THANKS TO MERKEL’S PRIORITIZATION OF VIRTUE-SIGNALING OVER POLICY, THIS MAY WELL BE THE FUTURE OF GERMAN POLITICS: A Guide To Germany’s “Far-Right” AfD Party.
Archive for 2016
April 30, 2016
DISPATCHES FROM THE JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE, AIRSTRIP ONE DIVISION: U.K. Considering Regulating Ads to Make Sure the Women In Them Aren’t Too Hot.
BLOOMBERG: ‘Yahoo, when looked at in a certain way, is worth approximately -$8 billion. The minus sign above isn’t a typo.”
IS THIS THE ONLY FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED HOUSING PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS? It’s in Delaware and it turns hundreds of subsidy receivers into independent, working, productive citizens. It’s called “Moving to Work” and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group found it.
“’Before we started Moving to Work, we had people who were on their third or fourth generation of the same family who were at the same site,’ Rebecca Kauffman, social service senior administrator at the Delaware Housing Authority’s Moving to Work program, told The Daily Caller News Foundation,” Watson reports.
“More than 850 families have completed the program to enter assistance-free living, and 30 percent of program participants became homeowners when they left,” according to Watson. Key to the program’s success is putting a time-limit on how long people can live in subsidized housing, and requiring them to work an increasing number of hours during their tenure.
The Delaware program is one of only 39 pubic housing authorities in the country that doesn’t allow tenants to remain in subsidized housing permanently. There are more than 3,000 pubic housing authorities in the country. Moving to Work was created as an experiment during the Clinton administration. Ya think it might be time to expand it?
IN THE MAIL: Charisma: How To Be Charismatic And How To Be Charming Using Science.
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ELIANA JOHNSON: The Path To Mike Pence’s Halfhearted Endorsement.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1087.
To gauge from the suggested names, the British public does not share the scientific community’s enthusiasm for this latest bout of government spending. True, some 2,400 voted to name the vessel RRS Henry Worsley, after a British explorer who died in January attempting the first unaided solo crossing of the Antarctic. And RRS David Attenborough, after the celebrated British naturalist, also made the short list.
However, both were blown away by the flood of votes for RRS Boaty McBoatface, which garnered 124,000 votes, four times that of the next-closest contender.
Related: Austin School Asks for New Name, the Internet Answers ‘Schoolie McSchoolface.’
WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT: German Right-Wing Party to Adopt Anti-Islam Manifesto.
Germany’s growing far-right party is likely to adopt a platform that calls for the banning of Islamic practices from public life. . . .
There are obvious parallels in the 2009 Swiss decision to ban minarets and the 2010 French ban on the veil. However, taken together, this is one of the more full-throated rejections of Islam to emerge from European politics. And unlike, for example, the French decision, it does not appear to be part of a broader, equally enforced tradition of laïcité in public life; this appears to be a forthrightly anti-Islamic manifesto.
To paraphrase Joseph Fouché (Napoleon’s chief of police), adopting this wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be a blunder. It’s hard to think of a series of steps that would more antagonize and alienate the refugee/migrant population, however you feel about the circumstances in which they arrived, from their new homeland, while delivering little practical gain.
Yet when responsible politicians fail to take responsible steps to keep immigration and integration within the bounds of public opinion, inevitably irresponsible people will advocate irresponsible measures. And while the AfD is not challenging the centrist parties in Germany for dominance yet, in other places in Europe that’s not true.
Stay tuned.
WHAT’S REALLY DRIVING THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS:
Again and again, progressives find the realities of the human body unbearable and demand that we collectively stick our heads in the sand rather than acknowledge truths that have been obvious for centuries. They seem desperate to free themselves from this mortal coil. Of course, they’d prefer to do it in a way that doesn’t involve dying.
Why do liberals hate bodies so much? It’s understandable when we consider how ill-suited the body is to progressive ideology. In the first place, bodies are dreadfully inegalitarian. However energetically we promote genetic counseling and prenatal vitamins, the reality remains that some people are born healthy, strong, and beautiful, while others are sickly, weak, and unattractive. Men on balance are taller, stronger, and faster than women. White men can’t jump. Liberals might ardently desire a “level playing field,” but in their efforts to realize it, they continually butt heads with the warm, fleshy reality that is the human body.
Having to constantly wage war against reality is exhausting, which helps to explain why liberals are so insecure and miserable, to slightly invert the headline on a new post by Steve Hayward at Power Line. Hayward quotes a 1972 essay by the Claremont Institute’s Harry Jaffa:
But that the laws of nature do exist, and that we are bound by them because they are, not the ideals of men, but the reality of a purposeful universe, and that human freedom is a freedom to disregard such laws only at our cost, seems to be taken seriously almost nowhere. The emancipation of Western man by technology from the necessities of nature has led to a loss of consciousness of the goodness that those necessities serve. As the old struggle for survival has, through the equivocal beneficence of technology, receded into the background of daily existence, the uses of leisure have become mysterious. Never has a whole society enjoyed such wealth as has the United States, and this wealth has increasingly become the share of Western Europe, Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Japan, and to a degree even some of the communist states. Wealth, properly understood, is the instrument of freedom and of happiness, and in the past freedom has always been seen as an oasis in the desert of necessity. But as the desert blooms, we do not see the enlargement of the oasis. Instead, as the desert disappears, so does the oasis, and we fail to comprehend the uses of the garden that blooms in their place. Apparently, if you do not worry about surviving, then you do worry about whether it is worth surviving*. And so, what is perhaps the most privileged class in the entire history of the human race, that of the Harvard College student, is among the most miserable!
The left has always been looking to engineer “The New Man” ever since the days of Nietzsche, followed by Hitler and Stalin. But the next phase in evolution may have finally arrived. Behold what a century of “Progressivism” has wrought:
* That sentence, in an era when it’s never been easier to create, via today’s powerful software, may also answer a recent query by the far left London Guardian: “Why are we so bored?”
EPA STASHING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN OBSCURE SLUSH FUND-LIKE ACCOUNTS: What happens when federal bureaucrats take billions of dollars collected for one purpose and squirrel them away in hundreds of obscure accounts to spend on whatever they decide? Does this help explain why EPA so often acts like it answers to no one?
The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton confirmed the existence of 1,308 “special accounts” and his next objective is to expose how they have been used during both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations. That won’t be easy, considering it’s been seven years since either GAO or the Inspector General at EPA reviewed the accounts.
“The ‘special accounts’ are financed by legal settlements between the agency and parties responsible for polluting Superfund sites. Funds are deposited and spent without prior congressional approval,” Barton reports. The accounts aren’t technically secret because EPA admits their existence, but the agency makes it all-but-impossible to learn anything about the accounts or how they are used.
Next question: Will Congress do anything about this? If not, the constitutional principles of separate-but-equal branches and separation of powers will be officially dead, to say nothing of congressional oversight. And Congress will have only itself to blame for the bad joke it becomes.
ON THE OTHER HAND, THE WAY 2016 IS GOING, IT MAY NOT BE THAT UNWELCOME: Human Extinction Isn’t That Unlikely.
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VDH DIDN’T TITLE HIS BOOK ‘MEXIFORNIA’ FOR NOTHING: “That was not the easiest entrance I’ve ever made,” Trump said when he arrived at the California Republican Party Convention at the Hyatt Regency near SFO yesterday via its back entrance, after hopping a fence to dodge protestors waving Mexican flags. “It felt like I was crossing the border actually. I was crossing the border, but I got here.”
Here’s who was in front of the hotel:
Related: ‘Captain Mexico’ burns Donald Trump effigy at protest in Calif. [photos, video].
Earlier: Dear Mainstream Media, Don’t You Dare Whitewash Anti-Trump Violence.
THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP BECAME THE FRONTRUNNER MISOGYNY WOULD BE EVERYWHERE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Maryland Democrats Have A Woman Problem.
For the first time since 1971, Maryland might have an all-male congressional delegation after the 2016 elections — and it will be the fault of Democrats.
This is the party that constantly accuses Republicans of being “anti-woman” and brags that they have more women in Congress. Now here they are, not even nominating any women in Maryland.
It’s made all the more alarming by the fact that Sen. Barabara Mikulski, D-Md., the longest-serving woman in Congress, who has spent her time advocating for more women in politics, is retiring. Two well-known Democrats were vying for Mikulski’s open seat — Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards. Van Hollen won the primary by 14 points. His campaign also outraised Edwards by a 2-to-1 margin.
Outside groups boosted Edwards more, however, including the well-known EMILY’s List. But the group’s influence has waned significantly in recent years.
Why do the Democrats hate women?
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?
New video from Prager University hosted by Caroline Kitchens, Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute.
THE SIMPLEST WAY TO EXPLAIN THE BEHAVIOR OF ANY BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATION IS TO ASSUME THAT IT IS CONTROLLED BY A CABAL OF ITS ENEMIES: Is Jerry Brown California’s Savior?
(Classical reference in headline.)
OH, GOD, THEY’RE GOING TO START YAMMERING ABOUT “NERD PROM” AGAIN: Best White House Correspondents Dinner Party Is At The Renwick, Roll Call Readers Say.
Reminder: Reporters aren’t smart enough to be nerds, and this isn’t a prom.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Speaker Disinvited from College Event after ‘Disrespecting’ Obama:
Students at King’s College in London no-platformed Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, after he criticized Obama’s decision to remove a bust of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the White House. Johnson had been scheduled to participate in a debate on the merits of the European Union, according to The Telegraph.
Johnson accused Obama of having an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire” because of his Kenyan heritage. The event’s organizers deemed Johnson’s remarks unacceptable.
Of course it is. As a former resident of London once said, in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why does the Left hate the Jews?
Related: Shocked, shocked! Who Could Possibly Have Expected This Anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party?
GUTSY OF HER TO BRING UP HER DISGRACED, ACCUSED-RAPIST HUSBAND: Hillary: I can handle men who go ‘off the reservation.’
Well, if by “handle,” you mean “cover for.”
BECAUSE THE RACE CARD IS SO 2009: Clinton offers donors their own ‘woman card.’
Huh — I can remember just last week when gender was still fluid and entirely a social construct. Very edgy of Hillary to push back against the worldview driving her own party’s war on ladies rooms!