Archive for 2019

CORRECTING FAMED CONSTITUTIONAL LAW EXPERT LAURENCE TRIBE on the difference between the House and the Senate.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Twitter has one great redeeming feature: it has exposed our ‘elites’ in the press as actually being C students who can’t comprehend the basic facts of history, government, and life, much less the subtleties.”

Which reminds me of this from Richard Fernandez:

JOHN HAWKINS: Long Term, How Do We Live With the Sorts of People Smearing Covington Catholic Teen Nick Sandmann?

Politics ain’t pattycake and expecting someone to love and adore people on the other side of the aisle who disagree with him on fundamental issues is probably a bridge too far.

Still, every American has a right to expect equal treatment under the law and from government agencies. There’s also a fundamental American belief in fair play. That means whatever rules we come up with get applied to everyone equally. It means that right is right even if you don’t agree with the person who benefits from that. It means that it is immoral to lie about someone even if you disagree with him. It means that at the end of the day, we put the good of the country ahead of our own petty political disagreements.

Those are the sorts of foundational customs and mores that allow people with wildly divergent viewpoints to live together in a functional society. The very fact that the Left has rapidly moved away from those principles is why our society has become increasingly dysfunctional. This is a tendency liberals have not just here, but everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

DAVID HARSANYI: Exposing the Times’ anti-Christian bias.

It’s rare to see a major media outlet be so honest about its ideological bias. But yet there was New York Times reporter Dan Levin on Twitter the other day, openly soliciting negative stories about Christian schools. “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools,” Levin tweeted, “Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.”

It would take a saint-like leap of faith to believe that Levin, as he later claimed, was merely looking for an array of stories related to Christian schools. Anyone who’s ever worked as a journalist can tell you that “exposing” someone does not typically — or perhaps, ever — entail the pursuit of positive stories.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn, then, that the #exposechristianschools hashtag Levin used did not initially go viral because Twitter users were anxious to share their enriching experiences in Christian-based educational institutions. The tag was predominately used to dox and smear the Covington Catholic School kids. . . .

The New York Times’ long history of prejudicial coverage of religious Christians should cement your skepticism about its intentions. Even while the newspaper was rifling through Twitter looking for people who had been damaged by a traditional Christian education, it was running a fawning profile on the overtly racist and anti-Semitic “Black Hebrew Israelites.” The piece opens with the line: “They are sidewalk ministers who use confrontation as their gospel.”

Christian schools, of course, irritate the sensibilities of contemporary Democrats for a number of reasons. It’s not only that students who attend them are often saved from the leftist cultural and political indoctrination, but also that the very existence of parochial schools, private schools and home schooling undermines their institutional political monopoly.

Toxic media.

HARSH BUT FAIR:

OPEN THREAD: Comment away.

MUSCLE SCIENCE: Muscles May Preserve A Shortcut To Restore Lost Strength. “Muscle physiology lore has long held that it is easier to regain muscle mass in once-fit muscles than build it anew, especially as we age. But scientists haven’t been able to pin down how that would actually work. A growing body of research reviewed Friday in the journal Frontiers in Physiology suggests that muscle nuclei — the factories that power new muscle growth — may be the answer. Rather than dying as muscles lose mass, nuclei added during muscle growth persist and could give older muscles an edge in regaining fitness later on, new research suggests.”