Archive for 2019
July 29, 2019
WASHINGTON POST SHOULD PREPARE TO LOSE THE COVINGTON APPEAL: A federal judge dismissed Nicholas Sandman’s defamation suit Friday, but don’t assume that’s the end of the case. It’s not and the once-respected newspaper’s attorneys and editors better prepare to lose on appeal.
UPDATE: Charles Glasser, than whom there is no better when it comes to Jags and media law, doesn’t think there will be an appeal.
YOU’RE PROBABLY MAKING INCORRECT ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT YOUR OPPOSING POLITICAL PARTY:
Consider, for example, that only about 22 percent of U.S. adults are on Twitter, and 80 percent of the tweets come from 10 percent of users. If you rely on Twitter for political information, you are being informed by ersatz pundits (and propaganda bots) residing within 2.2 percent of the population.
Well, that’s because Twitter is a virus of the mind — somebody should write a book about that.
PLEASE DON’T THROW ME INTO THAT BRIAR PATCH: With Sunday surge, nearly half of House Democrats back impeachment inquiry. “The four who issued their support on Sunday, all from Washington state, bring the total number of House Democrats who have publicly said they’d vote for an impeachment inquiry to 104 — 14 shy of a majority of the Democratic Caucus — with backers of an inquiry promising there are more waiting in the wings.”
All they have to do is not act crazy…
WELL, THAT’S TRUE OF THE ONES I KNOW, BUT I FIGURED IT WASN’T A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE: Study finds transgender people more politically conservative than straight men.
INDEED: Trump’s Attack on Baltimore Doesn’t Go Far Enough.
Take a look at the eight other cities that beat Baltimore on Orkin’s rattiest cities list. What do they all have in common? We’ll, let’s see:
Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931. Philadelphia last saw a Republican mayor in 1952, Detroit in 1962. San Francisco has been Democrat-controlled since 1964. Washington, D.C., has never had a Republican mayor.
In Los Angeles, Democrats have run the city in all but eight of the past 58 years, in New York, it’s eight in the past 74 (not counting John Lindsay, who switched parties while in office). Cleveland’s been run by Democrats in all but 16 of the past 78 years.
Indeed, if you want to see what liberal Democratic policies tend to produce, go to any one of those cities, or other Democratic strongholds. Democrats promise to help the poor and downtrodden, grow the middle class, make life more fair. But their policies consistently produce the opposite.
These cities are rife with crime. Baltimore ranks No. 1 for robberies and No. 2 for murders. Many of the other rat-infested cities also rank high for violent crimes. Their infrastructure is crumbling. The middle class has largely abandoned them.
Much more at the link.
ROD DREHER’S MAILBAG: Wokeness Drives Latino Student To Trump.
This summer, I received a grant to research monetary policy. The only catch is that one can only get the money if he (she/zhe/whatever) is multicultural (I’m part Mexican), so there was bound to be some issues with that if it came up. But money grants to multicultural students are a lot bigger and easier to get than standard research grants for undergraduates, so naturally I went with that. Sure, there’s a bit of gaming the system if I’m only part Mexican and culturally assimilated, but wouldn’t you rather have me get that money than some quack?
(The other people who got money really are quacks–one girl is doing research on how we should replace writing classes with learning how to tell stories through knitting because apparently indigenous people can’t express themselves through writing. No joke. In other words, the research is a propaganda program.)
One of the conditions for receiving the money is I have to occasionally meet with the other people who received funding and go to seminars on ridiculous crap. I usually don’t pay attention. But a couple of weeks ago we had to have a discussion circle about how students deal with mental health and what that might be like in graduate school. Sounds fairly innocuous and perhaps even useful, right? Wrong.
It never is. And do read the whole thing.
SEVEN TIMES MUELLER PLAYED DUMB: Margot Cleveland of The Federalist demonstrates with crushing clarity that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller was using feigned ignorance to avoid responding to seven key questions he was asked by Republicans on the House judiciary and intelligence panels.
ISN’T THIS WHERE THE WORD “KOW TOW” COMES FROM?: American movie studios appease Chinese censors.
PRIVILEGED OFFENDERS: Alleged ‘Antifa’ member who disrupted College Republicans meeting will NOT face charges.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: It’s the Trump Card vs. the Race Card, Who Will Win? “Cummings is black and you aren’t allowed to say anything to certain people who are protected. The protected crowd are designated minorities who are Democrats. Women, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, LGBTQ etc. who are NOT leftists are allowed and encouraged to be attacked.”
HERCULES WITH INVASION STRIPES: A USAF C-130H Hercules assigned to the 96th Airlift Squadron flies over Minnesota, July 16, 2019. The plane’s WWII invasion stripes honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Originally activated as the 96th Troop Carrier Squadron, the 96th dropped 101st Airborne Division paratroopers in Normandy during the D-Day invasion.
SALENA ZITO: Rural America, ‘romanticism,’ and open minds.
“UC IMPOSES POLITICAL LITMUS TEST“: Dan Walters reports on the University of California’s “loyalty oath”:
Although UC’s Board of Regents officially declares that “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee,” a new UC policy seems to be doing exactly that.
As part of its “commitment to diversity and excellence,” UC’s administrators are telling recruiters for faculty positions, as one directive puts it, to take “pro-active steps to seek out candidates committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.”
To enforce that dictum, UC also requires applicants for new faculty employment and promotions to submit “diversity statements” that will be scored “with rubrics provided by Academic Affairs and require applicants to achieve a scoring cutoff to be considered.”
The academic affairs department at UC-Davis says that diversity statements from tenure-track faculty applicants should have “an accomplished track record…of teaching, research or service activities addressing the needs of African-American, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic and Native American students or communities.” Their statements must “indicate awareness” of those communities and “the negative consequences of underutilization” and “provide a clearly articulated vision” of how their work at UC-Davis would advance diversity policies.
Please read the whole thing. I hope somebody at the UC has the intestinal fortitude to fight this.
DON’T GET COCKY: Trump’s economy is on fire, but Democrats aren’t so hot (and that’s why he’ll win in 2020).
Bill Clinton ran in 1992 claiming the brief ’90-’91 recession (which had ended before the election) was the worst economy since the Great Depression. And the media helped him sell that fake news. So it doesn’t really matter to the media what the economy does between now and November, 2020 — they’ll tell whatever story they think will help put a Democrat in the White House.
THIS OCTOBER, 2016 PIECE FROM THE ATLANTIC IS ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUSLY IRONIC NOW: Democracy Depends on the Consent of the Losers: What happens if Donald Trump is defeated?
Supporters of losing candidates tend to lose faith in democracy and democratic institutions, even after elections that aren’t particularly contentious. When your preferred politician or party loses, in other words, resentment is inevitable.
This is why the democratic bargain is so important: Winners do not suppress losers, which means losers can hope to be winners in the future. As a result, the losers’ doubts about the legitimacy of the political system gradually recede as they prepare for the next election.
But if the losing candidate doesn’t uphold his or her side of the bargain by recognizing the winner’s right to rule, that acute loss of faith in democracy among the candidate’s supporters can become chronic, potentially devolving into civil disobedience, political violence, and a crisis of democratic legitimacy. How the loser responds is especially critical because losers naturally have the most grievances about the election.
“[I]n the aftermath of a loss, there is plenty of kindling for irresponsible politicians to set fire to,” Bowler notes. “Most politicians who lose elections recognize this potential for mischief, and so they ordinarily make a creditable run at helping to keep matters calm.”
All losing presidential candidates in modern U.S. history have avoided the temptation to fan the flames of grievance, and have instead shown restraint and respect for the peaceful transfer of power.
Well, until November, 2016, anyway. The behavior of our political class in this regard since then has been deeply, criminally irresponsible and is in itself proof that it is unfit.
IT ISN’T JUST ABOUT PRIVACY: Please break up Facebook, cofounder asks regulators.
While consumers and experts alike wonder if Facebook’s size and outsized global market power are what allow it to play fast and loose with user data and privacy, Wu and Hemphill argue a much more basic case of good old-fashioned unfair anticompetitive behavior.
Through “serial defensive acquisitions,” they say, Facebook has prevented competitors from entering the marketplace and cut off innovation before it can flourish.
In other words, when a small company looks promising, Facebook leaps in and snaps it up, eliminating competition and reaping profit from other developers’ innovations.
I’ve come around to Paul Romer’s idea for a tax on targeted advertising. Here’s a FAQ for his proposal.
BREITBART: Breitbart’s Susan Berry weighs in on the Civil Rights Commission’s ill-considered school discipline report. (My dissenting statement here.)
FLASHBACK: NeighborhoodScout’s Most Dangerous Cities – 2019.
Baltimore is #6, and there isn’t a city or town on the list with a Republican mayor in the top (?) ten.
JONATHAN TURLEY: The mysterious Mister Mifsud and why no one wants to discuss him.
Media largely dismisses the fact that the Clinton campaign also solicited political dirt from foreign intelligence sources, including Russian intelligence, through investigator and British ex-spy Christopher Steele and the research firm Fusion GPS. Few programs mention that Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of Fusion GPS, had dinner with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya both the day before and the day after she met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.
Many figures are now household names, such as resigned Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But not Mifsud, despite his central role as a catalyst of the original investigation.
Funny, that. Plus:
There is a consistent effort to preserve a narrative that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. That was demonstrably true. However, it is not the only story. The Russians also had contacts and shared information with the Clinton campaign.
While Democrats have been highly emotive in demanding answers to the “full” story about Russian efforts, they have consistently opposed any effort to investigate such contacts within their own party or associates.
Indeed.
JUST THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: Couple decide not to have children because of climate change.