NEWSWEEK IS STILL REACHING FOR THE HARD NEWS: Why Do Hipsters Mock Vegans?

To ask the question is to answer it.

RIDING VIA RAIL, WINNIPEG TO HUDSON BAY: A BBC photo gallery trek on a rail line in Manitoba. Here’s the click bait: local folks want to buy the tracks. For many people the train is how they get their groceries and medical supplies. But that’s not the only complication in this tale. Muskeg. Muskeg is a complication.

THIS IS WEIRD, BECAUSE I’VE NEVER HATED MY EXES. In fact, I’m on good terms with most of them (the rest I’ve just lost touch with) and Helen’s met a few and really liked them. But then, she and I met through one of my exes. Why We Hate Our Exes So Much After Breaking Up. So I’m going to guess that the answer to this question is narcissism, poor judgment, and immaturity.

Heck, sometimes I press them into service as correspondents.

AT AMAZON, save big on Car Care.

Plus, deals on Pools Hot Tubs and Supplies.

CHARLIE MARTIN ON STEPHEN HAWKING AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOMS: “That, I think, is the biggest problem with this, and most other science reporting. Follow science reporting in the legacy media, and you’re continuously seeing stories about a famous scientist predicting impending doom, or a study that shows something we’re eating or drinking will kill us all. They know that impending doom will sell papers, so impending doom is what we get.”

Read the whole thing. If climate change scientists (and those who play them on TV, such as Bill Nye, the Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering Guy) and their enablers in the DNC-MSM wonder why they’ve been tuned out by much of the country, perhaps because It’s been nearly 50 years since Paul  Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb began the left’s doomsday cult, and it’s been nothing but “Temples of Doom” since. How many different ways – and how many times – can you say the sky is falling and still be taken seriously?

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: Tactical Bacon. Because everything’s better when it’s tactical!

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Will my baby granddaughter pay the price of my fight for equality? Sixties feminist JEANNETTE KUPFERMAN sees the emotional emptiness facing women today.

It makes me wonder what happened to the Brave New World we’d envisaged for our daughters and granddaughters. A world of unlimited possibilities, choices and equality for girls to become or do anything?

A world I — like many women — fought for in the Sixties.

Has feminism made life worse, not better, for today’s generation of girls?
Certainly, women have never existed in such a bleak emotional landscape.

Fish develops appreciation for bicycle-based culture. And not only did your — only, miraculously born — granddaughter pay the price, but so did the ones you never had.

KILLING THE GODS OF THE CITY.

Trump is slaying sacred cows and, in the words of American Greatness Senior Editor Julie Ponzi, he is killing the gods of the city and no one knows what to do. The only thing anybody knows is that the things we are seeing have never been done before and Donald Trump is refusing to follow any of the proper conventions (if he even knows what they are . . . tsk tsk).

The media—the cornerstone of the establishment—is doing its best to make it clear to the American people that they ought to be wringing their hands about all of this. Chaos reigns in the imperial city, and Trump is to blame. Nothing is getting done, and everything is terrible.

Of course, this is all poppycock.

People should not be upset; they should be enjoying this. . . .

Americans who elected Trump do not worship the current gods of the city. They know you’re responsible for killing the old ones and they wish to return the favor now. We want your gods dead.

Trump is not the cause of Washington’s decline. He’s a symptom, the wrecking ball that many Americans think was required.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: The Media’s Shameful Refusal To Report On Putin’s Ties To The American Left.

Earlier: Fusion GPS Illuminates the Brave New World of Manufactured News for Hire.

CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 45. THE BANALITY OF CHELSEA:

Chelsea tweeted a link to a story about an arson fire at an LGBT center in Arizona with her coda about how it is an example of “the banality of evil”—the phrase made famous in Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. [Prof. Corey Robin of Brooklyn College] thought this a gross misuse or misunderstanding of Arendt’s phrase, and naturally defaulted to the usual mode of progressives everywhere, hectoring Chelsea for her superficiality. And Chelsea responded!

There follows a lot of explication about Arendt’s phrase, but twice Robin describes Chelsea thus: “author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent to NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States,” adding that “We have in this country a really weird ruling class.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated – and the worst political class in American history, as Glenn likes to say.

Steve Hayward’s write-up of the exchange at Power Line is fun, but you really should read the full back and forth between Robin and Chelsea, plus Robin’s correct assessment of how Arendt coined her immortal phrase and what she intended it to mean.

JOURNALISM AS OPPO-RESEARCH — OR MAYBE IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND: News-For-Hire Scandal Deepens: ‘Fusion GPS’ Sleazy Venezuela Links Shed New Light on Trump Dossier.

Related: “Does Hinojosa have any idea that she’s heightening our suspicion of the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community? Don’t think about that! It would be ridiculous to question the Russian story they got everyone to sign onto.”

SLATESTARCODEX: Against Signal-Boosting As Doxxing. All I know is that if the genders were reversed this would be “bullying.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: And the orgasm capital of the world is …

SALENA ZITO: THE DEMOCRATS CAN RETAKE THE HOUSE. IT BEGINS WITH THE QUESTION, ARE THEY WILLING TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE?

Well, they can pose as being more inclusive. But after the 2006 midterms, in which those who pretended to be moderate “Blue Dogs” went full-on socialist, passed Obamacare and became “Nancy Pelosi’s Crash Test Dummies,” after Obama’s bitter clinger remarks about Hillary-supporting moderate Pennsylvania Democrats, after Hillary’s “Deplorables” sneer, and after all of the ongoing attacks on Trump and his core supporters, why would voters believe them?

More from Zito: The fate of the Democrats’ future may lie in Georgia. Eventually, they have to start winning elections in Georgia for Georgia to be a true battleground.

THE 1970s CALLED, AND THEY’D LIKE THEIR NOSE CARTILAGE BACK: Shocking cocaine adverts from 1970s.

They’re more amusing than “shocking,” but their artwork really captures the full stylistic horror of the 1970s quite well. Almost as well as James Lileks’ Interior Desecrations Website.

NEWSWEEK REACHES FOR THE HARD NEWS: The Solar Eclipse Could Mean Disaster for Trump, According to Astrologers. Keep hope alive, Resistance!

GREAT AGAIN: You can get a corn dog with your burger — what a time to be alive!

MICHAEL WALSH: THE WAGES OF THE ‘COLLUSION’ MEME ARE BIG TROUBLE. “In short, the ‘Russia!’ meme has worked like a charm. If the Democrats/Compromised Media/Never Trumpers had wanted to set out to help Putin in his global chess match vs. the United States, they could not have done a better job. And perhaps that was their goal all along.”

Read the whole thing.

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR METAPHOR: Is the Trump White House a real-life (or surreal) version of his Apprentice TV show, is it a rehash of Good Night and Good Luck, or is it Glengarry Glen Ross? 

Or perhaps, like New Shimmer, it’s a bit of all of the above. But it’s certainly never boring for the media – which is why, as John Cardillo tweets, “Notice how the MSM didn’t attack Reince as [chief of staff] pick, but are losing their collective minds over Kelly? Why? No. More. Leaks. That’s why.”

Bill Parcells drove the media insane (QED) by not allowing his assistant coaches to talk to the media, thus giving his teams one consistent voice and reducing the number of divisive stories sportswriters could craft, pitting assistant coaches against players, the head coach, etc. But how do you bottle up leaks in Washington?

THE TAKING OF GOTHAM 123: NEW YORK’S SUBWAYS HAVE BEEN HIJACKED BY CITY-STATE POLITICS.

It’s not coincidence that New York’s trains and its politics are both breaking down.

Our last mayoral election pitted a highly competent and experienced administrator against an ideologue with no executive experience. The administrator was a Republican and the ideologue was a Democrat and, after 12 years of Bloomberg proved four too many, voters didn’t see it as much of a choice.

As Ed Koch warned after he lost a 1989 primary fight paving the way for the horrors of the Dinkins years, “The people have spoken — and now, they must be punished.”

OR WHEN YOU DID, IT WAS TO CALL THEM RACIST MISOGYNIST DEPLORABLES: “I frankly blame a lot of Trump’s success . . . on Democrats. All this deep soul searching, what’s the right message and what did we do wrong? Pretty easy. We didn’t talk to average Americans.”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: The Emerging Democratic Minority? If Democrats can’t take advantage of Trump’s troubles in next year’s midterms, they could be out of power in Congress for a long time.

Democrats deserve credit in uniting their party to block GOP attempts at rolling back Obamacare. They managed to outline a vague list of economic priorities in hopes of convincing voters they’re not just obsessed with President Trump. But even after six months of shambolic Republican governance, Democrats are still viewed as an unacceptable alternative to many persuadable voters in middle America.

Those were the sobering findings of a Democratic survey commissioned by the party-backed House Majority PAC, which Politico and McClatchy first reported. The poll surveyed working-class white voters in pivotal districts that Democrats are targeting in the midterms. Despite the Trump turmoil in Washington, Republicans held a 10-point lead on the generic ballot (43-33 percent) among these blue-collar voters. Democrats hold a whopping 61 percent disapproval rating among these voters, with only 32 percent approving. Even Trump’s job-approval rating is a respectable 52 percent with the demographic in these swing districts.

Democrats maintain that with robust economic messaging, they can move those numbers in their favor. But the results show how difficult that task will be. By a stunning 35-point margin, blue-collar white voters believe that Republicans will be better at improving the economy and creating jobs than Democrats. Under Trump, the economy has been growing—even in the disadvantaged parts of the country. Between promising job creation and Trump’s own paeans to blue-collar work, it’s hard to see the GOP numbers changing significantly.

The more uncomfortable reality is that these blue-collar voters’ resistance to the Democrats is on cultural grounds, not economic ones—a finding that studies of Obama-Trump voters have repeatedly shown. Democrats are facing a double-whammy: They’re still experiencing resistance among moderate voters in suburban swing districts over tax-and-spend economic policies. Meanwhile, small-town voters are having a tough time voting for their candidates because of a growing cultural disconnect.

Maybe making transgender rights the next big thing was a bad idea?

ALSO, WHEN COMPENSATION IS BASED ON TIPS IT’S HARD TO GET PEOPLE TO JOIN A UNION: Restaurant Union Member: ‘Tipping is a Horrific Legacy from the Days of Slavery.’

QUESTIONS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ASKED IN 2008: Is the American republic built to withstand a malevolent president?

And I love the dek as well: “The principle of common good underpins the constitution. Donald Trump is gleefully shredding that ideal.”

Dude* – you write for the London Guardian. Except to tut-tut when Republicans are in power, when do socialists ever care about the limiting powers of the Constitution? (See also: Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Obama for some of the most egregious examples.)

* As former top ranking Obama officials are wont to call journalists.