FEAR AND JUSTICE: Firewall with Bill Whittle. “After a decade of justice denied — under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Brennan, James Comey, and others — Bill Whittle thinks he now detects a whiff of fear among those in that cabal.”
Must-see TV.
I’d love it if Glenn would weigh in on this, but I can’t see how any elected assembly has any constitutional authority to effectively hand my vote over to the people of another state.
UPDATE:
FLASHBACK FROM SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Betwixt Principle and Practice: Tara Ross’s Defense of the Electoral College. Reviewing: Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.
Tara Ross has taken on a herculean task: an exposition of and a defense of the electoral college, in conjunction with a defense of prevailing state statutory and customary presidential election processes, including: first-past-the-post, winner-take-all with regard to appointing electors.
It is a valiant, romantic, Don Quixote like effort. But in the end: the windmill still wins. It always does. Her explanation of prevailing practices falls short of the mark. And this I suggest might be a sign that the system is too complex and unwieldy. Ross also defends the electoral college for consistently producing the right winner, notwithstanding 1876 and 2000 where the electoral college winner (under the final tally) had fewer popular votes. But this defense, so common among defenders of the electoral college, fails to recognize that many states historically were rotten boroughs where those with the de jure and de facto vote controlled the whole state’s slate of electors. So the if-it-ain’t-really-really-broke-let’s-not-fix-it-Burkean position is not so clear. Lastly, Ross’s defense of the electoral college, rooted in federalism and states’ rights concerns seems, to this reviewer at any rate, somewhat untethered from the actual details of the electoral college she seeks to defend.
And some of those boroughs are getting more rotten.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The future is robots, and they’re teaching us how to flirt.
REMINDER TO ALL THE NEWS OUTLETS HIRING RAHM EMANUEL: HE’S AWFUL.
It’s been quite a day for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The Atlantic announced that Emanuel is coming aboard as a contributing editor to the venerable magazine’s “ideas” section. Meanwhile, ABC News announced it has hired Emanuel as a contributor. All within 48 hours of his leaving office.
The former Obama White House chief of staff has almost seamlessly transitioned to the next phase of his career: a sage political observer with his finger on the pulse of what 2020 Democrats need to do to defeat Trump. It’s completely predictable but still inexcusable for media outlets to hire him.
Besides the fact that Emanuel has been a mercenary politician his entire adult life, which should be disqualifying on its face, he should at the very least be blackballed from media gigs for his unrepentant and habitual violations of Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Under Emanuel’s leadership, the city government was notorious for stonewalling public records requests from news outlets and activists, most notably in the case of the 2014 fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police.
As Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner tweets, “The fact that this won’t drum up a fraction of the outrage that Kevin Williamson’s hire did tells you all you need to know.”
SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Report Shows Online Ties Linking HuffPost, the Guardian, and SPLC to Antifa.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY: 31% Passed February 2019 California Bar Exam, Up 4% From Last Year.
AT AMAZON, save in Dining and Entertaining.
AT AMAZON, deals on Jeans for Men.
NEO-MCCARTHYISM: James Comey calls Jimmy Carter a “Communist.”
OPEN THREAD: Discuss the events of the day.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Why Is Fat a Feminist Issue?
In a speech on the topic of “radical fat liberation” jointly sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Center for Equity and Inclusion (what else?) at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the prodigiously overweight Sonalee Rashatwar, a self-proclaimed Fat Sex Therapist, compared fitness trainers to Nazis, defined child dieting as sexual assault, attributed the Christchurch shooting to ‘thin” white supremacism, and condemned science as “fataphobic” for “promoting the idea that certain bodies are fit, able and desirable.” She wonders, rhetorically, “is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” She goes on to blame the Reagan administration for having refused to provide “social supports that also help me to subsidize my food costs.” Believe it! We have entirely transcended the realm of reason, sanity and common sense, and tossed the concept of personal responsibility into the cultural dumpster.
Found via David Thompson, who has many more links from the education apocalypse.
The WSJ article, for instance, notes that millennial households “had an average net worth of about $92,000 in 2016, nearly 40% less than Gen X households in 2001, adjusted for inflation, and about 20% less than baby boomer households in 1989.”
The driving reason for this disparity is the millennial penchant for delaying traditional adult milestones. As a group, they are prone to choose short-term happiness and independence over long-term wealth accumulation. Now, maybe millennials are leading more fulfilling lives than their parents and grandparents, and maybe not. Comparing themselves economically to generations that embraced a different set of priorities at the same age, and then wondering why the results are different, however, is disingenuous.
For example, millennials should consider themselves lucky that college is more readily available to them (this includes the poor) than any previous generation. Yet, no one says they have to rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by going to expensive schools. But the tradeoff for a higher education is often more debt, and delayed wealth.
College is too expensive for a host of reasons. No one says we live in a utopia. Yet, in the years before the government injected moral hazard into the equation by backing loans for every useless journalism degree, both lender and borrower had to weigh the compromises of debt. Perhaps being a well-read and well-rounded person with a fine arts degree is more important to you than an engineering degree and a big paycheck. That’s fine. That’s a choice.
Psychology, the seventh-most popular major in the United States, is also the 160th most useful major in making a living.
Read the whole thing.
IN NEW YORK, SCRAPPY LOCAL NEWSPAPER STRUGGLES FOR SURVIVAL: NY Times Editor Dean Baquet Predicts Doom For Local Newspapers: Most Will ‘Die’ in Next Five Years. Note this comment from Baquet:
During his speech before the INMA, Baquet said the “power as a news organization rests in the fact that people know we try to get it right and that we’re not advocating.”
“The story we did about Donald Trump’s taxes, the two stories we’ve done, my honest belief is that, even if you don’t like us, you believe those stories. I think if those stories had appeared in the Nation, which is an openly left publication that I happen to admire, it would not have had the same impact. One of my jobs is to protect the view that, if you like us or not, we try to be fair and we try to get it right and we’re not influenced by political perspective.”
“Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONE: Rotting Trash Piles Sky-High in LA, Attracting Rats and Raising Concerns of a New Epidemic. “The NBC4 I-Team first told Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office about the piles of filth in the 700 block of Ceres Avenue in October. At the time, he promised to make sure trash doesn’t pile up like that.”
TIME TO FIRE UP THE SCOOBY DOO MYSTERY MACHINE: “A law firm has completed its investigation into how a racist photo appeared on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s yearbook page 35 years ago, and is expected to release the results on Wednesday.”
LIKE PAUL EHRLICH, SHE ENGAGED IN SHODDY SCHOLARSHIP AND PAID NO PRICE FOR THE DAMAGE DONE: Millions Died Thanks to the Mother of Environmentalism.
TEXAS LAWMAKERS PASS ‘SAVE CHICK-FIL-A’ BILL IN THE HOUSE:
Texas’s Republican-controlled House voted Monday to pass a “Save Chick-fil-A” bill.
The “Save Chick-fil-A” bill does not allow the government to take “any adverse action” against any contractor, individual or business because of their religious beliefs.
“It strengthens and reaffirms Texas’s First Amendment rights,” Republican state Rep. Matt Krause said to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We had seen instances around the country where individuals were starting to be penalized … for what they believed or who they associated with.”
“I thought that this started a very dangerous precedent and wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t go down that road,” added Krause, who sponsored the measure.
There appears to be a very slight aura of a penumbra of a chance that Gov. Abbott will sign the bill:
FOR SOME REASON I WAS THINKING OF OLD-TIME BLOGGER ROB “ACIDMAN” SMITH. His blog is still online, which is nice.
ANNALS OF OIKAOPHOBIA: At Australian Ballot Boxes, the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost.
Progressive politicians like to assume that, on election day at least, blue-collar workers and urban progressives will bridge their differences, and make common cause to support leftist economic policies. This assumption might once have been warranted. But it certainly isn’t now—in large part because the intellectuals, activists and media pundits who present the most visible face of modern leftism are the same people openly attacking the values and cultural tastes of working and middle-class voters. And thanks to social media (and the caustic news-media culture that social media has encouraged and normalized), these attacks are no longer confined to dinner-party titterings and university lecture halls. Brigid Delaney, a senior writer for Guardian Australia, responded to Saturday’s election result with a column about how Australia has shown itself to be “rotten.” One well-known Australian feminist and op-ed writer, Clementine Ford, has been fond of Tweeting sentiments such as “All men are scum and must die.” Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who also has served as a high-profile newspaper columnist, argues that even many mainstream political positions—such as expressing concern about the Chinese government’s rising regional influence—are a smokescreen for racism.
In an interview conducted on Sunday morning, Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek opined that if only her party had more time to explain to the various groups how much they’d all benefit from Labor’s plans, Australians would have realized how fortunate they’d be with a Labor government, and Shorten would’ve become Prime Minister. Such attitudes are patronizing, for they implicitly serve to place blame at the feet of voters, who apparently are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.
What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement.
But as Dr. Helen has written, that dopamine hit of smugness is what being a leftist is all about.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
