Monthly Archives: June 2017
June 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Earlier this month, a North Carolina woman named Kayla Hart entered a Starbucks coffee shop in Charlotte, North Carolina wearing a pro-Trump T-shirt. According to Hart, Starbucks employees laughed at and taunted her. They shouted “build a wall” and shoved her drink at her. The label on the drink said “build that wall” in the place where her name should have been. The baristas in the back cracked up. Hunt
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June 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced that there would be no Senate vote on Obamcare reform legislation this week. Instead, the Senate will take up the matter of reforming Obamacare in July. Also yesterday, GOP Senators met with President Trump at the White House. The purpose was to see how the pending bill might be altered so as to get at least 50 of the 52 Republicans to vote “yes.”
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June 28, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I didn’t think it was possible to write a better satire of postmodernism as applied to the hard sciences than Alan Sokal’s great hoax on Social Text 20 years ago. But I have found a contender . . . Wait a minute. I think this article is for real, in Ethnic and Racial Studies: Racial physics or a theory for everything that happened Marcus Anthony Hunter [Sociologist—natch—at UCLA] Abstract This political
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June 28, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I often grab an old, forgotten book to take with me on overseas trips, and for my current trip I grabbed Max Eastman’s Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. Eastman is one of those mostly forgotten figures from the first half of the 20th century who left Communism and became a conservative of a kind. Eastman had been, for a time, the editor of The Masses, and later The Liberator—both
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June 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The ongoing “Minnesota cage match” is now venued before Judge John Guthmann in St. Paul. The city of St. Paul sits in Ramsey County. The Minnesota House and Senate filed their lawsuit against Governor Dayton and his commissioner of management and budget in Ramsey County District Court, within shouting distance of the state capitol. In writing about the lawsuit yesterday I misspelled “Ramsey” as “Rasmey.” A friend wrote to note
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June 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
In 2010, 2014, and (arguably) 2016, America elected Republicans because they wanted Obamacare repealed and replaced. They did not elect Republicans to revamp Medicaid. In fact, candidate Trump said he would not cut the program. Yet, neither the House nor the Senate health care bill repeals and replaces Obamacare. And both revamp Medicaid. Not wise. This is not to say that Medicaid won’t need to be revamped. It will. But
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June 27, 2017 — John Hinderaker
It’s been a tough couple of days for CNN. Yesterday, the network announced the resignation (firing, I assume) of three journalists–Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times, Thomas Frank, and the head of the network’s new investigative unit, Lex Haris. They published a Russia/Trump story that turned out to be false (embarrassingly so, the quality of the reporting was abysmal) and had to be retracted by CNN.
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June 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
I have been threatening for a few years now to write a book with the title Bureaucracy in America, which would attempt to do for our administrative state what Tocqueville’s Democracy in America did in the 19th century—explain the deeper cultural and philosophical aspects of the practice of American democracy. For it is Tocqueville who offers the preface to a serious reconsideration of our administrative state today, in his famous
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June 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
I wrote about the ongoing cage match between Minnesota Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Minnesota’s majority-Republican House and Senate here. Governor Dayton really doesn’t play well with others of the opposing party. We have all learned to tread lightly in his vicinity. His feathers are easily ruffled. At the end of this year’s slightly extended legislative session Dayton signed all tax and budget bills. He could have vetoed any of
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June 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
We know that President Obama had it in for Gen. Michael Flynn. The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was a persistent critic of Obama’s feckless policies, especially regarding ISIS. Obama reportedly advised president-elect Trump not to offer Flynn a high level position. According to this report from Circa, the FBI’s Andrew McCabe also had an ax to grind with Flynn. A few years ago, Robyn Gritz, a supervisory
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June 27, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Project Veritas, James O’Keefe’s project, has video of a senior CNN producer admitting that his network’s relentless coverage of the alleged Trump-Russia scandal lacked substance. “Mostly bulls**t” is producer John Bonifield’s apt description. Bonifield is also clear about the motive for pushing the bulls**t story. “Our ratings are incredible right now,” he exclaims. Bonifield notes that at a staff meeting, CNN’s CEO congratulated his reporters for their coverage of the
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June 27, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Seeking to distinguish herself from Attorney General Sessions, who explained that previously undisclosed encounters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak had taken place as a part of his routine senatorial duties, Claire McCaskill all but accused Sessions of lying. McCaskill wanted it to be known that, despite her membership with Sessions on the Armed Services Committee, she had never suffered such a close encounter either in person or by telephone despite
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June 27, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Scott has rightly nominated the demagogic hucksters at the Southern Poverty Law Center as our leading hate group, but the SPLC certainly has a lot of competition from other liberals who want the title for themselves. Start with the organizers of the gay pride parade in Chicago over the weekend who expelled a Jewish gay pride group because their Star of David pride flag (see left) is “oppressive.” As William
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June 26, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I don’t know. I don’t watch women’s college sports, and thus have no opinion. But Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post has one. She sees a problem: The data shows that since. . .2012, female athletes have become more anxious, more prone to depression, less adult and more insecure than ever before. What is up with that? According to a 2016 NCAA survey, 76 percent of all Division I female
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June 26, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Former CIA analyst Nada Bakos claims to be worried that President Trump’s tweets are a gold mine for foreign spies. Writing in the Washington Post, she explains: Usually, intelligence officers’ efforts to collect information on world leaders are methodical, painstaking and often covert. CIA operatives have risked their lives to learn about foreign leaders so the United States could devise strategies to counter our adversaries. With Trump, though, secret operations
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June 26, 2017 — John Hinderaker
The Free Beacon has an interesting story, based on interviews of unnamed Trump administration officials, about the Obama minions, some still embedded in the bureaucracy, who are leaking furiously to the Washington Post and the New York Times: A new wave of leaks targeting the Trump administration has actively endangered ongoing intelligence and military operations being conducted by the United States and its allies, sparking anger and concern inside and
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June 26, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Well not quite gravity, but close enough for post-modernist work. You know how liberals like to attach taxes on cigarettes so we’ll buy fewer of them, and on alcohol so we’ll drink less, etc? Funny, though, how the basic lesson of supply and demand and price sensitivity falls by the wayside when it comes to the minimum wage. We’ve commented on this invincible ignorance repeatedly (such as here, here, here,
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