IT’S COME TO THIS: Prof claims Trump ‘making microaggressions worse’ on campus.
Archive for 2018
July 17, 2018
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CHRIS DAVIS IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST: The True Power Of Trump’s Tweets: This is how the president’s tweets will go down in history. “A statement by the president, on Twitter or otherwise, must carry with it the authority and legitimacy of the Office of the President.” This is certainly timely.
DARPA AND AMERICA’S ELECTRONICS RESURGENCE INITIATIVE: Well worth reading.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Red Scare Heats Up and Much, Much More. “Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence, also countered Trump: ‘The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide the best information and fact-based assessments possible for the President and policymakers,’ Coats said in a statement. ‘We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security’.”
OUR GOVERNMENT IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Plutonium Stolen From the Parking Lot of the Marriott San Antonio Northwest
They left the materials in the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition and went to bed. The plutonium and cesium were stolen out of the Marriott parking lot…. The group that lost the nuclear material is the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program which is based at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — is the team charged with recovering plutonium and enriched uranium that has been loaned out by the military. Let that sink in for a moment.
AN A-10 DRESSED FOR LATVIA: A Michigan Air National Guard A-10 lands at Lielvarde Air Base, Latvia.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: Progressives Come After Brett Kavanagh. In a rather self-serving approach, one law professor yesterday seemed to be arguing on Twitter that after Trump’s Helsinki press conference, true conservatives should withdraw their support for Kavanagh. As a matter of high principle, this is kinda . . . convenient.
SUBTEXT: Ukrainian troops keep Russia on their minds as they train with US Marines.
Exercise Sea Breeze, which launched July 9 and brings together 19 nations, is a lot like many other annual drills at the operational level, and it brought with it the standard messages from U.S. officials about European partnership and cooperation.
But in this case, Ukrainians are going to use what they learn to fight separatists backed by Russia, which took the Crimean Peninsula from them in 2014 and whose leader, Vladimir Putin, is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump on Monday in Helsinki.
Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock.
PAUL BEDARD: Pollsters: Trump knows ‘how to win,’ would beat 2020 liberal ‘decisively.’
Democratic pollster John Zogby doesn’t care much for many of President Trump’s policies and thinks the man is rude, but he’s also coming to the conclusion that the Republican has something very big going for him.
“Some people just know how to win,” said Zogby, who didn’t think Trump would make it out of the Republican primaries in 2016.
After two years of polling on Trump, Zogby said that the president is emerging as an unusual non-politician who has confounded his critics and even his own party leaders by succeeding on an aggressive agenda that has pleased his supporters.
He compares Trump to three former presidents, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, who entered office to shock from the ruling elite. “With all three there was sense by the elites that this was the end of the world,” said Zogby.
But like them, Trump has connected with many in the country by battling the ruling powers. In his latest John Zogby Strategies poll, 54 percent view Trump as one “who is fighting the Washington, D.C. establishment,” compared to 26 percent who view him as an insider. He revealed the results in his Forbes Magazine column.
It is part of what Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin called the president’s profile as the “blue collar billionaire,” a leader standing up to Washington, and last week NATO, for taxpayers and workers.
“If you are a working class person, it feels to you that he is fighting for you,” McLaughlin said. “He’s their president.”
New polling from Zogby’s son Jonathan, who conducts the trademarked Zogby Poll, revealed that feeling is true even among some Hispanics and African Americans. His polling shows that a sizable portion of minorities feel positive about their lives and future finances under Trump, something that his father John Zogby said could “lessen the fervor to say, ‘We’re going to Hell, I’ve got to get this guy out of there.’ ”
While Trump’s critics suggest that there has never been such a threatening president, Zogby said that the same charges were filed against Jackson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and they won reelection. “They don’t remember that we’ve been here before. There is precedent,” he said.
Well, don’t get cocky, kids.
I THOUGHT THE (SOCIAL) SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: How Social Science Might Be Misunderstanding Conservatives
CHANGE: Federal Appeals Court Finds FHFA Unconstitutional as Separation of Powers Violation. Full opinion is here.
ALLIES: Congress Wants Recognition of Israeli Sovereignty Over Golan Heights.
The House’s National Security Subcommittee, led by chairman Rep. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) will hold a hearing Tuesday to examine how recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the territory could bolster U.S. national security efforts to stem the flow of terrorists in the Jewish state and elsewhere in the region by giving the Jewish state unilateral control over the Syrian territory, where Iranian-backed fighters and other jihadists have been spotted since the start of a bloody civil war.
The push to have the Trump administration formally recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the territory comes following a Monday afternoon press conference between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladamir Putin, where the two leaders discussed efforts to decrease tension in Syria.
When DeSantis and other Republicans pushed a congressional resolution recognizing Israeli control over the Golan Heights in May, it was nixed by GOP leadership who were seeking to prevent such a vote on the heels of the Trump administration’s successful effort to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The resolution had won support from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and others.
The Heights have been in Israeli possession since 1967 and Syria hasn’t seriously contested that since 1973.
WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: How Venezuela Became China’s Money Pit. “Beijing is reportedly throwing good money after bad to the Latin American producer, but it has its reasons.”
The CSIS tallies $55 billion in energy-related loans alone that it has extended. Unable to come up with hard currency to service them, Venezuela has been paying in discounted barrels of oil but struggled even to do that after prices collapsed in 2014. China offered a “grace period” on some loans.
At one point when prices were higher and its oil industry less decrepit, Venezuela was sending China 600,000 barrels a day, according to Russ Dallen, the chief executive of Caracas Capital Markets, who has done extensive work untangling Venezuela’s opaque finances. He estimated that has brought the balance down to about $20 to $23 billion, plus another $3 billion to $4 billion owed to Russian oil company Rosneft.
The cash drain from these enormous debts may have exacerbated the decline in output, and there is scant chance that China’s latest infusion will do much to arrest the fall. Hence the market’s shrug at the news. But why does cash keep flowing in?
Part of it is the potential equity value of that bad debt.
They’ll pick the bones of Venezuela’s corpse, then expect us to take care of the humanitarian cleanup.
MY COLLEAGUE JOAN HEMINWAY POSTS A REMEMBRANCE OF OUR LATE COLLEAGUE JONATHAN ROHR.
UNEXPECTEDLY: The $15 Minimum Wage Is Wreaking Havoc On New York City Dining.
This minimum wage spike has forced several New York City businesses to shutter their doors and will claim many more victims soon. Businesses must meet the $15 wage by the end of 2018, the culmination of mandatory increment increases that began in 2016. Restaurants where staff earn tips are subject to a $5 per hour tip credit, but must pay $10 per hour. That is nearly double the 2014 minimum wage of $8 with a $3 tip credit.
For many businesses, this egregious law is not just an inconvenience, it is simply unaffordable. The most recent victim is long-time staple, The Coffee Shop, a tremendously popular Union Square bar and café favored by many celebrities.
In explaining his decision to close following 28 years of high-volume business, owner Charles Milite told the New York Post, “The times have changed in our industry. The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees.”
If only there were some kind of predictable relationship between price and demand which politicians could look to before passing laws like this one.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Trump embraces deep state conspiracy theory.
—Headline, CNN.com, November 29, 2017.
● Chaser: CNN’s Philip Mudd Calls for ‘Shadow Government’ to Rise Up, Oppose Trump.
—NewsBusters, yesterday.
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BLAME THE MESSENGER: A large, longitudinal, randomized, controlled study recently found that Tennessee’s pre-kindergarten program for low-income children had modestly NEGATIVE effects on academic achievement once the children were in the third grade. The program participants also had more disciplinary problems than non-participants, most of whom had stayed at home that year rather than participating in some other program. This is, of course, disappointing, especially since the study had found positive effects when measured at the end of the pre-kindergarten year. But those effects faded over time and turned negative.
There are several different, plausible explanations for these results. I will leave it to you to read the study or its summary for that. Instead, I want to draw your attention to yet another case of bullying researchers who get politically incorrect results. Authors Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey commented on the vitriol to which they have been subjected:
[Our] findings were not welcome. So much so that it has been difficult to get the results published. Our first attempt was reviewed by pre-k advocates who had disparaged our findings when they first came out in a working paper – we know that because their reviews repeated word-for-word criticisms made in their prior blogs and commentary. We are grateful for an open-minded editor who allowed our recent paper summarizing the results of this study to be published (after, we should note, a very thorough peer review and 17 single-spaced pages of responses to questions raised by reviewers). We are also appreciative of the objective assessment and attention to detail represented in the Straight Talk review.
It is, of course, understandable that people are skeptical of results that do not confirm the prevailing wisdom, but the vitriol with which our work has been greeted is beyond mere scientific concern. Social science research can only be helpful to policy makers if it presents findings openly and objectively, even when unwelcome.
We share with our colleagues a commitment to the goal of providing a better life for poor children. Blind commitment to one avenue for attaining that goal, however, is unnecessarily limiting. If pre-k is not working as hoped and intended, we need to roll up our sleeves and figure out what will work, with solid research to guide that effort.
Here’s a question worth knowing the answer to: How much of the vitriol was coming from individuals with a financial stake in the continuation of government-subsidized pre-kindergarten programs for low-income children? As always, the more that gets spent on any government program, the harder it is to turn the spigot off.
By the way, as one might guess, there is similar vitriol aimed at researchers—like UCLA’s Richard Sander—who question the effectiveness of race-preferential admissions at increasing the number of minority professionals. Some of it comes from people whose jobs depend on maintaining the status quo.
THIS MIGHT BE ONE OF THOSE SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE. OR AT LEAST THE ADUCKALYPSE: A Charlemagne what?!?