Archive for 2016

NO SAFE SPACES FOR ANTI-AMERICANISM: Veterans protest flag removal at Hampshire College. There’s no reason for outsiders not to take their protests to college campuses. And it makes a nice lesson in free speech, and diversity of ideas, for students:

At least one thousand veterans gathered in Amherst this afternoon to protest the removal of the American flag at Hampshire College. 22news spoke to protesters about why they strongly disagreed with the college’s decision.

Freedom is not free. That’s the lesson that hundreds of veterans, their families and friends and other local residents hoped to teach students at Hampshire College Sunday afternoon.

Jerry Maguire, Veteran said, “They took down my flag, they have a right to that, I’m here to defend their right to do that but I want them to understand how bad that hurts me.” . . .

People came from all over New England to attend this protest. The news of the flag being taken down upset Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno who stood in solidarity with veterans Sunday.

This seems like a salutary teachable moment.

JAY COST: The Butcher’s Bill: Democratic losses in the age of Obama. “What makes Obama unique is the magnitude of his party’s defeat. When he entered office, he and his party had broad control of the government. When he leaves office in two months, the opposition will have broad control of the government. That is quite extraordinary. In fact, during the postwar era, no two-term president has lost more U.S. House seats and state legislative seats than Obama.”

Plus: “Obama seems to have given big government a bad name. When he was elected in 2008, the exit poll found that 51 percent of Americans thought the government should do more, compared with 43 percent who thought it should do less. But in 2016, after eight years of Obama, the exit poll found that 45 percent thought the government should do more, compared with 50 percent who thought it should do less.”

NOTES ON A POSTCARD FROM THE OTHER AMERICA: “Is this how the people in the American literary and academic establishment see the rest of us? Or, to be more precise: Even if they don’t share Kate Zambreno’s extreme opinion, are they the kind of people who think that this construal of America as a Boschian hellscape filled with ogres who gorge themselves at The Golden Corral and then gape sweetly at pregnant strangers — do they think this is normal? That it has anything to do with the country as it is? I think the answer is yes. Which explains the Fukishima-level meltdown they’ve had in the face of the Trump tsunami.”

Read the whole thing.

MOTHER OF THE YEAR: Woman accused of injecting feces into IV bag of son with cancer. “Doctors said the child’s health improved once Alberts was removed from the hospital room. But, they said the biggest concern now is they may have missed their best window to keep the boy’s leukemia in remission. It was months of severe hospitalization, some of which were surgeries, to keep the boy alive. Doctors said the boy could have died from any of the episodes of septic shock caused from the fecal matter in his blood, and they said he still may die from his leukemia due to the prolonged delay in therapy.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Castro, Chavez, and “Bad Luck:” Castro and his ilk showed us that under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.

Both Venezuela and Cuba have suffered under leaders who enriched themselves and their families. Chavez’s daughter is the richest person in Venezuela, with a net worth in the billions, while in true “socialist equality” fashion, Cuba is now run by Castro’s brother, Raul.

Yet their poverty and oppression are treated as if they’re just “bad luck.” But it’s only bad luck in the Heinlein sense. As Heinlein also said, a good cook can take wholesome ingredients and produce something much more valuable. A bad cook, on the other hand, can take those same ingredients — valuable in themselves — and produce an inedible mess.

Socialist kleptocrats are like Heinlein’s bad cook, with the added trait of stealing any edible leftovers for themselves and their kin. Perhaps the world will learn a valuable lesson from the fates of Cuba and Venezuela, and avoid such “bad luck” in the future.

Well, we can hope.

LOOKING FOR FASCISM IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES:

Shot: Tom Morello [of Rage Against the Machine] Defends Fidel Castro: ‘Huge Hero Throughout the Third World.’

—Headline, Rolling Stone, today. Note the in-your-face power fist photo of Morello; signaling that Rolling Stone fully supports Morello’s limousine leftist worldview.

Chaser: “Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, ‘We Will Rock You,’ is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.”

—Then-Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh’s review of Queen’s 1979 album, Jazz.

PROGRESSIVES WITHOUT POWER: Hard times for the Sanctimonious White Lady Party.

A very nice liberal broadcaster asked me earlier this week whether I am worried about the future of the Republican party. Funny question. There are 25 states in which the state legislatures and governorships are controlled by Republicans, and two states with executive/legislative divides in which there are Republican legislative majorities large enough to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Sixty-eight of the country’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers are Republican-run. There are only four states with Democratic governors and legislatures; it is true that these include one of our most populous states (California), but the majority of Americans live in states in which there are Republican trifectas or veto-proof legislative majorities. Two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control.

Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just won the presidency. Democrats control the dean of students’ office at Oberlin.

And Democrats have responded to their recent electoral defeat with riots, arson, and Alex Jones–level conspiracy theories. Progressives have just raised $5 million to press for a recount in several states. Clinton sycophant Paul Krugman, sounding exactly like every well-mannered conspiracy nut you’ve ever known, says the election “probably wasn’t hacked,” but “conspiracies do happen” and “now that it’s out there” — (who put it out there?) — “an independent investigation is called for.” Maybe it isn’t the Republican party whose future needs worrying about.

I worry more about America’s.

Plus: “The longer-term problem for the Democrats is that they are finding out that they have to play by their own rules, which are the rules of identity politics. This is a larger problem for the Democratic party than is generally appreciated. The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union.”

GOOD ADVICE!

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Castro, Chavez, and “Bad Luck:” Castro and his ilk showed us that under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.

Both Venezuela and Cuba have suffered under leaders who enriched themselves and their families. Chavez’s daughter is the richest person in Venezuela, with a net worth in the billions, while in true “socialist equality” fashion, Cuba is now run by Castro’s brother, Raul.

Yet their poverty and oppression are treated as if they’re just “bad luck.” But it’s only bad luck in the Heinlein sense. As Heinlein also said, a good cook can take wholesome ingredients and produce something much more valuable. A bad cook, on the other hand, can take those same ingredients — valuable in themselves — and produce an inedible mess.

Socialist kleptocrats are like Heinlein’s bad cook, with the added trait of stealing any edible leftovers for themselves and their kin. Perhaps the world will learn a valuable lesson from the fates of Cuba and Venezuela, and avoid such “bad luck” in the future.

Well, we can hope.

DO YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS HAVE A RIGHT TO YOUR GENETIC CODE? When a woman gets her genome sequenced, questions about privacy arise for her identical twin sister. “Patients must give their informed consent before undergoing whole-genome sequencing or any other genetic test. But there are no laws that restrict what patients can do with their own genetic information, or that require patients’ family members to be involved in the consent process. This raises questions about who owns an individual’s genetic code, since family members share many genetic traits and may harbor the same genetic abnormalities associated with certain diseases.”