Thoughts on Politics, Culture, Books, Sports and Anything Else Your Humble Author Happens to Think Is Interesting
"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."
Mad Men is both very good television and the most frustrating show on the air, probably for the same reason.... it never gives you what you expect. After last week's jump-the-shark Ginzberg's nipple moment, and after a season where the character who witnesses the horror, Peggy Olson, has been mostly angry and whiny, last night brought her back to her better self, working alongside Don Draper on an ad campaign and enjoying the hell out of it.
Peggy is, of course, played by the great Elizabeth Moss, who also moonlights in a very good detective show set in New Zealand called Top of the Lake.
In the category of Stories-That-We-Are-Hearing-Too-Much, a few days ago I saw this story on Glenn Beck's The Blaze:
On Thursday, May 15, Sudanese Christian Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, was sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of apostasy.
Ibrahim, a physician who graduated from the University of Khartoum Medical School, refused to renounce her Christian faith. The Islamist Khartoum regime claims that Ibrahim is a Muslim because her father, who abandoned the family when she was six years old, was a Muslim. Ibrahim, however, embraced for herself the faith of her Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother.
Independent Online noted that Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa told Ibrahim, addressing her by her father's Muslim name Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah:
We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged to death.
The judge reportedly instructed that her execution be carried out once the child has been weened but that she receive the 100 lashes for adultery soon after she gives birth. Morning Star News also reported that attorneys will file an appeal of the sentence on Sunday, May 18. This will put off execution of the sentence, including the flogging, until there is a ruling.
Ibrahim is married to Daniel Wani, an American citizen from South Sudan who came to the United States in 1998. She is in her ninth month of pregnancy with the couple’s second child. Their firstborn, Martin, 20 months, is imprisoned with his mother -- Sudanese authorities prohibit the Christian man from caring for his son. Wani has been prevented from seeing his wife and child since she was arrested along with her toddler son, but reports that she has not received proper medical care for complications from her pregnancy.
The correct solution is the one offered by Sir Charles James Napier, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India in the mid-19th Century. When confronted with the issue of Hindus burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, he replied: "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
The United States should not countenance the flogging or hanging of Christian women (and particularly Christian women married to U.S. citizens) for the crime of being Christian. Period. President Obama should announce that, if Mrs. Wani is not released within 24 hours, it will declare the Sudanese government an Islamist terrorist organization, and will immediately issue Presidential Directives ordering drones strikes on the presiding judge and prosecutor in her case.
They have a custom. We have ours. And our customs have high technology behind them.
Nancy Pelosi is a former Speaker of the House. So when she leads other Democrats in calling the Select Committee named by John Boehner to investigate the Benghazi scandal a "kangaroo court" she is doing something that is extraordinarily dangerous to the future of democracy. What she is essentially saying is that the Constitution, which created a House of Representatives and gave it an oversight function within our system of checks and balances, doesn't matter; that the people, who voted in each and every one of the Republican majority, don't matter; and, ultimately, that the rule of law doesn't matter.
Webster's defines a "kangaroo court" as one "in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted"; or one "characterized by irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular status or procedures." Does she really believe that the House Select Committee, chaired by Trey Gowdy, a former federal and state prosecutor, will "disregard" or "pervert" principles of law or justice? Does she really believe that the Committee will be characterized by "irresponsible, unauthorized or irregular" procedures? If so, what procedures is she talking about? Identify them, and perhaps they can be remedied.
Here's the nut of the matter: does she really believe that it is somehow illegal for the House to investigate the Benghazi scandal? If not, she should shut up about "kangaroo courts."
I'm sorry, but if these are your top 10 players, the PGA is going to wither and die as a major sport:
1. Bubba Watson
2. Jimmy Walker
3. Dustin Johnson
4. Matt Kuchar
5. Patrick Reed
6. Jordan Spieth
7. Harris English
8. Zach Johnson
9. Chris Kirk
10. Ryan Moore
Seriously, would you be able to identify any of these guys walking through an airport?
Golf, which before Tiger Woods was a boring white guys sport has now become, in Tiger's absence... a boring white guys sport.
The Regular Son had a smart observation a couple of weeks ago about the new season of Mad Men, which has been pretty flat so far. He noted that the attraction of the early seasons had a lot to do with the look of the early 1960s, which was stylish in a Sinatraesque way. But the later seasons, as they move into the late 1960s, are much uglier to look at, and thus less entertaining. He's a painter, so his experience is more visual than mine, but I think he's right here. The writing of the show hasn't gotten significantly worse... maybe it wasn't that great all along. But the original look was fantastic, and the new look of the show is not. Ask yourself the question:
This is the sort of analysis (from NRO) that mainstream media outlets ought to engage in every time they are asked to print as "news" some press release from a liberal administration:
The Obama administration has released the names of 55 colleges and universities that it is investigating over their sexual-assault policies, part of an accelerating campaign against universities for allegedly turning a blind eye to the purported epidemic of campus rape. The list is top-heavy with the elite of the elite — Harvard, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Dartmouth, among others. A more deserving group of victims would be hard to find.
Parroting over 20 years worth of feminist propagandizing, the White House claims nearly 20 percent of female college undergraduates are sexually assaulted during their college years. To put that number in perspective: Detroit residents have been fleeing the city for years due to its infamous violent crime. And what constitutes an American urban crime wave? In 2012, Detroit’s combined rate for all four violent felonies that make up the FBI’s violent-crime index — murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — was 2 percent. The rape rate was 0.05 percent. And yet, despite an alleged campus sexual-assault rate that is 400 times greater than Detroit’s, female applicants are beating down the doors of selective colleges in record numbers.
And then they ought to refuse to credit as newsworthy such patent nonsense. If 20% of the daughters of the affluent upper middle class and upper class parents who send their kids to Ivy League type schools were being raped, there would be thousands of affluent young men in prison, and those parents would be fleeing those schools for safer environs. None of that is happening.
I've said before here (and many others have said) that the job numbers reported every month are somewhat misleading. Politicians will tout as a "good" job number when the economy creates 150,000 or 200,000 new jobs. But those figures are gross numbers and are meaningless except in relation to the size of the country, which is always growing. 150,000 jobs in a country of 30 million is a significant boom; 150,000 jobs in a country of 300 million is barely keeping up with population growth.
To get a real sense of how the economy is growing or not growing, you thus have to "net out" population growth. Here's a neat graph that compares the Reagan recovery of the early 1980s to the Obama recovery in terms of job growth adjusted to net out population growth:
Seems pretty obvious whose recovery was robust and whose recovery was weak. The fact that their policies were so different should suggest the failure of Obama's big government/Keynesian-socialist solutions to economics. That is, if people can learn from history. Which is not always the case, sadly.
Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt. An extraordinarily useful and instructive timeline on the Benghazi scandal:
March 2011: U.S. secretly approves arms shipments from Qatar to Libyan rebels.
May 2011: Al-Qaeda flags raised over Benghazi.
November 2011: Rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi admits a significant number of Libyan rebels were al-Qaeda fighters who fought American troops in Iraq.
April 19, 2012: State Department rejects ambassador to Libya’s request for more security personnel.
June 20, 2012: Assassination attempt on the British Ambassador to Libya.
July 9, 2012: Ambassador Stevens asks the State Department for more security personnel.
August 8, 2012: The number of security personnel at Benghazi reduced by State Department.
August 16, 2012: U.S. Site Security in Benghazi alerts the State Department that conditions are perilous.
September 4–6, 2012: Democratic National Convention (“al-Qaeda decimated; bin Laden is dead and GM is alive; al-Qaeda is on the run”).
September 11, 2012: Ambassador Stevens alerts the State Department that conditions in Benghazi are deteriorating.
3:40 p.m. (D.C. time): Stevens calls deputy chief of mission Greg Hicks in Tripoli and alerts him that the consulate in Benghazi is under attack.
4:00 p.m.: The White House is advised that the consulate is under attack. 10th Special Forces Group in Croatia is three hours away; Brigadier General (Ret.) Robert Lovell, Deputy Director of Intelligence for AFRICOM, later testifies that intelligence knew immediately that it was not a protest but a terrorist attack; no request for aid comes from the State Department.
5:00 p.m.: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta discusses attack with President Obama.
6:00 p.m.: U.S. Embassy in Tripoli advises the White House and the State Department that al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia has claimed responsibility for the attack. CIA deputy director Mike Morrell later testifies that “analysts knew from the get-go that al Qaeda was involved with this attack.”
8:00 p.m.: Greg Hicks calls Clinton and tells her that consulate is under terrorist attack.
10:00 p.m.: Clinton and Obama talk.
10:30 p.m.: Clinton issues a statement linking the attack to an inflammatory internet video.
11:00–11:30p.m.: Former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Ty Woods killed.
September 12, 2012: Redacted e-mail from a State Department official says the official advised the Libyan government that the attack was carried out by Ansar al-Sharia. No mention of video.
September 12–15, 2012: CIA drafts several iterations of talking points; contains no known references to video as cause of the attack.
September 13, 2012: State Department memo blames the attack on terrorists.
September 13, 2012: Defense Intelligence Agency assigns blame for the attack on Ansar al-Sharia in Libya. No mention of a video.
September 13, 2012: Clinton condemns violence against U.S. consulate in Libya due to a video.
September 13, 2012: Jay Carney condemns attack due to a video.
September 14, 2012: State Department says the attack was a spontaneous demonstration due to a video.
September 14, 2012: Obama and Clinton receive the families of the fallen as their caskets arrive at Andrews Air Force Base; blame the attack on a video. Clinton tells Ty Woods’s father, Charles, that they will “get” the producer of the video.
September 14, 2012: Jay Carney blames the video.
September 14, 2012, 8:00 p.m.: Deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes sends an e-mail regarding the preparation of Susan Rice for the Sunday talk shows, advising Rice to underscore the video and that the attack is “not a broader failure of policy.”
September 15, 2012: Obama blames the video.
September 16, 2012: Susan Rice appears on five Sunday talk shows and characterizes the attacks as a spontaneous reaction due to a video.
September 16, 2012: Libyan president disputes Rice’s comments, asserting Benghazi was a planned attack.
September 18, 2012: Obama appears on the David Letterman show, blames the video.
September 19, 2012: The head of the National Counterterrorism Center testifies that the attack was not a protest but a terrorist attack.
September 20, 2012: Obama blames the video.
September 20, 2012: Obama and Clinton run an ad on Pakistani TV apologizing for the video.
September 21, 2012: Clinton says it was a terrorist attack.
September 24, 2012: Obama appears on The View, blames the video.
October 4, 2012: Clinton establishes the Accountability Review Board (“ARB”) to examine the circumstances surrounding the loss of personnel in Benghazi. Clinton not interviewed by ARB.
October 11, 2012: At the vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden claims the administration was not informed about requests for more security at the consulate in Benghazi.
October 16, 2012: Obama, in a response to a question from a reporter about whether he denied requests for aid to Benghazi on September 11 responds, “The minute I found out this was going on, I gave three directives. Number one, make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we are going to investigate exactly what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so that we can bring them to justice.”
October 18, 2012: Judicial Watch makes a Freedom of Information Act request to the administration for talking points and communications regarding the events in Benghazi. The administration ignores the request.
October 20, 2012: Obama claims that he was not aware of any requests for additional security in Benghazi.
January 23, 2013: Clinton asks, “What difference, at this point, does it make whether it was a terrorist attack or a spontaneous demonstration?”
June 21, 2013: Judicial Watch sues the administration for unlawfully withholding documents pertaining to Benghazi.
July 25, 2013: Obama slams the “endless parade of distractions, political posturing, and phony scandals.”
August 2013: The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requests Benghazi e-mails. The Ben Rhodes e-mail is not among those produced.
April 18, 2014: Federal court orders the administration to turn over documents to Judicial Watch. 41 documents are released, including the Ben Rhodes e-mail.
May 1, 2014: Tommy Vietor tells Fox News the president was not in the Situation Room on September 11, 2012.
May 2, 2014: Speaker John Boehner announces a vote to form a select committee on Benghazi.
May 4, 2014: Representative Adam Schiff (D.., Calif.), member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggests Democrats boycott the House select committee as a “colossal waste of time.”
May 5, 2014: Carney will not say whether White House will cooperate with the select committee.
Judicial Watch has uncovered, through a FOIA request, what many today are calling the "smoking gun" on Benghazi, at least in terms of how the Obama Administration sought to pin blame on a silly Internet video for what they already knew was a terrorist attack. Here is the email. Note that the recipients are all people like Dan Pfeiffer and David Plouffe, political hacks on the Obama permanent campaign, not foreign service officers or foreign policy experts. It was always already about politics, and saving the President's campaign of lies:
By the way, Plouffe and Pfeiffer are relatively young guys, 38 and 46, who by my reading of their resumes have never done a single thing outside of political campaigns. Neither have advanced degrees, and while I don't generally like credentialism, it does suggest something that they've never achieved much of anything intellectually and have never had gainful employment in the private sector either. That these lightweights are both "senior advisors" to Obama also suggests something about the type of people Obama likes to have around him.
UPDATE:The author of the email, Ben Rhodes, has a background that makes me cringe. This is from his Wikipedia entry:
Rhodes grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended the exclusive Collegiate School, graduating in 1996. Rhodes then attended Rice University, graduating in 2000 with majors in English and political science. He then moved back to New York, attending New York University and graduating in 2002 with an MFA in creative writing.
A rich (Upper East Side), preppy ("the exclusive Collegiate School") who wasn't smart enough apparently to get into an Ivy, so he went to Rice to be an English major, then took a creative writing MFA. Wow! Is there any company in America that would think that's someone I want running my business? But that's who Obama chooses to surround himself with.... a 37 year-old who has never done much of anything except write speeches for politicians. What on earth is he doing within a hundred miles of American foreign policy?
Oh, his brother is the President of CBS News. Hmmmm....
***
Oh, and isn't it interesting that the "paper of record," the New York Times, does not cover this breaking news story at all? Nada, not a word.
Face it, they are no longer a news organization. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama Left. They are Pravda.
Of course, this is the paper that employed Walter Duranty to write fairy tales about the Ukrainian terror famine in the 1930s, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised.
Apparently the newest putdown on college campuses is for women and minorities to tell white males to "check your privilege!" The point, like so much that passes for liberalism or progressivism these days, is to quash dissent from the liberal orthodoxy... a white male's opinion or accomplishments, being inherently biased by or produced by his "white privilege," must be discounted and dismissed a priori. If a government did this, we'd call it a "prior restraint" on expression. When private individuals do it to their fellow students, it's just bad manners. When professors permit it in their classes, it's pedagogical malpractice.
Anyway, a Princeton freshman named Tal Fortgang somewhat courageously (I wouldn't have had the balls to do it when I was a freshman there in 1977... but then it was a different time) has decided to fight back. Here's the money passage from his very well-written article:
I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential.Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
The two big stories dominating today are the lifetime ban the NBA gave to Donald Sterling, the Clippers' owner, for what to my ear were mildly racist comments he made during a private conversation that was illegally recorded then leaked to the media; and the discovery of emails showing the White House's manipulation of the Benghazi story. Why are they the same story?
Consider... this man is now under a lifetime ban from a business he was involved with for 33 years because he said something that offended a particular group (African-Americans).
And this man, the "director" of the Internet video that Obama blamed for Benghazi, went to jail for nearly a year... again because his expressions (via the video) offended a particular group (Muslims).
Now, again, I hold no brief for either men. Sterling is a boor and Mark Basselly Youssef (the creator of the Innocence of the Muslims video) is a no-talent hack who appears to have gone out of his way to make something offensive.
But in both cases all they did was engage in expression, which ought to be protected under the First Amendment. Yet, in both cases, they were essentially demonized by powerful, billion-dollar enterprises, the NBA for Sterling, the Obama campaign for Youssef. Why? Because they offended people? Well, maybe.
But mostly... because they hurt the brand. Sterling hurt the potential sales of the product called NBA basketball. Youssef was a necessary scapegoat to ensure the reelection of the product called Barack Obama.
Two stories in the past week struck me as being essentially about the same thing, although I'm pretty certain no one noticed it.
The first story had to do with the announcement (in a press conference) that Chelsea Clinton is 16 weeks pregnant, and the subsequent outpouring (read: gushing) of celebratory coverage by the mainstream media. Now, I don't want to be unnecessarily harsh. Having children is a great thing, and the happiness they bring is something that we ought to celebrate. But there's a few things that bother me about the way this story was presented, both by the Clintons and by the media. More on that below.
The second story is frankly much harder to take, and even revolting:
Wannabe celebrity Josie Cunningham last night confessed the chance of appearing on TV’s Big Brother was worth more than her unborn child’s life.
Puffing on a cigarette and rubbing her baby bump, the controversial model and call girl – who will have her abortion at a clinic this week – said: “I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I’m not going to ruin it now.
“An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.”
Josie, 23, is already 18 weeks pregnant by either an escort agency client or a Premier League footballer. But she claims her late life-or-death decision has nothing to do with who the father is.
She says it is based on the breakdown of negotiations with Channel 5 to appear on the reality show.
Josie – who caused outrage in 2013 when she demanded a £4,800 boob job on the NHS to become a glamour model – said: “Channel 5 were keen to shortlist me then they found out I was pregnant.
"Then they suddenly turned cold. That was when I started considering an abortion. After the operation I will be going back to them and asking if they will still consider me.
“I’ve also had loads of other offers to further my career – and I’m not willing to give them up because I’m pregnant.”
Well! In addition to being a viscerally repellent skank, this young lady also wins the prize for most disgustingly immoral. I'm pretty sure every thinking adult person, left or right, liberal or conservative, even pro-choice and pro-life, would read that and come to the same conclusion.
But why? Ms. Cunningham's utter barrenness of human feeling for her own child isn't all that far removed from the standard rationales for abortion, is it? I mean, isn't that what everyone says, including President Obama? That it's somehow "unfair" for a young girl to have to sacrifice her education or her career by having a child?
Back during the race for the 2008 election, he famously said at a Johnstown, Pa., meeting that, “I’ve got two daughters. Nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
In fact, the phrase "punished with a baby" isn't ontologically different than “I’ve also had loads of other offers to further my career – and I’m not willing to give them up because I’m pregnant.” Why it wasn't an immediate disqualifier of Obama for the Presidency speaks to the moral emptiness and incoherence of our culture.
Which brings me to my point... why these two stories are really the same story. Consider: both involve mothers of babies who are about at the same gestational age. For Clinton, her child is 16 weeks old; for Josie Cunningham, 18 weeks. And Clinton, of course, undoubtedly would stand with her mother and father as staunch supporters of the abortion on demand regime of the Democratic Party. So although she demands in a press conference that we celebrate her pregnancy, she undoubtedly would defend Ms. Cunningham's decision to abort her child and, at least theoretically, would equally demand that we accept her own decision if, two weeks from now, she decides that, nah, having a baby now on second thought would hurt her career too.
What these two stories are really both about, in my mind, is the corruption of euphemism surrounding abortion. So long as people use the right words and wear the right clothes and come from the right family and couch their decisions about the life and death of their children in the politically correct verbiage, we celebrate their decisions, either way. But, peel the euphemism away and let a patently immoral fame-hungry mental midget truthfully articulate a common rationale for abortion and.... we recoil in horror.
But it is the act itself that is horrific, not the language in which it is dressed, nor the person who does it.
The beginning of last night's episode of Mad Men mostly concerned Megan's off-screen melt-down as an actress in Hollywood. She has apparently done poorly at auditions, then stalked the directors, weeping, asking for second chances. Not good. Her agent complains to Don and asks him to come out and calm Megan down. The explanation for her failure... she has lost her confidence.
Confidence. Isn't that the key idea behind the whole show? In the beginning Don Draper oozed confidence... as a man, and as an advertising "genius." He's the smartest guy in the room, the best-looking, the sexiest. He can win any account, get any girl. His main attribute is confidence, which makes sense, because at bottom he is a confidence man in the old-fashioned sense of the word.... a fake, a phony, a charlatan, a grifter. He has lied his way to everything he's ever gotten... his career, his marriages, his affairs, his money, his position, his reputation.
So if I had to sum up where Mad Men is going as it slouches toward its conclusion, I think that it is a story asking the question: "What happens when a con man loses his confidence?" Put differently, what happens when a man whose life is built on confidence and energy and coolness is humiliated?
Because that's what happened in a small way at the end of this episode... Don Draper was humiliated. His partners basically said to him, we're going to make an offer that any self-respecting adult man would refuse... you can come back, but you can't drink, you can't be alone with clients, you have to run your ideas past a dullard for approval, and if you break any of our rules we shitcan you. He says "OK" because he's desperate. Right before he said it, I shouted at the screen, "Say 'No!'" Because no one in his position ought to have to crawl to people like that.
And I think that's what's happening in the series as a whole as it goes forward... we are going to see a proud man unravelling before our eyes. Don Draper will be humiliated, brought low, shattered.
It makes for tough viewing and, frankly, not very appealing television. Who are we supposed to admire in this show anymore? Don't we have to admire someone in order to want to watch?
I hold no brief for Clippers' owner Donald Sterling who has been vilified over the weekend because of racist comments he made during an argument with his then-girlfriend that were recorded by the girlfriend and then released to TMZ.com, a sleazy gossip website. I don't know him and what I do know of him suggests that I probably wouldn't like him very much. But a few additional facts seem important, to me anyway:
Sterling is 80 years old. I.e. from a generation that may have habits of thinking about race that are difficult to break. I.e. also at an age where he may or may not have some signs of dementia.
The ex-girlfriend is in the midst of a lawsuit with the Sterling family. I.e., she has motives to sully his character.
The ex-girlfriend is herself of mixed-race. I.e., his racism apparently doesn't extend to who he chooses to date.
The ex-girlfriend is much younger. I.e., much of his diatribe has to be discounted as angry jealousy.
Sterling's racist rant, interestingly enough, did not include any use of racial epithets. I.e., no "N" word.
Sterling's rant seems to be comprised mostly of asking the girlfriend not to post pictures of herself with black men, because Sterling had been teased about it by a friend of his. I.e., Sterling may be in part just reporting the racism of another person.
California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. I.e., Sterling was the himself the victim of a crime.
Sterling hired one of the first black GMs, Elgin Baylor.
Sterling hired the Clippers' current coach, African-American Doc Rivers.
Sterling has received awards from the NAACP.
Sterling is a liberal Democrat.
Look, like I said, I hold no brief for Donald Sterling. But these facts suggest to me that the situation is more complicated than simply putting a big Scarlet "R" on his chest and thenceforth forevermore shunning him from society. Does anyone really want to live in a country where you are read out of civilization because of something you said in private during an argument with your lover? Where you get a lifetime ban from your business because of something you said in a private conversation?
Really?
And if that's the case, the next time an NBA player or NFL player is charged with an actual crime (and not, like Sterling, a "thought-crime") such as, oh, beating up their wives or girlfriends, will the same punishment apply? Because I for one happen to think that beating up your wife or girlfriend is a more serious crime than saying a mildly racist comment in a private conversation.
So, I guess here's where I come out. I like to think of myself as a Christian. If Donald Sterling sincerely asks for forgiveness, he should be forgiven. An old man who said the wrong thing in an argument with his young girlfriend is to be pitied, methinks, not demonized.
When Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII are canonized this week, the Church will celebrate the two popes most closely associated with the sea change of the Church that was Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, of course, convened Vatican II, while Pope John Paul II, as the longest serving Pope since the adoption of the Vatican II reforms, more than anyone else brought its teachings into practice. What are they? Some might focus on the formalities -- moving away from Latin, increasing the participation of the laity in Mass, forcing the priest to turn around and face his congregation, etc. But to me, the main teaching of Vatican II is simply that everything the Church does, whether in its teaching role or in the sacraments, should be focused on bringing individual human beings to encounter Christ and His mercy.
What a great day April 27th will be! It's like we get a second holy week!
The Supreme Court handed down an important decision today on affirmative action. Previous cases had permitted the University of Michigan and, specifically, its law school, some limited use of race as a criterion for admission within the context of a general desire for diversity. In the aftermath of those decisions, however, the people of Michigan had amended their state constitution to prohibit the use of race in any way as a criterion for admission. A group with the aptly Stalinist name of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight For Equality by Any Means Necessary does what such groups are created to do... it sued, arguing that amending a state constitution to require that state agencies such as universities treat all citizens equally regardless of race offends the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Setting the stage for what in my view may be the greatest opening ever uttered in a Supreme Court opinion. Naturally it comes from Justice Scalia:
It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself.
The Left increasingly must resort to the Orwellian as its client constituencies seek government favor. Thus, in a liberal state in the North that never had either slavery or Jim Crow, to adopt as a principle of the state's constitution that race ought not to be used to distinguish between citizens must be called "racism." It would be funny (as Scalia's formulation is funny), if it were not (as Scalia also notes) so frightening.
Victor Davis Hanson today provides a must-read catalogue of the ways in which the left is moving increasingly toward a regime of Orwellian thought control, in which dissenting views on climate, gay marriage, Obamacare, Islam, etc., are deemed unacceptable, and thus suppressed in the name of "tolerance" or "diversity," often on college campuses expressly (and hypocritically) dedicated to the free exchange of ideas:
Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals — just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously “incorrect” Jews, Muslims, and heretics.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its appointees used the once-impartial IRS against conservatives. They monitored Associated Press reporters. They denied that the NSA was eavesdropping on average citizens. They arbitrarily chose not to enforce laws they didn’t like.
The president bragged of using “a pen and a phone” to circumvent the legislative branch, and urged his supporters to “punish our enemies.” The attorney general calls Americans who have different views from his own on matters of affirmative action “cowards.”
All of that them/us rhetoric has given a top-down green light to radical thought police to harass anyone who is open-minded about man-caused global warming, or believes that gay marriage needs more debate, or that supporting Israel is a legitimate cause, or that breaking federal immigration law is still a crime and therefore “illegal.”
Jim Geraghty at NRO has a good column up today that makes much the same point I made below about the Democratic strategy of distraction for 2014, but looking at different issues:
The Democrats have made their midterm agenda clear: passing a minimum-wage hike, fighting the menace of the Koch brothers, and expressing loud concern about climate change without actually bringing a cap-and-trade bill to the Senate floor....
So... the Democrats are appealing to
(a) People who don't understand the law of supply and demand, i.e., if you raise the cost of something (labor), consumers (in this case, employers) will demand less of it, resulting in the 500,000 jobs eliminated by the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, as estimated by the CBO;
(b) People who are susceptible to fears of "boogeymen" (the Kochs, who give much much less to conservative causes than unions give to liberal causes); and
(c) People who haven't been outside in awhile and haven't noticed that the weather is both always changing and hasn't changed all that much in the past 15 years, thus putting the lie to all of the global warming models upon which liberals base their climate change doomsday scenarios.
This week's White House-driven onslaught of propaganda about "fair pay" for women is a transparent attempt to distract voters from Obama's dismal record in advance of the 2014 midterms.
Let's face it, Dems can't run on the Administration's foreign policy successes -- there are none. With Russian resurgence in the Crimea, the Syria-Egypt-Libya debacles, retreats from victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, alienated relations with our key allies, a new superpower rival in a surging China, etc., etc., etc., no Democrat is going to want to talk about or be associated with Obama's foreign policy.
And they can't run on the economy, which has been bumbling along in a basically jobless recovery for four years (or at least they used to call these patterns "jobless recoveries" when Republicans were in the Oval Office).
And, of course, the big one... no Democratic Senatorial candidate wants to (or can) defend Obamacare. They've postponed and postponed the reckoning, but those tactics won't work forever.... essentially they've just slowed down the Titanic, but the ship of state remains on course toward the field of icebergs, as Michael Ramirez here brilliantly depicts:
So what can Democrats do? They can appeal to what I'd like to call the "no information" voter.
You've heard the term "low-information" voter, the voter who doesn't really have enough interest in politics to take the time to study issues with any kind of depth.
But I think what the Democrats are really appealing to are "no information" voters -- people who literally can't open their eyes to look around them at the world and compare political rhetoric to the reality around them.
Hence the mindless nodding of consumers of the claptrap spewed by the White House this week about how women are paid 77 cents on the dollar compared to men.
But this statistic is a bald-faced lie, and has been disproven time and again. It originates from an utterly useless and trivial calculation -- the average income of women throughout the U.S. divided by the average income of men. The purveyors of the statistic then make the entirely fallacious assumption that, on average, men and women have the same education, same experience, same work history, same skills, and are doing the same jobs as men. Then they announce with utter cynicism that women make 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men and loudly proclaim a desire for "equal pay for equal work!"
But anyone who doesn't close their eyes to reality knows (a) that women in fact often don't have the same work experience as men, because they often take many years off to raise children; and (b) that women in fact often aren't employed in the same types of jobs as men, tending to skew away from dangerous (and highly paid) jobs and jobs that require a lot of travel, instead opting for less dangerous, often clerical or bureaucratic jobs that provide lots of time off and regular hours, again to permit more time for child care. There are obviously individual women who don't fit these criteria -- there are, for instance, probably some women who work on oil rigs and some men who are secretaries, just as there are men who stay home with children while their wives work. But the White House isn't talking about specific individuals, they're talking about a wildly general statistic, so they ought in fairness recognize the general and prevailing patterns that affect the meaningfulness of that statistic.
Of course, they're not interested in fairness. They're interested in pushing votes. And they are cynical... they know there are people out there who are perfectly capable of closing their eyes to the reality around them -- their own mothers, their own friends staying home with children, their own sisters making decisions trading off career opportunities for child-raising -- and instead are capable of believing a myth that employers actively discriminate in pay against women doing the same work as men, even though any such tactic is already, and has long been, illegal under federal law.
These "no information" voters living in a fog of liberal propaganda are the real target of the White House's "equal pay for women" mantra.
***
A postscript. It is a known and commented-upon fact in 2014 that for the past few years more women are graduating college than men. If employers could really hire women for 77 cents on the dollar with the same education as men, presumably if they paid the same amount they could get a better educated, more productive female work force. Either way -- paying 77 cents on the dollar for equivalent production from women or 100 cents on the dollar for more productivity from women -- would make economic sense. Why then aren't we seeing companies with predominantly or exclusively female employees?
The firing (or "forced resignation") of the CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, for his supposedly "anti-gay" views is getting a lot of attention. Eich had donated $1000 to a group arguing for Proposition 8 in California in 2007, six years ago. That was the Constitutional amendment (to the California constitution) that defined marriage under California law as being solely between a man and a woman. It has since been held to be unconstitutional by the courts, but in 2007 it passed in California with more than 52% of the vote... about 7 million Californians voted for it.
Now, however, it is apparently deemed unacceptable for a company to hire a CEO, however qualified (Eich was their Chief Technology Officer, had helped found the company, and is by all accounts a genius computer programmer, having invented JavaScript), who was in favor of such an amendment, even though 99% of American politicians held the identical position at the time, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
There has been a somewhat predictable backlash from conservatives against what they call (a la Jonah Goldberg) "liberal fascism," and a good deal of that criticism is well-taken. We are certainly losing touch with our traditions of free speech under the 1st Amendment if we start blacklisting people who take positions that a majority (or, in this case, a loud minority) find offensive, for whatever reason.
But what I haven't seen anywhere is to me the most obvious point that needs to be made. Here are some facts that are noted in passing in some of the coverage:
1. Brendan Eich has five children.
2. Brendan Eich grew up in Pittsburgh.
3. Brendan Eich went to college at Santa Clara in California.
And, I'll add an even more obvious "fact":
4. Brendan Eich's name is, in fact, "Brendan."
Now I haven't seen this reported anywhere, but I put those facts together and what they suggest to me is that Brendan Eich has a high probability of being a Catholic. Pittsburgh is a heavily Catholic city. Santa Clara is a Jesuit university. "Brendan" is the name of an Irish-Catholic saint. And, five children... in today's society, I am certain that families who have five children or more skew heavily Catholic.
Which may put his supposedly "anti-gay" views in some perspective. It is perfectly coherent, and is in fact the position of the Catholic catechism, to believe that marriage is a sacred relationship between a man and a woman with the intent of forming a family and having children, and still also believe that gay persons should be treated fairly and with dignity and compassion. There is, of course, ample evidence that Eich always did treat Mozilla employees, gay and straight, fairly and with dignity and compassion.
So what we have here, in my view, and based on my conjecture about Eich's faith,. is not just a 1st Amendment free speech issue, it's also, and perhaps more importantly, a 1st Amendment free exercise of religion issue. Because it's apparent to me that Silicon Valley has essentially gone back to the 19th Century and is hanging out a "No Catholics Need Apply" sign.
Amy Smart has been playing the pot-smoking child services worker caught up in Raylan's world this season on Justified. Hope she survives the last two episodes, for obvious reasons:
I happened to notice this story in USA Today while I was down at the lobby restaurant this morning:
He's all-Ivy -- accepted to all 8 Ivy League colleges
In the next month, Kwasi Enin must make a tough decision: Which of the eight Ivy League universities should he attend this fall? A first-generation American from Shirley, N.Y., the 17-year-old violist and aspiring physician applied to all eight, from Brown to Yale. The responses began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, he found he'd been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight on Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin. The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation's most elite. "My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight," says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she's never seen anything like this. "It's a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary." For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA's top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%. But Enin has "a lot of things in his favor," says college admissions expert Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a New York-based consulting firm. For one thing, he's a young man. "Colleges are looking for great boys," Cohen says. Application pools these days skew heavily toward girls: The U.S. Department of Education estimates that females comprised 57% of college students in degree-granting institutions last year. Colleges — especially elite ones — are struggling to keep male/female ratios even, so admitting academically gifted young men like Enin gives them an advantage. He ranks No. 11 in a class of 647 at William Floyd, a large public school on Long Island's south shore. That puts him in the top 2% of his class. His SAT score, at 2,250 out of 2,400 points, puts him in the 99th percentile for African-American students.
Look, this young man seems like a fine kid, and he's certainly deserving of going to a fine college. But, let's face it... he might not get into any of these Ivy League colleges if he were white or Asian. And everyone who has spent five minutes on the College Confidential website reading posts from kids aspiring to go to elite colleges knows this. A 2250 SAT is very good, and would put him at the 98th or 99th percentile for all students (not sure why they note "African-Americans"... his score is terrific for anyone) but it's right at the median for Princeton et al. In other words, only the very very very elite kids are getting into those schools. So, were he white or Asian, he would be looking at an unbelievably uphill climb against a lot of kids who have the same scores or better... essentially a crapshoot. Maybe he wins and gets into one of the Ivies, maybe even two. But all eight? Come on. Who's kidding whom?
Which is what makes giving him obvious affirmative action admission so appalling and racist. Read more closely... he is African-American the same way a white Afrikaner from South Africa who emigrates here is African-American. Meaning: his family recently immigrated from that continent. But he is not "African-American" in the way that most of us think, and in the only way that makes giving affirmative action consideration make any kind of moral sense... he is not a descendant of slaves or grandparents who suffered under Jim Crow. There is no basis for America to be "correcting" past discrimination by giving him a leg up, not when he is getting that leg up by discriminating against Asian children, also recent immigrants, who are essentially kept out of the Ivies (and Berkeley and UCLA and USC etc.) by unwritten quotas. Or, for that matter, by discriminating against white kids who themselves bear no blame for any past discrimination.
(By the way, it's also appalling that no one at USA Today apparently had the balls to ask the obvious question... do you think the fact that you essentially flopped "21" eight straight times has something to do with affirmative action? Does it comport with a free and vibrant press for a national newspaper to self-censor quite so obviously?)
I have a friend who is an extraordinarily decent person whose son is a terrific kid who had higher SATs and higher class ranking at a competitive Jesuit high school. He didn't get a sniff of the Ivy League. The Regular Son has a higher SAT and we aren't even bothering. (Frankly, I don't think the marginal value of the education is worth the price, but that's a different story.) So tell me how exactly is any of that fair?
Nice looking kid. I wish him well. I'm certain he'd do great things wherever he goes. But this stuff has to stop. It will ruin us as a country.
If you find yourself too happy today because baseball is back, you could always bring yourself back down into despair by considering this ongoing fiasco:
The federal Obamacare website is down for maintenance on the final day of open enrollment.
Since 3:00 a.m. Eastern time, HealthCare.gov has been down to fix a software bug.
"The tech team is working now to bring the system online as soon as possible," a spokesperson told Politico.
News of the Obamacare bug fix comes as the Obama administration continues to claim it has surpassed the six million enrollment mark--a figure that includes 20%, at least, who never paid their first premium and are, therefore, not insured. It also includes duplicate enrollment and incomplete applications. The Obama White House has stonewalled reporter requests for specific demographic data about what are roundly regarded as inflated numbers.
Most importantly, the White House is remaining tight-lipped about the all-important question of how many of those it claims have enrolled were previously uninsured. The purported purpose of Obamacare was to cover the 48.6 million who did not have insurance. However, data from a McKinsey & Co. report reveals that only 715,000 of Obamacare's paying customers were previously uninsured; the rest already had coverage or were among the 5 million Americans who had their insurance plans canceled due to Obamacare.
Now in its fourth year, Obamacare remains more unpopular than ever. The latest Associated Press poll finds that an all-time low 26% of Americans now support Obamacare.
As I've said previously on this blog, the only metric that matters is how many previously uninsured are now insured. That was the problem to be fixed, and Obamacare was sold on the promise that it would fix it. If Obamacare hasn't provided a significant solution (it hasn't), but has instead likely exacerbated the problem (it has) by forcing millions off their plans, disincentivizing millions more from seeking insurance (why bother?), and confusing nearly everyone (oy!)... then it's a failure, period, full stop.
A prayer from Saint Thomas Aquinas, via the great Hillsdale Dialogues series on Hugh Hewitt:
Oh, merciful God, grant that I may desire ardently, search prudently, recognize truly, and bring to perfection, bring to perfect completion whatever is pleasing to You for the praise and glory of Your name. Put my life in good order, oh, my God. Grant that I may know what you require me to do. Bestow upon me the power to accomplish Your will as is necessary and fitting for the salvation of my soul. Grant to me, oh Lord, my God, that I may not falter in times of prosperity or adversity so that I may not be exalted in the former, nor dejected in the latter. May I not rejoice in anything unless it leads me to You. May I not be saddened by anything unless it turns me from You. May I desire to please no one, nor fear to displease anyone but You. May all transitory things, oh Lord, be worthless to me. And may all things eternal be ever cherished by me. May any joy without You be burdensome for me, and may I not desire anything else besides You. May all work, oh Lord, delight me when done for Your sake, and may all repose not centered in You be ever wearisome for me. Grant unto me, my God, that I may direct my hear to You, and that in my failures, I may ever feel remorse for my sins and never lose the resolve to change. Oh Lord, my God, make me submissive without protest, poor without discouragement, chaste without regret, patient without complaint, humble without posturing, cheerful without frivolity, mature without gloom, and quick-witted without flippancy. Oh Lord, my God, let me fear You without losing hope, be truthful without guile, do good works without presumption, rebuke my neighbor without haughtiness and without hypocrisy, strengthen him by word and example. Give to me, oh Lord God, a watchful heart, which no capricious thought can lure away from You. Give to me a noble heart, which no unworthy desire can debase. Give to me a resolute heart which no intention can divert. Give to me a stalwart heart which no tribulation can overcome. Give to me a temperate heart which no violent passion can slave. Give to me, oh Lord, my God, understanding of You, diligence in seeking You, wisdom in finding You, discourse ever pleasing to You, perseverance in waiting for You, and confidence in finally embracing You. Grant that with Your hardships, I may be burdened in reparation here that Your benefits, I may use in gratitude upon the way, that in Your joys I may delight by glorifying You in the kingdom of Heaven, You who live and reign, God, world without end. Amen.
