BLUE WAVE? Siren: New poll numbers after family separation crisis are a warning for… Dems!
“You know, I’m starting to think there might be some differences between the concerns of a lot of Americans and the activists that make up the Democrats base. Just a thought.”
ACLU SECRETLY DEMOTES FREE SPEECH:
The left bailed on free speech a while back. Everyone who has been paying attention knows this.
Less widely known is that the ACLU seems to be bailing too. So argues Wendy Kaminer, a former board member, in the Wall Street Journal.
Kaminer reports on new ACLU guidelines governing case selection and “Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities.” According to Kaminer, the guidelines are contained in a secret, internal document that wasn’t to be seen even by ACLU members. It was distributed to select ACLU officials and board members, who were instructed not to share it.
As portrayed by Kaminer, the guidelines suggest that, for today’s ACLU, free speech is just another “competing value or priority” to be balanced against others. Per the guidelines, in selecting speech cases to defend, the ACLU will now balance the “impact of the proposed speech and the impact of its suppression.” Factors like the potential effect of the speech on “marginalized communities” and even on “the ACLU’s credibility” could militate against taking a case.
Fundraising and communications officials helped formulate the new guidelines, according to Kaniner’s sources. These officials understand that free speech values do not appeal to the ACLU’s increasingly partisan leftist constituency, especially after the 2017 rally in Charlottesville.
Back in 2003, the late Steven Den Beste compared the ACLU with Amnesty International, after the latter forgot its original mission (remember those “to freedom!” ads that ran on MTV in the 1980s?) over how its members (read: fundraisers) viewed the Iraq War:
It’s not going too far to say that many of Amnesty International’s members have approximately as strongly negative of feelings now about America and George Bush as the ACLU’s members had about the Nazis when the ACLU defended them in Skokie.
The ACLU made the principled decision and weathered the downturn in contributions. When condemnation of Iraq didn’t make AI look as if it was aligning with America, Amnesty International was willing to try to shine a spotlight on the abuses there. But now AI has suddenly gone silent. The abuses against the citizens of Iraq have not stopped; indeed they’ve gotten worse. In addition to ongoing violent repression of Iraq’s civilian population, various Iraqi military and para-military units have been directly violating the Geneva Convention by, for instance, abusing the white flag of truce, and by using protected humanitarian facilities to hold military equipment, and by using “human shields” in combat, and by directly firing at refugees, and in numerous other ways.
And what we’re seeing is that AI seems unwilling to make more than oblique mention of these things, while at the same time explicitly condemning the US for what are at best minor transgressions by comparison. Why is it more important to strongly focus attention on “censorship” while ignoring mass slaughter of refugees?
In retrospect, Conquest’s second law of politics dictates that it was only a matter of time before the ACLU would similarly lose the thread.
MODERATE GOPERS CHASING HISPANIC VOTE ILLUSION: Former Washington Times desk editor Peter Parisi lands a devastating barrage on the perennial notion that caving on basic immigration issues will win Republicans millions of new Hispanic supporters.
“ABC’S ROSEANNE SPINOFF OFFICIALLY A GO — WITHOUT ROSEANNE BARR,” Hollywood Reporter reports:
“The Conners’ stories demonstrate that families can always find common ground through conversation, laughter and love. The spinoff will continue to portray contemporary issues that are as relevant today as they were 30 years ago,” ABC said in a statement….
As Ann Althouse writes in response:
But it’s fiction! In real life, they demonstrated that they don’t always look for common ground through conversation, laughter and love. They made Roseanne Barr an instant pariah and shut her out of her own TV home, and she can never ever come back. The public had to be assured she was gone forever — that monstrous women, the greatest female in the history of television — so it can bear to watch another show that instructs them in the fictitious banality that families can always find common ground through conversation, laughter and love.
Can Barr ever escape the Hollywood gulag? Plus in the comments: “Tonight on ABC: Roseanne Without Roseanne followed by ABC Movie of the Week Starring Peter Fonda.”
Heh, indeed.™
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Dermatologists show how to spot and identify 3 types of skin cancer.
TIME MAGAZINE ISSUES ‘CORRECTION’ FOR FAKE PHOTO OF TRUMP AND CHILD ILLEGAL:
Time Magazine has issued what they are calling a “correction” for using a “photo illustration” that showed Donald Trump looking down sternly at a small child that was supposed to represent children being separated from their families at the border after their parents had crossed into the US illegally.
The photo was dishonest not only because Trump’s image was superimposed on the photo making it appear he was personally responsible for the little girl crying, but also because the child in question was never separated from her mother.
The sarcastic caption — “Welcome to America” — was also horribly misleading. Most Americans tolerate, if not welcome legal immigrants. The child and her parents were illegal and thus, in violation of the law. Illegal immigrants are not “welcome” and hundreds of thousands of them are deported every year under Democratic and Republican administrations.
It’s official — Time has been deliberately been out of touch with the worldview of Middle Americans for a half century.
AT AMAZON, Beach House Essentials.
SPENGLER: Tariffs Are Not the Way to Beat China.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON THE BORDER CRISIS:
So great was elite prestige that fiction was sustained until suddenly it couldn’t any longer. The realization, when it came, was brutal. The rapidity with which the status quo of “open borders” has been overtaken by the “populist crisis” suggests that, like the financial crisis of 2008, a bubble has burst. It went broke gradually then all of a sudden. The globalization and multiculturalism that were supposed to have delivered prosperity and security have not paid off. This failure has started a run on political capital of elites which has yet to stop.
Trump and the European populists are picking up political assets at a bargain. Glenn Reynolds observed that “the press has three main kinds of power. One is to motivate the left. Another is to swing the middle. And the third is to demoralize the right. It’s pretty much lost the last of these, and I suspect the second one is fading too.” That’s tragic for the press.
A status quo that used to be able to buy on the margin has lets its account fall below the minimum level and perhaps for the first time has nothing more it can deposit. The media is shrill in the way a customer whose credit is bad out must shout at the waiter to get service. But it was grand while it lasted, the idea we could live without borders, without defense or even without civilization. Money for nothing and your checks for free. The music played for so long that even now no one can even imagine it could stop. How many will really prefer reality to illusion?
Read the whole thing.
VIRIGINIA POSTREL: The Art of Melania Trump’s Green Jacket — It means whatever you want it to mean.
In the end, we simply don’t know. The jacket demonstrates a consistent truth about Melania Trump: She is an enigma onto whom people project their pre-existing beliefs, hopes and fears. In that sense, she is still a professional model. She looks good in clothes and lets the audience imagine whatever meanings they prefer.
Huh – I remember a president who early in his career in politics admitted, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” Whatever happened to him?
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES TO EXPLAIN WHY IT’S NEVER HAPPENED: The Bill Clinton interview we’d like to see.
THE LEFT IS NOT ENJOYING LIVING UNDER THE RULES THEY CREATED: Yelp Users Slam Virginia’s Red Hen Restaurant After It Refused Service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Her Family.
Indiana’s Memories Pizza could not be reached for comment — because they’re now out of business.
(Classical reference in headline.)
IN THE MAIL: Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, “RAPE CULTURE IS REAL” EDITION: Marymount University settles Title IX lawsuit where adjudicator suggested men enjoy being sexually violated.
Marymount University saw the writing on the wall in March, when a federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit by a student it suspended for two years for alleged sexual assault.
It reached a confidential settlement last week with “John Doe,” who also reached a confidential settlement with his accuser and defendant “Jane Roe.” Each party will bear its own attorneys’ fees and costs.
The Catholic university in Virginia was looking at a very unpleasant trial scenario, based on Judge T.S. Ellis’s findings against it.
Doe raised credible evidence that Prof. Donald Lavanty, the Title IX adjudicator, held “certain gendered beliefs” against men in sexual-misconduct disputes, suggesting they “always enjoy sexual contact even when that contact is not consensual.”
Lavanty had reacted in disbelief when a male student in another sexual-misconduct case, who had reported himself the victim of unwanted female touching, said he was not aroused by it. The professor pressed on: “Not at all?”
Sheesh.
DON’T GET COCKY, KID: Trump ‘bullish’ on midterm elections, poll shows ‘rising tide’ for GOP.
Buoyed by the support he sees for his policies outside the Beltway and new polls showing a “rising tide” for Republicans, President Trump is growing more confident that his party will retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
“He’s pretty bullish,” said Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy, who traveled on Air Force One to Trump’s sold out rally in Duluth, Minn., Wednesday. . . .
Once poised to deliver a knockout blow to the White House, Democrats have seen their advantage lessen in midterm election polls. The latest Suffolk University/USA Today survey found Trump’s approval ratings increasing and the gap between House Democrats and Republicans shrinking.
There’s still a lot of time before November. And if you care what happens, you should be donating to, or better yet volunteering for, a candidate you like.
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS JUST A NOVEL: ‘It’s A Human Right’ — Mexican Presidential Candidate Calls For Mass Exodus To America.
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