TAKING ON YOUR MOST VITAL QUESTIONS: Can drinking alcohol protect you from coronavirus? Here is what WHO says.
Archive for 2020
March 10, 2020
I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA: High Court Won’t Consider Bikini Baristas’ Right to Reveal.
Related: PhRMA, the Washington lobbying arm for the drug industry, will close for the remainder of the week after an individual exposed to coronavirus entered the group’s office on March 5.
AT AMAZON, save in Tools & Home Improvement.
HEADLINES FROM WHEN YOU’VE RUN OUT OF GENUINE VICTIMS: Period Activists Say Men Should Have to Pay for Toilet Paper in Public Restrooms.
I DUNNO, YOU CAN’T BE CREATIVE WHEN YOU’RE ASLEEP. Coffee improves focus, but not creativity.
THE WAR ON MALE STUDENTS: Expelled for a Night of Drunken Sex, $283,000 in Debt: A Michigan State University medical student was expelled shortly before graduation—three years after the incident. Michigan State keeps coming up as a problem.
BYRON YORK: Three reasons Joe Biden will never be president. “The third reason Biden will not be president is the 14 Year Rule. The idea of former George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell, and popularized by writer Jonathan Rauch, it basically says that politicians have a strict sell-by date. “No one gets elected president who needs longer than 14 years to get from his or her first gubernatorial or Senate victory to either the presidency or the vice presidency,” Rauch wrote. That has been true for a century.”
Two more reasons at the link, and as ever, don’t get cocky.
BEING THERE: Democrats Are Nominating Chance the Gardener From ‘Being There’ for President, Roger Simon writes.
And Joe goes out his way to prove it: “You’re full of s***”: Biden’s 2nd Amendment voter outreach in Detroit going as well as you’d imagine. “Biden denies in this clip that he wants to confiscate anyone’s guns. One week ago, though, Biden publicly proclaimed that he would put Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke in charge of his gun policy, a former presidential aspirant who explicitly called for gun confiscations by law enforcement following an assault rifle ban…Biden at one point mentions ‘AR-14s’ as an example of firearms Americans don’t need, which is good because they don’t exist.”
Does Joe remember who he served as vice president, or even his own past rhetoric?
● Shot: “I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one. Cause that just ain’t true.”
—Barack Obama, September 9, 2008. (Narrator voice: ultimately, it was true.)
● Chaser: Biden Warns Gun Makers: ‘I’m Coming For You. Period.’
—Rick Moran, PJ Media, February 24, 2020.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Coronavirus closings: There are substantial benefits to not dilly-dallying around. “In short, we face a variant of the old medical adage that in the early stage, diseases are easy to treat but hard to diagnose, while in the later stages they are easy to diagnose but hard to treat. Right now, things aren’t bad enough to make closing the obvious action. The trouble is, by the time things get that bad, it’ll be too late for closing to do as much good.”
THIS MAKES NO SENSE TO ME: State reduces info reported in coronavirus cases. “The Tennessee Department of Health will no longer report the counties where coronavirus cases have been confirmed, state officials said Monday, taking a step away from reporting protocols being used by other states across the nation. The department will from now on disclose only whether a case was identified in East, Middle or West Tennessee, per Department of Insurance and Commerce commissioner Hodgen Mainda. The department cited patient privacy concerns and standard procedures for the change.”
Rather than “patient privacy,” I wonder if it isn’t an effort to keep Nashville from being mentioned, since that might hurt tourism. Is that too cynical of me?
SHOCKER: Mike Bloomberg’s Job Security Promises Are Falling Through, Campaign Workers Say. “When the multibillionaire Michael R. Bloomberg hired an army of staff members for his presidential campaign, he lavished them with salaries that were nearly double what other candidates were paying. His campaign also promised something rivals could not match: job security through the general election, even if he dropped out of the race. . . . In ramping up operations quickly after Mr. Bloomberg declared his candidacy last November, the campaign used pay as a powerful recruitment tool, assembling a legion of workers across the country and offering unusually high salaries. Field organizers were offered $6,000 a month, nearly twice the $3,500 that other campaigns paid. Bloomberg campaign staff members said they were told they had job security, mitigating the risk that typically accompanies such work. Some said they had taken leaves of absence from jobs that they were unable to reclaim until the end of the year. Some field organizers said they had turned down competing, full-time job offers in favor of working on Mr. Bloomberg’s bid.”
So sue him.
FORWARD DEPLOYMENT: The Air Force’s New Weapon Is…Shipping Containers? “The USAF could sprinkle potential battlefields and hotspots with shipping containers years in advance, each hiding a lethal drone.”
LITTLE DOUBT THAT THE GOVERNMENT BREACHED ITS DUTY OF CANDOR: The 21 words uttered by FISA court that change the Russia collusion case forever: Judge rules for first time FBI misled, rejecting years of excuse making and suggesting process reforms won’t be enough.
Means nothing unless people lose their jobs and go to jail.
NONSENSE, RESPONSIBILITY IS FOR EVERYONE ELSE: Dr. Drew On Coronavirus: Media ‘Hurting People,’ ‘Need To Be Held Accountable’ For Causing Panic.
COOL – NOW THAT PELOSI HAS ENDORSED TULSI GABBARD, WILL SHE ENSURE SHE APPEARS AT THE NEXT DEBATE? Pelosi: ‘Just Generally, I Usually Always Cast My Vote For A Woman. I Just Do.’ (Video.)
NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. Wells Fargo Officials Resign Days Before They Were Set To Testify Before Congress.
SOCIAL DISTANCING: A friend from Italy reports: “Day one of stricter measures throughout Italy. I went to the grocery store here in Pisa, where we waited outside, one to two meters apart, and one entered when another exited. No more than 15 in the store at a time.”
IF ONLY SHE HAD CONCEIVED OF IT AS A POTENTIAL HIT FILM: Birds of Prey Director Cathy Yan Reveals She Pitched Birds Of Prey As A Film “To Smash The Patriarchy.”
And it worked! The patriarchy stayed away in droves to avoid being smashed: Seven Reasons Birds of Prey Belly Flopped at the Box Office.
FRAUD ON THE COURT? UCSB hid federal settlement from court in Title IX due process loss, drastically lowering its penalty.
The University of California-Santa Barbara hid an agreement with federal regulators from a judge considering how to penalize the university for violating a student’s rights, according to his lawyer.
The existence of the September 2018 “resolution agreement” with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights could have led the judge to award “John Doe” hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees.
Instead, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderle issued a mild chastisement to the taxpayer-funded institution for running an “arbitrary and unreasonable” Title IX proceeding.
Lawyer Robert Ottilie had asked for $465,000 in “private attorney general fees” about a month after UCSB signed the agreement with OCR. Instead, he got $5,000 on the basis that his client’s win did not help students at large.
Ottilie told The College Fix in a phone interview that the existence of the agreement shows that UCSB misrepresented the status of the federal investigation to Anderle.
Higher education is not distinguishing itself on a moral or intellectual level these days.