WHY DOES NEWSWEEK HATE ITS CORE READERSHIP SO? White City: The New Urban Blight Is Rich People:

On the face of it, the New Urbanism is very pretty: Court Street in Brooklyn looks splendid, as does San Francisco’s Valencia Street. The aforementioned travel section of The New York Times has a column, called “Surfacing,” that frequently resorts to profiling some forlorn, blighted neighborhood suddenly graced by taxidermy shops that double as yoga studios. I am, as a matter of fact, writing this from a Whole Foods in West Berkeley, California, a formerly industrial district that was recently “Surfaced” in the Times. The coffee I am drinking was roasted about 20 feet away from my Apple laptop. How’s that for local?

Problem is, surfacing is usually whitening: Gentrification by any other name would taste as hoppy, with the same notes of citrus peel. There is really only one strike against the New Urbanism, but it’s a strike thrown by Nolan Ryan: It turns cities into playgrounds for moneyed, childless whites while pushing out the poor, the working-class, immigrants, seniors and anyone else not plugged into “the knowledge economy.” Right around the time that Michael Bloomberg was remaking Manhattan as a hive for stateless billionaires, I saw a slogan that captured perfectly the new glimmer of the city: “New York: If you can make it here, you probably have a trust fund.”

Marshall McLuhan called this one a half-century ago; in 1967, he told Tom Wolfe, ”Of course, a city like New York is obsolete. People will no longer concentrate in great urban centers for the purpose of work. New York will become a Disneyland, a pleasure dome…”

But why does Newsweek consider its core readers — however many remain — to be “blight?” Particularly when the author himself looks to be both white and doing his best to blend in with moneyed leftwing urban whites?

And note that Alexander Nazaryan is the same Newsweek author who in January compared Ted Cruz and his supporters to Nazis. That’s some seriously Mencken-esque pox-on-all-their-houses level misanthropy, though minus Mencken’s powerful writing chops, of course.

FAKE NEWS NOT PLAYING SO WELL: The Boston Globe sees itself broadly rebuked online for faux cover. I’m glad that this roundup quoted my reference to the Globe’s 2004 publication of fake photos that smeared U.S. troops as racists, and subsequent weaselly non-apology. Note that that fake-news effort also took place during an election year.

Related: Globe’s stunt could wind up being a big boon for Donald Trump.

Also: Howie Carr: Fake Front Shows Globe A Joke. Carr suggests some fake front pages for Hillary and Bernie, not that the Globe would ever do this to a Democrat.

ASHE SCHOW: Yet More Evidence That Hillary Clinton Is Out Of Touch.

Some politicians can appear to be in touch with young voters or average ones. Some seem neither “in touch” nor “out of touch.” But then there are those politicians who seem so out of touch that their attempts to seem like real people often blow up in their faces. Hillary Clinton is one of these politicians.

Clinton’s latest attempt to seem like a real person came Thursday when she rode the New York subway. Because she’s just like us, y’all, she was accompanied by security and campaign staff and members of the media, who captured her taking four tries to swipe her card and get through the turnstile. . . .

It wasn’t even Clinton’s only media gaffe of the day. Later, the Clinton campaign turned on a noise machine while she was giving a fundraising speech.

These are just the latest examples of Clinton’s war with Technology. She and Technology just don’t get along, and they haven’t for years. Maybe when she was younger she and Technology were friends, but the relationship has definitely soured in the past few decades. If Technology were using a dating app, it’d probably swipe left on Clinton.

We can go back to 1996 — the last time Clinton drove a car. Thursday’s trip was probably the first time she had ridden the subway since she boarded a train in 1992 while her husband Bill was running for president. Again, the media accompanied her, meaning Clinton may be the only person in the world who has never ridden the subway all by herself, outside of actual royalty.

She’s super-qualfied to be President, you guys. And she really gets the struggle of ordinary Americans.

MLK STATUE WEARING ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’ HAT CAUSES OUTRAGE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA.

Since college kids are now all-outrage all-the-time, on the college outrage meter does a baseball cap on a statue trump (pardon the pun) chalk on a sidewalk?

2016 BRINGS NEW MEANING TO THE PHRASE “RED QUEEN’S RACE:” Steve Green on “The Worst Candidate.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

THIS IS JUST EMBARRASSING: Law Professors Say Posting ‘All Lives Matter’ Flier Was ‘Incident Of Intolerance.’

ARTHUR BROOKS: Bipartisanship Isn’t For Wimps After All.

Let’s start by considering what has happened. First, the average American is becoming more ideologically predictable. A Pew Research Center study from 2014 shows that the share of Americans with “consistently conservative” or “consistently liberal” views has more than doubled in the last two decades to 21 percent from 10 percent.

Second, despite the talk about divisions within the Democrats and Republicans, both parties are becoming purer ideological vessels, rather than mixed coalitions that cover broad spectra. In 1994, nearly 40 percent of Republicans were more liberal than the median Democrat, and 30 percent of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican. Today, those numbers have plummeted to 8 percent and 6 percent.

Third, we also don’t like one another very much. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats have a “very unfavorable” view of Republicans, and 43 percent of Republicans hold that view of Democrats. About half of “consistently liberal” Americans say most of their friends share their views, and about a third say it’s important to live in a place where that is so. For those who are “consistently conservative,” these preferences are even more pronounced.

Furthermore, there is a Polarization Industrial Complex in American media today, which profits handsomely from the continuing climate of bitterness. Not surprisingly, polarization in the House and Senate is at its highest since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s.

Predictably, this polarization has led to significant political discrimination. A paper published last year in the American Journal of Political Science shows that discrimination against political opponents is real and pernicious.

The funny thing is that many years ago — long before I was born — the American Political Science Association called for more ideologically pure parties. As usual, when you listen to political scientists, the result is disaster.

REPORT: Clinton Campaign Panel Includes Controversial Muslim Leader Who Fingered Israel for 9/11 Attacks.

SCREAMING CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES DEMAND TO BE FED BY MOMMY: “A group called the Afrikan Black Coalition declared on its blog that [Ohio State University] officials were ‘starving’ protesters because they would not allow them to have food brought in the building.”

Related: “Anthropologists have apparently uncovered a university president who has a backbone, because he is threatening a mob of demanding student crybullies with expulsion: Ohio State’s Michael Drake…Here’s a 5-minute video of the announcement by university vice president Jay Kasey that the occupiers need to leave the building or be arrested and expelled.”

Faster, please.

SPY GAME: Top North Korean intelligence officer defected to South

The colonel, whose name was withheld by the South Korean government, worked for the North Korean military’s General Reconnaissance Bureau. The agency is believed to be behind two deadly attacks blamed on Pyongyang that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.

The General Reconnassance Bureau also deals in cyberwarfare, and it is widely suspected of being behind the 2014 hack attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the colonel is viewed as an elite member of North Korean society by other defectors from the Communist dictatorship.

“He is believed to have stated details about the bureau’s operations against South Korea to authorities here,” the agency quoted a source as saying.

That’s a rare coup for Seoul, and makes you wonder if Li’l Kim might be losing his grip.

POLITICIANS LIKE TO CUT RIBBONS AND AWARD NEW CONTRACTS. MAINTENANCE ISN’T SEXY. Michael Barone: The tragic deterioration of Washington’s Great Society Subway. “If government is what we decide to do together, Metro seemed to be government at its best. But after 40 years it has come to be government at its dreariest, with problems overlooked, maintenance deferred and safety scanted, by employees secure against discipline or dismissal and more concerned about overtime pay and pensions than serving the public. We have seen the same phenomenon across the country.”

At least its decline serves as an object lesson to the denizens of our capital city on how government really works. But there have been a lot of those object lessons, and they still don’t seem to have learned anything.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: America’s federal immigration system fails but one state succeeds.

EIGHT MORE OBAMACARE CO-OPS TO FAIL: By the end of 2016, odds are only one or two of the original 23 non-profit health insurance providers Obama promised would make for-profit insurers lower prices and improve services will still be around. And the price of this predictably failed experiment is $2.5 billion, plus an incalculable opportunity cost. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock has the details, as he has from the very beginning of the co-op epoch.

UNEXPECTEDLY:

● “Half of British Muslims want gay sex banned, says poll.”

No really, for some this news apparently was unexpected: “UK Equalities Chief Who Popularised The Term ‘Islamophobia’ Admits: ‘I Thought Muslims Would Blend into Britain… I Should Have Known Better.’”

Flashback: “Labour’s ‘secret plan’ to lure migrants — The Government has been accused of pursuing a secret policy of encouraging mass immigration for its own political ends.”

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: Subpoenaed Into Silence On Global Warming.

Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”

That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.

State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”

I have much more on this in my next USA Today column, including the suggestion that what they AG’s are doing may be a crime.

IF YOU’RE A LEFTIST, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS NO: Is government ever big enough?

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE HITLER FOR 15 MINUTES — AND THE FUTURE IS NOW! Trump’s new convention manager: Cruz is using “Gestapo tactics” to win delegates.

Which is an odd phrase for someone associated with a presidential candidate who’s been so heavily Godwinized himself in recent months.

SHOT: Cruz’s Methodical Delegate Strategy Narrows Trump’s Path To GOP Nomination.

Cruz picked up all 34 Republican National Convention delegates that Colorado Republicans awarded this week. Delegates backing Cruz won all three spots in each of the state’s seven congressional districts, as well as 13 statewide slots.

The Colorado win follows a similar outcome in North Dakota, where Republicans elected a mostly Cruz-approved slate of delegates at a state convention last week. Those two delegate hauls, along with more complex delegate maneuvering in states like Louisiana that had already held their primaries and caucuses, highlight a growing organizational gap between Cruz’s campaign and frontrunner Donald Trump’s.

CHASER:

8 years ago, there was a guy who understood his party's byzantine nom process better than his competitor.

Today, we call him Mr. President.

— Jay Cost (@JayCostTWS) April 3, 2016

We’ll see.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. #NeverTrump must become #NeverHillary.

BOSTON GLOBE PLAYS THE ONION: Offers Fake Sunday Front Page Mocking President Trump. “Can anyone imagine the outrage that liberal media pundits would have had if say, The New York Post or The Washington Times had created a fake page predicting that President Obama would force people off the insurance they wanted to keep, and food stamp use would soar by 70 percent? Imagine those complaints and transfer them to this: A serious newspaper doesn’t satirize the news. It leaves it to The Onion.”

In a 1974 episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on CBS, Mary, working late one night with Rhoda goading her on, writes a joke obit for Minneapolis’ oldest man – and Ted reads their obit on the air when, of course, the man dies soon afterwards. Lou threatens to suspend Mary, reminding her that “the news is sacred.” (Mind you that the real-life anchorman of CBS during this period Godwinned Barry Goldwater, lied about America losing the Tet Offensive and ran eco-crank stories about “global cooling.”)

Flash-forward to the 21st century, when any pretense that “the news is sacred” has long gone out the window, as the MSM are all but official Democratic Party operatives with bylines.   In September of 2004, Cronkite’s successor Dan Rather lied about George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record, and fellow anchormen Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings eagerly defended him in the last month of the presidential election. In 2005, the DNC-MSM invented the wildest lies about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina even though, as Vice Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile finally confessed in a 2013 column at CNN “Bush came through on Katrina.”

In 2008, the media lied endlessly about Obama, creating “The Wright-Free Zone” to airbrush away his racist mentor, and simultaneously comparing a failed community organizer turned Chicago machine hack to Lincoln, FDR, JFK – and God Himself. In 2012 Candy Crowley played blocking back to run interference on Obama’s behalf in his debate against Mitt Romney, and the entire MSM conspired to pretend that that Romney’s perfectly defensible 47 percent remark was somehow the end of the world. So no one should be surprised to see the Boston Globe, owned until 2013 by the New York Times, which invented the phrase “fake but accurate” in 2004 running fake news as a front page headline.

“Flashback: When Globe ran fake rape pics, smeared US troops, weaseled on apology,” Glenn tweeted yesterday, linking to this May of 2004 Insta-post.

Related: “Before Predicting the Future, Take a Closer Look at the Present,” the satiric People’s Cube Photoshop blog advises the Globe.

SHOCKER: BERNIE SANDERS IS A LYING POLITICIAN, TOO. Bernie Sanders’s False Claim That He Has Released His Full Federal Tax Returns.

DEGRADED AND ULTIMATELY DESTROYED: Islamic State recaptures key border stronghold from Syrian rebels.

The jihadists seized the Syrian border town of Rai, roughly two miles from the Turkish border in Syria’s Aleppo province, in a counterassault against rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The rebels had previously taken the town from the Islamic State on Thursday in what was hailed as a boost for U.S. and Turkish efforts to rout the extremists from Syrian territory along Turkey’s frontier.

Where is President Ash Carter when we need him most?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘This Thing Has Tentacles.’ “For two years, the former head men’s basketball coach at the University of Southern Mississippi directed his staff to complete the coursework of prospective athletes while they were still enrolled in junior colleges, the National Collegiate Athletic Association said Friday.”

It’s not possible to cabin this off as “just” an athletic scandal. These people all work for universities.

HOW THE FEDS UNCOVERED DENNIS HASTERT’S SORDID PAST.

JUST THE VULNERABILITY TO TERRORISM WOULD SEEM TO MAKE THIS A BAD IDEA:  WiFi-Connected, Autonomously Driven Trucks are Heading Our Way.