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GENERATIONS: Seniors Can’t Cheat Death, but They Can Cheat on Each Other. “Older adults are cheating on their spouses more and more, while younger couples are cheating less, annual data from the General Social Survey (GSS) reveals. Despite 30 years of data that shows three out of four Americans are agree that extramarital sex is wrong (the number of couples who report actually doing it usually hovers around 16 percent), those 55 and older are doing it anyways. And they’ve created an odd adultery age gap that the $3 billion erectile dysfunction drug market can’t be blamed for — well, at least entirely.”
LITTLE CHIEF SPEAK WITH FORKED TONGUE: Senator Elizabeth Warren Sidesteps Questions About Oprah 2020 Presidential Run.
I can clear this up for everyone involved.
STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING #METOO IT: Weinstein accusers claim they weren’t invited to Golden Globes.
Has anyone asked President Oprah about this glaring lack of empathy?
Director Lee Daniels, Oprah Winfrey and Harvey Weinstein at The Los Angeles Premiere of ‘The Butler’ after party, on Monday, August 12, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo byAlexandra Wyman/Invision/AP Images)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
● Shot: Academia is Overdue for a Reality Check.
—American Greatness.
● Chaser:
Based on interviews with 8 female STEM students, two professors recently concluded that “masculine” norms are to blame for the lack of female STEM graduates.
According to the professors, these masculine norms include “asking good questions,” “capacity for abstract thought and rational thought processes,” “motivation,” “independent” thinking, and a relatively low fear of failure.
— “Profs blame ‘masculine’ ideals for lack of women in STEM,” Campus Reform.
● Hangover:
Where was one to start trying to educate an adult student who thought the Great Depression began in the 1960s; who was unable to distinguish between the First and Second World Wars; who thought that Moscow was the capital of Missouri… or who averred, in a paper on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that “George Orwin, arthur of The Animal Firm, was heavily into natur.” You can’t make this stuff up.
—David Solway, “The Dead Letter of Modern Education,” PJ Media.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
WAGES OF POSTMODERNISM: Michael Wolff to MSNBC anchor on his book: “If it rings true, it is true.”
“If it rings true, it is true” may be the most Orwellian defense of slovenly reporting since the immortal “fake but accurate” line from the Rathergate days. This isn’t the way journalistic ethics are supposed to work, gasps an exasperated Haley Byrd of the Weekly Standard. It is if you want to sell a million copies, I guess. In fact, “if it rings true, it is true” is about as perfect a summation as you could ask for of the concept of confirmation bias. If you already hate Trump, the mix of fact, rumor, and third-hand smear in Wolff’s book, all relentlessly damning of the White House, is a political banana split with extra hot fudge. Nothing that tastes this good could possibly be bad for you!
And as Allahpundit quips, Wolff is “the second person in a hot media spotlight in less than 24 hours to casually undermine the idea of objective truth. The other, of course, was the 46th president of the United States.”
Heh.Ben Shapiro reminds Oprah that “There is no such thing as ‘your truth.’ There is the truth and your opinion.” But then, they don’t call Oprah “the pope of American gnosticism” for nothing.
On Friday, it was announced that the first guest on David Letterman’s upcoming Netflix series will be former President Obama.
But of course – there’s no reason why America’s first postmodernist talk show host should be joined by America’s most prominent postmodern former president. (Bill Clinton was the first of course, arguing over the meaning of “is” in 1998 to save his hide during the impeachment hearings. But his equivocating over a verb didn’t directly impact millions of Americans the same way that Obama’s fables did.)
In his recent book Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, author Jason Zinoman wrote:
In May 1985, Esquire magazine published an essay by a twenty-three-year-old Yale graduate named David Leavitt, who set out to do nothing less than explain his generation. It belonged to a long, dubious journalistic tradition in which a major media outlet sums up young people for its readers, using an envoy from their tribe. These stories follow a certain script: Mix some reported anecdotes with a few references to politics and pop culture trends, add a tone of alarm, and then draw a sweeping conclusion about wildly different groups of young people. The piece’s title: “The New Lost Generation.”
Leavitt argued that those coming of age in the Reagan era saw the idealism of the 1960s vanish and substituted a cynical and steely veneer. They sighed at political activism and rolled their eyes at passion and engagement. Unlike the hopeful kids from past decades, they were not marked by a particular cause to fight for. They were more likely to find all of politics contemptuous. What united them was a jaded outlook about not just politics but even the nature of honesty itself. “We are determined to make sure everyone knows that what we say might not be what we mean,” Leavitt wrote, building to a crescendo: “The voice of my generation is the voice of David Letterman.”
* * * * * * * *
Late Night had not become as popular as The Tonight Show, an impossibility, considering their respective time slots, but its cultural impact had surpassed it. By the middle of the decade, Letterman was the rare host who stood for something bigger than a television show. He was increasingly mentioned as the talk-show avatar of postmodernism, a movement marked by self-awareness and challenges to dominant narratives that was then shifting from academia to the mainstream press. He became the host who didn’t believe in hosting, a truth-teller whose sarcasm rendered everything he said suspect, a mocking challenge to anyone who pretended to take the ridiculous world seriously. Letterman became the face of an ironic sensibility that permeated comedy, television, and popular culture.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that “politics is downstream from culture.” In the 1980s, Letterman’s postmodernism made for fascinating and often wryly amusing late night television. But as Obama, and multiple DNC-MSM outlets have proven, it’s a lousy way to run a country or “report” its news. And of course, all of its worst practitioners are still clueless as to how they got Trumped.
‘MORNING JOE’ ACTUALLY CLAIMED MEDIA COULDN’T TALK ABOUT TRUMP’S MENTAL STATE: Until, that is, Michael Wolff came out with his increasingly discounted book and claimed everybody around the chief executive thinks he’s losing/lost it between the ears. LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst points to multiple instances when Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski speculated at length on whether Trump is mentally stable. Reminds me of advice I read long, long ago at the dawn of the blog age: “Go ahead and claim it; we’ll fact-check your a–.”
NONSENSE. I’M TOLD THAT THIS ISSUE WAS SOLVED BY PRESIDENT OPRAH’S INAUGURAL SPEECH LAST NIGHT: On Eve Of Golden Globes, Hollywood Women Fear Backlash For Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault Accusers.
Three months to the day after the New York Times first published its detailed exposé alleging decades of sexual harassment and sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein, a female producer, agent, actress and a showrunner all told Deadline they fear a backlash against women who initiate allegations of sexual harassment or sexual assault against A-list men — especially at the studios, networks and uber-agencies.
Indicative of that fear and despite the rising #MeToo movement, each women in the quartet would only speak anonymously about the matter.
“Hollywood’s a boys’ town and they will do what they have to do to keep their power, even if that means paying lip service for a while to stamping out misogyny,” the award-winning showrunner tells Deadline. “There are a lot of women staying quiet, worried that the boys are keeping a list for those who go public,” she added. “It’ll happen later, under the radar, a lot of it will be unspoken even, but careers will be sidetracked, promotions blocked, I just know it. That’s always been the way this town has worked.”
Why are Democrat-dominated industries such cesspits of misogyny, abuse and predation?
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Does Oregon Have Gas Station Attendants In the First Place?
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KISSING JESSICA STEIN HARVEY WEINSTEIN: Will This Photo Sink an Oprah Winfrey 2020 Candidacy Against Donald Trump?
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THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? 2018 Golden Globes Review: Woke, Anti-Trump Lecturing.
YEAR IN REVIEW: 2017 Libertarian Films.
First and most importantly, Hollywood no longer has a lock on film content, because the film industry is rapidly being democratized by digital film production. Meanwhile theater chains no longer monopolize distribution, thanks to online streaming. Talented libertarian and conservative filmmakers — who in the past would have been sidelined by the progressive borg –now finance their own films and distribute them online or in DVD. It’s notable that a number of the 2017 libertarian films listed below were produced on shoe-string budgets and distributed mostly via Amazon streaming; these are just the kind of films that never would have seen daylight in the pre-digital world. There are hints that the new block chain technology will take this even further, and meanwhile the streaming service VidAngel, owned by libertarians, produced its first TV series.
Second, old Hollywood can no longer stake the slightest claim on moral superiority.
That’s an understatement.
WE GOT TREACHER: Is Trump Crazy, or Just a Jerk?
It can hardly be coincidence that President Trump’s election has sparked debates from certain members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) about eliminating the Goldwater Rule. The rule was the consequence of a 1964 article in Fact magazine that published the results of a survey they’d given 12,356 psychiatrists asking whether Sen. Barry Goldwater was fit to be president.
The response was modest, but telling. Of the 2,417 respondents, 1,189, or less than half (49 percent), affirmed Goldwater was indeed unfit for office. The survey was part of an exposé on the senator entitled, “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.”
Goldwater later sued the magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg for libel, and was awarded $75,000. It seems what some psychiatrists deemed a necessary call, nay, an obligation to diagnosis from afar, turned out to be libelous. In 1973 the APA remedied this embarrassing display of amateurism by adding section 7.3 to their “Principles of Medical Ethics,” now known as the Goldwater Rule.
…
A Google search (a lodestar for informational trends) lays out a timeline that shows almost to the day when substantive opposition to the rule started. A 2015 Vanity Fair article published shortly after Trump announced his candidacy showed where opponents were heading. Not unlike the Fact article a half century before, several therapists were interviewed about Trump’s mental fitness.
You’d think the psychiatric profession would be better attuned to its own self-destructive derangement syndrome, but no.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Seattle Sugar Tax Raises Soda Prices by 75 Percent.
Jon Gabriel:
Where will all the new revenue go? Seattle officials expect a $15 million boost in the first year. Since this was sold as a health initiative, $2 million of that will expand a city program that gives fruit and vegetable vouchers to low-income families. Of course, only $400,000 will go to actual vouchers; the other $1.6 million stays with the government for “administrative costs.”
Philadelphia, which enacted a similar tax last year, overestimated the expected revenue. Sales of carbonated soft drinks fell 55 percent inside the city, while sales rose 38 percent in the towns that surround it. It achieved neither the financial goals nor the health goals.
When the Seattle tax was first proposed, a “racial-equity analysis” found that diet beverages should be included since they are more popular among whites and the wealthy people. The politicians shot this down since they know which constituents donate to and vote for them.
Like most of these beverage taxes hitting blue cities, what is and is not included are counter-intuitive. All meal replacement drinks, powdered mixes, and most sugary coffee drinks — such as those found at local mega-company Starbucks — are exempt.
So, if you buy a bottled lemonade, you pay the tax. If you buy Kool-Aid and mix it with water at home, no tax. If you buy a Venti Brown Sugar Shortbread Latte at Starbucks, the tax doesn’t apply. If you get a Tall Brown Sugar Shortbread Frappuccino, which has less sugar, it does.
It’s cute that Seattle actually expects to collect all that revenue, instead of driving soda shoppers outside of city limits.
“IT DOESN’T LOOK GOOD”: Intel CEO In Jeopardy For Selling Stock After Learning Of “Staggering” Flaw.
The trade, which took place on Nov. 29, has been called “a highly unusual move” that risked attracting regulatory scrutiny, according to lawyers and analysts who spoke to the WSJ. The timing of Krzanich’s sale “is really odd,” said Dan O’Connor, a Ropes & Gray attorney specializing in securities law. “The timing, the size, the unusual nature compared to prior sales—that’s going to get this a lot of scrutiny.”
While the trade took place under an SEC rule that allows officers and directors to prearrange sales of specific numbers of shares at particular times, the experts note that the rule prohibits insiders from setting up such transactions while possessing undisclosed information that might affect the stock price.
Which is precisely what happened in this case.
For what it’s worth, a friend of mine who runs data centers for a living — and whose servers might be greatly impacted by the Intel flaw — told me yesterday he bought a few shares of rival chipmaker AMD last week.
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SOME THOUGHTS ON MY WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMN, over at Simple Justice. “Without clerkships, how would anyone prove they were pretentious enough to be lawprofs? Without clerkships, academics could end up coming from the ranks of people with actual knowledge of the law from experience. It would be a disaster.”
FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: It was very wise for the Golden Globes to hand Oprah an award last night; instead of discussing the embarrassment of the first major awards show in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Pervnado, the MSM gets to dangle the possibility of Oprah running for the presidency to coastal elite audiences exhausted from nearly two years of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not to mention, Oprah versus Trump would be ratings gold for the news media, which was in its glory making Obama happen in 2007 and 2008.
For Hollywood, it’s a chance to at least temporarily rebrand from one of its worst scandals. “Remember, they’re not making a big deal because they found out what was going on in Hollywood,” Glenn noted, “They always knew. They’re making a big deal because you found out what was going on in Hollywood.”
However, if this is indeed the high visibility launching point for Oprah 2020; associating herself with the aftermath of Pervnado seems like very poor personal branding: “Actress: Weinstein used Oprah and Naomi[Campbell] to seduce me,” the New York Post reported in late November 28, 2017. And Weinstein and Oprah were quite chummy, as this photo of the two attending the 19th Annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards back in January 16 of 2014 attests. It quickly made the rounds on Twitter last night. Oprah co-starred in the 2013 film The Butler, produced by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whose company distributed the movie.
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon writes in his recap of last night, “Oprah kicked off her presidential campaign last night, apparently, so 2020 should be fun. Or horribly depressing. As much as she might want to be president, I can’t imagine Oprah has any interest in campaigning for president—it’s such a slog and the Democratic primary will be a cluttered knife fight and I shudder to think at the nicknames Trump would hurl at her. But I digress. (Important side note: no one who voted for Trump gets to complain about “celebrity candidates” ever again.)”
Director Lee Daniels, Oprah Winfrey and Harvey Weinstein at The Los Angeles Premiere of ‘The Butler’ after party, on Monday, August 12, 2013 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Alexandra Wyman/Invision/AP Images.)
RETAIL BLUES: JCPenney is going straight for the jugular of its embattled rival.
“We’re going after Sears and we’re going after market share that we think is going to be available not only now but as they continue to contract,” JCPenney CEO Marvin Ellison told Fortune’s Phil Wahba.
Sears has been closing hundreds of stores amid a years-long sales decline. The company said this week it was planning to close 103 Sears and Kmart stores by April, on top of the 63 store closures scheduled at the end of this month. Last year, the company closed nearly 400 stores.
Ellison said JCPenney is gearing up to swallow what remains of Sears’ business, and he suggested that Sears may eventually close all of its brick-and-mortar locations.
“When and if they decide to get out of the brick-and-mortar business we have a very clear understanding of where those locations are,” Ellison told Fortune. “We’re not going to be caught off guard.”
Sears did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
What’s left to say?
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SARAH HOYT ON TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES:
If you never had to second guess yourself in a professional situation before you refer to current events, for fear you give away your political affiliation, you must be suffering from liberal privilege.
Read the whole thing.
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REMINDER: China Hasn’t Won the Pacific (Unless You Think It Has).
In Australia, for instance, White is hardly alone in publicly questioning his nation’s continuing reliance on the U.S. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has voiced similar ideas. And in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has ostentatiously repositioned his country between Beijing and Washington on the thesis — exaggerated, no doubt, but nonetheless telling — that “America has lost” its strategic duel with China.
It would be foolish, then, for U.S. policymakers to simply dismiss the concerns that are emanating from Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries. But it would also be dangerous for U.S. and allied leaders to accept the thesis that China is destined to dominate the region and simply give up on countering Beijing’s ambitions.
China appears imposing today, but it is hardly 10 feet tall. As I discuss in my new book, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump,” Beijing is still no match for the U.S. in aggregate national power: Its military budget is still less than half that of the Pentagon’s, and its per capita gross domestic product remains roughly a quarter of America’s, even as its overall GDP approaches parity.
Moreover, China is almost certain to encounter serious economic and political difficulties in the coming years because of the rapidly approaching limits of its existing growth model and the inherent instability of authoritarian rule. It is a fantasy to believe, as U.S. observers sometimes have, that China will collapse or democratize before it is able to make a serious bid for geopolitical supremacy in the Asia-Pacific. But it is hardly preordained that China will be able to maintain, over a period of decades, the impressive trajectory needed to decisively overtake America as the region’s leading power.
In fact, the U.S. and its allies can make it enormously difficult for China to accomplish that objective.
Read the whole thing.
China’s rise, as a local power with territorial ambitions, should practically require its neighbors to gravitate towards the US, which is a far-off power with no territorial ambitions.
It would take a genuine and sustained effort to screw that up, but we did have eight years of Obama.
THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE: Psychologist: Having best friends should be banned because it’s ‘exclusionary.’
HMM: Mexico’s Trumpian populist could mean trouble for Donald Trump. “If the left-leaning nationalist wins Mexico’s presidency, it could boost tensions over immigration, trade and border security.”
I hate to have to break this to Politico, but I’m pretty sure those are all already longstanding tensions.
IF YOU CAN’T READ THIS, BLAME A TEACHERS’ UNION: A couple of years ago, my organization published a series of studies that showed that strong union laws depressed states’ economic outcomes. Now, researchers from Cornell have looked at the effect of collective bargaining by teachers’ unions on educational outcomes. The results?
We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: living in a state that has a duty-to-bargain law for all 12 grade-school years reduces male earnings by $1,493 (or 2.75%) per year and decreases hours worked by 0.52 hours per week. Estimates for women do not show consistent evidence of negative effects on these outcomes. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $149.6 billion in the US annually. Among men, we also find evidence of lower employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men, although white and Asian men also experience sizable negative impacts of collective bargaining exposure. Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we demonstrate that collective bargaining law exposure leads to reductions in measured cognitive and non-cognitive skills among young adults, and these effects are larger for men.
My children’s old middle school principal (a real innovator) used to say that he loved teachers’ union states – because he could visit them and recruit good, hungry young teachers whose careers were stymied by union rules.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: THE BOOK, Hollywood Hypocrites, Miller v. Tapper and Much, Much More.
“THE BOOK” is the new “RUSSIA” and it seems both are a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
ALLIES ONCE MORE: Israeli PM backs Trump critique of Palestinian UN aid agency.
Netanyahu suggested UNRWA’s budget should be transferred to the more far-reaching United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where it would be allocated to those truly in need.
“UNRWA is an organization that perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem. It also perpetuates the right of return narrative in order to eliminate the state of Israel. Therefore UNRWA must become a thing of the past,” he said.
Netanyahu voiced a common Israeli criticism that UNRWA was created specifically for the Palestinians, while the UNHCR deals with the rest of the world’s refugees.
“This of course creates a situation where great-grandchildren of refugees who are not refugees are treated as such by UNRWA. And 70 more years will pass and they will have great-grandchildren, so this absurdity must be stopped,” he said.
Maybe something can change, now that the Sunni Arab states need Israeli cooperation against regional threats more than they need the Palestinian thorn in Israel’s side.
IT’S WEIRD HOW TRUMP’S CRITICS KEEP POINTING AT STUFF HE SAYS, WHILE THE STUFF HE DOES SEEMS FINE: Mike Pompeo: North Koreans ‘trying to come up for air’ as they’re being ‘strangled’ by Trump.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo says the North Koreans have reached out to South Korea to begin talks because they’re being “strangled” by President Trump who has made clear their behavior is “unacceptable.”
“The North Koreans are in a tough spot,” Pompeo told “Fox News Sunday.” “President Trump has made very clear that the U.S. policy is denuclearization of the peninsula and that we are going to achieve that. You see the North Koreans doing what they have historically done, reaching out, trying to find space, trying to come up for air when they are being strangled by a president who’s made very clear that their behavior is unacceptable.”
You know?
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? Good Fight to Explore Impeachment of President Trump by ‘Shameless’ Means.
CBS All Access’ The Good Fight will explore the process in which Democrats — smelling blood in the water after the midterm elections — might seek to impeach President Trump, and the firm of Reddick, Boseman & Kolstad is solicited to help in that endeavor.
Previewing the seventh episode of Season 2, which is tentatively titled “Shameless,” series co-creator Robert King said at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Saturday, “We’re satirizing the Democratic [party] licking their chops at the possibility of turning the House over, and impeachment. They want to have their ducks in a row when they [potentially regain a majority] in November, so they’re auditioning a lot of law firms to see who would be best to prosecute in an impeachment.”
Enter Reddick, Boseman & Kolstad, which as an African-American firm offers the Democrats an interesting option. “It’s really a satire of Democrats wanting to impeach a sitting president in a way that would make them angry if it were Republicans going after Obama. A lot of it is, ‘If you wanted to execute the 25h Amendment, how would you do it?’”
If The West Wing’s President Bartlett was Hollywood’s fantasy version of President Clinton, then this is Hollywood’s fantasy version of President Trump.
But I wonder who will explain to the producers that invoking the 25th Amendment is not impeachment, nor does it require a Democratic majority in the House.
What a mess.
“MISSPEAKS:” Roll Call: Democratic Candidate Misspeaks When Asked About Potential Influence.
The prominent cancer researcher and political newcomer said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, a top member of leadership, told him he would like to give Keirstead an “early appointment” on the influential Appropriations Committee, and that leaders wanted to make him chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee.
It turns out that wasn’t the case.
Hoyer’s office denied that the whip made such assertions.
“No, neither of those statements is remotely true,” the Maryland Democrat’s spokeswoman Katie Grant said in a statement.“The idea that Mr. Hoyer would promise a candidate either a chairmanship or a seat on Appropriations is preposterous.”
Weird that he misspoke then.
MICHAEL WALSH: Dear Al Franken: About that Forced Resignation…
APPLE IN THE ERA OF TIM COOK: Tim Cook Stumbles at His Specialty, Shipping Apple Products on Time.
As Apple Inc.’s longtime chief operating officer, Tim Cook was known for ensuring that new products hit the market on schedule.
With Mr. Cook as CEO, though, Apple’s new gadgets are consistently late, prompting questions among analysts and other close observers about whether the technology giant is losing some of its competitive edge.
Of the three major new products since Mr. Cook became chief executive in 2011, both AirPods earbuds in 2016 and last year’s HomePod speaker missed Apple’s publicly projected shipping dates. The Apple Watch, promised for early 2015, arrived late that April with lengthy wait times for delivery. Apple also was delayed in supplying the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, two critical accessories for its iPad Pro.
The delays have contributed to much longer waits between Apple announcing a product and shipping it: an average of 23 days for new and updated products over the past six years, compared with the 11-day average over the six years prior, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Apple public statements.
Longer lead times between announcement and product release have the potential to hurt Apple on multiple fronts. Delays give rivals time to react, something the company tried to prevent in the past by keeping lead times short, analysts and former Apple employees said. They can stoke customer disappointment and have cost Apple sales.
I’ve found the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Apple to be comically ignorant of how the company operates, but this story is a valid critique.
ME IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL: Why Do Federal Judges Need Clerks Anyway?
Getting rid of law clerks would eliminate the harassment problem and get judges doing their own work. Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916-39, is said to have observed that the high court’s members “are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”
That’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court decided 160 cases in 1945, when each justice had a single clerk. Nowadays it decides about half as many cases with four clerks per justice. Law clerks were unknown for roughly the first century of the American judiciary, and the courts seemed to do fine. As my law students often comment, the older opinions are shorter and more intelligible than the newer ones.
So I propose eliminating law clerks for the lower federal courts. If the workload is too burdensome, we can always add more federal judges, as some are already suggesting. The federal courts already have excellent librarians to help with research, and staff attorneys to deal with frivolous petitions.
The Supreme Court has the additional burden of wading through thousands of certiorari petitions and deciding which cases to hear. That’s probably too much for justices to do on their own, but I’d limit the justices to one clerk each, as in 1945. That would ensure that justices do their own work again—and encourage those who aren’t up to the task to take retirement instead of grimly hanging on while their clerks do all the writing.
As an added advantage, for those concerned with inequality in America, this would break up a chummy system in which elites in academia trade favors with elites in the judiciary for the benefit of select elite graduates.
I hope Congress will pay attention.
RAND PAUL: Recovery after attack ‘was a living hell.’
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) discussed his recovery after he was attacked by his neighbor outside of his Kentucky home in November, calling the process “a living hell.”
“It was sort of a living hell for the first four or five weeks,” Paul told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“Couldn’t get out of bed without assistance. Six broken ribs, damage to my lungs two bouts of pneumonia,” he continued. . . .
The incident marked the second time Paul had been attacked last year after he and other members of the GOP congressional baseball team were shot at during practice in June.
The senator was not shot in the attack.
Paul went on to discuss the safety of elected officials while not in the capitol.
“I was also at the baseball field when we were shot at with semiautomatic fire,” he said.
“People don’t want to think it is open season on our elected officials.”
Well, only the Republican ones. Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
And not just the elected Republicans: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai canceled his appearance at CES because of death threats.
BUT THE NARRATIVE! Federal Investigators Couldn’t Illegally Buy Guns Through Legitimate Websites Despite 72 Attempts.
Between July 2015 and November 2017 investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), following up on a congressional request, tried to make the illegal private gun purchases through a number of online forums and market places. They made 72 attempts over that time but couldn’t complete a single sale using legitimate sites.
In 29 attempts the gun sellers refused the sale after being asked to illegally ship the gun to the buyer. Twenty-seven sellers refused after being told the potential buyer was a felon, domestic abuser, or otherwise prohibited from buying a firearm. Eleven sellers attempted to scam the investigators after finding out they were prohibited from buying firearms with two successfully obtaining money from investigators but never sending the promised firearm. Another five attempts to illegally purchase firearms were ended when the investigators’ accounts were shut down due to suspicious activity.
“Tests performed on the Surface Web demonstrated that private sellers GAO contacted on gun forums and other classified ads were unwilling to sell a firearm to an individual who appeared to be prohibited from possessing a firearm,” Seto J. Bagdoyan and Wayne McElrath of the GAO’s Forensic Audits and Investigative Service section said in a report on the investigation released in November.
I’ve never met a firearms dealer who didn’t take his trade with deadly seriousness.
ABC PANEL LAUDS WOLFF’S GOSSIP DESPITE AGREEING ONLY ’50 PERCENT’ TRUE.
As David Harsanyi writes at the Federalist, Don’t Let Wolff’s ‘Fire And Fury’ Normalize ‘Fake But Accurate.’
EVERGREEN HEADLINES: We’re still better off with Trump than Clinton.
Michael Goodwin:
One result is that reports of his imminent demise have been near-constant ever since he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015. Those predictions have been nonstop — and always wrong.
Of course, this time could be different. Or maybe the next time will. Or maybe not.
Meanwhile, his is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency.
So much so that, despite my own frustration over his missteps, there has never been a day when I wished Hillary Clinton were president. Not one.
Indeed, as Trump’s accomplishments accumulate, the mere thought of Clinton in the White House, doubling down on Barack Obama’s failed policies, washes away any doubts that America made the right choice.
Left unsaid? Whatever Trump’s flaws, Clinton would have robbed the country blind.
JAMES TARANTO INTERVIEWS MORRIS FIORINA: Moderate Voters, Polarized Parties.
Most observers of American politics predict 2018 will favor the Democrats. The party has a good chance of taking control of the House in November, and even a Senate majority is within reach, although Democrats are defending three times as many seats in the upper chamber as Republicans are.
Here’s a safer prediction: If the Democrats do triumph on Nov. 6, they and their supporters will emerge triumphalist, proclaiming their majority permanent and President Trump a lame duck. Ten months in advance, Morris P. “Mo” Fiorina has a bucket of cold water to throw on such claims.
Mr. Fiorina—no relation to 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina or her husband—is a 71-year-old Stanford political scientist and author of a new book, “Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting and Political Stalemate.” As the title suggests, he believes the U.S. has entered an era in which no party can hold a majority for very long. “We can change our pattern of government every two years,” he tells me on a recent visit to the Journal’s offices, “and we started doing that.”
Did we ever. The party controlling the House, Senate or White House changed in seven of the nine elections between 2000 and 2016—the only exceptions being the presidential re-election years, 2004 and 2012. “I sort of trace it back to ’92, the end of the Republican presidential era, and then ’94 is the end of the Democratic congressional era,” Mr. Fiorina says.
Hmm.
WELL, IF A PLOT LINE FROM JOHN RINGO IS GOING TO BECOME REAL, I’M GLAD IT’S THIS ONE: Haint Blue Launches Beer that ‘Fights Terrorism.’
VARIOUS AUTHORITIES HAVE LET HER GET AWAY WITH AN AWFUL LOT: Ex-Professor Deborah Frisch Jailed Again.
When last we reported on notorious cyberstalker Deborah Frisch, the deranged former psychology professor had been arrested in Bend, Oregon, on fugitive warrants from Colorado. Frisch had failed to appear at a November court hearing on two felony charges related to her continued harassment of Jeff Goldstein. In 2006, Frisch made national headlines when she resigned from her position at the University of Arizona after using her school computer to post obscene threats to Goldstein and his family. Since then, she “has accumulated a fantastic record of legal troubles” including stalking charges in Oregon. . . .
More than a year later, it seems, Frisch’s modus operandi is unchanged, but some people still haven’t figured this out. On Dec. 29, a judge in Deschutes County, Oregon, signed Frisch’s release from jail, despite the fact that Frisch was a fugitive being held on a no-bond warrant pending extradition to Colorado. Almost immediately, Frisch was back on Twitter, posting messages that Goldstein considered threatening to himself and his family. She posted messages aimed at Goldstein, his wife and the school their children attend. Goldstein was understandably shocked by the Oregon judge’s decision to release Frisch. . . .
Finally, however, it seems Colorado officials convinced authorities in Oregon that they had been wrong to release Frisch, but when police showed up to arrest her Friday, she evidently caused such a scene that she was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She will reportedly be arraigned at a court hearing Monday.
The question is, what can be done with Frisch, who clearly has a psychotic fixation on Goldstein and has been harassing him for 12 years? Frisch seems unable to restrain herself from this type of behavior.
What, indeed? As a middle-aged woman with an academic background, I think she’s been treated more kindly by the legal system than others with similar records might be.
ENJOIN THIS! According to the New York Daily News, WikiLeaks shared the complete text of a new book containing explosive allegations about President Trump before deleting its post on Twitter. But the publisher will find out that suppressing publication is — surprise! — like playing “whack-a-mole”, and links to the book (oddly, without page numbers, suggesting these are page proofs) are popping up everywhere.
Will Wolff’s publishers start filing suit and serving subpoenas to unmask the infringing uploaders? Or will they just send DMCA “take down” notices to the ISP’s? Stay tuned.
THINK OF THE PRESS AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: The Sudden Hazing of Lindsey Graham: The media loved him when he rebuked Trump. Not so much now, when he questions the DOJ’s and FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation.
NBC: Oprah is OUR future President.
It’s not playing well everywhere: “So remind me: which network killed Ronan Farrow’s report on Harvey Weinstein?”.
Meh, they’re already walking that back and starting to rehabilitate him.
Remember, they don’t have standards, beyond “whatever gets us power.”
WHAT IS IT ABOUT DEMOCRATS AND INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE? Senate candidate from Texas wants to make year of ‘service to country’ mandatory.
UPENDING LONG KNOWN “FACTS”: Parrots and Falcons — Long-lost Cousins.
THREE YEARS? GIVE ME THIRTY: You can look three years younger by doing ‘face yoga’.
SO IXNAY ON THE AXSPRAY: It turns out that smell is the way to a woman’s heart.
SAME AS THE LEFT ALWAYS DOES: Lying For Money and Power.
QUICK! LIGHT THE VIRTUE SIGNAL: #GoldenGlobes: Seth Meyers’ Monologue Is Hot Mess Of Political Virtue Signaling.
IT’S NOT TROUBLING. IT’S SOCIALIST. IT’S BEEN TRIED MANY TIMES BEFORE. ITS NEVER WORKED: Iceland’s troubling Equal Pay Standard.
THE MEDIA CONTINUES TO IMITATE THE DOGS WHO BARK AS THE CARAVAN PASSES. SCOTT ADAMS SERVES UP HUSH PUPPIES: Scott Adams Says Trump Isn’t Crazy, He IS a Genius. Here’s Why.
IF THEY KICKED OUT EVERY CREEP AND PERV THERE WOULDN’T BE ENOUGH REMAINING TO VOTE THE AWARDS: Academy members now regret banning Weinstein so hastily.
IT’S A ONE-STOP INSECURITIES SHOP: Of course ‘Goop for Men’ sells erectile dysfunction pills.
HELLOOOOOOO 21ST CENTURY! Woman receives bionic hand with sense of touch.
January 7, 2018
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Missouri adopts performance-based funding for higher education.
This performance-based portion of the funding will be determined by metrics such as degree completion, budget practices, and job-placement rates.
Missouri joins a growing list of states that are either developing or using formulas that tie their support to these key performance indicators. Thirty-five states have attempted performance-based funding. Missouri’s higher education board believes that the formula would help schools demonstrate their stewardship of state funds at a time when public trust in higher education is quickly diminishing.
Academic skepticism has been such a pain point for colleges and universities that it emerged as a dominant theme at the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ annual meeting. Lynn Pasquerella, president of the AAC&U, tried to blame the trend on “political jockeying” and a lack of “rational inquiry” on the matter. However, she also admitted that academia needs to demonstrate how it is “teaching students 21st-century skills … within the context of the workforce, not apart from it.”
They have their work cut out for them.
Indeed they do.
JULIETTE OCHIENG: Libyan Slave Markets And Jumping Into The Fire.
SABO STRIKES AGAIN: ‘We All Knew’ street art welcomes Hollywood elites to Golden Globes.
Remember, they’re not making a big deal about sexual assault in Hollywood because they found out about it. They’re making a big deal because you found out about it.
I MENTIONED THIS A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, but it’s worth pointing out again that the Neck Gaiter is the single most underrated piece of cold-weather gear. Much better than a scarf.
TINNITUS NEWS: Science has a solution for that constant ringing in your ear. “The condition doesn’t have a cure yet, but those suffering from it might not have to endure all the phantom ringing, clicking and hissing for life, thanks to a device developed by researchers from the University of Michigan. Their creation treats tinnitus by using precisely timed sounds and weak electrical pulses designed to persuade damaged nerves in the region of the brainstem called dorsal cochlear nucleus into working correctly again.”
ME IN TOMORROW’S WALL STREET JOURNAL: Why Do Federal Judges Need Clerks Anyway?
Getting rid of law clerks would eliminate the harassment problem and get judges doing their own work. Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916-39, is said to have observed that the high court’s members “are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”
That’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court decided 160 cases in 1945, when each justice had a single clerk. Nowadays it decides about half as many cases with four clerks per justice. Law clerks were unknown for roughly the first century of the American judiciary, and the courts seemed to do fine. As my law students often comment, the older opinions are shorter and more intelligible than the newer ones.
So I propose eliminating law clerks for the lower federal courts. If the workload is too burdensome, we can always add more federal judges, as some are already suggesting. The federal courts already have excellent librarians to help with research, and staff attorneys to deal with frivolous petitions.
The Supreme Court has the additional burden of wading through thousands of certiorari petitions and deciding which cases to hear. That’s probably too much for justices to do on their own, but I’d limit the justices to one clerk each, as in 1945. That would ensure that justices do their own work again—and encourage those who aren’t up to the task to take retirement instead of grimly hanging on while their clerks do all the writing.
As an added advantage, for those concerned with inequality in America, this would break up a chummy system in which elites in academia trade favors with elites in the judiciary for the benefit of select elite graduates.
I hope Congress will pay attention.
KANGAROO COURTS GONNA KANGAROO: Oberlin College’s 100% sexual assault conviction rate prompts lawsuit, due process concerns.
Weird how Oberlin’s enrollment is declining.
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KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The Democrats’ ‘Russian Descent:’ Tactics in the Trump probe are starting to look a lot like McCarthyism.
Democrats have spent weeks making the case that the Russia-Trump probes need to continue, piling on demands for more witnesses and documents. So desperate is the left to keep this Trump cudgel to hand that Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats have moved toward neo- McCarthyism.
If that sounds hyperbolic, consider an email recently disclosed by the Young Turks Network, a progressive YouTube news channel. It’s dated Dec. 19, 2017, and its author is April Doss, senior counsel for the committee’s Democrats, including Vice Chairman Mark Warner.
Ms. Doss was writing to Robert Barnes, an attorney for Charles C. Johnson, the controversial and unpleasant alt-right blogger. Mr. Johnson’s interactions with Julian Assange inspired some in the media to speculate last year that Mr. Johnson had served as a back channel between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. There’s still no proof, but in July the Intelligence Committee sent a letter requesting Mr. Johnson submit to them any documents, emails, texts or the like related to “any communications with Russian persons” in a variety of 2016 circumstances, including those related to “the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.”
Mr. Barnes seems to have wanted clarification from Ms. Doss about the definition of “Russian persons.” And this would make sense, since it’s a loose term. Russians in Russia? Russians in America? Russians with business in the country? Russians who lobby the U.S. and might be affected by the election—though not in contact with campaigns?
Ms. Doss’s response was more sweeping than any of these: “The provision we discussed narrowing was clarifying that the phrase ‘Russian persons’ in [the committee letter] may be read to refer to persons that Mr. Johnson knows or has reason to believe are of Russian nationality or descent” (emphasis added).
Well, to be fair, it was the Democrats who imprisoned people in concentration camps simply for being of Japanese descent, so at least they’re consistent.
WORKING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: Regime-friendly NY Times makes big money selling Iran tours.
THIS WILL END WELL: New ‘Feminist Business School’ to Fight ‘Masculine’ Capitalism.. “Understanding feminist theory before starting a business is crucial, since it will give you a ‘huge leg-up on established entrepreneurs’ and help you ‘avoid the frustrations and pitfalls of outdated masculine business models,’ according to the program’s website.”
BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SPELL ‘THE BUTTERFIELD EFFECT’ WITHOUT ‘BUT:’ “Marin County has long resisted growth in the name of environmentalism. But high housing costs and segregation persist,” notes an L.A. Times headline, blissfully unaware of the irony.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHY IS OBESITY GETTING WORSE? “It’s so serious now that close to 40 percent of Americans are obese. The average woman in the United States today weighs about 168 pounds, or roughly the same as an average man in 1960.”
This stupid article, however, jumps directly from telling us that obesity is a worldwide problem, to telling us that it’s directly related to a unique “sickness in American society.” And yet it’s written by a professor of endocrinology, who presumably is supposed to be able to think logically.
THEIR BUDGETS ARE HUGE, THEIR TRACK RECORD DREADFUL: Another ‘Oops’ from the Intelligence Community.
MEA CULPAS ARE A BITCH, JUST ASK STEPHEN K. BANNON: When President Donald Trump said of his former White House strategist that he “lost his mind” when he lost his job at the Chief Executive’s right side, it marked one of the most definitive such repudiations in American political history. Today Bannon seeks a way back into Trump’s good graces with multiple apologies. Curious that he gave his statement exclusively to, of all publications, Axios.
WHICH IS A REASON TO AVOID THEM IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FLU: Emergency rooms overcrowded with flu patients.
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ELITES CAN’T BELIEVE TRUMP ACTUALLY WILL DEFEND AMERICA: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is amused by the reactions up and down the Northeast Corridor to President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate U.S. aid to Pakistan.
“It has so thoroughly shocked the elites that we actually are going to protect America, and defend America, and that we’re actually going to render judgment,” Gingrich told radio host John Catsimatidis in an interviewed aired on 970 AM. “That is such a shocking moment for a lot of our elites that they don’t know how to deal with it.” LifeZette political reporter Kathryn Blackhurst pulls together multiple comments on the same theme by Gingrich, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and British Prime Minister Teresa May.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: As Flow Of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel The Sting. “The shift comes just as some states also are experiencing a drop in domestic students, partly the result of a decline in birthrates two decades ago. This year, the number of domestic undergraduate students dropped 224,000, or 1 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.”