NOTHING WRONG THAT NEW STUDENTS, A NEW ADMINISTRATION, AND THE REPLACEMENT OF MOST FACULTY WOULDN’T FIX: Where Yale Law School Has Gone Off The Rails, And What Is Needed To Get Back On Track.
If Yale drops from #1 in reputation in the US News survey this year — and it should — that might be enough to spur real change, but I’m not betting on it.
ANOTHER DEFEAT IN COURT FOR THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION: Fifth Circuit Affirms Its Stay of President Biden’s Illegal Vaccine Mandate. “Well, for a start, the court affirms that the Act that created OSHA ‘was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.'”
Plus: “Summing up, the court savaged the move in every possible way.”
The full opinion is here.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Did Liberal Media Outlets Finally Take Red Pill on ‘Bidenflation’ Crisis?
—NewsBusters, yesterday.
● Chaser: Ruhle Wonders Why Dems Won’t Tell Their ‘Great Economic Story.’
When she is not hosting her own show on MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle doubles as the network’s senior business correspondent and it was in that role that she lamented to MTD Daily host Chuck Todd that the Biden Administration is not telling their supposedly “great economic story.”
On Wednesday it was reported that inflation has reached a 31 year high, which led Todd to declare: “So, bottom line is, this is something that it, this has got to just work itself out, and, you know, the Democrats are the ones in charge so they’re going to pay the price of this sort of short term economic frustration.”
Ruhle agreed with the political logic of Todd’s claim, but added “it’s unfortunate” because “the Democrats don’t do a great job of telling their economic story.”
—NewsBusters, Wednesday.
THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SPACEX LAUNCHES 53 STARLINK SATELLITES INTO ORBIT FROM FLORIDA. “After about 2.5 minutes, the first stage’s job was done and it separated from the second stage. The first stage landed some 385 miles (620 kilometers) downrange on SpaceX’s drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions.'”
MARTIN CENTER: Here’s a transcript of the talk I gave at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh last week: “How Short-Term Thinking on Race Has Caused Long-Term Problems in Higher Education.”
EVERYTHING IS FOR THE OLIGARCHS: ‘Build Back Better’ to hike taxes on some middle-class families while giving some wealthy people a massive tax cut.
CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Joe Biden Invoked ‘I, Pencil’ To Explain Supply Chains, but He Seems To Have Missed the Point:
“Products like smartphones often bring together parts from France, Italy, chips from the Netherlands, touchscreens from New York state, camera components from Japan,” the president continued, before acknowledging that “global supply chains have helped dramatically bring down the price we pay for the things we buy.”
Yes, yes, yes, exactly right.
But—and you knew there had to be a “but” coming—it took Biden less than five minutes to toss all that aside and begin promoting his “Buy American” agenda. That “won’t just be a promise but an ironclad reality,” he promised.
What happened to the wood from Brazil and the graphite from India being used to make pencils here, one might wonder.
The simplicity of the pencil-making metaphor destroys the performative politics of Biden’s “Buy American” rules, which will accomplish little besides forcing taxpayers to pay higher prices for just about everything the government purchases. Those rules also mean that Biden’s just-passed $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan—Wednesday’s speech was a victory lap moment for the president—will be less significant than it otherwise would be.
And it means that Biden didn’t really digest the meaning of “I, Pencil.”
The lesson Read offers in the essay’s final paragraph is thus: “Leave all creative energies uninhibited…let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows to freely flow.”
Notice that there is nothing in there about how you should stop the free-flowing of creative energy if less than 50 percent of it was manufactured in the United States. There’s also nothing about import quotas or tariffs. Maybe next time Biden’s speechwriters will read all the way to the end.
Related: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.
LET THEM EAT SMALLER PORTIONS OF CAKE FOR THE SAME HIGH PRICE: WATCH: Biden White House Dismisses Rising Inflation: Labor Dept says inflation at highest point in 30 years.
Related: Democrats’ war on suburban women includes inflation-fueling reckless spending.
JOE BIDEN AND THE REALITIES OF THE N-WORD:
“If you didn’t vote for Biden, you ain’t black,” tweeted 2020 Florida Republican congressional candidate Lavern Spicer on Thursday, “I guess you’re a negro.” Spicer, who is black, was referring to President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe.
Delivering his first Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery to a nation reeling from the baleful effects of his failed presidency, and amid historically low approval ratings, Biden referred to the 1940s black baseball player Satchel Paige as “the great negro,” apparently because Paige could still competitively play at age 47.
Biden’s history with race is, at the risk of using a woke euphemism, troubled. He is old enough to have a checkered record on segregation, having called racially integrated schools a “jungle” and a place where he would not care to send his own children. As a senator, he at least purportedly wrote and then sponsored the 1994 crime bill, which the progressive left identifies as the core federal legislation responsible for what it believes to be “systemic racism” inherent in America’s criminal justice system. More recent gaffes include the one Spicer mocked on Twitter, in which presidential candidate Biden condescended to a black interviewer, who, upon remarking to a departing Biden that he had more questions for him, was told that all black voters would vote for the future president because of the color of their skin (nearly one in five black males voted for Donald Trump in 2020). Earlier in the campaign, Biden told a town hall meeting hosted by the Asian and Latino Coalition that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
Read the whole thing — and note the double-standard from his party’s operatives with bylines who gave Biden a pass:
DIM BULBS LIGHT UP, DIMLY: Progressives wonder: Maybe calling Manchin racist is a bad idea.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: After a misfire in New Jersey, pollster offers a remarkable apology for error.
Two days after the election, Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth poll, publicly embraced his survey’s error, resorting to none of the grudging defensiveness that’s common when pollsters address their failings. That made Murray’s acknowledgement of responsibility as remarkable as it was candid. “I blew it,” he declared in a commentary posted at NJ.com. “The final Monmouth University Poll margin did not provide an accurate picture of the state of the governor’s race.”
Murray apologized in the next paragraph to the Murphy and Ciattarelli campaigns, noting that “inaccurate public polling can have an impact on fundraising and voter mobilization efforts. But most of all,” he added, “I owe an apology to the voters of New Jersey for information that was at the very least misleading.”
It was a statement of regret of a kind the polling industry seldom sees. In a way, Murray’s comments evoked the admonition of Warren Mitofsky, the innovative director of surveys for CBS News who died in 2006. “There’s a lot of room for humility in polling,” Mitofsky said in 1998, at the 50th anniversary of election polling’s greatest debacle, President Harry Truman’s stunning victory over Republican Thomas E. Dewey.
“Every time you get cocky, you lose,” Mitofsky added.
Don’t get cocky, to coin an Insta-phrase.
WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: The media framed Kyle Rittenhouse — and won’t come clean even after the prosecution’s case falls apart.
Media malpractice has come full circle in Kenosha, Wis.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial for the shooting deaths of two people and the wounding of another is nearing its end, with the jury expected to get the case soon. The shootings took place as riots, arson and looting shook Kenosha after police shot Jacob Blake on August 23, 2020. The violence fed off the nationwide riots and looting that followed the May death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
From the start, the media misrepresented the Blake case and ensuing riots. They portrayed Blake as an unarmed man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, subjected to police brutality due to racism.
The truth was far different.
After an intensive investigation, prosecutors declared Blake’s shooting a justifiable use of force. The federal Justice Department reached the same conclusion. Contrary to media portraits, Blake was armed with a knife and was shot when he turned in a slashing motion at a policeman within arm’s reach.
While it wouldn’t be fair to say the media coverage caused the Kenosha riots, the press downplayed the mayhem and ramped up the hysteria. As with the Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis and beyond, the mainstream media incessantly focused away from the violence, despite almost 20 related deaths and more than $1 billion in damage.
Perhaps the most notorious example is CNN reporter Omar Jimenez standing in front of burning buildings in Kenosha with the on-air chyron reading, “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” The phrase “mostly peaceful” is now a popular internet meme used to mock distorted mainstream media coverage.
It’s happening again with the Rittenhouse case, which was born in the Kenosha riots. From the media coverage leading up to the trial, one would think Rittenhouse was a white supremacist militia member who traveled to Kenosha to shoot up peaceful protesters.
But as has been widely documented, the case is going poorly for the prosecution. While I’m not predicting an outcome, having followed the case carefully, I can say that Rittenhouse has a strong case for self-defense.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Looks like ‘sole survivor of Rittenhouse shooting’ Gaige Grosskreutz either lied to Anderson Cooper last night or committed perjury (video).
JOEL KOTKIN: How the Left Ruined San Francisco.
OPEN THREAD: We rock the joint at a cool, steady pace.
JON GRUDEN SUES NFL, ROGER GOODELL: “‘The complaint alleges that the defendants selectively leaked Gruden’s private correspondence to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in order to harm Gruden’s reputation and force him out of his job,’ Gruden’s attorney Adam Hosmer-Henner said. ‘There is no explanation or justification for why Gruden’s emails were the only ones made public out of the 650,000 emails collected in the NFL’s investigation of the Washington Football Team or for why the emails were held for months before being released in the middle of the Raiders’ season.’”
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Space rocks keep hitting Jupiter. What’s the deal with that?
TO BE FAIR, MANY U.S. THINGS ARE NOW MORE HORRIBLE THAN WASHINGTON ADMITS: US Inflation more horrible than Washington admits.
The US Consumer Inflation Report for October was horrible, showing a 12% annualized rate of price change. But it’s even worse than it looks. The shelter component of the index lags the more reliable private gauges of rent inflation. That means worse is to come.
Three US companies publish national rent indexes – CoreLogic, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com – and their readings of year-on-year rent inflation range from 9% to 16%. But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a year-on-year rise in the rents of just 3.4%. Shelter represents a third of household expenditures according to the Consumer Price Index.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the private indices and the government measure of rent inflation moved in lockstep, albeit with lags in the latter reflecting the fact that not everyone’s lease expired at the same time. Given past lags, the rent increases should have shown up in CPI by now. So I really can’t explain the discrepancy.
Oh, I have some ideas. More:
Led by used vehicle prices, durable goods prices rose 12% over the twelve months through October, according to the official data. That can be blamed on the chip shortage, which constrained auto production and left consumers and car dealers in bidding wars for everything on four wheels. But the price of nondurable goods also jumped 10% over the past year. That’s simple demand-pull inflation: the combination of a $6 trillion giveaway to US consumers and enhanced jobless benefits that kept 2 million Americans out of the workforce left too much money to chase too few goods.
The annualized 12% inflation number, to be sure, will ease a bit, but rent inflation ensures that the pipeline of price increases will persist for the next couple of years. 5% inflation over 10 years will reduce the purchasing power of money by 80%. That’s unsustainable. Either the Federal Reserve will raise rates and strangle demand, or consumers will balk at price increases and stop buying. Incomes have fallen by 2% over the past year according to the government’s official measure, and by considerably more when shelter inflation is added in. In either case the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have set the stage for the next recession.
At best.
UPDATE: I think that should be 40%, not 80% as above. At least that’s what my math indicates. Still bad enough.
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: The First Lieutenant (The Call of the Sea Book 2). #CommissionEarned
UPDATE: Just saw this passage as I read:
Nick was puzzled. He had thought the government was opposed to smuggling.
“It is, as a matter of principle, but the politicians like to drink their wines and can get them nowhere else, so the smugglers flourish.”
“That is just a little corrupt, is it not, sir?”
“The whole concept of government is corrupt, Mr. Turnhouse. It is not for us to judge those who habitually inform us they are our betters.”
Sounds familiar.
WELL, SINCE THE MEDIA WAS SAYING IT, I FIGURED IT WASN’T TRUE: The Rittenhouse-Trial Judge Isn’t a Trumpist.
Bruce Schroeder is in fact none of the things that his critics have proposed. Instead, he’s a liberal.
I use that word favorably. As the Washington Post notes in a recent profile, Schroeder is “a jurist who believes trials can be too easily manipulated, particularly by the prosecution.” Or, as Slate’s Jeremy Stahl puts it, Schroeder has a reputation for being “generally more favorable to defendants than many other judges.” Why has Schroeder conducted the trial in the way that he has? Because that is how he always conducts trials. It has nothing to do with some preposterous wish to help Rittenhouse, or with some secret desire to defend the Second Amendment, or with some longshot play to replace Tucker Carlson in the 9 p.m. hour. Schroeder is a liberal on matters of criminal justice, and this is how liberals on matters of criminal justice tend to judge. . . .
Two days ago, Hakeem Jeffries, a Democratic representative from New York, tweeted, “Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.” Last year, he sang a different tune: “End. Mass. Incarceration. Defund The Prison Industrial Complex.” So which one is it? Are we ending “mass incarceration” and defunding the “prison industrial complex”? Or are we intervening mid-trial to recommend life sentence for suspects who are guaranteed the presumption of innocence by the very Constitution that Jeffries has sworn to uphold? Clearly, we can’t do both.
Remember all the elite chin-pulling concern about de-legitimizing our institutions? But the left does it whenever it doesn’t get its way, because they’re garbage people.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Rittenhouse Trial Brings Out The Crazy. “I am not sure how liberals expected the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial to go. Anyone who had seen the videos of Rittenhouse’s interactions with the men who were chasing him, striking him and trying to kill him knew that he had a strong case of self-defense. But apparently the fact that Rittenhouse has a defense–and is so bold as to assert it!–came as a surprise to the Left. . . . The depth of ignorance that flows from liberals on a daily basis is hard to fathom, as is the unremitting hate they express toward all who fail to agree with them.”
The goal of the left is to create an environment in which its people are encouraged to be violent without consequences, while their victims are denied the right to respond.
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