FAIRLY SURE NOT THE ONLY ONE: NRA Gains Lifetime Membership from Former Liberal.
Archive for 2018
April 27, 2018
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE? WHAT HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE? America’s $1 trillion student debt problem heads into its sixth year.
PEOPLE BUILDING THEIR CASH RESERVES IS NOT A GOOD PORTENT: Economists are freaking out over this checking account trend.
I HAVE THIS ODD URGE TO HEAR JOHN COULTON’S “CODE MONKEY”: Chinese start-ups hire attractive women to ‘motivate’ male coders.
GIVING HIGH SCHOOL KIDS A TWO-HOUR LUNCH SO THEY CAN GRAB A NAP? WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Here’s proof that teens really just need a nap.
April 26, 2018
WELL, IT SOUNDS LIKE MORE FUN THAN “TAKE YOUR KID TO WORK” DAY: Millions Across Country Celebrate ‘Make A Kid At Work’ Day.
TOM BROKAW ACCUSED OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT BY FORMER NBC ANCHOR LINDA VESTER.
As Richard Fernandez says, the torpedoes the Democrats put in the water to sink Trump keep circling back on them.
FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Likely coldest April since 1895 – U.S. farmers delay planting crops. “Soil temperatures are below normal, and not conducive to planting yet.”
SENATE ETHICS PANEL SAYS MENENDEZ GUILTY: Of a lot, including accepting multiple gifts “of significant value” and failing to report them, as required by Senate rules and federal laws. Senate Select Committee on Ethics released its Letter of Public Admonition late Thursday.
TOUR DE FORCE: FNC’s Baier Grills Comey Over Dossier, E-Mail, Leaks in Epic Interview.
The questioning began with the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe and if it was “true that you and your FBI colleagues made the decision to exonerate Secretary Clinton well before she was interviewed.”
Comey denied that despite having written a memo exonerating her and emphasized that it’s crucial for investigators to have an idea of where a probe that ended up lasting almost a year.
It was soon after that Baier showed his mettle, telling Comey that “you already knew that she had been telling, whatever you want to say, lies, mistruths about this investigation of what — and how she handled those emails” and played a clip of Comey stating just that in congressional testimony in July 2016.
Here’s more of that exchange, including a question about why Cheryl Mills was allowed to sit in on Clinton’s FBI interview.
Read the whole thing.
More here: Comey Makes Surprising New Claims In Disastrous Fox News Interview.
OPEN THREAD: Share your wisdom freely.
ANOTHER “TRUMP-INSPIRED HATE CRIME” BITES THE DUST: Suspect admits to toppling more than 100 headstones in St. Louis Jewish cemetery.
In 2017, large swathes of the American Jewish community were in the throes of what I termed The Great Anti-Semitism Panic of 2017. The last few years have seen an increase in visible anti-Semitism among alt-right trolls, but the panic that ensued with the election of Donald Trump was bizarrely and extremely disproportionate to any actual threat to the safety or standing of American Jews. (For noting this, one Jewish newspaper editor, Rob Eshman, called me an “apologist for anti-Semitism.”)
One incident that received disproportionate attention was the vandalism of a St. Louis Jewish cemetery. Even though some of us cooler heads noted that similar incidents of vandalism occurred with some frequency during the Obama and Bush years, many so-called Jewish leaders were quick to cast blame on the atmosphere allegedly created by Trump. St. Louis police arrested the perp, a thirty-four year old African-American man, yesterday, and announced “[t]here is no evidence to indicate the incident was racially, ethnically or religiously motivated.”
Those who participated in creating and spreading the panic should be ashamed of themselves, and heads should roll at certain organizations. But they aren’t, and they won’t. Heck, I still haven’t gotten an apology from Eshman.
POSITIVELY DICKENSIAN:
NO EASTER DOODLES FOR YOU AND…Google snubs Christian publisher, because their ad (and WEBSITE) “refers to Jesus and/or the Bible.”
Related: Breitbart.com Reporter Warner Todd Huston Suspended from Twitter over Transgender Comments.
But it’s all OK, because Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler assures us that social media censorship of conservatives is a ‘hoax.’
KEYBOARD WARRIORS, UNITE! (Bumped from this morning).
AT AMAZON, deals on Dishwashers.
MESSING WITH THE MULLAHS: America now has a leader willing to practice coercive diplomacy.
From Radio Free Europe:
Every day, hundreds head to Tehran’s bustling Ferdowsi street to buy foreign currency, only to find that many exchange offices have shut up shop, have turned off their currency-rate displays, or have signs up reading, “We don’t have U.S. dollars to sell.”
A nationwide dollar-buying panic is in full swing, spurred by the plunging value of the Iranian rial, a sluggish economy, and fears that the United States will reimpose crippling sanctions on the Islamic republic.
With the rial hitting all-time lows, the government has imposed an official exchange rate of 42,000 rials against the dollar, set a cap on the amount of foreign currency that citizens can hold outside banks, and sent police to patrol exchange shops to ensure that no under-the-table currency trading is going on.
But economists say the new currency measures will be difficult to maintain. Exchangers are hoarding U.S. dollars, and Iranians who require foreign hard currency for business or travel are already defying the government and turning to the black market, where the rate has skyrocketed.
Read the whole thing.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Broward County Scott Sheriff Israel defiant after 534-94 no confidence vote by his deputies.
HILLARY CLINTON’S LACK OF CHARM:
A curious dualism emerges in New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. As I noted yesterday, Chozick makes it clear that she was rooting for Clinton. But she also thinks Clinton hates her.
Chozick shouldn’t take things so personally: Clinton hates everyone. You can’t relate to people you despise. Her inability to master the basics of being a politician inspired one of the great underreported witticisms of the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump was asked about his comparatively loose debate preparations. “I don’t need to rehearse being human,” he said.
As a college sophomore, Clinton once described herself as a “misanthrope.” Her inability to hide that made her an amazingly poor candidate, one who would have had difficulty capturing a seat on any city council on her own. Dealing with the populace standing between her and power was never anything but a chore. . . .
That inability to schmooze was a noxious gas, the flammable hydrogen that doomed Clinton’s two Hindenburg-like presidential campaigns. Bill Clinton once told Chozick that Hillary had told him back at Yale Law School, “Nobody will ever vote for me for anything.” Her husband tried mightily to help, but charm can’t be lent.
Glimpses of Clinton caught on the fly confirm that Clinton despised campaigning. In Iowa in 2015, as the press is hurling fangirl queries at her (“Secretary! Can you believe you’re back in Iowa!”), Hilary pretends to flip a steak, unable to hide her revulsion. “The image screamed all at once, how long do I have to act like I enjoy this [sh**] and Why the [f***] am I back in this state?” writes Chozick. When Chozick shared Clinton’s amazingly light August schedule with an editor at the Times, the latter responded, “Does she even want to be president?” Clinton spent much of that month holed up with her rich friends in the Hamptons.
Clinton “suffered from a chronic inability to crack a simple joke,” Chozick writes. Even at special off-the-record drinks events specifically designed by her staff to allow Clinton to let her guard down and banter with reporters the way Barack Obama did, Clinton excoriates the journos for having big egos and little brains.
Well, she’s not wrong about that, but it’s poor salesmanship.
IS TRUMP A GREAT DEREGULATOR? Jeff Jacoby says yes and no:
[W]hile Trump deserves credit for eliminating red tape, it will take a far more aggressive effort, and significant help from Congress, to effect any lasting drainage of the regulatory swamp. In 2017, even this most regulation-averse administration signed off on 3,281 new federal rules, and another 1,834 were in the pipeline at year’s end. If Trump truly intends to be the Deregulator-in-Chief, he has a lot more work to do.
In other words: Faster, please.
MORE GOOD MEDICAL NEWS FOR MICE: Exercise leads to generation of new heart cells in study with mice.
WOBBLIN’ GOBLIN GOODBYE: StrategyPage’s webmaster finds an interesting oldie from 2008. The photo captures two F-117 Nighthawks enroute to Wright-Patterson AFB for a retirement ceremony. The very non-stealthy belly paint job is spectacular.
THIS IS GOING TO BACKFIRE: Press release: “Minnesota Department of Human Rights Reaches Agreements with Ten School Districts, Charter Schools to Reduce Disparities in Suspensions for Students with Disabilities, Students of Color, Charges Files Against 2 Districts.”
For a sense of why this is a very bad idea, read The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong for Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law. It focuses more on federal law, but the problems are about the same.