Archive for 2018
October 16, 2018
OUTING VICTIMS IS NOT OKAY: Women Say Heitkamp Campaign Identified Them as Sexual Assault Survivors Without Their Permission. “A lot of these people listed, including me, did not give anyone permission for our names to be posted. I don’t even support Heidi Heitkamp and I am not a domestic abuse survivor.”
It’s even less okay when they aren’t actually victims.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A Fractional Native American and Much, Much More. “‘Journalist’ Jamal Khashoggi was seen entering the Saudi embassy in Turkey and has not been seen since. All sorts of fantastic stories surrounding his disappearance are showcased in the media: he was chopped up into little pieces by Saudi agents, “sources” say he was murdered in the embassy, there is video and audio of his murder etc. But we have been given no evidence of any of theses claims. None.”
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: NASA’s ‘brilliant’ plan for a cloud city of airships in the atmosphere of Venus.
Now that’s the 21st century I was hoping for, to coin an Insta-phrase.
HOWIE CARR ON ELIZABETH WARREN’S RESURRECTION OF THE “ONE-DROP” RULE: Fake news matched only by the fake Indian’s fake math. “She’s not an Indian according to the bylaws of the various Indian nations. She doesn’t meet Bureau of Indian Affairs standards. She … is … not … an … Indian. Period.”
BUT OF COURSE: Venezuela’s Meltdown Creates a Nation of Desperate Capitalists.
Hyperinflation and scarcity have the Bolivarian revolution’s socialist heart pulsing with entrepreneurship. Desperate citizens are eking out a living with ventures such as digging home water wells, bartering bananas for haircuts and transporting commuters in animal-cargo trucks. The economy’s erosion has created markets and market players where none existed.
“I had to improvise in this crisis,” said Ramirez, 31, who always had a knack for fixing things, tinkering with television remotes and microwaves. “Many people today have to pick food over buying things like lightbulbs. I do things well, and I help them afford a good product that will last.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, I joked at the time that Friedrich Engels was half-right: The socialist state did indeed wither away — so that people could go back to practicing a little capitalism.
LOVE WILL FIND A WAY: New app for Trump singles ‘Makes Dating Great Again.’
TIM BLAIR ON THE WORLD’S FRACTIONEST INDIAN.
OF COURSE SHE DID: Claire McCaskill took campaign contributions from Harvey Weinstein’s enabler. “The contributions come from Bryan Lourd, a partner of CAA and a man the New York Times listed as part of ‘Weinstein’s Complicity Machine.'”
WITH ALL THE HATRED DIRECTED AT “OLD, WHITE MEN,” THAT COULD PUT A LOT OF PEOPLE IN JAIL: Hostility to men and elderly people could become hate crimes. The whole idea of “hate crimes” is stupid, but hey, sauce for the goose. . .
FACE, MEET PALM: San Francisco to vote on taxing rich businesses for homeless.
Some streets are so filthy that officials launched a special “poop patrol,” and a young tech worker created “Snapcrap” — an app to report the filth. Morning commuters walk briskly past homeless people huddled against subway walls. In the city’s squalid downtown sector, the frail and sick shuffle along in wheelchairs or stumble around, sometimes half-clothed.
The situation has become so dire that a coalition of activists collected enough signatures to put a measure on the city’s Nov. 6 ballot. Proposition C would tax hundreds of San Francisco’s wealthiest companies to help thousands of homeless and mentally ill residents, an effort that failed earlier this year in Seattle. San Francisco’s measure is expected to raise $300 million a year, nearly doubling what the city already spends.
Subsidies don’t get you less of anything except money.
DON’T GET COCKY: Don’t expect a big Democratic wave this fall, a new CNBC poll says.
WELL, WE CAN HOPE: Did Elizabeth Warren Just Kill Identity Politics? If the Massachusetts senator is now a person of color then the term has no meaning.
At least according to the report from Professor Bustamante, it’s possible that Sen. Warren has far less than one percent Native American ancestry, and that her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S. Could this create a problem for the senator both among those who have never claimed minority status and those who believe they clearly deserve it? . . .
Before facing President Trump in a 2020 debate, Sen. Warren will first need to win over the Democrats who vote in presidential primaries. If these voters accept her as a Native American then logically it suggests that most if not all Americans can also claim to be members of groups that have historically suffered discrimination. We’re all minorities now?
We didn’t wipe out the Indians. There are Indians everywhere, running America and living in it. Basically, the Indians won!
#METOO: Woman accusing Murphy staffer of rape says she ‘received no justice.’
The woman who accused a senior staffer in [Democrat New Jersey] Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration of sexually assaulting her while he worked for Murphy’s campaign last year is a state official who says she is now telling her story because she has “received no justice.”
Katie Brennan, who later volunteered for the campaign and is now the chief of staff at the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, detailed her allegations against Albert J. Alvarez publicly for the first time in a story published by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday afternoon.
After the report was published Sunday afternoon, Brennan said in a statement: “On April 8th, 2017, Al Alvarez raped me. On April 9th, 2017 I learned that the system is broken.”
Whether it’s broken depends on what it was designed to actually do.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Tucker Carlson Says He Can’t Go to Restaurants Anymore.
Earlier: Rage when you disagree: How ‘safe spaces’ led to today’s political mobs.
(Via Newsalert.)
HMM: Could Democrats be Suppressing Voter Turnout in Georgia?
In yet another crazy conspiracy theory to undermine our electoral process, Democrats across the country are accusing Brian Kemp of “stealing” Georgia’s gubernatorial election against Stacey Abrams. The accusation is based on 53,000 voter registration applications that have been flagged as “pending” by the Secretary of State’s office. Democrats are all up in arms because these 53,000 people won’t be allowed to vote. The only problem? A pending voter registration doesn’t prevent you from voting.
This issue goes back to a state law that requires the address in your voter registration file match the address with the DMV. If there is a discrepancy, you will need to present photo ID to verify your information to obtain an absentee ballot or vote at your polling place. If you provide the ID (which is required to vote in Ga anyways), you can still vote in the November election. The “pending” term essentially amounts to a clerical designation. But Democrats seem hellbent on telling Georgians who are on the list they cannot vote, which could cause some people to stay home.
Plus: “For some reason, Stacey Abrams seems more intent on undermining the credibility of our elections than she is on trying to win.”
Oh, I think we know the reason.
BEN SMITH: Donald Trump Will Dominate The Democratic Primary. Elizabeth Warren Just Showed Him How.
Warren’s decision to launch her campaign on Donald Trump’s terms is not going to discourage him.
And it’s easy to see how Trump will keep weighing in. The most obvious path is simply tweeting — he can live-tweet speeches and debates, comment in the early morning hours on a candidate’s looks or conduct, the usual. The other, which he’s begun to try out, is to try to revive the flagging media interest in court gossip by talking about the Democrats to his sieve-like staff and watching it leak into the press as a catalog of his “views” on the candidates. There even seems to be a race to figure out the nicknames he’ll attach to each, something to which commentators — in this moment of a bipartisan suspicion that the president has magical political abilities — attach totemic power.
Candidates, meanwhile, will not exactly have their feelings hurt by a mean tweet. Anyone who has the misfortune of having her email full of quarterly fundraising requests from Democrats knows there’s no better subject line than “The President Is Attacking Me” to harvest credit card numbers. And in a crowded field, Trump will have the power to elevate his targets.
What’s more, Trump and the reporters covering him will be bound by an eternal truth of presidential campaign coverage: Re-election campaigns are grindingly boring.
That last line is so far removed from reality that I think it must be Smith’s tell that he believes Trump will win in 2020.
JIM JONES & HARVEY MILK: THE SECRET HISTORY: Daniel Flynn’s new book Cult City reveals how 1970s San Francisco led to Jonestown.
OOPS: Beto O’Rourke Fundraising ‘Cannibalized’ Money From Other Dems, Boosting GOP Hopes. “O’Rourke is on a vanity mission that is just basically flushing money down the toilet.”
I had been assured by members of the “Party of Science” that O’Rourke was the man to beat Ted Cruz and well-qualified for high office because he has Kennedyesque teeth.
AS IF THEY WOULDN’T DO THE SAME: Dems angered by GOP plan to hold judicial hearings in October.
Democrats and liberal groups are fuming over a GOP plan to hold Senate hearings for President Trump’s judicial picks over the next two weeks while senators are out of town campaigning for the midterm elections.
Judiciary Committee Democrats sent a letter Monday to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the panel’s chairman, criticizing the hearings and noting that Democrats were not even consulted about their scheduling.
“The committee has never before held nominations hearings while the Senate is in recess before an election,” the letter stated. “The handful of nominations hearings that have been held during a recess have been with the minority’s consent, which is not the case here — in fact, we were not even consulted.”
The two hearings are set for Wednesday and Oct. 24. Next week’s hearing is tentatively scheduled to include two nominees for appeals judges on the Ninth Circuit, even though Democrats say senators who represent states in the Ninth Circuit would not be able to return to Washington for the hearing.
Democrats want Grassley to delay the hearings until after the Senate returns to Washington on Nov. 13.
“Holding hearings during a recess, when members cannot attend, fails to meet our constitutional advice-and-consent obligations,” Democrats wrote in the letter.
Democrats were backed up in their request by progressive outside groups, who warned that Republicans would “abuse their power” by holding a hearing in Washington, D.C., during the recess.
Well, if “progressive outside groups” are against it, that changes everything.
GAME, SET, AND MATCH ALREADY?: Harvard Admissions Dean Testifies as Affirmative Action Trial Begins: “Harvard University’s dean of admissions testified in federal court on Monday that in the interest of attracting a diverse student body, the school lowers its recruiting standards a bit for many students from rural regions — but not if they are Asian-American.”
The Hmong people living in the U.S. have among the worst socio-economic indicators of any American ethnic group. But not only don’t they get an admissions preference, whites from the same town get a preference over them because they are “Asian-American,” a nonsense category that includes everyone from Filipinos to Chinese to Indians, groups with wildly varying religions, cultures, and appearances. Yet Harvard maintains with a straight face that it doesn’t discriminate.
October 15, 2018
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