PUTTING POLITICS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE: The APSA cancels the Claremont Institute.
Archive for 2021
October 13, 2021
WIFE INVOLVED IN SUBMARINE SPY CASE IS ANTI-TRUMP, PROGRESSIVE, AND ‘VERY LIBERAL.’
If the couple was MAGA you know the media would have this story plastered on the front pages and make it the lede.
No wonder the media has buried the story about an Annapolis couple trying to sell top-secret submarine secrets to a foreign country.
The New York Times wrote an article about Jonathan and Diana Toebbe, but buried the lede they would have started with it was the opposite: Mrs. Toebbe is a far-leftist.
No enemies to the left.
CHINESE ROBOTAXI WERIDE SAFETY DRIVER APPARENTLY FALLS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL; HOW CAN THAT STILL HAPPEN? “The video above, captured last month on highway 85 in San Jose, shows a WeRide test robocar with the safety driver apparently asleep at the wheel for at least 45 seconds. The eventual resolution is not shown, but presumably the safety driver later awakened as no problem was reported. WeRide has stated this driver was suspended, and then terminated after an investigation concluded he did not follow their safety procedures and policies. This opens up many questions about what procedures are, or should be in place to prevent safety driver errors, or to handle them if they happen.”
MORE FALLOUT FROM THE “JON GRUDEN EMAIL SCANDAL:” ESPN’s Adam Schefter Latest Person to Face Heat in Jon Gruden Email Scandal.
The NFL’s investigation into the Washington Football Team that led to the discovery of offensive emails sent by Jon Gruden between 2011 and ’18 has now unearthed an email from ESPN’s Adam Schefter that is causing a big stir in the journalism world.
The Los Angeles Times reported that in July 2011, Schefter emailed a complete draft of a story about the NFL lockout that ESPN was publishing that day to then WFT president Bruce Allen.
“Please let me know if you see anything that should be added, changed, tweaked,” Schefter wrote. “Thanks, Mr. Editor, for that and the trust. Plan to file this to espn about 6 am ….”
While giving Allen the chance to change the story is bad, that “Mr. Editor” line is so cringe.
Most journalists will send quotes or an overview of a story to someone to give them the opportunity to respond on the record. Sending an entire story is totally unethical.
Meanwhile: Washington cheerleaders furious over topless photo leak in Jon Gruden scandal.
According to WFT cheerleaders, who spoke with the Daily Beast Tuesday, emails showing images of topless cheerleaders from a past swimsuit photoshoot video were allegedly passed around by Gruden to then-WFT general manager Bruce Allen.
Gruden, at the time, was a color commentator for ESPN, and Allen had hired Gruden’s brother Jay to coach the team.
In the 10-minute video, first reported by the Washington Post in 2020, WFT staffers were allegedly instructed to take behind-the-scenes content at the swimsuit photoshoot, to package and create a video featuring only “the good bits” — reportedly of bare nipples and pubic areas while cheerleaders were changing clothes or moving around. According to the outlet, the video was shared with WFT team owner Daniel Snyder, who later denied the allegations.
While the media has, not surprisingly, dubbed this the “Jon Gruden email scandal,” in reality, as Amber Athey wrote yesterday, “The email fiasco reeks of a bait-and-switch. There are two obvious motivations for the leak: to protect Washington Redskins—er, Football Team—owner Dan Snyder and to avenge NFL commissioner Roger Goodell:”
Gruden’s emails were unearthed during the discovery process for an investigation into the WFT’s alleged toxic workplace environment. Investigators had access to more than half a million emails as part of the investigation, but oddly only Gruden’s were leaked to the media. Not only have we not seen Snyder’s emails, we don’t even really know the results of the investigation because the NFL opted not to publicly release detailed findings. All we learned from the probe is that Snyder was found to have presided over a “very toxic” and “unprofessonial” workplace and ordered to pay a measly $10 million fine. Oh, and he was still allowed to purchase a minority stake in the WFT, giving him more control over the team than ever.
To recap, if you are accused by nearly 50 women of running a toxic and sexist workplace environment but suck up to the NFL commissioner, you will get a slap on the wrist. If you beat your girlfriend, you will be drafted and rewarded with a multi-million dollar contract. But if you call the NFL commissioner a “pussy,” “someone” will leak your emails to the media and you will lose your job.
After Gruden was made an unperson in the NFL over his decade-old emails this week, I can’t wait for the G-rated language during the Super Bowl halftime show in February: Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar will headline.
In new memoir, Going There, Couric writes that she edited out a part where Ginsburg said that those who kneel during the national anthem are showing ‘contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.’
The published story, which Couric wrote for Yahoo! News in 2016, did include quotes from Ginsburg saying refusing to stand for the anthem was ‘dumb and disrespectful’, but omitted more problematic remarks.
But Couric writes in her memoir that she thought the justice, who was 83 at the time, was ‘elderly and probably didn’t fully understand the question.’
The anecdote is the latest controversial revelation to emerge from Couric’s book, which is set to be released October 26.
“Interviews are often edited for length and clarity, of course, but in this case, there’s no excuse* for leaving out the interaction,” David Harsanyi writes:
If RBG was genuinely unable to answer a simple question regarding flag protests, as her friend New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested to Couric, any genuine journalist would have immediately sensed the interaction as newsworthy. If RBG understood the question — which it seems to me is the case as she offers a completely coherent and normal answer about spoiled athletes disrespecting the American flag — it would also have been newsworthy. This was the year Colin Kaepernick began his protests. Couric included RGB’s describing the protests as “dumb and disrespectful” because, in our warped discourse, it is far less incendiary than pointing out protesters are bequeathed “decent lives” by their nation.
As Harsanyi adds, “It’s worth remembering that Couric isn’t new to helpful edits.” Flashback: Katie Couric & Gun Rights: A Study in Dishonesty.
* Just think of Couric as a Democratic Party operative who used to have a Chyron, and it all makes sense.
Evergreen:
MORE T-SHIRTS: Let’s Go Brandon Conservative US Flag Gift T-Shirt. (Bumped)
UPDATE: Sold out, here is another good one: Truth The New Hate Speech Political Correctness T-Shirt. #CommissionsEarned
UPDATE: The “Commissions Earned” tag is required by the FTC. You’ll be seeing it on future posts having to do with affiliate marketing. Nothing you didn’t already know, but them’s the rules.
I THINK THIS IS MORE ABOUT DAVE CHAPPELLE’S WELL-EARNED POPULARITY THAN NETFLIX’S SPINE: Netflix Shows Us How to Stand Up to the Left-Wing Mob.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: A Yale Law Student Sent a Lighthearted Email Inviting Classmates to His ‘Trap House.’ The School Is Now Calling Him To Account.
Throughout the Sept. 16 meeting and a subsequent conversation the next day, Eldik and Cosgrove hinted repeatedly that the student might face consequences if he didn’t apologize—including trouble with the bar exam’s “character and fitness” investigations, which Cosgrove could weigh in on as associate dean. Those investigations review aspiring lawyers’ disciplinary records in considerable detail: The New York State Bar, for example, asks law schools to describe any “discreditable information” that might bear upon an “applicant’s character,” even if it did not result in formal discipline.
It is unclear whether that is what Cosgrove was referring to when she warned on Sept. 16 that things “may escalate” without an apology. “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person,” Eldik chimed in. “Not just here but when you leave. You know the legal community is a small one.”
The best way to “make this go away,” he continued, would be to formally apologize to Yale’s Black Law Students Association. “You’re a law student, and there’s a bar you have to take,” Eldik said in a follow-up meeting on Sept. 17. “So we think it’s really important to give you a 360 view.”
When the student resisted, saying he’d prefer to have a face-to-face discussion with anybody offended by his email, Eldik nonetheless drafted an apology for the student to send in the service of “character-driven rehabilitation.”
Nice education you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it…
CHRISTIAN TOTO: How the Media Make Cancel Culture Worse. “Reporters are very much pro-Cancel Culture. They haven’t collectively said as much, and some may be uncomfortable admitting so in public. Their actions say otherwise. Scream, to be more precise.”
TRANSLATION: SHE HATES THIS COUNTRY. ‘Shameful Past’: Kamala Harris Criticizes European Explorers in Vicious Speech.
CAN YOU GUESS WHICH FORTUNE 500 COMPANY WON’T MANDATE VACCINES? Hint: It’s arguably the most science-driven of all.
THE ROLLING STONES CANCEL THEMSELVES:
If you go to Muscle Shoals today, you can almost see the mark where the Stones reached flood tide, where, in the course of two days [in December of 1969], they cut some of their most iconic sides. It started with “Brown Sugar,” which Jagger goofed with in Australia but finished here, which is probably why it plays with so many taboos. It’s a slave owner telling his story in the language of his chattel; the blues reflecting on its own antecedents. In it you hear the African Gold Coast, the middle passage, the auction block, the cotton fields. Once again, Jagger put himself in the place of the old blue-eyed devil, a “scarred old slaver [who] knows he’s doing all right, [you] hear him whip the women just around midnight.” Even Mick couldn’t get away with that today. But the power of a song is to tell many stories at once. “Brown Sugar” also means interracial sex—the working title was “Black Pussy”—as well as heroin, which cooks to golden molasses. “I watched Mick write the lyrics,” Dickinson said. “It took him maybe forty-five minutes…. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads… and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it.”
—Excerpt from The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen (2016).
The key phrase there is “Even Mick couldn’t get away with that today.” Flash-forward five years:
First, the good news. Despite the recent death of drummer Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones are back among us, playing a series of sold-out US stadium shows between now and Thanksgiving. It’s not just that the three surviving band members, now all in their seventies, refuse to grow up. They seem actually to live in a time warp: in an era when most rock stars dress like they work at UPS and offer a relentless diet of screwed-up nihilism and phony salves, the Stones are still out there in their skimpy, Day-Glo T-shirts and leather pants, serving up great meat-and-potato rock songs garnished with lyrics about sex and drugs, and generally carrying on like it’s 1967 all over again.
Now the bad news. For the first time in 50 years, the Stones have dropped their iconic — and latterly ‘problematic’ — classic hit ‘Brown Sugar’ from their repertoire. For once, it’s not even a case of a public figure falling prey to a relatively few malcontents venting their spleen on social media. Instead, it seems the Stones have taken the initiative and canceled themselves.
What’s up with the song? Musically, it’s a libidinous party rave-up, which purists might call derivative, but which still zips along like a Maserati. Unfortunately, the lyrics are a smorgasbord of every taboo subject likely to cause palpitations in today’s woke listener.
* * * * * * *
Will the Stones now drop ‘Brown Sugar’ for good? I don’t know. I hope not. They used to stand in opposition to precisely the sort of nauseating smugness that would have us only patronize entertainers on communally approved lists, shop primarily at officially sanctioned outlets, and in general deport ourselves as beacons of moral virtue. Somehow I’m reminded of the time in 1974 when the politically active Bianca Jagger challenged her husband to write a song with a ‘serious message’. Mick’s response was a defiantly raucous number with the title “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It).” I notice the old codgers are still doing it on some nights of their current tour, so perhaps there’s hope for us yet.
—“The Rolling Stones cancel themselves,” Christopher Sandford, Spectator World, yesterday.
WALGREENS CLOSES FIVE MORE SAN FRANCISCO LOCATIONS, CITING ‘ORGANIZED RETAIL CRIME:’ “The retailer had previously shuttered 17 stores in San Francisco during the past five years, Fox News reported.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. Many different factors impact crime rates, but when the government fails to protect property rights and enforce the law, theft becomes more common and innocent business owners are victimized. The resulting economic uncertainty discourages growth and, in extreme cases like San Francisco, literally leads stores to close.
Protecting property and enforcing the rule of law is one of the core, legitimate functions of government. That the Golden State has chosen to focus its government’s robust spending and involvement in social life elsewhere speaks to a grave misalignment in priorities.
Gooder and harder.
WE’RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: Forget What You’re Being Told. Here’s the Real Reason for California’s Trucker Shortage.
What if I told you that in California, the trucker shortage is a self-inflicted wound?
What if I told you the wound was inflicted by Democrats?
You can’t find your shocked face, can you?
This one is just for our PJMedia/Townhall VIP members, so if you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.
SO LESS NEED FOR COMPULSORY VACCINATION, THEN? Scientists discover a highly potent antibody against SARS-CoV-2. “Scientists at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and EPFL have discovered a highly potent monoclonal antibody that targets the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and is effective at neutralizing all variants of concern identified to date, including the delta variant. Their findings are published in the prestigious journal Cell Reports. . . . In addition to its antiviral properties, the new antibody is designed to have a lasting effect in humans. A typical unaltered antibody provides protection for up to 3-4 weeks. But this new one can protect patients for 4-6 months. That makes it an interesting preventive-treatment option for unvaccinated at-risk individuals or for vaccinated individuals who are unable to produce an immune response. Immunocompromised patients, organ transplant recipients and those suffering from certain kinds of cancer could be protected against SARS-CoV-2 by receiving antibody injections two or three times a year.”