HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Arkansas wants to be able to fire even tenured professors who fail “collegiality” test. We know how that will turn out, don’t we?
Archive for 2017
October 25, 2017
GOOD LORD: HIV-infected school aide accused of sexually victimizing 42 children in Maryland.
The Charles County State Attorney’s Office announced Monday a 206-count indictment for Carlos Deangelo Bell, 30, a stark increase from the 119-count indictment handed out in late July.
Bell is now accused of assaulting 42 juveniles after officials originally reported 24 victims in July.
“The ages of the alleged victims at the time the offenses were committed range from 11 years old to 17 years old,” the state attorney’s office said.
Of the 42 victims, officials said they have identified 28 juveniles, and 14 remain unidentified.
The ex-school aid is accused of sexually abusing his victims at Benjamin Stoddert Middle School, at his home and possibly at other locations between May 2015 and June 2017, police said.
While Bell allegedly sexually assaulted students while not wearing protection, the state attorney’s office said they were not aware of any of the victims testing positive for HIV.
Prosecutors will press for life in prison, which seems far too kind.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The ‘Never Trump’ Construct: The president’s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP’s internal strife.
For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him. Bitterness Over the 2016 Election? So a vocal Never Trump Republican establishment had not much effect on the 2016 election. Voters do not carry conservative magazines to the polls. They are not swayed much by talking heads, and on Election Day they do not they print out conservative congressional talking points from their emails.
John McCain and Susan Collins are as renegade now as they were obstructionist in 2004. If in 2016 it is said that John McCain cannot forgive President Trump for his 2016 primary statements, it was also said in 2004 that John McCain could not forgive President Bush for how he won the 2000 primaries. Trump is called a Nazi and a fascist. But so was George W. Bush in 2006. Reagan in the campaign and during his first few months as president was slandered as a pleasant dunce as often as Trump is smeared as a mean dunce.
If neocons are now on MSNBC in 2017 trashing a Republican president, paleocons were doing the same in 2006 over Iraq. Parties always have dissidents. Donald Trump got about the same percentage of the Republican vote (about 90 percent) as John McCain won in 2008 — slightly less than Mitt Romney’s supposed 93 percent in 2012. If Romney’s 93 percent is the standard of party fealty (Obama usually pulled in about 92 percent of the Democratic vote), then it is hard to know whether the 3 percentage points fewer of Republicans who could not stomach McCain were about the same as the 3 percentage points fewer who were Never Trump.
In either case, 90 percent party loyalty was not good enough for McCain, and even 93 percent did not win Romney an election. Both, unlike Trump, lost too many Reagan Democrats and Independents in the swing states of the Electoral College. . . .
Apart from establishment figures, there is a split in perceptions between the vast 90 percent majority of Republicans who voted for Trump and the small 10 percent minority who did not — and it is largely over Trump himself and not his message. Never Trumpers now see the Trump base as prone to demagogic frenzies on immigration and trade; too monolithically white; often-angry blame-gaming losers of globalization; naïve rather than self-critical about so-called white pathologies; and in their populism too dismissive of the importance of political experience, impressive education, and the changing demography of the U.S.
The far more numerous Trump base voters see the Never Trumpers as too self-important; predictably bicoastal careerist; too quick to judge and write off their supposed ethical inferiors; too eager to get along with liberals within their own bubble; too wedded to traditional definitions of political qualifications and success; and more worried about decorum than winning.
Read the whole thing.
Plus: “The war is mostly infighting among politicos, pundits, politicians, and media people and so far does not necessarily change the realities of the voting public. We saw that reality in 2016 when the thunderous damnation Trump received from his own party had no profound effect on his candidacy.”
WHAT WAS THIS APE DOING IN EUROPE OVER NINE MILLION YEARS BEFORE HIS FAMILY LEFT AFRICA? Probably standing on the corner, minding his own business, but all the same… 9.7 million-year-old teeth could ‘rewrite’ human history.
THE ‘ELITES’ ARE REVOLTING: Who is to blame?
ONCE A TREASONOUS WEASEL… Bergdahl Once Again Avoids the Consequences of His Actions.
HOIST ON THEIR OWN PETARD: Hillary Clinton: House Opens Investigations Into Uranium One And Emails.
SOMETIMES IT’S CORRUPTION ALL THE WAY DOWN: Emails: Obama DOJ Officials Sought to Route ‘Slush Fund’ Cash to Orgs of Their ‘Choosing’. Future Historians will be fascinated by how the last administration was dirtier than the Augean stables, while bragging of probity.
WELL, I ACTUALLY AM SHOCKED DECENCY PREVAILED: Park Service Cancels Funding for Project ‘Honoring Legacy’ of Black Panther Party.
THERE ARE WASHED UP ROCK STARS, DEEP IN THE THROES OF DRUG ADDICTION, WITH A BETTER GRASP ON REALITY THAN HILLARY: Hillary Unplugged.
SOLVING NONEXISTENT PROBLEMS DEPARTMENT: ‘Feminist’ ballet flat emoji is downright offensive.
October 24, 2017
DRUDGE ON THE LATEST:
Hillary should be happy because at least the picture is flattering.
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GOSH, READING THIS PIECE, it’s almost like it might be a mistake to put off childbearing until your forties.
Related: Kim Cattrall, 61, claims gruelling Sex And The City filming stopped her from having children. “Claiming the gruelling working hours had heavily impacted on her decision not to start a family, she said: ‘That was my early 40s and I had just started filming Sex and the City, the chances of getting pregnant with these procedures was, everyone was talking about it. ‘But I thought to myself, ‘wow I have 19 hour days on this series, I have weekends where I finish at Saturday morning. My Monday morning would start at 4.45am and go to one or two in the morning.”
Related thoughts from Karol Markowicz.
TOOK SOME LAW STUDENTS TO SEE MARSHALL, which I thought was a really good movie. I recommend it.
The portrayal of Thurgood Marshall is somewhat jerkier — and hence more accurate, since he was a hotshot litigator — than the Sidney Poitier version, even though that was an excellent movie too.
AT AMAZON, save on bestselling Jewelry.
Plus, fall deals on Bedding.
YOU DON’T SAY: Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the firm in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Prior to that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by a still unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC through the law firm continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.
FLASHBACK: Fusion GPS partners plead Fifth before House Intel.
Maybe it’s time for more subpoenas, this time with immunity.
JOURNALISM: 10 Times CNN Told Us An Apple Was A Banana.
The first ad in CNN’s “Facts First” initiative features nothing but an apple with a voiceover lecturing you about the need to embrace facts. “This is an apple,” an amiable man tells us. “Some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana. They might scream banana, banana, banana, over and over and over again. They might put BANANA in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it’s not. This is an apple.”
This reflects the smug and didactic disposition of many in a political media that treats a vocation as if it were a religious crusade. Considering the numerous mistakes and misleading stories CNN has produced over the past several years, you’d think that they’d be a tad less sanctimonious. . . .
We’re not talking about Candy Crowley arguing with Mitt Romney during a presidential debate, and misleading millions of voters by mangling the facts. We’re not even talking about transparently partisan reporters like Jim Sciutto or Jim Acosta. We’re talking about CNN political analysts like Julian Zelizer, who claimed this summer that President Trump never made an Article 5 commitment to our NATO allies a month after Trump did. Rather than correcting what may have been an oversight (if we give him the benefit of the doubt), Zelizer rationalized his definitive assertion by alleging that “POTUS has sent mixed messages and there is reason to question his commitment.”
Trump said: “I am committing the United States to Article 5.” Even if you don’t trust the president, a banana is not an apple.
And CNN is not a news organization.
I’M HAPPY HE’S SURRENDERING; BUT AMERICA REALLY SHOULD GET TO NEGOTIATE THE TERMS: Michael Moore’s leftwing ‘The Terms of My Surrender’ Broadway show surrenders to reality, closes on Broadway.
So, next stop Rio de Janeiro?
MATT DAMON AND GEORGE CLOONEY: Goodness Us, We Never Heard a Blessed Thing About Weinstein’s Misbehavior. (Except for the Things We Did Hear About):
Two weeks ago, former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman (now at The Wrap) wrote that Damon helped get her 2004 exposé on Weinstein scrubbed. Waxman got calls from Damon and Russell Crowe personally to tube a story that tied Fabrizio Lombardo, then heading Miramax’s Italian unit, to Weinstein’s sexual appetite and about a payoff to a woman who had accused Weinstein of non-consensual sexual behavior. Damon claimed he was just asked to talk about Lombardo’s work for Miramax, not anything to do with Weinstein.
However, he already knew about Weinstein’s sexual harassment of Paltrow by this time. She married Coldplay frontman Chris Martin in 2003, having ended the relationship with Affleck in 2000. If Waxman was writing about Weinstein in 2004, then Damon had an important piece of information — or at least knew enough to refrain from running interference on a sex scandal at Miramax.
As Ace writes, “while Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is also Hollywood for ugly people.”