THE ‘DEPLORABLES’ ARE TEACHING TRUMP HOW TO BE PRESIDENT, Roger Simon writes.
Is Trump proud to be an Okie from Muskogee? Read the whole thing.
Archive for 2016
September 15, 2016
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT YESTERDAY, BRADLEY AREHEART ON antidiscrimination law and the principle of symmetry.
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WELL, THAT’S EMBARRASSING: Chicago Law Faculty Do Not Join Letter Defending Trigger Warnings And Safe Spaces.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama’s Legacy: The Rise Of Donald Trump.
Without policy achievements to hang his hat on, Obama’s rhetoric will be how he’s remembered – and the results have been ugly. On his recent Asian tour, President Obama characterized his fellow Americans (the most productive workers in the world) as “lazy.” In fact, he went on to deride Americans for a list of supposed transgressions ranging from the Vietnam War to environmental desecration to the 19th century treatment of Native Americans. “If you’re in the United States,” the president said, “sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.”
The attack on supposedly insular Americans was somewhat bizarre, given that Obama himself knows no foreign languages. He often seems confused about even basic world geography. (His birthplace of Hawaii is not “Asia,” Austrians do not speak “Austrian,” and the Falkland Islands are not the Maldives).
Obama’s sense of history is equally weak. Contrary to his past remarks, the Islamic world did not spark either the Western Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Cordoba was not, as he once suggested, an Islamic center of “tolerance” during the Spanish Inquisition; in fact, its Muslim population had been expelled during the early Reconquista over two centuries earlier.
In another eerie ditto of his infamous 2008 attack on the supposedly intolerant Pennsylvania “clingers,” Obama returned to his theme that ignorant Americans “typically” become xenophobic and racist: “Typically, when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” (“Typically” is not a good Obama word to use in the context of racial relations, since he once dubbed his own grandmother a “typical white person.”) Too often Obama has gratuitously aroused racial animosities with inflammatory rhetoric such as “punish our enemies,” or injected himself into the middle of hot-button controversies like the Trayvon Martin case, the Henry Louis Gates melodrama, and the “hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson mayhem.
Most recently, Obama seemed to praise backup 49ers quarterback and multimillionaire Colin Kaepernick for his refusal to stand during the National Anthem, empathizing with Kaepernick’s claims of endemic American racism. What is going on in Obama’s home stretch? Apparently Obama is veering even further to the left, in hopes of establishing a rhetorical progressive legacy in lieu of any lasting legislative or foreign-policy achievement.
Obama opened the way for Trump. He’s like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, or something. And even Ghostbusters was ruined on his watch. . . .
IT’S COME TO THIS: Panicked Democrats Body Shame Donald Trump.
AND NOW, SOME THOUGHTS FROM COLIN POWELL ON THE 2016 ELECTION:
Related: “Unexpectedly,” the news division of CBS, run by Obama advisor Ben Rhodes’ brother, censors Powell’s accusation that Clinton is still ‘d***king bimbos,’ after editing Bill’s Monday admission that his wife “frequently” suffers from fainting spells. It’s like Dan Rather never left his old office.
ASHE SCHOW: Some good, some bad in Ivanka Trump’s defense of her father’s family leave plan.
Ivanka has been a great asset to her father’s campaign, especially when it comes to women and family issues. That said, she makes one of the common mistakes when discussing statistics about gender pay equity.
“For me, motherhood is a gift and a tremendous source of joy,” she writes. “Yet it’s also the greatest predictor of wage inequality in our country,” Ivanka writes at the beginning of her article. “In 2014, single women without children earned 94 cents on a man’s dollar. Married mothers made only 81 cents.”
Ivanka doesn’t explain why this wage gap actually exists, let alone the fact that it seems to contradict the more commonly used (and even more misleading) statistic that hints at even lower pay for women compared to men.
It’s not that men and women are working side-by-side doing the same job and being paid unequally (even if that happens in some places). Men and women choose different careers, work different hours, and often have different levels of experience.
The reason married mothers earned 81 cents to the dollar that men earned is because so many married mothers leave the labor force when they have a child. That drops the average earnings if they go back to work later compared to single women. Or they work fewer hours or take a less time-consuming job, which generally pays less.
That said, there is some good in Donald’s plan. Allowing working parents to deduct child care expenses is a good idea. Society should value parenthood more. Parents are shouldering many expenses now that prevent the state from having to pay more later. Anything that helps them cover those expenses without being taxed on the extra money they have to earn to pay the costs of raising a family is a good idea.
Read the whole thing.
CAFETERIA-STYLE CONSTITUTIONALISM: Anti-Second Amendment Director: Lawsuit Over Deceptive Edits On Anti-Gun Doc An Attack On First Amendment.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Paris is a post-apocalyptic hellhole of public urination and litter. Hurrah for the incivility brigade.
BECAUSE THAT WAS THE PLAN ALL ALONG? Daphne Patai: How Diversity Came to Mean ‘Downgrade the West.’
FREE SPEECH? THAT’S SO 20TH CENTURY: Congress to allow special restrictions on speech ‘inappropriate with respect to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or other intrinsic characteristic’? Eugene Volokh comments: “That, I think, is a very bad idea, and indeed an unconstitutional idea. Should Congress be free to set up one set of contract law rules for contracts dealing with ‘unpatriotic speech’ and another for contracts dealing with other viewpoints?”
Actually, at least at the NFL, unpatriotic speech seems to be specially privileged.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low, Gallup reports, “with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year:”
Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007.
Republicans Fuel Drop in Media Trust
While it is clear Americans’ trust in the media has been eroding over time, the election campaign may be the reason that it has fallen so sharply this year. With many Republican leaders and conservative pundits saying Hillary Clinton has received overly positive media attention, while Donald Trump has been receiving unfair or negative attention, this may be the prime reason their relatively low trust in the media has evaporated even more. It is also possible that Republicans think less of the media as a result of Trump’s sharp criticisms of the press. Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14% from 32% a year ago. This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years.
Why on earth would that be? Paul Krugman assures me his fellow DNC-MSM operatives with bylines are “objectively pro-Trump.”
(Classical reference “unexpectedly” in headline.)
ADVICE TO LAW SCHOOL DEANS: How To Avoid Sinking Your Ship.
THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: The Era of the Drama Queens: Every Crisis Is a Triumph.
Because on today’s college campuses (and other lefty enclaves), the Will to Power derives from victimhood.
THE LEFT IS WEAPONIZING SPORTS: What happens when a culture loses its last neutral ground?
Related: The NCAA is boycotting North Carolina in the name of trans rights. How will it reconcile its stance with women’s rights and its own divisions by sex?
Sharpen the contradictions!
More: National pass-time: NFL ratings take big hit after anthem protests. As Ed Morrissey writes, “If the NFL doesn’t want to provide an escape, then fans will create their own escape.”
Read the whole thing.
WEALTH: How Much Would Be Lost if Uber Simply Went Away?
How much would be lost if Uber simply went away? That’s actually happened in Austin, Texas, and the service has faced legal troubles in France, Spain, Germany and parts of India.
How much is really at stake? A new paper by Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt (of “Freakonomics” fame) and Robert Metcalfe comes up with a pretty good, dollars-and-cents measure of how much UberX, the main Uber service, is improving the lives of its users.
Based on their study, here are a few ways of framing the value of Uber ride services to Americans:
For a typical dollar spent by consumers on UberX, they receive $1.60 worth of gain.
That’s an unusually high amount of “consumer surplus,” as it is called by economists. It means there aren’t that many close substitutes for Uber at prevailing prices, as moving people around is something the U.S. does not do especially well.
UberX produces daily social value of about $18 million.
That is comparable to having an excellent French impressionist painter produce a beautiful work each day and give it away for free.
UberX produces about $6.8 billion in social value a year.
If distributed across every American, that would be over $20 in benefits for each.
Not bad.
BILL FLUBS HILL: Nah, I spelled it right. Flubs, people, not, uh…Look, Hillary has cankles and Colin Powell’s emails comment on ole Bill’s, uh, sexual shenanigans…(Please. Don’t make me go there. Google for General Powell’s observations. Use the search terms “bimbos,” “dicking,” and “Clinton” and then read and absorb what you get…)…now…back to Bill flubbing Hill…flubbing…flub…flub…I am spelling the word I intend to spell…between Bill and Hill it’s all flub, if you get my drift…anyway…Ole Bill said Hillary had the flu ‘cept it was pneumonia. Or is pneumonia…maybe…read the link…Seems ole Bill’s flub of Hill has lost CNN as an agitprop asset…at least temporarily…and like Glenn says, when you’re a Dem and you’ve lost CNN…never mind…flub, that’s the word I meant…long quote coming…ready…don’t flub it…from CNN:”Bill Clinton’s effort to help his recuperating wife Wednesday may have instead caused her another political headache when he said Hillary Clinton was suffering from the flu, not pneumonia, as her campaign has said.”…like Glenn says, when you’re a Dem and you’ve lost CNN…Flu…You said flu, Slick, you idiot…Hillary…she’s you’re wife, even though according to Colin you’re still…carousing with bimbos…Colin said it, not me, Slick…But wake up, jerk. Your wife’s campaign claimed she has pneumonia, idiot…
Ole Slick idiotsplains:
“It’s a crazy time we live in where people think there’s something unusual about getting the flu,” Clinton then said. “Last time I checked, millions of people we’re getting it every year.”
Yeah…getting it…
‘Cept:
A spokesman for the 42nd president quickly said Clinton misspoke. “He clearly meant pneumonia,” Angel Urena clarified afterward.
‘Cept he said flu, Angel. Bill said FLU, Angel. He idiotsplained FLU, Angel. Is idiotsplaining Bill suffering from dementia, Angel? Or is he, uh, overheated? (HINT TO ANGEL” Go google “Colin Powell”, “Bill Clinton:, and dicking “bimbos” to get the context for “overheated.”)
Don’t start a social justice warrior email tantrum about this post, Angel. Get in Bill’s face. He said flu.
MORE DEMOCRAT PAY FOR PLAY: It’s Obama-style transformational! Pay enough and you get to play ambassador…This stuff stinks, people…Crooked media let’s media privileged Democrats get away with it.
September 14, 2016
WELL, THAT’S THE POINT: Bogus allegations of “racism” undermine honest policy debate.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet. “Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.”
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE ANY STANDARDS AT ALL: UNC Rape Case Reveals Race Double Standard.
NOW ON SSRN: My paper for the Cato Supreme Court Review on the Supreme Court’s next term. I discuss leading cases pending, some cases not taken (like the New York / Connecticut gun-control laws), the possibly-disastrous effect of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on Donald Trump should there be a disputed election result, and the diminishing role of the Supreme Court in relation to lower courts. Download it early and often!
Here’s an excerpt from my Ginsburg/Trump discussion:
The comments were injudicious, and though they are unlikely to become relevant in the coming term, should they in fact matter – because of a contested election, with the nation closely divided – her recusal, or worse, her refusal to recuse herself, would undoubtedly have explosive results, both for the nation and for the Court itself, an institution that depends on public regard and that has been growing less popular already in recent years. The comments are an iceberg that most likely will never meet its Titanic, but worth noting here because, should that meeting come to pass, the results would surely be the most significant event of the coming term.
Looking somewhat more likely now than last month. And thanks for your downloads — who knows, maybe this piece will make the Top Ten list, too! (Bumped).