Archive for 2016
March 6, 2016
THE NEGLECTED ART OF overhead pressing.
POLITICIZED SCIENCE: When Biology Meets Ideology.
CLOTHES, TOYS AND MORE in the Amazon Easter Shop.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Health Benefits From Drinking Coffee.
NANCY REAGAN has died. She was 94.
NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: Ka’plah! You too can successfully play RPGs at a sci-fi or comic convention, human!
IN THE MAIL: Outdoor Life: Hunting & Gathering Survival Manual: 221 Primitive & Wilderness Survival Skills.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 71% Off “Pixels.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1032.
WARNING — WHAT IS SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN: Watch Hillary’s Embarrassing And Cringeworthy 1995 Parody of Forrest Gump (Video).
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The New SAT Won’t Work.
The College Board has set high expectations for the new test, which is supposed to track high school curricula more closely by scrapping sophisticated vocabulary, focusing more heavily on reading, and dispensing with difficult math puzzles. In his 2014 speech announcing the changes, and in a subsequent public relations campaign, College Board President David Coleman presented the reforms as a social justice cause. The new SAT would be less convoluted, more difficult for rich kids to cram for with expensive tutors, and level the playing field for minorities and low-income students. Coleman even brought the historian Robert Caro on the stage to read a passage from his book about Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts—a not-so-subtle suggestion that changing the SAT would similarly expand opportunity for those at the bottom of the ladder.
It was not quite clear then how this was supposed to work (Can’t rich kids hire tutors for the new version of the test, too? If the tough questions are scrubbed from the test, won’t it lose its utility for colleges trying to assess applicants’ academic ability?) and it is still not clear today, on the eve of the new test’s debut. . . .
As we’ve written before, “We have the terms ‘privileged’ and ‘disadvantaged’ for a reason: Some people are born into more fortunate circumstances than others. Tinkering with the SAT won’t change this fundamental fact of life.” The College Board should do everything in its power to make the SAT as fair and predictive as possible. But it was probably a mistake—and a distraction from other, more important efforts—for the test-maker to create the expectation that its revamped exam would deal a major blow to socioeconomic inequality in America.
You want to reduce inequality? Make success less contingent on attending expensive institutions.
CLAUDIA ROSETT ON YOUR TAX DOLLARS AND UNRWA’S LOBBYING SHOP IN WASHINGTON:
You remember UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a.k.a. the UN outfit with schools in Gaza that have doubled as rocket depots for terrorists attacking Israel. Opened in 1950 as a temporary jobs and aid program for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has become an ever-expanding fixture of the UN and the Middle East, a de facto patron of Hamas in Gaza, and welfare-dispenser for what is today a population of some 5 million “registered Palestinian refugees” — a project that down the generations has helped foster both a Palestinian culture of grievance and dependency, and money and jobs for UNRWA itself.
Read the whole thing.
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SCOTT GERBER: Clarence Thomas’ views to loom larger at Supreme Court following Scalia’s death.
What has gone unmentioned to date, however, is that Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia did not share the same interpretive approach in one major category of constitutional law: civil rights. As the recent tributes to Justice Scalia have made clear, Justice Scalia was the pre-eminent figure in American law on the conservative strand of originalism that Mr. Liptak’s quote describes. But Justice Thomas is not a conservative originalist on civil rights questions. Rather, he is what has come to be known as a “liberal originalist:” an originalist who places the libertarian political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence at the heart of the American conception of civil rights.
Although Justices Thomas and Scalia tended to vote together in civil rights cases, Justice Scalia declined to sign on to those portions of Justice Thomas’ opinions that invoked the Declaration of Independence as the rule of decision.
I’m a fan of the Declaration as a source of interpretive principles, and so were the Framers. Just read Story’s Commentaries on this.
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Here’s why libs will consider $200 million DC Streetcar a huge success even if it isn’t.
SPRINGTIME FOR DONALD IN FLORIDA; Trumpland is happy and gay!
A week ago, Jimmy Kimmel pressed Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane into service to revive their Bialystok and Bloom characters from the Broadway and film remake of The Producers in search of the next big not a chance it can succeed effort:
Yesterday, this photo made the rounds on Twitter after a Trump rally in Orlando, Florida:
As Twitchy notes, “Donald Trump’s voter pledge is a news photographer’s dream.” In asking his supporters to raise their right hands and pledge they’d vote for him in the Florida primary, Trump had to know he was creating a photo op where the cameraman in the back of the room could compose a shot that implies every Fuhrerprinzip cliché that Kimmel, the Washington Post, Louis CK and numerous others have been throwing at The Donald in recent weeks.
As Iowahawk describes the image, it’s perhaps the first “Self-Godwinization” in presidential history. Of course, as with his quoting the line “better to live one single day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep,” which turns out not to originate with Mussolini but predates his rise to power, Trump can point to how Americans pledged allegiance to the flag prior to WWII, so there’s plausible deniability – but c’mon. Trump knew just such a photo would go viral on Twitter, and is likely thrilled that it did.
CHANGE: Conservatives wonder what’s worse: The establishment or Trump?
Republican grassroots leaders and members of Congress attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are torn between their suspicions about Donald Trump’s conservative bona fides and their desire to burn down the party establishment that is frantically trying to block the billionaire’s path to the nomination.
Trump — who dramatically dropped out of CPAC on Friday afternoon, earning a stern rebuke from the conference conveners — had scarcely been mentioned in the formal speeches at CPAC.
But in private conversations held in the corridors, cafes and restaurants at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center, the bombastic billionaire, who leads the Republican race for president, was the near-universal topic of conversation.
“I’ve heard a lot of delegate math theories” to stop Trump, said Shaun McCutcheon, a well-known Republican donor and Trump backer.
“I don’t see anything stopping us,” said McCutcheon, who brought the McCutcheon v. FEC case to the Supreme Court that overturned major campaign funding limits.
McCutcheon, like many others at the convention, is “infuriated” by the GOP establishment’s increasingly desperate efforts to stop Trump.
“These other guys are making fools of themselves,” he said. “I poured my heart into Romney in the last election and he just needs to stay out of it. It’s time for somebody else to do it. I just thought it was tacky and it was real poorly done.”
The dominant feeling about Trump among the conservative leaders, activists, media personalities and members of Congress interviewed by The Hill was one of caution about the sudden and frantic turn by Republican leaders and the party’s donor class to take down Trump.
There are widespread suspicions among CPAC attendees that Trump cannot be trusted to uphold conservative principles.
Driving all of this is that people busted their asses to elect GOP majorities in 2010 and 2014, and felt like they didn’t get much of anything out of that.
CIVILIZATION RESTORED; THE BIKE PATH LEFT’S LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER: “‘Definitely our mistake’: Whole Foods pulls pre-peeled oranges from the shelves after being hammered on Twitter. Whole Foods has pulled controversial pre-peeled oranges from the shelves.”
Yes, in 2016, as ISIS over-runs the Middle East and Islamic “immigrants” descend upon Europe, a human being actually wrote the words “controversial pre-peeled oranges” and placed them into a sentence. This wasn’t the 21st century I was promised.
(Classical reference in headline.)
HOW JOE BIDEN BROKE THE SUPREME COURT.
Though the man sitting next to him in the photo atop Jonathan Tobin’s Commentary article deserves plenty of blame as well.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Yes, There Will Be a Downturn. No, You Shouldn’t Freak Out. Here’s Why.