BECAUSE YELLOW STARS WOULD BE TOO GAUCHE? NYT Marks Jewish Opponents of Iran Deal with Yellow Highlighter.
Perhaps the Times is trying to patch things up with David Brock — or else the paper is really taking Pinch’s advice that “it’s the other guy’s country” to heart.
ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW ISN’T SUPPOSED TO APPLY TO US! IT’S SUPPOSED TO APPLY TO THEM! Men’s Rights Activists Used a 56-Year-Old Anti-Discrimination Law to Shut Down “Women in Tech” Group.
Get used to this, folks.
NOTHING CREEPY ABOUT THAT: NY Times Launches Its Jew-Tracker.
NEWS ALERT: DEMS BLOCK BILL OPPOSING IRAN DEAL.
BEING A CLINTON APOLOGIST IS A HARD LIFE: At the Politico, veteran center-left media critic Jack Shafer writes, “From the outside at least, being a friend of the Clinton’s looks like a demeaning occupation. You defend them, you defend them some more, you lie down in front of tanks for them and then—when you least suspect it—they reverse gear and betray you:”
[Hillary] also used the ABC News interview to apologize for previous, inadequate attempts to explain her conduct. “I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that,” she said. But even in this minor act of self-criticism, Clinton reflexively added the qualifying word of “perhaps” to pave an escape route should she need to abandon the apology six months from now. “I take responsibility,” she added, which is politician-speak for, “Now, will you leave me alone?”
You can decide for yourself how sincere these devious and dissembling comments by Clinton are. What interests me is how dramatically this turnaround ditches the surrogates who rushed to the airwaves and to defend her conduct. In early March, when the story broke, Clinton defenders (and intimates) David Brock, Lanny Davis, Maria Cardona, Jennifer Granholm, James Carville and Karen Finney advanced with absolute certainty that the Clinton email/server story was, in Granholm’s words, “just a nothing burger.” Brock’s pro-Clinton advocacy organization Correct the Record called the email affair a “manufactured controversy” and a “tempest in a teapot.” Carville called the email dispute “made up” and Clinton a victim of a double standard (“Colin Powell does the same thing. Jeb Bush does the same thing.”). About the emails, Davis said, “All preserved. And if deleted you know they can be found.” Cardona had so much faith in Clinton that she said, “I don’t think she needs to say anything more until she actually announces her campaign.”
Clinton has now conceded on national TV that the email story is not quite a nothing burger. It’s actually a Royale With Cheese—maybe a Double Royale With Cheese and Pineapple. Nothing was “manufactured” and indeed, yes, some of the emails were deleted. In recognition of these facts, will these Hillary loyalists volunteer to return to the TV chat shows to acknowledge their errors? Better yet, will the shows revisit the issue to illustrate how Clinton’s proxies attempted to roll them? Nah, but it would make great TV, wouldn’t it?
As Mark Steyn likes to say, “When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: ‘Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.’”
But then, some friends are more willing than others to serve as kamikaze crash test dummies. Which brings us to this fun blue-on-blue attack starring David Brock pounding his highchair that the New York Times has “a special place in hell” due its being an anti-Hillary “megaphone for conservative propaganda”…despite endorsing Hillary in 2008 and being court stenographer to her husband’s administration.
Please, please Gray Lady, take Brock’s advice and move even further to the left. Make de Blasio and Bernie Sanders look like members of the VRWC – you can do it!
I’M SURE IT’S JUST A COINCIDENCE:
● Al-Qaeda Tries to Recruit Black Activists in New Magazine Issue.
● Law Enforcement Agencies On High Alert For 9/11 Attacks Following Threats From Black Militants.
Curious how the goals of radical Islam and the radical left always seem to “unexpectedly” connect, isn’t it?
YOU CAN TRUST GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES WITH YOUR DATA, BECAUSE THEY’RE TRAINED AND RESPONSIBLE: City Of Boston Left License Plate Data Unprotected And Unencrypted. “If you want a rough estimate on how much respect law enforcement agencies (and the contractors they hire) have for your personal information, all you have to do is take a look at how well they protect the vast amount of data they slurp up.” Abolish government immunity.
THE INSTA-WIFE ON the female psychopath.
COULD ALZHEIMER’S BE spread via blood?
WOMAN WHO ABANDONED HER CHILDREN TO JOIN OCCUPY WALL STREET SUES NYC FOR ALLEGED POLICE BRUTALITY: “‘Somebody grabbed me by my hair and dragged me . . . behind the police officers, said Stacey Hessler, 42, in Manhattan federal court,” the New York Post reports. “But city attorneys said in their opening statements that Hessler had blocked pedestrian traffic during the November protest, then refused to move when cops politely asked her to make way. She also allegedly tried multiple times to escape when they finally moved to arrest her.”
As Leon Wolf of Red State noted last month about the “Black Lives Matter” crowd, the socialist far left have a curiously negative view of the police for an ideology that wants to grow government and regulation ever-larger. (It’s sort of the inverse of the relationship between wealthy “global warming” carbon-obsessed zealots and private planes, mansions and other high-energy luxuries.) As reported, Hessler’s situation sounds very much like the scene portrayed in the Libertarian Party’s 2012 ad:
ONCE MY WIFE PHONED ME TO TELL ME TO WATCH OUT ON MY COMMUTE HOME BECAUSE SOME GUY WAS DRIVING THE WRONG WAY ON THE INTERSTATE. “SOME GUY?” I REPLIED. “EVERYBODY’S GOING THE WRONG WAY!” New Bosch Technology Saves Us From Wrong-Way Driving.
Bosch, the German auto supplier, has done so with a software package that compares a car’s direction with a Web-based database of roads and quickly alerts the driver of wrong-way movement. It even goes so far as to stop the car, giving oncoming vehicles a bit more of a chance to get out of the way.
At the same time, the system alerts those oncoming cars using a cloud-based, anonymized system. It can activate roadside signage; even if such signage isn’t around, it can send an alert to drivers via their smart phones or car infotainment systems.
That’s critical because in many cases the driver who’s going the wrong way may be unresponsive to any warning. Studies have shown that such drivers are often impaired by disease, old age, or alcohol. Worst of all are the ones who go the wrong way on purpose.
According to Christain Jeschke, an engineer at Bosch, some 50 percent of all wrong-way drivers are suicidal.
That’s tacky. If you’re going to kill yourself, you should do it in a way that doesn’t endanger others.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Jobs That Are Headed For Extinction.
REMINDER: Amazon carries shooting supplies.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE TORTURE! Woman pleads guilty in one of the nation’s first federal Animal Crush video cases after she tortured helpless puppies, kittens and chickens in sexualized videos.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Latest military lab concerns involve plague bacteria, deadly viruses.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Government Employees Outnumber Manufacturing Employees 1.8 To 1. Though to be fair, Obama is a symptom, more than a cause, of this trend.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN SOCIAL JUSTICE POSTURING: 5 Ways Taylor Swift Exemplifies White Feminism – And Why That’s a Problem. “Every love interest that Taylor has ever had — to my knowledge, both in real life and in her videos — has been a straight, cis, able-bodied, fit, middle-to-upper class, white dude.”
Hey, her body, her choice. Right? On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with this: “Anyone who calls themselves a feminist after learning about the movement from, of all people, Lena Dunham, is not to be trusted.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s Not Just Syria: The Obama-Hillary Mideast Debacles.
SOME THOUGHTS ON JUDGE COLLYER’S OPINION ON THE HOUSE LAWSUIT: As I reported yesterday, federal district judge Rosemary Collyer defied the predictions of numerous pundits by ruling that the House of Representatives’ lawsuit against the Obama Administration–challenging various rules implementing Obamacare–may move forward to the merits. Now that I’ve had some time to digest Judge Collyer’s opinion, I will offer a few observations.
First, as someone who has been deeply involved in this issue, I do believe Judge Collyer’s opinion is good news. While it has always been the case that this lawsuit will take years to fully resolve–possibly even until after President Obama leaves office–those who criticize the lawsuit for this ineluctable reality misunderstand what the lawsuit is about. It is not about President Obama, as an individual, but about the constitutional obligation of the President to “faithfully execute” the laws, and his related obligation not to spend money that Congress has not appropriated. Pursuing litigation to clarify the importance of these constitutional obligations is important, regardless of when such clarification comes.
A judicial determination that a President lacks power to unilaterally rewrite unambiguous laws or appropriate money is important as a matter of constitutional principle, and will prevent future presidents from behaving in similarly unconstitutional ways.
Second, while Judge Collyer fully embraces the notion that Congress, as an institution, has standing to vindicate an injury to its constitutional prerogatives, she oddly (and in my opinion, inconsistently) concludes that the House’s claims relating to President Obama’s abuse of Congress’s appropriations power may move forward, but not its claims relating to his abuse of Congress’s legislative power. This is an artificial and unsustainable bifurcation.
Specifically, Judge Collyer concludes that “[d]espite its formulation as a constitutional claim, the Employer-Mandate Theory is fundamentally a statutory argument” that is no more than a complaint that the “Executive Branch is misinterpreting a statute . . . .” Because the employer-mandate claim is “merely” a claim that the President has “misinterpreted” a statute, Collyer asserts that “other litigants” are “free to sue” over such mere misinterpretation.
But this overlooks the fact that all federal courts–including the Seventh and Eleventh Circuits– that have considered such private-party lawsuits challenging the Administrations “mere” misinterpretation of the Obamacare employer mandate have been unable to pursue such claims, due to their own lack of standing. More importantly, if the House’s appropriations claim is sufficient to establish standing because, in Judge Collyer’s words, of Congress’s “unique role in the appropriations process prescribed by the Constitution,” then its employer-mandate claim should also be sufficient because of Congress’s “unique role” in the legislative process, and the President’s unique constitutional duty to take care that the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully” executed.
While I dispute Judge Collyer’s artificial bifurcation of the House’s appropriations-related claim as “constitutional” and its employer mandate-related claim as “statutory,” I give her much credit for recognizing that the legislative branch is not an institutional orphan, incapable of vindicating its constitutional prerogatives. To hold otherwise would be to allow the President to eviscerate the separation of powers.
Third, I also give Judge Collyer credit for rejecting the specious argument that the House lawsuit was a “political question” that is not justiciable by courts. The political question doctrine is invoked only in those rare situations when there are no ascertainable standards by which the judiciary can resolve an issue, which appears to have been textually committed by the Constitution’s text to the sole discretion of one of the two political branches (Congress or the Executive).
The PQD doctrine is not invoked merely because a constitutional question has important political ramifications–most constitutional questions do (think gay marriage, abortion, or any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of any presidential act). As Judge Collyer noted, the House’s constitutional claims against the President present “pure questions of constitutional interpretation” for which there are ample, “familiar judicial techniques [] available to construe the meaning . . . .” She correctly noted that, since Marbury v. Madison (1803), the federal courts have been both willing and able to “say what the law is,” even in separation of powers’ disputes among Congress and President.
IN THE MAIL: From Ross Guberman, Point Taken: How To Write Like the World’s Best Judges.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Madden NFL 16, $39.99 (33% off).
And, also today only: “Friday Night Lights,” the complete series on DVD, $36.49 (64% off).
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s Not Just Syria: The Obama-Hillary Mideast Debacles.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 854.
SPYING: Of Course the Government Wants to Read Your Texts.
Imagine, if you will, a law that said all doors had to be left unlocked so that the police could get in whenever they needed to. Or at the very least, a law mandating that the government have a master key.
That’s essentially what some in the government want for your technology. As companies like Apple and Google have embraced stronger encryption, they’re making it harder for the government to do the kind of easy instant collection that companies were forced into as the government chased terrorists after 9/11.
And how could you oppose that government access? After all, the government keeps us safe from criminals. Do you really want to make it easier for criminals to evade the law?
The analogy with your home doors suggests the flaw in this thinking: The U.S. government is not the only entity capable of using a master key. Criminals can use them too. If you create an easy way to bypass security, criminals — or other governments — are going to start looking for ways to reproduce the keys.
Or consider another case cited by the Times, in which the government is trying to get Microsoft to give up messages stored on a server in Ireland. With today’s global networks, it’s frustrating how easily criminals can move things out of reach of the law. On the other hand, do we want the law to have farther reach? It might be kind of frightening if other governments, with weaker civil liberties protections, could get access to any of our messages, just by getting an order from their local court.
Also, I don’t trust our own government agencies not to abuse their power for the benefit of the people in charge. Well, the Democrats in charge, anyway. I’m sure there’d be whistleblowers galore if a Republican administration tried something like that.
OBAMA’S LEGACY — LAYING AMERICA OPEN TO ITS ENEMIES: Records: Energy Department struck by cyber attacks. “Incident reports submitted by federal officials and contractors since late 2010 to the Energy Department’s Joint Cybersecurity Coordination Center shows a near-consistent barrage of attempts to breach the security of critical information systems that contain sensitive data about the nation’s power grid, nuclear weapons stockpile and energy labs. . . . The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Energy Department responsible for managing and securing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, experienced 19 successful attacks during the four-year period, records show.”
Attackers got root 53 times, but DoE won’t say if they got anything critical. Hint: Yes, yes they did. This is another first-order debacle, but it won’t get the attention it deserves because we’re currently in such a debacle-rich environment.
Related: What if Pearl Harbor happened and nobody noticed? In cyberwar, the U.S. doesn’t have an edge.
CAN WE GET LEGISLATION ZEROING OUT FUNDING? K.C. Johnson: Office For Civil Rights Goes After Michigan State.
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MEET THE NEW PALACE GUARD, THE SAME AS THE OLD PALACE GUARD: GROSS: Colbert Launches ‘Late Show’ with Donald Trump on Screen With KKK (Video).
BACK WHEN OUR CONGRESSMAN CHAIRED THE CIVIL AVIATION SUBCOMMITTEE IN THE DAYS OF REGULATED AIRLINES, Knoxville had a suspiciously large number of convenient, mostly-empty flights. Now, though, that sort of thing is a scandal.
VETERAN PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA MEMBERS ANGRY OVER INFILTRATION FROM UPSTART JUDEAN PEOPLE’S FRONT WANKERS: Oregon is tired of all these immigrants from… California.
Shades of 2007, when the L.A. Times reported blue-on-blue in-fighting among sclerotic elderly first generation Haight-Ashbury hippies and the upstart next generation young hippies moving in and further ruining what remained of the neighborhood their spiritual grandfathers had originally trashed all those decades ago.
I SMELL A COVERUP. BUT THE PUBLIC HAS A RIGHT TO KNOW! Ashe Schow: We might not learn anything new from Rolling Stone lawsuits.
Rolling Stone magazine is seeking to limit what gets publicly disclosed during the ongoing defamation case brought forth by University of Virginia Associate Dean Nicole Eramo.
Eramo was the only named official blamed for improperly handling an accusation of a brutal gang rape by a student known as “Jackie.” The accusation was detailed in a now-discredited article that appeared in Rolling Stone. After the story fell apart, Eramo filed a defamation lawsuit against the magazine for its portrayal of her.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted late last week that even though a Columbia Journalism Review of the article revealed some additional details, there could still be more information out there — information that could be private (such as Jackie’s confidential report of the alleged gang rape). It doesn’t matter that she lied, what she said to Eramo could be protected information.
“The proposal would secure confidentiality for disclosures that fall into any one of several baskets, including information whose release is barred by statute, trade secrets or ‘commercially sensitive’ information, ‘unpublished newsgathering materials’ and ‘information of a personal or intimate nature regarding any individual,’” Wemple wrote.
Wemple, predictably yet amusingly, opposes the protection of “unpublished newsgathering materials.”
The big story here is one of malfeasance by the press. “Unpublished newsgathering materials” are highly relevant to the public’s ability to judge.
ANDREW McCARTHY: John Kerry’s Letter to Congress Is a ‘Guilty’ Plea to the Charge That Iran Deal Materially Supports Terrorism.
RELATED: Khamenei: No Israel in 25 Years.
Fortunately, the DNC-MSM is there to tell us where the real evil exists.
TWO MONTHS OF MISLABELING: ABC, NBC Evening News Shows Haven’t Called Bernie Sanders ‘Socialist’ Since July 3.
Because if they did, the networks might have to define the term, its history, and how his ideology impacts both Hillary and Obama, which could mean bad news for Democrats. And the networks are also reluctant to quote from Sanders’ fire and brimstone speeches, which are focused on how poorly the economy has been performing for the last six and a half years with a Democrat in the White House, as Glenn has noted in USA Today:
Sanders recently went after the Obama administration on inequality and unemployment, noting that although the official government unemployment is at 5.4%, the real unemployment figure, including those who have given up looking for work or who are involuntarily working part-time, is 10.5%, almost double.
What’s more, he notes, youth unemployment is even worse. For young high school graduates, unemployment is 33% for whites, 36% for Hispanics and 51% for blacks. Never mind that Sanders’ proposed minimum-wage increase would make that worse. The point is that he’s speaking to a concern that is evident to ordinary Democrats around the country, but that is concealed by the Obama administration’s gauzy proclamations of economic recovery.
All of which makes Bernie so problematic, as the kids like to say these days, to the MSM. But then, this is the media whose biggest names were proudly proclaiming “I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is” on the eve of the 2008 election, so don’t expect them to tell their viewers what Bernie’s worldview is anytime soon, either.
RELATED: Democrats seem to forget who ‘owns’ this sad economy.
Well, they’ll certainly want presidential voters to forget next year.
BECAUSE ISLAM THREATENS WESTERN CIVILIZATION, AND JUDAISM DOES NOT: Brendan O’Neill: Why does the left care more about Islamophobia than anti-Semitism?
In recent days, a Manchester teen was beaten up in a suspected anti-Semitic assault; a Jewish Spanish teenager was physically attacked; and two Holocaust survivors in Amsterdam were assaulted and called ‘dirty Jews’. Yet these incidents aren’t frontpage news; certainly they aren’t cited as evidence that a new plague of prejudice is stalking Europe, as is done when Muslims are assaulted. The message of this double standard, however implicit it might be, is pretty clear: attacks on Jews are less important than attacks on Muslims.
The extent to which chattering-class concern for Muslims trumps concern for Jews reached its nadir when four Jews were murdered in a Parisian deli shortly after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo. Pretty much every liberal newspaper in Europe continued thundering on about the potential for an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ following the Charlie killings, even as Jews were being killed. On the morning the four dead Jews were being put on a flight for burial in Israel, George Clooney was telling fawning hacks how worried he was about ‘anti-Muslim fervour’ in Europe. It’s surreal. Some people seem more worried about possible attacks on Muslims than by actual attacks on Jews.
Seem?
THE MIGRANT CONQUEST OF EUROPE: As Gilbert T. Sewall writes at the American Spectator, “this cannot end well:”
“The guilt trip from World War II, which one would think would gradually fade over time, seems to grow exponentially,” says an academic acquaintance who may understand the German soul as well as any living scholar. “The ultimate expiation will be to hand the whole country over to Muslims, lock, stock, and barrel.”
It seems appropriate here to recall Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall describing the Goths moving west into the Roman Empire at the end of the 4th century, “rendered desolate by the loss of their native country.”
The Barbarians still wore an angry and hostile aspect; but the experience of past times might encourage the hope, that they would acquire the habits of industry and obedience; that their manners would be polished by time, education, and the influence of Christianity; and that their posterity would insensibly blend with the great body of the Roman people.
Notwithstanding these specious arguments, and these sanguine expectations, it was apparent to every discerning eye, that the Goths would long remain the enemies, and might soon become the conquerors of the Roman Empire. Their rude and insolent behavior expressed their contempt of the citizens and provincials, whom they insulted with impunity.
Call Gibbon’s barbarians what you wish. We can invent many labels for those now in transit — perhaps the “other” or “deprived” will work — to please our modern sensibilities. We can hope for the best.
But notwithstanding specious arguments and sanguine expectations, Europe faces an existential alien threat. From Charles Martel to the Siege of Vienna, it has resisted invaders and would-be conquerers from Africa and the East. In 2015 it is doing the opposite.
Read the whole thing.
RELATED: “Trump: We have to accept Syrian refugees because they’re living in hell back home.”
SCOTT WALKER: WHAT WENT WRONG? “Walker is a conservative but not a fire-breather. That made his attempt to straddle the grassroots and the establishment — which would have been difficult for any politician — harder to pull off:”
Of course, it’s still early. The old baseball cliché that you are never as good as you seem when you’re winning and never as bad as you seem when you’re losing often applies to politics. And Walker, like all of the candidates this year, has been buffeted by an unexpected force. No one would have guessed that the candidate who talks of buying affordable shirts at Kohl’s and campaigns at Harley-Davidson outlets would get shoved aside in Iowa by a loudmouthed billionaire who brags about his incredible wealth and woos voters by taking their children for rides in his helicopter.
Oh I don’t know – look at the run that Newt Gingrich gave milquetoast Mitt Romney in 2011 simply by being an MSM-attacking fire-breather himself.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Reviving America’s Nuclear Culture.
At 8:15 a.m., most of downtown Hiroshima disappeared in a searing flash of light and a crushing blast of superheated air. At least 70,000 Japanese (including around 20,000 soldiers) were killed by the firestorm that incinerated the city’s wooden houses and buildings. Three days later, on August 9, the city of Nagasaki was similarly destroyed, this time with the immediate death of around 40,000 civilians. Tens of thousands more would die in coming weeks and years from burns and radiation sickness.
For 70 years since those August mornings, the world has been spared another nuclear bombing. Even as the United States and the Soviet Union built enormous stockpiles of nuclear warheads, reaching a maximum combined total of 64,500 in 1986, neither they nor the other official nuclear powers ever detonated a nuclear weapon during a conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, in particular, the threat of nuclear war has appeared to recede, and the massive nuclear arsenals relegated in importance to the backwaters of national strategy.
Today, though, a quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons are back, proliferation is increasing, and the world faces a new and unsettling nuclear future. To prepare for the return of a nuclear world, the United States above all must revitalize its once-dominant nuclear culture, relearn the language of deterrence, and reincorporate nuclear strategy into all levels of security policymaking.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The Huma Files: Feds investigated top Hillary Clinton aide for embezzlement.
Federal investigators formally investigated top Hillary Rodham Clinton aide Huma Abedin for the crime of embezzlement after confirming she took a “Babymoon” vacation and maternity time at the State Department without expending her formal leave, resulting in thousands of dollars of pay she wasn’t entitled to receive, The Washington Times has learned.
The probe also gathered evidence she filed time sheets charging the government for impermissible overtime and excessive hours after she converted from a full-time federal employee to a State Department contractor.
Those timecards were filed during a period that remains under investigation over questions about possible conflicts of interest, documents gathered by the State Department inspector general show.
Related: Anthony Weiner told to stay away from Hillary Clinton fundraiser. He and Huma are a real power couple.
TAKE BYRD DOWN: GET A KLANSMAN’S NAME OFF THIS COURTHOUSE!
It looks like you’re going to need a bigger petition, considering how many buildings in West Virginia the former “Exalted Cyclops” turned Democrat senator had his name plastered onto.
Let’s get back to Myers’ “just let the poor traumatized kids get the degrees they paid for” argument. No, don’t let them get those degrees. The whole point of those degrees is to signify their bearers possess qualities beyond merely the credit rating to take out vast amounts of student loans. The entire reason college degrees are supposed to be valuable is that they signify a capacity to absorb and process specialized knowledge beyond what non-degree-holders have. This is, in fact, the whole purpose of education generally.
This means if some troubled or weak students have allowed their mental illness to preclude them from absorbing such knowledge, the fault lies not with the college, but with them. Such people are as ineducable as an illiterate English major. The solution is not to expel knowledge from the classroom that is disagreeable to these feeble and fragile minds. It is to expel them. Their place is in a psych ward, not a school, and their money (or, more likely, their parents’) is better spent seeking treatment there than spoiling education for everyone else.
I am not exaggerating when I say that the stigma attached to mental illness exists at least partially because “sufferers” exhibit these sorts of cognitive glass jaws. Why should you be willing to spend time around someone prone to breaking down and blaming you at any moment, let alone take responsibility for them as an employer, supervisor, or especially the sort of educator-cum-substitute-parent that many college administrations try to be? In our lawsuit-happy culture, there is no reason for any rational being to want anyone who is mentally ill nearby if their most visible “advocates” are so fragile they want to see a Shakespeare play labeled like a pack of cigarettes. . . .
It’s not fair to the colleges or to them to expect them to hack it any more than it’s fair to expect someone with easily broken bones to become a body builder. Either the college will have to dumb its educational mission down to the point of meaninglessness, or the extremely damaged will have to put themselves at risk of interminable mental agony. The first option destroys learning; the second destroys people. Better to keep the people incapable of learning away from it.
Read the whole thing.
UNEXPECTEDLY: This Deal (Still) Keeps Getting Worse All the Time.
WAIT, WHAT: Al Qaeda Mag, Occupy Mag… at this point what difference does it make? Al Qaeda Mag Urges Attack on Koch Brothers, Buffett, Bloomberg
I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WORRYING ABOUT THE SILLY: Men of Honor vs Victim Culture.
GEEZE, YA CAN’T TRUST ANYBODY THESE DAYS: Al-Qaeda leader criticizes Islamic State for dividing jihadist ranks.
SPEAKING OF SILLY, ABOUT TIME SOMEONE SAID THIS: Expel People Who Demand Trigger Warnings.
BEYOND BAD OPTICS: CA Votes for Suicide During Suicide Prevention Week.
THIS REALLY IS GETTING SILLY: #BlackLivesMatter Activists Are Angry at Fear the Walking Dead, but They’re Angry at the Wrong Thing
DAVE FREER’S: Stardogs $3.99
WE USED TO HAVE A CONSTITUTION FOR THAT: Why Americans are so fond of the queen.
A SINGLE CONSTANT: Hillary Clinton, faux hawk: The only thing that never changes is her ambition.
THIS IS GETTING SILLY: New Korean Hulk could begin to smash issues over Marvel’s creative diversity. If they really need all these people by the names, can’t they CREATE new heroes?
YOUR WEDNESDAY DOSE OF DOOM AND GLOOM: What the August Jobs Number Didn’t Tell You.
TIM COOK’S LEGACY: Apple Goes Middle-Aged with Bad Fashion and Live Slip-Ups. Well, all the Steve Jobs stuff has basically gone through the pipeline, and Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs. “And there’s something missing in Tim Cook’s presentation style, too. The whole event today felt sloppy and awkward and some of the products were simply daft. Apple is crapping slightly on Steve Jobs’s legacy by introducing a stylus, called the Apple Pencil and retailing at a whopping $99. Jobs famously scoffed in 2010 that if you see a stylus, someone screwed up.”
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: EPA admits never planned for ‘worst-case scenario’ at site of toxic mine spill.
HMM: UT president: Gender-neutral pronoun controversy ‘like nothing I’ve seen.’ People saw it as symptomatic, or maybe emblematic, of a deeper out-of-touchness in academia, I’d say.
But adopting a sexual consent policy when you know that at least two courts have already found it “ridiculous” seems like a bigger misstep.
WHEN THEY DON’T LIKE YOUR POLITICS, THEY LIE ABOUT YOU:
First, it is indeed a striking coincidence that Judge Day’s miscellaneous ethical lapses are suddenly of interest to the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability. The commission’s complaint (PDF) even includes allegations that Judge Day was a bad soccer dad, for heaven’s sake (Day said the other guy pushed first) and improperly raised money for a veterans’ display. It’s hard not to agree with Judge Day that this is a politically motivated hit.
What about that Hitler photo? According to Korten, it was part of a World War II display. “We went to war against Hitler,” Korten told Reuters. “His picture was there. It was not admiringly. It was him as the epitome of the enemy that we went to fight against.”
A photograph of the display has now surfaced, and appears to bear out this story. While Hitler’s image is unusually large, it is surrounded by American veterans’ memorabilia. It is in bad aesthetic taste, perhaps, but is hardly a shrine to Hitler.
Surely the commission acted in bad faith. They had to know the headlines that would result from its accusation of Judge Day “hanging a picture of Hitler in the Marion County Courthouse.” After all, what did you picture when you read the first line of this story? This allegation makes Judge Day into the victim of a progressive-led hit job.
This is who they are. This is what they do.
SO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DID ALL THE STUFF THEY ACCUSED BUSH OF DOING. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IS, BUSH WON THE WAR, AND THEY LOST IT. Exclusive: 50 Spies Say ISIS Intelligence Was Cooked. “The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command.”
To be fair, each administration got what it wanted.
GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Independent Agency Confirms: VA Retaliated Against Whistleblower.
SO YESTERDAY, A SUGGESTION THAT TRUMP MIGHT STEAL ENOUGH BLACKS FROM DEMOCRATS TO WIN.
And today, a suggestion that Trump’s father kinda/maybe/who knows? was arrested at a KKK rally in . . . 1927. We even get this qualifier, several paragraphs down: “To be clear, this is not proof that Trump senior—who would later go on to become a millionaire real estate developer—was a member of the Ku Klux Klan or even in attendance at the event. Despite sharing lawyers with the other men, it’s conceivable that he may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event.”
Upside for Trump: The number of blacks who read Boing Boing is probably roughly equal to the number of blacks who attend Bernie Sanders rallies. . . .
WHEN SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS HAVE KIDS: “This sounds like so terrible an idea that it almost has to be a joke — parents seriously proposing to give their daughter a large amount of money because she’s a girl…”
FIGHT THE POWER: College Promises To Punish Students Who Heckled Mandatory Play. Mockery is the best response. They can’t take it.
A TAX REFORM PLAN from Jane The Actuary.
BOEHNER CAVES TO CONSERVATIVES ON IRAN VOTE: Looks like pressure from the House conservative Freedom Caucus membership has forced House Speaker John Boehner to agree the House will not pass a resolution disapproving of President Obama’s Iran deal. Instead, the House will apparently vote Friday on the resolution introduced by Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL), which will state that Obama has not complied with the Corker-Cardin law because he has not submitted the full Iranian nuclear “agreement,” which that law explicitly defines to include all “side deals,” between third parties (including the Iran-IAEA side deals).
The House is also anticipated to now vote on a second resolution, which would state that because the President has failed to submit the “agreement” defined by Corker-Cardin, the President has no corresponding authority to lift any existing Iranian sanctions.
The move by Boehner came after Freedom Caucus members threatened to vote down a planned resolution disapproving of the Iran deal, leaving the House on record as approving the deal. This threat was designed to leverage Boehner via potential political embarrassment, and encourage GOP leadership to consider the Roskam alternative, which will both delay congressional action on the Iran deal, as well as provide a stronger legal basis upon which to challenge any presidential action lifting sanctions.
This alternative approach was first put forth in a Washington Post oped over the weekend by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and constitutional lawyer David Rivkin.
TED CRUZ ON THE IRAN DEAL: A catastrophic threat to security.
AUSTIN BAY: Behind the Persistent Crisis of Refugees and Displaced Persons.
The Assad regime has clung to power, despite using chemical weapons. Recall that the Obama administration said use of chemical weapons against civilians constituted a “red line” the Assad regime could not cross. But cross it did, without punishment. ISIL rose when the U.S. withdrew from Iraq and left a power vacuum.
Assisting refugees by providing aid and shelter is necessary, but both are second-order responses. The first-order response is confronting the violent, malevolent local regimes that spur the flight. They thrive on poverty, oppression, persecution and war. Confronting them may mean regime change.
Weeping for the refugees’ plight is a superficial reaction unless you’re willing to fight the evil that produced it.
True, but for many it offers a convenient distraction.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Among the Secret Christians of Brooklyn. “It can be a struggle to be publicly Christian in Brooklyn.”
U.S. NEWS AND THE REPLICATION OF HIERARCHY: The U.S. News and World Report college rankings: A public vs. private dilemma.
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AN ARMY OF DAVID GERROLDS: “Smithsonian Enlists Star Trek Fans to Help Send USS Enterprise Back in Time,” asking them to “search their memory banks for firsthand, pre-1976 images or film of the original studio model of the USS Enterprise. Conservators are working to restore the ship to its appearance from August 1967, and they will use the primary-source photos as reference materials for the project…The current restoration will restore the ship to its August 1967 appearance, during and after the production of the episode ‘The Trouble with Tribbles,’ which is the last time the Enterprise was altered throughout the original Star Trek.”
MARTIN O’MALLEY: Hey, you know what America needs? More Syrian refugees!
HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES: Try inventing a vegan egg.
Three years after embarking on a sweeping effort to build a cheaper, safer, and all-around healthier egg using all-natural plant proteins, Silicon Valley startup Hampton Creek is facing The Big Backlash. All Silicon Valley startups reach this point, somewhere along the way—though the backlash is perhaps more extreme in the case of Hampton Creek.
In early August, fueled by disgruntled ex-Hampton Creek employees, Business Insider published a story questioning both the company’s ethics and its science, raising doubts over how Hampton Creek portrayed its egg-less products, which include cookie dough and mayonnaise. Three weeks later, the Food and Drug Administration told the startup that its eggless mayonnaise can’t be called mayonnaise. And by the beginning of September, a Freedom of Information Act request turned up emails showing that the American Egg Board—the egg-industry marketing organization (“incredible edible eggTM“) overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—had marshaled PR professionals and other forces in an effort to blunt the startup’s progress and perhaps even encourage unfavorable treatment from the FDA and others.
Naturally, Hampton Creek is in fight-back mode. It played a role in the widespread distribution of those FOIA-ed emails—an MIT researcher with connections to one Hampton Creek co-founder acquired the emails, before Hampton Creek helped distribute them to journalists—and now, it’s pushing for added leverage.
What I hate about vegan eggs is, they tell you they’re vegan within the first 30 seconds after you meet them.
BREAKING: Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has just ruled that the House of Representatives has standing to sue President Obama, challenging the constitutionality of the executive branch’s decision to spend billions of unappropriated dollars to support Obamacare. Judge Collyer denied legislative standing to pursue the House’s claim that President Obama has disregarded the 2014 effective date of Obamacare’s employer mandate. More updates will follow once I’ve had a chance to digest Judge Collyer’s opinion.
FROM A “GLOBAL WARMING” PERSPECTIVE, ISN’T THIS GOOD NEWS? Sam Champion’s morning show cancelled as Weather Channel pulls back on original programming reporting that online is now their most lucrative platform.
Back in 2007, when he was a weatherman on ABC’s Good Morning America, that show ran a Chyron hysterically asking, “Will Billions Die from Global Warming?”, over which Champion declared:
That’s what’s in this report and why everyone is trying to jump this report that officially comes out Friday, Robin. There are big, new headlines and some of them are coming out of Australia in media reports. Now, they say that those scientists in Paris will estimate that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will suffer from water shortage problems by 2080. That’s not your grandchildren, that’s your children. And between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.
Well — gosh. (Video at link.) If things are that bad, don’t the networks have an obligation to go off the air and shut down their Internet server to reduce energy use and help save the planet? Even if they’re doing it one show at a time, anyone who asks “Will billions die from global warming?” with a straight face should applaud these baby steps taken by the Weather Channel.
RELATED: Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Prof Jobs Are Drying Up. “The number of new law professors hired at American Bar Association-accredited law schools fell nearly 55 percent between 2011 to 2015, according to data compiled by Sarah Lawsky, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Just 70 people snagged tenure-track teaching jobs last year, compared with 155 in 2011, Lawsky’s data shows.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Seven Steps to Building a Baby Schedule, from Susan L.M. Goldberg at the PJ Parenting section.
TRUMP TO CNN: DONATE THE PROFITS I DRIVE TO VETERANS’ CARE:
Needless to say, this is a brilliant stroke by Trump, all kidding aside. In one moment, Trump has cast himself as a populist crusader against excess profits, as a champion of veterans (after his fumble about military prep school), and a leader in holding national media’s feet to the fire. If CNN goes along with this idea, Trump can take credit for the largesse. If they don’t, Trump has a new media target at which to aim for the next few weeks, one that doesn’t attempt to undermine conservative-media allies the eventual nominee will need to combat media bias in a general election.
As Ed Morrissey writes, “Troll-fu level: Master.”
DEVELOPMENTS IN DIVERSITY: White Writer Makes “Best Poetry” — With An Asian Pen Name. “In his bio for the anthology, Hudson admits that he used the pen name of Yi-Fen Chou as a strategy for getting his poems accepted by literary journals.”
Related: The Fall Of The Meritocracy.
SORRY FOR WHAT, HILLARY? Ron Fournier’s National Journal piece excoriates Hillary Clinton for her non-apologetic “apology”:
Six years after seizing control of government email and after six months of denying wrongdoing. Just this week, it took three different interviews in four days for her to beg the puniest of pardons: “I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier.”
You think? By any objective measure, the Democratic presidential front-runner has responded to her email scandal with deflection and deception, shredding her credibiliity while giving a skeptical public another reason not to trust the institutions of politics and government.
An apology doesn’t fix that. An apology also doesn’t answer the scandal’s most important questions.
1. While apologizing in an ABC interview on Tuesday, you said, “What I had done was allowed; it was aboveboard.” You must know by now that while the State Department allowed the use of home computers in 2009, agency rules required that email be secured. Yours was not. . . .
2. If what you did was “aboveboard,” then you wouldn’t object to all executive-branch officials at every level of government and from bothparties storing their email on private servers—out of the public’s reach. Tell me how that wouldn’t subvert the federal Freedom of Information Act and “sunshine laws” in every state?
3. If what you did was “allowed,” then you wouldn’t object to all executive-branch officials at every level of government and from both parties using secret servers to shield themselves from legislative oversight. Wouldn’t that undermine the legislative branch’s constitutional authority? Wouldn’t it lead to more political corruption? . . .
9. Ever hear of Thomas Drake? He’s the former senior National Security Agency official indicted under the Espionage Act for keeping an agency email printout at his home that was not marked as classified. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Why do you and your aides keep suggesting that it matters whether or not your emails were marked classified? . . .
The whole thing is worth reading– all 19 questions. Wouldn’t it be nice if a mainstream reporter actually asked such questions? But we know that would never happen, as evidenced by veteran reporter Andrea Mitchell’s admission yesterday that she was afraid of pushing Clinton on the server issue for fear that Clinton would cut short her interview. One can only push the monarch so far, after all.
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NEW SJW OUTRAGE: USING PHOTOSHOP ON A PICTURE OF A WOMAN TO MAKE HER SMILE MORE: “What I like most about modern SJW feminists is how they completely disprove all those old hoary negative stereotypes about women, like the old saw that they get hysterical over trivial matters usually related to fashion and beauty.”
RARITY: A commercial that actually says something positive about boys. Thanks to reader Ronald Henry for the tip.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Experiments Show How Lasers Can Despin Asteroids by Turning Them Into Rockets.
HOARDING IS BAD, but so is obsessive decluttering. “Diller’s compulsive-decluttering patients, she says, sometimes describe ‘this tightness in their chest if they see things that should be thrown out,’ one that can be eased only by getting rid of the offending objects.”
SCIENCE: A new technology will allow authorities to tell whether you used drugs recently, if you’re a smoker, even what sex you are—all from your fingerprints. But there’s this: “There is a cost to a test being less invasive: It doesn’t require someone’s permission to be conducted. Civil liberties advocates fear that our rights could be violated without us even realizing it – with a test whose accuracy is not yet known.”
REMINDER: Amazon carries rifle scopes. I like this Aimpoint.
FASTER, PLEASE: Peter Thiel Backs Biotech “Unicorn” Fighting Cancer Stem Cells.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Campus Rape Panic Scaring Women Away From College. “Why is the government collaborating in this dangerous myth?”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: UT program to allow students to earn law, bachelor’s degrees while saving full year of tuition. ” In the program, students complete three years of approved undergraduate coursework in the College of Arts and Sciences. Following their third year, participating students admitted to the College of Law become full-time, first-year law students. The first year of law study will count toward a student’s law degree and also toward the completion of his or her bachelor’s degree. Two additional years of law study follow, after which a student earns a juris doctor degree.” We’re not the first law school to do this, but I predict many more will follow suit.
DONALD TRUMP OPED: It’s Amateur Hour With The Iran Nuclear Deal.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: Reining In the EPA.
IN THE MAIL: Find Your Balance Point: Clarify Your Priorities, Simplify Your Life, and Achieve More.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 854.
EUROPE’S IMMIGRATION PROBLEM is structural.
This time the crisis is over one of Europe’s most cherished icons: the Schengen visa-free/passport-free zone, which has given the European project arguably its strongest evidence yet that a larger and ultimately “pan-European” community would emerge from the nation-states bound by the treaty and the ideals behind it.
The current wave is fast invalidating all earlier numerical projections: Germany is looking at about 800,000 asylum applications this year; in July alone more than 100,000 people entered Europe, mainly through Greece and Italy. Reportedly, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker will now call for the member countries to resettle the 160,000 people who have reached Greece, Italy, and Hungary—a fourfold increase relative to two months ago. This is the “Schengen wave” of immigration; now reaching the point of entry places one within striking distance of Europe’s interior.
The size and distribution of the resettlement quota within the EU has become an intra-family squabble, with Britain resisting and Germany and Italy asking for higher quota commitments from other countries, especially from the reluctant “new members.” Here Hungary has led the way in its opposition to the plan, building a barbed wire fence along the Serbian border and pushing enabling legislation through the parliament that would reassert national control. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called the immigration wave a “German problem.”
So it now will come to this: Germany’s Angela Merkel will insist that increasing resettlement quotas for all is inevitable, making it a litmus test of intra-EU solidarity. If she gets her way—and she likely will next week—Greece, Italy, and Hungary will be allowed to dispatch the migrants from their territory to other countries, establishing an ad hoc quota policy of sorts. Problem solved? Not so fast, as another deal on the resettlement quota will not alter the overall migration dynamic or momentum, with push and pull factors (war in MENA and Europe’s generous social support and prospect of a better life) now mutually reinforcing and locked in. And in a world framed by instant communications and social media, the message of Europe’s promise will continue to go out to the desperate and the entrepreneurial thousands, reinforcing their determination to come.
You can’t have open borders and generous welfare benefits. At least, not for long. And something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
LIBERALISM DOESN’T DESERVE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT: AT Commentary, Noah Rothman explores Bill de Blasio’s indifference to the gang-related shooting of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s aide Carey Gabay and the rapid increase in New York City’s homelessness:
No New York City resident or commuter can pretend not to notice it. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people sleeping on the streets, begging on corners, nodding off with an outstretched hand amid an opioid-fueled stupor.
“This is a historic problem, decades old,” de Blasio said in his own defense. “The fact is, the Great Recession led to something we hadn’t seen before.” The mayor’s attempt to blame the city’s homelessness spike on a recession that began six years before he took office was exposed as naked scapegoating when he was asked if Barack Obama’s economy remained subpar. “The economy’s not worse, it’s better,” he said in direct contradiction to his earlier pronouncement. The mayor sought to inoculate himself against attacks on his record by noting that his administration has transitioned 15,000 out of city shelters and into affordable housing. “Putting people in a shelter costs their lives a lot,” he added. It’s unlikely that those souls who spend their days laying face-first on a sidewalk in Manhattan’s Herald Square being literally stepped over by morning commuters would agree.
“A city with homeless on its streets is a city that has no love of its people,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently wrote. “A city that lets people sleep in the streets doesn’t care.” The city’s homeless population is up by an estimated 59 percent over 2013. Calls from concerned citizens about the homeless population have spiked by 35 percent in the same period. In response to Giuliani’s stinging admonition, de Blasio called him “delusional” and suggested the rise in awareness of the city’s homeless problem was due only to the media’s renewed interest in the subject. Apparently, the mayor thinks his city’s residents are “delusional,” too.
Well, the socialist elites who a decade ago publicly longed for a return to the bad-old days of the 1970s and found their man to accomplish that in de Blasio might qualify.
MIGRANT CRISIS: Where Have The Gulf States Been? Why a region with $2 trillion in annual income can’t seem to spare much for the neighbors. Why should the rest of the world do more?
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IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? In Egypt, Muslim Soldiers Slaughtering Their Fellow Christian Platoon Mates.
I DON’T WANT AN APOLOGY, I WANT AN INDICTMENT: “So Hillary Clinton mumbled some kind of apology yesterday. . . . This raises the question: Who gives a rat’s ass? Were you demanding an apology from Hillary Clinton? I wasn’t. I wanted the facts. And those are still in short supply.”
