BUILD THAT WALL OR SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT? That’s former Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s advice on the Sunday morning news shows circuit. Give Congress till September to take credible concrete action and if they fail, close Uncle Sugar’s doors and let voters decide in November. What do you think?
Archive for 2018
June 17, 2018
STREET-FIGHTING NAN: Pelosi Wonders Why There Aren’t ‘Uprisings All Over the Country’ Because of Border Policy.
Nancy Pelosi’s weekly press briefings are becoming the stuff of legend.
That is, legendary bonkers.
Pelosi has given her opinion on the tax cut (“crumbs”), jobs growth (“means little”), and now offers her thoughts on the separation of children from their parents at the border.
“I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be when people realize that this is a policy that they defend,” she said. “It’s a horrible thing, and I don’t see any prospect for legislation here.”
* * * * * * *
Frankly, I don’t know if it’s better that kids are separated from their jailed parents or not. But it’s clear, Democrats don’t care. If they did, they would have screamed just as loud when President Obama was trying to hide illegal alien kids, as Rep. Henry Cuellar points out.
Flashback: Bobby Kennedy’s Fascist Moment: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.”
“Of course, Democrats are old hands at inciting deadly political violence because they feel disrespected,” Glenn wrote late last week on Pelosi’s violent rhetoric. “All the way back to 1861.”
(Classical allusion in headline.)
WELL, THEY’RE FALSE AND DEFAMATORY STATEMENTS OF FACT: Jordan Peterson threatens to sue prof who called him ‘white nationalist,’ ‘incel.’
According to her faculty page, Lee’s areas of specialization include “environmental philosophy, feminist theory, [and] philosophy of mind.” Her published articles include “Who’s My Special Beagle?” (included in What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Dog), “The Sexual Dialectics of Karl Marx,” and “Queering Ecological Feminism: Erotophobia, Commodification, Art, and Lesbian Identity.”
Sad.
ROUTINE INTRA-THEATER DEPLOYMENT: A Global Hawk based on Guam lands at Misawa Air Base, Japan.
Missing for more than 50 years, recordings by jazz legend John Coltrane leading the quartet behind his masterpiece “A Love Supreme” are coming out as a posthumous album.
Impulse! Records announced Friday that it will release “Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album,” recorded in 1963 and never heard before publicly, on June 29.
Coltrane recorded the seven tracks with his classic quartet — Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano — at the New Jersey studio of jazz enthusiast Rudy Van Gelder, an initially makeshift space in a living room that became a go-to spot for artists.
I’m looking forward to listening to it.
JOEL KOTKIN: Patriarchy or no, it’s good to have dad around on Father’s Day.
After hearing nonstop from feminists about how fragile and impressionable women are, I’m beginning to think that patriarchy is a good idea. I mean, look what happened to Thelma and Louise once they escaped male control.
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, ENFORCED RELIGIOUS PIETY WOULD INVADE OUR INSTITUTIONS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Muslim prof made students praise Allah before entering office.
SALENA ZITO: These Harvard kids got the lesson of their life in the Heartland.
“The best way to blow apart a stereotype is to challenge it,” Kuang, an applied math and economics major, told me.
So, before we started traveling, we held several workshops to discuss their ideas about the “other” America.
Nearly all of them agreed that they didn’t know what life was like outside the coastal cities and states. Only one student, Henna Hundal, 20, had grown up in a rural environment — an almond farm in Turlock, Calif., — while Kessler, a computer-science major, was the only member of the class who had ever fired a gun. The students ranged in age from 19 to 21, with an equal number of girls and boys and a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. The majority of them hailed from cities and suburbs in blue states along the East and West coasts. One was from Wales.
They admitted they had been fed a steady diet of stereotypes about small towns and their folk: “backwards,” “no longer useful,” “un- or under-educated,” “angry and filled with a trace of bigotry” were all phrases that came up.
And so we embarked on our journey. For the next few weeks I would conduct three classes in rural and industrial towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Most of the trips were a two-to-four-night stay, getting from place to place in a van and sleeping in locally owned B&Bs.
Read the whole thing.
CRUZ FOR THE WIN: Cruz wins charity basketball challenge against Jimmy Kimmel. “After days of smack talk by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and late night host Jimmy Kimmel, the result of their one-on-one basketball challenge is in — Cruz beat Kimmel 11-9.”
FROM THE INSTA-WIFE: Thoughts On Father’s Day.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: More Misery in Missouri: The university continues to struggle with fallout from the 2015 protests.
Indulging protesters can be expensive, as the University of Missouri is discovering three years after students successfully demanded the resignation of the president and chancellor. Last week the school said it will have to eliminate 185 positions on top of 308 cut last year.
Apparently fewer parents want to send their kids to a school where activism eclipses academics. Between the fall 2015 and 2017 semesters, freshman enrollment dropped by 35%. Lost tuition accounts for $29 million of the university’s current $49 million budget shortfall.
In response, Mizzou has had to lay off employees, decline to renew expiring faculty contracts, and leave positions unfilled after retirements. The university is also cutting back on travel and phasing out low-demand courses, among other austerity measures.
Mizzou claims more aggressive recruitment from neighboring states’ schools has contributed to the enrollment decline. And it says growing maintenance, research and personnel costs have contributed to the budget strain. But “we know the perception of Mizzou was a key factor in the difficulties we had over the past two years,” adds spokesman Christian Basi. . . . Missouri is learning the hard way that most students and parents believe a university should be a place for open inquiry run by administrators who will insist on it.
Wreck your university to please a few dozen angry students and staff who by their very nature are never happy for long. Good plan. But hey, they’ve wrecked their standing with the voters and legislature, too.
JOHN KASS: Obama’s silky lie and FBI bias in the Clinton investigation.
Of all the silky lies being told in Washington over the findings of the FBI’s inspector general on the biased culture of those investigating Hillary Clinton’s email server, one lie seems to be ignored:
It’s the silky lie told by then-President Barack Obama.
It may have set the tone for the smarmy intrigue detailed in the FBI inspector general’s damning 500-page report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
And Washington is revealed once again as our modern Versailles, a place of courtiers and lickspittles who’d use the Ministry of Justice to serve their ambitions.
Obama told his silky lie when his chosen successor was Hillary Clinton.
Clinton had endangered top secret information by using an unsecured, home-brew email server when she was U.S. secretary of state. Any other American who dared risk top government secrets on a basement server would have faced federal prosecution and prison.
Obama’s lie was told in 2015, when Obama was asked by CBS’ Bill Plante when he learned Mrs. Clinton had used an unsecured email server.
“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” Obama said. He was so silky that you couldn’t even hear his tongue rustling along his teeth.
He waxed on about how his administration was all about “transparency.”
But Obama did not learn about Clinton’s home-brew server like “everybody else.”
According to the inspector general’s report, Obama was in fact one of 13 top government officials communicating with Clinton on her private email server, even as Clinton’s server was targeted by foreign intelligence services.
According to the IG report, before former (and fired) FBI Director James Comey took it upon himself to publicly criticize Clinton (and exonerate her from a criminal charge), a draft of his public address was heavily edited.
It was edited for Hillary Clinton’s benefit, to buttress the case that what she did wasn’t prosecutable.
But Comey’s comments were also edited to protect someone else. The IG report discusses a key paragraph in Comey’s statement summarizing the FBI’s thinking that “hostile actors” had accessed Clinton’s server.
The paragraph, the report said, “referenced Clinton’s use of her private email for an exchange with then President Obama while in the territory of a foreign adversary. This reference was later changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”
Obama cut his political teeth in Chicago. And Chicago Democrats are asking taxpayers to help build a great Temple of Love and Fealty to honor that “senior government official.”
And they’ll honor him by name.
Just chew on this apiece: How could Hillary Clinton ever be prosecuted without implicating Obama, who emailed her using a pseudonym?
Obama might have been portrayed as a victim of her use of a private server. She used that server to hide her dealings with the controversial Clinton Foundation from congressional inquiry. She should have been prosecuted.
But then, two things would have happened.
Her campaign would have fallen apart immediately, and along with it, Obama’s legacy.
The Obama White House, the senior pro-Obama bosses of the FBI and just about all the political suits thought Clinton would be our next president.
And who wants to anger the next ruler? Careers were at stake, promotions, perks, power, just as it was back in the day, in old Versailles.
I’m beginning to suspect that Versailles was less corrupt.
Related: “Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness.”
HEATHER MAC DONALD: If America’s so evil, why does the left think immigrants keep coming?
In coming to the US, if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the US.
Not only is rape culture pervasive in the US, but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-Nehesi Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.
It’s as if they’re just full of crap.
MORE ON THE LAWSUIT AGAINST HARVARD: According to the analysis by Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, Harvard is not using race merely as a small “plus factor” in admissions. It’s a very large factor. An Asian-American applicant with a 25% chance of admission would have a 35% chance if he or she were white, a 75% chance if Hispanic and a 95% if African American. Arcidiacono studied only applicants who are non-athletes and non-legacies in order to take those factors out of the analysis.
YOU KNEW THIS WAS COMING: Father’s Day Updated To ‘Toxic Masculinity Awareness Day.’
June 16, 2018
MATT “GUITAR” MURPHY DIES: Blues Brothers Guitarist And Noted Sideman Was 88.
How good a guitarist was Matt Murphy? When asked by Guitar World’s Brad Tolinski, “What kind of music were you playing at that time?”, when Page was first gigging in the early 1960s, “I was trying to play like Matt Murphy,” Page told him, in a series of interviews collated in the 2012 book, Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. RIP.
SARAH HOYT AND CHARLIE MARTIN: Book Plug Friday! Seven Steps to Make Money From Writing.