TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE BOTH PRETTY OLD: At Debate, Clinton and Sanders Show Their Exhaustion.
Archive for 2016
April 15, 2016
THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Merkel Allows Prosecution of German Comedian Over Erdogan Satire.
While Merkel left the legal fate of the comedian, Jan Boehmermann, in the hands of the country’s courts, she said her government will seek to scrap the law in Germany’s criminal code that penalizes insults against a foreign head of state. The decision wasn’t a prejudgment on the satirist’s culpability, she said.
“In a state of law, it’s not the domain of the government, but rather the prosecutors and the courts, to weigh individual rights,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin on Friday, reading from a prepared statement. While lauding Germany’s cooperation with Turkey, the chancellor said Turkey’s crackdown of media organizations was of “great concern.”
I wonder if this law has ever been used to prosecute German comics for insulting President Obama.
EDIT: Looks like I should have checked for Glenn’s post first…
NOT-SO-SHOCKING POLL: Young Women Care As Much About Gun Rights As They Do About Abortion.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON THE FRUITS OF LEFTY GOVERNANCE: Empty Dorms, Empty Mansions.
IT’S SAD THAT THIS IS GOOD NEWS, BUT IT IS: Florida Governor Signs Bill Requiring Actual Criminal Charges Before Seizing Property.
BEST. KINSLEY. GAFFE. EVER: Sen. Claire McCaskill: Son once called me ‘best prostitute in Kansas City.’
CHINESE SPIES ARE EVERYWHERE: Feds: TVA executive traded nuclear information for cash in Chinese espionage case. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Knoxville on Thursday announced an espionage conspiracy indictment against China General Nuclear Power, Chinese nuclear engineer Szuhsiung ‘Allen’ Ho, and Ho’s firm, Energy Technology International. Prosecutors said Ho conspired with the companies to lure nuclear experts in the U.S. into providing information to allow China to develop and produce nuclear material based on American technology and under the radar of the U.S. government. Ho was taken into custody in Atlanta on Thursday afternoon and will be returned to U.S. District Court in Knoxville to face the two-count indictment. The indictment consists of one count of conspiracy to illegally engage and participate in the production and development of special nuclear material outside the U.S. and one count of conspiracy to act in the U.S. as an agent of a foreign government.”
HOW DID THE SJWs LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND BULLY THE BOARDROOMS?
Question asked and answered — along with some thoughts on how the right can make its own long march through the institutions, by David French of NRO.
SO IF PUTIN IS SO POPULAR WITH RUSSIANS, why is he creating a personal army outside the general military structure? That’s usually what leaders do when they’re afraid of a coup.
WHY THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS MATTERS: “Unfortunately, the bathroom wars are likely just getting started,” Heather Wilhelm warns. “The Obama administration has already chosen sides. ‘This is a good illustration that the fight for civil rights is not over,’ White House press secretary Josh Earnest said of the North Carolina law. ‘The president, every time, is going to be on the side of equality and fairness and justice for every American.’ That sounds great, unless you’re an American with traditional views on gender, your kids are in a public school, and the girls’ locker room has just been declared a gender-fluid zone. Alas, my friend; you simply have the wrong thoughts. Sadly, in some cases, that’s when ‘equality and fairness and justice’ don’t really apply.”
As Matthew Hennessey wrote last month at Ricochet on Bill de Blasio’s war on bathrooms, “Fair warning: If you come to New York and you see a dodgy looking dude hanging around the little girl’s room, you’re better off keeping it to yourself. His reality is all that counts.”
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Texas A&M campus carry rules: Guns OK in classrooms, dorms.
ASHE SCHOW: Why aren’t the Democrats discussing the campus sexual assault ‘epidemic’?
We’re told campus sexual assault is a massive problem across the country. We’re told that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while they’re in college. And we’re told we need to enact draconian policies right now in order to stop the epidemic.
So why then, if our country is facing a rape epidemic on par with war-torn Congo, aren’t the presidential candidates being asked about how they would solve the problem?
The candidates are asked every single debate about the Islamic State and how the United States can best fight terrorism. They’re asked about gun control and mass shootings. They’re asked about illegal immigration. But the alleged mass rapes on college campuses? Crickets.
Could it be because every rational person has realized that campus sexual assault is not the epidemic being reported in the media and by politicians eager to prove they support women?
Well, also the notion that campuses — which are core Left institutions — are hotbeds of rape is problematic past a certain point. It’s fine to use as a slogan on campus, but if voters in general start really thinking about campuses as high-cost rape factories, the consequences are likely to be unpleasant.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: “Bill Clinton is finding that crafting a Sister Souljah moment in 2016 isn’t as easy as it was back in 1992.”
In 1992, Clinton understood that he and his party had to woo white, middle class voters by at least appearing sane and centrist and not just the latest crop of McGovern retreads, hence the Sister Souljah moment and his use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” to signal that he wasn’t trapped in the Mobius Loop of his party’s far left radical past. Obama has moved the base so far to the racialist left, Bill is now seen as an unwelcome reminder of its dalliance with centrism in the 1990s.
Or as John Schindler of the New York Observer tweeted last night, “A generation ago, Bill Clinton + DLC got the Democrats off their own brand of crazy. Obama brought them right back.”
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF OIKOPHOBIA? College students in San Francisco think Trump supporters on campus are ‘scary.’
“And apparently there was chalk, too. No wonder they were terrified.”
San Francisco believes in diversity and tolerance — as long as you think the same way as everyone else there.
PORTLAND PROFESSOR WANTS A ‘WORLD WITHOUT WHITENESS.’
Why are Democrat-run institutes such intolerant cesspits of racism and eliminationist rhetoric?
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Federal judge calls IRS untrustworthy in tea party case. It’s always nice when they admit the obvious.
HE’S ALSO A FAKE HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY. ‘Fake Obama’ roaming California campuses.
REASON TV: ECONOMIST DON BOUDREAUX ON THE CRUELTY OF THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE.
It’s designed to keep people unemployed, dependent on the government, and voting Democratic.
I WON’T BACK DOWN: Mike Lee provokes leadership showdown.
Lee’s gambit also could disrupt the unity within the party fostered by its stance against the president’s Supreme Court nomination — and further the senator’s reputation as a conservative bomb-thrower.
But Lee is pressing his case, insisting that the position of Republican Policy Committee chairman is wide open for 2017.
“I have no interest running against John Barrasso for this or anything else. I am interested in running for the open-seat Republican Policy chair,” Lee said in an interview on Wednesday.
That Lee believes the seat is still open is a direct challenge to McConnell, who brought Republican Secretary Laura Dove into the Tuesday caucus lunch to explain that Barrasso is eligible for another two-year term. But if Lee wins the argument, he’d imperil three-fifths of the leadership team: Barrasso, Republican Conference Chairman John Thune of South Dakota and Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt of Missouri all took their jobs in late 2011.
Surely a little fresh blood near the top of the GOP Senate leadership couldn’t hurt.
WHY WOULD THE DNC-MSM WASTE TIME COVERING SOMETHING THEY CONSIDER TO BE GOOD NEWS? Tax Freedom Day Gets Later, But Media Ignore It.
SJW VANDALISM AT TULANE: “Members of the Kappa Alpha fraternity at Tulane University erected a sandbag wall on their own property, and spray painted TRUMP and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN on it. A group of black men — allegedly members of the Tulane football team — tore it down,” Rod Dreher writes, with video at link. Naturally, “the Tulane administration faulted the fraternity for provoking everyone else via their intolerable expression of support for the Republican GOP candidate who actually won the Louisiana primary…If the administration of Tulane University cannot unambiguously support the right of its own students to express political speech on their own, off-campus property without it being attacked and destroyed, reportedly by other Tulane students, they ought to resign, because they have no business running an actual university.”
Related: DePaul says no more political chalking in response to pro-Trump messages.
Outlaw chalk, and only outlaws will use chalk on sidewalks.
CHANGE: How Brazil, the darling of the developing world, came undone.
The plunge that Rousseff and the country have taken has laid bare the frailty of Brazil’s commodity-driven growth. Big parts of the Brazil model, it turns out, were glued together with kickbacks, dirty money and lies.
Rousseff herself is not accused of illegal personal enrichment but of improperly using money from government banks to cover budget gaps. A separate inquiry is examining whether her Workers’ Party benefited from an illegal campaign-finance scheme, which could lead to an annulment of her victory and force new elections.
Call it “the Venezuela model,” in which high commodity prices are used to create a facade of growth over unsustainable social spending for the poor, cronyism for the rich, corruption, and bad management.
Then of course commodity prices eventually fall and expose the rotten structure behind the facade.