he may well cost us our last chance to recover from the great dangers into which the Obama administration has gotten this nation.
We already have an ego-driven, know-it-all president who will not listen to military or intelligence agency experts. Do we need to tempt fate by having two in a row?
Obviously an establishment tool. Read the whole thing here.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” I still want my flying car, though.
FREEDOM MARCHES ON: West Virginia lawmakers eliminate permits for concealed carry guns.
I BELIEVE THIS: Learning A New Sport May Be Good For The Brain.
Past neurological studies in people have shown that learning a new physical skill in adulthood, such as juggling, leads to increases in the volume of gray matter in parts of the brain related to movement control.
Even more compelling, a 2014 study with mice found that when the mice were introduced to a complicated type of running wheel, in which the rungs were irregularly spaced so that the animals had to learn a new, stutter-step type of running, their brains changed significantly. Learning to use these new wheels led to increased myelination of neurons in the animals’ motor cortexes. Myelination is the process by which parts of a brain cell are insulated, so that the messages between neurons can proceed more quickly and smoothly.
Scientists once believed that myelination in the brain occurs almost exclusively during infancy and childhood and then slows or halts altogether.
But the animals running on the oddball wheels showed notable increases in the myelination of the neurons in their motor cortex even though they were adults.
At the same time, other animals that simply ran on normal wheels for the same period of time showed no increase in myelination afterward.
In other words, learning the new skill had changed the inner workings of the adult animals’ motor cortexes; practicing a well-mastered one had not.
This makes sense.
IT LOOKS EVEN MORE LIKE SOMETHING FROM HOT WHEELS: 2017 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport.
THE MODERNIST 1969 PALM SPRINGS DREAM HOME WHERE TIME STOOD STILL. All these eerie photos of bad late ‘60s kitsch lack is a terrified boy on a Big Wheel and a pair of twins with British accents to complete them.
James Lileks writes, “I wouldn’t call it Modernist. That would imply restraint.” Instead, the Bard of Jasperwood dubs it “The Most Garish House in the World,” and writes, “sometimes you come across an era whose ugliness is not debatable. It’s not a matter of subjective analysis. It’s truth. That era would be the end of the Sixties through the mid 70s, when American design went barking mad — either from drugs, or more likely, to assure actual drug users that you, too were cool.”
DOG BITES MAN: Illinois Obamacare plan crippled by losses.
Related: Twitter loses $2 billion in 10 years.
But I’m sure that deliberately making their appeal more “selective,” as Ian Faith* would say, is the key to reversing their fortunes. (Or the lack thereof.)
U. OF SOUTH CAROLINA PROMISES ‘NO LIMITS’ … EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO FREE SPEECH: Check out this video featuring the two student plaintiffs in the new FIRE-sponsored First Amendment lawsuit against the University of South Carolina (USC). The lawsuit is the twelfth in FIRE’s undefeated national Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project.
While USC’s marketing materials claim there are “No Limits” to what students can achieve at USC, the university clearly doesn’t think this catchy slogan extends to constitutional rights on campus. In this video, student plaintiff Ross Abbott and Michael Kriete, president of USC’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, describe how they were interrogated and threatened with disciplinary action, ironically, for organizing an outdoor event aimed at educating the student body about freedom of speech on campus. You can read more about the lawsuit over at The Torch.
REAL RACE CARS HAVE NO FENDERS! That video Glenn posted Monday of the Mazda guy passing 34 competitors at Australia’s Bathurst racing circuit provides a great look into the world of door-slammer racing. But those of us who have or are racing Formula Fords or other open-wheelers know where the real fun at speed is found. So check out this video of FFs on the same track.
THE PURIST’S PORSCHE: The 2016 911 R.