I’M SKEPTICAL THAT THE SCIENCE REALLY SUPPORTS THIS: CDC: Young women should avoid alcohol unless using birth control.
Archive for 2016
February 3, 2016
CLEARLY, THE ANIMAL MAGNETISM THAT IS RICK SANTORUM WAS JUST TOO MUCH FOR THE MILQUETOAST AMERICAN PEOPLE TO HANDLE: ‘Santorum was running?’ Report: Rick Santorum to bow out of GOP POTUS race.
Santorum would have cleaned up in Iowa, if only he hadn’t splashed on so much Mandom before meeting the voters.
WHY ARE CORPORATIONS INCREASINGLY LEFTIST?
Because the people who run them are. In the case of the oil industry, as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason noted a decade ago, in the 1990s, “environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green,” thus paving the way for the full-on corporatism and crony venture socialism of the Obama era.
And because the people they cater their products to are. The TV series Mad Men increasingly failed as watchable television after its first couple of seasons. But consider the the arc of the series. It begins in 1960 with Don Draper crafting Lucky Strike pitches to conservative smokers in 1960. In the final moments of the series finale, Draper attends an uber-’70s est session in Big Sur and comes away with the brainstorm to craft the proto-multi-culti Stepford-hippy populated “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coca-Cola commercial. This neatly sums up how the advertising industry responded to coastal elites moving more and more perilously leftward in the 1960s and ’70s.
To build on what Aaron Clarey wrote in the headline link above, Whole Foods have devoted their entire business model to catering to this demographic — which was all fun and games until libertarian-leaning CEO John Mackey came out against Obamacare as “tantamount to ‘fascism’ because ‘the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it.'” That’s an accurate definition of the F-word, but good luck both explaining that to your core audience and keeping them as customers; Mackey quickly capitulated to the mob.
AT AMAZON, 30% off Valentine’s Jewelry.
WORSE YET, THE FRENCH FRIES AREN’T ACTUALLY FROM FRANCE: McDonalds Sued Because Its Mozzarella Sticks Aren’t Pure Mozzarella.
BOB WOODWARD: Hillary ‘shouts,’ needs to ‘get off this screaming stuff.’
To be fair, I think that’s a simple screwdriver adjustment in the newly-installed Human Emulation Module.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Obama Visits Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Mosque.
Related: “Obama defends the faith,” Scott Johnson writes at Power Line.
WHAT A DIFFERENT A DECADE AND A HALF AND A (D) AFTER THE NAME MAKES, Betsy Newmark writes:
James Taranto points out that Hillary’s supporters are definitely more willing to paint her squeaker of a win in Iowa based on winning coin tosses as a victory than they were to characterize George W. Bush’s squeaker of a win in Florida in 2000.
Among known tosses, then, Mrs. Clinton has a net gain of five delegate equivalents, more than double her lead of 1.8. Maybe there are unreported Sanders tosses that even things out, but at any rate the designation of one or the other candidate as the “winner” comes down to pure randomness.
Which won’t stop Mrs. Clinton’s supporters from insisting their woman won. Last night Peggy Noonan tweeted: “I’m sorry but a 50-50 race on Democratic side is not, if she wins, a Hillary win. This is a draw. The fight continues. No HRC validation.” Which prompted this response from Democratic strategist Donna Brazile: “Let’s not set new rules in the middle of the game. A win is a win. They will fight this out next week and beyond.”
Donna Brazile was not saying “a win is a win” in Florida in 2000, when George W. Bush really did have more votes than her man.
As Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, “The accord that emerged in the post-attack period had no chance of standing up to the most powerful force in American life now: party politics. For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives occurred a year earlier—the Florida presidential recount.”
But hey, for somebody who desperately needs to kick off her campaign win to both avoid painful memories of 2008 and to keep her bid for coronation alive, all those memories — all that rage over November of 2000 — must be discarded. It’s yet another reason why, as Jonah Goldberg writes, “Hillary Clinton’s asterisk-heavy victory in Iowa might have been the narrowest of wins for her, but it was arguably the worst of all possible outcomes for the Democratic Party.”
THE 21ST CENTURY PRODUCT: A FLYING SELFIE-BOT.
AN INTERESTING NEW PITCH FOR AMAZON PRIME: The Only Music Streaming Service with Free Two-Day Shipping. I’ve actually been using the music and video aspects of Prime more, and they’re nice. You can get a 30-day free trial and see for yourself.
TRUMP: TED CRUZ STOLE THE ELECTION IN IOWA SO WE SHOULD HAVE A DO-OVER.
As Allahpundit writes, “This is the single dumbest thing he’s done since he got into the race…I don’t know what he’s doing here, apart from pure ego preservation.”
UPDATE: The USS Caine is the plushest, swankiest, most luxurious ship in the fleet. Yuuge!
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Government Seeks High-Fidelity “Brain-Computer” Interface.
THE EXCITEMENT OF A Road Trip In A Supercar.
MIZZOU’S TRAVAILS: Capitulation Has Its Consequences.
First, a great university needs well-qualified students and the financial resources to hire and retain top faculty. Capitulating to the protesters has impaired Mizzou’s ability to secure both.
Not surprisingly, applications are down significantly. According to a leaked internal memorandum, undergraduate applications for the 2016-17 term dropped by five percent from the previous year. Graduate applications fell a whopping 19 percent.
In particular, applications from students with high ACT scores (30 or above) were down 7.7 percent, and the number of African-American applicants plummeted by 19 percent.
While numerous factors affect application numbers from year to year, it’s hard to believe that last fall’s widely publicized protests aren’t largely to blame for the decline.
With fewer applicants to choose from, particularly at the top end, Mizzou’s incoming class is almost sure to be less qualified than its predecessor.
The application numbers also portend financial difficulties for the university. The drop in undergraduate applications was entirely from out-of-state applicants. A substantial reduction in out-of-state students, who pay much more in tuition than do Missouri residents, will impair the university’s financing.
There’s almost no chance that state funding will offset the shortfall in tuition receipts. Many Missouri voters believe that the protesters’ demands—e.g., that the president of the four-campus system be fired because of a few isolated racist incidents over which he had no control—were unreasonable. When faculty, coaches, and staff endorsed those demands and feckless administrators capitulated, no one from the university would speak reason for fear of being called a racist.
Voters have lost confidence in the institution and legislators have responded predictably. Many of them are threatening to reduce the university’s funding for next year.
If enrollment drops and the legislature reduces state support, the university will have to raise more money from private donors or cut spending. While data on Mizzou’s post-protest fundraising aren’t yet available, the frequency with which remarks like “I’ll never give another dime to that school” are heard suggests that the former outcome is unlikely. Budget cuts are almost certainly coming, and Mizzou’s academic offerings will suffer.
Second, free speech and open inquiry will suffer.
To be fair, to the “social justice” crowd that last isn’t a bug, but a feature.
Why is it daring to say what it’s obvious the teacher wants you to say? The class was imposed on the students. They’re required to sit through it. What might be daring would be to push the teacher back with the kind of statements that have been upvoted in the NYT comments section: “Sharapova looks like a Victorias secret model while Williams looks more like a NCAA football linebacker and that has NOTHING whatsoever to do with race, so don’t make it about race” or “However, Serena IS muscular and she is not built with the long-legged model body of Maria. It’s a fact that most women would prefer to be tall and thin. It’s not a racist fact, it’s simply a fact.” It would be daring to say that from the classroom (as opposed to the comments section), because you’d risk becoming the lesson, as the teacher uses his superior power and experience to demonstrate why what you just said really is racist, including the part where you engaged in denial that it was racist. . . . Human nature exists. Ironically, in an effort to elucidate the human nature that has to do with race, the university and the NYT act as if they are utterly naive about that human nature involved in the teacher-student power relationship and the resistance to coerced speech.
Yeah, people will be lining up to pay top dollar for this experience.
WHICH IS A GOOD REASON: I don’t like Bernie because he is a socialist. “To begin with, you need to understand what it really means to be a socialist. Only then can you understand that putting the word ‘democratic’ in front of ‘socialist’ doesn’t change anything.”
USA TODAY: Zika Do’s and Don’ts. “As for the appropriate reaction in the USA, it’s worth noting that while Ebola was an epidemic in Africa, it was never much of a threat to this country. Zika — which is not deadly but has been linked to a serious birth defect — is already in the Western Hemisphere and will likely travel to the USA. . . . The good news for America is that a related virus carried by the same mosquitoes, dengue fever, has shown up in the continental U.S. — but always in short-lived outbreaks confined to small areas, such as south Texas in 2005 or several Florida counties in recent years. That history — plus the widespread use of air conditioning, screens and effective mosquito control in the USA — leads top public health experts to believe that the disease will not spread widely and rapidly here.”
OBAMA LIED, THE DEBT CEILING DIED: Veronique de Rugy reports for National Review.
Well, as it turns out, documents subpoenaed by the House Financial Services Committee reveal that during the 2013 debt ceiling debate, ”the Obama Administration is not only capable of prioritizing payments in case the nation’s borrowing authority is not raised, it has run ‘tabletop exercises’ to prepare for such a contingency – contradicting earlier public statements from Treasury officials.”
Here are some tidbits from the committee’s press release:
Made public for the first time, records turned over to the Committee in response to the subpoena show the Federal Reserve Bank of New York previously made plans to prioritize Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and principal and interest payments on the debt over other government obligations.
The Administration, however, directed the New York Fed to withhold this information from the Committee because “Treasury wants to maximize pressure on Congress by limiting communications about contingency planning,” according to a previously undisclosed internal email of the New York Fed….
Efforts by the Obama Administration to keep its contingency planning a secret were met with objections from officials at the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed, who described the approach in an email as “crazy, counter-productive, and add[ing] risk to an already risky situation.”
The next time someone accuses the GOP Congress of playing chicken with the economy, show them this link.
A NICE PROFILE OF PAUL CARON: The IRS Scandal, Day 1,000: Every single day for nearly three years prof chronicles IRS scandal.
WELL, HE’S A FOX GUARDING THE HENHOUSE: I’m referring to President Obama, who has a constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law, making him the chief guardian of the rule of law.
Obama’s track record on fulfilling this constitutional duty has been consistently abhorrent–the worst in history–so perhaps this is merely another transgression that will trigger a collective yawn from the mainstream media. But nonetheless, Andy McCarthy cogently explains “Obama’s Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton Email Scandal.”
[C]lassified information so pervades the thousands of pages of e-mails communicated through and stored on Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured, homebrew server system that the court-ordered disclosure process has ground to a halt. . . .[I]t turns out [her emails] were so threaded with classified information that the State Department and intelligence agencies have fallen hopelessly behind the court’s disclosure schedule: The task of reviewing the e-mails and redacting the portions whose publication could harm national security has proved much more complicated than anticipated. Thousands of remaining e-mails, and any embarrassing lapses they contain, will be withheld from voters until well into primary season.
So egregious have the scandal’s latest developments been that a critical State Department admission from last week has received almost no coverage: Eighteen e-mails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have been identified, and the government is refusing to disclose them. The administration’s rationale is remarkable: Releasing them, the White House and State Department say, would compromise “the president’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel” from top government officials.
Think about what this means. Not only is it obvious that President Obama knew Mrs. Clinton was conducting government business over her private e-mail account, the exchanges the president engaged in with his secretary of state over this unsecured system clearly involved sensitive issues of policy. Clinton was being asked for “advice and counsel” — not about her recommendations for the best country clubs in Martha’s Vineyard, but about matters that the White House judges too sensitive to reveal. . . .
If the administration is refusing to disclose the Obama-Clinton e-mails because they involved the secretary of state providing advice and counsel to the president, do you think those exchanges just might touch on foreign-government information, foreign relations, or foreign activities of the United States — deliberations on which are presumed classified?
Will anyone in the press corps covering the White House and the State Department ask administration officials whether this is the case? . . .
To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama.
From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information. He discussed sensitive matters on a non-government, non-secure e-mail system that could easily be penetrated by foreign governments (among other rogue actors). By doing so, he left an electronic- and paper-trail that was outside the government’s tightly secured repositories for classified information. He also personally indulged, and thus implicitly endorsed, Clinton’s use of private e-mail to do government business.
Law enforcement investigations are supposed to proceed independent of political considerations, but I’d wager few people believe the decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton will be made by Attorney General Loretta Lynch alone. It will be the president’s call. In making it, he may face a profound conflict of interest. A prosecution of Clinton might expose that Obama engaged in recklessness similar to Clinton’s, albeit on a far smaller scale. Moreover, Clinton would likely argue in her defense that the president, who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding classified information, not only authorized Clinton to use private e-mail but knowingly used it himself in order to communicate with Clinton.
I’m not so sure about the “far smaller scale” conclusion. But that aside, gosh, I’m shocked that an inexperienced, insouciant, and narcissistic President would be so careless with our national security. And so corrupt.
MARK HARRISON: Enemy Of The State.
IN THE MAIL: From Dean Reuter and John Yoo, Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 50% off Hudson Jeans for Women & Men.
And, also today only: Ivation Portable HDMI Projector.
SOLE VIDEOTAPE OF SUPER BOWL I BLOCKED FROM CIRCULATION DUE TO PROPERTY-RIGHTS IMPASSE BETWEEN NFL AND TAPE OWNER.
(H/T: Virginia Postrel.)