August 8, 2020 — Steven Hayward
This especially fast-paced edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour with “Lucretia,” Power Line’s International Woman of Mystery, gets off track right at the start, when an incidental mention of the famous 1978 Bakke case turned into an extended revisionist “what if?” thought experiment and all around rant. From there we turn our attention to logging the accelerating BGR (short for “Biden Gaffe Rate”), which reached two-a-day by the end
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August 8, 2020 — Steven Hayward
According to the polls Joe Biden has a big lead over Trump, but I seem to recall a candidate once before named Joe (Lieberman), who claimed some early successes gave him “Joe-mentum,” right before his campaign crashed and burned. Say what you will about Trump discovering “Yo-semitism” or “Thighland” (isn’t that a club in Vegas?), but if Biden keeps stumbling at the rate he did this week, watch suppositories sell
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August 7, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Readers periodically suggest adding a “Videos of the Week” feature to go along with the Week in Pictures, and though I have thought about this from time to time, I’ve usually concluded that the required time commitment of sitting through even a short collection of videos wouldn’t have the same frisson as TWiP. But we’ll still gladly post videos as they arise on individual merit. And I think I’ve found
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August 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Well, this didn’t take long. To paraphrase the Sundance Kid: Keep digging Joe. It’s what you’re good at. I expect there will be a lot of Tweets like this over the next three months.
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August 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Slow Joe did it again today. Take in this 15-second clip and listen carefully to his implication about black Americans: By the way, hasn’t someone on his staff told him you’re supposed to say “Latinx” now, like 99 percent of woke whites but only 2 percent of actual Latinos? No wonder Democrats and the media are so desperate to get Biden out of having to debate Trump. Chaser on this
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August 6, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Herewith a chart-heavy roundup about a lot of things in motion at the moment. • The latest campaign contribution report shows the Trump campaign and the RNC outraised Biden and the Democrats over the last quarter. But this chart shows Trump TV ad spending falling off a cliff. Is this a sign of campaign disarray (Trump did, after all, fire Brad Parscale recently), or regrouping for a new line of attack?
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August 5, 2020 — Steven Hayward
If you want to know just how ancient Joe Biden is, take in Johnny Carson nailing him back in 1987 (30 seconds): And then Robin Williams sometime around 2012 or so (language warning—also just 30 seconds):
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August 5, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Prof. Josh Dunn of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs brought my attention to a nasty review of Thomas Sowell’s 2010 book Intellectuals and Society by Aidan Byrne, a Senior Lecturer in English and Media/Cultural Studies at Wolverhampton University in Britain. It was published online in 2012 on a well-read site of the London School of Economics. Byrne didn’t like Sowell’s arguments at all. According to Byrne it suffers from “a
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August 5, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Gallup has a new poll out today with the headline “Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence.” This headline understates the findings a bit, as the summary says “most [blacks] (81%) want police to spend same amount of or more time in their area.” (The actual numbers are 61% same; 20 percent more time.) The Gallup report, part of its new initiative called the Gallup Center on Black Voices,
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August 5, 2020 — Steven Hayward
• So the news out this morning is that Joe Biden won’t travel to Milwaukee to accept the Democratic nomination later this month. Because COVID. Question: If Biden wins the election, will he come to Washington to be inaugurated on January 20? Or will he be sworn in by a local justice of the peace and conduct his administration from his Delaware basement? I expect the Trump campaign can make
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Not long ago UC Hastings School of Law, as well-regarded law school in downtown San Francisco, sued the city because local neighborhood conditions had deteriorated to the point that the law school was losing prospective students who took one look at the place and said, “No, thanks!” Hastings is a very liberal law school—I don’t think they have a single conservative on their faculty—but as Robert Conquest reminded us, everyone
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
With talk of ordering more widespread shutdowns to fight the resurgence of COVID-19 cases, it is worth taking note of a paper released over the weekend on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by Prof. Christian Bjørnskov of Aarhus University in Denmark. The paper is “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison.” The abstract is both direct and concise (a rarity in academic writing): I explore the association between the
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August 4, 2020 — Steven Hayward
You know who doesn’t suffer from “white fragility”? J.P. Sears, that’s who. Here in this 5-minute video, J.P. offers his short course in attaining a Ph.D in “White Wokeology,” which you get through Twitter University (though he doesn’t actually say where the program is accredited). I can’t believe J.P. hasn’t been rounded up and sent to a sensitivity training relocation camp in Cambridge or somewhere.
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August 3, 2020 — Steven Hayward
I know there are thousands of crazy Tweets available every minute of the day, but this thread, from a certified blue check marker (a “national correspondent” for The Week), is certifiably demented: Here’s the news story behind it. By the way, only “hundreds” of conservatives buying pickups? Um, I have some news for Mr. Cooper (or is it Ms. Cooper?). Meanwhile, just to brighten your day, watch carefully at about
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August 3, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Everyone is familiar with stories of dumb criminals, like the person who calls an Uber for a bank robbery getaway car, but in fact most criminals are like everyone else: they respond rationally to calculations of risk and reward. And with current attack on policing advancing relentlessly, does it take a rocket scientist to know what message this sends to criminals? As such why is this a front-page headline: Homicide
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August 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
Watching the literally insane behavior on display in places like Portland and Seattle has prompted a lot of observers to suggest that many of the Antifa mobs suffer from mental illness. This is a thesis we talked about here back in April in “Does Liberalism Cause Mental Illness?“, in which I passed along some of the survey data Zach Goldberg at Georgia State had turned up and analyzed. One of
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August 2, 2020 — Steven Hayward
America’s newspaper of record—which is the Babylon Bee of course—is out with the headline, “Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close to a VP Pick He Can Smell Her.” The Bee really needs to stop scooping the New York Times. In any case, in this episode of the weekend happy hour Lucretia and I survey the box canyon Biden has got himself into by pledging to pick a woman running
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