BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOWS DEMS WOULD DO THE SAME THING IF PARTIES WERE REVERSED: WaPo: Why the campaign to pressure Republicans to confirm Merrick Garland is failing.
Archive for 2016
March 24, 2016
AND THE PRESS GOES ALONG: ISIS Is Using the Media Against Itself: How a terrorist group effectively seized control over the coverage of its acts.
My advice to the media: Treat ’em like they were an anti-abortion group. In six months, people will wonder where they went. . . .
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WELL, HILLARY’S WALL STREET’S CREATURE, AND BERNIE’S TOO DUMB TO WORRY ABOUT: Why The Rise Of Donald Trump Has Even Wall Street Worried.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Panicked Professor Calls 911 Over ROTC Drill. I think that assuming that anyone wearing camo is a mass killer is a microaggression. Send her for reeducation at once.
JAMES WAGNER EMBARRASSES HIMSELF: Emory University President Vows to Hunt Down Student Whose ‘Trump 2016’ Message Wrecked Safe Space.
UPDATE: From the comments: “I’m not a Trump fan. I’m having an internal struggle trying to reconcile how I can vote for him come November. At the same time when I hear of stories like this continuing saga I can’t wait for him to be President.” Yep.
LAWPROF KEVIN COLE ON The American Law Institute’s Many Words for, and Shifting Pronouncements About, “Affirmative Consent.”
Related: The NACDL weighs in.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, BIG CORPORATIONS WOULDN’T PAY TAXES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! IRS Auditing Of Big Corporations Plummets. Well, when you spend that much time harassing the Tea Party, something has to give.
More seriously, this is something a populist Republican candidate could make hay out of. Ordinary citizens sweat their taxes while big corporations skate.
ASHE SCHOW: Amherst College: Finding key evidence in sex assault cases is expecting ‘perfection.’
Amherst College, which is in the midst of one of the most egregious sexual assault lawsuits I’ve ever seen, is now defending itself against a lawsuit by claiming it can’t be expected to find key evidence.
I’ve written about this case previously, and though it seems like an article from The Onion, it’s real. A male student was blacked out (as in, a blackout state, not passed out) and received oral sex from a female student, who happened to be his girlfriend’s roommate. The ordeal cost the female student her friends, and 18 months later (and after befriending some victims’ advocates) she accused the male student of sexual assault.
So, to briefly recap: A male student is blacked out, receives a sex act, and is then accused of sexual assault.
The male student was expelled by a campus process where he lacked basic due process rights. After being expelled, he got a lawyer, who discovered text messages from the accuser immediately following the alleged attack. Needless to say, the texts do not support her story.
Her first text was to a boy she had a crush on and with whom she had been flirting earlier in the night. She invited him over for sex, right after she had allegedly just been sexually assaulted. She also texted a female friend, writing: “Ohmygod I jus did something so f–kig stupid” [sic throughout]. She then fretted over upsetting her roommate, because “it’s pretty obvi I wasn’t an innocent bystander.”
The woman then complained to her friend about the second man she invited over waiting until 5 a.m. to have sex with her. This male friend would supply an affidavit for the accused student’s lawsuit stating that when he went to the accuser’s dorm, she was “friendly, flirtatious and spirited” and was in no way “anxious, stressed, depressed or otherwise in distress,” as she would later claim during the campus hearing.
Armed with these revelations, the accused went back to the university to try to get his expulsion overturned, and the university declined, saying that he had missed his opportunity (during the appeal process, when he did not have a lawyer or any ability to discover the text messages) and therefore the school didn’t need to consider the evidence.
In Amherst’s response to the lawsuit, they went so far as to claim that the messages above and others didn’t prove the accused student was innocent. The mental gymnastics the school had to perform to come up with that conclusion are Olympic-worthy.
If this stuff is so hard, maybe they should try leaving it to the police.
POLL: ISIS supporters vote UK top target as terrorists ‘warn of London attack’
Members were able to vote for one of 10 countries including the UK, Russia, America, Germany and Italy.
Britain came out top as half voted it as their chosen destination.
Also on the list were Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.
In the chilling Twitter post, an account claiming to be an ISIS-affiliated news agency warned that the terror group will form its own ‘state’ in London.
Some might argue they already have.
NORTH KOREA CLAIMS SUCCESSFUL TEST OF SOLID-FUEL ROCKET ENGINE:
Pyongyang’s claim indicates it is continuing to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at a rapid pace in defiance of U.N. sanctions, and amid assessment by the South’s officials that it could conduct a new nuclear test at any time.
The isolated state has in recent weeks stepped up bellicose rhetoric, threatening pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Washington and Seoul, as well as making claims of advancement in its weapons technology.
The Rodong Sinmum, the North’s ruling party newspaper, carried photos of leader Kim Jong Un on site as a rocket engine laid horizontally on the ground emitted a fiery blast. A two-page report detailed the testing of the engine’s structure and thrust.
Solid fuel rockets are easier to maintain than liquid fuel, and can be fired with far less warning.
ROLL CALL: Brussels Attack: Are We Any Safer Here?
PEACE: Iraq says it’s launched offensive to recapture IS-held Mosul.
In the push, Iraqi forces retook several villages on the outskirts of the town of Makhmour, east of Mosul, early in the morning on Thursday and hoisted the Iraqi flag there, according to the spokesman for the Joint Military Command, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool.
It was not immediately clear how long such a complex and taxing offensive would take. Only recently, Iraqi and U.S. officials refrained to give a specific time on when the Mosul operation could begin, saying it would take many months to prepare Iraq’s still struggling military for the long-anticipated task of retaking the key city.
Some U.S. and Iraqi officials have said it may not even be possible to retake it this year, despite repeated vows by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
This year?
QUESTION ASKED: “In one of his last acts in Havana, President Obama threw out a false equivalency between the American Revolution and Cuba’s 1959 communist takeover. What are we to make of a U.S. president who embraces such hoary Marxist equivalencies?”
That now we know what eight years of President George McGovern would have been like.
Related: Why the Obama-Che Photo Was Even Worse Than It Looked.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Millennial West Point Cadet Asks President Ash Carter* About ‘Less Hierarchal,’ More ‘Casual’ Work Environment.
Earlier: “What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace?”
* Well, for all intents and purposes, until January.
I DUNNO, I’LL BET THE BELGIANS WISH THEY’D DONE IT IN MOLENBEEK: Obama goes after Cruz for urging patrols of Muslim neighborhoods.
President Obama on Wednesday delivered a sharply personal rebuke of GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz for his call to institute surveillance on Muslim communities in response to the Brussels terrorist attacks.
During a press conference in Argentina, Obama called such a proposal “wrong and un-American” and said it would undermine the U.S. campaign against Islamic extremists.
Obama invoked Cruz’s Cuban heritage, arguing the Texas senator was ignoring the personal journey of his father, who fled the island nation for the United States to escape political oppression.
“I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance, which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America,” the president said. “The land of the free. The notion that we would start down that slippery slope makes absolutely no sense.”
You’d hardly know from this statement that Obama’s own Justice Department wants to be able to spy on everyone’s iPhones. But it’s nice to hear the criticism of Cuban repression: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Related: Cruz doubles down on call to monitor Muslims in US.
In the face of continued criticismRepublican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Wednesday doubled down on his call for authorities to monitor Muslims living in the United States.
Cruz touched off a political firestorm Tuesday with his call to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels, for which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has claimed responsibility.
Cruz took to “CBS This Morning” Wednesday to point to isolated neighborhoods in Belgium that “become incubators for radical, Islamic terrorism,” saying “of course” the same exists in the United States.
“Name one community, one city where we have a large group of radicalized Muslims,” host Norah O’Donnell responded.
“You have communities, for example, in Minnesota, you have communities in Michigan with heavy concentration” of Muslims, Cruz said, mentioning “radical imams preaching jihadism, preaching Islamism.”
Obama’s IRS is already monitoring churches for political content. But that’s different, because it’s targeting Republicans.
Meanwhile, Cruz needs to explain to Obama that he’s just trying to make America more like France. What Democrat could be against that?
THE COUNTRY’S PLANET’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: That horrible feeling when you realize the entire Western world is being run by the mayor from ‘Jaws.’
SIXTH-ANNIVERSARY THOUGHTS: Obamacare Was Going to Lower Health Care Costs. What Actually Happened.
Hawking the Affordable Care Act (ACA) six years ago, President Barack Obama said, “Every single good idea to bend the cost curve and start actually reducing health care costs [is] in this bill.”
Team Obama projected that their version of health care reform—replete with the bells and whistles of “investments” in health information technology, health care delivery and payment reforms—would translate into big cost reductions for individuals, families and businesses. In his iconic health care “talking points”, the president said that the “typical” family would see a yearly $2500 savings in their health costs.
Those family cost savings, of course, have not materialized.
In year six, even with lower than anticipated enrollment in the health insurance exchanges and the refusal of 21 states to participate in the law’s Medicaid expansion, the health care cost curve is still on an upwardly mobile trajectory.
It is fueled by sharp increases in both public and private health care spending.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data show that total per capita health insurance spending will rise from $7,786 in 2016 to $11,681 in 2024. Looking at the future of employer-based health insurance costs, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that job-based premiums are poised to increase by almost 60 percent between now and 2025.
Obamacare’s cheerleaders have allowed their exuberance to outrun their supply lines. Medicare trustee Charles Blahous best summarized the problem:
“Given how the ACA’s advocates touted the law as ‘bending the cost curve down and reducing the deficit’ while occasionally in the same sentence crediting it with expanding coverage to ‘more than 94 percent of Americans’, many Americans could be forgiven for not understanding that those two goals were in conflict.”
Obamacare cannot deliver the impossible (even if it were good public policy— and it isn’t).
It’s like the whole thing was just a gigantic fraud, sold with a pack of lies.
March 23, 2016
SO SOME FOREIGN READERS HAVE HAD TROUBLE REACHING INSTAPUNDIT: For the last day-plus we’ve been under a fairly massive DDOS attack. Initially we just blocked all requests from outside the U.S. and Canada; after that brute-force defense, we’ve been gradually refining things and opening up again. We should have everything running smoothly again soon.
YOU SHOULD PROBABLY NEVER HIRE A RECENT EMORY GRAD: Emory student gov. pledges ‘emergency funds’ to help those ‘in pain’ over Trump chalking.
MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: University Of Michigan Group’s ‘Fossil Fuels’ Flyers Torn Up By Pro-Socialism Activists. They can’t brook argument, because they can’t win an argument.