Archive for 2019
January 17, 2019
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela children left behind as parents flee to find work abroad.
Yusneiker, 12, and Anthonella, 8, are eating better thanks to hard currency remittances from their parents, according to their grandmother Aura Orozco, who is grateful for the dollars that offer a reprieve from Venezuela’s annual inflation of nearly 2 million percent.
Still, she said, they miss their parents.
When they fall sick, they clamor for their mother. Though Yusneiker has adapted, Anthonella’s grades have slipped. The dark-eyed, curly-haired girl has clammed up and often answers her grandmother by simply nodding or shaking her head.
“To this day, she will lay down and if you ask her ‘what is wrong?’ she will say ‘I miss my mommy,’” said Orozco, 48, in her home in the hillside Caracas slum of Cota 905.
Some 3 million Venezuelans have migrated in three years, putting a growing strain on the country’s children as more parents are forced into the heart-wrenching decision to leave.
But if you’re opposed to socialism, it’s because you’re an heartless monster.
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN: 10-year economic optimism jumps: More hiring, investing, seeing fundamentals ‘strong.’
ROCKETS IN KUWAIT: A U.S. Army HIMARS in a live fire exercise with Kuwait Land Forces. Photo taken January 8, 2019.
JON CALDARA: Progressives should embrace their inner-Archie Bunker.
If All in the Family were rebooted today, Archie would be a progressive. Love it or leave it.
I live in Boulder, the progressive town that buys billboard space to advertise its tolerance, acceptance and diversity.
I remember being in the checkout line at my neighborhood King Soopers. The gentleman next to me stared and said, “Aren’t you that Caldara guy?” I smiled, put out my hand, “Hi, I’m Jon Caldara.” His response, “Why don’t you just (expletive) leave.” To which I could only reply, “and miss all the tolerance and acceptance Boulder has to offer?”
Horrible people.
LET THE DISCOVERY BEGIN: Judge won’t dismiss libel suit against Fusion GPS over dossier.
SO SHE’S THE NEW BARBARA MIKULSKI? Amy Klobuchar, Possible Presidential Candidate, One of Congress’s ‘Worst Bosses’?
A potential Democratic candidate for president is ranked among one of the “worst bosses” on Capitol Hill, according to staff turnover data compiled by government tracking site Legistorm.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) on Tuesday morning indicated on two separate occasions that she may be moving closer to jumping into the Democratic field for president in 2020.
Klobuchar told NPR’s Steve Inskeep that she would be “going south for the winter” when asked if she would be headed to Iowa. Additionally, the Minnesota senator announced the “big news” that her family is on board for a possible presidential run.
“Big news today, my family is on board including my in-laws, so showing momentum,” Klobuchar said on “Morning Joe.” “But I’ll make this decision on my own course regardless of what other candidates are doing.”
Klobuchar, who has been described as “Minnesota nice” in public settings, has consistently had one of the highest staff turnover rates in the Senate. An index of past Klobuchar staff shows that since she was first elected to the Senate in 2006, around 200 individuals who have worked in her offices have departed.
The Legistorm staff turnover data, compiled in a feature called ‘Worst Bosses?’, is calculated using official salary disclosures. Members of leadership are excluded from the lists, and only full-time, non-temporary staff are used as part of its data set. The formula used to determine staff departure additionally weighs the departure of senior level staffers higher than those of lower level staffers.
Generally speaking, the more people talk about “social justice” the worse they treat the people under them.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: U.S. Navy Moves Toward Unleashing Killer Robot Ships.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is ‘Acceptable Loss’ More Cheney Obsessed than ‘Vice?’ “This bizarre rehashing of the Bush years fuses silly geopolitics with sillier details.”
Narratives don’t maintain themselves, you know.
THE 1969 GUNFIGHT AT UCLA: Fifty years ago today, rival gangs, made up in part of “High Potential Program” students, fought it out on campus, leaving two dead.
The tiny “High Potential Program” was UCLA’s early, experimental form of affirmative action. Unlike today’s affirmative action programs, which primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-class students, this was a real effort to benefit young people born on the wrong side of the tracks. As one might expect, UCLA relaxed the academic qualifications for this project. One of the founders of the program put it this way: “A high school diploma was not a requisite. We recruited people who were active in their community and who had the ability to lead.”
Here’s the crazy part: In practice, the leadership requirement meant that UCLA wanted—and actively recruited–leaders of street gangs, especially those involved in black nationalism. A history of violence was no barrier to admission.
Not a lot of learning went on in the special classes conducted for the program. Linda Chavez, a UCLA grad student at the time, wrote about her experiences in teaching classes for Chicano High Potential students in An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal. I won’t spoil her story here. Suffice it to say it wasn’t pretty.
Among the students recruited for the program was Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter was the former leader of the Slauson gang, a mega-gang in South Central Los Angeles, and was known as “Mayor of the Ghetto.” Shortly before registering at UCLA he had spent four years in Soledad prison for armed robbery, where he had become a disciple of Malcolm X. In 1967, after meeting Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey Newton, he formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, mostly out of members of the Slauson gang.
John Jerome Huggins was Carter’s right-hand man; it was only natural that they would attend UCLA together. Huggins’ apartment was a meeting place for Black Panthers. A cache of weapons, including rifles, shotguns, handguns and homemade bombs, was kept there.
Carter and Huggins never made it thorough their freshman year. They were gunned down in UCLA’s Campbell Hall in the course of a feud between the Panthers and a rival Black Nationalist group, the US Organization (also known as United Slaves), several of whose members were also UCLA High Potential Program students. These broad daylight murders sent shock waves through colleges and universities across the country.
The US Organization bore some similarity to the Black Panthers in that its membership was derived in large part from ordinary L.A. street gangs of the early 1960s. And like the Panthers, its veneer of Black Nationalism was thin. But the two groups despised each other (as rival gangs tend to do).
UCLA administrators never understood what hit them. They thought they were introducing young street toughs to a whole new world. And, of course, they were right. But the reverse was also true. Just as UCLA wanted to turn gang members into college students, gang members wanted to turn UCLA into a part of their protection racket.
Shortly before the gun battle, student activists pressured UCLA Chancellor Charles Young to create a Center for African American Studies—complete with an executive director and staff, office space and a generous budget. The Panthers and US were simply vying to control those resources, knowing that whoever controlled the executive director’s position would control the center. The Panthers backed one candidate for director and US another. The situation got out of hand. Two brothers, George and Larry Stiner, members of US, were convicted of murder.
The High Potential Program experiment was quietly terminated (though it is still celebrated in some quarters). After that, affirmative action programs took more conventional forms.
SMART THINKING: “I shouldn’t accept the George Conway spin.”
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: The Secret Service Says Nancy Pelosi Is Lying.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON P.C. CULTURE: A License To Hate.
MSNBC’S NICOLLE WALLACE CLAIMS ‘THERE ISN’T A STRAIN OF RACISM ON THE LEFT.’
Wallace does know she’s employed by MSNBC, right?
HEY, IF YOU CAN BUY IT WITHOUT A PRESCRIPTION, YOU DON’T NEED A “WOMEN’S CLINIC:” Over-the-Counter Contraception Is Immensely Popular. But Democrats Have Doomed It.
DONALD TRUMP’S PIVOT TO ASIA. “Michael Auslin of the Hoover Institution commends President Trump for his pivot to Asia. He says it’s ‘shaping up to be more substantive and potentially transformative than the one the Obama Administration regularly touted.’ That’s a low bar. However, there is, indeed, much to like about Trump’s pivot.”
READING SHOULDN’T BE PUNISHMENT: Maybe It Wasn’t the Reader, Maybe It Was the Book.
I’M SORRY, ISN’T THAT ABORTION BARBIE? Gillibrand Pressed by Maddow on Previous ‘Conservative Bona Fides,’ Apologizes for Being ‘Callous’ on Immigration.
THIS IS MY INCREDIBLY SHOCKED FACE: Denver ‘Womxn’s March’ Scrubs Website of Secret Service Agent’s ‘Leadership’ Role .
YEAH. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS: When Did It Become the FBI’s Job to Act as a Check and Balance to the President?
NO QUESTION ABOUT IT: Sabotaging Brexit?