Archive for 2018
June 2, 2018
IT’S NOT YOU: THEY HAVE BECOME UNHINGED. “Democrat compares budget process to rape, NC to North Korea.” It’s a few days old, but worth noting.
Democratic state Rep. Mickey Michaux of Durham is declining to apologize for comments he made during a press conference on Tuesday, when he expressed his anger over how the state budget is being crafted…”Today we have seen a rape of this budget,” Michaux said Tuesday. “And I’m having problems right now trying to reconcile whether I’m in North Carolina or North Korea.”
I’m surprised he didn’t work the Holocaust in there. The best part…wait for it, wait for it…Michaux, the third African-American elected to the N.C. General Assembly, is serving his 43rd year in office.
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HEARTWARMING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Woman born without vagina gets one made from tilapia fish skin.
ROSA PARKS, THIS AIN’T: Portland bakery fires employees for denying black woman service after closing.
In one statement, “Back To Eden Bakery” says that according to its own surveillance video, a black woman named “Lillian”, who is well known in the area as a “professional equity activist”, entered at 9:06 p.m., after the bakery’s closing time. Employees had also turned off the “Open” sign, but several customers (all white) who had already ordered were still inside. Two other white women who went to the bakery two minutes before “Lillian,” and were also informed that the business was closed for the night.
The bakery says “Lillian” left the store briefly and began recording video.
The bakery’s statement says that even though it does not consider the employees to be racist and that they were following the business’s protocol of closing at 9 p.m., they were fired because “sometimes impact outweighs intent.” The bakery also says in the statement that the way the employees went about denying the woman service, “lacked sensitivity and understanding of the racial implications at work.”
In the statement “Back To Eden” says the employees were fired because the woman and the “clamoring public” demanded they be fired.
In one statement, the bakery admitted that the employees did not necessarily do anything wrong, “this is more about how a black woman was made to feel” at the business.”
I had a hard time believing a story this stupid actually happened, but it seems to check out.
UPDATE: The bakery owners seem to have modified their story a bit in a new Facebook post. They now claim that the fired workers served the two white women who came in slightly earlier, but only if they took their order “to go,” and that one employee was probationary, and the other had been warned about poor customer service in the past. That would make a certain amount of sense, and yet it doesn’t explain why the owners decided to scrub their earlier posts on the subject.
DEFENSIVE KNIFE USE: Georgia hiker fights off attacking coyote.
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WHEN MILLENNIALS DRAW MAPS: The kids running graphics at USA Today must have skipped that day in high school…**pssst: Don’t tell Wyoming**
CBS Evening News anchor Jeff Glor is reportedly on the hot seat with his bosses over sagging ratings just six months into his tenure.
David Rhodes, CBS News president, called a meeting with Glor and his producers on Tuesday and ‘unleashed on the team’ over the broadcast losing nearly 1.5million viewers since Glor took over in December, an insider told Page Six.
The network denied the account in a statement, saying ‘the meeting as described never happened. What did happen was a discussion centered on editorial and production, not ratings, which is not unusual.’
That last statement is by CBS News, the former home of Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley, led by the brother of former failed novelist, Obama middle east guru and nascent MSNBC contributor Ben Rhodes, which certainly helps to strengthen its believability, and to explain Glor’s ratings predicament.
FASTER, PLEASE: New material regenerates dental enamel, researchers say.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH CHEAP ENERGY: Why Aren’t Liberals Celebrating Higher Gas Prices? It’s What They Want.
YEAH, PROFESSIONAL LICENSING IS NEVER ABOUT PROTECTING PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE PROFESSION: Georgia nursing board prioritizes drug-addicted nurses over patients, report says.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Former Obama Aide Ben Rhodes Joins MSNBC, NBC News as Political Contributor. He’ll be right at home there:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on promoting the deal, which apparently included the feeding of talking points at useful times in the news cycle to foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward it. “We created an echo chamber,” he told the magazine. “They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
—“Obama official says he pushed a ‘narrative’ to media to sell the Iran nuclear deal,” the Washington Post, May 6, 2016.
As Stephen Miller tweets today, “How can we as a network put an end to a perfect week that has seen our entire credibility shredded?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtCs-kK2hQU
WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE DAILY BEAST… MSNBC Staff on Joy Reid: Enough Apologies, We Want Answers:
While Reid is well-liked and respected by colleagues, said one staffer, they are waiting for Reid and MSNBC management to demonstrate a sense of accountability for her inconvenient past writing beyond boilerplate apologies. “It’s very problematic,” said an MSNBC insider.
Particularly, several LGBT staffers at the network expressed feeling insulted by how Reid seemingly suffered no consequences for her old homophobic blog posts or transphobic tweets.
“How many apologies do we need?” another staffer asked.
Others pointed out that this ordeal makes it difficult for Reid to freely comment on the news without viewers calling out some hypocrisy. Multiple staffers pointed to how Reid was roundly mocked online when—amid outrage over Roseanne Barr’s racist tirade—daytime host Andrea Mitchell asked Reid, without irony, “What do you have to do on social media to get fired from a top rated show on an American broadcast network?”
“Now she can’t talk about Samantha Bee, she can’t talk about Roseanne, she can’t talk about anything to do with Israel,” another MSNBC staffer told The Daily Beast. “What can she talk about?”
Fortunately, MSNBC executives, furiously brainstorming, have hit upon the perfect method to both salvage their credibility, and get Reid out of the headlines.
BUILDING A VIRTUAL PORN WORLD “the size of Grand Theft Auto.”
I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER HOLLYWOOD’S #METOO ERA: Hollywood Women Invalidate Themselves in Supporting Samantha Bee.
Today celebrities — actresses — are coming forward to essentially declare that some women just have it coming. After more than half a year pleading with us to fix the problems that women are facing we now learn that our cultural elite believe certain women deserve to be degraded. Staggering to consider, after Hollywood and the media have been posturing the need to eliminate this very poison.
It was in 2015, when Hillary Clinton was launching her Presidential run, that a list of banned words was issued that should not be used when writing about the female candidate. Innocuous terms like “ambitious”, and “inevitable” were said to be forbidden for carrying sexist overtones. In just three years we now see the media defending vulgar epithets as acceptable in describing a prominent female in politics.
But this is our current climate. The need to apply one of only two labels to any story means these contradictions will be ever present. A day after the press was telling us to stop being crude they excuse Samantha Bee. While the entertainment industry demands women be treated better they applaud treating a woman in this fashion. The party that claims to support women, and claims conservative wage a war-on-women, now praises degrading a woman and mother in this fashion.
As Charles C.W. Cooke writes, “Samantha Bee’s Defenders Play Calvinball with the Language:”
Attempts to appeal to the speaker’s humanity — “that’s not the Ann I know!” — would fall flat. And not just in the case of an Ann Coulter or a Sean Hannity, but for anyone on the “wrong” side. If the speaker were tough to paint as a sexist, the word would be used instead as an example of the “latent” sexism of American culture — a sexism so potent that it pulls even ostensibly good people into its clasps. Breathless comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale would become de rigeur. And in would come the headshakers: “There’s just so much more work to be done,” they would sigh. “That the word came to mind in the first place shows that we’ve failed.”
But when Samantha Bee does it? It’s just a “word choice.” Hell, she might as well as have said “asparagus.”
When you’re “in the family,” you have the full protection of the soldato.
LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: How They Hijacked Anthropology.
IN THE MAIL: From Theodore Dalrymple, Grief and Other Stories.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The World As It Wasn’t: Barack Obama’s revealing reaction to Donald Trump’s victory.
Apparently Obama had read a column—I have an idea of which one—about the role of identity in shaping peoples’ lives and political choices. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he mused. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” No question his fellow passengers that day reassured him that no, no, he did everything he could to bend the arc of history a little more toward justice. It’s not your fault, Mr. President. You didn’t push too far.
All you did was troll Donald Trump into running for president in the first place, stand by while Ferguson and Baltimore rioted and burned, give Iran billions in exchange for empty promises, allow Russia to establish a beachhead in the Middle East for the first time in half a century, browbeat Israel at every opportunity, ram through Obamacare after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, preside over the mass migration of children across the southern border in 2014, expand the DACA amnesty despite saying 22 times you lacked authority to do so, use the permanent structure of government to devastate the Appalachian economy, convince half of America that liberals were ready to take their guns (this wasn’t hard to do), have your Education Department issue orders that led to the campus-assault craze and the deterioration of classroom discipline and that, months before a presidential election, mandated trans-bathrooms in schools, have your Justice Department preside over a sloppy (I’m being charitable) investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that included, at one point, your attorney general secretly meeting with the husband of the subject of the investigation on an airport tarmac, muscle out Joe Biden, who might have won, from the race, and hand the party back to the less-likable half of America’s most polarizing and corrupt political couple. Not to mention the eight years of lecturing. Oh, the lecturing. . . .
Last year, it was Merkel’s turn for electoral repudiation. Then Italians repudiated their elites last March. Unlike their American counterparts, however, the undemocratic liberals of Europe have sophisticated ways of bypassing popular sentiment. Obama must be envious. No third term for him, either literally or figuratively. Instead Hillary is out, Angela is alone, and Obama is left with his $65 million book deal, his “high-8-figure” Netflix deal, and, above all, his vanity intact.
Read the whole thing.
ADDICTION: Cell Phones As Cigarettes. Twitter is the tar, and Facebook is the nicotine.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: School commits to ‘freedom of thought,’ but not speech. “A student who has been repeatedly punished for expressing his viewpoints is blasting Lone Star College-Tomball for proclaiming its commitment to ‘freedom of thought’ while censoring speech based on content. Quade Lancaster was demoted from his role as student government president after expressing support for the Second Amendment, and later had an award mysteriously revoked after he had already invited his family to the ceremony.”