WHY IS GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATE AND ISLAMOPHOBIA? “Muslim woman who voted for Trump asks Georgetown to intervene over professor’s ‘hateful, vulgar’ messages.”
From the comments: “Isn’t it one of Alinsky’s Rules to make the other side live up to their own code?”
IN THE MAIL: From Eric Flint, 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught (Ring of Fire).
Plus, today only at Amazon: Save on Bushnell Binoculars.
And, also today only: 2016 Kindle Best of the Month picks, $3.99 or less.
Plus, Lightning Deals galore. There are new deals every hour, so check back often!
HMM. MATTIS, TILLERSON, DAN COATS AS DNI. HOW LONG BEFORE DEMS PIVOT TO “TRUMP IS TOO TOUGH ON RUSSIA?” Rex Tillerson talks tough on Russia in private Capitol Hill meetings.
OUT: ALT-RIGHT. IN: California As Alt-America.
In 1949 the historian Carey McWilliams defined California as the “the Great Exception” — a place so different from the rest of America as to seem almost a separate country. In the ensuing half-century, the Golden State became not so much exceptional but predictive of the rest of the nation: California’s approaches to public education, the environment, politics, community-building and lifestyle often became national standards, and even normative.
Today California is returning to its outlier roots, defying many of the political trends that define most of the country. Rather than adjust to changing conditions, the state seems determined to go it alone as a bastion of progressivism. Some Californians, going farther out on a limb, have proposed separating from the rest of the country entirely; a ballot measure on that proposition has been proposed for 2018.
This shift to outpost of modern-day progressivism has been developing for years but was markedly evident in November. As the rest of America trended to the right, electing Republicans at the congressional and local levels in impressive numbers, California has moved farther left, accounting for virtually all of the net popular vote margin for Hillary Clinton. Today the GOP is all but non-existent in the most populated parts of the state, and the legislature has a supermajority of Democrats in both houses. In many cases, including last year’s Senate race, no Republicans even got on the November ballot. . . .
According to the most recent Social Science Research Council report, the state overall suffers the greatest levels of income inequality in the nation; the Public Policy Institute places the gap well over 10 percent higher than the national average. And though California may be home to some of the wealthiest communities in the nation, accounting for 15 of the 20 wealthiest, its poverty rate, adjusted for cost, is also the highest in the nation. Indeed, a recent United Way study found that half of all California Latinos, and some 40 percent of African-Americans, have incomes below the cost of necessities (the “Real Cost Measure”). Among non-citizens, 60 percent of households have incomes below the Real Cost Measure, a figure that stretches to 80 percent below among Latinos.
In sharp contrast to the 1960s California governed by Jerry Brown’s great father, Pat, upward mobility is not particularly promising for the state’s majority Latino next generation. Not only are housing prices out of reach for all but a few, but the state’s public education system ranks 40th in the nation, behind New York, Texas and South Carolina. If California remains the technological leader, it is also becoming the harbinger of something else — a kind of feudal society divided by a rich elite and a larger poverty class, while the middle class either struggles or leaves town. . . .
Instead of a role model for the future, the Golden State seems likely to become a cross between Hawaii and Tijuana, a land for the aging rich and their servants.
Their approach is unsustainable, but they mean to keep it going as long as they can.
SO WHO WAS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF AND CHARGED WITH DEFENDING THE COUNTRY WHEN THOSE HACKS HAPPENED?
I feel sure that Glenn Thrush — who was one of the ones exposed by Wikileaks as collaborating with Dems — will provide much more scrutiny in the coming Administration. He never would have asked Obama a question like this in January of 2009. Heck, even today Thrush won’t ask Obama why this is worse than the OPM hack. Of course the answer is “because the Wikileaks hack is bad for the Democrats, and the OPM hack was only bad for America.”
ENTITLEMENT AND INSANITY: She was angry she always lost. So this woman threatened to kill lottery officials, police say. “A Pennsylvania lottery player who kept buying losing scratch-off tickets called her string of losses a conspiracy and threatened to kill employees at state lottery headquarters, authorities said. Towanda A. Shields is wanted on 53 charges, including harassment, stalking and terroristic threats, for phone calls and voice-mail messages that police said started as a ‘nuisance’ last year and escalated into a ‘relentless’ stream of hostile, sexually explicit and threatening statements to Pennsylvania Lottery officials in Lower Swatara Township.”
Plus: “Most people know when they play the lottery, they’re not going to win. She seemed like she had a sense of entitlement — that she was supposed to win the lottery.”
Funny, when I saw this breakout quote on Twitter — “She seemed like she had a sense of entitlement — that she was supposed to win the lottery,” I thought it was about Hillary
JOHN KASS, IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE: In Facebook torture, victim’s eyes terrify most.
There’s a lot to unpack from Chicago’s latest racial outrage, the Facebook Torture Case, and it’s ugly, so let’s get to it.
You know the news. Four African-Americans were charged Thursday with hate crimes in the alleged kidnapping and torture of a bound, white and mentally disabled young man.
Police said they beat him, forced him to drink toilet water, jabbed at him with a knife and cut his scalp, shouting “F—white people!” and “F— [Donald] Trump!” and laughing while smoking blunts and streaming it all live on Facebook.
I watched some, not all of that video, the way they brutalized that young man, the terror in his eyes, hearing their laughter. And I realized these were human beings, amusing themselves with the pain of a mentally disabled man. There are many words for this, but irredeemable is the one that comes to mind.
Ridiculous. As Hillary made clear, it’s Trump supporters who are irredeemable, and these people clearly opposed Trump.
Plus:
There are other elements of this heater case that should be acknowledged, like the politics of this thing. It’s crawling with politics now.
It’s partly a racial thing so let’s talk race. If the races were reversed, and a mentally disabled black kid were tortured by white barbarians, the political left would be screaming that over-the-top political rhetoric from the right had trickled down and encouraged the brutes. You can argue with me about this, but that won’t change it.
Yet it’s the other way now, isn’t it? And the political right is arguing that anti-Trump rants from the left — including casting white males as the political enemy — have given license to this kind of thing. The two sides will slap-fight each other over this on social media, in anonymous and hateful comments under online news stories, and they’ll slap each other in the journals.
And this is how we craft political weapons from human misery.
But there is another kind of politics at work here, as well, the politics of Chicago musical chairs. From the moment the torture video went viral, picked up by the cable news networks and replayed, over and over, and as talking heads debated whether “evil” was the appropriate word, Chicago politicians hunkered down.
You weren’t in the meetings and neither was I, but you can envision them huddling in three distinct groups: One group with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his people; another with new Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and hers; and a third with Eddie Johnson with his white shirt supervisors and detectives. And in each one, there must have been some staffers, staring at their phones, wondering if this heater case would burn their boss when the music stopped.
Foxx seemed to never miss a camera during the Laquan McDonald controversy. When that video finally surfaced after the mayoral election, showing the white cop shooting a black kid 16 times, Foxx won her election.
She was all over the news then, but for this case, she was rather reserved, though her office pressed the charges.
And Emanuel, hoping to rehabilitate himself with black voters after the way he handled the McDonald fiasco, waited until the water was warm.
Most of it was left to Johnson, and he made sure to hit his main political talking point early in his Thursday news conference, as the charges were read and national news was made.
Why are Democrat-run cities such cesspits of political violence and political incompetence?
ANDREW FERGUSON: Courtiers In Denial: Obama’s Rapidly Shrinking Legacy.
IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: The Case for Eating Cheese is Stronger Than Ever.
I CAN’T SAY I’M SURPRISED: African-American Hill Staffer: In 20 Years, Sen. Sessions Hasn’t Said ‘Anything Offensive or Racist.’
THANK GOD TRUMP SAVED US FROM THAT HORROR: The Era of ‘The Bitch’ Is Coming: A Hillary Clinton presidential victory promises to usher in a new age of public misogyny.
DER SPIEGEL: Has political correctness backfired in America? “Oehmke mainly focuses on campus-related political correctness, which is easier to spot — but it only accounts for part of the progressive disconnect, and the frustration of Middle Americans with it. Still, this focus is important not just because Academia is the wellspring of obsessive political correctness, but also the presumed source for America’s future.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Government by faculty lounge subject to repeal.
President Obama went up to Capitol Hill Wednesday to counsel congressional Democrats on how to save Obamacare. Or at least that’s how his visit was billed.
But to judge from the responses of some of the Democrats, his advice was typical of the approach he’s taken to legislation in his eight years as president. Which is to say, disengaged, above the fray, detached from any detailed discussion of how legislation actually works.
He was “very nostalgic,” said Louise Slaughter, ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee. But, she added, he left it up to Hill Democrats to come up with a strategy to protect Obamacare.
This is in line with the standoffish relations Obama has had with members of Congress, even with Democrats who are inclined to be and capable of being helpful. Schmoozing with those he gives the impression of regarding as his inferiors has not been his style.
Nor has he ever seemed interested in the content of laws, even his trademark healthcare legislation. His February 2010 decision to move forward on Obamacare despite the election of Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts meant accepting a bill with multiple flaws, many of them glaringly visible after passage.
But policy just wasn’t his thing. And isn’t now. At the Hill meeting Obama, according to Massachusetts Democrat Bill Keating, was “basically saying let’s not get down into policy language.” The key word there may be “down.”
Indeed.
THEY’RE CANNIBALS: Giant star Betelgeuse may have devoured sun-size companion.
AND YET MORE: Emails and Russians.
AND THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Plastic bag tax is fueling spread of food poisoning as people do not wrap raw meat separately .
BY THE VOICES IN HER HEAD: Hillary Clinton Being Urged to Run for Mayor of New York.
JUST WHEN I THINK MY SCHADENFREUDE IS SUBSIDING: You must have a heart of stone not to laugh like an hyena. (video)
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.