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Archive for 2018
April 28, 2018
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University of Texas to Treat Masculinity as a ‘Mental Health’ Issue.
AKA, Soviet-style psychiatry. Or as Iowahawk likes to say, “College: an oasis of totalitarianism in a desert of freedom.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A recent graduate and former student employee of the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point recently posted a list of all the students on a College Republicans email list on social media to help “identify the racists.” “When challenged, Erwin Palma retorted that others have no business telling him how to treat Republican supporters because he is ‘a target for multiple forms of violence and oppression fueled by the Republican Party.'”
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Ignoring Frigid Winter, Jerry Brown Screams That 3 Billion Will Die of Global Warming.
(Via Maggie’s Farm; classical reference in headline.)
MICHAEL BARONE: Trump’s Saudi policy gamble.
QUINN MARTIN LEFT THE BUILDING A LONG, LONG TIME AGO: The Streets of San Francisco.
I’ve always thought of Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo as an inadvertent documentary of San Francisco before the rot set in. Given how badly that once great city has fallen, I wonder if reruns of the formulaic early 1970s ABC cop show might qualify these days well.
SELLING BOOKS in the Internet Age.
COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks suggested in a radio interview that Republicans are retiring en masse because of assassination fears.
Well, I’m sure it’s a factor.
Earlier:
- “Democrats should fight dirty, play dirty, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes. ‘When they go low, we go high’ doesn’t work. Playing nice got us to this point with President Trump,” the New York Times tweets.
- NBC’S Rachel Maddow Show Sparked FBI Investigation Into Death Threats Against Mcconnell, Pruitt.
- Rand Paul: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
- Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
- FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
- Terry McAuliffe says he’d punch Trump: ‘You’d have to pick him up off the floor.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
DOESN’T MATTER. LIKE HARRY REID’S LIE ABOUT MITT ROMNEY’S TAXES, IT ACCOMPLISHED ITS PURPOSE. White House: No evidence Ronny Jackson crashed government vehicle.
An investigation did not uncover any evidence that President Trump’s former nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs drunkenly wrecked a government vehicle after a Secret Service party, White House officials told The Washington Post.
The accusation against Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, the White House physician, emerged as one of the more serious allegations the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee examined as part of his confirmation process this month.
A summary of the allegations released earlier this week by Democratic staff on the committee claimed that Jackson “wrecked” a government vehicle after becoming intoxicated at a Secret Service going-away party.
Jackson has denied that allegation.
White House officials also told the Post that Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.), the top Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee who authorized the release of the summary, never questioned Jackson about the allegations before making them public.
A review of Jackson’s record uncovered only three minor traffic incidents, according to the Post. None of the incidents involved alcohol nor was Jackson found to be at fault in any of them, The Associated Press reported.
The Secret Service on Thursday separately denied that it intervened to prevent Jackson from drunkenly disturbing former President Barack Obama during an overseas trip in 2015.
What’s interesting is that in order to block a Trump nominee the Democrats were willing to portray the Obama White House as a drunken, chaotic mess. And Obama, who said so many nice things about Jackson, kept quiet for it instead of coming out to defend him.
Plus some thoughts on where conservative media is headed next during this internecine squabble between pro and never-Trump right-leaning journalists from Ace of Spades.
JOEL KOTKIN: Giving Common Sense a Chance in California: A coalition opposed to top-down planning defeats a zoning power grab.
In California, where Governor Jerry Brown celebrates “the coercive power of the state” and advocates “brainwashing” for the unanointed, victories against Leviathan are rare. Yet last week brought just such a triumph, as a legislative committee rejected an attempt by San Francisco state senator Scott Wiener to take zoning power away from localities in areas within a half-mile of a bus or train stop. Wiener had sold his measure as a solution to California’s housing crisis and a means of bringing about the dense, green, transit-oriented development that the governor and his supporters prefer. Yet it failed, in large part because few cities wish to give up their zoning power and because even affordable-housing advocates don’t believe that handing blank checks to developers will do much to lower rents or housing prices.
But it would be a mistake to see Wiener’s defeat as a triumph of conservative principles of limited government and local control. In fact, two of the senators who voted for the bill in committee were Republicans, both from suburban districts whose constituents would not have been much affected by the bill’s passage. Meantime, some libertarian conservatives, champions of “small government,” supported Wiener’s efforts to expand state power because the proposal would remove regulatory restraints—albeit only in dense cities, not on the periphery.
Federal regulators need to preempt excessive state housing regulation, on the basis that the resulting high housing prices disproportionately affect the poor and minorities. Ben Carson, take note. It’s a matter of social justice!
Related: How The Greenwashed Liberal Gentry Keep Out The Rabble.
April 27, 2018
IT’S COME TO THIS: Pop star Halsey says free hotel shampoo ‘alienates people of color.’
Earlier: Forgotten Skills Millennials (and Others) Need to Know.
A sense of proportion, amongst them.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HERB PEDERSON: I still listen to Wheatstraw Suite and Copperfields all the time.
FROM THE GENIUSES AT THE DUFFELBLOG: Ayn Rand Delivers Your Weekend Safety Brief.
Or, if you prefer, there’s the Hemingway version.
UPDATE: Or the H.P. Lovecraft version.
NYC GALLERY: Scenes Unseen: The Summer of 1978.
OPEN THREAD: Make it the threadliest one yet!
FASTER, PLEASE: This prosthetic hand brings back sensation from lost limbs.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Appearing on Monday’s “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw praised Sheriff Dupnik of Pima County, Ariz. for condemning political vitriol, and wished more officials would follow suit. Dupnik, a Democrat, blamed violent political rhetoric in part for the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), and singled out conservatives Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle for instances of unacceptable hate speech.
—NewsBusters, January 10th, 2011.
It is 4:00 am on the first day of my new life as an accused predator in the universe of American journalism. I was ambushed and then perp walked across the pages of The Washington Post and Variety as an avatar of male misogyny, taken to the guillotine and stripped of any honor and achievement I had earned in more than a half century of journalism and citizenship.
* * * * * * * *
I am not a perfect person. I’ve made mistakes, personally and professionally. But as I write this at dawn on the morning after a drive by [sic] shooting by Vester, the Washington Post and Variety, I am stunned by the free ride given a woman with a grudge against NBC News, no distinctive credentials or issue passions while at FOX.
—“Tom Brokaw goes nuclear on the Washington Post but we’ve been told they’re real news so the article must be true. Sorry Tom!”, Twitchy, today.
Related Flashback: Brokaw’s Now-Awkward Takes on Sexual Harassment.
DECLASSIFIED CONGRESSIONAL REPORT: JAMES CLAPPER LIED ABOUT DOSSIER LEAKS TO CNN.
As The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway noted after Comey’s memos were finally made available to the public, the fired FBI director’s account of the briefing of Trump suggested that the entire briefing was a setup from the beginning, and that it was scheduled and held just so it could be leaked to journalists who wanted an excuse to publish a dossier nobody had verified.
In their coordinated response to the full intelligence committee’s findings, committee Democrats defended Clapper, claiming that he broke no laws while acknowledging that he did leak information about the dossier to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“Evaluated in context, Clapper denied leaking classified information, while acknowledging that, as DNI, he engaged in legitimate discussion of unclassified, non-intelligence information with Tapper,” they concluded.
Read the whole thing.
Related: CNN Rewarded Obama Official With Contract After Leaking Dossier To Tapper, Report Says.
YEAH, I’M IN THE MEDIA, SCREW YOU: Jim Acosta says voters too stupid to grasp Trump ‘act’: ‘Their elevator might not hit all floors.’
Mr. Acosta then lamented what he perceives as a large-scale intellectual void afflicting the population.
“The problem is that people around the country don’t know it’s an act,” the reporter said. “They’re not in on the act, and they take what he says very seriously, and they take attacks from [former White House press secretary] Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders and what they do to us on a daily basis very seriously. They don’t have all their faculties in some cases — their elevator might not hit all floors. My concern is that a journalist is going to be hurt one of these days.”
As John Nolte adds at Big Journalism, “If Acosta wants to claim he misspoke at the end, fine. Even so, there is no getting around the fact that he opens this part of the interview clearly insulting ‘people around the country’ as rubes who can’t see through Trump’s act.”
Perhaps due to the “infection” they’re suffering from, as Acosta’s colleague Brian Stelter tweeted yesterday, to remind you just how badly CNN despises half their potential viewers.
(Classical reference in headline.)