Archive for 2018
May 10, 2018
MOMMY KNOWS WORST: “Expert claims parents should ask babies for permission before changing diaper.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Hurricane Preparedness Week: Check your supplies, evacuation zone and more.
Related: Hurricane Supplies.
BLUE WAVE? Dem Advantage on Generic Ballot Down to 1.4%.
Historically, Democrats have needed about a five-point or better advantage to take the House.
Still, don’t get cocky.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: How Do These Liberal Monsters Hide In Plain Sight?
The Schneiderman case is still fresh, reports of circulating rumors have yet to be discovered. But that passage from Farrow about him being “too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose,” leaves little doubt that such knowledge was had. That sentiment does not occur in a vacuum.
The world in which Schneiderman and Weinstein operated is small, people don’t move into or out of it with regularity. Dating in insulated, powerful circles means people tend to know much of the business of others. To put it another way, people talk. That’s how rumors spread.
So how is it that no one in the media heard anything about either of these men until their stories were reported? How was it “news to them”? It is, after all, the jobs of these people to observe, to gain information, then disseminate that information to the public, particularly information about the powerful and politicians.
The reason is rather simple, and it’s one of the main complaints about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner – that the media elite are too close, too friendly with the people they cover, specifically liberal politicians, to cover them honestly.
Even if they were only acquaintances, no one wants to be the skunk at the garden party. Operating in the same social circles pollutes the relationship between journalist and politician, even when they agree politically. That means rumors are ignored or laughed off, no matter how many times they’re heard or their source.
—Derek Hunter, Townhall, today.
Which is why, often, the first instinct by their employers is to assume that the victims are the real issue:
The former producer described the HR department at the network as completely unhelpful, indicating that they didn’t take complaints seriously and would try to turn the victim into the problem.
“Their common first instinct is to protect the talent, no matter what the complaint, and then turn the victim into the problem,” the producer insisted. “When he turns on you, look out. All they do is protect him. All they do is protect him from himself.”
All five of the sources TheDC spoke to expressed fears that speaking out publicly against Matthews could hurt their careers.
“No other workplace like this exists where you can get away with that,” the former producer concluded.
—“Sources: Chris Matthews Runs An Abusive Work Environment,” Amber Athey, the Daily Caller, December 31, 2017.
Which helps to explain the network’s latest modified limited hangout. As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism, “NBC News Investigated Itself and Found No Culture of Harassment at NBC News.”
Just NBC the Möbius loop!
SEXUALITY EXPERT: Parents Need to Ask Babies Permission to Change Diapers.
Oh do shut up.
AND IF YOU DISAGREE, HIS NETWORK WILL DOXX THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF YOU: Silly Cillizza! People Think CNN has an ‘Imagined Ideological Agenda.’
Also from Chris Cillizza: “Here’s a name that would shake up the New York AG race: Hillary Clinton.”
MATTHEW WALTHER: The humorless media has learned nothing.
President Trump sent many journalists into hysterics on Wednesday when he tweeted that he might “take away” press credentials from unspecified purveyors of “Fake News.” “Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt?” the 71-year-old real-estate tycoon tweeted at 7:38 a.m., presumably in his pajamas. “Take away credentials?” The press met this obviously inane and idle threat not with an eye roll, but with gasps and whinges and cries of alarm. It was an “assault on the First Amendment,” the White House Correspondents Association huffed.
Spare me. Here is the painful truth for the emotional kindergartners who increasingly make up the Washington press corps: Our 45th president was making a joke to rile you up because he thinks it’s hilarious.
Whether or not you found the President’s tweet humorous, the press’s reaction to it has been hysterical.
KYLE SMITH: WHO’S AFRAID OF BARI WEISS?
It happens intermittently, without warning, on no fixed schedule. First: eerie wails in the distance. Then comes the rustle of terrified feet, soon growing into the low roar of a stampede. The faces of the tormented show a mixture of hostility, disbelief, and confusion. Thomas Pynchon captured the mood in his famous description of the V-2 rocket attacks on London, at the start of Gravity’s Rainbow: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” This week the screaming across the skies of the Internet could mean only one thing: Another Bari Weiss column had arrived.
Some right-leaning writers are provocateurs, but Weiss, a New York Times columnist and editor, is not Kevin Williamson or Ben Shapiro. She writes reasonable, even-tempered essays from a commonsense perspective. In her latest, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” a profile of a loosely affiliated group of public intellectuals from left and right who don’t share much in common except for a belief that ideas should be freely discussed, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a single point that’s outrageous or even controversial.
Unless you peddle in leftist identity/outrage politics, of course. Responding to a Morning Joe segment on Weiss’s “Dark Web” column, Shapiro writes, “This MSNBC Guest Just Showed Why The Intellectual Dark Web Exists:”
Instead of acknowledging that identity politics is not a mere synonym for justice — and it certainly isn’t, given that identity politics insists that people be identified by their racial, ethnic, or sexual group rather than as free-thinking individuals — [Eddie Glaude Jr., chair at the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton] suggests that those who oppose identity politics are merely covering for their secret racism. That’s nasty, and it’s why the IDW exists. More importantly, it’s why intellectually honest people of the Left like Sam are now engaging with people with whom they disagree politically. If we can’t have discussions without throwing out buzzwords meant to end those discussions, discussions won’t take place.
And that’s the whole goal of identity politics; it’s “An Enemy of Reason and Enlightenment Values,” Steven Pinker writes.
CHANGE? Nikki Haley Calls for Regime Change in Venezuela: ‘It’s Time for Maduro to Go!’
He won’t go before there’s nothing left to loot.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Obama Legacy Deserves To Be Destroyed.
David Harsanyi:
The Constitution doesn’t say “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law unless liberals tell us it’s super important.” Yet, shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration realized it would need more subsidies and asked for an appropriation from Congress.
When Congress, then teeming with politicians elected on the promise of overturning Obamacare, refused, Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew ordered the administration to begin making “cost-sharing reduction” payments anyway without any public legal justification. Obama created a $7 billion per year appropriation for insurance companies participating in the supposedly self-sufficient and competitive state health-care exchanges. Not a single liberal pundit that I know of concerned himself with this norm-breaking.
One federal court found the Obamacare subsidy unconstitutional, and the case is working towards the Supreme Court. But, then again, no administration in memory was stopped more often by courts, often by unanimous SCOTUS decisions. Whether it was ignoring the Senate in making appointments or claiming to rewrite employment law, Obama tried to function without constitutional restraints.
None of this even breaches the unprecedented regulatory regime Obama built to circumvent the legislative branch. Even The New York Times characterized his governing as “bureaucratic bulldozing, rather than legislative transparency.”
Change it back.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: ‘Never happened’: 26 years later, two men to be cleared of rape as accuser recants story. “Investigators had no physical evidence connecting the men to the crime or the crime scenes. Semen recovered from the woman, identified in court records as “the complainant,” did not belong to the accused. The prosecution’s case relied solely on her testimony, which was inconsistent, court records show. Defence attorneys argued that the case was poorly investigated and that the complainant, a recovering crack addict, fabricated the story to protect her boyfriend, who shot Perry two months earlier and was wanted by the police, court records show. Still, in 1992, a jury convicted Counts and Perry on all counts except for the weapons charges.”
But: “Last month, nearly three decades later, the woman told investigators that Perry and Counts were innocent and that the rape ‘never happened.’ . . . By then, Perry had served nearly 11 years in prison before being released in 2001; Counts, who was released in August, had served 26 years behind bars.”
Seems like there’s no reason to keep her name secret now.
BLUE WAVE? Why the Democrats Just Lost the Senate. “While Nancy Pelosi is shopping for speaker’s gavels, Chuck Schumer should be preparing for another term as minority leader.”
Because the bulk of Republican incumbents up for reelection this year are in states that are nearly impregnable—think Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming—Democrats will almost certainly have to defeat Nevada’s Dean Heller and pick up the Arizona seat left open by Jeff Flake’s retirement.
Beyond that pair, everything else is a stretch. Rep. Marsha Blackburn appears capable of blowing a lay-up open seat in Tennessee for the Republicans, and there are signs that Sen. Ted Cruz could be ripe for a takedown from cash-flush Democrat Beto O’Rourke in Texas, but both of those races are mostly progressive wishcasting at this point.
In any case, picking up two seats is the easy part. The Democrats must also protect incumbents in 10 states that Trump won in 2016. Five of those senators (Indiana’s Joe Donnelly; Missouri’s Claire McCaskill; Montana’s Jon Tester; North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp; and Manchin) represent states where Hillary Clinton failed to muster even 40 percent of the vote.
The Democratic brand is no asset in many of these places. Equally important, the president known for his historically weak approval ratings at the national level remains popular locally in states like Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia.
Charlie Mahtesian repeats the conventional wisdom that “the House seems to be a lost cause for Republicans,” but that might not be the case.
Anyway, don’t get cocky.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: One million people enter Colombia amid Venezuela crisis.
“To date we know that approximately one million people have entered Colombia through official migration points, and we don’t know how many have entered Colombia through unofficial migration points,” he said in a phone interview in Geneva, specifying that this movement had occurred “since mid-2017.”
With the economic crisis in Venezuela intensifying, an estimated 37,000 people were now moving across the Colombian border each day, he added.
On a recent trip to the region, Capobianco said he witnessed “a constant stream of people,” leaving Venezuela, some with their belongings strapped to the backs.
While the group is diverse, with some only looking to work in Colombia for a short period before returning home, most are on the move because they cannot meet their basic needs in Venezuela, Capobianco explained.
He described the situation as a “humanitarian crisis that needs to be better assessed,” including from a public health standpoint amid rising cases of malaria, diphtheria and other serious ailments affecting those migrating.
Weird how you never see this kind of thing happen in capitalist countries where the workers are exploited.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students ‘deeply hurt’ by criticism of liberal intolerance.
A conservative student was scolded by an administrator for giving a speech at a recent “Open Mic” event that apparently “deeply hurt” her liberal classmates.
The administrator said several students had filed complaints after Nicole Miller read a letter describing “horror stories” of conservative students being ridiculed, threatened, and even attacked simply for being “Trump lovers.”
They want to be nasty little Red Guards and they don’t want to have to confront what they’re doing, and — of course — there’s an “administrator” handy to take their side. Her name is Trisha DeWolf and she works at the . . . “Lifestyles Center.”
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Hostages Returned to America and Much, Much More.
JOHN STOSSEL: Why The Left Hates Betsy DeVos.
People hate Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
When she spoke at the Kennedy School of Government, students held up signs calling her a “white supremacist.”
When she tried to visit a school, activists physically blocked her way.
The haters claim DeVos knows little about education, only got her job because she gave money to Republican politicians, and hates free public education.
Of course, education isn’t really “free.”
Taxpayers spend $634 billion a year on it. It’s laughable that activists claim conservatives “cut” education spending. Funds per student tripled over the past several decades, while test scores stayed flat.
Some of that failure is because of what DeVos really opposes: government’s education bureaucracy.
Education is one of the Long March’s biggest fiefdoms. They won’t give it up without a fight.
CIVIL RIGHTS/CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE UPDATE: Illinois counties declare themselves ‘sanctuary’ counties for gun owners.
HOW HAVE MEN been affected by feminism?
IRONIC COMING FROM THE PUBLICATION WHICH FIRED KEVIN WILLIAMSON AFTER JUST ONE COLUMN: The CIA Needs an Independent Thinker—Not Gina Haspel.
I’M FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND I’M HERE TO HELP YOU: New Research Reinforces Earlier Studies Suggesting PDMPs Are Adding to Opioid Overdose Rate.
A study published last year by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University found that state Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs), a popular method used to drive down the opioid prescription rate, do not drive down opioid overdose death rates, but might have the unintended consequence of adding to them, by driving users to the underground market where dangerous drugs like fentanyl and heroin await them. Another study last October by a Purdue University researcher found that while PDMPs drove down the prescription rate of oxycodone, they significantly drove up the rate of heroin use.
Yesterday the Annals of Internal Medicine published a systematic research review by Columbia University epidemiologist David Fink and others that drew the same conclusion. The authors stated, “Evidence that PDMP implementation either increases or decreases nonfatal or fatal overdoses is largely insufficient, as is evidence regarding positive associations between specific administrative features and successful programs.” They added, “implementation of PDMPs may have unintended negative outcomes—namely, increased rates of heroin-related overdose.”
Meanwhile, all 50 states have implemented PDMPs and state and federal policymakers seem focused on beefing them up. This is driven by the mistaken belief that the opioid overdose rate is primarily the result of doctors over-prescribing opioids to patients. As I have written numerous times, the overdose crisis is primarily a product of drug prohibition, as non-medical users access drugs in the dangerous black market.
Unexpectedly!