SPENGLER ON TED CRUZ: Our Last, Best Hope.
Archive for 2016
March 26, 2016
YES. Thomas Sowell asks, is Obama a socialist or a fascist?
Plus an approving shout-out to Jonah Goldberg’s must-read 2008 book Liberal Fascism, which was written with the assumption that Hillary was going to be the nominee, and offers a remarkable insight into her worldview and the milieu in which it was acquired.
YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: Black Women’s Caucus to Launch: Congressional group answers White House initiative focusing on men and boys.
Three Democratic House members are launching a new caucus specifically focused on issues affecting black women, saying that Congress “altogether ignores the systemic challenges they face.”
Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey, Robin Kelly of Illinois and Yvette D. Clarke of New York announced on Tuesday the launch of the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, calling it a long awaited answer to the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which focuses on black men and boys.
“From barriers in education, to a gender-based pay gap that widens with race, to disparities in both diagnoses and outcomes for many diseases, our society forces black women to clear many hurdles faced by no other group, and asks them to do it with little assistance,” Watson Coleman said in a news release. The group will launch formally on April 28 with a reception.
The #SheWoke Committee, a grassroots effort among seven national women activists focused on minority women issues, spurred the caucus’ creation in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death in July 2015 after her arrest for a minor traffic infraction in Texas.
The caucus is the answer that black women advocacy groups have been hoping for since My Brother’s Keeper launched in 2014.
While the White House Council on Women and Girls aims to incorporate women and girls of color into their initiative, Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program hit a nerve among minority women groups.
Advocacy groups argued that it was another way black women and girls were being excluded from policy issues. They pointed to the pay gap for black women, the increased number of black girls in juvenile confinement and the brutal treatment black women sometimes receive from police officers, which can include sexual assault.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director for the African American Policy Forum, was among the advocates in 2014 who criticized the Obama administration for excluding women and girls from My Brother’s Keeper. She said she remembers feeling shocked when the initiative was announced.
When victimhood is power, victim status must be heavily guarded.
SHOT: Leonardo DiCaprio: We Can’t Elect a Candidate Who Doesn’t Believe in Climate Change.
Chaser: Obama takes two Air Force One planes to Argentina for sightseeing.
I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who are telling me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves, to coin an Insta-phrase.
DROP THE HATE: Cruz campaign to Trump: Ever had a psych eval?
Sen. Ted Cruz’s White House campaign manager took to Twitter on Friday to attack Republican front-runner Donald Trump, calling him “Sleazy Donald” and questioning his mental health.
“Why no events in 4 days; none planned for 8,” Jeff Roe tweeted, mimicking Trump’s social media style. “Ever had psychological eval?” . . .
The tweet is the latest in an escalating feud between the two campaigns over attacks on the candidates’ wives and personal lives. Cruz has even blamed Trump for an article in the National Enquirer claiming he has had extramarital affairs.
Trump has not appeared in public since the feud began, with Cruz’s campaign accusing him of dodging questions about his new tactics of going after Cruz’s, Heidi.
Wow. And here’s my message to Republicans.
March 25, 2016
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Belgium, My Country, Is in Denial.
TWEET OF THE DAY:
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Was law school worth it? Only 20% of recent grads strongly agree, pilot study says.
LIFE IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION POLICE STATE: Professor Ordered To Apologize For Conservative Blog Post, Or Lose His Job.
UPDATE: Marquette Continues to Earn ‘Worst School’ for Free Speech Label With New Punishments for McAdams.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: How can you tell a civilization is dying? When they try to appease the Barbarians at the Gate.
YEAH, THAT’S THE TICKET: Muslim Congressman: Cruz, Trump Exploiting Brussels Attacks ‘to Make Electoral Gains.’
KEEP YOUR EARTHQUAKE PREP UP TO DATE: “Grim Seismic Scenario:” California’s ‘Big One’ Could Be Caused by 2 Faults Combining. But remember that there are faults outside California — the New Madrid is overdue, for example. Some earthquake-preparedness stuff is rounded up in this post. And I actually keep some supplies, and one of these, in a shed so that if the house is knocked down by a tornado or earthquake, they won’t be buried.
AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.
And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.
Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Or if a generator isn’t practical, consider an inverter.
Winter’s over. Now it’s time for spring and summer storms!
ICYMI: Obama Needs to Get Over His Self-Serving Guilt Trip: POTUS should read some honest, non-Leftist comparative history. I’m pretty sure he’s a Howard-Zinn-worldview-for-life kinda guy.
WHITE PRIVILEGE: WaPo seems surprised that people regard yoga in school as an Establishment Clause problem.
In my opinion, it’s cultural appropriation and otherizing not to perceive that this is religion.
Commenters pick up the cue and say things like “Georgia hicks object to ‘mindfulness.’ Why am I not surprised?”/”They opt for ‘mindlessness.'”
Wow. Double otherizing.
Watch their heads explode when you tell them that it started as a sex cult.
COLUMN: You Don’t Know Trump As Well As You Think:
Many commentators are convinced they know the real Donald Trump. He is, they think, so obviously shallow, insecure and garish that single descriptive words or phrases are all that is needed.
He is, take your pick: “the Last of the Great Vaudevillians,” the “king of bad taste in a country that loves bad taste,” a “comic-opera demagogue.” Or, more seriously, a “con artist,” “a fascist,” “the latest in a long line of demagogues,” or a “bullying thug.”
Most of these characterizations are little more than name-calling masquerading as analysis. . . .
Business conducted at his level of play requires ambition, risk-taking, resilience, and the capacity to fight back — just like national politics. Trump’s broadsides are a signal that if attacked, he will not go quietly into the night. And his outlandish policy perceptions like the mass deportation of illegal aliens and a possible trade war with China are best seen as reflecting the direction of his thinking– opening bids as it were, not deeply held and entrenched policy positions.
Empathy for the left out, ignored little guy? Trump has built his campaign on it. Ordinary Americans are looking for a fighter, someone who considers “cares about people like me” to mean that a candidate will fight for them. His reflects a much keener diagnosis of the public he hopes to lead than Jeb Bush’s idea of campaigning as a “joyful tortoise.”
Critics have conflated the by-products of Trump’s branding strategy with his character. He engineered a successful repositioning of his highly leveraged building empire to one increasingly built on his brand name. Big, bold, brash and successful are its sales themes.
Is there an element of hype in the pitch? Of course there is, and it carries over to his “Make America Great Again” theme. Yet note that the object of his ambitions is not himself, the mark of a true narcissist, but his country. And note too the word “again” that speaks to restoration and reform.”
I keep hearing this kind of thing from people who actually know Trump.
WHAT DO YOU CALL ONE MILLION TEXANS CARRYING GUNS? A good start.
HENRY MILLER: Drugs And The Democrats. “The Democratic campaign trail this political season has been replete with policy ‘solutions’ to the much-publicized spikes in the prices of a few drugs. These policy prescriptions are a doubling down on the kinds of government interventions that have made the current system slow, unwieldy, expensive—and sometimes, deadly.”
GIVE A PO’ MAN A BREAK: Palo Alto May Subsidize Housing for People Making Up To $250K: In other words: the richest 3% of Americans. Well, but they’re not the richest 3% in Silicon Valley. But trust the press not to notice that. Or the connection between extensive regulation and high housing prices.
And is there any news story that can’t be tagged with a Norman Cook song title? And can you believe that album is 20 years old?
CLOSE, BUT NO FLYING CAR: The quickest SUV Motor Trend has ever tested.
The Tesla Model X P90D in Ludicrous mode ripped its way to 60 mph in just 3.2 seconds and to the end of the quarter mile in 11.7 seconds at 116.0 mph. That beats out many high-performance SUVs including the 2015 BMW X6 M (3.7 sec; 12.1 sec @ 114.3 mph), the 2016 Mercedes-AMG GLE63 Coupe S (3.9 sec; 12.5 sec @ 110.5 mph), and both the 2015 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S and 2015 Porsche Macan Turbo (which posted nearly identical numbers of 4.2 sec; 12.9 sec @ 107.4 mph and 106.2 mph, respectively).
Nice — but that’s no SUV; it’s a crossover.
I DUNNO, I SAW 2001 AND THAT DIDN’T GO WELL: Machines Just Got Better at Lip Reading.
THE RISE OF THE SEX BUREAUCRACY. “We are living in a new sex bureaucracy. Saliently decriminalized in the past decades, sex has at the same time become accountable to bureaucracy. In this Article, we focus on higher education to tell the story of the sex bureaucracy. The story is about the steady expansion of regulatory concepts of sex discrimination and sexual violence to the point that the regulated area comes to encompass ordinary sex.” The Left ruins everything.