THEY’RE NOT POOR AT ALL, ACTUALLY:   A New York Times writer named Wednesday Martin has an unbelievably sexist hit piece about Upper East Side women she demeaningly refers to as Glam SAHMs (Stay At Home Moms).  

The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools. They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home.

Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.

Their self-care was no less zealous or competitive. No ponytails or mom jeans here: they exercised themselves to a razor’s edge, wore expensive and exquisite outfits to school drop-off and looked a decade younger than they were. Many ran their homes (plural) like C.E.O.s.

Okay, so the implication is that there’s something wrong with being married to a rich, powerful man? And there’s also something wrong with “intensive mothering,” which apparently means being intensively involved in your child’s upbringing?  As for “self-care,” should we all not strive to keep ourselves attractive and fit, regardless of whether our spouse is rich and powerful?  Clearly, to Ms. Martin, however, such things–being rich, a good mother, and taking care of one’s self–are suspicious, odd behaviors worthy of “research.”

Her conclusion from observing what she clearly views as another species?:

Rich, powerful men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of true economic parity in a marriage, and act like true partners, and many do. But under this arrangement women are still dependent on their men — a husband may simply ignore his commitment to an abstract idea at any time. He may give you a bonus, or not. Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But it can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns, hunts or gathers it.

The wives of the masters of the universe, I learned, are a lot like mistresses — dependent and comparatively disempowered. Just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates her version of power from her man’s, might keep a thinking woman up at night.

So these women are just dependent little slaves– no better than mistresses. I’ll put aside the “mistress” label, since I hardly think most mistresses are “dependent and comparatively disempowered.”  But more to the point, if this is slavery–being married to a rich/powerful husband, being able to stay at home with one’s children, and having time to get involved with charitable causes–I think a lot of women would willingly sign up.

Only a hardcore feminist would think such a life is odd enough to pen an anthropological essay about it in the New York Times.

CUE THE PROGRESSIVE AUTOMATIC RESPONSE:  U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) has used the recent Amtrak derailment as an opening to demand an increase in federal funding.

“We should not, the Congress should not put Amtrak in the position of choosing between positive train control and fixing crumbling bridges,” Casey told host Bob Schieffer on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We have to do both,” he said.

“And we’ve got to make sure they have the resources to do that,” he said. “We don’t know the connection between funding and this incident, but regardless, Amtrak needs more funding.”

How about just making sure engineers don’t drive the trains at dangerous speeds? But that wouldn’t grow the federal government, so it’s not an attractive option for progressive/liberal federal politicians.

AL SHARPTON’S MINI-ME:  Sharpton’s daughter, 28 year-old MSNBC host Dominique Sharpton, is suing NYC for $5 million, after she sprained her ankle on a city street corner.

Maybe she’ll use the money to pay off her father’s estimated $4.5 million unpaid taxes.  Or it could just be an indirect means of shaking down NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.

WHO KNEW?:  South Korea is apparently the world’s plastic surgery capital, with about 20 percent of women there going under the knife.

And like the manufacturing industry, South Korea’s plastic surgery clinics pump out relatively standardized products. Many young women and men in Korea now look eerily similar — something that reddit users commented on with the flock of similarly looking the Miss Korea 2013 contestants.

They do look mighty similar (use your mouse and click on the pictures to zoom in automatically).

THEY WANTED TO GIVE TO “CHARITY”:  Big labor groups gave over $2 million to the Clinton Foundation, with some such contributions labeled as “political contributions.”  But I’m sure that was just a typo, and the unions were giving money because they supported the Foundation’s work on climate change, HIV/AIDS, or Haitian redevelopment.

Oh, and–surprise, surprise:  those same unions also lobbied Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. But again, I’m sure that’s just a coinkydink.

IT WASN’T US, IT WAS THE COMPUTER: That’s the excuse the Department of Homeland Security is offering to federal trial judge Andrew Hanen, who is overseeing the 26-state lawsuit challenging Obama’s unilateral executive amnesty.  Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reports:

TheObama administrationblamed a technology glitch for why it continued to approve new amnesty applications in February, even after a federal judge issued an injunction, telling the court late Friday that they are now begging about 2,000 illegal immigrants to tear up their three-year work authorizations.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that approved the deportation amnesty applications for Dreamers despite the judge’s order, insisted it’s corrected the immigrants’ records at headquarters, but said it’s also asking the immigrants themselves to send back their three-year documents and accept two-year papers instead.

The agency also told JudgeAndrew S. Hanen that more botched cases could still be found as employees dig through tens of thousands of applications.

President Obama’s lawyers are desperately trying to head off punishment by Judge Hanen after several embarrassing missteps.

The Administration’s missteps in this case just keep getting more and more disturbing. It leaves one with the impression that either this Administration is the most incompetent or mendacious in history, or both.

And I’m sure those 2,000 illegal immigrants who “mistakenly” obtained an additional one-year work authorizations will throw them in the trash. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

ISIS TAKES HISTORIC CITY OF PALMYRA:  Palmyra is a city in the middle of Syria, about 130 miles northeast of the capital of Damascus.  It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site, and has a lot of amazing Greco-Roman ruins.

HILLARY’S VIEW OF EXECUTIVE POWER:  William Jacobson has an oped in the Washington Examiner, asserting that an executive branch headed by Hillary Clinton would witness even more egregious, unconstitutional power grabs than the Obama Administration:

A President Clinton would almost certainly face a Republican House of Representatives in 2017, if not a Republican-controlled Congress.

Rather than trying to work with such a Congress, Hillary has made it clear she would be even more aggressive than Obama in expanding presidential power at the expense of Congress and the Constitution.

He’s right, of course. This is the problem with unconstitutional executive power grabs: Unless the courts or Congress can stop them, future presidents (of any political persuasion) can be expected to continue them, and consider them a baseline upon which they can “work around” Congress.

HILLARY’S #PRIVILEGE:  Noemie Emery has a terrific piece in the Weekly Standard, documenting the genesis of the “stacked deck of cards” that have been held by the Clintons:

The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary Clinton has warned us, and she ought to know. Having been “at the top,” or close enough to it, since 1976, when her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas at age 30—not the biggest job ever, but one with a whole lot of power to play with—she has leveraged every ounce that it held to bring to them ever and ever more money and power, until at this moment, 14 years after leaving the White House, she and Bill sit on a mile-high mountain of both. Their wealth is immense and their power unlimited, at least in their party. The very few viable national candidates left after the two midterm wipeouts that decimated Democratic ranks in the reign of Obama are so afraid to risk the Clintons’ wrath that she is cruising unopposed to the nomination for the first time since no one knows when. How did two penniless kids living in roughly 1,000 square feet in Fayetteville, Arkansas, reach such heights? Let us look back and see.

Read the whole thing.

I WANT ONE: Driving to the law school in one of these would definitely be empowering.  I have a pretty big SUV now, but nothing like this one.  Sadly, I don’t think they make these anymore.

THE PLANT PRODUCTIVITY CONNECTION:  According to a new study by the University of Queensland in Australia, adding plants to an office can increase worker productivity by 15 percent.  I think I’m going to add a couple of plants to my office and see if this works.  But of course, I will need to find a way not to kill them through neglect.

THAT ASSUMES SHE HAD A SOUL TO BEGIN WITH:  Politico article: “Hillary Clinton Sold Her Soul When They Accepted that Money.”

It’s certainly true that the Clintons have had a long—and lucrative—relationship with Morocco. Moroccan King Mohammed VI, who was traveling abroad during last week’s CGI meeting in Marrakech, nonetheless loaned one of his palaces to Bill and Chelsea Clinton to stay in during the meeting, according to attendees. The king was listed on a donor roll as having pledged as much as $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation to help build Bill Clinton’s presidential library (though the foundation says the donation never came through), while the state firm OCP has donated as much as $6 million over the years to the Clinton Foundation’s efforts. Both Clintons have publicly embraced the king in recent years as an example of an Arab moderate ruler with whom the U.S. should partner, and leaked Moroccan diplomatic cables show that Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state was seen by Rabat as among its most ardent supporters in the Obama administration.

There is no evidence that she tailored her official positions to suit Morocco’s preferences because of personal or financial relationships. But the overlap between her diplomatic portfolio and the funding for her family’s philanthropy illustrates the way nearly any foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation can be viewed through the prism of U.S. policy. And it highlights why countries, companies and individuals that could benefit from her past and possibly future public service might be inclined to support the foundation.

There’s “no evidence” of Secretary of State Clinton’s tailoring of her official positions because no one in the Obama Administration (or Congress, thus far) has investigated whether such linkage exists.

I HOPE HE’S RIGHT:  Florida GOP Chairman says “This state is going red in 2016.”  We’ll see. It’s an incredibly politically diverse state. The last two presidential elections have seen Florida’s electoral votes awarded blue.  Candidates such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio should do well here (simply because of their past history of winning statewide election), and any Republican nominee with an Hispanic running mate would probably help.

STAY QUIET AND WIN:  This seems to be Hillary Clinton’s electoral strategy for controversial issues upon which the polls don’t provide a clear consensus for the progressive/liberal base. Her latest non-position is on President Obama’s controversial trade deal.

If Clinton doesn’t answer questions from the press and doesn’t take a position on issues beyond those clearly embraced by the progressive/liberal base, the low information voter can be won, as research indicates LIVs are much more likely to vote for well known politicians accused of corruption.

IT’S ABOUT TIME:  Asian American coalition files discrimination complaint against Harvard with the DOJ.  The complaint, in part, says:

Over the last two decades, Asian-American applicants to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges have increasingly experienced discrimination in the admissions process. Many Asian-American students who have almost perfect SAT scores, top 1% GPAs, plus significant awards or leadership positions in various extracurricular activities have been rejected by Harvard University and other Ivy League Colleges while similarly situated applicants of other races have been admitted. Because of this discrimination, it has become especially difficult for high-performing male Asian-American students to gain admission to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges. In recently years these trends have become more and more severe.

It’s nice to see the concept of “diversity” come back to haunt the elitist higher education institutions that created this race-based cancer.

Students regularly tell me that they didn’t reveal their race, or they check the “other” box, because they’re afraid that their “whiteness” is a handicap. This isn’t true, but checking the “black/African-American” box is a huge plus in admissions, as is “Native American.” But Asians– who are consistently the most high achieving group, academically, can be hit very hard, especially in the California public university system, where there is an “abundance” of Asians and universities don’t feel they need “more” of them for diversity purposes.

Pitting groups against each other, based on their race, is a disastrous way to operate higher education (or anything else) in a pluralistic society.  But this is exactly what affirmative action does.

WHY NYC WOMEN WISH THEY LIVED IN THE ‘MAD MEN’ ERA:  Or, why the “Sex & the City” life isn’t so great for finding a permanent mate.

The proliferation of online dating sites and “hookup culture” — or decreased stigma around no-strings-attached sex between strangers — means that immature men’s playground is no longer just the halls of their office buildings. It’s the entire city. . . .

“When I watch ‘Mad Men,’ I think, ‘Wouldn’t it have been great to date a man who knows what he likes to drink, who pulls out the chair, who dresses up and is clean shaven and at least wears a sport jacket?’ It’s sexy,” said Notkin.

Pretty much, except I would say that it’s not just immature men, but also equally immature women, that are perpetuating hookup culture.  And I don’t know many women who’d really want to work in the office environment portrayed in Mad Men.  But the well mannered, well groomed men and women portrayed in the series do seem to be endangered species nowadays.

SMOKING OUT CONSERVATIVE DONORS:  The Center for Competitive Politics–a conservative-leaning supporter of free political speech–has petitioned the Supreme Court to stop California state Attorney General Kamala Harris from gaining access to its list of donors, contained in a Form 990 that is filed with the Internal Revenue Service (as part of its application for 501(c)(3) educational organization status).  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered CCP to comply with California’s demand.  In their filing, CCP asserts that it has a First Amendment right to keep its donors private, based on the Supreme Court’s 1958 decision in NAACP v. Alabama, in which the Court unanimously protected the NAACP’s membership lists against compelled disclosure to Alabama officials, declaring:

This Court has recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations. When referring to the varied forms of governmental action which might interfere with freedom of assembly, it said in American Communications Assn. v. Douds, “A requirement that adherents of particular religious faiths or political parties wear identifying arm-bands, for example, is obviously of this nature.” Compelled disclosure of membership in an organization engaged in advocacy of particular beliefs is of the same order. Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs. . . .

Petitioner has made an uncontroverted showing that on past occasions revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility. Under these circumstances, we think it apparent that compelled disclosure of petitioner’s Alabama membership is likely to affect adversely the ability of petitioner and its members to pursue their collective effort to foster beliefs which they admittedly have the right to advocate, in that it may induce members to withdraw from the Association and dissuade others from joining it because of fear of exposure of their beliefs shown through their associations and of the consequences of this exposure.

It is not sufficient to answer, as the State does here, that whatever repressive effect compulsory disclosure of names of petitioner’s members may have upon participation by Alabama citizens in petitioner’s activities follows not from state action but from private community pressures. The crucial factor is the interplay of governmental and private action, for it is only after the initial exertion of state power represented by the production order that private action takes hold.

If protecting NAACP membership lists is protected by the First Amendment, there is no principled reason why CCP’s membership lists should be any different. Progressives have shown that they are more than willing to harass and intimidate donors to conservative organizations.  Just ask the tea party groups targeted by the IRS, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), or the conservative groups such as Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservatives in Wisconsin.

GERRYMANDERING IN 7 MAPS:  An interesting visual of the phenomenon of gerrymandering.

GYROCOPTER PILOT WAS TRYING TO “SAVE DEMOCRACY”:  That’s his claim in a Washington Post oped today.  The pilot, Doug Hughes, says his reckless act to protest Citizens United was “a message Americans agree with.”  I think if most Americans really understood what Citizens United was about–allowing groups of people to exercise their First Amendment rights–they would feel very differently.

O’MALLEY RAILS AGAINST DEATH PENALTY:  In the wake of the jury decision to impose the death penalty on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Martin O’Malley says he “respect[s] the verdict of the jury” but opposes the death penalty as a matter of policy.

Meanwhile, radical Islamists praise Tsarnaev as a martyr on Twitter.

WE’LL PROBABLY BE SEEING MORE OF THIS:  Hackers are stealing money via Starbucks’ mobile app.  “Security experts warn that any account that is linked through third party is vulnerable.  Their advice: use strong passwords and avoid auto reload if you can.”

V.A. WHISTLEBLOWER SAYS DEP’T WASTES $6 BILLION ANNUALLY: The biggest cause, apparently, is abusive use of purchasing cards by VA employees.

[Whistleblower] Frye, deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics, first brought to light problems of abuse back in March. He decided to air the information publicly after his 35-page memorandum to VA Secretary Robert McDonald went completely unanswered.

Of course they did. Congress should clamp down on all purchasing cards.

HEALTHCARE.GOV CONTRACTOR QUITS:  QSSI, the politically connected IT firm that runs the federal Obamacare exchange, Healthcare.gov, announced Thursday it is calling it quits.  QSSI is the third IT firm to run the problem-plagued exchange in two years.

PROGRESSIVE POLITICS OF GLOBAL WARMING CLIMATE CHANGE:  NASA scientists are now warning that the Antarctic Larsen B ice shelf is going to detach and disappear:

[R]esearchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that “it is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.” If these two research teams are right, then the coming years could see major ice calving events off of the Antarctic peninsula. “What might happen is that for a few years, we will have the detachment of big icebergs from this remaining ice shelf, and then at one point, one very very warm summer, when you have lots of melting of the surface, the whole thing will just give way, and will shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar, lead author of the new study.

Of course, as I recently posted, scientists have also observed that the Antarctic ice has thickened so much recently that they cannot even reach their destinations.  And NASA itself has become highly politicized, with high-ranking leaders toeing the Obama Administration’s line on global warming climate change, but many rank and file scientists publicly disagreeing. And with a little research, NASA’s Ala Khazendar, who is quoted in the Washington Post excerpt above, has several letters to the editor newspapers that evince strong political inclinations–most notably, an anti-Israel philosophy.  In a May 2002 letter to the editors of The Telegraph, for example, Dr. Khazendar condemns “the hateful racism that emanates from the other side [Israeli] of the Middle East conflict.”  In a October 2003 letter to the editors of The Guardian, Khazendar understandably criticizes Palestinian suicide bombings but simultaneously observes that “Zionism [has] dehumanised the Palestinians as a prelude to expelling them, or to justify placing them under a ruthless military occupation”.  In September 2009, he wrote to the Los Angeles Times, Khazendar criticizes a prior oped penned by an Israeli academic, saying,

Of which Zionist ideology exactly is Carmi proud? The one that demanded a homeland for the Jewish people in response to the persecution and genocide they suffered in Europe before and during World War II, or the Zionism that created Israel by expelling most of Palestine’s native inhabitants on the orders of the same man after whom Carmi’s university is named?

In June 2002, he wrote a short letter to the British Medical Journal in which he said, “Israel is indeed open and democratic, as long as one is not a Palestinian who has the misfortune of being a native of the land that it so much covets” In May 2006, Dr. Khazendar was even more bold, writing to The Guardian, criticizing the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict and concluding, “if the BBC is really plucky, perhaps it will start describing those Palestinian acts of terrorism as retaliations to Israeli persecution.”

But hey, I’m sure Dr. Khazendar is politically neutral when it comes to matters like global warming climate change.

UPDATE:  Oh, and let’s not forget that President Obama has turned NASA into a Muslim outreach organization.

ISIS SEIZES RAMADI:  ISIS fighters have now captured key sites in Ramadi, the capital city of Iraq’s largest province, Anbar. It is only about 70 miles west of Baghdad.  Great.  But hey, no worries– our President assures us that ISIS is just the JV.  God forfend if we ever have to deal with the varsity.