Black is white; up is down; and ….
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” (“1984” Orwell)
Donald Trump roared to a huge victory Tuesday in New York's Republican primary, delivering a much-needed chance to reset his presidential campaign and retake the upper hand in the fight for the GOP nomination.More.
There had been little doubt Trump would carry his home state, where the real estate mogul is literally a household name: In giant letters and various forms, “Trump” adorns some of Manhattan's most exclusive properties.
The outcome was clear the instant that polls closed, with the front-runner leaping to an enormous lead that never wavered. With nearly all of the votes counted, Trump had 60% support, followed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 25% and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 15.
The key question was the size of Trump's victory and whether he would capture all of the delegates by winning 50% of the statewide vote and a majority in each of New York's 27 congressional districts. It appeared he would claim at least the overwhelmingly majority of the state's 95 delegates, with Kasich taking a handful.
The allocation was more than a matter of vanity or political perceptions. The GOP contest has become a hand-to-hand battle for delegates to the party's July convention in Cleveland, where they alone will choose the nominee to carry the party standard into the fall campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
It takes a majority, 1,237 delegates, to be assured of the nomination before the GOP gathering, which appears to be Trump's best hope as opponents work to stop him short and throw the convention open to one or another of his rivals.
Trump entered the day with 756 delegates, followed by Cruz with 559 and Kasich with 144. Trump's substantial gain eases his quest for the nomination but still leaves the outcome far from certain.
“The path forward is a high wire,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and speechwriter for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson of California. “It is manageable, but there is no room for error on either side.”
Trump was blown out by Cruz in the last GOP contest, the April 5 primary in Wisconsin, and has been steadily losing ground to the senator's better-organized campaign ever since, as Republicans seat their national delegates at state- and district-level conventions across the country.
Still, of the three candidates remaining, Trump is the only one with a realistic chance of winning the nomination on the first ballot in Cleveland.
In an effort to steady his campaign, Trump recently shook up its staff, bringing in some of the very Washington establishment figures he once criticized. Amid the upheaval, his campaign field director, a political neophyte, resigned as Trump sought to professionalize his delegate wrangling under Paul J. Manafort, a former lobbyist and longtime Beltway insider, who quickly moved to consolidate and extend his power.
In one sign of Manafort's apparent influence, Trump has grown uncharacteristically restrained in his public comments, in a seeming effort to project a more presidential image. His victory speech Tuesday night was notably brief and absent the insults and braggadocio that characterized previous celebrations...
The government and media alliance advancing the transgender cause has gone into overdrive in recent weeks. On May 30, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the "reassignment" surgery sought by the transgendered—those who say that they don't identify with their biological sex. Earlier last month Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he was "open" to lifting a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Time magazine, seeing the trend, ran a cover story for its June 9 issue called "The Transgender Tipping Point: America's next civil rights frontier."Keep reading.
Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.
The transgendered suffer a disorder of "assumption" like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one's maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.
With body dysmorphic disorder, an often socially crippling condition, the individual is consumed by the assumption "I'm ugly." These disorders occur in subjects who have come to believe that some of their psycho-social conflicts or problems will be resolved if they can change the way that they appear to others. Such ideas work like ruling passions in their subjects' minds and tend to be accompanied by a solipsistic argument.
For the transgendered, this argument holds that one's feeling of "gender" is a conscious, subjective sense that, being in one's mind, cannot be questioned by others. The individual often seeks not just society's tolerance of this "personal truth" but affirmation of it. Here rests the support for "transgender equality," the demands for government payment for medical and surgical treatments, and for access to all sex-based public roles and privileges.
With this argument, advocates for the transgendered have persuaded several states—including California, New Jersey and Massachusetts—to pass laws barring psychiatrists, even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor. That government can intrude into parents' rights to seek help in guiding their children indicates how powerful these advocates have become.
How to respond? Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned. Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry's domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field. Many will recall how, in the 1990s, an accusation of parental sex abuse of children was deemed unquestionable by the solipsists of the "recovered memory" craze.
You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned...
Comptroller Scott Stringer is launching an audit of the city’s Board of Elections after reports of problems voting in today’s primary elections and the purging of more than 100,000 voters from rolls in Brooklyn.More.
“There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site,” Mr. Stringer said in a statement this afternoon. “The people of New York City have lost confidence that the Board of Elections can effectively administer elections and we intend to find out why the BOE is so consistently disorganized, chaotic and inefficient.”
In a letter to BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan, Mr. Stringer ticked off a litany of problems constituents had reported at the polls today, including one voter who reported arriving at 6 a.m., when voting begins, to find their Williamsburg polling site wasn’t open and wouldn’t be open any time soon. Voters have also complained of being sent to different poll sites or being given conflicting information, Mr. Stringer’s office noted.
“Comptrollers audit agencies, that’s why comptrollers are there,” Mr. Ryan said in a telephone issue. “If Comptroller Stringer believes that it is a worthy use of his agency resources to investigate the Board of Elections, we’re no different than any other city agency.”
Mr. Ryan insisted the voter problems Mr. Stringer and others had cited today were rare.
The infectious "thump" to the song was achieved using mixer Bob Clearmountain's famed "bathroom reverb", a process involving the recording of some of the song's vocal and drum tracks with a miked speaker in the bathroom of the Power Station recording studio in New York City.[2][4] It was there where final touches were added to the song, including Jagger's switch of the main lyrics from "start it up" to "start me up."
The song opens with what has since become a trademark riff for Richards. It is this, coupled with Charlie Watts' steady backbeat and Bill Wyman's echoing bass, that comprises most of the song. Lead guitarist Ronnie Wood can clearly be heard playing a layered variation of Richards' main riff (often live versions of the song are lengthened by giving Wood a solo near the middle of the song, pieces of which can be heard throughout the original recording). Throughout the song Jagger breaks in with a repeated bridge of "You make a grown man cry", followed by various pronouncements of his and his partner's sexual nature. Although the lyrics to the song might be read as double entendres referring to motorcycle racing, they are clearly sexual in nature.
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
Billy Joel
10:37 AM
Money for Nothing
Dire Straits
10:30 AM
Fortunate Son
Creedence Clearwater Revival
10:27 AM
For the Love of Money
The O'Jays
10:24 AM
Moneytalks
AC/DC
10:20 AM
Sunny Afternoon
The Kinks
10:16 AM
Money
Pink Floyd
10:10 AM
Take the Money and Run
Steve Miller Band
10:07 AM
Lawyers, Guns and Money
Warren Zevon
10:04 AM
Taxman
The Beatles
10:02 AM
Start Me Up
The Rolling Stones
Ready for Love
Bad Company
9:46 AM
Beyond the contentious backbiting of the presidential contest, the nation's major political parties are undergoing a dramatic and potentially long-lasting cultural shift.Notice that all of this upheaval does not augur a party realignment, but is perhaps a trend toward the deepening of decades-old tendencies toward partisan dealignment. It's really interesting.
Both of the outsider challengers — Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — are campaigning in part against the parties they hope to lead. Both have gained much of their success from confounding what has been mainstream party thought for decades.
As the nominating battles move into their final phase, Sanders has yanked his party leftward — or, at a minimum, greatly hastened a change that was already underway. Trump has pushed against the Republican Party on issues as small as delegate selection and as large as foreign policy and brought with him ground troops to enforce his views. The second-place Republican, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, has made a career of defying Republican leaders, even if Trump is now attacking him as part of the establishment.
The redefinition is occurring on a political landscape shaking from the continued aftershocks of the 2008 economic collapse. That territory has proved inhospitable, to different degrees, to more traditional politicians like Hillary Clinton and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, extending her nomination battle and blunting his candidacy.
"All things being equal, if you'd showed up from Mars you would think Hillary Clinton would have this wrapped up," said Lee Miringoff, a pollster at Marist College with long experience in presidential politics. "And you would have thought Kasich on paper would be stronger. But he's 1 for 30, and that was Ohio."
The lasting effect of the Great Recession is not the only force that has propelled the parties' movement. So, too, has the changing face of America. Among Democrats, a more youthful electorate has contributed to the success of Sanders' effort; among Republicans, blue-collar whites who in many cases feel threatened by the rise of other groups have powered Trump's campaign.
Tellingly, the outsider candidacies are in some cases sounding similar themes. Both Trump and Sanders, coming at it from opposite ideological sides, have pressed to reverse trade deals they say have gutted American manufacturing jobs. Both have called for other countries to begin paying more for the NATO military alliance. Both have criticized their respective parties for the way delegates, who will determine the nominations, are selected.
The lasting effect of the Great Recession is not the only force that has propelled the parties' movement. So, too, has the changing face of America. Among Democrats, a more youthful electorate has contributed to the success of Sanders' effort; among Republicans, blue-collar whites who in many cases feel threatened by the rise of other groups have powered Trump's campaign.
Tellingly, the outsider candidacies are in some cases sounding similar themes. Both Trump and Sanders, coming at it from opposite ideological sides, have pressed to reverse trade deals they say have gutted American manufacturing jobs. Both have called for other countries to begin paying more for the NATO military alliance. Both have criticized their respective parties for the way delegates, who will determine the nominations, are selected...
Another fantastic "Winning!" screed by Trump to end his speech here in Buffalo. Says it or "win" 15 times here. pic.twitter.com/FaE4NaET8Z
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) April 19, 2016
@AmPowerBlog most disagree, but I predict Sanders wins big & sends Dem into total turmoil. Get the popcorn
— Norman Gersman (@NormanGersman) April 18, 2016
Sen. Bernie Sanders has all but eliminated Hillary Clinton’s polling lead among Democratic voters nationwide, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found, offering signs that she continues to struggle with the primary electorate at a time when she wanted to build strength for the general election.More.
Mr. Sanders for the first time is close to tying Mrs. Clinton, as 48% of Democratic primary voters picked him as their first choice for president, while 50% picked her. In a poll last month, Mrs. Clinton was ahead by nine percentage points, enjoying a 53%-to-44% edge.
A majority of states have already held their primary contests, and the Vermont senator’s surge in support likely comes too late for him to overcome Mrs. Clinton’s big lead in delegates to the summer nominating convention in Philadelphia. But the survey suggests that the long and bitter primary campaign has taken a toll on the former senator and secretary of state.
“As she is finishing this primary, she is not gaining strength,” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang. “The cracks are showing, and she is losing strength.”
Mrs. Clinton’s saving grace is the weakness of her potential Republican opposition. The survey found that GOP front-runner Donald Trump would have a harder time consolidating his party behind him than she would hers. Some 38% of Republican primary voters said they couldn’t see themselves supporting the New York businessman, while 21% of Democrats said they couldn’t support Mrs. Clinton.
In a hypothetical general-election matchup, Mrs. Clinton outpolls Mr. Trump 50% to 39%, the survey found.
But for most voters, that would be a lesser-of-two-evils choice: 56% of both Trump and Clinton voters said their vote would be cast because they didn’t want the other candidate to win.
“For these voters, casting their ballot for president in 2016 is not about an idealistic vision of hope and change or a new day in America,” Mr. Yang said, “but, rather, a much more sober and pragmatic feeling as they check the box: It could be worse.”
Among Republicans, Mr. Trump has maintained his advantage as the field of candidates dwindled. He is the first choice of 40% of GOP primary voters, compared with 35% for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and 24% for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
But the poll would fuel his rivals’ argument that Mr. Trump would be the party’s weakest candidate against Mrs. Clinton in a general election: Mr. Cruz trails her by two points, 46% to 44%, in a hypothetical matchup, while Mr. Kasich outpolls her, 51% to 39%.
The two parties’ front-runners are making history with the negative feelings they inspire. The share of voters who feel negatively toward Mr. Trump, at 65%, or Mrs. Clinton, at 56%, is unprecedented for a major-party nominee. By comparison, President Barack Obama was viewed in a negative light by 43%, and Republican nominee Mitt Romney by 44%, at the end of the 2012 general-election campaign.
“America is on the path to electing the most unpopular president since 1948,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who also helped conduct the survey...
Notice how this is ultimately the punch line of all feminist "jokes"? https://t.co/acCm4tBGkR pic.twitter.com/yrujHynRzO
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 18, 2016
Feminism is ultimately about complete contempt for men, per se. If you are a man, nothing you say is of interest to any feminist. Everything men do is bad and everything men say is wrong. This categorical certainty — the absolute moral and intellectual inferiority of males — is so commonly accepted among feminists that none of them ever question it, because they never even notice it, for the same reason fish don’t notice water.
If Donald Trump is right about one thing, it’s that America doesn’t win enough. But aside from the obvious issue that we don’t want to live in a loser nation, there’s a follow-on problem even worse than the first. So many elites seem so phony and venal that patriotism has started to feel that way too. Exhibit A? Marco Rubio’s cheerful, red-blooded campaign tanked in the polls, even after he tried to spice it up with smackdowns. It goes downhill from there—as Trump himself makes painfully clear.Keep reading.
Fortunately, there’s good news. Even though Rubio’s fresh face was a false dawn, today’s rising generations are poised to do something even more important than making America great again. They’re going to make patriotism cooler—and more authentic in the bargain.
Now, there’s no doubt that trying to hype up classic and serious principles can lead to disaster. Everyone’s eyes roll when elites take a “hey, kids!” approach to citizenship, the Constitution, even the bare minimum of voting. Patriotically minded institutions can’t just save themselves.
Yet one of the many lines that has blurred away in our shadowy and uncertain times is the once-sturdy barrier between authentic cool and intentional cool. For Gen-Xers, that’s a bit of a shock. Even five years ago, it’s easy to guess, a musical theater production about the Revolutionary era would not have made anyone “down” with the Founders. Today, however, Hamilton is a runaway hit—precisely because it celebrates America in a deep way with a sharp edge, at a time when we’re all so hungry for that.
Of course, you can make a trend out of just about anything that sells, so get ready for hotshot director Zack Snyder to make good on his plans for a Washington movie in the kinetic, comic-book style of 300.
But Snyder’s scheme isn’t another one-off or part of a fleeting trend. It wasn’t so long ago that his lowbrow style would be seen as a hopeless mismatch with such highbrow material. For all the justifiable mockery aimed at our glut of superhero franchises, the flourishing graphic-novel trend that spawned them has actually done the culture a massive service: finding a way back to the sweet spot of middlebrow, which at its height—hello, Mad Max—can be as gripping, and potent a piece of art as opera or Shakespeare...
Insisting that the delegate selection process is “corrupt and crooked,” Donald J. Trump offered a vivid example on Sunday to prove his point.More (via Memeorandum.)
Imagine being wooed by Mr. Trump.
“Look, nobody has better toys than I do,” he told reporters at a hotel on Staten Island, where he pressed his case that the system was rigged against him. “I can put them in the best planes and bring them to the best resorts anywhere in the world.”
But Mr. Trump said that was unseemly.
“You’re basically buying these people,” he added. “You’re basically saying, ‘Delegate, listen, we’re going to send you to Mar-a-Lago on a Boeing 757, you’re going to use the spa, you’re going to this, you’re going to that, we want your vote.’ That’s a corrupt system.”
Mr. Trump’s comments were the latest salvo in an escalating war against the Republican National Committee over how delegates were being selected in the presidential race.
On Sunday, two days before New York’s primaries, Mr. Trump was the only Republican presidential candidate to campaign in the state, where polls showed him with a wide lead.
During his visit to Staten Island, a stronghold of his support, he accepted an award from the New York Veteran Police Association and spoke at a party brunch. At a rally in Poughkeepsie, he berated party officials once again...
Feminism vs. Fauxminism--great new piece by @CathyYoung63 https://t.co/sZ0nHgXPWC
— Christina H. Sommers (@CHSommers) April 18, 2016
George Clooney, who hosted big-money fundraisers for Hillary Clinton in California this weekend, has called such fundraising “obscene”.More at that top link.
In response Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic nomination, said he respected Clooney’s “integrity and honesty on this issue” and added: “One of the great tragedies is that big money is buying elections.”
Clinton leads Sanders by double digits in most polls regarding New York, which stages its primary on Tuesday.
The issue of fundraising has been a constant on the campaign trail, as Sanders heralds his reliance on small donors and lack of any fundraising Super Pac. Clooney’s events, however, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, attracted criticism from the Sanders campaign and, on Friday in San Francisco, protests outside the venue.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, the actor was asked by host Chuck Todd whether the sums involved in his events, such as $353,400 a couple to be a “co-chair”, were, as critics and protesters have said, obscene.
“Yes,” he said. “I think it’s an obscene amount of money. I think – you know that we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they’re right to protest, they’re absolutely right, it is an obscene amount of money...
BUCHANAN COUNTY, Va. — There isn’t much Jody Bostic believes in these days.More.
The government has abandoned him, he feels. Local coal mines have laid him off so many times he opened a T-shirt store to make a living. Big-city media treat him and his neighbors like know-nothings.
His remaining hope: Donald Trump will become president and use his business skills to bring jobs to this Appalachian mountain county. “Hey, in this county, things are going downhill. People are getting laid off. People are leaving,” says the 39-year-old former miner. “If Trump don’t get it, it will be another blow.”
Mr. Trump won Buchanan County with 69.7% of the vote in the March 1 Republican primary, the highest percentage vote he has collected in any U.S. county so far. A close look at the white, working-class enclave, which is in Virginia’s southwest, provides a clearer picture of why Mr. Trump inspires supporters and poses problems for anti-Trump GOP strategists.
Voters here say Mr. Trump understands their frustration and will fight the Washington establishment on their behalf. In an area awash in uncertainty—Will mines remain open? Will the river flood? Must the young leave to find work?—he is a reassuring presence, someone who has visited their living rooms for years via television.
Here, as elsewhere, his message of American renewal, closed borders and antigovernment populism resonates despite his brashness, even among Democrats.
His wealth isn’t a put-off. County Sheriff Ray Foster, who supports Mr. Trump, says rich businessmen have long been well-liked around the county because “they make jobs for the people here.”
As for the imbroglios over Mr. Trump’s comments about women and his shifting views on abortion and foreign policy, which have driven up his negative ratings in national polls, they are generally seen here as a plus. They reinforce his outsider status.
“He talks before he thinks,” Mr. Foster says, “so he doesn’t have time to think up something and lie to you.”
The lessons are important for New York, where Mr. Trump is heavily favored to win the primary on Tuesday and has a chance of peeling off working-class Democrats in the general election. He could do especially well in Republican strongholds along the state’s southern tier, federally classified as part of Appalachia. Counties there share some characteristics of Buchanan County.
In Buchanan County, Mr. Trump has won over many Democrats because he not only “speaks for them—he speaks in terms they’re comfortable with,” says Gerald Arrington, the county’s commonwealth’s attorney and a registered Democrat. Mr. Arrington says Mr. Trump won his vote in the Virginia primary, the first time he had cast a vote for a Republican...
Its @indiareynolds_ on https://t.co/rTXAI2iF67 today hmu @charlietoons shot in tenerife. Leave a comment on our page pic.twitter.com/e60EhScQkb
— Alison Webster (@alisonvwebster) April 13, 2016
The Supreme Court's last great case of the Obama era comes before the justices Monday when the administration's lawyers defend his plan to offer work permits to as many as 4 million immigrants who have been living here illegally for years.
Once again, lawyers for Republican leaders from Congress and the states will be challenging the actions of the Democratic president. And as with past battles over healthcare and same-sex marriage, Obama administration lawyers will need to win over at least one of the court's more conservative justices.
If the justices split 4 to 4 — a possibility since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia — the tie vote would keep in place a Texas judge's order that has blocked President Obama's deportation relief plan from taking effect.
At issue is whether the president has the power to extend a "temporary reprieve" from the threat of deportation and a work permit to immigrant parents of U.S. citizens or lawful residents. More than one-fourth of those who stand to benefit live in California, according to immigration experts.
The two sides disagree not only on what is the right outcome, but on what the case is about. One side sees a great constitutional clash over the rule of law in a democracy, while the other sees a narrow regulatory dispute.
The Republicans, in written briefs, portray Obama's order as a profound threat to the constitutional system. If the president can defy Congress and change the law on his own, the nation has abandoned "a bedrock constitutional principle," they say.
This "would be one of the largest changes in immigration policy in the nation's history," say lawyers for Texas and 25 other Republican-led states. They note that the president's action arose after Congress refused to change the law in line with his wishes, so the order rests on "an unprecedented, sweeping assertion of executive power," they say.
The House Republicans joined the case on the side of Texas, and if anything, raised the stakes even higher. They described Obama's immigration order as "the most aggressive of executive power claims" and a threat to "the separation of powers that underpins our very constitutional structure."
Meanwhile, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli Jr., the administration's top lawyer, sought to play down the significance of Obama's order and defuse the constitutional clash. He said the immigrants who qualify would be offered a temporary relief from deportation that does not "confer any form of legal status." He cited instances in which Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush gave similar relief to large groups of immigrants who were fleeing wars or despotic regimes.
UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.Well, that's for sure.
The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.
Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”
Others sought to improve the school’s use of social media and to devise a new plan for the UC Davis strategic communications office, which has seen its budget rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.
“We have worked to ensure that the reputation of the university, which the chancellor leads, is fairly portrayed,” said UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis. “We wanted to promote and advance the important teaching, research and public service done by our students, faculty and staff, which is the core mission of our university.”
Money to pay the consultants came from the communications department budget, Topousis said.
*****
IT IS ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF HOW OUT OF TOUCH THE LEADERSHIP AT UC DAVIS IS WHEN IT COMES TO THEIR PUBLIC PERSPECTIVE...
*****
As the news rippled across the web last week that a Long Island student had won admission to all eight Ivy League universities, thousands of people reacted with messages of praise.Keep reading.
But when Peter Kang, a high school senior in Chantilly, Va., saw a New York Times article last week about the student, Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, on his Facebook feed, he grumbled.
“This is exactly what is driving down college acceptance rates and making university that much harder to get into,” he wrote on the site, setting off a lively discussion in the comment thread.
The crux of Mr. Kang’s complaint, one shared by many other students, is that he and his peers are applying to too many colleges, driving down admission rates and elevating the prestige of selective universities, which leads more students to apply.
“It just seems like a vicious cycle,” Mr. Kang, 17, said in an interview.
Admissions experts say Mr. Kang has a point.
Mr. Kang blamed the Common Application, the standardized form that has risen in popularity and is now accepted by more than 600 colleges, including all the Ivy League universities. The ease of using the form has led many students to decide almost on a whim to add one, two or even 10 more universities to their list.
Mr. Kang admitted that he, too, chose to “blast send” his applications. He felt as if he had to. “I was one of those people that took advantage of the system,” he said.
He applied to 21 colleges, all but two through the Common Application, and won acceptance to six. All the Ivy League campuses to which he applied rejected him.
The experience left him deflated, though despite his critique, he said he was happy for Ms. Uwamanzu-Nna (pronounced oo-wah-man-ZOO-nah), a child of Nigerian immigrants.
“She did the same exact thing I did and she got the results, but I can’t be mad at someone trying to improve their odds,” he said. “It’s so much easier to apply and there’s so much pressure to apply.”
Admissions experts point to a trend called application inflation. Students are sending off more applications than ever. In 1990, just 9 percent of students applied to seven or more schools, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. By 2013, that group had grown to 32 percent.
For the first time in five years, Northern California’s rivers are roaring and its reservoirs are filled almost to the brim.Keep reading.
But you’d hardly know it, based on how quiet it’s been at the two giant pumping stations at the south end of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The pumps deliver Sacramento Valley water to 19 million Southern Californians and millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.
While precipitation has been roughly four times heavier than a year ago, the Delta pumps have produced just a 35 percent increase in water shipments. For every gallon that’s been pumped to south-of-Delta water agencies since Jan. 1, 3 1/2 gallons have been allowed to flow out to sea. Pumping activity has decreased considerably the past three weeks, to the rising irritation of south state contractors.
The reason lies in a combination of poor timing, the drought-ravaged status of several endangered species of Delta fish, a suite of environmental laws and regulations that govern the pumps – and the complexities of the Delta’s intricate network of river channels, canals and sloughs. As regulators have taken extraordinary steps to protect nearly extinct fish species, their decisions to restrict pumping have become another flash point in California’s water wars – one that shows the easing of the drought doesn’t calm the fighting over how water gets allocated.
Congress has weighed in, with House Republicans and California’s senior Democratic senator pushing for more pumping. In Sacramento, federal and state bureaucracies are butting heads in response to competing demands on the Delta’s water.
On one side are the California Department of Water Resources, which operates the State Water Project, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the federal government’s Central Valley Project. These agencies oversee the state’s vast network of dams, pumps and canals, and they are under pressure from their south-of-Delta customers to help replenish groundwater reserves and south state reservoirs that have shrunk after four years of drought.
On the other side are two federal agencies responsible for safeguarding Delta fish protected by the Endangered Species Act: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. Court rulings empower the agencies to govern Delta water flows, which often translate into pumping limits to keep fish from being harmed.
“This year we saw the fishery agencies, particularly the Fish and Wildlife Service, make more conservative calls,” said Mark Cowin, director of the Department of Water Resources. “My sense is they felt compelled to take every conservative action they could ... to try to prevent extinction.” He said his agency has engaged in “spirited conversations” with the fisheries agencies about their determinations this year.
Many of the water agencies that depend on the Delta pumps say the restrictions are based on faulty science and harming the economy.
“The state will never recover from this water shortage, if they keep operating (the pumps) the way they have been this first three months of the year,” said Johnny Amaral, deputy general manager for Westlands Water District, an influential San Joaquin Valley farm-water contractor. Westlands has been told to expect just a 5 percent water allocation this year from the Central Valley Project.
A Sanders supporter's 'Democratic whores' insult just exposed the party's risk of splitting https://t.co/vM9Id7cXZw— L.A. Times Politics (@latimespolitics) April 14, 2016
A supporter's inflammatory rhetoric at a massive rally for Bernie Sanders on Wednesday — capped by a reference to Hillary Clinton as being among "corporate Democratic whores" beholden to the pharmaceutical industry — underscored the concerns of some Democratic leaders about unifying the party heading into the general election.And notice the Bernie Guevara t-shirt on that Sanders supporter. Just wow.
Dr. Paul Song, a Santa Monica radiation oncologist and leader of a major California progressive group called the Courage Campaign, was one of the first speakers at Sanders' evening rally in New York's Washington Square Park. He used his remarks to rail against what he called "an immoral and unjust healthcare system" even after some improvements through President Obama's Affordable Care Act.
"Please do not believe ... that our healthcare system is OK," he pleaded with the crowd, which the Sanders campaign said numbered more than 27,000. "Please do not believe that we only need minor tweaks."
Song praised Sanders as the only candidate who recognized healthcare as a human right and support for universal healthcare, before he turned his attention to Clinton.
First, he said he respected Clinton and her husband and noted they had helped his family -- President Clinton traveled to North Korea to secure the release of his sister-in-law, Laura Ling, a journalist who was detained there. But Song said he could only support a candidate who "will help every single family in the United States."
"Secretary Clinton has said Medicare-for-all will never happen," he said. "Well, I agree with Secretary Clinton that Medicare-for-all will never happen if we have a president who never aspires for something greater than the status quo. Medicare-for-all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to Big Pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us."
Clinton's campaign pounced on the comment, calling on Sanders to disavow it. Sanders' campaign did so on his Twitter account Thursday morning, calling the comment "inappropriate and insensitive."
"There's no room for language like that in our political discourse," the post reads...
WASHINGTON (AP) -- To all the political junkies yearning for a contested Republican convention this summer: not so fast.Well, we'll see. We'll see.
It's still possible for Donald Trump to clinch the nomination by the end of the primaries on June 7. His path is narrow and perilous. But it's plausible and starts with a big victory Tuesday in his home state New York primary.
Trump is the only candidate with a realistic chance of reaching the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the July convention in Cleveland. His rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, can only hope to stop him.
If Cruz and Kasich are successful, politicos across the country will have the summer of their dreams - a convention with an uncertain outcome. But Trump can put an end to those dreams, and he can do it without any of the 150 or so delegates who will go to the convention free to support the candidate of their choice.
What comes next isn't a prediction, but rather, a way in which Trump could win the nomination outright on June 7.
To be sure, Trump will have to start doing a lot better than he has so far. He gets that chance starting Tuesday, beginning the day with 744 delegates...
El Niño has doused northern California, but farmers in the state’s Central Valley won’t see much benefit. The Obama Administration is again indulging its progressive friends at the expense of low-income communities.Keep reading.
The Bureau of Reclamation recently announced that Central Valley Project agricultural water contractors south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would receive a mere 5% of their contractual allocation this year despite brimming reservoirs in the North. Lake Shasta is at 90% capacity, and billions of gallons of water were released from Lake Folsom this winter to avert flooding.
Meantime, wildlife refuges and farmers north of the Delta—those in Democratic Reps. Jerry McNerney and John Garamendi’s districts—will get 100% of the water they’re owed. The liberal gentry in the Bay Area, which pipes its pristine water directly from Hetch Hetchy reservoir, also won’t be affected by this government water rationing. Federal biological opinions limit Delta water pumps to a third of capacity to protect endangered smelt and salmon, which can get sucked into the machines. Despite these restrictions, fish populations continue to decline.
The Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged last year that “existing regulatory mechanisms have not proven adequate” to halt the smelt’s decline and that “we are unable to determine with certainty which threats or combinations of threats are directly responsible.” The bigger culprits appear to be invasive species, Delta farm fertilizer, Sacramento effluence, the drought and, perhaps, natural selection.
The Obama Administration is nonetheless doubling down on a failed policy. Amid this winter’s storms, Delta water regulators reduced water pumping to protect putatively vulnerable larval and juvenile smelt. Three adult smelt—and no juveniles or larvae—have been killed by the pumps this year....
House Republicans and [California Democrat] Senator [Dianne] Feinstein have backed legislation to give federal agencies discretion to increase pumping during heavy storm flows. Ms. Feinstein last month told the Sacramento Bee that Mr. Obama hasn’t engaged. The unavoidable conclusion is that the President and his green patrons care more about protecting fish larvae than the poor.
Throughout its postwar history, Germany somehow managed to resist the temptations of right-wing populism. Not any longer. On March 13, the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD)—a party that has said it may be necessary to shoot at migrants trying to enter the country illegally and that has mooted the idea of banning mosques—scored double-digit results in elections in three German states; in one, Saxony-Anhalt, the party took almost a quarter of the vote. For some observers, the success of the AfD is just evidence of Germany’s further “normalization”: other major countries, such as France, have long had parties that oppose European integration and condemn the existing political establishment for failing properly to represent the people—why should Germany be an exception?Keep reading.
Such complacency is unjustified, for at least two reasons: the AfD has fed off and in turn encouraged a radical street movement, the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West,” or Pegida, that has no equivalent elsewhere in Europe. And perhaps most important, the AfD’s warnings about the “slow cultural extinction” of Germany that supposedly will result from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming of more than a million refugees have been echoed by a number of prominent intellectuals. In fact, the conceptual underpinnings for what one AfD ideologue has called “avant-garde conservatism” can be found in the recent work of several mainstream German writers and philosophers. Never since the end of the Nazi era has a right-wing party enjoyed such broad cultural support. How did this happen?
The AfD was founded in 2013 by a group of perfectly respectable, deeply uncharismatic economics professors. Its very name, Alternative for Germany, was chosen to contest Angela Merkel’s claim that there was no alternative to her policies to address the eurocrisis.The professors opposed the euro, since, in their eyes, it placed excessive financial burdens on the German taxpayer and sowed discord among European states. But they did not demand the dissolution of the European Union itself in the way right-wing populists elsewhere in Europe have done. Still, Germany’s mainstream parties sought to tar them as “anti-European,” which reinforced among many voters the sense that the country’s political establishment made discussion of certain policy choices effectively taboo. Like other new parties, the AfD attracted all kinds of political adventurers. But it also provided a home for conservatives who thought that many of Merkel’s policies—ending nuclear energy and the military draft, endorsing same-sex unions, and raising the minimum wage—had moved her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) too far to the left. Since there was a mainstream conservative view opposing many of these decisions, the AfD could now occupy space to the right of the CDU without suspicion of being undemocratic or of harking back to the Nazi past.
The AfD narrowly failed to enter the German parliament in 2013, but managed to send seven deputies to Brussels after the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, where they joined an alliance of Euroskeptic parties led by Britain’s conservatives. With outward success came internal strife. Young right-wingers challenged the AfD’s professors with initiatives such as the “Patriotic Platform,” which appeared closer to the nationalist far right than an authentically conservative CDU. In summer 2015, most of the founders of the AfD walked away; one expressed his regret about having created a “monster.” The AfD seemed destined to follow the path of so many protest parties, brought down by infighting, a lack of professionalism, and the failure to nurture enough qualified personnel to do the day-to-day parliamentary politics it would have to engage in to become more than a flash in the pan.
And then the party was saved by Angela Merkel. Or so the AfD’s new, far more radical leaders have been saying ever since the chancellor announced her hugely controversial refugee policy last summer. At the time, her decision was widely endorsed, but in the months since, her support has declined precipitously—while the AfD’s has surged. Many fear that the German state is losing control of the situation, and blame Merkel for failing to negotiate a genuinely pan-European approach to the crisis. Alexander Gauland, a senior former CDU politician and now one of the most recognizable AfD leaders—he cultivates the appearance of a traditional British Tory, including tweed jackets and frequent references to Edmund Burke—has called the refugee crisis a “gift” for the AfD.
Others have gone further. Consider the statements of Beatrix von Storch, a countess from Lower Saxony who is one of the AfD’s deputies to the European Parliament, where she just joined the group that includes UKIP and the far right Sweden Democrats. A promoter of both free-market ideas and Christian fundamentalism she has gone on record as saying that border guards might have to use firearms against refugees trying illegally to cross the border—including women and children. After much criticism, she conceded that children might be exempted, but not women.
Such statements are meant to exploit what the AfD sees as a broadening fear among voters that the new arrivals pose a deep threat to German culture. The AfD will present a full-fledged political program after a conference at the very end of April, but early indications are that there will be a heavy emphasis on preventing what the party views as the Islamization of Germany. A draft version of the program contains phrases such as “We are and want to remain Germans”—and the real meaning of such platitudes is then made concrete with the call to prohibit the construction of minarets. It is here that the orientation of AfD and the far more strident, anti-Islam Pegida movement most clearly overlap...
#ResistCapitalism pic.twitter.com/mYkBHmXMdu
— Countermoonbat (@CounterMoonbat) April 9, 2016
Bethenny gives lesson in how NOT to empower a room full of women founders -- by @msmarypryor https://t.co/BRrY5cFzGs pic.twitter.com/KaLUZfi66r
— HuffPost BlackVoices (@blackvoices) April 13, 2016
(1) To the organizers of @RenttheRunway #PEIntensive16 and their events this weekend I applaud the diverse room of women thanks to @UBS
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
(2) However #PEIntensive16's keynote via @Bethenny was offensive and wrong NOT proper for a room full of female founders
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
(3) I along with another ally of color stood up to address how offensive @Bethenny was to not just us but the entire room #PEIntensive16
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
(4) For @Bethenny to insist that a young, Black female founder "Find a white guy" to rep her biz is a racial microaggression #PEIntensive16
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
(5) For #PEIntensive16 to not issue an apology to the women of color in the room that were offended by her statement bothers me
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
(6) I am tired of being asked to be present in the room for female founders events & have my voice SHUT DOWN #PEIntensive16 @RentTheRunway
— Mary Pryor (@msmarypryor) April 11, 2016
The Guardian study's hidden lesson: trolls reinforce white male dominance in journalism https://t.co/yeAQrDn331 Nice work from @amandataub
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) April 13, 2016
