WHEN LAWFARE FAILS: Cooper, NAACP both lose their lawsuits against NC legislators over constitutional amendments. “North Carolina voters this November will likely be able to vote on all six constitutional amendments that Republican legislators want them to approve. That’s because on Tuesday the N.C. Supreme Court handed losses to two lawsuits challenging the amendments. The court ruled against Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in his lawsuit over two potential amendments that would take power away from the governor’s office, and give that power to the legislature, late on Tuesday afternoon. Earlier in the day the court had also declined to hear an appeal from the North Carolina NAACP, which had sued over two different amendments that would create a new voter ID law and lower the state’s maximum possible income tax rate.”
Archive for 2018
September 5, 2018
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Enter The Labyrinth: “Today’s librarians no longer operate out of ivy covered buildings in bucolic campuses with collections of a few millions. They now operate on an unimaginably gigantic scale using hardware scattered across continents. For the most part the public don’t even know who they are. Yet these librarians wield enormous power: the effect of their decisions on access, erasure or alteration of digital data are identical in impact to fire and earthquake on earlier paper.”
TUCKER CARLSON: CHUCK TODD SAYS IT’S ONLY FOX NEWS WHICH HAS ERODED THE MEDIA’S CREDIBILITY. How About Chuck Todd’s Own Silence In the Face of NBC’s Weinstein Cover-Up?
ROGER SIMON: NYT’s “Inside” Attack on Trump Unbelievably Cowardly.
On the other hand, it sure was nice of the Times to provide the evidence that the deep state actually exists.
WE DON’T MIND, AS LONG AS IT’S THE RIGHT PEOPLE LEAVING: Dear Tennessee: Sorry about the ‘Illinois Exodus.’
Just don’t send people who are going to vote for the same crap policies they’re fleeing.
AT AMAZON, Fall Deals in Wheels and Tires.
Plus, save on Office Products.
SOME STUDENTS FROM THE LAW SCHOOL VETERANS’ GROUP THAT I SUPPORT LAID THE WREATH at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington last weekend. They’ve started an excellent student group, Vols for Vets, that supports legal aid and scholarships for veterans and dependents. I gave them $1000; if you’d like to donate you can donate here. Just click on “tickets.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Education System Isn’t Designed For Smart Kids.
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: “GREAT WORK”! Did the NYT just serve Donald Trump “his ‘Deep State’ talking point” on a silver platter?
Prediction: The author will turn out to be less “senior” than is implied. Either that or it’s Mike Pence. . .
NATURE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW AND BEAK: Head-turning violence helps tiny songbirds kill big prey: study.
JOHN ELLIS: The 5 Most Overrated Beers.
The best beer is the one in your hand, even if it isn’t all that good.
THEY KEEP TELLING US TRUMP IS CRAZY, AND THEN . . . ACTING CRAZY: The Democrats’ No Good, Frivolous, Ridiculous Day. “It strikes me that the Democratic Party crossed a Rubicon of sorts today. They abandoned all norms not just of civility–something they purported to yearn for just a few days ago!–but of sanity. They deliberately turned a Senate confirmation hearing into a farce. There was no distinction between the howling left-wing mob that infiltrated the hearing room and the Senate Democrats. Not long ago, some Democrats resisted the crazier fringes of their party. No longer. There is no daylight among the violent fascist group Antifa, the crazed Democratic activists bleating about impeachment, and the establishment Democratic Party. They are now one and the same. So, disgusting as today’s hearing was, it at least achieved some clarity. There is no longer any wing of the Democratic Party that can be described as sane.”
BEN SHAPIRO ON THE FAUX BIPARTISAN UNITY AT JOHN MCCAIN’S FUNERAL:
For those of us who have watched politics for the past several decades, pinning the death of a common American ethos on Trump is like blaming gravity for the Hindenburg disaster: It had something to do with the problem, but the bigger problem was the enormous fire ripping through the dirigible. George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not have a common vision for America. Neither did George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. What’s more, the hobnobbing and backslapping of these supposed representatives of sharply varying philosophies — the notion that an elite class of political actors were playacting their conflict in public, but smoking cigars together in private — led to the rise of an outsider such as Trump.
This isn’t a case against civility, of course. Trump has seriously degraded the public discourse; unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t hide his personal animus behind a veneer of niceness. But that wasn’t all that Obama and Bush were calling for. They suggested an ideological unity that no longer exists — and everyone knows it. The day before Barack Obama and George W. Bush at McCain’s funeral were signaling supposed American unity against unpalatable politics, Bill Clinton was sitting next to anti-Semites Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin’s.
We are disunited. Trump is a symptom of that. If political actors want to criticize the specifics of Trump’s philosophy, or if they want to criticize Trump’s character overtly, they should have at it. But presenting a false façade of unity where none has existed for decades only leads Americans to believe that the political elites are united by their elite status. And ironically, that plays directly into Trump’s populist hands.
As PJM’s David P. Goldman, aka “Spengler” put it in the Asia Times, It was “A funeral for a world that never was.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO FLASHBACK: Celebs Pledge Allegiance [to Obama].
JUSTICE: Man who threatened to kill Ajit Pai’s children pleads guilty, faces prison. “‘I will find your children and kill them,’ man wrote after net neutrality repeal.”
DEMOCRATS REVIVE THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS: If that title sounds vaguely familiar, you’ve probably been around for a lot of years. It’s from the title of a 1964 Harper’s Magazine feature by Columbia historian Richard Hofstader.
Democrats used it against Barry Goldwater then and have accused conservatives and Republicans of being paranoid about Blacks, Hispanics, change, The Other, Climate Change, The Future, and just about everything else in every election since LBJ buried Goldwater.
But check this out: Democrats on the opening day of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings put on a clinic for applying the paranoid style of politics. Yes, it’s not the first time they’ve done so, but boy is it obvious in the attacks on Kavanaugh.
TAMARA KEEL: Single-Handed Shooting: Why Practice It? “As it happens, I’m typing this month’s column with a wireless keyboard in my lap. Because it’s hard to reach the usual keyboard tray on my desk with one arm in a sling. Yeah, I broke my collarbone, which means I’m getting a couple unanticipated months to work on my one-handed pistol-manipulation drills.”
INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM: Millennial men say women are favoured at work. “Millennial men are leading a major backlash against women’s rights, according to new research from the University of Canberra. Those men, born between 1982 and 2000, backed by their older Gen X brothers, say they are left out of the conversation about gender equality and believe there is too much political correctness at work. Nearly half say their rights are being eroded by the focus on gender equality.”
VOTERS CAN BE PRETTY SMART: Voters Say Politics, Not Issues, Driving Kavanaugh Opposition.
YESTERDAY IN HISTORY: I forgot to post this yesterday. And maybe it’s fitting that I forgot. On September 4, 476 A.D., came the Fall of the Roman Empire (or rather the Western Roman Empire, the only Roman Empire to be headquartered in … wait for it … Rome). Here’s the crucial point: The September 4th date is just a convention. It is the date Odoacer overthrew Romulus Augustulus. But one could make an argument for dating the fall earlier or later. It is very doubtful that average Romans understood on that exact date that they were witnessing the close of an epoch. Alas, history is like that. Civilizations fall inch by inch, not all at once. It’s easy to miss.
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME 21 YEARS AGO THAT PROPOSITION 209 WAS FINALLY IMPLEMENTED: Proposition 209, which prohibited (among other things) state universities from engaging in discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, color, sex, or ethnicity, had been tied up in litigation for nearly a year. But by September the Ninth Circuit had spoken and en banc review had been denied. The University of California has no choice but to conduct its admissions season as if Proposition 209 was the law … because it was the law.
At the end of the admissions season, UC Berkeley leaked the results to the L.A. Times, which screamed in its headline, “Acceptance of Blacks, Latinos to UC Plunges.” This was highly misleading. While the numbers of Blacks and Latinos had decreased at UC Berkeley, they had increased dramatically at Riverside and at Santa Cruz.
More important—indeed more important than anything—the grades of black students had dramatically increased (and the internal documents at UC-San Diego made it clear that their experts understood exactly why this happened). You can read about it in The Politics of Admissions in California.