THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: “I took this picture and wandered down closer. Crates stacked floor to ceiling, most had multiple dogs in them. Dozens of people walked dogs ohhing and awwing. The transport owner stepped in front of me and asked what I wanted. I looked in the trailer and said really? If a breeder ever had that many dogs packed into crates like like they’d be crucified. Someone said “he’s not a breeder, he’s a rescuer!” I said how much to transport? He said I only charge $185 a dog. I said no you’re not a dog breeder, you’re a dog trafficker…The ultimate virtue signalling accessory, so-called ‘rescues’ are being farmed, imported, and sometimes stolen to supply the insatiable demand. Don’t fall for this scam.”
Archive for 2016
September 17, 2016
SHOT: DOES HILLARY HAVE A SID BLUMENTHAL BIRTHER PROBLEM?
Chaser: “Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign Monday of ‘shameful offensive fear-mongering’ by circulating a photo as an attempted smear,” the Politico reported in February of 2008. “Plouffe said in a statement: ‘On the very day that Senator Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election. This is part of a disturbing pattern that led her county chairs to resign in Iowa, her campaign chairman to resign in New Hampshire, and it’s exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties and diminishes respect for America in the world,’ said Plouffe.”
As the McClatchy News Service reported yesterday, during the 2008 campaign, “former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher tweeted Friday that Blumenthal had ‘told me in person’ that Obama was born in Kenya…‘Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false.’”
Here’s the photo that caused all the commotion:
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Administration Used Bank to Purchase Iranian Heavy Water, Top Lawmaker Says.
You younger readers might not believe this, but in its less enlightened days, long before the fundamental transformation took place, America worked to prevent totalitarian regimes from acquiring heavy water. It was in all the history books, which is why Obama and Ben Rhodes probably missed it.
ROGER SIMON: I WAS A FUGITIVE FROM THE #NEVERTRUMP CHAIN GANG! What Will ‘NeverTrumpers’ Like George Will Do If Trump Wins?
IN THE MAIL: From Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 30% off top Hunting Products.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1227.
KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANT! This just in: Old media dowagers still hate their readers, particularly when they comment on their articles:
The other problem, especially for opinion sites like The Spectator, is the comments have become the place that make the writers cry. Sure, there’s lots of inane chatter in the comment threads, but it is also where some smart people post corrections and point out the many glaring logical errors. Guys like Damian Thompson have fragile psyches so seeing their mistakes highlighted for everyone to see, right under their posts, is a source of constant distress. Look at the first comment under that blog post.
When you live in the snow globe of opinion journalism, the outside world is horrifying. That’s why you went into the snow globe in the first place, to get away from the cold, pitiless world of reality. The Spectator is a collegial place where peers josh with one another, engage in witty repartee, but always respect their “shared dignity.” Those angry Dirt People in the comments with their facts and reason just don’t get it. Many of them don’t even have a PhD. They are ruining it for everyone!
The media’s new war on their readers is part of the general unrest we are seeing in the West. People in the media have long viewed themselves as the fourth estate, part of the ruling class, but policing the ruling class. This was always nonsense. The press has always been staffed by obsequious rumpswabs and toadies. The reason for that is noticing is dangerous in the mass media so only the most blinkered and stupid thrive. Suddenly, these dullards are learning that the rest of us have no respect for them.
But it’s not a “new war on their readers”—the late Ginny Carroll, a bureau chief with Newsweek, then a division of the Washington Post, wore a “Yeah, I’m in the Media — Screw You” pin to the 1992 GOP Convention—and defended her slur on C-Span shortly thereafter. Six years later, the Washington press corps openly despised Matt Drudge not just for showing them up by publishing the Lewinsky story that was buried (coincidentally) by Newsweek, but because they recognized that he was one of the first and most visible of what was soon to become a rapidly growing phenomenon—the one man news Website.
In those pioneering World Wide Web days, Drudge was rolling his own HTML code from scratch, but it didn’t take long for Blogger.com and WordPress to develop their own prefab blogging platforms. For me, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Instapundit in its early days was that Glenn was one of the first self-publishers on the Web to use the Blogger platform not as a daily diary, as it was originally intended (hence the name “weblog”), but to quickly aggregate posts commenting on news articles. On the afternoon and evening of September 11th, 2001, small Websites such as the nascent Instapundit and Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist e-zine (I think Virginia was rolling her own code back then) stayed readable when the servers of the big boys like the New York Times, the WaPo and CNN went dark, knocked offline by the sheer number of people looking for information on what just happened.
That, and all of the misreporting by the MSM during the early days of the War on Terror led to lots of other people wanting to become news aggregators and critics as well, and by early 2002, Steve Green’s Vodkapundit site and my own Ed Driscoll.com were online, also initially using the Blogger.com platform as were loads of other early blogs inspired by Instapundit—who were of course, dismissed near en masse as navel-gazing cat food eating losers typing away in their parents’ basements. Ask Eason Jordan, Trent Lott, and Dan Rather how that worked out. Similarly, in late 2004, “when Time magazine held a lunch to discuss candidates for its person of the year, he exposed a side of his personality that is seldom seen on the air. When a fellow panelist mentioned that bloggers had had a big impact on the reporting on Election Day, Williams waved that point away by quipping that the self-styled journalists are ‘on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem.’” I wonder if the former NBC anchorman regrets that comment these days.
As Roger Ailes once told Matt Drudge, “You don’t need a license to report. You need a license to do hair.” At least for now. The DNC-MSM would love to have a Ministry of Truth-level monopoly on information. And if and when the Internet ceases being under American control, so would the governments in much of the rest of the world.
Earlier: Why We Turned Off Comments.
(Found via Kathy Shaidle, who advises always read the newspaper upside down—“newspapers’ online comment sections are ‘the place you get the real story.’”)
FOR THE SEPARATION OF STADIUM AND STATE, as explored by Jonah Goldberg, who writes:
San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick…[has] gone on at tedious and sanctimonious length about the legitimate problem of police brutality and other Black Lives Matter talking points.
I think this is ludicrous on any number of fronts. Kaepernick isn’t being asked to salute rogue cops, or even cops generally. He’s being asked to show respect not just to the flag but to a non-partisan custom. Instead he offers a blanket indictment of America itself and vows to hold his compliance hostage to his personal assessment of complicated social issues. That’s not in a quarterback’s job description any more than it is in a plumber’s.
As Kaepernick’s stunt has metastasized to other teams, the NFL has responded to this lugubrious moral preening and bravery-on-the-cheap with the same rubber-spined resolve we’ve come to expect from most large corporations. And it’s not just happening in the NFL. As my National Review colleague David French has detailed, progressives are “weaponizing sports” all over the place, including North Carolina, where the NCAA is boycotting the state over a disagreement about transgender issues.
My point is not that the issues athletes care about are illegitimate. Kaepernick is right that some issues are “bigger than football” — but that is an argument for keeping them out of football! Religion is bigger than football too, which is why we try to keep it from intruding in public life in a divisive way.
Related Exit Question:
I suspect we’ll find out soon enough; moral frenzies whipped up by the left have a nasty habit of boomeranging in all sorts of ways they never anticipated.
OUT MEDIA CREATED A REALITY-TV CULTURE, NOW THEY’RE UNHAPPY THEY’RE BEING OUTMANEUVERED BY A REALITY-TV MASTER: WaPo: Donald Trump’s birther event is the greatest trick he’s ever pulled.
THE DANGEROUS IDIOCY of global leadership:
The brewing popular rebellions against incumbent leaders throughout the Western world—from the United States to Germany to Great Britain to Italy—are, despite their different forms and circumstances, a rejection of post-national leadership so in vogue over the past decades. What increasingly larger swaths of Western electorates are indicating is that they do not want global leaders who seek global solutions to purportedly global problems, are critical of national borders, and are disdainful if not outright fearful of expressions of patriotism. They want national leaders—leaders, that is, who put them, their own nations, above other nations and other concerns.
The difference between global and national leaders does not reside in specific policies, such as free trade or a country’s international role and its military presence abroad. Those are issues over which wise individuals can have reasonable disputes, and often agreement is found across political aisles. It would be simplistic therefore to insist that national leaders, by virtue of elevating their own nations’ interests above all else, espouse commercial protectionism, withdrawal from the world, or an abdication of the use of force. Some do, but not all, the same way that some leaders who seem more concerned about global challenges (usually defined by nouns, rather than actors: climate change, poverty, population growth, and so on) do not in unison support free trade or military intervention and support for allies.
Rather, the difference lies in whom a leader considers his community—the group he seeks to protect and whose welfare he wants to promote.
Political leadership requires discrimination. A leader in charge of a state has to determine whom he will defend and whose welfare he will seek to promote. This is what sustains his legitimacy and appeal, and it is the primary task of a political leader. Much of the current leadership at the helm in the West has, as Peggy Noonan observed, detached itself “from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it.”
And the plebs are returning the favor.
COMING SOON TO A COLLEGE CAMPUS NEAR YOU: North Korea bans sarcasm because Kim Jong-un fears people only agree with him ‘ironically.’
What a juchebag. Still though, I’m having a tough time squaring this story out of the Hermit Kingdom with this recent headline: North Korea airs Saturday Night Live-style sketch show mocking Barack Obama… and the jokes are as awful as you think they are.
Top comedy scientists ponder: can you have comedy without irony?
PROJECTION? YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT.
Shot: Harry Reid lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. He’s still not sorry.
— Chris Cillizza, the Washington Post, Thursday.
Chaser: Reid Calls Trump ‘Most Unbelievably Immoral’ After Trump Mocks Senator’s Exercise Accident.
—Bridget Johnson, PJ Media, yesterday.
Funny how the execrable Senator Geary, who has savagely mocked everyone from Obama to the voters themselves screams like a weenie in the fire, as Tom Wolfe would say, when finally, he’s the object of scorn.
JOURNALISM: “It’s as if somebody at WaPo decided to make the left-hand column as female-oriented as possible. All the authors are female. Story #1 alarms us about Trump’s ‘stance’ — which calls to mind that bane of female existence, manspreading. Story #2 calls to mind The 3 Stooges, who enact a style of male behavior that women find so off-putting. We all know women hate The 3 Stooges. And finally, there’s relief: 2 female lead characters. If we can’t love Hillary Clinton, surely we can warm up to these 2 solid standby females, Laura and Michelle. Gotta love at least one of them. First Ladies! Hillary was a First Lady, so… let’s love First Ladies. Maybe that will help.”
But whatever you do, don’t talk about the old ladies Hillary is ripping off via illegal, repeated credit card charges.
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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Wisconsin “John Doe” anti-conservative witch hunt enters new level of sleaze.
LES DÉPLORABLES: Hillary’s supporters “say it’s Donald Trump’s rhetoric that is ‘divisive.’ Just so. But it’s rich to hear them claim that their words and politics are ‘inclusive.’ So is the town dump. They have chopped American society into so many offendable identities that only a Yale freshman can name them all,” Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal. “If the Democrats lose behind Hillary Clinton, it will be in part because America’s les déplorables decided enough of this is enough.”
Read the whole thing.
ASHE SCHOW: Regulating student sex lives.
In the article, Bader takes OCR to task for getting so involved in the sex lives of college students. I would note that they’re this involved in student sex lives, while conveniently not wanting the same rules to apply to themselves.
That’s because the rules for college students having sex have become absurd. The new puritans are practically begging for abstinence by making consensual sex so impossible that it is better to forgo.
Part of this problem stems from a broad definition of sexual “violence” that includes unwanted comments about someone’s physical appearance (which could be as mundane as someone telling their female friend they “look good” today). These comments constitute sexual “violence” even between two people involved in a committed relationship.
“If you expect colleges to police ‘remarks about physical appearance’ made during a relationship with an ex-partner, and treat it as ‘violence,’ you will end up with vastly more investigations (and need a vastly larger and more costly administrative apparatus),” Bader wrote.
Bader also expertly tackles the problem of “affirmative consent,” a new rule that requires college students to constantly say “yes” to every sexual act — though it’s never really defined just how often they must say this. Some affirmative consent policies even state that the “yes” must be sufficiently “enthusiastic,” otherwise it’s sexual assault.
That degree of involvement in student sex lives is unconstitutional under Lawrence v. Texas.
REPORT: $216 Million From Clinton Foundation Donors Bought 205 Invitations to White House State Dinners.
One million dollars per invitation? If true, the late Jim Wright (D-TX) had nothing on the Clintons.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Ithaca College Professor Stopped Teaching About Sexual Violence Because Students Complained:
Plante is one of many academics who increasingly find themselves walking on eggshells to avoid offending their students. Some law school professors have stopped teaching rape law due to complaints from students who claim the subject is traumatizing—even though educating students about this important topic should be more important than making everybody in class comfortable all of the time.
If professors want to warn their students before discussing particularly disturbing subjects, that’s fine. But it’s concerning that strenuous objection from the students is leading academic to stop teaching these subjects entirely.
And I hate to say this, but it’s undeniable: Plante’s experience makes me wonder if some students are feigning trauma in order to skip class, readings, and assignments. “This triggers me” is the new “my dog ate my homework.”
And thus, knowledge passed on to future generations, much like successive editions of 1984’s Newspeak Dictionary, becomes ever smaller. Tom Wolfe promised us the 21st century would the era of “The Great Relearning,” but in the race between those who wish to preserve mankind’s knowledge and those who want to toss it all away, the airbrush artists are currently winning.
WELL, TO BE FAIR, WHAT’S THERE TO BE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT? Enthusiasm gap looms for Clinton.
What matters more in winning elections: voter enthusiasm or the ground game?
It’s a question that has long been debated among political operatives and is now being put to the test in this year’s presidential election.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is running her operation by the book, spending millions of dollars on staff, TV ads, data modeling and field office in battleground states.
Her Republican rival, Donald Trump, has done little of that. He has relied largely on media coverage to fuel his candidacy and has called data-led political activity “overrated.” His field operation is skeletal, leaning instead on the more extensive network put in place by the Republican National Committee (RNC).
But, for all that, Trump is competitive, recently pulling ahead of Clinton in polls of swing states like Ohio and Florida, and reducing the Democrat’s lead in national polls to around a single percentage point.
One reason for his strength: People who intend to vote for him are more enthusiastic about doing so than those planning to back Clinton, according to three major recent polls.
That fact alone makes some Republicans bullish about Trump’s prospects.
“You can have all the infrastructure you want, but if people are not inspired or excited to vote for you, then it is not going to do you any good,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the RNC. “You can have very little, or weak, infrastructure, but if you create momentum or a force majeure that wins the argument.”
Well, it’ll have to be that, since there’s not much in the way of infrastructure.
21st CENTURY CARRIE NATIONS WILL DEFINITELY FIND SOMETHING: As Marijuana Prohibition Winds Down, What Will Control Freaks Ban Next?
QUESTION ASKED: What Follows the Left’s Bathroom Boycott?
It was early 1993. The Clintons had just entered the White House after a solid win that broke the Republicans’ 12-year hold. He was a young and dashing New Democrat. She too was something new, a professional woman with modern attitudes and pronounced policy interests. They had captured the national imagination and were in a strong position.
Then she—not he—messed it up. It was the first big case in which she showed poor judgment, a cool willingness to mislead, and a level of political aggression that gave even those around her pause. It was after this mess that her critics said she’d revealed the soul of an East German border guard.
And it’s been the same ever since.