Author Archive: Stephen Green

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: White Men Are Terrorists and Much, Much More. “We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them,” Lemon said in the segment on Tuesday. “There is no travel ban on them … They had the Muslim ban; there is no white-guy ban,” he added. “So what do we do about that?”

Who is this we, kemosabe?

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: CNN Falls To Hallmark Channel’s Made-For-TV Movies In October. “CNN was by far the least competitive cable news network in October, finishing 9th in primetime behind Fox Sports 1, The Hallmark Channel, and Home and Garden Television. CNN finished 7th in total day behind Nickelodeon and Hallmark.”

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT THE WAY I’D HOPED: Surgery students ‘losing dexterity to stitch patients.’

Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical.

“It is important and an increasingly urgent issue,” says Prof Kneebone, who warns medical students might have high academic grades but cannot cut or sew.

“It is a concern of mine and my scientific colleagues that whereas in the past you could make the assumption that students would leave school able to do certain practical things – cutting things out, making things – that is no longer the case,” says Prof Kneebone.

Are universities going to have to add “remedial doing stuff” classes on top of Bonehead English?

WINNING: The American Wage Boom. “Raises for U.S. workers are creating very confident consumers.”

Compensation for U.S. workers grew at an accelerating rate in the third quarter, a sign a historically tight labor market is yielding better pay for employees…

The increase was led by improving pay for private-sector workers. Wages and salaries, which account for about 70% of total compensation, rose 3.1% from a year earlier for private-sector workers. That was the strongest year-over-year gain since the second quarter of 2008.

Total compensation for those workers increased 0.8% on the quarter and 2.9% from a year earlier… Worker compensation is now rising at a faster pace than prices. The consumer-price index rose 2.3% from a year earlier in September, the Labor Department said.

Vote like your paycheck depends upon it.

POLITICKING: Obama and Biden are on mission to win back swing state voters. “The former president and vice president are campaigning in places they won but flipped to Trump in 2016.”

Obama-to-Trump voters put Trump in the White House, and it seems a bit soon for them to switch back to the President and Veep who disappointed them for eight years.

ROGER KIMBALL: They Can’t Bear the Thought That Trump’s Win Was No Anomaly. “Adamant anti-Trump and NeverTrump commentators have circulated and then taken solace from the Blue Wave meme not because they are especially credulous, but because the election of Donald Trump offended their sense of existential propriety.”

I’m still dumbfounded by supposedly principled conservatives who place personality and NOKD snobbery above principles.

THE PURGE: Facebook Purges Proud Boys And Gavin McInnes After New York Scuffle With Antifa.

Twitter users reported the Facebook take-downs on Tuesday, noting that both public and private accounts associated with the Proud Boys had vanished from the social media network, including founder Gavin McInnes, and a large account with over 20,000 members.

A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed the bannings with Business Insider, pointing to the company’s rules and adding that the removal applies to Instagram as well.

On October 12, the Proud Boys engaged in a fight with Antifa outside of the Metropolitan Republican Club, where the 49-year-old McInnes had given a speech that evening. Left-wing activists had protested the club’s decision to invite McInnes to speak for much of the week, making threatening phone calls in an attempt to convince them to cancel the event, according to club president Deborah Coughlin.

After the event a brawl erupted after a member of Antifa threw a bottle at the Proud Boys, ultimately resulting in the arrest of nine Proud Boys and three Antifa on charges of rioting, assault and attempted assault.

Facebook has not banned Antifa.

DAVID HARSANYI: The New York Times Botches America’s History With The Gun. “Over the past 50 years, a wide-ranging, well-funded political, cultural, and legal revisionism effort has been undertaken to erase much of the United States’ history and culture of the gun and the Second Amendment. The New York Times’s Nick Kristof’s recent column, ‘It’s Time To Talk About The NRA’ (because no one’s been talking about them!) is a good example of this trend.”

The right to defend your property, life and liberty girds the entire American project. Not a single Founder ever challenged the notion of individual firearm ownership. Most celebrated it. Individual ownership of firearms was so omnipresent in colonial days—and beyond—that Americans saw no more need to debate its existence. Debates over the Second Amendment involved a disagreement over who should control the militia: state or federal government.

Second, the idea that “Gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century is the work of politically motivated historians who cobble together every minor local restriction they can find in an attempt to create the impression that gun control was the norm. If this were true, Kristof wouldn’t need to jump to 1879 to offer his first specific case.

Read the whole thing.

RED ON RED: Congress Goes to War With Treasury Department Over Saving Iranian Financial Access. “Cruz bill gaining momentum as Iran hawks see Trump Treasury Dept. saving Iran’s banks.”

U.S. officials familiar with Congress’s effort to take the reins on tough new Iran sanctions ahead of a Nov. 4 snapback deadline have been battling with the Treasury Department over its efforts to allow Iran to remain connected to the SWIFT banking system, which facilitates cross-border transactions and has provided Iran with a key lifeline to the West.

Iran hawks on Capitol Hill are said to be frustrated over the Treasury Department’s efforts, telling the Washington Free Beacon that some officials in the Trump administration are walking back the president’s promise to reimpose a bevy of new sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the nuclear deal.

The Free Beacon first reported last week on the internal battle in the administration over the extent of sanctions and efforts by some European allies to pressure the United States into keeping Iran involved in the international marketplace.

While Trump and top officials such as National Security Adviser John Bolton have publicly advocated for a hardline on Iran, pressure from the Europeans appears to have worn down the Treasury Department, which first told the Free Beacon last week that Iran’s connection to SWIFT could remain intact.

Trump was ballsy enough to get us out of the lousy Iran Deal, but apparently failed to whip his own Treasury people into line. Followthrough counts, bigly.