ASHE SCHOW: Where Feminism Went Wrong:

No one suggests men and women shouldn’t have equal rights. So by the textbook definition, we should all be feminists.

Why then, do so many women — especially young women — refuse the label?

Feminism has gotten a reputation in the past few decades of being less about equal rights and more about crushing men in order to raise women up. A new report from the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank and my former employer) suggests modern feminism (and some of second-wave feminism from the 1960s) no longer views the movement as being about erasing inequalities in opportunity, but about enforced parity. . . .

This is in contrast to first-wave feminists, Villegas wrote, who referred to the Constitution in their bid for equal rights. They also approached their movement from a limited-government stance.

But modern feminists request government assistance at every step of their quest to overturn perceived inequality. No longer are feminists devoted to equality — because men and women do have equal rights under the law (although Janet Bloomfield has pointed out five legal rights women have that men don’t). The focus now is on parity, and the refusal to accept that men and women might just be different enough on aggregate that they have different priorities in life.

“A system focused on group achievement, in contrast, actually requires unequal, preferential treatment of some individuals over others based solely on their membership in a particular group or class,” Villegas wrote.

That’s right, this sort of thinking is what’s driving the current feminist movement’s claims of sexism while at the same time engaging in sexism against men.

Like Walter Reuther, when asked what they want, the only answer is “more.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. Exercises in Unreality: The Decline in Teaching Western Civilization.

MAYBE HE THINKS SHE’LL BE THE MOST UNCOMPROMISING WARTIME PRESIDENT IN UNITED STATES HISTORY OR SOMETHING: Paul Wolfowitz, a neocon and strong supporter of Iraq war, says he’ll vote for Clinton.

I wonder how the Bernie folks feel about their nominee?

THIS BRILLIANT RESPONSE TO OBAMA’S ‘DON’T DISCRIMINATE’ WARNING TO LOUISIANA IS PURE AMERICAN GOLD.

Definitely read the whole thing.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Watchdogs warn of ‘serious’ conflicts of interest for Clinton Foundation.

Donald Trump is not the only voice sounding the alarm over conflicts of interest surrounding Hillary Clinton’s namesake nonprofit.

Government watchdog groups — all of them champions of heightened transparency, campaign finance reform and other Democratic priorities — are also warning of potentially “very serious” conflicts of interest if the Clinton Foundation continues as business as usual with Clinton in the White House.

The transparency advocates are not calling for the foundation to shut its doors, as Trump has done from the campaign trail. But they are urging the adoption of tough new firewalls to eliminate any perception that Clinton Foundation donors could use their wallets to gain undue access to a Hillary Clinton White House.

“The Clinton Foundation has posed a very serious conflict of interest for the entire time that it’s existed,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, said Thursday. “The conflicts of interest are very real, and that gives Trump some ammunition to throw at it, and we’re going to hear about it [until the campaign ends].”

Holman said Clinton’s recent vow to bar all foreign and corporate donations to the Clinton Foundation if she wins the presidency is “a big, big step in the right direction.” But, he quickly added, that alone is not enough to eliminate the “pay to play” perceptions now dogging the Clinton campaign following revelations that top State Department aides acted on the foundation’s behalf when Clinton headed the agency.

To do that, he said, the Clintons will have to snip all family ties to the foundation, including the removal of Chelsea Clinton from the group’s board — a step the Clinton team said it’s not ready to take.

They’ll do nothing, because they can get away with anything. And rubbing your noses in it is half the fun.

NYT’s CHARLES BLOW EXPLODES ON PRO-TRUMP CNN GUEST: ‘THIS GUY SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED’ ON TV.

Perhaps even more so than their readers, Timesmen just can’t handle having their liberal cocoon pierced.

DEAR SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS: Your Religion Is Progressivism, Not Judaism.

All of “Progressivism” is largely an exercise in building a religion without God.

SOCIALISTS AS “SCARCITY DENIERS.” Actually, I think they create scarcity, as a means of control.

HUMA, HUMA, HUMA! Bill Clinton bombed Saddam to distract from the Monica Lewinsky scandal — what Huma Abedin’s Muslim journal claimed about her boss’s husband.

For what it’s worth, even Newt Gingrich didn’t play that card in 1998.

FLASHBACK: Me on Europe’s immigration problems, from a year ago. “No country can accept and assimilate an unlimited number of outsiders, and when the number exceeds a threshold, a backlash is certain. Thresholds are being exceeded, and backlashes are building, all over the world.”

RIGGED: C. Boyden Gray & Elise Passamani: How the media nearly stole the 2000 election for Al Gore.

To hear the mainstream news media retell the story of the contentious 2000 presidential election, one would think that it all boils down to Bush v. Gore. The Supreme Court decision created huge controversy and poisons public life to this day. But this focus on the decision serves to obscure an act of great duplicity on the part of the media that dwarfs the impact of that case: namely, that if it hadn’t been for actions they took on television on Election Night, November 7, 2000, there never would have been a Bush v. Gore or a Florida recount in the first place.

It is a story of voter suppression. As it turns out, most of what we think was important about that election—hanging chads, butterfly ballots, 36 days of legal jousting—is unimportant. And by 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Election Night, a cover-up had already begun. . . .

The northwesternmost part of Florida is the Panhandle, which stretches along the Gulf of Mexico to Alabama. Often called the “Redneck Riviera,” it is the most Republican part of Florida, regularly giving Republicans big margins in state and national elections. The nine Panhandle counties that are farthest west—Bay, Calhoun, Escambia, Holmes, Jackson, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Walton, and Washington—are in the Central Time Zone, and one additional county, Gulf, is split between Central and Eastern Time. According to the Miami Herald, “It is only a few miles to the Alabama border from anywhere in the western Panhandle, but more than five hundred miles and a cultural light-year to Miami.”

On Election Night, between 6:30 and 7:50 p.m. Eastern, anchors on all the major networks and cable channels reported over and over again that the polls in all of Florida closed at 7 p.m. Eastern. Not once did anyone on ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC, or MSNBC inform the audience that Florida has two time zones and two poll closing times. During that hour and 20 minutes, 13 journalists asserted a total of 39 times that there was only one poll-closing time throughout the entire state of Florida.

There were five anchors who handed out this misinformation more than once—Cokie Roberts on ABC, Brian Williams on MSNBC, Judy Woodruff on CNN, Tom Brokaw on NBC, and Dan Rather on CBS. Their words are slight variations on the same theme, interwoven with trivia and banter.

For instance, Tom Brokaw said, “we want to point out to our viewers that in half an hour, at 7 o’clock Eastern Time, we have a group of critical states that will be closing their polls, including the state of Florida.” A few minutes later, he repeated himself, saying, “the polls will close in Florida, as we said just a few moments ago, at 7 Eastern Time tonight.” Brian Williams said, “Just a reminder that we are minutes away from the 7 o’clock hour here in the East when several major states close down the polls. Biggest of them all: Florida.” Minutes later, Williams said: “Seven o’clock here in the East. The polls in six new states have just closed and the lead story at this hour is the state of Florida is too close to call. The state everyone said yesterday would be the story here today and, thus, tonight. It is at this hour too close to call, even though the polls there have closed.”

But the polls there had not closed. Voters in the 10 counties in the Central Time Zone still had an hour left to vote.

They never make mistakes like this in the GOP’s favor, do they?

IF YOU ARE A SCIENCE FICTION FAN, CONSIDER REGISTERING TO VOTE IN THE DRAGON AWARDS: It’s free and you have till Sunday to register.  Register here.

MY FRIEND STEPHANIE OSBORN WON THE SILVER FALCHION AWARD: This is the book she did it with.  And today she has a post at my blog, too, about space weather which is one of her specialties.

IT IS NEEDED: Teaching American Government.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION AGENCY: EPA spills again in Colorado.

HOW WE’VE COME SO FAR, SO FAST: The Mote in Gernsback’s Eye.

OF COURSE IT DOES: Clinton campaign finds legal loophole to collect big donations.

MORE OF HAVING ILL-FITTING BRAS:Men at bra company forced to feel the pain of having boobs.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMING AMERICA: Howard Johnson’s restaurant to close in Maine, leaving only 1 more.

I DON’T THINK THERE IS ENOUGH HAY TO HIDE THAT ELEPHANT: Covering up the $1.3 billion payoff to Iran.

OF COURSE SHE DOES: Hillary’s worst scandal is that she really thinks she’s clean.

MERKEL’S DEBACLE: ‘We’re not a MIGRANT WAITING ROOM’ Austria blasts Merkel and demands ‘deportation summit.’

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Reminder For Clueless Jerks: Don’t Drive Slow In the Left Lane. Though InstaPundit readers, who aren’t clueless jerks, will mostly use it by passing it on to people who need it. . . .

JOHN SCHINDLER: The Truth About Trump.

I knew from the moment Mitt Romney lost an election in 2012 that he shouldn’t have that the Republican Party would take all the wrong lessons from that needless defeat. As I predicted, rather than refocus to win more votes from demographics that felt unloved by Romney — especially working class whites — the GOP establishment would jump through great intellectual hoops to reach any other conclusion. And so they did.

Right-leaning pundits and the GOP’s donor class, which between them pretty much call the shots on what’s acceptable Republican discourse, wanted nothing to do with any outreach to downmarket whites, whom they despise. So it’s safe to say we wouldn’t be talking about out of control illegal immigration or job losses to China if it weren’t for Trump, who sashayed and tweeted his way into the campaign and shifted the GOP’s Overton window in a stunning fashion.

There will be much for future historians to ponder in this year’s remarkable Republican primary race, which left the party’s “stars” gasping for breath, not sure exactly what hit them when the vaunted Trump train barreled through their ranks. Like pretty much every other pundit in America, I got it wrong when I said last summer that Trump stood no chance of getting the Republican nomination, much less winding up in the White House. Otherwise I stick by most of what I said about Trump and his candidacy when this strange saga kicked off.

That said, I always had doubts about Trump, enormous ones. How not? This, after all, is a reality TV star whose all-over-the-map business dealings can charitably be called dodgy. In a field like national politics that attracts narcissists like schoolyards beckon pedophiles, Trump is a standout for his rank, tacky self-absorption. His inability to admit ever being wrong, his incessant need to double, then triple-down on any issue, however small, was impossible to miss. Warning signs were large and neon-lit for anyone caring to see.

Nevertheless, I had hopes that, eventually, professional handlers would get a hold of Trump and moderate his rough edges. Once he secured the GOP nomination a more focused Trump — one not needing to respond to every imagined slight with an incendiary tweet — had to arrive. Surely if he expected to be competitive in the general election, Trump knew he would have to refocus, stop pandering to his narrow but fervent base, and start talking like, well….a president.

Alas, I was wrong. Wise friends of mine like Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson were right all along. There is no better Trump. There is no responsible Trump. There is no balanced Trump. There is no presidential Trump. There is only Trump.

Well, 70-year-old men don’t change much. And it’s worked pretty well for him so far.