MAX BOOT: Obama Will Never Give up on Iran.
Obama — or Jarrett?
Archive for 2016
August 6, 2016
THE COMEBACK BEGINS? In a shocking new poll, Trump is down by only 3 points.
Related: Despite all the headlines, Reuters/Ipsos poll has the race nearly tied.
More: Howard Kurtz asks, “Media trumpeting Trump implosion, but is it real?”
IN THE MAIL: From Mark Rubinstein, Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 40% off top-rated strategy board games.
And, also today only: Up to 30% off Barska Level Series spotting scopes.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1187.
MELTDOWN: SEAN HANNITY ATTACKS WSJ’S BRET STEPHENS IN PROFANITY-LACED TWITTER RANT.
Needless to say, given Hannity’s role as a Trump surrogate, this is yet another bad sign for the Trump campaign, particularly given that it’s still early August. Most presidential candidates and their surrogates wait until closer to the election when it’s blindingly obvious things are going haywire before entering into Chernobyl mode. Even John McCain’s staffers didn’t lose their lunch until late September of 2008. Perhaps the nearest analogy in recent memory to Team Trump’s myriad self-inflicted wounds is John Kerry’s strange midnight Ohio rally early in September of 2004. Responding to the last day of the GOP convention, Kerry (who by the way, served in Vietnam*) fronted what the late Bob Novak described as an “anesthetized” crowd, and tore into Bush and Cheney’s Vietnam-era record, even after the Swift Vets and Kerry’s “Christmas in Cambodia” debacle were wreaking havoc on his own campaign.
Yes, there’s still time for Trump to get it together, particularly facing off against a candidate whose negatives are as bad as his own, but as Jonah Goldberg writes in his latest G-File, this is the equivalent of “Waiting for the Pivot at the End of the Universe.”
OBAMA’S CASH PAYMENT TO IRAN: As Nixon put it: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Campuses Encourage Racial Balkanization.
Normally, “deans of diversity affairs” are not in the position of fending off accusations of racial insensitivity. It’s their job to make sure that trigger warnings and speech codes expunge every last drop of bigotry from campus life. But Concordia’s mandatory minority orientation session struck many students as discriminatory in and of itself. And understandably so.
As the article notes, Concordia has hosted a similar minority orientation session every year. The practice is widespread throughout the American higher education, and it is representative of the way that academic-left ideology believes in fighting bias: Through ethnic studies programs, racially exclusive housing, and safe spaces—that is, cordoning women and minority students off from the sea of bigotry that allegedly surrounds them.We’ve previously highlighted the evidence that this approach is woefully ineffective. Social science research suggests that self-segregation efforts often exaggerate racial tensions. Instead of creating a sense of solidarity and common identity among students, campus bureaucracies often encourage division and mistrust.
Concordia’s diversity bureaucracy is convinced that the outrage from students of color of the racially segregated orientation event is a misunderstanding, because the aim is merely to welcome minority students and make them feel at home. How could anyone possibly object to that? Well, this seems like an instance where a 2007 quote from Chief Justice John Roberts seems particularly apt: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Insufficient opportunities for graft.
CHANGE: Europeans Fear Wave of Refugees Will Mean More Terrorism, Fewer Jobs.
Racist proles and their petty fears.
AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.
Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.
And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!
DAILY BEAST PUNDIT PONDERS ‘THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A LEFTIST TRUMP.’
I know! Democrats wanting an authoritarian president from a wealthy background with roots in the New York political scene and a penchant for getting tough with immigrants? I just can’t see it myself.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Leftist college profs bewail insidious “white privilege.” You don’t hear’em complain about this insidious privilege.
GOOD NEWS: The robocalling scourge may not be unstoppable after all.
“We know that the majority of robocalls only come from 38 different infrastructures,” Aude Marzuoli, research scientist at a company called Pindrop Labs, told Ars. “It’s not as if there are thousands of people out there doing this. If you can catch this small number of bad actors we can “stop the problem.”
Pindrop researchers reached the conclusion by creating a security honeypot of phone numbers that received more than 1 million robocalls. The researchers transcribed about 10 percent of the calls and analyzed the semantics with machine-learning techniques to isolate identical scams. The researchers combined those results with analysis that tracked 150 different audio features of each call. By studying the codecs, packet loss, spectrum, and frequency inside the audio and combining the results with the machine learning, the researchers were able to obtain a fingerprint of each different call center.
I get up to a dozen of these things every day, and haven’t found a better solution than to simply never answer the phone.
WAR WITH FISHING BOATS AS PAWNS: China probes Japanese waters with coast guard ships and fishing boats. OK, 230 fishing boats around the Senkakus is an invasion. Yes, The Hague arbitration court’s South China Sea ruling in favor of the Philippines has embarrassed and angered Beijing, so attempting to intimidate Japan has a face-saving purpose. But this is a dangerous situation.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOTIC INK-STAINED OVERLORDS: The Washington Post will use robots to write stories about the Rio Olympics.
Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, but the man sure knows how to use automation to generate maximum efficiency on all of his assembly lines! On the flipside though, from Joseph Pulitzer to Woodward and Bernstein to the juicebox JournoList mafia to robots — the Washington Post isn’t exactly advancing the quality of journalists who’ve walked through their doors during the newspaper’s lifespan.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
RADIO FREE EUROPE: “As numerous Kremlin-watchers have documented, the Putin system runs on murky deals, graft, fraud, and kickbacks. Corruption is the carrot and the stick that keeps everybody in line.” Remember, the Panama Papers revealed Hillary Clinton’s Kremlin connection.
THE CLOSING OF TRUMP’S DOOR: “All the damage done to him this week was self-inflicted.”
On the other hand, as Iowahawk chillingly warns, “Too many people writing off Trump already, [to be honest.] Truth is, one more Orlando or San Bernardino, and he’s right back in it.”
HOWARD FINEMAN DERIDES ‘DANGEROUS,’ ‘INSANE TRAITOR’ DONALD TRUMP.
Because not just any president can launch his career in the living room of a former Weatherman who bombed the Pentagon and culminate it by giving Iran $400 mil in cash, you know.
VIDEO: I LEARNED MORE AT McDONALD’S THAN AT COLLEGE. From Olivia Legaspi at Prager University:
I can understand and relate to that — in retrospect, I learned far more skills and knowledge of how the business world worked — heck, how the world in general worked — running a small business in the early 1990s than in college.
AUDIO-ANIMATRONIC: Clinton: I ‘short-circuited’ in describing FBI findings.
Hillary Clinton on Friday said that she may have mischaracterized FBI Director James Comey’s statements about her truthfulness during the investigation into her use of a private email server.
Clinton was asked at the National Association of Black Journalists-National Association of Hispanic Journalists Convention if she misrepresented Comey’s conclusions in two recent interviews she gave.
“I may have short-circuited it, and for that I will try to clarify,” she responded.
At the close of his investigation, Comey announced that the FBI had found over a hundred emails containing information that was classified at the time they were sent. The conclusions clashed with Clinton’s repeated claims that no emails she sent or received had been marked classified at the time they were transmitted.
Comey laid out a number of findings that contradicted many of Clintons’ claims about her email server and handling of classified information.
But in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” this week, Clinton suggested the FBI director had concluded that she never misled the public.
“Director Comey said my answers were truthful and consistent,” with what she’s said in the past, she said on Sunday.
Well, that was a lie.
YALE HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Yale goes full Orwell, establishes “Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming.”
It’s a bit like Monty Python’s Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things, only far more insidious.
SOME VAGUE STIRRINGS OF SANITY: As Corn Devours U.S. Prairies, Greens Reconsider Biofuel Mandate.