TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Woman Banned From Uber for Life After Threatening to Falsely Accuse Driver of Rape. “Luckily the driver had the whole encounter on video, where it even appears she hit him at one point. She also threatened to punch herself in the face and tell the cops the driver had punched her.”
Archive for 2017
April 8, 2017
AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases Freshly Updated Each Hour.
Plus, Save Big on Amazon Bestsellers by Category.
And don’t miss Big Savings in the Kindle Daily Deals.
DAVID BERNSTEIN: The post-constitutional world of Judge Richard Posner.
REALITY SINKS IN: Gay voters embrace French far-right.
Motivated in part by the deadly Islamic extremist attacks at home and at a Florida gay nightclub, a growing bloc of traditionally left-leaning gay voters has embraced far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, leader of the once-fringe National Front party.
“Faced with the current threats, particularly from radical Islam, gays have realized they’ll be the first victims of these barbarians, and only Marine is proposing radical solutions,” said Kelvin Hopper, 25, a gay artist who lives in a hipster district of Paris and plans to cast his ballot for Le Pen.
While nobody knows how far Le Pen’s supporters will carry her in the April 23-May 7 vote, several years of polls have shown the National Front is now more popular with the LGBT voters who make up 6.5 percent of the French electorate than it is with straight voters.
Say what you want about Le Pen, she won’t be throwing gays off buildings.
EXCELLENT CHOICE: White House names Neomi Rao as next ‘regulatory czar.’
Prior to joining the faculty at the Scalia Law School, Rao worked in the White House counsel’s office in the George W. Bush administration and as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She worked for Clifford Chance in London and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. Rao also serves as a member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and is co-chair of the Regulatory Policy Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.
Trump’s selection of Rao suggests the administration is serious about regulatory reform, not merely reducing high-profile regulatory burdens. The selection of a well-respected administrative law expert further suggests the administration recognizes the need to be attentive to legal constraints on administrative action and that meaningful reforms require more than issuing a few executive orders. Rao is a superlative pick.
As Abner Mikva later reflected (gloated?) one reason why so many Reagan Revolution reforms foundered in the courts was insufficient attention to the niceties of administrative law. I’m glad to see that the Trump Administration is taking the right steps to avoid that error.
WELL: Source: Trump ‘expects’ four more Supreme Court picks.
President Trump believes that he will have the opportunity to pack the Supreme Court with five judges, making him only the seventh president to appoint a majority and potentially cementing his legacy and that of the conservative court well past 2055.
Buoyed by the Senate’s expected confirmation today of Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia, Trump has told associates that he fully expects to name four more justices.
“He expects to name five to the court,” said one of those associates.
A new report on the court reveals that the average age of justices who leave the court is 79. Scalia was 79 when he died.
By the end of Trump’s first term, three will have crossed that line, Anthony Kennedy, who will be 83, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who will be 86, and Stephen Breyer, who will be 81. The next oldest is Clarence Thomas, who will be 71.
Supreme Court justices are notoriously long-lived, but the actuarial odds aren’t bad for Trump. I certainly hope he gets to fill several seats.
NEW LEFTY THESIS: Donald Trump Is Functionally Illiterate, Can’t Really Read.
I’ve heard similar stuff about every GOP president from W., who read dozens of books a year, all the way back to Gerald Ford, who was a Yale Law grad. But imagine that it’s true. If it’s true, then Hillary and all the brightest minds of the left were beaten like drums by a man who can’t even read!
But maybe, as with Reagan, it’s all just an act.
ALEXANDER BOLTON: McConnell’s shining moment.
Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court is a huge victory for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a frequent target of conservatives who saved Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat for the right.
When Scalia died suddenly in February 2016, in seemed certain that then-President Obama would be able to tilt the court to the left with his third appointment.
Instead, McConnell issued a statement within hours that essentially shut the door on an Obama appointment, stating “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
The Senate GOP backed McConnell up, and Donald Trump won the presidential election in an upset of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Months later, Trump nominated Gorsuch. McConnell made good on his promise to see the judge confirmed, even triggering the controversial “nuclear option” to break Democrats’ blockade and end filibusters for Supreme Court nominees.
“When the final chapter in Mitch McConnell’s book is written, this will place very prominently,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).
“It prevented the court from going in a completely opposite direction, so in that sense, it’s a huge victory, consequential for decades,” he added.
McConnell on Friday, moments before the Senate confirmed Gorsuch, said the decision to keep the seat open was “the most consequential decision I’ve ever been involved in.”
The strategy leaves McConnell as an unlikely hero of hard-line conservative activists who have sometimes criticized him over as an establishment figure too willing to craft deals with Democrats.
True.
April 7, 2017
AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Home Improvement.
MAKES SENSE; MY HAIR PRIVILEGE ENDED BY THE TIME COLLEGE WAS OVER AS WELL: Villanova Student Shaves Her Head to Confront ‘Hair Privilege.’
THIS IS GENERALLY, ALTHOUGH NOT UNIVERSALLY, TRUE: Suzanne Venker: We Need To Admit That Men Need Sex More Than Women Do. “As a rule, men communicate via sex. Via action. Your husband isn’t being insulting when you walk by and he grabs your butt. He’s not being rude when he turns some innocuous statement you made into something sexual. (If I had a dollar for every time that happens in our house!) He’s trying to get close to you. So let him. If he didn’t do those things, you’d have a problem on your hands.”
Well, that’s where the Maintenance Sex comes in, you know. And maintenance sex has saved some InstaPundit readers’ marriages.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO MURDER: Wife gets 40 years for putting antifreeze in husband’s steroids.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE on outrage: “Outrage is a substitute for religion: It convinces us that our existence has some kind of meaning or significance beyond itself, that is to say beyond the paltry flux of day-to-day existence, especially when that existence is a securely comfortable one. Therefore we go looking for things to be outraged about as anteaters look for ants. Of all emotions, outrage is not only one of the most pleasurable but also one of the most reliable.”
FROM WHAT I KNOW ABOUT HIM, HE’S A GOOD CHOICE, BUT HE WAS POSITIONED TO BE A STRONG CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR. I WONDER IF SOMEBODY ENCOURAGED THIS TO TAKE HIM OUT OF COMPETITION? President Trump nominates Tennessee state Sen. Mark Green for Army secretary.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 1860s series of photos illustrating the ‘5 stages of inebriation’
Larry Miller’s take is both more modern and more accurate.
DAVID SOLWAY ASKS, WHAT WILL TRUMP’S SECOND HUNDRED DAYS BE LIKE?
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Woman says Fitbit helped save her life. “A few months ago, she wasn’t feeling well and thought her sinus infection may have turned into pneumonia. ‘I went to the doctors to have that checked out and that turned out to be negative,’ she told CBS News. Lauder then noticed her resting heart rate on her Fitbit was climbing higher and higher every day. One day, she experienced shortness of breath and her heart rate spiked to 140 beats per minute, so she called an ambulance right away. She underwent a CT scan and doctors discovered a potentially life-threatening problem – two pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots clogging an artery in the lung.”
RELAX, EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY ON THE IMMIGRATION FRONT: Sweden: Soldiers of Odin target Muslim school in Stockholm.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Yale punished male student for writing essay that said rape is an ‘irrational act,’ lawsuit says.
ROGER SIMON: “I’m on RCP again this aft. It’s about the hundredth time in the last two years. (Yes, I bribe them.) Naturally, this brings out the trolls in force. I can’t imagine they have any impact at all on readers. Most of them are too obvious. Some, I suppose, do this out of “love,” but many are obviously paid and have pre-written talking points. You can see this because their responses are always vaguely off-topic. Anyway, what I’d like to know – and perhaps someone in our group has some information – just how much are these people paid and by whom? Yes, I know Soros is often the Grand Paymaster in the Sky, but how exactly does it work?”
I’ve often wondered this myself — any clues?
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should you stand or walk on the escalator?
Huh. It’s faster if everybody just stands.
Update: Link was weird, fixed now — sorry!
TOM KNIGHTON: Why Climate Change Models Are So Horrendous.
