“SO THERE’S OUR MEDIA: Afflicting those who afflict the comfortable, and comforting those who afflict the afflicted… I don’t think a lot of people quite understand what’s happening here: This is actually the overclass declaring war on anyone who does not swear fealty towards them.”
As Sean Davis of the Federalist tweeted, “Joe the Plumber, Elizabeth Lauten, Justine Sacco, Ken Bone. If what happened to them doesn’t prove how much media loathe you, nothing will.”
I TAKE THIS: First Human Clinical Trial For Nicotinamide Riboside. “In the first controlled clinical trial of nicotinamide riboside (NR), a newly discovered form of Vitamin B3, researchers have shown that the compound is safe for humans and increases levels of a cell metabolite called NAD+ that is critical for cellular energy production and protection against stress and DNA damage. Levels of NAD+ (first discovered by biochemists in 1906) diminish with age, and it has been suggested that loss of this metabolite may play a role in age-related health decline.”
I take the Niagen brand. I do seem to feel better and have more energy. There’s some evidence that combining it with pterostilbene may help, so I take a pterostilbene/resveratrol blend called PteroMax.
WE TAKE RESPITE FROM 2016 WHEREVER WE CAN: David Solway on the Pleasures of Karaoke.
Not my thing, but I’ve attended numerous Christmas party dinners with Asian Silicon Valley businessmen that concluded with plenty of scotch and karaoke. Do you indulge?
CHUCK YEAGER REMINISCES ABOUT breaking the sound barrier. Amazing (and awesome) that he’s still around today.
EVEN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ISN’T IMMUNE FROM CONQUEST’S FIRST LAW OF POLITICS:
Springteen’s experiences in his early bands taught him he preferred total control, and he formed his own backing band for his little hit-making factory, a nifty, tight, hard-rocking outfit that eventually evolved into The E Street Band. But make no mistake, the band served and continues to serve at the Boss’ pleasure, what Springsteen refers to as “the real world.” In other words, Bruce Springsteen is not only a heavily guarded and protected brand but a thriving corporation overseen by its chief executive officer’s steel fist.
An example: One day I had one of my musicians come to me and explain he would need more money if he were to continue doing his work. I told him if he could find a more highly paid musician at his job in the world, I would gladly up his percentage. I also told him I could spare him the time to search. All he had to do was walk into the bathroom, close the door and walk over and take a look in the mirror. There he’d find the highest-paid musician in the world at his post. I told him, ‘That’s how it works in the real world.’ He then looked straight at me and, without a trace of irony, asked, ‘What do we have to do with the real world?’ At the moment I knew I had sheltered some of my colleagues perhaps a bit too much.
The Boss also pared down the E Street Band to record his solo album, “Tunnel of Love,” believing that’s what the songs he was performing at the time required. While he ultimately toured with the entire band to support the album, he disbanded them entirely afterwards, recording and touring with a different collective for his twin albums of the 1990s, “Human Touch” and “Lucky Town.”
Ten years later, he’d reform the group for several successful recordings and tours, but rest assured the E Street Band members were left to their own financial devices when the Boss shuttered (albeit temporarily) the music factory. Some of them thrived, others not so much.
Corporate Rock for Blue-Collar Americans
What would Woody Guthrie say about all this? And how is this different from the closed factories and laid-off workers Springsteen’s songs depict? Aren’t the economic realities behind such events also “how it works in the real world”? Of course it is.
This disconnect between corporate America and corporate rock is hardly surprising when Springsteen names Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” Henry Steele Commager, and Guthrie as major influences on his lyrics and worldview from 1980s “The River” forward. The curse of progressivism is that it is consistently inconsistent in perceptions of how not only the economic but also the artistic world works. You may want to reconcile these two “real worlds” the next time you record another “Nebraska” or “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Mr. CEO.
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
IT’S GOT TO BE BETTER THAN THE 1990 MOVIE, BUT THAT’S NOT SAYING MUCH: Chuck Lorre’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ Series in Development at Amazon.
To understand how PC (then in its early phases), Hollywood tinkering and egos run amok and Murphy’s Law on mega-steroids can conspire to sink a multimillion dollar adaptation of one of the definitive 1980s novels, Julie Salamon’s classic 1991 book The Devil’s Candy is a must-read.
IN THE MAIL: The Tax and Legal Playbook: Game-Changing Solutions to Your Small-Business Questions.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Save 20% or more on Shelving.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1255.
MY PIECE ON THE SUPREME COURT’S 2016 TERM IS UP TO #4 ON SSRN. Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded it!
CLINTON EMAILS: COMEY LIED AND THE SCANDAL DIED.
Related: “Remind yourself of one big fact: Richard Nixon’s proximate sin over Watergate was interfering with an FBI investigation.”
QUESTION ASKED: So, What Exactly Did Billy Bush Do Wrong?
To be fair, that’s the least of the questions NBC should be answering over the Trump tape, its release, and his continued employment at the network, even as they were stoking the left’s “war on women” narrative.
THE WAGES OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Walter Russell Mead: What Erdogan’s Pivot to Putin Means.
Obama handling of Syria continues to become more incoherent and more damaging to American interests. Putin has not only, thanks to White House dithering and irresolution, managed to reinsert Russia into Middle East politics in a spoiler role and his gains have not just included a deepening and commercially beneficial relationship with Iran and the weakening of the European Union and Merkel’s leadership in it over the refugee issue; he has also, thanks to the incoherence of American policy, managed to drive a thick wedge into NATO by further alienating Turkey from the West and, especially Washington.
As for what a naive and vainglorious President Obama once (back in those days when he collected Nobel Peace Prizes and was hailed as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln by a clueless and infatuated press corps) identified as a central goal of his foreign policy—the reconciliation of America with the Muslim world—his callous abandonment of the Syrian Sunnis to their increasingly genocidal foes has done as much, if not more, to tarnish America’s reputation among Sunni Arabs than anything any of his predecessors managed to do going back to Harry Truman.
The issues in Syria are difficult and the alternatives are few, but President Obama’s Syria policy is one of the shabbiest and sorriest displays of serial ineptitude that has unfolded in world politics in all these many years. That his emissaries and representatives attempt to cover the nakedness of their policy with grandiose rhetorical denunciation of the crimes that Obama’s incompetence has enabled merely underscores the horrifying moral and political emptiness of the President’s approach to world politics.
Obama could hardly have accomplished more harm if he were trying to ruin America’s position in the world.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Weird. Hillary had an off the record dinner w/ a bunch of journalists prior to her campaign launch to ‘frame the HRC message.’”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Going Full Kafka At Brooklyn College.
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TO BE HONEST, IT WAS QUITE OBVIOUS WHAT THEY WERE DOING AT THE TIME, AND TO MY SURPRISE ROBERTS FELL FOR IT: Rolling Justice Roberts: A Clinton ally reveals how the left played the Chief on ObamaCare.
The WikiLeaks email disclosures make fascinating reading about the political calculations of leading progressives, and Chief Justice John Roberts may want to pay particular attention. This week’s leaks show Hillary Clinton ally Neera Tanden laying out a strategy to intimidate the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare.
Ms. Tanden runs the Center for American Progress, the think tank that is essentially an arm of the Clinton campaign. CAP’s former chief, John Podesta, is now the Clinton campaign chairman, and on June 2, 2015 Ms. Tanden sent an email to Jake Sullivan, a key Clinton aide, copying Mr. Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, another campaign operative.
The subject line was “King v. Burwell,” the second big legal case contesting the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, three years after the first case in which the Chief sided with the four liberals to uphold the law.
Ms. Tanden wrote that, “As Jennifer will remember, it was pretty critical that the President threw the gauntlet down last time on the Court, warning them in the first case that it would politicize the role of the Court for them to rule against the ACA. As a close reader of the case, I honestly believe that was vital to scaring Roberts off.”
We wrote at the time about the campaign to mau-mau the Chief, and now we know it was orchestrated. The campaign included a Senate speech by Vermont’s Pat Leahy, a broadside from President Obama about “an unelected group of people” overturning “a duly constituted and passed law,” and articles by such media progressives as Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic and Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. Mr. Rosen hit the talking points out of the park when he wrote that, “If the Roberts court strikes down health care reform by a 5-4 vote, then the chief justice’s stated goal of presiding over a less divisive court will be viewed as an irredeemable failure.”
What’s funny is that the Court’s prestige has fallen dramatically since then, largely in consequence. It may be that the best way to promote the Court’s prestige is to not pay too much attention to what people are saying about it. Sad as it is to conclude this, it may be that Harriet Miers would have done a better job.
TRUMP ONLY STEPS REPEATEDLY ON THE YUGEST, MOST LUXURIOUS RAKES: Trump campaign’s eyewitness once claimed to be a procurer of boys for sex parties with British politicians, according to Twitchy.
At Red State, Jay Caruso adds, “It is possible that [Anthony] Gilberthorpe is lying about his pimping past. So what if he is? Who the hell lies about that? And if he is lying about it, why on earth should anybody believe his take about what happened on that plane? So the Trump campaign was faced with two choices: Gilberthorpe was either a pimp or a serial liar and fabulist. Either way, there’s no way in hell they should have put him forward as a character witness.”
Before being put up as a character witness, I’m sure Gilberthorpe was vetted by the campaign as thoroughly as Trump himself.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: 7 Ways Russia Is Telling People to Prepare for War.
ANALYSIS: TRUE: In Her Criticism of Trump, Hillary Forgets Her Own Past as a Slut-Shamer.
And as Jonah Goldberg adds in his latest G-File, “I honestly can’t get my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton’s closing ‘argument’ in this election is sexual harassment. Bill Clinton’s lifelong enabler has managed to turn this topic into a deadly weapon against a Republican nominee. This is like Godzilla turning public safety into a winning issue in the Tokyo mayoral race.”
JONATHAN TURLEY: The Murder of Professor Dan Markel: Confession of Contract Killer Raises Questions Over Role of Wendi Adelson.
Plus, a big roundup from Paul Caron.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Kimberley Strassel: The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins.
If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.
But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.
It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.
Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”
A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”
Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.
A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”
The Obama administration—the federal government, supported by tax dollars—was working as an extension of the Clinton campaign. The State Department coordinated with her staff in responding to the email scandal, and the Justice Department kept her team informed about developments in the court case.
Worse, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show, took special care of donors to the Clinton Foundation. In a series of 2010 emails, a senior aide to Mrs. Clinton asked a foundation official to let her know which groups offering assistance with the Haitian earthquake relief were “FOB” (Friends of Bill) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs). Those who made the cut appear to have been teed up for contracts. Those who weren’t? Routed to a standard government website.
The leaks show that the foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: “Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.”
The entire progressive apparatus—the Clinton campaign and boosters at the Center for American Progress—appears to view voters as stupid and tiresome, segregated into groups that must either be cajoled into support or demeaned into silence.
Well, yes.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Bill de Blasio Says He’s Fine With Hillary Clinton Aides Calling Him ‘a Terrorist.’
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is There An Anti-Trump Media Conspiracy?
Related: “Slim Behind the Slime?”, asks the Drudge Report.
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