Archive for 2016
January 18, 2016
THANKS FOR FIGHTING FOR AMERICA, VETERAN. WANT TO CLEAN VA TOILETS?: That’s often VA’s message to vets seeking jobs in the department. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak “scraped” thousands of VA job vacancy announcements and found menial janitorial duties were most frequently offered to vets:
“The VA is currently advertising for 3,000 positions, some seeking multiple people each. Only about 50 job ads, seeking an estimated few hundred workers, are accepting applications exclusively from veterans. And of those, all but a handful would have a returning hero trade a rifle for a mop and $13 an hour. At the same time, more than a thousand vacancies, many with no highly specialized skills required, were being advertised as open only to current civil servants.”
It’s mainly a result of VA’s collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees labor organization, which, as Rosiak previously reported, puts current union members first in line for open positions. And then we wonder why VA so often seems not to give a rat’s patooty about America’s returning heroes?
THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNISM.
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HENCHMAN TO HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER: Jimmy Carter’s former chief speechwriter James Fallow has a new obsession — banning the gas-powered leaf blower.
Fight the power!
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t be fooled by Bernie Sanders — he’s a diehard communist.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The biggest story in America today is the roaring return of Andrew Jackson’s spirit into the political debate. “Jacksonian populism, the sense of honor-driven egalitarianism and fiery nationalism that drove American politics for many years, has never been hated and reviled as often as it is today, and many American academics and intellectuals (to say nothing of Hollywood icons) are close to demanding that Jacksonian sentiment be redefined as a hate crime.” Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that.
IS 23-CENTS-AN-HOUR CHEAP LABOR OR SLAVE LABOR? That’s the minimum wage in the African nation of Ghana and it’s why long-time Clinton confidant Cheryl Mills thinks investors should invest in that nation’s textile industry. Her firm, BlackIvy LLC, was established after she and Hillary Clinton left the State Department in 2013 and specializes in consulting work in West African nations. Talk about cheap labor? That ought to devastate what’s left of the textile industry here in the U.S. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has the rest of the story.
ASHE SCHOW: California colleges to make proving innocence a punishable offense.
Advocates for due process knew this day was coming. We knew that one day colleges would notice that there was only one way for students accused of sexual assault would be able to defend themselves and that the colleges would make that defense itself a violation of policy.
Of course the new policy is coming out of California, which led the way in inserting campus bureaucrats into the bedroom with its “affirmative consent” policies. These policies mandate how students must engage in sexual activity – not as a passionate act but as a contractual question-and-answer session. The only way to prove one followed such a policy is to videotape the encounter, but now, California colleges are making such recordings a violation of school policy.
Due process advocates knew that one day a student would try to record an encounter to retain evidence that he obtained sober consent. We also knew that if an accuser claimed she was too drunk to consent to sex, someone would make the argument that she must have also been too drunk to consent to a recording. And that’s where the new policy comes in.
In a Q&A with the University of California’s daily newspaper, the Daily Bruin, Title IX officer Kathleen Salvaty said students could be expelled for recording sexual encounters without consent.
You can’t make this stuff up.
OBAMA — STILL POLARIZING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, writes Victor Davis Hanson, with a detail that should have gotten much wider play last week:
Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him. Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?
A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?
Read the whole thing.
VDH naturally asks how the media would have responded if GWB had invited a figure this polarizing to the White House, but the current president’s own history is also telling. Recall that in January of 2011 after the Tucson shooting, “Obama [Called] for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics,” as the New York Times described his widely praised speech. Jared Lee Loughner severely wounded a congresswoman, killed or wounded 17 others — and killed a federal judge. And last week, Obama met with someone whose album cover features an image of a judge who had just been murdered. And a media that was once utterly obsessed over “eliminationist rhetoric” and bulls-eye clip-art didn’t lose a moment of sleep.
As Jonah Goldberg once said of the DNC-MSM, “To Hell With You People.”
HE’S NOT LIKABLE ENOUGH: Why Obama Has So Few Friends On Capitol Hill.
PATRICIA MURPHY: Hillary, Please Leave Bill at Home.
Take your husband to work day has taken a turn for the worse in Hillary Clinton’s world. Having Bill around used to seem like such a good thing. He survived scandal with high approval ratings and after leaving the White House, went on to create a foundation that did good things for needy people all around the world. Bypass surgery and grandfather-hood made him all the more human. Republicans such as George H.W. Bush grew to love him, while Democrats embraced him as the “explainer in chief.” What wasn’t to love?
Donald Trump changed all that when he attacked Bill Clinton as “one of the great woman abusers of all time.” And with that, he broke the seal on the long dormant Clintonian ick that polite political society had locked away in a vault, never to be exhumed until the 42nd president’s obituaries are written to include the whole unpleasant sideshow.
Smart move by Trump. Plus:
Making other people look good is not Bill Clinton’s jam.
As far back his first term in the White House, Democrats suffered catastrophic losses in the 1994 midterm elections — losing 54 House seats, eight Senate seats and 10 governors mansions. Two years later, Clinton won re-election, but his fellow Democrats weren’t all so lucky. They picked up two House seats, but also lost two Senate seats. In Arkansas, Clinton’s successor as governor was forced to resign after a Whitewater- related felony conviction. Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Huckabee became governor instead.
By 2000, after the Monica Lewinsky affair and a disastrous impeachment effort from Republicans, Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, lost his own bid for the White House, even as Bill Clinton rode into the sunset with 70-plus percent approval ratings. He entered private life, but continued to joyously campaign for Democrats across the country whenever they called. The love was rarely transferable.
In 2008, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, her campaign dispatched her husband to reach voters they worried wouldn’t go for Hillary without a nudge from Bill. But in state after state where Bubba was supposed to be the secret weapon (think the entire Deep South) his wife lost — by a lot.
His latest bust was in 2014, when a slew of former Clinton associates, all Democrats, were on the ballot in Arkansas. His former driver was running for governor. His political mentor’s son was up for re-election to the Senate. His old Federal Emergency Management Agency chief was running for House, as was one of his earliest supporters for president. He went on eight “Billgramages” to Arkansas to campaign for the ticket, only for them all to lose by 10 points or more.
Ouch.
ANDREA MITCHELL’S Two Decades of Spinning the News Hillary’s Way.
OBAMA’S NEW, NEW!, NEW!!, NEW!!!, NEW!!!! WAR ON CANCER: ICYMI, Nixon started giving cancer the Apollo treatment in 1971.
Easy to get the two confused, of course.
ROGER SIMON: How Would Dr. King Have Felt about ‘Black Lives Matter’?
Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday for all of us to celebrate, so I am going to go for it — and, not just because, once upon a time, I was a civil rights worker. That was 1966, fifty years ago now, when I was living in a Sumter, South Carolina, house belonging to the very MLK’s cousin, the mortician for that small city’s black population who was extremely gracious to my then-wife and me. We were young Northern grad students there registering voters, teaching black history to African-American children, directing those kids in what was undoubtedly the first local production of A Raisin in the Sun and helping to integrate public facilities that were still Jim Crow.
So it should come as no surprise that Dr. King has meant a lot to me — emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Of all the ghastly political assassinations of my youth — JFK, RFK and MLK — King’s was the one that affected me most deeply by far. I remember dropping to my knees and sobbing the moment I heard about it.
You may already suspect I believe Dr. King would not have taken so kindly to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, that he more likely would have avowed, unlike the cowardly Martin O’Malley, that “All Lives Matter.” If you don’t agree with that, consider these words from King’s most famous speech — in fact the most famous American speech since the “Gettysburg Address”:
Read the whole thing.
TIME TO BUY POPCORN: In primary challenge, Wasserman Schultz faces unprecedented test.
For Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the problems with the left just keep coming.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) chief has infuriated many Democrats with her handling of the party’s presidential primary debates. She drew further howls from liberals for deeming a whole generation of young women “complacent” about their abortion freedoms.
And now she’s facing a primary challenge from a liberal Wall Street reformer who says she’s a corporate shill detached from her district.
The challenge highlights the difficulty facing Wasserman Schultz as she juggles her dual roles as Florida representative and head of the DNC — duties that sometimes come into conflict.
Timothy Canova, a professor at the Shepard Broad College of Law in Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, says Wasserman Schultz’s positions on trade, criminal justice, consumer protection and drug policy reform — among others — are evidence that she’s sold out to corporate interests at the expense of her constituents.
It marks the first primary challenge to Wasserman Schultz since her arrival on Capitol Hill in 2005.
Canova launched his bid last week on a platform that pulls more than a few pages from that of populist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the Democratic presidential hopeful who’s waged a surprisingly strong challenge to front-runner Hillary Clinton by attacking from the left.
HEH.
IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? Salena Zito charts the Obama economy and notes that “Among the many things” Obama mocked in his State of the Union address was “anyone who denies that he led a national economic resurgence:”
“Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” he said. He shamelessly went on to embellish statistics, claiming 14 million new jobs, including 900,000 manufacturing jobs.
Afterward, FactCheck.orgshowed that it’s more like 9 million jobs, many of them lower-paying service jobs. And, over Obama’s time in office, manufacturing jobs have plummeted by 230,000.
In short, if you “made” something in the Obama economy, you lost your job; if you “served” someone, you got a job — but probably needed two, so you could make ends meet.
In the Obama economy, wages have not improved; in fact, they have created great unease and not inspired the confidence Americans once had in work — which is why the president has responded by pushing higher wages for service jobs once meant to be temporary bridges from high school and college to adult life.
Which has consequences among employers as well, as Christine Rousselle writes at Townhall: “Walmart Cancels Plans for Two DC Stores Due to Minimum Wage Concerns.”
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Marc Rich continues to pay big.
Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”
Congressman Barney Frank added, “It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified. It was contemptuous.”
Loyalty and principle have never been a Clintonian hallmark.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: A post-Christian era has dawned in Britain, with most white Britons now saying they have no religion, according to a new survey.
Related: More people in Europe are dying than are being born:
“Natural decrease is much more common in Europe than in the U.S because its population is older, fertility rates are lower and there are fewer women of child-bearing age,” Poston and his colleagues explain. “Natural decrease is a major policy concern because it drains the demographic resilience from a region diminishing its economic viability and competitiveness.”
See also: Japan.
BERNIE MOPPED THE FLOOR WITH HILLARY in last night’s little-watched blue-on-blue debate on public access TV, John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post:
She also had a genuinely creepy, Michael-Corleone-in-“Godfather 2” moment when she basically said “we’re both part of the same hypocrisy” after the third man in the debate, Martin O’Malley, criticized her for raising money on Wall Street.
She really doesn’t have a choice but to position herself as the insider’s insider, really, though she could do it more artfully. She talked about how O’Malley had gotten Wall Street donations when he was head of the Democratic Governors Association. “Well,” O’Malley replied, “I’m not getting them now.”
And we know Sanders isn’t. His issue set is simple. The rich should be soaked, health care should be single-payer and banks are screwing you. The reason good things don’t happen, in his view, is that rich people control politics through our campaign-finance system.
He’s not compelled to deliver the coup de grace — which is that Clinton’s career is simply another manifestation of the ailment plaguing America — because it is ragingly obvious.
Instead, he mentioned Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street financial firm, twice — to make the point that both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations had a Goldman Sachs alum as treasury secretary.
And of course Hillary Clinton took hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from the firm, which makes it difficult for her to stage a counterattack on the point.
Well, yes.
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE: Why ‘invisible effects’ are Hollywood’s best kept secret.
AT LEAST THEY’RE NOT AFRAID OF WORDS: Extremist groups must be allowed to preach on British campuses, new Oxford head says. Of course I worry the students won’t hear any pro-western view points, but that’s something else.