Archive for 2015

I’M SURPRISED TO SEE THE NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISH THIS: Marine Le Pen: To Call This Threat by Its Name: France Was Attacked by Islamic Fundamentalism.

Let us call things by their rightful names, since the French government seems reluctant to do so. France, land of human rights and freedoms, was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology: Islamic fundamentalism. It is only by refusing to be in denial, by looking the enemy in the eye, that one can avoid conflating issues. Muslims themselves need to hear this message. They need the distinction between Islamist terrorism and their faith to be made clearly.

Yet this distinction can only be made if one is willing to identify the threat. It does our Muslim compatriots no favors to fuel suspicions and leave things unspoken. Islamist terrorism is a cancer on Islam, and Muslims themselves must fight it at our side.

I’m not sure which is more surprising — the substance, or the author.

LIFE IN DEBLASIO’S NEW YORK: NYC may yank terrorism report to appease mosque ‘spying’ critics.

In top-secret talks to settle federal lawsuits against the NYPD for monitoring mosques, the city is weighing a demand that it scrub from its Web site a report on Islamic terrorists, The Post has learned.

The groundbreaking, 92-page report, titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” angers critics who say it promotes “religious profiling” and discrimination against Muslims. But law-enforcement sources say removing the report now would come at the worst time — after mounting terror attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris, Boston, Sydney and Ottawa.

Here in New York, Zale Thompson, a man who heeded online calls by ISIS for jihad, attacked two NYPD officers with a hatchet in October.

“The harm is that it sends the message that the NYPD is ­going to back down on its counterterrorism effort in the name of political correctness,” said a former NYPD official. “Shame on the NYPD if they do.”

Sources familiar with the case confirmed that removal of the NYPD report is one of the major sticking points in settlement negotiations.

I wonder why these mosques are so concerned about an already-published report on homegrown terror?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Cost Cutting in an Age of Declining Law School Enrollment. “For the past four years, virtually every law school in the country has been faced with a choice: lower admissions standards, shrink the entering class size, or some combination of the two. As I have previously noted, 95% of law schools have demonstrably lowered their standards and probably the real number is pretty close to 100%. This can be seen not only by the declining LSAT numbers of entering students, but also in the fact that enrollment has not declined at the same rate as the decline in applications.”

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry! One day I’ll master cut-and-paste.

IS REBOUNDING GOOD EXERCISE?

Many websites do tout almost miraculous benefits from jumping on a rebounder or, as it is also known, a minitrampoline, claiming that such workouts improve fitness, build bone, spur lymphatic drainage, fight depression, and goose the health of every cell in your body, since they supposedly experience beneficial G-force pressure during a workout.

These claims are unproven.

I’m sure it’s better for you than doing nothing, but I think I’ll stick with Rippetoe.

MICKEY KAUS: “Journalists love to publicly complain about the influence of money in politics — it’s one of those safe causes that doesn’t compromise your objectivity. But when it comes time to campaign, journalists do the donors dirty work for them by refusing to cover candidates who aren’t backed by lots of money. Those candidates are deemed ‘non-viable’ oddities and not worth telling voters about.”

SHOCKER: SPENDING MORE MONEY WON’T FIX OUR SCHOOLS:

I was accused of just wanting to stick it to President Barack Obama, and also of wishing to deny the dream of college education that should be the birthright of every single American. I was also accused of being unfamiliar with the known fact that America woefully underinvests in education compared to other advanced nations.

It is true that I am unfamiliar with America’s woeful underinvestment in education, in the same way that I am unfamiliar with the tooth fairy, because both are legends with no basis in fact. American spending on education is in line with that of our peers in the developed world — a little higher than some, a little lower than others, but not really remarkable either way. . . .

You can argue that there’s an inequality problem in our schools. In fact, I think there is obviously an inequality problem in our schools, but that the big problem is not at the college level, but rather in the primary and secondary schools that are overwhelmingly government-funded. And those disparities are also not primarily about the dollar amounts going into schools — Detroit spends well above the U.S. average per pupil, and yet one study found that half the population of the city was “functionally illiterate.”

Maybe the problem is with who is running them. Anyway, as K-12 education implodes, we’ll have to make changes, and spending more money won’t be the change we’ll need to make.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Want More Women in Office? Look to Republicans. “If women are going to achieve parity in elected office, or anything close to it, most of the future gains will have to come from the GOP.” Except, of course, that the press attacks Republican women in office as not “real women.”

GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT: Box-Office Shocker: ‘American Sniper’ Targeting Massive $75M-Plus Debut.

Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is smashing records at the North American box office, where it’s now projected to earn $75 million or more over the long Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, well ahead of expectations.

That would mark the largest opening of all time for the month of January, as well as for a modern-day war movie. To boot, it is one of the top nationwide debuts for an R-rated title.

Contrast with Hollywood’s sad anti-war movies of the Bush era, which barely earned back their catering budgets.

UPDATE: IowaHawk:

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HOW OBAMA LOST THE MIDDLE CLASS: “One of the emerging ironies of the Obama presidency, in fact, is the sagging fortunes of the American middle class while those on either end — rich and poor alike — have arguably fared better under Obama. The poor have been direct beneficiaries of many Obama programs — most notably, Obamacare—while the rich have benefited from a roaring stock market that has helped restore all the wealth lost during the 2008 financial meltdown, and then some. Middle earners, however, still face soaring costs for healthcare and education, while incomes have stagnated and many are sliding sideways or drifting backward.”

The press will do its best to hand the middle class back to whoever the Dems’ nominee is in 2016 by portraying whoever the GOP runs as an out-of-touch, scary plutocrat. This is obvious, and yet the GOP seems to be doing nothing to counter it.

5 MYTHS ABOUT MITT ROMNEY. Including: “Some of the explanations for Romney’s loss are overblown. He does not appear to have lost because he was an especially unappealing candidate, or a too conservative or too moderate one, or one with a position on immigration offensive to Hispanics. It appears, instead, that what held him back was the electorate’s view of the Republican Party as a whole, especially its approach to economic issues. If he runs again, Romney should take note of that point, and so should his primary rivals.” Yeah, I don’t think he should run again.

WHEN NAPPING GOES BAD. “It’s never occurred to me to study my naps, or chart them, or pick them apart for quality. There are good naps and bad ones. There are short naps that leave you refreshed, and short ones that leave you groggy. Long ones that seem to add a year to your life, and long ones that make you feel as though you emerged from a bog of tar. To be fair, long naps never leave me logy. Short naps can make me feel angry, because they weren’t longer naps.”

JIM TREACHER: If You Don’t Want Indiana University To Monitor You, Stop Saying Things They Don’t Like. “On behalf of Hoosiers everywhere, I apologize for my home state’s least-crappy public university. . . . These fascist creeps mutter amongst themselves about how to deal with an “ultra-right wing” website — that’d be the Beacon — that actually wants to know what they’re doing with taxpayer dollars. As you’d expect from an institution of higher learning, and a project that wants to tell other people how to think, ultimately they decide not to talk to the press. They also monitor ‘hate speech’ that seems to encompass just about anything they don’t like.”

DEBRA SAUNDERS: Mitt Should Walk Away — Not Run. Mitt’s a fine human being who would be a good President. But he’s a two-time loser, and — as with the Jeb Bush phenomenon — he’s not the new blood that the GOP, and the nation, needs.