Archive for 2016
February 8, 2016
DEAD BROKE: “Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.”
FORMER YALE ADMISSIONS OFFICER REVEALS SECRETS OF WHO GETS IN:
The applicants were an impressive lot. A girl wrote a brilliant feminist essay — worthy of Harper’s, really — about gender and socialization, revealing that she was a phantom serial farter in public and yet no one ever suspected because of her gender.
An aspiring art major sent in a dazzling, poster-size pen-and-ink drawing of himself suspended high over the campus on a pair of gymnastic rings, his body forming a perfect Y for Yale. A Vietnamese refugee wrote about finding solace in a school in Nebraska after a near-death experience as a “boat person” when she was 6 years old. They all waltzed into the freshman class.
Being too clever could backfire.
A self-saboteur from Chicago wrote her essay about her fear of going to the dentist — in backward letters, colored pen, and a spiral “Yellow Brick Road” pattern; not the kind of thing you want to tackle in a mirror at midnight.
* * * * * * *
It was the kiss of death when the daughter of a prominent alum from Columbus, Ohio, “discovered” she was one-sixteenth American Indian and checked the box for Native American.
Yeah, that’s strictly a Harvard stunt.
GOSH, WITH SUCH FRAGILE DECISION-MAKING SKILLS, MAYBE IT WAS A MISTAKE TO GIVE THEM THE VOTE: Feminist Gloria Steinem says young women support Bernie because they want attention from boys.
NEW YORK POST DUBS DE BLASIO “MAYOR PUTZ:” “New Yorkers see a deterioration in public spaces, an explosion of disheveled vagrants and have a growing belief that the mayor isn’t as committed to fixing those things as he should be. After last week, it is impossible to argue that they are wrong.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON HILLARY AND THE SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF.
At this point, what difference does it make?
BILL CLINTON UNLOADS ON BERNIE SANDERS:
For weeks, former president Bill Clinton has been the doomsday device of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — a mighty weapon capable of doing great good or harm to her campaign — so held in reserve until absolutely needed.
Now, as Hillary Clinton — who barely won the Iowa caucus last week — seeks to seize momentum from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his own backyard days ahead of the New Hampshire primary, that moment of truth has come. The former president, uncharacteristically quiet in recent weeks even as Republican contender Donald Trump called him “an abuser,” struck out at Sanders Sunday, according to reports from Bloomberg, Politico and the New York Times, while campaigning for his wife in New Hampshire, leveling charges that the senator is hypocritical and that some of his followers are sexist.
The former president appeared to get the most mileage out of his criticism of “Bernie Bros” — the name given to some supposed young male supporters of the Vermont senator. Bill Clinton did not use the term — but he offered quite the critique. As Politico noted, Clinton accused these people, some of whom have been denounced by Sanders, of sexist behavior online.
That last line is rich with irony — but so is the entire story. Bill Clinton never wavered in his support of President Obama, even as Obama moved their party hard to the left, undoing virtually all of Clinton’s policies from the ’90s. Hillary has been forced to embrace those policies, but not even she can move far enough left to thwart the avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders.
The Sanders candidacy is the inevitable result of the Obama presidency, which the Clintons helped to advance every step of the way since Obama’s coronation in Denver eight years ago.
Much like Hillary has always enabled Bill’s sexual appetites, Hillary now risks being denied her own coronation — after spending eight years enabling the machinations of a far-left President.
REMEMBER WHEN OBAMA WAS GOING TO GET ALONG WITH THE EUROPEANS, UNLIKE THAT DUMB COWBOY BUSH? Distrust of US surveillance threatens data deal.
European privacy regulators are putting U.S. surveillance practices under the microscope, this time with a crucial transatlantic data deal hanging in the balance.
Legal and privacy advocates say European nations are poised to strike down the deal if they decide the U.S. hasn’t done enough to reform its spying programs.
The new test comes after the European Commission and the Commerce Department — after months of tense negotiations — reached a deal this week permitting Facebook, Google and thousands of other companies to continue legally handling Europeans’ personal data.
Critics though have long warned that unless the U.S. overhauls its privacy and national security laws, there is no legal framework that can stand up in European court, where privacy is considered a fundamental right under the EU Charter.
The joke, of course, is that the Euros are doing just as much spying.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Pentagon orders commanders to prioritize climate change in all military actions.
Earlier: Obama Spares ISIS Oil Facilities to Save the Earth.
As Glenn suggested last week, “Republicans should add a rider cutting limiting Presidential use of Air Force One to a single trip per month, effective immediately. For the environment!”
Yes, help save Gaia by breaking the president’s painful addiction to binge flying!
WHY RAND PAUL SUPPORTERS SHOULD RESIST THE #FEELTHEBERN CALLS: “Granted, he wants free health care, free day care, free college tuition, and free scoops of Ben and Jerry’s. But hey, nobody’s perfect.”
JUST NBC THE DOUBLE STANDARD: SNL Mocks Ted Cruz’s 5-Year-Old Daughter.
Earlier: In a 1992 “Wayne’s World” sketch on Saturday Night Live, “the characters Wayne and Garth (portrayed by Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, respectively) made fun of Chelsea Clinton (the then 12-year-old daughter of the then President-elect Bill Clinton), implying that Chelsea was incapable of causing males to ‘Schwing!’. This joke was subsequently edited out of all repeats and syndication rebroadcasts of this sketch, and Myers even wrote an apology letter to the White House.”
And in 2008, then-MSNBC anchor David Shuster was suspended “for suggesting the Clinton campaign had ‘pimped out'” then-27-year old Chelsea Clinton “by having her place phone calls to celebrities and Democratic Party ‘superdelegates’ on her mother’s behalf,” as the New York Daily News reported in 2008.
THIS IS SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT, ACTUALLY, NOT JUST TO DERIDE: Joel Kotkin: Millennials heed the siren call of socialism.
The biggest story this election season is not Donald Trump or the fortunes of the two winners in Iowa, the unattractive tag team of Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. For all their attempts to seem current and contemporary, these candidates – and Trump as well – represent older, more established elements in American life, such as evangelicals, nativists and, in Hillary’s case, the ranks of middle-age women, seniors and public-sector unions.
The biggest and most important development has been the massive support among the new generation of voters for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his open embrace of socialism. In Iowa’s Democratic caucuses, which ended with Clinton and Sanders in a virtual tie, young people opted for Sanders at an almost inconceivable rate of 84-14. In 2008, Barack Obama won this segment, claiming only a 57 percent majority.
So we are seeing the embrace of an openly socialist septuagenarian by a generation that, within a decade, will dominate our electorate and outnumber baby boomers as soon as 2020. That should put more conventional politicians, and business, on notice. Whether you are a Republican, a free-marketer or, even a Democratic-leaning crony capitalist, be afraid – be very afraid.
For the first time since labor leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs in the early 20th century, Americans are flocking in big numbers to a politician who rejects the efficacy of capitalism and seeks to create a new, notionally fairer, system. Now, as then, the reason to support socialist ideas – some of which were implemented during the New Deal – lies with the palpable failures of capitalism. Polls of millennials show consistently that economic issues, such as jobs and college debt, are their dominant concerns.
Well, decades of long-marching through the institutions are bearing fruit for the left. Time for a counterassault.
CNN-WMUR POLL: Sanders up in New Hampshire by eight points – with female voters.
While many older women’s rights advocates see the election of Clinton as the next logical step in a broader movement, some younger activists have expressed resentment at the notion that they should feel obligated to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Some have argued in recent months that Sanders, with his calls to end income inequality and make college free, is arguably the more feminist candidate.
Strong, independent women looking for free stuff from an old white man.
Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.
In total, the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of $210,795 for each address. The two also reported at least $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, collecting at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks.
Scott Johnson comments: “There’s a joke in there somewhere — probably more than one — but I am afraid the big joke is on us.”
BRENDAN O’NEILL ON THE TROUBLE WITH ‘RACIAL AWARENESS’ ON CAMPUS:
Ultimately I find these new campus movements profoundly pessimistic. They’ve accepted the reactionary view that it’s not only possible but desirable to categorize people by color and — as a corollary — that genuine integration is futile.
And thus, a century later, “Progressivism” returns to its roots. Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson would approve.
WAR ON COLLEGE MEN, WASHINGTON & LEE UNIVERSITY EDITION: W&L settles lawsuit by student expelled for alleged sexual assault.
Both sides are asking Judge Norman Moon to dismiss the case. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Last April, Moon denied a motion by the university to throw the case out, saying that the allegations made in the lawsuit, if “taken as true, suggest that W&L’s disciplinary procedures, at least when it comes to charges of sexual misconduct, amount to a practice of railroading accused students.”
In a statement posted Friday on its website, W&L defended its in-house judicial system as “fair and equitable.”
Doe’s lawsuit asserted that the odds were stacked against him during a hearing before the Student Faculty Hearing Board — a process that he argued was slanted to favor female accusers over male defendants.
For one thing, he claimed, a university administrator who handled the investigation in November 2014 recently had given a talk on campus about “regret equals rape,” or the argument that what first passes for a consensual sexual experience later can be called a rape by a woman who has second thoughts.
Doe’s alleged victim heard those comments, the lawsuit alleged, and was influenced by them in her decision to bring charges seven months after their sexual encounter.
And in alleging a rush to judgment by the disciplinary board, Doe pointed out that the decision to expel him was made one day after the publication of a Rolling Stone story — since discredited — about an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house. The article prompted a national outcry against what it portrayed as UVa’s culture of indifference to rape victims.
“The negative impact of the Rolling Stone article on UVa influenced W&L’s decision to find the plaintiff responsible for sexual assault so as to avoid a similar fate,” the lawsuit alleged.
My advice to young men: Avoid Washington & Lee University, which can’t be trusted to treat you fairly.
SHE ONLY HAS TO DO IT NINE MORE MONTHS: Hillary can’t dodge Goldman Sachs questions forever.
IT’S TIME FOR DC TO: Rep. Dave Brat: ‘The American people are waking up’.
OH, HAI SHOCKED FACE, I HADN’T SEEN YOU TODAY YET: Obama bullied bank to pay racial settlement without proof: report.
WINNING THE FUTURE, OSCARS? This year’s Oscars swag bag includes $275 toilet paper.
WHEN HILLARY GIVES THOSE SPEECHES TO GOLDMAN-SACHS, DOES SHE ADDRESS SEXISM? Trader exposes sexist horrors of the Wall Street ‘frat house’.
MORE DOUBLE STANDARDS: Did Amy Schumer Get a Pass for Stealing Jokes because She’s a Woman?
HOW THIS ADMINISTRATION PLAYS THE NUMBERS: Why January is always a bad month for job growth.
What did the seasonal adjustments do to the January gain? If you look at the raw data provided deep inside the Labor Department’s Web site, you’ll see that there were 141.123 million jobs in the US in January compared with 144.112 million in December.