The Bookworm Beat 12/6/14 — Saturday sweep-up edition, and Open Thread

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Woman writingA cold has been making the rounds in my neighborhood and it finally caught up with me. I don’t feel particularly ill, but I feel congested and quite desperately sleepy. I had a great deal to do today, and mostly managed to re-read Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, which wasn’t too taxing (and, thankfully, I’d forgotten whodunnit). I’ve now roused myself enough to clean the kitchen, do the laundry, and share with you a few browser tabs I still have open from yesterday:

The all-around best post about the Rolling Stone’s journalistic malpractice

I’ve shouted my opinion about Rolling Stone’s UVA rape story from the treetops (“It didn’t happen that way!”), and I’ve linked to several posts that agreed with me, only they did so more thoroughly, more elegantly and, most importantly, from more prominent platforms than mine.  These combined voices forced Rolling Stone to admit to gross journalistic malpractice.

Of all these bully-pulpit loud voices on the subject, my favorite is Jonah Goldberg. Writing before Rolling Stone walked back its story, Jonah Goldberg had this to say:

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The Bookworm Beat (9/29/14) — The unpacked portmanteau edition, and Open Thread

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Woman writingI’ve got a lot of open tabs with all sorts of random, but useful and interesting, information. Here goes….

Whither Eric Holder?

The Watcher’s Council has a new forum up, this one examining Eric Holder’s resignation and his future plans. I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that none of the forum participants believe Holder retired because he needed a break from the job.

Is it real or is it a satire?

When a friend sent me this link about Obama’s plans regarding ISIL, it took me a few seconds to decide whether it was real or satire. Now it’s your turn to spend a few seconds answering that question for yourself.

Men without women are dangerous

For years I’ve been harping away on what a very wise friend told me, which is that Islam’s fundamental quarrel with the West is about women: Islam wants to control women, and the West refuses to get with the program. Roger Scruton adds another dimension to the problem Islam has with women, which is that the women are being locked away from the young men who need them most. Between the whole burqa/locking up thing, and the polygamy that gives old men lots of young women, while leaving young men with nothing, the Muslim world has produced a huge population of young men with an enormous amount of unresolved sexual tension.  Combine this tension with the promise of its full resolution in the afterlife provided that you first kill non-Muslims, and you’ve created a whole lot of nascent murderers.

Why is this recovery different from all other recoveries?

It’s different because Obama’s crony capitalism has ensured that any benefits derived from the recovery have gone primarily to the rich people encircling his White House throne.

The Leftist dream about Common Core

The Leftists are slowly letting the cat out of the bag. It’s not that they believe that Common Core will educate children better; it’s that they believe that it will educate them equally. A lot of parents, though, are getting very worried that Common Core will leave children all equally uneducated.

By the way, when I watched the video at the link, I thought of this poster that I culled long ago from a Leftist Facebook friend:

Equality and Justice

A wonderful paragraph from Jonah Goldberg’s post about the endless feminist sense of grievance

Goldberg’s whole post is worth reading, insofar as it seeks to explain why American feminists, despite succeeding beyond any woman’s wildest dreams at any previous time in history, still complain bitterly about their victimization. I especially liked the following paragraph, though, about the way in which feminists discount objective facts merely because men state them:

Maybe it’s true that pointing out that women are doing much better today according to myriad measures somehow solidifies my rank in the cult of Priapus, but I’m at a loss to figure out how. And, even if it did, even if pointing out there is no rape epidemic on college campuses earned me an extra round of martinis at the men’s club with Mr. Monopoly and the Koch brothers, I cannot for the life of me see how that makes the facts any less factual. If I slapped my wife’s name on my column instead of my own, would the facts therein suddenly be more true? (“Hey don’t use ‘slap’ and ‘wife’ in the same sentence or they’ll compare you to Ray Rice.” — The Couch)

Note to Jonah: Logic is also part of the male hegemonic structure aimed at excluding women from power.

Matthew Continetti lets loose against journalists for Hillary

Continetti unleashes a wonderful stem-winder against a journalist class that can report no wrong when it comes to Hillary Clinton. This will give you a taste of his tour de force:

I am not entirely without sympathy. Mainstream journalists are under pressures that we are not. They have to pretend for example that David Brock is a serious person. They are implicated in the liberal Democratic project through family or sympathy or ambition. They have to take angry calls from the White House and congressional Democrats and candidates. One of Alana Goodman’s scoops involved a meeting at the D.C. bureau of the New York Times at which Hillary Clinton’s top lieutenants complained about the paper’s coverage of their boss, saying it was too intrusive and critical and that Clinton is not a public figure but an expectant grandmother. Leave Hillary alone, she’s under a lot of stress right now, she still has to wear those glasses at night, we have long memories, all she wants to do is swim, she hasn’t made up her mind about 2016, she’s putting the finishing touches on her book, dinner last Saturday was a lot of fun we should do it again sometime, she’s really a private person and doesn’t like all of this attention, why do you have to be so mean to her, I’m not going to write that recommendation letter for Sidwell Friends, Chelsea’s afraid the bad press may affect the baby, yes I’ll be at Hilary Rosen’s on Friday, we are totally uninteresting and unaffected and blameless and prosaic and apolitical but cross us and we’ll cut your f—ing knees off . . . Could you have been at that meeting and not laughed?

The Bookworm Beat — August 22, 2014 mid-day edition edition

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Woman writingClimate change hysteria will make you crazy

We all know that it’s wrong to laugh at those who are mentally ill, but doesn’t it seem like there should be an exception for those whose particular mental illness takes the form of aggressive, obsessive climate change mania? Tim Blair’s brilliant fisking of an article about a climate change Nazi who’s depressed is just too funny to ignore.

Progressives continue to try to make futile any resistance to their “scientific” dogma

Scarily, the climate change Nazis — the ones who wish to end all scientific debate in favor of ideologically dictated theories — are on the move again. Having successful demonized any challenges to their theories (never mind that virtually all of their predictions re climate have failed to materialize), is a movement to federalize “science” instruction in schools along Progressive lines.

Sarah Palin, living rent free inside Leftist heads

Speaking of crazy people, The Guardian wrote an article saying that Sarah Palin likes the new movie The Giver because it comes out strongly against a seemingly beneficent Nanny State. That’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is the unbelievably rage-filled, completely maddened comments that people left in response to Sarah Palin’s movie review. Here’s just one example, plucked off the top of the comment pile:

“…Palin also praises Streep for taking part in a movie….”
If Streep ever gets asked about this Palin-endorsement in an interview and she somehow manages to hide her contempt for the grifting, snake-oil selling, intellectual-capacity-of-a-tree-stump, lying, race-baiting, bullshitting, couldn’t-write-her-name-in-the-dirt-with-a-stick, idiot then Meryl will cement her standing as the greatest actress in the world.

Clearly, Sarah Palin’s doing something right if, by hewing to arguments that as little as 30 years ago were mainstream American concepts, she can drive them so insane.

And another thing that’s wrong with Obama….

While I’m on the subject of vituperative dislike for an opposing politician, I recommend a strong round of applause for David Horowitz’s epic rant against Barack Obama. Unlike the Palin haters, who exist in a fantasy land, Horowitz is helped in his rant by the fact that he has facts on his side, rather than just inchoate anger and slander. This is not a post that will convert the unbelievers, but it will make the believers feel good.

America plays the price for Obama’s refusal to recognize terrorism

Andrew McCarthy has resurrected a six year old column in which he essentially predicted precisely what has happened: a resurgent Islam that Obama is incapable of dealing with, since he treats all terrorism as a form of crime, rather than an act of war. (McCarthy also notes that Obama has helped resurgent Islam along with his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists.) I cannot remember where I read it, but I definitely read that Obama intends to treat the Foley murder — another act of war — as a mere crime to be sucked into our dysfunctional criminal legal system.

Unlike Obama, Chuck Hagel is slowing figuring out that ISIS is not a mere criminal problem

Vengeance is ours, sayeth Hamas

Yesterday, I wrote:

Something very, very big happened in Gaza last night: Israel assassinated three of the highest ranking Hamas leaders. Dayenu. But the enormously skillfully strike, which could have been achieved only with extraordinary knowledge, reveals something that should strike a shattering blow at Hamas: “The killing of the three constituted an indication that something in the intelligence discipline at the very top of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades has cracked.”

Today, Hamas enacted swift vengeance against those it alleges were the leakers:  it summarily executed around 18 Palestinians.  My own suspicion is that these 18 were just random victims, killed solely to instill fear in all other Palestinians.

Hillary: Hamas enabler

It was not a coincidence that the Hamas tunnels came into being during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State:

In a bombshell revelation, Dennis Ross, the senior Mideast policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2011, has admitted that it was he who was assigned the task of pressuring Israel to ease up on its military blockade of Gaza.

“I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross revealed in the Washington Post on August 10. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Read the rest here.

“Israel, you’re not alone”

It’s not great music, but it’s such a great sentiment, I have to share a Christian group’s promise to Israel:

Israel You’re Not Alone – Official Music Video from HaYovel on Vimeo.

The Bookworm Beat — trying to be upbeat and failing edition (and Open Thread)

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Woman writingThe last few days have been perfectly nice, but without repose. My brain churns frantically, but I don’t get the time to process the information through my keyboard. My apologies.

I think things will even out a little in the next few days (although that may just be wishful thinking on my part). Still, as frantic as the last few days have been, I actually have something to show for my efforts, right down to my dogs’ unusually fresh breath (I added carrots and yogurt to the usual routine of brushing their teeth).

On that happy note, to the news!

Another dissatisfied Obamacare customer

My son spent some quality time with our neighbors who are just about the loveliest people you could ever hope to find. They’re also ardent Democrats and Obama supporters. Or at least, they were ardent supporters. My son told me that one of the parents was grousing furiously about Obamacare, which is costing their family an extra $4,000 this year — and that’s $4,000 that they don’t have.

Add their personal tale to the long list of Obamacare woes, including the fact that Obamacare is not generally a hit, with enrollment numbers coming in far below administration projections.  I only wish, as I always do, that people would have realized that it’s all a con before the 2012 elections, not after.

It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it

Lots of my Leftist Facebook friends recently ran a poster showing that George Bush actually took more vacations than Barack Obama. I’m sure this is true. The problem, though, is that Obama and his family vacation like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, something taxpayers find tacky. No quiet time at their own remote property or at Camp David for the Obamas.  Instead, they’re jaunting off to multimillion-dollar hotels and estates all over the world. Even worse, when it comes to Obama himself (not his family), Obama is heading off for ostentatious vacations just when he should be looking busy. Jonathan Tobin sums it up nicely:

While no one can say that Obama—or any president for that matter—doesn’t work hard, he has a habit of acting as if the normal rules of political behavior don’t apply to him. This president has spent more days golfing than any of his recent predecessors. While George W. Bush spent more days away from the White House—principally at his Texas ranch or at the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, both of which functioned routinely as little White Houses—Obama has never shown he cares much about the optics of being seen recreating while terrible things are happening. Bush stopped playing golf in 2003 after the war in Iraq began principally because he believed it didn’t look right for the president to be strolling the links while Americans faced death abroad. Obama has no such compunctions.

The timing is also a problem. It can be argued that there is something bad happening somewhere on the globe every day of the year. But there is something particularly egregious about Obama loafing around while the successful outcome in the Iraq War that he inherited from Bush is transformed into a victory for Islamist terrorists.

As I’m constantly saying to the kids, it’s not always what you do, it’s also how you do it.

Is Obama bringing identity politics to the Middle East?

Maybe Paul Mirengoff is being picky . . . and maybe he’s not. He’s wondering why, with ISIS slaughtering everyone in its path, Obama was moved to act mercifully only towards the Yazidi. Mirengoff’s conclusion: identity politics strikes Iraq. The Yazidi are more “genuine” and “ethnic” than run-of-the-mill Christians and “apostate” Muslims caught in the maw of the ISIS killing machine.

Yes, ISIS looks bad in its PR, but that’s its point

Ian Tuttle is correct that ISIS is not doing itself any publicity favors by boastfully publishing pictures of its horrible depredations, everything from mass slaughter, to crucifixions, to small children proudly portraying severed heads. I’m less sanguine than he, though, that these pictures will help defeat ISIS. In the theater of battle, the images are doing a good job of making opponents run away. Moreover, here in the West, we’ve already proven that, if Islamists threaten and protest, we will instantly back down. These pictures are only going to increase our spinelessness.

Can you compromise with religious absolutists?

I’ve tried as hard as possible to ignore the appallingly vapid, self-serving, viciously partisan interview Barack Obama had with Tom Friedman, a sycophant in chief. What I couldn’t ignore, though, was the terrible agreement between the two about victory, or its absence. Friedman summed up Obama’s view as follows:

Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. (Emphasis added.)

That’s an accurate summary. What Obama, always yeasty and puffy in his wording, said was this (and I’ve included the preceding self-serving Friedman riff):

The only states doing well, like Tunisia, I’ve argued [says Friedman], have done so because their factions adopted the principle of no victor, no vanquished. Once they did, they didn’t need outside help.

“We cannot do for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves,” said the president of the factions in Iraq. “Our military is so capable, that if we put everything we have into it, we can keep a lid on a problem for a time. But for a society to function long term, the people themselves have to make decisions about how they are going to live together, how they are going to accommodate each other’s interests, how they are going to compromise. When it comes to things like corruption, the people and their leaders have to hold themselves accountable for changing those cultures…. … We can help them and partner with them every step of the way. But we can’t do it for them.”

Obama seems unable to contemplate an absolute ideology that doesn’t believe in compromise. For him, the only allowable absolutist ideology is his own, which sees a supine West yielding gracefully to the “reasonable” demands of an ascendant Third World.  For radical Islamists, however, the only game in town is total military victory. To them, compromise is weakness, inviting more attacks. It’s very frightening to have a president who is so rigid in his belief system that he’s unable to acknowledge that there’s an enemy out there even worse than the Republicans.

Is it real or is it satire?  Only the Obama administration knows for sure

With a president such as ours, one who has a State Department that believes that hashtags actually accomplish something, it’s often hard to separate satire from real news. I think that if you go to this link regarding the prayer campaign the administration is starting, you’ll be able to determine whether it’s satire or not but, nowadays, maybe I’m wrong in that supposition.

The very real power of prayer

Still, prayer can have quite a power beyond anything we can imagine. In a report about the attack that killed Lt. Hadar Goldin in Israel’s war with Hamas, comes this most amazing and moving story:

In the midst of this attack, a second force of IDF soldiers–which had gone into a mosque looking for weapons, explosives, and rockets– encountered a female suicide bomber who was about to detonate the belt she wore, which would have resulted in the deaths of the soldiers. One of the soldiers instinctively recited the opening words of the holiest Jewish prayer “Shema Yisrael”. The female suicide bomber hesitated and began trembling, giving the soldiers a chance to grab her and disable the device.

The soldiers then took her prisoner and turned her over to a counter-intelligence unit. Their investigation uncovered that the female suicide bomber’s mother was a Jew who had married a Palestinian in Israel and, after the wedding, was smuggled against her will into Gaza. There she lived a life filled with abuse and humiliation, and was basically a captive. In addition to the female suicide bomber, there were two smaller children as well. An armored force went in and rescued the two small children.

For more on the Shema, go here.

Hillary Clinton would have been different, but probably just as bad

Megan McArdle thinks Hillary Clinton would have been a better president than Obama simply because she’s more willing to play with the other kids on the playground. That is, says McArdle, she wouldn’t have been as dismissive of Republican and Tea Party concerns. I often agree with McArdle but in this case I wonder. After all, it was Hillary who thought up the whole “vast right wing conspiracy.” The Clintons are just as corrupt and paranoid as Obama. Certainly Hillary would have made different decisions, and these might have been less doctrinaire and more intelligent, but she’s not any more interested in true partisanship than Obama is.

Shovel — or spoon — ready jobs

Milton Friedman, when asked about “shovel ready jobs,” famously said if the point is just to keep people busy, the government should be handing out spoons, not shovels. The Welsh were apparently listening closely, since they’ve created make-work jobs that are the functional equivalent of tiny little teaspoons to dig big holes.

Incidentally, if that image seems familiar to you, think back to Norton Juster’s wonderful The Phantom Tollbooth. There, our intrepid heroes, Milo, Tock, and the Humbug, meet the Terrible Trivium, who wastes their precious time having them do such meaningless tasks as filling buckets with eye-droppers or digging holes with needles. As he says, “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You simply won’t have the time, for there is always something to do to keep you from what you should really be doing.”

The terrible trivium

Robin Williams never let politics blind him to our common humanity

John Nolte almost gets it right:

Williams was political — a heavy donor to Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Al Franken, but never offensive. Politics would sometimes rear its head in his stand-ups, but the jibes at Republicans were good-natured, not caustic; the kind of jokes Johnny Carson told.

In fact, when I last saw Williams on stage here in Marin (he showed up unexpectedly at a local comedy club), his anti-Bush and anti-Cheney jokes were just as nasty as any other Leftist comedian’s. Even worse, they weren’t funny.

What made this mindless political attack almost irrelevant I thought was that Williams never let his politics prevent him from seeing the troops as people in need of laughter, rather than monsters in the Bush war machine.  Nolte has a lovely quotation to support this principle:

When the wars came in 2002, without seeking personal attention or publicity, he was overseas with The Boys. Over the course of the decade he would visit 13 countries and entertain 90,000 service men and women. A retired General told ABC News:

After his shows, he’d stick around, making personal connections with service members. Retired Gen. Carter Ham respected Williams’ character.

“He would go to the guard towers, he’d got the dining facilities, he’d got the security police who couldn’t come to the shows because they were on duty. And he would spend time with them individually. That was very moving,” Ham said.

The Bookworm Beat — A little of this and a little of that (and an Open Thread)

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Woman writingWe are at sixes and sevens today. Our house guest arrives and my twice monthly cleaning service. Between the two, we’ve purged the house of as much extraneous material as possible. I swear that, if you could put my house on a scale, it would weigh substantially less. There’s still much more I’d like to get rid of, but I’m happy for now.

Even rich people can be broke

I’m still reeling a bit from Robin Williams’ death. I didn’t know him, of course, but I saw him so often, including several live appearances, that he seemed much more real to me than the average Hollywood star. I also found exceptionally sad that money woes worsened his depression. It’s a reminder that, even if you have a $35 million dollar ranch, as long as your debts exceed your assets, you’re still poor. There’s a lesson there for individuals and nations. My great-grandfather, a banker, was wont to say “the man without debts is the richest man of all.”

Will anyone prosecute Hamas for war crimes

William Levinson has decided to stop waiting for others to act and has acted himself. He is filing a formal complaint against Hamas for war crimes.

Hillary’s posturing on Iraq shouldn’t feel fool anyone (but probably will anyway)

Too lazy and too rushed to look up links, but I find it hard to take Hillary seriously as a hard-liner against ISIS. She, after all, was the Secretary of State when the Obama administration pulled all troops out of Iraq. Pulling troops out, obviously, was mechanically a Department of Defense operation, but our relationship with other nations was Hillary’s responsibility. Her record as Secretary of State is a series of useless photo ops punctuated intermittently by appalling mistakes, ranging from the “reset” with Russia; to her criminal and moral negligence regarding Benghazi; to her willingness to preside over America’s abandonment of Iraq.

The only thing that worries me is that the American people will give her a pass. Yes, I know the media will, but really! How dumb do Americans have to be to forget history that happened in just the past few years? As Andrew Klavan wrote, it’s the American people who first elected Obama and then re-elected Obama. As a nation, you tend to get what you deserve.

Wednesday afternoon round-up and Open Thread

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Victorian posy of pansiesIt’s quite amazing watching DemProg heads explode on my “real me” Facebook page. To hear them tell it, the Hobby Lobby decision was four white religious men banning women’s right to contraception across America because a mean-spirited Christian corporation demanded that they do so.

I’ve been doing my best to say that (a) Hobby Lobby always provided a broad range of contraception coverage to its employees, and is only protesting the fact that the government is forcing it to pay for contraception that can be used to cause abortions; and (b) that the Court’s narrow holding said only that the Health & Human Services contraception mandate, which is not law under Obamacare, does not pass the test set by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which President Clinton approvingly signed. My comments are greeted with silence.

But there’s no room for silence here. I have a lot to say, and I delight in your comments. So off we go….

***

I may as well start with a good Hobby Lobby round-up. All of these posts were very helpful when I was trying to craft a short, fact-filled response to confused DemProgs on Facebook.

Both Elizabeth Warren’s and Hillary Clinton’s responses to the decision show that (a) it’s amazing they graduated from law school, let alone, in Warren’s case, became teachers and (b) that they’re each as bad as the other, and that’s saying a lot. Let me say again what I learned from taking Warren’s Banking Law class a long time ago: she’s soft-spoken and mean; she’s a muddled thinker; she’s an incoherent communicator; and there’s a lot of anger there. (Warning:  this article might be behind a pay wall, but you can demolish that pay wall for a mere 99 cents per month.)

I found an exceptionally good trio of cases from the crew at National Review (which really excels at this type of analysis:

Charles C. W. Cooke points out that a great deal of the DemProg’s hysteria derives from the fact that they don’t understand that the Supreme Court’s role is to interpret law, not to enact it. That’s not surprising. DemProgs want their (not any, but their) president to enact law and, trained by Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade — both of which involved the Court creating rights out of whole cloth, for better or worse — actually believe that the court exists to enact a DemProg-approved agenda.

Ramesh Ponnuru explains how illogical, hysterical, and unrealistic Ruth Ginsburg was in her dissent — something that explains why DemProgs are so wildly excited by what she wrote.

Ross Douthat notes that DemProgs are exceptionally sore, and dishonest, winners. This reflects the fact that the Hobby Lobby decision peeled out a tiny corner of religious freedom in the face of a vast government takeover of . . . everything.

And finally, one of Jonah Goldberg’s best, in which he explains out that it wasn’t the Court putting the employer in women’s uterus, it was the Obama administration. That accurate analysis kind of puts a different spin on this poster, which DemProgs are excitedly passing around through social media:

Who makes medical decisions

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Obama’s a chart topper: After thinking it over, Americans agree that Barack Obama is the worst president this country has seen since the end of WWII (and Ronald Reagan is the best). The only problem with this confirmation of my bias is that, for me to be proved right, the country has had to suffer terribly. It’s no fun being Cassandra.

***

On the subject of Obamacare, Kevin Williamson allows himself a bit of schadenfreude, and it makes for brilliant reading.

***

When I heard about the IRS’s “dog at my hard drive” excuse for the missing emails from Lois Lerner and six other key employees, I immediately said “that’s spoliation” and it’s bad.  It turns out that  the IRS’s conduct was even worse than I remembered at the time I made this statement.

The IRS wasn’t just hiding stuff from Congress, which could be classified as political game-playing. By the time it lost the emails, the back-up and the hard-drive, it was engaged in litigation that placed upon it a heavy legal burden to do everything possible to preserve any material that could be germane to the lawsuits. A judge with any reverence for the law should come down on the IRS like a ton of bricks for this behavior, even if it was “merely” negligent, as opposed to a deliberate fraud on the court.

***

The Founders did not imagine an America of incredible wisdom, by incredible wisdom, and for incredible wisdom. Madison readily envisioned that the government would be able to function despite man’s worst nature. However, even the Founders’ checks and balances didn’t comprehend a president and his supporters who would willingly cast aside constitutional governance.

Sadly, judging by changes made to the AP US history test, which drives US history curriculum at high schools across America, things aren’t going to get better any time soon. Since our children are prevented from learning the Founders’ wisdom, they can’t institute those ideas into their understanding of government.

And, while Boehner’s lawsuit is a step in the right direction, I remain dubious that it will accomplish anything. I’m with Andrew McCarthy in that I fear it will simply see the House cede power to the courts. At the rate Congress is ceding power to the other branches of government, it becomes nothing but an expensive Kabuki piece.

***

The kind of people who vote for Hillary won’t care that, on July 4th, this potential presidential candidate has decided to spend her time with a British, America-bashing newspaper. That’s what DemProgs do, and they’re damn proud of it too.

***

For years, people have been trying to figure out what the “Obama doctrine” is. Jeffrey Anderson thinks he knows: the Obama doctrine is Obama’s belief that, when Americans voted him into office, they got a twofer — both a president and a legislator.

***

Earlier today, I posted that, whether one agrees or not with the cheerleader who is also a big game hunter, disagreement is not a basis for censorship. DemProg, chart-topping songstress Diane Warren has different idea altogether. She thinks that disagreement is a basis for murder. Assuming Warren survives the coming ISIS sharia takeover, she should fit in quite well with the Islamist mindset.

***

I’m not a BBC fan, but this rap version of WWI’s origins is cute.

***

And finally, pictures!

Democrats are brave enough

Me myself and I

Plenty of room on the calendar

Reasons for owning guns

Illegal immigrants displace veterans

(Thanks to Caped Crusader, the Family Back East, and Earl Aagaard for their help with this post.)

Saturday mid-day round-up and Open Thread

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broken-washing-machineI’m just thankful that the washer wasn’t doing a bleach load when it decided to break. And I’m thankful that the clothes were mostly rinsed of detergent (indeed, there was so little detergent in them that they weren’t actually cleaned). And I’m thankful that I was able to wring the clothes out and that my dryer still works. All in all, a lot to be thankful for.

As for the being thankful about the news in Obama’s America . . . well, not so much:

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I cannot tell you how much I dread the thought of a possible Elizabeth Warren presidency. I’ve disliked and disrespected that woman for almost thirty years now. Nothing I’ve learned about her in the intervening years has changed my opinion. If you think Obama is bad, Warren will be just as bad in her own way.

***

Of course, I dread a Clinton presidency too. In that regard, I’m grateful for a new book that is again raising the charge that Hillary Clinton was fired for “writing fraudulent legal briefs, lying to investigators and confiscating public documents.” The book is written by Jerry Zeifman, a serious Nixon partisan, but he was her boss at the time, so it will be interesting to see his support for this charge and Hillary’s opposition, if any.

***

This Commentary Magazine article about the Leftist fight against moderate Muslims may be behind a pay wall for you, but if you can do so, please read it. This might whet your appetite:

After years of effort to promote the myth of a post 9/11 backlash against American Muslims, the left is breaking some new ground in the debate about terror. Instead of merely trying to make Americans feel guilty about defending themselves against radical Islamists, they have a new goal: banning the use of the term “moderate Muslim.”

That’s the conceit of a piece in The New Republic by Georgetown University’s Nathan Lean in which he argues that to attempt to differentiate between Islamists who seek to pursue a war on the West and those Muslims who wish to live in peace with non-Muslims is itself an act of prejudice. For Lean, any effort to ascertain whether Muslims are supportive of the radical ideologues that have supported not only al-Qaeda but also other Islamist terror movements is wrong because it feeds the “Islamophobia” which he believes is at the core of all Western attitudes towards Muslims. In doing so, he is attempting not only to discourage efforts to combat the radicals but to delegitimize those Muslims who choose to speak up against the Islamists.

I’m familiar with that New Republic article because one of my “real me” Facebook friends posted it. I went ballistic and left a long comment noting that there’s a huge difference between truly moderate Muslims, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, (a) the radicals and (b) the silent majority behind the radicals. If we don’t make that distinction, we run the risk of two things: (a) having the bad guys metastasize even more because we’re afraid to label them or (b) having things come to such a head that, when all distinctions are gone and the bad guys are ascendant, we turn on the good guys too. I completely shut down the burgeoning comment thread. No one had a word left to say after my rant.

If you can, please read Jonathan Tobin’s analysis of the terrible harm this new Leftist tactic will cause in the West’s existential war against radical Islam, a war the West barely won the first time, in the centuries spanning the 7th centuries when Islam burst out of the Arabian peninsula through the medieval Crusades that finally pushed Islam back a little bit, and that it barely won again the second time, in the 17th century when the Ottoman Turks made their way to the outskirts of Vienna. If we can’t even name our enemy this time around, Islam will succeed.

***

The New York Times has examined its conscience and decided that it is pure; it did indeed report with sufficient weight and depth on the IRS scandal. Scott Johnson, at Power Line, begs to differ and has the facts to undermine the New York Times’ self-serving, highly inaccurate exculpation.

***

Roger Simon thinks the liberal media is silent about things such as the IRS scandal because individual members of the media cannot bear to admit that everything they believed was wrong. I think Neo-Neocon is closer to the mark when she says that the media is silent about Obama’s cascading failures and scandals because they still agree with his agenda wholeheartedly, and don’t want anything to derail it. Or as she says, “I’m afraid what the Times is doing is ass-covering. They can’t think of a way to spin Obama’s abysmal failures any more (they do have certain standards, although those standards are pretty low), so they are silent.” Yup.

***

Greg, at Rhymes with Right, explains how far Obama has deviated from the Constitution when it comes to the way in which he exercises his “executive” powers. Greg politely ascribes this to Obama’s failure to understand the Constitution. I wouldn’t be so nice. Obama fully understands the Constitution. He just doesn’t agree with it. Democrats like what he’s doing and are willing to destroy constitutional checks and balances to support his agenda, and Republicans understand precisely what Obama understands: As the nation’s first sort-of black president, he can’t be stopped.

***

Some political ads are better than others. This one, by Darius Foster, a black conservative, is one of the best. (Hat tip: Hot Air)

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Andrew McCarthy excoriates John Boehner for going the weakling’s route in his challenge to Obama’s lawlessness, rather than using the full complement of weapons available to the House under the Constitution.

***

What I continue to find fascinating about the plan to put a suicide barrier under the Golden Gate Bridge, something that will cost almost $80 million dollars is that it’s being advanced by the same crew of people who agree with Nancy Pelosi that abortion is “sacred ground.” For example, one of the barrier’s proponents is Tom Ammiano, a hard Left, political gay (as opposed to someone whose life is not defined by his sexual predilections) who makes Pelosi look moderate.

Ammiano supports all forms of abortion, including sex selection abortions. He also strongly believes that the public should pay for abortions: “In my 21 years in public office, I have been one of the strongest advocates for public funding of abortion services.”

I don’t get the logic of a man who says that the public must pay $79 million to prevent a statistically small number of suicides by people who desperately want to die, even as he even more zealous demands that the public pay even more money in order to enable the millions of abortions that kill infants who most certainly do not want to die.

***

Your health care provider is watching you. If you put a bottle of soda, a bag of sugar, a stick of butter or, Heaven forbid, a cigarette pack on your credit card or your grocery store club card, don’t be surprised if you get a warning from your doctor, followed by the denial of care for which you previously paid by buying insurance.

***

One wishes that the same-sex marriage crowd, which insists that all couples who love each other should get the state’s and the church’s imprimatur of marriage, would get as excited about events in Pakistan.  There a couple who married for love were beheaded by the bride’s outraged family. The fact that you can’t get the state’s stamp of approval for same-sex love in America seems to pale a bit in importance when compared to love and death in the stone age world of Islamic/tribal countries across the Islamic swath of the Middle East.

***

It’s Ramadan, so the United States Navy is warning troops in Bahrain to hide their day-time eating habits and, men and women both, to cover up when in public. I’m of two minds about this. Normally I would say that there’s nothing wrong with the military behaving politely during a host country’s religious festival. However, when the host country is Muslim, I never get the feeling that these actions are taken because of politeness and mutual respect. I always feel that they have more to do with dhimmitude and fear.

***

Check out Sultan Knish’s “Friday afternoon roundup” to see a great anti-Hillary video. Also, you simply have to read an entire post that contains gems such as these:

The ongoing problem on the right is that it talks ‘extremist’ and legislates ‘moderate’ while the left talks ‘moderate’ and legislates ‘extremist’.

That’s a big part of why Obama is in the White House and conservatives are still struggling to make headway.

Obama isn’t in the White House because Americans woke up Communist one morning. I know that “Free Stuff” is a popular theory, but people always liked free stuff. The larger welfare population helped shift the balance, but if Obama had been a non-viable candidate, there would have been no balance to shift and it would have done him as much good as it did Jesse Jackson or Dukakis.

Obama is in office because much of the country believes that he is a moderate and a centrist.

The left can get away with it because it talks centrist and lives radical. If the right is ever going to do better than another liberal Republican, its candidates are going to have to talk like liberal Republicans while legislating well to the right.

It is doable. Rand Paul has been doing the talking part well enough. Unfortunately he talks the talk so well because he actually is well to the left.

***

Do you believe IRS Commissioner John Koskinen’s claim that ordinary taxpayers can pull a Lois Lerner and claim that their dog at their hard drive, with all their tax relevant documents on it? No, I don’t either.

You know who Koskinen reminds me of? Lillian Hellman in the context of Mary McCarthy’s famous Hellman put-down: “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

***

Everyone is a’Twitter and a’Facebook about a Verizon ad claiming that it’s parents who are at fault for the fact that there aren’t more girls who are engineers. You see, they yell at their prepubescent daughters for committing acts of science instead of just being pretty. HuffPo did an entire post supporting the ad. The horror statistic is that, while 66% of 4th grade girls say that they like math and science, only 18% go on to become engineering majors.

I think that’s a bunch of garbage. Through the process of raising a boy and a girl, not to mention being surrounded by boys and girls, and having once been a girl myself, I know what happens between 4th grade and high school/college. Science and math transform from simplistic, teacher directed classroom exercises to becoming hardcore, data-rich, formula-driven, highly analytic problems.

During 4th grade, when girls are infinitely better than boys at sitting down and following directions, they shine with simplistic problems. However, as boys finally mature, their brains click into gear and enjoy the higher level work while the majority (not all, but the majority) of girls dislike the mental effort and rote memorization of the STEM subjects and prefer softer subjects that engage the verbal, artistic, and emotional parts of their brain.

Is the above a gross generalization? Yes, up to a point. There’s always a bell curve, with outliers, but the fact is that maturing girls draw away from STEM just as maturing boys are drawn to it — and this isn’t because 21st century girls are told to shut up and be pretty, but because that’s where their developing brains take them. And no, that’s not science talking. That’s living in the real world talking.

***

Use an obvious, albeit bloodthirsty metaphor opposing the party in power and end up in the mental hospital. Soviet Union? No. Obama’s America.

***

And some pictures:

Obama endowed by his creator

Obama's priorities

Obama's priorities 2

(Thanks to Earl and Sadie for their help assembling this round-up.)

Saturday evening round-up and Open Thread

by 22 Comments

Victorian posy of pansiesJust a few things that caught my eye as the day went by:

In one of his weirdly counter-productive defenses of Hillary, Bill said that there was nothing wrong with her — except that it took her six months to recover from her head injury after her fall.  That’s a serious recovery time.  Even when my mom fell and gave herself a brain bleed, once she had surgery to relieve the pressure on her brain, she recovered in much less time than six months.

People are carping at Rove for putting this issue out there, and I concede that he did it inartfully, but the public should be apprised of the status of Hillary’s brain in the event she runs. Much as the media may pretend that it’s still 1960, when they successfully covered up Kennedy’s serious illness and drug use, the internet gives the people a voice on important subjects such as a potential president’s physical and mental health.

***

All of my local Dem friends trust Jerry Brown, so I’m sure that they’re all good with him saying that, insofar as the new Bay Bridge span apparently has a serious design flaw, no one should worry. Maybe we shouldn’t, or maybe he’s just rearranging the deck chairs….

I’m not so sanguine about bridges in our earthquake rich territory. When I’m on them, I invariably drive too fast so that I can get off them as quickly as possible. I also have two of these in my car, in the unlikely event that I survive the moment (God forbid!) when my car plunges into the Bay.

***

Despite the fact that Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann sued Mark Steyn for daring to question his intelligence and veracity, Steyn has not been cowed. He’s not only counterclaimed, he also continues to challenge Mann’s “climate change” data, using the ever-increasing number of stories about failed predictions, hidden data, and McCarthyism. He’s at it again, in a wonderful post that touches upon the latest McCarthy-ite moment that proves that “climate science” isn’t a science at all but is, instead, a faith.

Incidentally, while you’re visiting Steyn’s site, if you have some change rattling around in your pocket, please consider donating to his legal defense fund. He’s fighting the good fight, but even the staunchest warrior needs cash.

***

I like Alex Trebek (that’s what thirty years of watching Jeopardy will do to you), so I was very pleased to see that he’s come out in favor of the Redskins keeping their name. His common sense, though, isn’t why I’m linking to this particular article. Instead, please note that, just as Voldemort’s name must go unspoken, so too has the Redskins’ name been stricken from the lexicon. That’s how you end up with incomprehensible sentences such as this one, quoting Trebek (who was making sense when he voiced it): ““They weren’t called the [WFT] because we thought [WFT] were terrible.”

Huh? WTF is a WFT? It turns out that an WFT the one and only “Washington Football Team,” formerly known as the “Redskins.” I preferred “the artist formerly known as ‘Prince.'” It had more of a ring to it.

We live in ridiculous times.

***

Andrew McCarthy is never better than when he’s writing what is essentially a prosecutor’s opening brief. And so it is with this article he wrote about the IRS scandal, a scandal that grows with every document produced. I, of course, will remind you all again that I said early on that the IRS scandal was the worst scandal ever in American history and I stick to that — especially as it’s becoming increasingly clear that this exercise in banana republic governance had its genesis in D.C., and quite high up in D.C. (as in “close to the President”).

***

The Left is starting to realize that both the IRS and the Benghazi scandals hit way to close to the President for anyone’s comfort (well, the comfort of anyone on the Left). That’s why the Financial Times announced today that the worst scandal for the President is the VA scandal (you know, the one where VA hospitals have been killing veterans by ignoring them to death). The VA scandal is heinous and disgusting. It stands as a savage indictment of both socialized medicine (which it is) and the American bureaucracy . . . but it doesn’t go up to the White House. Claiming that it’s the worst scandal for Obama is a red herring.

If you think I’m wrong about that interpretation, just consider the first paragraph in the FT article, which expressly warns people away from the genuinely serious stuff (emphasis mine):

Amid contrived outrage over Benghazi and the improving fortunes of its healthcare reform, the Obama administration could be facing a genuine scandal about its treatment of military veterans that has the potential to attract broad political condemnation of its competence.

That’s not journalism. That’s crisis management for the White House.

***

My husband brought the movie Philomena home from the library yesterday. I was going to write a scathing review, but I see that Kyle Smith got there before I did.

Even if every word of Philomena was the God’s honest truth (which apparently is not the case), it still is a nasty movie. The thing about movies such as this is that all nuns get tarred with the same brush. Think about it: If you see a movie about a woman who is a bad mother, or a bus driver who is rude, or a doctor who commits malpractice, you don’t immediately indict all mothers, bus drivers, or doctors. But a movie about bad nuns somehow creates the belief that all nuns are bad.

While I may be Jewish, I have a deep respect for nuns. During WWII, Belgian nuns sheltered my Jewish grandmother at great risk to themselves.  Moreover, when my mother was in the Japanese concentration camp, the Dutch nuns she was imprisoned with were gracious to all, including the Jewish prisoners. My mom still speaks fondly about their cheerfulness and helpfulness no matter how bad the circumstances were.

***

And finally, would the Atlantic have Photoshopped a picture of a watermelon into an article about Thurgood Marshall? I don’t think so. But they were willing to do this. Hey, isn’t that microaggression?

Friday morning round-up and Open Thread

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Victorian posy of pansiesGood stuff today. Really good stuff. Here goes:

Kevin D. Williamson says that the IRS scandal is the worst scandal ever in American politics, since it fundamentally undermines our form of government. I’m inclined to agree with him and would even go so far as to wonder whether he’s been reading my blog.

***

And while I’m on the subject of destroying our form of government, Barack Obama is again investigating whether the power to issue executive orders is actually the power to re-write entirely federal legislation to suit his own political purposes. The administration claims it’s contemplating this exercise of power because the current program is controversial — but it’s only controversial because there are a lot of people who want to grant de facto amnesty to illegal immigrants. Here’s the deal in America as it once was: if you didn’t like the law, you changed it through the legislative process. Only in banana republics do you let the Dear Leader ignore the law and do it his way.

***

Even if common core works perfectly in some pristine education program on an Ivy League campus, it’s a disaster in real life. H

Here’s a squirrely idea from me: One of the things that totalitarian governments do is separate children from the parents, either physically or emotionally. (Remember that Hitler’s Youth would turn in their own parents for infractions.) To the extent that common core makes it impossible for parents to help elementary school aged children with what used to be basic math problems, you have to wonder if a goal, or a pleasant by-product, of the Common Core program is that it makes children see their parents as stupid, unhelpful, and unreliable.

***

Hillary lies again, this time about Iran. You’d think Hillary would eventually wise up to the fact that, in an internet age, it takes minutes, not years, to expose blatant lies. Of course, she’s counting on the media to shelter her. That’s naive too. In 2008, the media dropped her in a New York minute when Barack came along last time around. It even seems as if Bill’s dropping her, and Keith Koffler amusingly ponders why that’s so.

Career overseas civil servants should also think about dumping Hillary. The DiploMad explains that she (and her whole State Department) broke the special bond between America and her employees overseas.

***

More and more people are catching on to the fact that the Left is entirely adolescent in its approach to itself and to world governance. Matthew Continetti applies that adolescent theory to the New York Times, which is caught up in a firestorm made up of allegations that it fired Jill Abrahamson, its first female executive because she complained about wage discrimination. (And isn’t that irony lovely from a paper that carries the Democrats’ water on the wage discrimination campaign issue?)

***

Everything you need to know about life in Obama’s America: The same Pentagon that is actively or passively responsible for the VA program that intentionally killed veterans through neglect is working hard to get a sex change operation for convicted traitor Bradley Manning.

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Meanwhile, the insanity on America’s college campuses continues. This time, a college is dropping “hump day,” because the camel theme (complete with a camel petting zoo) is seen as disrespectful to Arab culture.

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What it’s like to be a voter in Chicago.

***

And finally, a look into the ugly heart of ProgressiveLand:

Monday morning round-up and Open Thread

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Victorian posy of pansiesI’m still clearing out the inbox, but I’ve also got some current stuff in here, so I consider this a round-up. I’ll just dive in, with the stuff presented here in pretty random order:

Last Sunday, a New York Times op-ed addressed “Why People Don’t Donate Their Kidneys.” Sally Satel, the author, recognized that we don’t want to pay people for body parts, but thinks that she’s figured out a clever way around it by giving them non-cash rewards. Frankly, that strikes me as the same immorality, just wearing different clothes.

I suspect people don’t donate their kidneys for the same reason I haven’t: People like having a back-up system. They like knowing that, if one kidney fails, they’ve got another one available, instead of having to depend on the kindness of strangers. That investment in a back-up changes when the kidney donation becomes personal.  That happens when the kidney donee is a family member, close friend, or even a stranger who touched a chord in the donor. Without that personal touch, people kind of like to hang on to the spare.

***

Have you heard of Archbishop John Joseph Hughes, aka “Dagger” John, aka the first Catholic Archbishop of New York?  I hadn’t, so I found absolutely fascinating this City Journal article about the way in which he brought discipline and purpose to the vast cadre of lawless, self-destructive Irish immigrants who had been so deeply traumatized by the horrors of the famine in Ireland and the societal disintegration that followed in its wake:

Hughes’s solution for his flock’s social ills was to re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner, moral transformation in them, which he believed would solve their social problems in the end. He put the ultimate blame for their condition squarely on the historical oppression they had suffered at the hands of the English, which he said had caused them “to pass away from the faith of their ancestors,” robbing them of the cultural heritage that should have guided their behavior. But that was in the past: now it was time for them to regain what they had lost. So he bought abandoned Protestant church buildings in Irish wards, formed parish churches, and sent in parish priests on a mission of urban evangelization aimed at giving the immigrants a faith-based system of values.

With unerring psychological insight, Hughes had his priests emphasize religious teachings perfectly attuned to re-socializing the Irish and helping them succeed in their new lives. It was a religion of personal responsibility that they taught, stressing the importance of confession, a sacrament not widely popular today—and unknown to many of the Irish who emigrated during the famine, most of whom had never received any religious education. The practice had powerful psychological consequences. You cannot send a friend to confess for you, nor can you bring an advocate into the confessional. Once inside the confessional, you cannot discuss what others have done to you but must clearly state what you yourself have done wrong. It is the ultimate taking of responsibility for one’s actions; and it taught the Irish to focus on their own role in creating their misfortune.

How do we respiritualize a society that seems, lately, to concern itself solely with sexual license? It can be done, you know. Hughes did it with the Irish immigrants. The Victorians (especially the Evangelical movement) did it as a response to the worst excesses of the Georgian and Regency eras. Presumably, we can do it too.

***

The Daily Mail’s profile of Lt. John Randall, the first member of the Allied troops to enter Bergen Belsen is a useful reminder that “Holocaust denial” means denying the reality of the past, one that was experienced by millions, witnessed by thousands, and proudly documented by its perpetrators. In this regard, it differs from “climate change denial,” which involves rejecting a predictive theory that, so far, has been wrong approximately 90% of the time.

***

Apropos that whole climate change thing, you can get a good insight here into the hoax that serial liar Michael Mann perpetrated with his famed hockey stick graph, a graph to which the Left still clings to “prove” that climate change is real.

***

When Hillary came to the Bay Area in early April, John, of The City Square, was there to record the protests. Should Hillary run in 2016, she will face a lot of opposition, based upon a long history of dubious, frequently immoral, and possibly criminal behavior. Benghazi is just the exclamation point to a long, unsavory career.

***

The reliably Leftist, tax-payer funded NPR just hired a new, reliably Leftist CEO. What I found so amusing was the WaPo’s article about his hiring, which expressed surprise and dismay that NPR had problems sticking to its budget (emphasis mine):

[Jarl] Mohn, who has a reputation as a turnaround specialist, will inherit an organization that has been battling persistent operating deficits. It is projecting a deficit of $6.1 million in its current fiscal year, or a little more than 3 percent of its projected revenue of $178 million. The gap between revenue and expenses led NPR to offer buyouts to its 840 employees in September, in an effort to pare about 10 percent of its staff.

Could it be that NPR has operating deficits because it knows that, unlike an actual business, its deficits are meaningless? A real business goes under when it has chronic deficits. A government-funded business simply gets more money from the government. And yes, NPR likes to point out that it gets a large part of its budget from corporate and individual donations, but the fact is, it knows that the government will always be there to bail it out.

***

The Left is all about its fealty to science . . . until that fealty clashes with political correctness. When that happens, it’s under the bus for you. In this case, the sinner is long-time New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, who looks at differing genetic data in sub-Saharan Africans and reaches non-PC conclusions. His conclusions could be entirely wrong, of course, but Leftists won’t debate him, they’ll just erase him.  (Remember, on the Left, the debate is always over.)

As someone who believes in evolution, I’ve also assumed that certain tribes have, over the centuries, encouraged certain traits. For example, in societies where hunting prey (and running fast so as not to become prey) are necessary for survival, those who successfully passed their DNA down would have been the fast runners, not the slow. With the DNA inheritance, you would soon have a tribe composed of very fast people. Jews, when viewed as a tribe, have always centered their lives around the Bible.  It therefore makes sense that those with a certain academic bent would be most successful in passing on their DNA. The result would be that Jews would excel at tasks requiring an academic bent.  Even Hollywood is an example of genetic selection. For decades, starting in the 1920s, many of the most attractive people in America poured into that city. Most never ended up in pictures. Instead, they married each other and created generations of good-looking Southern California kids with straight noses, good jaw lines, and great figures.

***

In case you didn’t know, Ambassador Christopher Stevens wasn’t “murdered.” Nope. According to “journalist” and Democrat party shill Eleanor Clift, he died of smoke inhalation after a movie review ran amok. You and I are now thinking, “How can anyone still parrot that line after the revelation about the Ben Rhodes Benghazi email? She must be really stupid.” She’s not. We’re stupid. Clift understands the whole concept of the Big Lie, and recognizes that it will still work if you’re the party that controls the media.

***

I know nothing about football, but I posited yesterday that Michael Sam was going to be trouble for the Rams. Jazz Shaw, who does know something about football, agrees. Moreover, he does so for the same reason I gave: unless the Rams treat Sam like the crown prince of the game, they’re going to get raked over the coals in the media (which, after all, is their conduit to the money people pay).  As it is, the “re-education” has already started.

***

Ruth Wisse, one of the few conservative professors at Harvard, writes a powerful opinion piece about the closing of the academic mind. Today’s students will not speak out. They’ve been taught that they’re worthless (“check your privilege at the door”), and their professors are impenetrably wrapped up in their self-righteous and invariably vindictive Leftism.

***

I’ve stated repeatedly that one of the things that turned me away from my staunch pro-choice position was the pro-death attitude that permeates the abortion rights movement. Andrew Klavan, another former pro-abortion person, comments on the same thing, but more powerfully than I could.

***

My friend Gary Buslik has written two hysterically funny books: Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls: A Novel of International Intrigue, Pork-Crazed Termites, and Motherhood and A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it’s Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen. He recently got interviewed over at “Divorced Girl Smiling” and, as you can probably guess, the interview is laugh out loud funny. I found especially amusing the bit about cats and high heels, in part because of this picture, which has been making the rounds on Facebook:

Dog in heels

***

And finally, from Prager University, a short lesson about forgiveness. There was nothing new in it for me, but I liked how well-organized it was, and I especially liked the reminder that forgiveness is psychology important, not just for the person seeking forgiveness but, in certain circumstances, for the one doing the forgiving: