HARRIS DECLINED THE INVITE: Trump’s Interview With the Economic Club of Chicago Was Epic.
Archive for 2024
October 16, 2024
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Did Yale, Princeton, and Duke Violate SFFA in Last Year’s Admissions Cycle?
NON-CITIZEN VOTING IS NOT RARE: In fact, as is seen in the steadily accumulating evidence, there are tens of thousands of non-citizens who have previously registered and voted in Texas, Arizona, Nebraska and Oregon. And, as Issues & Insights points out, that’s just scratching the surface.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Black Nationalist Gets $20 Million to Promote ‘Segregation’ in Public Schools.
An adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who supports school segregation and is a member of the Black Panther Party with family ties to Iran, runs a nonprofit that has raked in nearly $20 million in donations from the government and nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation.
Sharif El-Mekki, a former middle and high school teacher and principal, founded the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) in 2019, which defines its vision as “a world where. . . all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers,” and where “all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.” CBED argues that employing black teachers to educate black students increases educational outcomes.
Since its founding, CBED has trained thousands of teachers across the U.S. in “education activism,” urging a “commitment to liberation education from the racism inherent in America’s institutions, including our schools.” A CBED information packet titled “The Anti-Racist Guide to Teacher Retention,” developed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, defines education as “a political act” that “can upend white supremacy and a racist history of using education as an oppressive social force.”
“Every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement,” the guide reads.
El-Mekki’s nonprofit boasts more than $19.5 million in assets, boosted by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated over $1.4 million between 2020 and 2021, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave over $1.1 million in 2022, according to public tax filings. Other backers include NBC Universal, Nike, the Bezos Family Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, and dozens more. In 2023 alone, CBED trained more than 1,700 educators. In their most recent tax filing from 2023, El-Mekki drew a salary of $233,410 from the organization.
“He started up this organization, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavor, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a senior research associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with The Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface—not even beneath the surface, it’s on their website—he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.”
El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name.”
Well, that’s been the left’s goal for over a quarter of a century now.
WITH RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN ADMISSIONS NOW ILLEGAL, ABA HATCHES WAY TO DO IT ANYWAY. Imagine if we had spent the 46 years since Bakke (my entire life) sending the simple message “You can’t make decisions about individuals based on race–end of story” instead of encouraging it. Is there a serious argument that we wouldn’t be better off?
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Leave it to the dedicated folks at Open the Books to keep digging deeply into the federal budget (as well as state and municipal budgets) and exposing more of the rottenness, despite so recently losing its founder, Adam Andrzejewski. See here as well.
You’ve likely never heard of the Department of Education’s Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, but your tax dollars are funding more than $283 million since 2020 through the program, including $22.1 million to 12 major universities focused on the Middle East.
Among a number of the FLAS-funded programs on those campuses are professors who are blatantly teaching anti-semitism, encouraging violent demonstrations on behalf of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian population, and praising that terrorist group’s October 7, 2023, massacre of more than 1,200 Jews in Israel.
UPGRADE YOUR WORKOUT: Doctor-Developed Gym Wrist Wraps/Lifting Wrist Straps for Weightlifting. #CommissionEarned
IT DOES FEEL LIKE A SEA CHANGE IS BREWING:
It wasn't long ago that Trump was completely ostracized. He wasn't even allowed to have a Twitter account. Now he's getting standing ovations from elite types. What an incredible comeback. https://t.co/3Bkvd8twpQ
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) October 15, 2024
FREE SPEECH AT UCAL? The National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California claims to stand for restoring appreciation on campus for the value of freedom of speech and thought. But, as James Rushmore reports today on Racket News, the center’s role in the despicable silencing of Dr. Scott Atlas during the Covid Pandemic points to a different conclusion.
WARGAMING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: Is Pelosi Sharpening Her Knives for Harris?
The Polymarket betting odds quickly tilted so heavily in Donald Trump’s favor — bettors prefer him 60/40 over Kamala Harris this morning — that Nancy Pelosi just put in another order with Long Knives. She ordered two sets, one for doing in Harris and the second for Tim Walz.
Enter stage left, Gavin Newsom.
I’m kidding, of course. It’s much too late (I think) to pull yet another presidential candidate switcheroo. But you’d better believe it’s a notion Pelosi entertained last night while finishing off her first bottle of chardonnay.
Harris, you see, is flailing.
Much more at the link, including the most meth-fueled lefty wishcasting prediction ever.
HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE: Democrats Are Launching A Judicial Power Grab In Case Of A Trump Victory.
Left-wing activists are now attempting to use the Judicial Conference, the supervisory body that essentially acts as the federal judiciary’s own Deep State, to end the use of single-judge divisions in all cases of injunctions against the federal or state government. Earlier this year, the Judicial Conference issued “advisory guidelines” to all the nation’s district courts, recommending that all cases be randomly assigned throughout the district in which they are filed — regardless of the division that actually receives the filing.
Conservatives have properly protested this thinly veiled ideological power grab. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for instance, reminded the Judicial Conference that the legally relevant congressional statute — 28 U.S.C. § 137 — clearly vests district courts with the power to decide how to divvy up their own case assignments.
Now, just weeks before a monumental election, leftists have once again ramped up their efforts to ram through a rule in the Rules Committee of the Judicial Conference that would make the previously “advisory” guidance outright mandatory, thus caving to the demands of, among others, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the Biden Justice Department. The Judicial Conference purports to locate such authority in the Rules Enabling Act, the 1930s-era statute that authorizes the Judicial Conference to prescribe rules of civil and criminal procedure for the federal judiciary.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Buildings can be racist, concludes CU Boulder prof.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches second batch of 18 satellites for Thousand Sails megaconstellation.
A Long March 6A rocket lifted off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, north China, at 7:06 a.m. Eastern (1106 UTC) Oct. 15. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced launch success over two hours after liftoff.
The Long March 6A upper stage deployed the flat panel Qianfan (or “Thousand Sails”) Polar Orbit-02 group of 18 satellites into polar orbit for Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST). The project is sometimes referred to as G60 Starlink.
The mission will be followed closely for a number of reasons. The Long March 6A, developed by the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), has, despite successful launchers, suffered issues with its upper stage fragmenting. Its last launch—which carried the first 18 Qianfan satellites—broke up into a cloud suspected to number more than 700 pieces of orbital debris. SAST has so far not responded to requests for comment.
Furthermore, there are concerns over the apparent brightness of the Qianfan satellites and their potential impact on astronomy.
Another concern: using obsolete, disposable rockets it will be quite a long time before Thousand Sails achieves positive cash flow.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Space Heater, 1500W Electric Heaters Indoor Portable. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Bidenomics Wrecking Ball Continues Handing Campaign Ammo to Trump. “Yes, Bidenomics is helping. It’s helping a lot of people into the unemployment line. I wonder how many Walgreens and 7-Eleven employees who are fearing the loss of their jobs are feeling any of that joy that the Harris-Walz people are always going on about.”
In 16th century Japan, the Daimyo feudal lords, like their Medieval European counterparts, battled to secure control of the realm. Today, in the current US presidential race, a similar conflict has emerged, over an increasingly feudalised landscape.
The discord among the American elites is far more pronounced now than in 2016 or 2020. This time, Donald Trump has gained more support from more tech and financial lords, notably the backing of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and America’s most accomplished entrepreneur. Some of this can be traced to Biden’s policies, which have led to the likes of Chase’s Jamie Dimon to praise Trump, something unexpected from President Obama’s “favourite banker”. Financial industries overwhelmingly favoured Biden in 2020, but now are slightly more oriented to the GOP – despite continued evidence that Trump remains ever more irrational and crude.
But Trump does best with those industries, like construction, manufacturing and agriculture, that actually make things. People who work with their hands – truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, oil-workers and farmers – generally favour the Republicans and so do the people who employ them. Trump’s business backers include those like Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren, with ties to fossil fuel energy. The pro-Trump producer lobby also includes Musk, easily America’s most important industrialist, as well as others such as Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
One element is concern among producer companies that a Harris administration would follow the model she championed in California. The Golden State imposes environmental and labour laws that have accelerated the state’s significant de-industrialisation and the immiseration of swathes of its population.
But Harris is still winning the daimyo wars. As has occurred throughout her career, she continues to harvest big money from the tech oligarchy. The industry helped her raise four times as much as Trump in August, and gathered in over $1 billion, two to three times Trump.
These are the very people who Teamsters President Sean O’Brien claims have “bought and paid” for the Democratic Party.
Well, that’s just because they have. Plus:
Elon Musk, the new bete noir of progressives, may not be totally insane for predicting that he may be jailed under a Harris regime; his business has been hindered by parts of the Biden administration. And California’s coastal commission is looking into blocking launches from Vandenberg Airforce Base on the state’s central coast, apparently to punish Musk for his Trump support. Oil executives could also expect to be hounded and forced into court for their “climate crimes”.
If Harris wins, expect hard times for Musk, the oil barons, suburban developers and startup businesses unable to cope with the likely tsunami of regulations. If Trump is elected, things could get dicey for some tech oligarchs, who have managed to alienate the MAGA base. Campaign ads may target the middle and working class, but the real battle may be over which cabal of monied lords triumphs on the electoral battlefield.
It’s a pretty lawless environment.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Venezuelan Gang Now In Texas Middle Schools. “It’s bad enough that Venezuelan illegal alien gang Tren de Aragua is taking over apartment complexes in San Antonio and hotels in El Paso, but now they’re recruiting Houston middle school students.”
Martha Raddatz would like to remind you that it’s only a handful of middle schools.
I MEAN, OBVIOUSLY: Bad sign: Most not better off than they were four years ago.
WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME, THEY’VE BEEN DOING THAT SINCE WALTER DURANTY: Did The New York Times Publish a Hoax? “These days, you can feel confident that the Times will stick to a Narrative no matter the evidence. They received a Pulitzer for the coverage of the Russia Russia Russia scandal, relying on the Steele Dossier for much of their reporting. They have never apologized for spreading lies.”
Hey, they still have Duranty’s Pulitzer.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Did Child Trafficking Explode Under Border Czar Harris? DUH!
WSJ NEWS COVERAGE IS ONLY MARGINALLY BETTER THAN NYT NEWS COVERAGE NOWADAYS: The WSJ Story About Future Trump Judicial Nominees.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Trump Loyalists Push for a Combative Slate of New Judges.” The first sentence repeats the theme of loyalty: “A rising faction within the conservative legal movement is laying the groundwork for Donald Trump to appoint judges who prioritize loyalty to him and aggressively advocate for dismantling the federal government should he win a second term.” The implied connection is clear: Trump loyalists in executive branch seek to install Trump loyalists in the judiciary branch. Nonsense.
There is not a single word in the story to suggest that Trump appointees would be “loyal” to Trump. These judges have a constitutional vision that far surpasses whatever ephemeral issues matter to Trump. Judicial appointments can last up to forty years. Trump will be in office for, at most, four years. And if Trump prevails, he will not have to stand for any more elections, thus no more Trump-election-related litigation. More likely than not, anti-Trump litigation will be brought in blue circuits, where Trump-appointees are a discrete and insular minority. Does anyone think that a handful of Trump appointees on the Ninth Circuit will make a difference? Judges Katsas, Rao, and Walker will be flying solo on the D.C. Circuit for some time. And the Fourth Circuit is lost for a generation. I truly do not understand the thrust of this “loyalist” meme. It is not accurate, and even if accurate, will have no practical effect.
Everything is all about battlespace prep for the election.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “That instapost re: The WSJ headline about Trump only appointing loyalists. That kind of thing is why, about two weeks ago, I finally canceled by WSJ subscription. I had subscribed to the print or online version for about 30 years, I think. The news side has totally collapsed, IMO.”
I’ve noticed a distinct decline just in recent months.
MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH:
Woman tears down a string of flags outside of the Eli’s Gyro restaurant because she thought it was for Israel. After accusing the restaurant staff of supporting a genocide, they told her “this is Greek” pic.twitter.com/qKgHyV6p7d
— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) October 16, 2024
From the river to the sea, souvlaki will be free!