Archive for 2016

GEORGA PEACH? Clinton leads by 7 points in GA.

Clinton leads Trump by 7 points, 44 to 37 percent, in the JMC Analytics poll released Monday, with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson taking 7 percent.

Another 10 percent of respondents were undecided, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein registered just 1 percent support in the poll.

Clinton leads Trump, 84 to 6 percent, among black respondents, while Trump leads her among white respondents, 52 to 25 percent.

Clinton also holds a big advantage among women, 48 to 35 percent, while men are more evenly split, 41 to 40 percent, in favor of Trump.

Poll respondents more than not disapprove of the job President Obama is doing, with 48 percent disapproving and 44 percent approving.

I dismissed the first poll showing Clinton with a small lead in Georgia, because it was just one poll of registered voters. But this is the second one now, and it was taken of “likely households.” You can see JMC Analytics’ full results and methodology here.

RCP’s poll averaging gives Trump a two-point lead, although they don’t yet include JMC’s numbers and do still include two outdated polls of registered voters from the Atlanta Journal and PPP.

CANADA’S MEDIA PARTY “HITS FULL PUTIN-ESQUE” GLORY WITH SHIRTLESS TRUDEAU STORY: “And isn’t it odd that when Vladimir Putin sends out shirtless photos of himself showing how virile he is, the media laughs at him but when Justin takes off his shirt, our Media Party gets positively giddy that the rest of the world has noticed how dreamy our Prime Minister is.”

JUSTICE: Benghazi victims’ families file suit against Clinton.

The parents of two men killed in Benghazi, Libya nearly four years ago are suing former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, saying the attack resulted from her “reckless” handling of classified information.

The federal lawsuit, filed Monday, comes from Patricia Smith of San Diego, whose son Sean Smith was a U.S. State Department technology officer, and Charles Woods of Portland, Ore., whose son Tyrone Woods was CIA security contractor.

If the FBI and the DOJ won’t do their job, maybe the courts will.

ROGER KIMBALL: The College Formerly Known As Yale: Any renaming push on the Ivy campus should start at the top—with Elihu Yale, slave trader extraordinaire.

The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” On American campuses today, I suspect that the operative word is “committee.”

On Aug. 1, Yale University president Peter Salovey announced that he is creating a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. There has been a craze for renaming things on college campuses the last couple of years—a common passion in unsettled times.

In the French Revolution, leaders restarted the calendar at zero and renamed the months of the year. The Soviets renamed cities, erased the names of political enemies from the historical record, and banned scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

At Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard and elsewhere, students have demanded that buildings, programs and legacies be renamed to accommodate modern sensitivities. Amherst College has dropped Lord Jeffrey Amherst as its mascot because the colonial administrator was unkind to Indians. Students at the University of Missouri have petitioned to remove a statue of the “racist rapist” Thomas Jefferson. This is part of a larger effort, on and off campuses, to stamp out dissenting attitudes and rewrite history to comport with contemporary prejudices.

But isn’t the whole raison d’être of universities to break the myopia of the present and pursue the truth? Isn’t that one important reason they enjoy such lavish public support and tax breaks?

Well, that’s just the sales pitch for the rubes, Roger. Plus:

I have unhappy news for Mr. Salovey. In the great racism sweepstakes, John Calhoun was an amateur. Far more egregious was Elihu Yale, the philanthropist whose benefactions helped found the university. As an administrator in India, he was deeply involved in the slave trade. He always made sure that ships leaving his jurisdiction for Europe carried at least 10 slaves. I propose that the committee on renaming table the issue of Calhoun College and concentrate on the far more flagrant name “Yale.”

Perhaps “Gramsci University” would be more fitting, these days.

ALL OBAMA WANTS TO DO IS DANCE (AND CREATE AMERICAN PENANCE): Obama’s Iran deal is a fraud top to bottom.

In exchange for vague promises, Obama has solved the Islamic Republic’s cash-flow problem by releasing unknown quantities of frozen assets. At least some of those assets took the form of hard cash flown to Tehran via Beirut in sealed safes, all in secret. Part of the cash, the Wall Street Journal revealed, appears to have been $400 million for the release of four hostages held by the mullahs — disregarding United States policy not to pay ransom. Iran wasted no time seizing six new American hostages.

 

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Watson correctly diagnoses woman after doctors were stumped. “After treatment for a woman suffering from leukemia proved ineffective, a team of Japanese doctors turned to IBM’s Watson for help, which was able to successfully determine that she actually suffered from a different, rare form of leukemia than the doctors had originally believed. Watson managed to make its diagnosis after doctors from the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Medical Science was fed it the patient’s genetic data, which was then compared to information from 20 million oncological studies. This analysis found a different diagnosis for the type of leukemia from which the patient suffered, and it suggested a different form of treatment, which proved far more effective than the original methods doctors had been using up to that point.”

I need a Larry Niven-style autodoc. And as soon as possible.

HEH:

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