A tipping point, so to speak

NPR: "Study Finds More Adults Are Obese Than Underweight."

Tom Price out

Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.

I think in the Trump Administration, everybody will be Secretary for 15 minutes.  Fox News: "HHS Secretary Tom Price resigns over private plane trips."

NYT: "World to end, women hit hardest."

Power Line has the latest from the Gray Lady on tax reform: "Captain Obvious at the NY Times."

"The plan would not benefit lower-income households that do not pay federal income taxes."

No kidding.

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

NY Post: "Multiple arrested after fight inside Berkeley’s ‘empathy tent’." 

Anything goes, Trump-style

Look who has a pen and a phone now.  Washington Examiner: "Trump preparing executive order to let Americans purchase health insurance across state lines."

I didn't think a President could do that but Ace convinced me otherwise:

Is this constitutional? Well, if Obamacare has taught us anything, it's that it's endlessly mutable according to the whim of the president -- and the Supreme Court has blessed this regime of unconstitutional reinterpretations-by-decree at least twice.

So much of Obama's agenda depended on President Hillary.  Oops.

The New York Times sucks

I have to admit that I'm facing a dearth of topics to blog about recently.  I don't want to talk about the past which includes Hillary and Obama.  I'm in the Ben Shapiro camp when it comes to Trump.  The Republicans' recent half-assed attempt to repeal Obamacare was always doomed to failure; these dummies will probably botch tax reform too.  The culture wars are an exhausting marathon of outrage.

Thank heaven there's always the failing New York Times to fill the void.  Don Surber: "It's official: NYT couldn't cover a Dumpster fire in its newsroom."

How lousy is the New York Times today? Its staff is so inept that it would not be able to cover a Dumpster fire in its newsroom.

Here was the set-up. A staffer ("a contributing writer") for the New York Times Magazine wrote a book. The editors assigned another staffer to review the book.

Not only did the book reviewer pan the book, but she made numerous errors in the review, so many that the Times had to issue a lengthy correction -- which only brought further attention to the author getting a bad review.

The reviewer was a recent hire of editorial editor James "I don't read the paper" Bennet.

Steelers not going to play this particular game

MassLive: "Entire Pittsburgh Steelers team will not participate in national anthem, stay in locker room."  From the statement of head coach Mike Tomlin, it sounds like they just want to avoid the whole deal: "We're not participating in the anthem today, not to be disrespectful to the anthem, to remove ourselves from this circumstance."

I feel the need to explain this tweet

Mary Katherine Ham was attacked as a "liar" because of her Fox News career.  She responded with this napalm firebombing:

It's amusing to me that someone who edited TNR is sensitive about potential fabulism. See how dumb this can get? Just mad bc I'm not a liar. https://t.co/fI0P9SEEqn

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) September 22, 2017

So, according to Twitchy, Mr. Chotiner deleted his embarrassing tweet.  For the record, the New Republic got caught up in "the most spectacular, sustained campaign of fabrication known to American journalism" when it got taken in by Stephen Glass.

Molon labe

Persuasion is kinda an ancient notion for the Left nowadays.  It's all Kimmel's world:

Kimmel doesn't matter. He's just another half-smart big mouth Hollywood multi-millionaire. But they're all Kimmel, all the left. They're all doing the Kimmel Three-Step: 1. Emotion. 2. Hectoring. 3. Violence. Trying to get you to give them and their government your money and your freedom.

Well, come and get it, Jimmy.

Some people just want to graduate

Politico: "Protesters disrupt James Comey's Howard University convocation speech."

What a fun day for everyone.

Of course

Federalist: "After Self-Reflection, Journalists Discover They’ve Been Too Critical Of … Democrats."

I understand: you can't fathom that you might have helped elect Trump.  Don't worry, dudes, you're not that important anymore.

Extra - Don Surber: "The whole Russian meddling was a ruse to justify spying on Trump. The mainstream media went along with the gag because they wanted to protect Obama, and they wanted to overturn the election."

Good luck, Andrew Franks

The Miami Dolphins missed their first game of the season because of Hurricane Irma so I didn't find out until this past Sunday that field goal kicker Andrew Franks was let go from the team after two seasons.

The appearance of Andrew Franks was always my favorite part of any NFL game because of the incredulous reaction from the broadcast commentators whenever he appeared on the field.  They would always say something like: "Andrew Franks from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute?!?"

That's right: Franks rose to the NFL from a Division III school sometimes described as the "oldest technological university in the English-speaking world."  The recently-unemployed Franks will now have to fall back on his Bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering.

My offer is this: two bits

This should help settle the selling price for Rolling Stone.  Hot Air: "Appeals Court Revives Lawsuit Against Rolling Stone."



Extra - Hit and Run: "Good luck with the sale, Jann Wenner."

Sounds like a man with something to hide!

Daily Caller: "Manafort Calls On DOJ To Release His Intercepted Communications With Foreigners."

“Mr. Manafort requests that the Department of Justice release any intercepts involving him and any non-Americans so interested parties can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there,” Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement.

This whole Russia thing is going to come down to a guy who didn't register as a lobbyist.

The Left hates free speech, continued

Megan McArdle: "We Didn't Normalize Trump. We Normalized the Left's Violence." "Every time it happens, we have to remind ourselves that all this security is the price we’re paying to protect ourselves from thieves who want to steal our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms."

I used to subscribe

NY Times: "Rolling Stone, Once a Counterculture Bible, Will Be Put Up for Sale."

Yes, it's true, I was an avid reader of Rolling Stone when it used to cover....music.

The times, they are a'changin'

Daily Dot: "The struggle against Internet overload is real."

Since the dawn of civilization, roughly 12,000 B.C., to 2003 A.D., only 5 exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data has been created. Now, with the rise of the Internet’s influence in our daily lives, we produce this amount of data every two days.

Holy cow.  It's probably because we went from Mathew Brady taking a dozen pictures a day to a typical teenager taking that many pictures of his/her lunch.  Plus videos!

Garbage time

Hot Air: "A Chicago Judge Amazingly Rules That Grant Money Can Be Mandatory."

Update: This originally sounded to me like Chicago judge-shopping for a favorable ruling but my go-to legal analysis guide says the judge may have a solid legal basis for the executive branch changing standards originally set by Congress.

I don't know, man, I just work here.

You can have anything you want if you don't care about the cost

This morning, Obamacare cheerleader Sarah Kliff wrote this piece on Vox: "Bernie Sanders's new Medicare-for-all plan, explained."  Here's the tl;dr "explanation":

1) It's going to be awesome
2) We have no idea how much it's going to cost

At no point does Kliff mention rationing of health care but at least she mentioned that single-payer crashed and burned in Vermont:

But Vermont’s single-payer dream fell apart when the state figured out how much it would need to raise taxes to finance its new system. Vermont abandoned the government-run plan after finding it would need to increase payroll taxes by 11.5 percent and income tax by 9 percent.

Unmentioned is that Colorado and California also ran screaming from single-payer plans when the price tag was revealed.  Perhaps sensing that she had overreached in her earlier "explanation", Kliff followed up in the afternoon with "How much is that Medicare-for-all plan in the window?"  Oh, good, we're going to find out the cost of Sanders' plan.

Or not:

Sanders certainly offers a wide array of financing options, and you can read through all them right here. What makes them difficult to evaluate, however, is that we don't know how much he expects his single-payer health plan to cost.

What was the point of these articles, Sarah, other than to keep up the drumbeat for a single-payer plan that will never see the light of day and/or fill your article quota at Vox?

Must be chilly in Hell tonight

I have to say: the NY Times published this?  Hot Air: "NY Times Author Defends Ben Shapiro, Attacks ‘Sloppy Conflation’ Of Conservatives With White Supremacists."

Well, it was an opinion page piece.  The editorials are safely in the hands of James "What's Google?" Bennet.

Humorless scolds

Hot Air: "John Cleese: ‘A Lot Of The Politically Correct People Have No Sense Of Humor’."

I don't want to talk about Hillary

So I won't.

Nine-eleven

Discovered de Kooning in New Mexico

This is the craziest story.  In 1985 a Willem de Kooning painting was stolen from the University of Arizona and later found in an antiques store.  The investigation has come to this: it looks like it was robbed by a regular Joe who just wanted to hang it over his fireplace.

It was finally recovered last month, and investigators are focusing on several theories. And one of them is, in its own way, extraordinary: They are trying to determine if the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher — something of a renaissance man — who donned women’s clothing and took his son along as his accomplice, and then hung the masterwork in the bedroom of his own rural New Mexico home, where it remained.

In other words, they are examining whether he stole a painting now valued at in excess of $100 million simply so he could enjoy it.

This reminds me of another nutty art story where a friend of Norman Rockwell was afraid he would lose his original painting in a divorce, so he painted a copy and hid the original.  

College-freude

Legal Insurrection: "Radical fallout: Oberlin College enrollment drops, causing financial problems - Is social justice war coming home to roost at Oberlin, as it did at Mizzou and Evergreen State?"

Journalism

Don Surber: "Anatomy of a sleazy editorial."  It's the ole Russian guilt-by-association drivel.

Al Gore was right!

2006: "Hurricanes are going to be worse and more frequent!"
2007:
2008:
2009:
2010:
2011:
2012:
2013:
2014:
2015:
2016:
2017: "Told you so!" https://t.co/aQ31Qsseo3

— Deplorable Locutor (@Elocutioner) September 9, 2017

NY Times, again

Here's John Bolton writing in the National Review: "What ‘News Gathering’ Looks Like at the New York Times."  "The questions, perhaps in response to an article I wrote on the North Korean threat, are utterly one-sided, simplistic, incorporate factually incorrect assertions, and signal that the story is all but written. There is clearly no basis to try to engage such a “reporter” in reasoned dialogue."

The case against Bob Menendez

The New York Times forgot the Senator's political affiliation and NBC News just assumed he was a Republican because, you know, "layers of fact-checking" in the age of Google.

Anyway, Ace has the lowdown on that Son of the Confederacy and his love for #MAGA hats: "MSNBC Has Some Unwelcome News for Its Zombie Viewers: Case Against Senator Bob Menendez (Republican from Texas or Somewhere "Jesusy") Is "Overwhelming"."

Hold on to your hat

You're not going to believe this story: it seems that a mainstream media news source went forward with a story damaging to a Republican without proper sourcing.  I know!  Daily Caller: "CNN Pulled Investigative Team Off Trump-Russia Coverage."  "The error was also particularly damaging to CNN’s brand as it occurred as Trump was harshly criticizing the network over charges of biased coverage."

Then there's the other side of the coin: for the first time in 36 years, a sitting U.S. Senator is in the midst of a federal bribery trial.  Political affiliation of this corrupt official: unknown.  The Hill: "NY Times mocked for not mentioning embattled senator is a Democrat."

The "Paper of Record".

Run, Deval, run

The Hill: "Obama team’s 2020 signals spark chatter among Dems."

Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest confidantes, and David Simas, the CEO of Obama’s foundation, have sent smoke signals urging former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) to enter the race.

Do it, Deval.  There's two things I know about politics:

1.) President Dukakis, Kerry, and Romney prove that America loves politicians from Massachusetts.

2.) Americans can't get enough of identity politics.  Bring on Kamala, too.

Side note: I love how the Hill included the (D) in this story so you weren't confused about the political affiliation of an Obama-endorsed candidate from Massachusetts.

Deplorable sees the light

The Onion: "Former Conservative Recalls Belittling Tirade From College Student That Brought Him Over To Left."

My favorite Supremes song

Approaching peak Harrison Bergeron

"The year was 2081 2017 and everybody was finally equal."  City Journal: "Peril in numbers - Affirmative-action hiring endangers the FDNY."  The New York Fire Department needs women because of triggering or something:

The results of all this quota-setting and bean-counting were predictable. FDNY insiders say that the department struggles to fill the minority quotas despite degraded hiring standards. Hence Paul Washington dissembles to potential recruits. Hence standards for women have grown so lax under Sifton’s dictum that one female recruit failed entrance exams six times and was hired anyway. Hence nine felons—each a beneficiary of Garafulis’s quotas—graduated in a class of probationary firefighters from the city’s fire academy last November.

The era of Un-hurt Feelings: coming soon to a courtroom and surgical theater near you.

Extra - "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut.