MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Puerto Rico has big problems, but President Trump isn’t one of them.
Archive for 2017
October 2, 2017
DUMB: Hundreds Injured in Catalonia as Spanish Police Attack Referendum Voters.
Instapundit’s own Austin Bay noted last week: “Current polls indicate Catalan voters will narrowly reject secession. However, ham-handed Spanish attempts to halt the referendum have sparked a pro-secession uptick.”
MORE ON SAN DIEGO: Brian Leiter: How should a Dean who understands academic freedom respond to public controversy about faculty writing?
So we know from the unhappy example of Dean Ferruolo throwing a faculty member under the bus what not to do: you don’t publish a statement on the homepage of the school singling out a faculty member’s work, declare that not only do you, as Dean, disagree with it, but suggest that these are pariah views in “our law school community”, and imply that the offending views may implicate “racial discrimination” and persecution of the “vulnerable” and “marginalized.” Making an obligatory reference to academic freedom in passing does not undo the damage that this decanal misconduct causes.
Yes, this was an unforced error, and a major one. My thoughts here.
BECAUSE IT VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Sex change regret: Gender reversal surgery is on the rise, so why aren’t we talking about it?
Those wishing to reverse their gender reassignment, Prof Djordjevic says, have spoken to him about experiencing crippling levels of depression following their transition and in some cases even contemplated suicide. “It can be a real disaster to hear these stories,” says the 52-year-old.
And yet, in the main part, they are not being heard.
Unexpectedly.
RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: Behind ‘Grassroots’ Campaigns Over Airbnb, Millions of Industry Dollars.
AirbnbWatch is an example of a hotel industry-funded effort that doesn’t look like one. Internal board meeting documents from the American Hotel & Lodging Association last year say the trade group “stood up” AirbnbWatch as a way of “gathering stories of short-term rental’s harms” and “highlighting Airbnb’s lack of transparency.”
Another AHLA document from August, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, outlines a communications strategy for the next year intended to create partnerships with “groups, think tanks and other credible voices to weigh in on this issue.”
On its website, AirbnbWatch advertises itself as a project of American Family Voices, a communications firm that wants to “fill gaps in the progressive movement.”
Mike Lux, a former Clinton administration staffer who is president of the group, said he has often opposed the hotel industry on wage and workplace issues, but “on this particular issue, they obviously are in alignment.”
“That’s what you do in politics,” he said.
Politicians legally proscribing entrepreneurial activity at the behest of established players who write fat checks to politicians? Yep, that’s what you do in politics.
THE NORMALS WEIGH IN: Byron York: On game day, new polls show what Americans think about NFL protests, Trump.
Whenever President Trump sets off a new controversy, there’s always a period of hair-on-fire commentary, usually conducted in the absence of polls or other evidence of public opinion. It’s happened again and again, the latest example being the president, the NFL, and the national anthem.
Trump set things off September 22 during a speech in Alabama. Now, after more than a week, there are five new polls with information on the underlying issue — NFL players protesting during the national anthem — and Trump’s treatment of it.
On the protests, the short version is, the public, which disapproved when Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the anthem last year, still disapproves.
A new CBS poll asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of football players protesting by kneeling during the national anthem?” Fifty-two percent said they strongly or somewhat disapprove, while 38 percent said they strongly or somewhat approve, and nine percent said they haven’t heard enough to say.
The disapprove-approve numbers were 51-39 in a new ESPN poll.
Fox News asked, “In general, do you think kneeling during the national anthem is an appropriate — or inappropriate — form of protest?” Fifty-five percent said inappropriate, while 41 percent said appropriate, and five percent didn’t know.
CNN asked the question in a slightly roundabout way, asking “Do you think athletes who protest by kneeling during the national anthem are doing the right thing or the wrong thing to express their political opinion? Forty-nine percent said the wrong thing, 43 percent said the right thing, and eight percent didn’t know.
Finally, the Huffington Post found a lot of indecisive respondents when it asked, “Do you think it’s appropriate or inappropriate for NFL players to kneel in protest during the national anthem?” Forty-eight percent said inappropriate, 36 percent said appropriate, and a full 16 percent said they weren’t sure.
The CBS poll shed some additional light on the public’s attitude toward the demonstrations when it asked, “Do you think professional athletes should or should not use their position and fame to talk politics or raise issues, if they want to?” The poll gave respondents three choices: “Yes, whenever they want to,” “Yes, but only on their own time,” and “No, they should not.”
A decisive 68 percent said athletes either should get political on their own time or not at all. . . .
Given the racial dimension of the controversy, the poll broke things down further by race. Forty-six percent of blacks said athletes should get political on their own time or not at all; 64 percent of Hispanics said the same; 58 percent of other races/ethnicities agreed; and 75 percent of whites agreed. Blacks were the only group that said, by a 54 percent majority, that athletes should get political whenever they want.
The bottom line is that in most polls, small majorities oppose the national anthem protests. But in a broader sense, a much larger majority opposes athletes using the field of competition to play politics.
Why is the majority generally opposing political activity on the field larger than the majority specifically opposing the anthem protests? Just a theory here — it could be that the former is a true measure of opinion on sports protests, while the latter is associated with Trump, which means measures of opinion about the anthem protests are comingled with respondents’ opinions about the president.
What doesn’t, these days?
QUESTION ASKED: Could America’s Socialists Become the Tea Party of the Left?
Inspired by the Vermont senator’s success at forcing left-wing ideas into the nomination battle, the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, has watched its dues-paying membership, which historically has hovered around 5,000, swell to 25,000. The DSA is still nowhere near the levels of the Socialist Party in 1920, when nearly a million people voted for Eugene Debs, but its members, too young to remember the Cold War, much less the “red scares” of the 1910s and 1950s, aren’t content to sit quietly on the political sidelines, perennially irrelevant in a system built to sustain two major parties.
They want to win. And to do it, socialists are dispensing with their penchant for symbolic protest votes and their principled disdain for an electoral process they believe can’t deliver meaningful change. Sanders’ ability to run well in primaries across the country, say new DSA members, proved that democratic socialism isn’t destined for the kind of third-party tokenism that bedevils the Green Party and World Workers Party, among others. And it has opened their minds to an electoral strategy that was until very recently considered heretical.
“The only viable electoral strategy is to work with the Democratic Party,” says Michael Kazin, the editor of leftist magazine Dissent. “There is no viable third party.”
Either the Democrats are electorally screwed or the country is politically screwed — or eventually, both.
BECOMING A MULTIPLANET SPECIES: Stephen L. Carter: Elon Musk Wants Mars. We All Should. An interplanetary mission may be a balm for our cynical times.
The 1969 moon landing capped an era of enormous optimism about what humanity could achieve. Norman Borlaug was saving hundreds of millions from starvation. Integrated circuits heralded a digital revolution. The campy innocence of the original “Star Trek” dates from those years. So do the Jetsons. People actually believed that science was the endless frontier.
Since then our species has turned its vision inward; our image of human possibility has grown cramped and pessimistic. We dream less of reaching the stars than of winning the next election; less of maturing as a species than of shunning those who are different; less of the blessings of an advanced technological tomorrow than of an apocalyptic future marked by a desperate struggle to survive. Maybe a focus on the possibility of reaching our nearest planetary neighbor will help change all that.
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the lack of an open frontier promotes factionalization and zero-sum thinking.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Slaughter in Las Vegas and Much, Much More.
AND HOW DID THEY DO THAT? “Authorities ruled out terrorism, NPR reported.”
UPDATE: Here’s the guy. They’re also seeking a woman “companion.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: She’s been arrested. Plus, on the shooter: “Paddock was known to local law enforcement and had a criminal past, investigators said, but no additional details were available.”
Somebody was already blaming Bernie Sanders in a now-deleted tweet, but we don’t really know anything yet so don’t get ahead of the story. The only thing we know for sure is that a bunch of people were killed and shouldn’t have been. And judging from reports on Twitter, a lot of bystanders, many ex-military, responded heroically. Just remember that, as in the aftermath of most such events, an awful lot of what you’re hearing is wrong.
On a personal note, I sure am tired of these stories. The 9/11 attacks took place when InstaPundit was just a few weeks old, and I’ve been blogging this stuff, from the Al Qaeda bombings in Spain and London, to the Boston Marathon bombings, to the Scalise shooting, and a seemingly endless number in-between. It kinda wears on you after a while. Of course, if I weren’t blogging, I’d still be waking up to the awful news, but the blogging does make you feel a bit more connected to events, which sucks.
MORE: Las Vegas Strip shooting: More than 50 dead, 400 others injured. “The massacre Sunday night ended when police stormed a 32nd-floor hotel room overlooking the concert and the shooter, identified as Stephen Paddock, 64, killed himself, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said.” It says they’re “pretty confident” he was a lone wolf, though I don’t know how they know that.
PRE-POSITIONING? Russia Denies Ukrainian Allegations It Left Troops In Belarus.
“As far as the Russian troops which took part in the joint strategic exercises, Zapad (West) 2017, they all returned to their permanent bases,” Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in an e-mailed statement late on September 30.
The denial came after Viktor Muzhenko, the Ukrainian military’s chief of staff, made the claim in a September 29 interview with Reuters that threatens to heighten tensions between Moscow and Kyiv, which have been locked in a standoff over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The Belarus border is closer and more conveniently located to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
WELL, THAT’S WHAT HIS VOTERS ELECTED HIM TO DO: Beyond the daily drama and Twitter battles, Trump begins to alter American life.
Over his first nine months, Trump has used an aggressive series of regulatory rollbacks, executive orders and changes in enforcement guidelines to rewrite the rules for industries from energy to airlines, and on issues from campus sexual assault to anti-discrimination protections for transgender students.
While his administration has been chaotic, and his decision-making impulsive and sometimes whimsical, Trump has made changes that could have far-reaching and lingering consequences for society and the economy. Some have grabbed headlines but many, no less consequential, have gone largely unnoticed amid the daily controversies and Twitter insults that have marked Trump’s early months in office.
Unnoticed. Huh. Related: Scoop: Trump urges staff to portray him as “crazy guy.”
I just wish Phil Hartman was around to reprise his Reagan sketch. I don’t think Alec Baldwin’s up to it.
WEIRD THAT SO MUCH OF THE COUNTRY IS AN INEXPLICABLE MYSTERY TO THEM: One in five reporters lives in NY, DC or LA.
SANITY: Vast majority of Democratic voters support due process for accused students.
There appears to be a wide rift between federal Democratic lawmakers and the voters who put them in office on the question of investigating campus sexual assault.
In contrast to two thirds of Senate Democrats, who denounced Education Secretary Betsy DeVos* for rescinding previous Title IX guidance that gave short shrift to due process, two thirds of Democratic voters believe students accused of “crimes” should receive “the same civil liberties protections” in campus proceedings as they do in courts.
The YouGov survey commissioned by the Bucknell University Institute for Public Policy was conducted in mid-summer, before Education Secretary Betsy DeVos* announced three weeks ago the guidance would be rescinded and released interim guidance last week.
Though both self-identified Republicans and independents supported common due process protections at higher rates, the gaps between them and Democrats were all under 15 percentage points.
Strong majorities of Democrats believe students accused of sexual assault “should have the right to know the charges against them before being called to defend themselves” (80 percent) and punished only if there is “clear and convincing evidence that they are guilty of a crime” (67 percent).
Even a majority (58 percent) believe accused students should have the right to cross-examine their accusers.
To be fair, Dem lawmakers are all for due process when they’re the ones accused.
JOHN KASICH: If GOP “can’t be fixed,” I can’t support it. “Kasich has been one of President Trump’s most vocal opponents within the party, and some point to him as a likely primary challenger in 2020. But Kasich seems to be toying with the idea of leaving the GOP entirely — though he said for now he remains committed to trying to change it from within.”
Kasich made a name for himself in the ’90s as one of Congress’s more libertarian-leaning Republicans. But his clashes with Trump and his platforms as a gubernatorial and presidential candidate, reveal that he has long since left aside his libertarian leanings.
Fans of the Old Kasich haven’t trusted him since he embraced Big Government, and he’s gone out of his way to make himself unwelcome in this new GOP. If he feels politically homeless, he probably doesn’t have anyone to blame but himself.
CEO OF ENGINEERING FIRM DOING RECONSTRUCTION: ‘Inept’ Puerto Rican government ‘riddled with corruption.’
orge Rodriguez, 49, is the Harvard-educated CEO of PACIV, an international engineering firm based in Puerto Rico that works with the medical and pharmaceutical sectors. The Puerto Rican-born engineer says he has dispatched 50 engineers to help FEMA rehabilitate the devastated island — a commonwealth of the United States — after Hurricane Maria. He refuses to work with the local government, which he called inept and riddled with corruption.
For the last 30 years, the Puerto Rican government has been completely inept at handling regular societal needs, so I just don’t see it functioning in a crisis like this one. Even before the hurricane hit, water and power systems were already broken. And our $118 billion debt crisis is a result of government corruption and mismanagement.
The governor Ricardo Rossello has little experience. He’s 36 and never really held a job and never dealt with a budget. His entire administration is totally inexperienced and they have no clue how to handle a crisis of this magnitude.
For instance, shortly after the hurricane hit, the government imposed a curfew from 6 pm to 6 am and then changed it. Now, it’s 7 pm to 5 am, and makes no sense. The curfew has prevented fuel trucks from transporting their loads. These trucks should have been allowed to run for 24 hours to address our needs, but they have been stalled, and so we have massive lines at gas stations and severe shortages of diesel at our hospitals and supermarkets.
I’m really tired of Puerto Rican government officials blaming the federal government for their woes and for not acting fast enough to help people on the island. Last week I had three federal agents in my office and I was so embarrassed; I went out of my way to apologize to them for the attitude of my government and what they have been saying about the US response. When the hurricane hit we had experts from FEMA from all over the US on the ground and I was really proud of their quick response. The first responders and FEMA have all been outstanding in this crisis, and should be supported.
Doesn’t fit the narrative.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Is Italian Food So Amazing?
HAVE I MENTIONED MY SHOCKED FACE: Puerto Rican Female Cop Says Local Government Is Preventing Supplies From Getting to People.
PRETTY MUCH, YEAH: Trump Is 100 Percent Right About the NFL.
THESE LIBERAL FANTASIES ARE PRETTY BUT ACCOMPLISH NOTHING: You can’t have modern life in a modern city without the internal combustion engine. To pretend otherwise is make believe, such as overgrown children might engage in. In Paris aujourd’hui, a Day Without les Voitures.
VIRTUE DISPLAY: The Psychology of Overrated Art.