WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Ratings: ‘Trump is indeed destroying CNN.’

Related:

JOURNALISM: “It seems as though WaPo can’t report this story without pushing the usual agenda, characterizing Republicans as bent on disenfranchising people.”

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SOCIAL SCIENCE: “Female university students are more likely to be ridiculed online about their sexual activity, and men are more likely to be bullied about their sexual orientation and whether they’re skilled or talented enough at sports and hobbies, a new study has found.” Actually, you could divine this simply from looking at lefty online comments about the Trumps: They call Melania a whore (well, until she sued someone and won) and charge Trump with having a small penis.

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

WEIRD HOW OFTEN FAMOUS LEFTIES TURN OUT TO BE HORRIBLE, GREEDY PEOPLE: Sanders investigation: Bernie’s wife attempted to evict disabled group home residents, report claims.

CHANGE: Trump Administration Signals End To Campus Star Chambers.

I hope they’ll go beyond that, and take affirmative steps to remedy the hostile environment for male students on college campuses today.

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Hypocritical Leftists Are Happy To Give Muslim Extremists A Pass. When you realize that they have a common enemy in Western civilization, it all makes sense.

CARRIER STRIKE GROUP 5: Lovely shot of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan and escorts — the sun low in the sky. Photo was snapped June 29.

SARAH HOYT: Becoming American.

As a friend of Sarah’s I can tell you that she’s really, really good at it.

EUROPE: A BABY IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH BY SOCIALIZED MEDICINE:

American liberals often gaze across the Atlantic with admiration, viewing Europe as the model for our future. They covet Europe’s rail systems, green-energy subsidies, social liberalism, secularism, welfare states and government-run healthcare.

As Washington rings with cries that a Republican health reform bill would kill “hundreds of thousands of people,” consider the desperately sad tale of Charlie Gard, a baby boy sentenced to die by Britain’s National Health Service.

Charlie was born in October with encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, or MDDS. It has left him crippled and with brain damage. He depends on a ventilator to keep him alive.

We don’t know what’s best for Charlie. But we do know that the British government doesn’t either. Nevertheless the NHS, installed by socialists in the last century, has decided that it will not treat Charlie anymore, although his parents desperately want to save and nuture their son.

Worse yet, and an outrage that boggles the mind, is that the NHS refuses to release Charlie into the care of his parents. Charlie’s mother and father want to bring him to America for an experimental treatment that could help his body work more normally. They have even, through an appeal for charitable donations, raised enough money to bring their son here and get him treated. But the NHS has said it will not release the child, and every court has agreed.

This is the apotheosis of big government. The British state has become the Alpha and the Omega. It has nationalized a child and, implicitly, other children whom it might one day cut off from the love and care of their parents.

The point of this is not to save money, but to establish that the government has the power of life and death over its citizens. If I were this baby’s parent, I might be inclined to rub out a few doctors and judges to remind them that the reverse is also true.

FINLAND AND SWEDEN JOIN BRITISH-LED RAPID REACTION FORCE:

Sweden and Finland have joined a British-led military rapid reaction force that can either operate alone or jointly with the United Nations, NATO or the European Union.

The two non-NATO members joined the Joint Expeditionary Force on Friday when Sweden’s Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist and his Finnish counterpart Jussi Niinisto signed a deal in Stockholm in the presence of British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, who called it “a force of friends.”

And Moscow howled. Well, it’s what you get when you invade Ukraine.

RELATED: From March 2014. Putin’s Three Cold Facts. Remember, Obama was the one who was “flexible” with Putin.

HONG KONG PRO-DEMOCRACY MARCH:

Au Nok-hin helped organize and lead the march:

Au described the freedom of assembly in Hong Kong as being under threat, pointing to the detention of a dozen pro-democracy activists for staging a rally during the just-concluded three-day visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Another marcher said that he “continued to come out every year to remind people that the mainland government made promises about the city’s autonomy, but he said the political situation was getting worse.”

Beijing is violating the spirit and the letter of the autonomy agreement it made with Britain and Hong Kong.

SHE’S LIKELY TO REMAIN THE BOTOXED FACE OF THE DEMOCRATS FOR QUITE SOME TIME: Six Who Could Succeed Pelosi — Someday.

NOTHING TO HIDE: 19 states refusing to provide voter data to Trump election panel.

FEMALE PRIVILEGE: Study: More Men Hired in Gender-Blind Job Application Process.

The trial, which was an effort to push more women in senior position jobs, revealed that removing the gender from a candidate’s application does not help boost gender equality in hiring. The trial also revealed that adding a male name to a candidate’s application made them 3.2 percent less likely to get the job while adding a female name made it 2.9 percent more likely that the candidate would be hired.

Researchers assumed that removing gender identifiers from an application would make it easier for women to obtain employment in senior positions that have traditionally been dominated by men.

“We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist,” said Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic. “We found the opposite, that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist.”

So they identified pervasive discrimination in favor of women. But what was the lesson drawn? Not that the (female-dominated) HR departments need to remedy that. Instead:

Hiscox warned governments and companies to consider the real possibility that gender-blind hiring processes may actually lessen equality in the workplace. “We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect,” Professor Hiscox claimed.

Well, one thing this illustrates is that “diversity” isn’t the same thing as “equality.”

“LET’S JUST DO IT AND BE LEGENDS, MAN:” Fyre Festival organizers blew all their money early on models, planes, and yachts.

And…Achievement Unlocked!  Fyre Festival founder arrested and charged with wire fraud.

To be fair, becoming infamous is a form of reaching legend status, right?

WELL, NOW WE KNOW HOW THEIR ANTIFA MUTANTS WERE SPAWNED: Oregon’s Sex Guide for Teens: Written By Children, for Children.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

ANALYSIS: TRUE. SO DEUCEDLY, DEUCEDLY TRUE. Damn It, It Feels Good to be a Chap!

THE TRUMP-MOON, U.S.-SOUTH KOREA UNIFIED FRONT: Against Kim Kong Un’s violent North Korea.

President Donald Trump on Friday declared the U.S. has run out of patience with North Korea, as he met with his South Korean counterpart at the White House.

Speaking in the Rose Garden alongside South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Trump vowed a “determined response” against Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

“The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed,” Trump said, referring to his predecessors’ approach to the North. “Many years and it’s failed, and frankly, that patience is over.”

Trump and Moon differ over exactly how much to pressure the North into giving up its weapons programs. Both leaders also have criticized certain aspects of their countries’ defense cooperation.

But on Friday the two leaders presented a unified front.

MORE:

After a discussion that lasted about 30 minutes longer than scheduled, Moon praised Trump’s “determination and pragmatism” and said they were able to build a “broad consensus” on issues ranging from defense ties to the North Korean nuclear issue.

Good report. Trump’s amazing. In ten years we’ll be reading histories examining how he could simultaneously cooperate with a threatened U.S. ally while giving arrogant poseurs in the mainstream media a taste of their own silly poison.

JOURNALISM: CNN Won’t Discipline Producer Caught in O’Keefe’s Sting.

PORTLAND’S ANTIFA MOVEMENT IS SPIRALING OUT OF CONTROL:

For antifa, it’s not enough to simply outscream their opposition; rather, those far-right forces must, in a bizarre nod to the Bush Doctrine, be preemptively denied a voice from the outset. “We are unapologetic about the reality that fighting fascism at points requires physical militancy,” Rose City Antifa’s Facebook page reads…

Shortly after Trump’s election, anarchist and far-left protesters rioted in Portland, bringing at least a million dollars’ worth of damage—and resulting, in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, in “domestic terrorism.” Further riots followed Trump’s inauguration, and more in the months thereafter. “Their actions—conducted anonymously but brutally—show them to be punk fascists,” wrote an editorial in The Oregonian, slamming those leading the greatest political violence Portland had seen in a generation.

“You really have to see it to appreciate how out of control some of the protesters were,” John Sexton adds to the above Politico article, at Hot Air. Scroll to about the 3:15 minute mark, where a masked, mostly peaceful™ protestor kicks in a Target department store window and then attempts to throw a flair into the store, followed immediately after by the mostly peaceful destruction of a Portland police car, including breaking its windows and slashing its tires:

That was the Portland May Day protest. But fear not, Portland residents – the city’s Democrat mayor is not taking the months of violence lying down:

Still have questions about Portland police tactics during the June 4 protester standoff? So does Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Wheeler today sent a letter to Portland Police Chief Mike Marshman that asks five detailed questions about the methods police used to drive left-wing protesters from Chapman Square and detain them in downtown streets.

Wheeler’s questions cover much of the same ground as a June 6 WW story that summarized a persistent complaint from the Sunday protests: that Portland police cracked down too aggressively on local antifascists and anarchists.

The mayor’s letter is especially interesting because its asks the bureau to defend not only its June 4 actions but explain its guiding policy on how it responds to political protests. Wheeler asks why police arrive at rallies in riot gear, and what grounds the bureau uses for deploying crowd-control weapons like stun grenades and rubber bullets. (Both were used on June 4.)

“I have heard from people who claim they were protesting peacefully and following instructions, but nevertheless were affected by the use of crowd control devices,” the mayor writes. “What steps are taken to minimize the use of crowd control devices? What steps are taken to attempt to ensure that when they are used those protesting peacefully and following instructions are not affected?”

As CBS reported in 2015, when a reporter asked Wheeler’s fellow Democrat, then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, “to comment on how Baltimore police responded to the protestors she said she instructed officers to allow protestors to express themselves, and that ‘we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.’”

Evidently, that’s how Portland’s mayor is cracking down on leftwing violence in his town as well. Portland’s last Republican mayor left office in 1980; Baltimore’s in 1967. Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits of government-sanctioned violence?

IN CHICAGO, THOUGHT-POLICE BRUTALITY; Chicago Theater Critic Shunned for Racial Honesty:

In Chicago, where there were more homicides last year than in Los Angeles and New York City combined, expressing any support whatsoever for the police is now considered an outrage. Should you point out that, say, a play seems to suggest cops are evil crackers, you may find yourself denounced as a racist and targeted for abuse and ostracization.

A theater writer has just found that out. In what the website American Theatre dubbed “the review that shook Chicago,” adding in a subhead that “Local theatre artists rise in revolt,” veteran theater critic Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times criticized a new play called Pass Over, which I haven’t seen but is being described as a kind of update of Waiting for Godot filtered through the sensibility of Black Lives Matter. The play, by Antoinette Nwandu, was mounted by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, perhaps the most celebrated outfit of its kind outside of New York City. Weiss found its racial politics to be a bit reductionist, and offered these thoughts in her review:

No one can argue with the fact that this city (and many others throughout the country) has a problem with the use of deadly police force against African-Americans. But, for all the many and varied causes we know so well, much of the lion’s share of the violence is perpetrated within the community itself. Nwandu’s simplistic, wholly generic characterization of a racist white cop (clearly meant to indict all white cops) is wrong-headed and self-defeating. Just look at news reports about recent shootings (on the lakefront, on the new River Walk, in Woodlawn) and you will see the look of relief when the police arrive on the scene.

Cue unbridled rage. Steppenwolf charged her with “deep-seated bigotry.” An actor named Bear Bellinger announced that he would not perform if Weiss showed up at a workshop production he was appearing in. An ad-hoc coalition that might as well have dubbed itself the Blackball Hedy Movement (but is actually called the Chicago Theater Accountability Coalition, or CTAC) launched a petition via change.org to organize the theater world of Chicago against Weiss by denying her invitations to its plays. Several theater organizations have publicly agreed to join the blackballing effort, and dozens have offered noncommittal statements of support. The group’s broadside against Weiss reads, “Over the last few years especially, we have joined together to make it clear that inappropriate language or behavior does not have a place within our community, and that prejudice of any kind will not stand.”

* * * * * * * *

It was less than two years ago that Steppenwolf mounted a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Do these people not recognize their kinship with the thought police? Do they not see that “Shut up” is not an argument?

Other than violence, what other arguments do the left have these days?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Serena Williams Is Not the Best Tennis Player. “This is not to take anything away from Williams, whose athleticism stuns me into a near-faint. But even McEnroe’s detractors have had to grudgingly acknowledge that if Williams were playing with the men, at best, her superb athleticism and mental strength might occasionally earn her a win. That’s a pretty strange definition of ‘best tennis player in the world.’ . . . Tennis, after all, is a court, a moderate amount of equipment, and some highly detailed rules for determining who wins. The best tennis player is the person who can most regularly defeat the other players under those rules. Unless some sort of terrible plague wipes out hundreds of top men’s tennis players, that person will never be Serena Williams.”

THANK GOD NO TWEETS WERE INVOLVED: “Pat, 41, told CPJ that municipal police in Playa del Carmen, in the southern state of Quintana Roo, signaled for him to pull his motorcycle over as he left a meeting with other journalists at around 1:30 a.m. on June 25. When the journalist complied, police handcuffed him and violently pushed him into the patrol car, he said.”

“They pulled a T-shirt over my head and started kicking me while driving around,” Pat told CPJ. “At least one of them repeatedly punched me in the face.”

Can you imagine if the police had tweeted about him? That would be all out war on journalists! (The Captain has now turned off the Sarcasm Light).