I WROTE ABOUT THIS PHENOMENON IN ARMY OF DAVIDS: Meet The Teen Who Pays For College With A Jewelry Business. “LeiLei Secor, a rising sophomore at the University of Virginia, is her own boss at her Etsy and online shop, Designed by Lei. Secor doesn’t simply sell the jewelry, she makes it herself with tools and supplies that are stashed under her dorm room bed and desk. Oh, and to top that off, she was the winner of the 2013 National Federation of Independent Business Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Now that’s what we call an extracurricular.”
What if fear is the origin of all the anger that voters feel toward Washington? Not just fear over economic stability in our homes and communities, but fear for our personal safety, our nation’s security? When was the last time that felt stable?
Numerous terror attacks have occurred in Main Street America since 2009. In June of that year, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot at a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting office, killing one soldier and wounding another.
Five months later, Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allahu-akbar!” (“God is great!”) as he opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30.
The Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, carried out by brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, took four lives.
In 2014, an aspiring jihadist beheaded an Oklahoma woman, and Ali Muhammad Brown went on a killing spree in two states in the name of his faith.
As each awful event occurred, the Obama administration refused to state the obvious — that each was an act of terrorism based on a fundamentalist version of Islam; it even insisted that the Fort Hood massacre was “workplace violence.”
In January of this year, during his State of the Union address, President Obama declared that the greatest threat to America’s future was neither terrorism nor nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran. “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” he said.
Just once, we’d love a little honesty and a lot less political division from the White House, so that guys like Larry Fitzpatrick know that Obama has the backs of our military — and so they don’t feel compelled to arm themselves and protect a military recruitment center.
Well, the security situation — like the economic situation — is a constant reminder to ordinary Americans that the folks in charge don’t really care what happens to them. And yeah, that makes people upset.
In rural, small-town Iowa, a group of parents and community leaders is seeking to prevent students from the local taxpayer-funded middle school and high school from attending future versions of an anti–bullying conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens.
Iowa Safe Schools, an activist group out of Des Moines, hosted the conference.
It was quite something.
Among the nearly two dozen speakers, “only two” addressed bullying, one attendee estimated, according to EAGnews.org.
The rest of the sessions involved issues such as “how to pleasure their gay partners.”
Middle school girls from Humboldt (pop.: 4,690) had the opportunity to learn “how to sew fake testicles into their underwear in order to pass themselves off as boys.”
One speaker wore a dress made out of condoms to which could be “used as needed.” . . .
The mission of Iowa Safe Schools is to: a) improve school climate in order to increase the personal safety, mental health, and student learning of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied (LGBTA) and all other students; b) increase awareness and understanding among current and future educators, school administrators, and key community agents of inequities regarding the safety of LGBTA students and their family member(s) in schools and communities throughout Iowa. Iowa Safe Schools also seeks to empower these key actors with effective, research-based tools and strategies to combat intolerance and safety inequities.
What one student thought was going to be a day to support anti-bullying at the Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth, turned out to be much more graphic.
A metro high school student who attended the conference says she was overwhelmed by a sexually explicit question and answer forum at one of the workshops. She was so shocked that she recorded a portion of the Q&A, where someone anonymously asked if anal sex was painful.
The conference hosted by Iowa Safe Schools. Executive Director Nate Monson defends the open forum and says it’s the only chance many LGBTQ teens have to get answers.
Since when does a teen’s desire to “get answers” mean that all fellow students must hear a graphic answer, down to specifics about sexual toys and positions? When did sexual education turn into sexual proselytizing?
Iowa Safe Schools and other similar LGBT “safe schools” efforts aren’t about preventing bullying or even sexual education, but about promotion of LGBT sex. Yes, students need to learn the specifics about body parts, how they work, and how babies are made. Such education became integral, after all, to help prevent unwanted pregnancies. But unwanted pregnancy is not possible with LGBT sex. So teaching about specific LGBT sexual techniques and practices isn’t sexual education, it’s sexual promotion. And many parents are, understandably, not comfortable with the public school system being used for such promotion. Those parents who are comfortable with teaching sexual promotion–learning the means of sexual pleasure–are of course free to discuss these matters with their children.
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (a Republican) and the Iowa legislature should immediately ban all “safe school” efforts sponsored by Iowa Safe Schools.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 5:12 pm
Link
Blue collar white voters believe the Republican Party is better equipped to make the economic system more fair by an overwhelming margin, according to a new Washington Post poll.
In the survey of non-college educated whites, 50 percent had more faith in GOP policies, while 29 percent favored the Democratic strategy.
These are among the workers hit hardest by the economic shifts of the past quarter century, and in particular by the failed polices of the Obama administration.
They’ve seen good paying jobs in Appalachian coal mines become casualties of the president’s war on coal. They’ve lost solid, middle class work on the oil rigs of the Gulf to a president more obsessed with tomorrow’s temperatures than today’s families. And they’ve bid goodbye to Midwestern factory jobs while the president saddles employers with oppressive taxes and regulations. . . .
Mitt Romney, the failed GOP standard bearer in 2012, bemoaned the prospects for selling a message of smaller government when 47 percent of the population is receiving some form of government assistance.
But many of these blue collar whites are among the 47 percenters. They may be getting Obamacare subsidies, or unemployment benefits, or even food stamps.
And that’s not what they want. They’re looking for the opportunity to take care of themselves and their families. They want jobs, not another Big Government giveaway designed to replace the paychecks Democratic policies have killed.
They’ve lost faith — if they ever had any — in the government’s ability to solve their problems. And who can blame them?
I would also add that Democrats’ incessant demeaning of blue collar workers because of their race (predominantly white), religion, gender (predominantly male), or values isn’t helping a whole lot, either. If you keep suggesting that white, male, Christians who believe in earning a dollar are racist, ignorant, xenophobic, homophobic or otherwise evil, they probably won’t vote for you.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 2:28 pm
Link
MORE LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Stretchable Conducting Fiber Provides Super Hero Capabilities. “The list of potential applications for a new electrically conducting fiber—artificial muscles, exoskeletons and morphing aircraft—sounds like something out of science fiction or a comic book. With a list like that, it’s got to be a pretty special fiber… and it is. The fiber, made from sheets of carbon nanotubes wrapped around a rubber core, can be stretched to 14 times its original length and actually increase its electrical conductivity while being stretched, without losing any of its resistance. An international research team based at the University of Texas at Dallas initially targeted the new super fiber for artificial muscles and for capacitors whose storage capacity increases tenfold when the fiber is stretched. However, the researchers believe that the material could be used as interconnects in flexible electronics and a host of other related applications.”
And perhaps it’s my liberal heart speaking, the fact that I grew up in a liberal town, learned US history from a capital-S Socialist, and/or went to one of the most liberal universities in the country, but I view this is a good thing. The idea that societal ills should be remedied such that one group is not given an unfair advantage over another is not, to me, a radical idea.
But millennials are grown up now — and they’re angry. As children, they were told that they could be anything, do anything, and that they were special. As adults, they have formed a unique brand of Identity Politics wherein the groups with which one identifies is paramount. With such a strong narrative that focuses on which group one belongs to, there has been an increasing balkanization of identities. In an attempt to be open-minded toward other groups and to address social justice issues through a lens of intersectionality, clear and distinct lines have been drawn between people. One’s words and actions are inextricable from one’s identities. For example: this is not an article, but an article written by a straight, white, middle-class (etc.) male (and for this reason will be discounted by many on account of how my privilege blinds me — more on this later).
And while that’s well and good (that is — pride in oneself and in one’s identity), the resulting sociopolitical culture among millennials and their slightly older political forerunners is corrosive and destructive to progress in social justice. And herein lies the problem — in attempting to solve pressing and important social issues, millennial social justice advocates are violently sabotaging genuine opportunities for progress by infecting a liberal political narrative with, ironically, hate. . . .
This particular brand of social justice advocacy assaults reason in a particularly frightening way — by outright denying it and utilizing fear-mongering to discourage dissent. There is no gray: only black and white. One must mimic the orthodoxy or be barred forcibly from the chapel and jeered at by the townspeople. To disagree with the millennial social justice orthodoxy is to make a pariah of oneself willingly. Adherence to the narrative is the single litmus test for collegiate (and beyond) social acceptance these days. . . .
To the social justice advocate of our time, conclusions are not contingent on facts; rather, facts are contingent on conclusions. In a global example of confirmation bias, the truth is malleable. The malleable truth is molded around the theoretical viewpoints of social justice. In order to uphold the sanctity of this viewpoint, adherents ostracize dissension. It’s nothing new — it’s a tactic as old as religion itself. Instead of holy texts, though, the millennial social justice advocate bows at the altar of the currently-in-vogue ideological Trinity: Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism.
Yep. It’s the new religion of the political left, and it insists on rigid orthodoxy. How ironic that a group of post-modern atheists whose entire identity is wrapped around a notion of “social justice” have become the most fervent religious zealots whose primary tactic is bullying and intimidation? There are odd parallels between this western social justice movement and radical jihad of Islam. Is it just something in the water (or the parenting) that is causing the millennial generation to be angry, convinced they are right, and willing to use whatever means necessary to prove it?
And I wonder if we can count on Michelle Obama to help us stop the bullying by these social justice warriors? According to the government’s new website, StopBullying.gov, bullying “includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.” So basically this would include virtually everything SJWs do, plus much of the mainstream media. But it would be interesting for our young people, particularly those in high school and college, to start pushing back against social justice tactics by reframing their behavior as bullying (which it undoubtedly is).
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 12:42 pm
Link
A quick recap: Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, violated guidelines from the National Archives and her own State Department by using her own private email server for professional correspondence, and then destroying whatever messages she deemed destructible.
At first Clinton claimed that she needed a single non-governmental email account for “convenience,” because she only had one phone. That claim turned out to be provably false. Next, she claimed that it didn’t matter much, because “The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.” The latter half of that claim turned out to be provably false, too. She further insisted that none of the emails contained classified information, a claim that many people with intimate knowledge of such things—such as a former senior State Department official—described with phrases like “hard to imagine.” And her assertion in a CNN interview this month that she went “above and beyond” the email disclosure requirements was—wait for it—false.
In sum, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton’s repeated claims, contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”*
So how much do Democrats value basic transparency, accountability, and honesty in their presidential candidates? Not bloody much, if you go by the handy polls over at RealClearPolitics.
Former Columbia University student Paul Nungesser, who was accused of being a “serial rapist” by mattress-toter Emma Sulkowicz, has amended his lawsuit to include his graduation ceremony, where Sulkowicz carried her mattress across the stage.
The amended complaint, filed on Tuesday, includes a section titled “The mattress attends graduation,” and describes how Columbia allowed Sulkowicz to continue her harassment campaign against him through graduation, where she carried her art project, a mattress, across the stage.
“In the weeks and months before graduation, Paul reached out repeatedly to Columbia administrators, requesting detailed information regarding whether Defendant Columbia would allow Emma to carry the mattress at the graduation ceremony,” the lawsuit says. “Despite repeated requests, Defendant Columbia refused to provide him with any information.”
The night before graduation, university administrators sent an email informing students they could not bring “large objects which could interfere with the proceedings or create discomfort to others in close, crowded spaces shared by thousands of people.” Despite Sulkowicz’s mattress clearly falling into that category, she did in fact carry her mattress during the ceremony.
It’s a hostile environment for male students. And it was intended to be so.
“Wisconsin is in turmoil,” Trump told a boisterous crowd at a rally in Iowa. He pointed to the state’s roads, schools and hospitals, which he said were all “a disaster.”
Walker, who is leading polls in Iowa, remains one of Trump’s biggest rivals in the race.
If Trump worries about people thinking that he’s a Hillary shill, maybe he should dispel those rumors by going after Hillary.
It’s not just consumers who like the Uber experience and the sharing economy; it’s the drivers, as well.
The New York Daily News recently headlined a column, “Uber Job Beats Working for Yellow Cab,” by one such driver. Rabiul Karim said, “With Uber, it’s like 50 percent stress is gone right there, because you don’t have to look for passengers.” Reducing stress among drivers is a good thing for all of us!
But Karim added another reason he prefers driving for Uber. “I have flexibility with time. Suppose my daughter has a doctor appointment. I can take her without having to pay the day rate for yellow cabs.”
On the other coast last week, in California, I heard that exact same theme while chatting with my Uber driver. His first reaction was to talk about how much he loved the flexibility. With three kids under 7, he appreciated the ability to schedule his work around other family needs. And when he needs a little extra money, he can work a little bit more.
Despite all of this, a lot of Democratic politicians really dislike Uber and the entire sharing economy. The latest to try to stand in the way of progress was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The New York Daily News described the mayor’s anti-Uber plan as “a protectionist crusade for an entrenched industry, absurdly claiming to stand for the thousands of New York passengers and drivers who have flocked to Uber.”
The New York Post noted that the beneficiaries of the mayor’s plan would have been “a yellow-cab monopoly, and fleet owners who’d donated more than $550,000 to de Blasio’s mayoral campaign.”
Like I say, Uber’s problem is insufficient opportunity for graft.
CHANGE: Walmart announces infant car seat designed to prevent hot car deaths. “In most new cars, an alert sounds if a driver or passenger is not wearing a seat belt or if headlights are left on. Using a similar idea, a sensor on the infant seat harness triggers a series of tones if a child is still buckled in when the ignition is switched off. The feature is meant to remind drivers who might forget that a child is in the vehicle.”
This is kid stuff. You need a motion sensor in the car, coupled with a thermometer. When the temp gets above 100 degrees and the sensor shows the car’s occupied, the windows should automatically roll down, or the AC come on. Coming soon to Teslas, probably.
The president “must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” One can imagine hearing such counsel from a contemporary United States senator on the receiving end of President Obama’s “full disclosure” of the nuclear deal with Iran. But the admonition actually came from James Iredell, a champion of the Constitution’s ratification, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington.
Iredell was addressing the obligations the new Constitution imposed on the president in the arena of international affairs. Notwithstanding the chief executive’s broad powers to “regulate all intercourse with foreign powers,” it would be the president’s “duty to impart to the Senate every material intelligence he receives.” Indeed, among the most egregious offenses a president could commit would be fraudulently inducing senators “to enter into measures injurious to their country, and which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them.” . . .
After a few days of misdirection, administration officials now admit that there are “side deals” that the administration has not revealed to Congress and does not intend to make public. So far, we know of two “side deals” — who knows how many more there may actually be? As the Center for Security Policy’s Fred Fleitz writes in National Review, they involve (a) a full accounting of Iran’s prior nuclear activities (many of which are believed to have been in blatant violation of international law) and (b) access to the Parchin military base, where Iran has conducted explosive testing related to nuclear missiles. . . .
Now consider this: Under cover of this IAEA ruse, Obama ran to the Security Council and rammed through a resolution commencing implementation of his Iran deal before Congress or the American people could consider it. He thus undermined American sovereignty and the Constitution by scheming to impose an international-law fait accompli. And he thus undermined American national security by transferring his inspection commitments to an international agency that he knows is not close to being capable of executing them — an agency that will be further hampered by notice restrictions that, as Charles Krauthammer concludes, render the inspections “farcical” in any event.
The Constitution forbids providing aid and comfort to America’s enemies. And the Framers’ notion that a president would be punishable for deceiving Congress regarding the conduct of foreign affairs meant that lawmakers would be obliged to use their constitutional powers to protect the United States — not merely shriek on cable television as if they were powerless spectators.
Well?
McCarthy’s right, of course. But as his ending query reveals, no one realistically expects the Republican establishment to call for impeachment, despite the fact that the House GOP could issue articles of impeachment with a simple majority vote, sending the case to the Senate for conviction (which would require 2/3 supermajority).
Why not? Because the GOP leadership has given up, and like a jilted lover, is trying so hard to “look the other way” that it no longer sees the obvious, and has lost all self-confidence in its own power, and the power of the truth. It also is betting the farm–i.e., the country–that the U.S. can survive another 18 months of an Obama presidency, and that the next (hopefully) GOP President can magically “cure” all of the Obama-induced cancers. It’s a risky and stupid gamble.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 8:01 pm
Link
UNEXPECTEDLY: Fall in gas prices hasn’t led to increased consumer spending. “Visa CFO Prabhu also said the company felt that the money being conserved at the pump was being funneled into savings accounts, a trend that has been backed up in various economic data reports. . . . But just a few months ago, the collapse in gas prices was supposed to be the next big thing for the US economy. Instead, it seems like nothing has happened.”
Maybe consumers realize that we can’t expect any real economic improvement until after January 2017 at the earliest.
This is the essence of Walker’s appeal — and why he is so dangerous. He is not as outrageous as Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), but his technique of scapegoating unions for the nation’s ills is no less demagogic. Sixty-five years ago, another man from Wisconsin made himself a national reputation by frightening the country about the menace of communists, though the actual danger they represented was negligible. Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy, but his technique is similar: He suggests that the nation’s ills can be cured by fighting labor unions (foremost among the “big government special interests” hurting the United States), even though unions represent just 11 percent of the U.S. workforce and have been at a low ebb. . . .
But deception is the demagogue’s tool. Walker spoke Thursday about “the death threats not just against me and my family but against our lawmakers” and about the nails put in the driveway of one lawmaker to puncture his tires. Such behavior is beyond the pale — though hardly unique to Walker’s opponents. And some of Walker’s claims — including the alleged threat to “gut” his wife “like a deer” and of protesters “beating” and “rocking” a car he was in — could not be substantiated by independent authorities.
Such deception, however, is in the service only of the larger deceit at the core of his candidacy: By scapegoating toothless trade unions as powerful and malign interests, he enlists working people in his cause of aiding the rich and the strong.
Notice how Milbank himself engages in outlandish deception: He insinuates that Walker is somehow lying about the death threats he has received, saying that they “could not be substantiated by independent authorities.” But the threats made by union thugs against Walker and his fellow Wisconsin Republicans do, indeed, appear to have been substantiated, as evidenced here, here, here and here. For Milbank to suggest that Walker is lying because Milbank failed to even conduct a cursory Google search to confirm the validity of the threats tells you everything you need to know about Milbank’s far-left agenda and lack of veracity.
On the larger level, Milbank is trying to convince the low information reader that Walker’s campaign to end outlandish, expensive, taxpayer-funded perks for public union workers is somehow analogous to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against Communism. The only think McCarthy and Walker have in common is that they’re both from Wisconsin. But Milbank’s unintended analogy between Unions and Communists is on point, as they both encourage working the minimum amount, guaranteed jobs for life (regardless of merit), and redistributing wealth. So maybe Milbank is right, after all: Scott Walker’s willingness to take on public sector unions is dangerous indeed– to these liberal/progressive/Marxist values. No wonder Milbank is afraid.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 5:01 pm
Link
I was born into a family of famous gay pagan authors in the late Sixties. My mother was Marion Zimmer Bradley, and my father was Walter Breen. Between them, they wrote over 100 books: my mother wrote science fiction and fantasy (Mists of Avalon), and my father wrote books on numismatics: he was a coin expert.
What they did to me is a matter of unfortunate public record: suffice to say that both parents wanted me to be gay and were horrifed at my being female. My mother molested me from ages 3-12. The first time I remember my father doing anything especially violent to me I was five. Yes he raped me. I don’t like to think about it. If you want to know about his shenanigans with little girls, and you have a very strong stomach, you can google the Breendoggle, which was the scandal which ALMOST drummed him out of science fiction fandom.
SPACE: New Horizons mission shares more high-res Pluto images. “The images are the last of the initial download splurge, as scientists will now focus on processing the data streaming in slowly but surely from the probe and as it continues to speed away from Earth. NASA will release more imagery and data in September.”
Jon Stewart’s Only Black Writer Told Him He Was Uncomfortable With Stewart’s “Black Guy” Impression; Racist Jon Stewart Told Him to “F*** Off,” Angrily.
I kind of understand Stewart’s reaction — it is, in fact, annoying to be accused of bad motives (racism has in fact been defined as the worst possible motive in existence) over things that are, or at least seem, harmless, and without harmful intent.
On the other hand, this jackass is, like Seth Rogen, a reliable cheerleader for SJW attacks so long as they’re directed at other people; only when such attacks are directed at themselves do they suddenly feel that maybe this censorship-by-contrived-hypersensitivity is stultifying, anti-creativity, anti-thought and ultimately anti-human.
F*** you, Jon Stewart. You’re a hypocrite, a liar, and — by your own rules — an unrepentant racist who not only won’t check his privilege, but who uses his privilege to silence any black voices who dissent against you.
Way to speak truth to power, Ace. These liberal/progressives deserve to be called out–every single time–on their hypocrisy. Don’t hold back calling them the “r” word, because they surely would not, if the tables were turned.
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 1:29 pm
Link
Two decades ago, in the spring of 1996,Newsweek magazine described a group of voters it called the “radical middle.” Formerly known as the Silent Majority, then the Reagan Democrats, these voters had supported Ross Perot in 1992, and were hoping the Texas billionaire would run again. Voters in the radical middle, Newsweek wrote, “see the traditional political system itself as the country’s chief problem.”
The radical middle is attracted to populists, outsiders, businessmen such as Perot and Lee Iacocca who have never held office, and to anyone, according to Newsweek, who is the “tribune of anti-insider discontent.” Newt Gingrich rallied the radical middle in 1994—year of the Angry White Male—but his Republican Revolution sputtered to a halt after the government shut down over Medicare in 1995. Once more the radical middle had become estranged from the GOP. “If Perot gets in the race,” a Dole aide told Newsweek, “it will guarantee Clinton’s reelection.”
Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences. . . .
What Republicans are trying to figure out is not so much how to handle Trump as how to handle his supporters. Ignore or confront? Mock or treat seriously? Insult or persuade? The men and women in the uppermost ranks of the party, who have stood by Trump in the past as he gave them his endorsements and cash, are inclined to condescend to a large portion of the Republican base, to treat base voters’ concerns as unserious, nativist, racist, sexist, anachronistic, or nuts, to apologize for the “crazies” who fail to understand why America can build small cities in Iraq and Afghanistan but not a wall along the southern border, who do not have the education or skills or means to cope when factories move south or abroad, who stare incomprehensibly at the television screen when the media fail to see a “motive” for the Chattanooga shooting, who voted for Perot in ’92 and Buchanan in ’96 and Sarah Palin in ’08 and joined the Tea Party to fight death panels in ’09.
These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago. They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote.
Amen. Read the whole thing.
My own preference isn’t to describe this middle as “radical” (because I don’t think they are) but “patriotic.” They abhor the cronyism of Washington elites, and reflect a major “values gap” between DC and Main Street, USA. The irony, of course, is that Trump does not share their values, really–except perhaps on immigration and a few other patriotism-centric issues upon which he’s wisely capitalizing. But at least Trump is finally giving a voice to the Silent Majority’s deeply felt patriotism. The great middle is craving a leader who is unafraid to be unabashedly patriotic.
The question is: Why aren’t more GOP presidential hopefuls getting a clue and matching Trump’s vigor on these issues? Are they simply too weak, and are waiting for Trump to stop stealing “their” spotlight? Or are they too weak on these issues to really care?
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 12:56 pm
Link
BRITISH RESEARCHER PICKS EXACTLY THE WRONG VIDEO GAME TO PUSH HER WHITE PRIVILEGE THEORIES: “People who are supposedly doing scholarship on video games should at least make an effort to play those video games first,” Moe Lane writes in his latest article at PJM. “You avoid all sorts of embarrassing errors that way.”
Nonsense — as we’ve seen before, being an socialist justice warrior means never having to research the battlefield before attacking.
Millennials are hard to pin down. They’ve been characterized as politically liberal, but turn out to be quite skeptical of government. They’re thought to have Tweet-length attention spans, but turn out to read more books than older adults. They’re sometimes described as careerist and individualistic, but a certain group of them, at least—high-achieving women—actually prioritizes family over work to a greater extent than their mothers did. . . .
Feminists will likely see the shift as evidence that the women’s liberation is still incomplete, while social conservatives are likely to welcome the (modest) move toward more traditional gender norms. But the social picture communicated by the data is probably more complicated than the orthodoxies of either the left or right would allow.
The Times article cites three surveys—one of “college educated professionals,” one of business students at Wharton, and one of business students at Harvard. The trend away from full-time working motherhood, in other words, is limited to a narrow and privileged group of American women. Poor and working class women (a disproportionate share of whom are divorced) are less likely to have the luxury of taking time off to spend with their children. While the Times report pitches the data as a story about changing gender norms, they also tell a story about class stratification.
So while the surveys might seem to vindicate the conservative view that many women would opt for part time work or full-time motherhood if given the choice, they also highlight the fact that this choice is not actually available to the majority of the population.
Well, “economic inequality” is as much a symptom as an explanation of many societal problems.
What was so much fun about the original National Lampoon’s Vacation was its maniacal expression of the love-and-hate relationship between weird hip sensibilities (Hughes) and even weirder normal middle-class values (Clark Griswold).
That kind of fun can’t be had in the 21st century, where there are no normal middle-class values, all the Clark Griswolds are alienated, sarcastic and cynical, and every suburban schlub is a font of nihilism’s dark, ironic genius.
Early National Lampoon writer and onetime Michael O’Donoghue paramour Anne Beatts (who created the legendary mock VW ad with a Beetle floating in water and the text, “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be President today,”) was quoted as saying, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.” The reverse is true as well — when did the intersection occur when, as O’Rourke wrote above “every suburban schlub” began to fancy himself “a font of nihilism’s dark, ironic genius,” and National Lampoon lost its edge? And what caused it?
GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: IRS Used Donor Lists to Target Conservatives for Audits. “These documents that we had to force out of the IRS prove that the agency used donor lists to audit supporters of organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected lawful political speech. And the snarky comments about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the obsession with Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPD show that the IRS was targeting critics of the Obama administration.”
Here’s a silver lining for parents of rule-breaking, defiant, disagreeable children: Such surly offspring could end up being a very good investment.
A recent study published in the journal Developmental Psychology looked at data on a cohort of 745 children in Luxembourg from the time they were about 12 years old in 1968 until 2008, when their average age was about 52. Researchers sought to connect the information collected on the children—including their socioeconomic background and questionnaires answered by both the children and their teachers—with their career outcomes four decades later.
The short version? Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and The Free University of Berlin found—perhaps unsurprisingly—that occupational success was closely associated with IQ, the socioeconomic status of parents, and a metric of “studiousness” based on teacher assessments. (To define occupational success, researchers used an index that ranked occupations on prestige and socioeconomic status.)
But when it came to income levels, researchers found a slightly different pattern. After accounting for the impact of IQ-level and class background, researchers found that “rule-breaking and defiance of parental authority” was the best predictor of which students ended up making higher incomes. The writers called this a “surprising finding” and admitted there were reasons to be cautious about it. But they did float a few theories on why this might be the case. “We might assume that students who scored high on this scale might earn a higher income because they are more willing to be more demanding during critical junctures such as when negotiating salaries or raises,” they wrote.
Another explanation, they said, might be that childhood troublemakers “also have higher levels of willingness to stand up for their own interests and aims, a characteristic that leads to more favorable individual outcomes—in our case, income.”
12 DONALD TRUMP BUSINESSES THAT NO LONGER EXIST: It really feels like entering an alternate universe when exploring the Wonderful World of Trump, doesn’t it? I have no problem with the concept of brand extension — Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren are putting their name on everything these days from cologne to furniture to eyeglasses. But the products they associate with, even when obviously produced by outside manufacturers, usually seem fairly classy and upscale. Trump’s entire image revolves around his yuuuuge net worth, so why do his products always seem incredibly tacky? How much does the tackiness reflect Trump thinking that’s what the public wants, and how much does it reflect it his own oddly nouveau riche tastes?
RON FOURNIER: Clinton’s Conspiracy of Secrecy Worthy of Criminal Probe. “Here’s all you need to know: The Clinton campaign doesn’t—and can’t—deny the nut of this story. Two Obama administration inspectors general want an investigation into whether her personal email system contributed to the release of classified information.”
“I remember he was like, ‘What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice.’ I was like, ‘There’s no tone. It bothered me.’ And then he got upset. He stood up and he was just like, ‘Fuck off. I’m done with you.’ And he just started screaming that to me, and he screamed it a few times. ‘Fuck off! I’m done with you.’ And he stormed out. I didn’t know if I had been fired.”
Liberal hero abuses minority employees. Actually, a pretty common story. . . .
This is quite a dilemma for pro-abortion gay activists like Rachel Maddow, the Human Rights Campaign, and Planned Parenthood itself. Donors to gay rights groups and pro-abortion groups are frequently the same individuals, and millions are exchanged between these two causes. Finally, for reasons I have never understood, gay activists frequently cite “abortion rights” as a keystone to achieving overall LGBT equality.
SOLVING THE BLOOD SHORTAGE BY draining the dead? “Roughly 15 million pints of blood are donated each year by approximately 9.2 million individuals. Over the course of the same year, about 2.6 million Americans will — sadly — pass away. If hospitals were to harvest the blood from a third of those people, roughly 4.5 million liters would be added to the reservoir. . . . Draining the blood from a body is hardly out of the ordinary; it’s actually a regular part of the embalming process. To prepare a dead body for funeral services and eventual burial or cremation, morticians pump out all of the blood and interstitial fluids and replace them with an embalming solution, typically containing formaldehyde and methanol. Would it not make more sense to remove the blood at the hospital soon after death, rather than let it all go to waste?”
CRAZY LAWS AND OVERREGULATION: I will be on the John Stossel show tonight @ 8pm, Fox Business Channel, talking about an array of crazy laws–most of which will probably surprise you. Tune in if you can!
Posted at by Elizabeth Price Foley at 5:35 pm
Link
When the Green Mountain power company, Vermont’s largest utility, announced earlier this year it will be buying nuclear power from New Hampshire’s Seabrook reactor, many environmentalists felt betrayed.
“This is exactly why we closed Vermont Yankee, because we didn’t want any nuclear power,” they complained. But consumer demands left Green Mountain with no other choice. Nuclear is the ultimate reliable source of power – reactors operate more than 90 percent of the time – and Green Mountain needs back-up in case other sources stop working or if demand exceeds supply on a hot summer day. Vermont is struggling with its desire to be clean and green. The state closed down Vermont Yankee, which provided 600 megawatts of power, when public opinion against it became overwhelming. The state only consumers 1100 megawatts on the hottest day.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Choose The Right Glue. I remember the Insta-Daughter proudly telling her uncle that her broken bookcase was better because “Daddy fixed it with glue.” And a couple of c-clamps. I’m a big fan of Gorilla Glue, myself, though traditional Elmer’s is underrated for wood fixes that don’t have to be waterproof.
UPDATE: In the comments, lots of love for Titebond.
Giving Democrats a pass on the financial crisis is like giving Bill Clinton a pass on the rise of Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11. If you wanted to choose one single soundbite from the past two months to support the case that Trump’s a Democrat in Republican clothing, this would be it. On the other hand, the way populist hero-worship works is that whatever the hero says is true and correct whether it contradicts ideological orthodoxy or not. If Trump says Republicans alone were to blame for the crash, well … that’s just his way of reminding the Beltway RINOs that they’re complicit in the subprime crisis too. He’s trying to tear down the GOP establishment. Why would we begrudge him this hugely damaging lie in service to that noble cause? The most important thing now is to stop Bush; reminding the world that Jeb’s brother presided over the crash helps do that, even if Democrats are destined to pull this soundbite and beat the hell out of the eventual GOP nominee with it in attack ads. The reason it’s called a “cult of personality” is because, ultimately, it’s about personality, not about correctly apportioning blame for the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression in the middle of a presidential race.
Gee, I was really looking forward to Trump’s nuanced insights into Bill Clinton’s role in radically expanding the Community Reinvestment Act:
But as Allahpundit writes above, “The most important thing now is to stop Bush.” And play the role of stalking horse for Clinton. It’s deja ’92 all over again.
The Times also changed the headline of the story, from “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email” to “Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account,” reflecting a similar recasting of Clinton’s possible role. The article’s URL was also changed to reflect the new headline.
As of early Friday morning, the Times article contained no update, notification, clarification or correction regarding the changes made to the article.
One of the reporters of the story, Michael Schmidt, explained early Friday that the Clinton campaign had complained about the story to the Times.
“It was a response to complaints we received from the Clinton camp that we thought were reasonable, and we made them,” Schmidt said.
“How do you think this crazy pack of Republican candidates and the level of their conversation has made the race for Hillary?” Susan Lehman, the podcast’s host, asked editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal about six minutes into their discussion.
“I think she’s basically ignoring it, which is extremely intelligent,” he responded. “And this is going to sound rather strange coming from a journalist,” Rosenthal added, apparently referring to himself, “but she’s also ignoring the press which I don’t think is such a terrible idea.”
“I don’t think [Hillary Clinton’s] not talking to the press is an issue,” Rosenthal continued. “Sincerely, who cares?”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went off on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on the Senate floor this morning, claiming that McConnell told him there would be no vote allowed on renewal of the Export-Import Bank.
“It saddens me to say this. I sat in my office, I told my staff the majority leader looked me in the eye and looked 54 Republicans in the eye. I cannot believe he would tell a flat-out lie, and I voted based on those assurances that he made to each and every one of us,” Cruz said.
As Ace writes, “Skip to 12:55 for the best part, as he gets into the part about McConnell’s ‘corrupt,’ ‘cronyist’ lies, but the whole thing is good.”
Across the country, young college men are being accused of sexually assaulting young college women based either solely on an accusation or occasionally on flimsy witness statements.
No one is arguing that sexual assaults never happen. But the degree to which the definition has been broadened in order to “fix” the “epidemic” has ensnared many young students who are not the monsters the media would have you believe.
And the narrative being pushed by activists has been one of black and white, good and evil. According to them, accusers, mostly women, always tell the absolute truth, and the accused, almost universally men, are awful even if proven innocent. That double-standard has led to policies that treat accused students as guilty-until-proven-innocent. These policies also have to carve out special provisions that ensure accusers are innocent of sexual assault even when both parties would have a reasonable claim.
This double-standard has produced policies that state that an accuser who has been drinking alcohol (any amount) is absolved of anything they willingly consented to that night on the grounds that they wouldn’t have done so sober. Conversely, accused students who were also drunk are not absolved of their decisions.
Notice the double-standard? If being drunk means you can’t consent, presumably a drunk accused student would also be unable to consent, meaning that the two students essentially sexually assaulted each other. But of course findings such as this won’t help schools prove to the Department of Education that they take accusations seriously, thus the one-sided policies.
We saw this play out recently at Amherst College, when a student who was in an alcohol-induced, black-out state received oral sex, only to be accused of sexual assault nearly two years later.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Revenge Of The Radical Middle: Why Donald Trump Isn’t Going Away. “What Republicans are trying to figure out is not so much how to handle Trump as how to handle his supporters. Ignore or confront? Mock or treat seriously? Insult or persuade? . . . What the radical middle has seen in recent years has not given them reason to be confident in our government, our political system, our legion of politicians clambering up the professional ladder office to office. Two inconclusive wars, a financial crisis, recession, and weak recovery, government failure from Katrina to the TSA to the launch of Obamacare to the federal background check system, an unelected and unaccountable managerial bureaucracy that targets grassroots organizations and makes law through diktat, race riots and Ebola and judicial overreach. And through it all, as constant as the northern star, a myopic drive on the part of leaders in both parties to enact a ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ that would incentivize illegal immigration and increase legal immigration despite public opposition.”
If you don’t want their votes, it’s because you don’t want to win. “Our political commentary is confused because it conceives of the Republican Party as a top-down entity. It’s not. There are two Republican parties, an elite party of the corporate upper crust and meritocratic winners that sits atop a mass party of whites without college degrees whose worldviews and experiences and ambitions could not be more different from their social and economic betters. The former party enjoys the votes of the latter one, but those votes are not guaranteed. What so worries the GOP about Donald Trump is that he, like Ross Perot, has the resources and ego to rend the two parties apart. If history repeats itself, it will be because the Republican elite was so preoccupied with its own economic and ideological commitments that it failed to pay attention the needs and desires of millions of its voters. So the demagogue rises. The party splits. And the Clintons win.”
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) suggested the U.S. wage a “comparable” cyber attack in response to the Office of Personnel Management hack, reportedly carried out by China.
“We are very good at what we do but there are other countries who are constantly working to get better. The Russians are very good at what they do. The Chinese are as well. Iran and North Korea continue to get better, that’s why it’s so important that we develop a policy because I think we’re getting close to a point where it will be close and we will need a policy in place in order to address actions that take place,” Fischer, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said at the Hudson Institute.
Fischer serves as the chairman of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, which deals with cybersecurity issues.
“What can we do? The United States could react in a number of ways whether it’s going into their systems to let them know we can. Whether it’s to do a retaliatory attack that would be comparable — but anytime we would do something like that whoever we’re going after learns something about what we have as well,” she said, referring to the OPM hack, which resulted in the theft of millions of federal employees’ personal information.
“So it’s a balance there on what we can do. Is it deterrence where you would say if you do a major cyber attack on us, we turn around and would do a major one on you, which would have the same consequences if not greater? Again, that goes to policy,” she added.
Hmmm. If that’s a bluff, sooner or later, someone will call it. Otherwise, Jim Geraghty described the OPM hack as America’s “Cyber Pearl Harbor” last month. Is Sen. Fischer suggesting the cyber Hiroshima in response?
Any negotiation can be looked at in two different ways. First, there is the immediate deal and how it is reached. The focus is on who won and who lost, and whether the deal is one-sided or reasonably balanced. The questions are how shrewd were the negotiators, could they have gotten more, or were they hoodwinked into giving up too much? Call this focus “the art of the deal.”
The other approach looks at the long-term consequences of a negotiation. Here the questions are how the agreement fits into each side’s strategy, and how unanticipated political and strategic developments could affect behavior. Most important, a longer-term framework focuses on the residual capability that exists after an agreement. Are organizational structures dismantled, systems taken down, and key staff dispersed?
The biggest mistake in any negotiation is to confuse these two approaches. Rather, the two approaches should be integrated into a balanced overall strategy. In the Iran agreement the focus has been on the art of the deal, that there was no better deal to be had, and that the United States got more in the agreement than many people expected. All of these things may be true—and to a reasonable extent I think that they are. But this isn’t a “good deal” from the long-term point of view. Highlighting the laudable energy put into the agreement by the United States team makes good political sense. After all, the deal has to be sold. As a practical matter putting the focus on the art of the deal is one way to do this. But it doesn’t put the spotlight where it belongs, on the consequences down the road.
There are two such consequences that are worrying. First, the Iran agreement is likely to increase the spread of nuclear weapons, both in Iran and in the Middle East; it doesn’t alter the strategic environment in any way, nor are there other initiatives underway to do this. The other feature of the agreement that is worrying is that it barely touches Iran’s residual capability to get a bomb. All of the knowhow, institutes, and systems to do so remain in place, even if some of them are monitored. A largely unrestrained residual nuclear capability remains in a strategic environment that Iran considers extremely dangerous. This gives Tehran considerable scope for strategic and political moves to get atomic weapons.
So, about what you can expect from the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight. Meanwhile, I still love this picture:
I wonder if you can get this t-shirt translated into Farsi?
Finding true love and settling down is so much a part of the Hollywood script that it may seem a leap to call it a conservative movie just because of that. But the reason I walked out wondering if Schumer or Apatow were among the Hollywood crypto-conservative cadres has more to do with what came before the ending. Ms. Schumer is famous for sexually explicit humor, a kind of caustic feminism, and a certain generational outrageousness. And yet, in her maiden film, she consciously depicted every single sexual encounter of her liberated heroine as dreary and unenviable. They vary from tedious to visibly empty and frustrating. The viewer is forced to wonder why she lies there, when it’s doing nothing for her; why she goes home with someone just because he asks; and what it means when she says that she likes sex, when she clearly does not like the actual sex she manages to have. No young woman watching this movie, including the 19-year-old I was with, could walk out of the theater thinking anything about the protagonist’s lifestyle was appealing. The movie could be used as part of aversion therapy. All of that changes, of course, when she meets the good doctor, and has to figure out how to have a real relationship.
A conservative moviemaker could do worse than to depict the millennial hook-up culture as so empty that marrying a doctor and joining the suburban bourgeois looks like salvation.
To be fair, even Klute ended with Jane Fonda’s character chucking her lucrative call girl career and leaving swinging New York to go live in the country with Donald Sutherland’s small town detective character, a remarkably conservative ending despite both actors being at the peak of their far left anti-American activist phase.
I’m sure it added several million at the box office, which must have pleased Fonda, even as she was insisting, “If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist. . . . I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.”
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: America Is Even Less Socially Mobile Than Previously Thought. Want more social mobility? Make success less dependent on expensive educational credentials and burdensome occupational licenses. On the other hand, the suggestions in this piece are just more of the same.
