#TommyRobinson appeal in progress. I say to the Establishment, maybe you will think twice the next time you throw one of our own to the wolves. The Muslim overlords of our prisons will get him. Eventually. pic.twitter.com/OOKf9RHuhU— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) July 18, 2018
#TommyRobinson appeal will be heard today— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) July 18, 2018
Standing up for our girls against majority Pakistani Muslim rape squads pic.twitter.com/OOKf9RHuhU
What with all the swiping, scrolling, snap-chatting, surfing and streaming that consume the adolescent mind, an American parent might well watch his or her teen and wonder whether any sustained thought is even possible.
New research supports that worry, suggesting that teens who spend more time toggling among a growing number of digital media platforms exhibit a mounting array of attention difficulties and impulse-control problems.
In a group of more than 2,500 Los Angeles-area high school students who showed no evidence of attention challenges at the outset, investigators from USC, UCLA and UC San Diego found that those who engaged in more digital media activities over a two-year period reported a rising number of symptoms linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
The association between digital media use and ADHD symptoms in teens was modest. But it was clear enough that it could not be dismissed as a statistical fluke. On average, with each notch a teen climbed up the scale of digital engagement, his or her average level of reported ADHD symptoms rose by about 10%.
The results do not show that prolific use of digital media causes ADHD symptoms, much less that it results in a level of impairment that would warrant an ADHD diagnosis or pharmaceutical treatment.
Indeed, it’s possible the relationship is reversed — that attention problems drive an adolescent to more intensive online engagement.
But at a time when 95% of adolescents own or have access to a smartphone and 45% said they are online “almost constantly,” the new study raises some stark concerns about the future of paying attention. It was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
The findings come as mental health professionals are rethinking their understanding of ADHD, a psychiatric condition that was long thought to start in early childhood and last across a lifetime. Marked by impulsivity, hyperactivity and difficulty sustaining attention, ADHD is estimated to affect about 7% of children and adolescents.
But the disorder is increasingly being diagnosed in older teens and adults, and in some it waxes and wanes across a lifespan. Whether its symptoms were missed earlier, developed later or are brought on by changing circumstances is unclear.
The new research, involving 2,587 sophomores and juniors attending public schools in Los Angeles County, raises the possibility that, for some, ADHD symptoms are brought on or exacerbated by the hyper-stimulating entreaties of a winking, pinging, vibrating, always-on marketplace of digital offerings that is as close as the wireless device in their pocket.
“We believe we are studying the occurrence of new symptoms that weren’t present at the beginning of the study,” said USC psychologist Adam M. Leventhal, the study’s senior author.
The study “is just the latest in a series of research findings showing that excessive use of digital media may have consequences for teens' well-being,” said San Diego State University psychologist Jean M. Twenge, who has conducted research on teens and smartphone use but was not involved in the new work.
Twenge’s research, published this year in the journal Emotion, explored a sharp decline in U.S. teens’ happiness and satisfaction since 2012. Combing through the data from 1.1 million teens, Twenge and her colleagues found dissatisfaction highest among those who spent the most time locked onto a screen. As time spent in offline activities increased, so did happiness.
Leventhal and his colleagues assessed the digital engagement of their 15- and 16-year-old subjects five times over a two-year period — when they first entered the study and four more times at six-month intervals. They asked the students to think back over the last week and report whether and how much they had engaged in 14 separate online activities. Those included checking social media sites, browsing the web, posting or commenting on online content, texting, playing games, video chatting, and streaming TV or movies...
"European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense. There will be no Cold War II." Buchanan: https://t.co/smXDYWl4ZH
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) July 17, 2018
Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
On Syria, Trump indicated that he and Putin are working with Bibi Netanyahu, who wants all Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias kept far from the Golan Heights. As for U.S. troops in Syria, says Trump, they will be coming out after ISIS is crushed, and we are 98 percent there.
That is another underlying message here: America is coming home from foreign wars and will be shedding foreign commitments.
Both before and after the Trump-Putin meeting, the cable news coverage was as hostile and hateful toward the president as any this writer has ever seen. The media may not be the “enemy of the people” Trump says they are, but many are implacable enemies of this president.
Some wanted Trump to emulate Nikita Khrushchev, who blew up the Paris summit in May 1960 over a failed U.S. intelligence operation — the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Urals just weeks earlier.
Khrushchev had demanded that Ike apologize. Ike refused, and Khrushchev exploded. Some media seemed to be hoping for just such a confrontation.
When Trump spoke of the “foolishness and stupidity” of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that contributed to this era of animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, what might he have had in mind?
Was it the U.S. provocatively moving NATO into Russia’s front yard after the collapse of the USSR?
Was it the U.S. invasion of Iraq to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction he did not have that plunged us into endless wars of the Middle East?
Was it U.S. support of Syrian rebels determined to oust Bashar Assad, leading to ISIS intervention and a seven-year civil war with half a million dead, a war which Putin eventually entered to save his Syrian ally?
Was it George W. Bush’s abrogation of Richard Nixon’s ABM treaty and drive for a missile defense that caused Putin to break out of the Reagan INF treaty and start deploying cruise missiles to counter it?
Was it U.S. complicity in the Kiev coup that ousted the elected pro-Russian regime that caused Putin to seize Crimea to hold onto Russia’s Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol?
Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did.
Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the U.S. bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo?
How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?
If Russian military intelligence hacked into the emails of the DNC, exposing how they stuck it to Bernie Sanders, Trump says he did not collude in it. Is there, after two years, any proof that he did?
Trump insists Russian meddling had no effect on the outcome in 2016 and he is not going to allow media obsession with Russiagate to interfere with establishing better relations.
Former CIA Director John Brennan rages that, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki … was … treasonous. … He is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
Well, as Patrick Henry said long ago, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”
Nobody ever went to Teen Vogue for moral or political enlightenment. But who would have thought it would become an exemplar of a wider moral sewer https://t.co/da3QkaTPEv
— The Spectator (@spectator) July 18, 2018
I have no words... Disgraceful.— Andreas Fagerbakke (@afagerbakke) July 17, 2018
Three-dozen far-left pro-BDS Jewish groups urge rejection of anti-Semitism definition https://t.co/YcbvTb0EHi via @JNS_org
(July 17, 2018 / JNS) Three-dozen far-left pro-BDS Jewish groups from around the world have signed a statement rejecting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of anti-Semitism over its alleged conflation of anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel.And see the Jerusalem Post, "Outcry by UK Jewry as Labour adopts controversial antisemitism guidelines."
The statement, spearheaded by the anti-Israel U.S.-based group Jewish Voice for Peace, said that the IHRA definition, which has been adopted by a number of Western countries, “is worded in such a way as to be easily adopted or considered by western governments to intentionally equate legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former.”
The statement said the conflation “undermines both the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and the global struggle against antisemitism.”
“It also serves to shield Israel from being held accountable to universal standards of human rights and international law,” the statement said. “Israel does not represent us and cannot speak for us when committing crimes against Palestinians and denying their UN-stipulated rights.”
Among the other U.S.-based groups that signed the letter are Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, Jews of Color & Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews and Jews Say No!
The statement by the far-left Jewish groups comes amid an intense debate within the United Kingdom’s Labour Party over the adoption of the IHRA definition...
It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to terminate my membership of the Labour Party – A party I have supported throughout my life, a party I stood for as a candidate in local elections, a party that that was the natural home for British Jews #LabourAntisemitism pic.twitter.com/QfCLemaKmw
— Tal Ofer (@TalOfer) July 17, 2018
'The Labour party was my home – but anti-Semitism is forcing me to leave it'https://t.co/zSCRSqeGHX @NewStatesman @LabourAgainstAS @AntisemitismOut #LabourAntisemitism #EnoughIsEnough @BoardofDeputies
— Tal Ofer (@TalOfer) July 18, 2018
Why is a bookseller on Amazon asking $2,000 for a 99-cent paperback? https://t.co/U4YGOV2Ap6
— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) July 16, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace.
Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon.
“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.
“How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. “Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side,” she said.
Amazon is by far the largest marketplace for both new and used books the world has ever seen, and is also one of the most inscrutable. The retailer directly sells some books, while others are sold by third parties. The wild pricing happens with the latter.
Democrats are more interested in the upcoming midterm elections and more enthused to vote than usual, and that helps them to an 8-point edge in the generic congressional ballot test. This amid widespread concern that the country’s political debate is overheated and even dangerous -- to the point that many voters steer clear of talking politics with family and friends.The election's still months away. I don't think Dems should get too excited, especially if they're planing on running and "Abolish ICE" platform.
Fifty-four percent of Democrats are “extremely” interested in the November elections, and 51 percent are more enthusiastic about voting than usual, according to the latest Fox News national poll.
Republicans trail on both measures: 47 percent are extremely interested and 42 percent are more enthused.
Here’s the take-away: by a 48-40 percent margin, voters prefer the Democratic candidate in their congressional district over the Republican. Democrats were up 48-39 percent last month. The rule of thumb is the Democrats need to carry the generic ballot test by about 10 percentage points to take over the U.S. House this fall.
When the results are narrowed to only extremely interested voters, the Democratic advantage is 13 points: 54-41 percent.
“Things seem to move day to day, but the prevailing political wind favors the Democrats right now,” says Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts the survey with Democrat Chris Anderson.
“There’s still a lot of time until Election Day, but we’re close enough that polls like this should worry the Republicans.”
There’s a 14-point interest gap between Republican men and women, as 53 percent of GOP men are extremely interested, while 39 percent of GOP women say the same.
Among Democrats, 54 percent of men and 53 percent of women are extremely interested...
This picture of Alexis Ren is hilarious because she had someone take it, looked at it, loved it, and posted it…knowing that people would be excited by it, knowing that despite it being pretty fucking aggressive, it’s what the people want…and she’s not going to be the one to not give it to them…so here she is giving it to them….I mean I’ve seen butt shots, I’ve seen over the shoulder butt shots, I’ve seen it all, I’ve probably even seen this pose..but it’s so hardcore, hard to believe she was one of the most followed “influencers”…I mean not really with posts like this…it’s the kind of thing I want to follow…
Oh, girl. The fact that you think overturning Roe v Wade has anything to do with religion shows how ignorant you are about the constitution & abortion itself.
— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) July 11, 2018
Also, now YOU are dictating what conservatives should stand for? No thanks. https://t.co/TboXZQ37gI
Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said that she fears the fate of Roe v. Wade, with Trump's selection of Judge Kavanaugh.
— CRTV (@CRTV) July 11, 2018
Good.
Listen and SUBSCRIBE to @ConservMillen's podcast:https://t.co/QA2I31rA8v pic.twitter.com/wSlEg7ZuTH
President Trump threw the annual NATO summit into crisis Thursday — forcing an emergency session and suggesting the United States could leave the nearly 70-year-old alliance — before switching positions and claiming victory.More.
As the summit closed, the president held an unexpected news conference, taking credit for having secured firmer commitments from all 28 other member nations to increase their spending on defense.
Other leaders, however, denied that NATO members had made any significantly new commitments to spending beyond what they’d agreed to in 2014, under some pressure from President Obama.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in his own closing news conference, said NATO members had made no new commitments. He also said that Trump "never at any moment, either in public or in private, threatened to withdraw from NATO."
From Brussels, Trump headed next to Britain on a diplomatic tour that will end Monday in Helsinki, Finland, with his first official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Before departing for London, however, he sent some undiplomatic advance signals in his news conference — calling Britain a “hotspot,” noting the resignations that have threatened Prime Minister Theresa May’s government and questioning whether her “Brexit” plan for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is what British voters want.
Trump at NATO’s close cast himself as a savior in a crisis of his own making. Yet in declaring victory and agreeing to sign a closing declaration — emphasizing joint defense against Russia — Trump avoided the debacle that he made of last month’s summit of the Group of 7 industrialized powers in Canada. There, as he flew off, he tweeted his withdrawal from the summit’s final statement and hurled insults at host Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, for his perceived slights.
In Brussels, Trump said that the NATO members committed to meet the already agreed-to goal of allocating an amount equal to 2% of each nation's gross domestic product toward defense spending, and that he would like to see the benchmark raised to 4% eventually.
"Yesterday, I let them know I was extremely unhappy with what was happening. And now we're very happy. We have a very powerful, very strong NATO — much stronger than it was two days ago,” Trump said at the 35-minute news conference here...
UC opens doors to record number of Californians, led by growth in transfer students https://t.co/COB6Cbm8NY pic.twitter.com/xvz9Syf0xo— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 11, 2018
The University of California opened its doors to a record number of Californians for fall 2018, led by growth in transfer students from across the state, according to preliminary data released Wednesday.RTWT.
The public research university’s nine undergraduate campuses offered seats to 95,654 Californians, nearly 3,000 more students than last year. Overall, UC admitted about three-fifths of the 221,788 California, out-of-state and international students who applied.
“After reviewing yet another record-breaking number of applications, our campuses have offered admission to an exceptionally talented group of students,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement. “With the benefit of a UC education, these accomplished young people from different backgrounds, with diverse beliefs and aspirations, will make California and the world a better place.”
The data reflect UC’s stepped-up efforts to reach more deeply across California for community college students, as it responds to growing pressure from Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature to open access for more residents.
Brown has long advocated the transfer option as a cheaper alternative to a four-year degree at a time the state is projected to face a 1.1-million shortfall in college-educated workers by 2030, and he has used his budget power to prod UC to adjust its admission policies. In recent years, state elected officials also have successfully pressed UC to boost enrollment of Californians and limit out-of-state and international students.
The mix of offers for freshmen and transfer students slightly shifted this year in response to such pressure. Most campuses increased offers to California transfer students and decreased them for freshmen.
UCLA, for instance, admitted 562 fewer freshmen but 64 more transfer students this year. Berkeley, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz also boosted their admission offers to state transfer students. Offers to California freshmen were down at Berkeley, Irvine, San Diego and Santa Cruz in addition to UCLA.
“Transfer students are the future of our university,” said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, UCLA vice provost of enrollment management.
One of them is Francisco Cruz Tapia, a 24-year-old transfer student from Moreno Valley College who plans to study computer engineering at UCLA this fall. He said he chose to start at a community college to stay closer to family and save money. His costs were minimal, he said, because he lived at home and received a fee waiver for his classes.
At UCLA, his tuition and fees will be covered by Cal Grant and university aid, but he said he’ll need to pay rent in the pricey Westwood area. Cruz Tapia said, however, that the costs will be worth it for a chance to pursue his research interests in artificial intelligence.
“It was really challenging to transfer because I had to take a lot of math and physics classes, but I’m excited to go to one of the top universities in the nation,” Cruz Tapia said.
UCLA particularly focused on recruiting in the Central Valley this year as part of a joint effort between UC and California Community Colleges to increase students from areas with historically low transfer rates. Under the partnership, launched in September 2016, the college system gave UC $2.6 million to help students at 39 of its 114 community colleges become more competitive applicants.
Copeland-Morgan said the campus chose to work with four Central Valley colleges — San Joaquin Delta, Bakersfield, Solano and Reedley — because students there are more geographically isolated, often low-income and the first in their families to attend college. Many have less access to the resources and information needed to succeed in the competitive world of college admissions, she said.
Her recruiters made multiple trips to the colleges to help students and counselors understand how to become not only eligible but also competitive for UC admissions. UC requires a minimum 2.4 GPA for California transfer applicants, but Copeland-Morgan said most successful UCLA applicants have at least a 3.6 GPA..
UCLA boosted applications from those colleges by 29% and admission offers by 34% this year. Overall, the Westwood campus admitted students from 109 state community colleges...
After President Trump announced Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to the Supreme Court on Monday, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) spent all day Tuesday engaged in a competition to demonize Kavanaugh. If you believe what Democrats tell you, Kavanaugh is the most extreme extremist in the history of extremism. How extreme is he? Extremely extreme! He’s not just a right-winger, he’s “far-right.” How far? Extremely far! He’s so extremely far right as to “threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades,” to quote Clinton crony and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. (Hat-tip: Hogewash.)More.
The reader who isn’t tuned into the CNN/MSNBC/Democrat hysteria may wonder, how does a federal judge threaten millions of lives? On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Chuck Schumer said: “I will oppose this nomination with everything I’ve got. . . . This man should not be on the bench. . . . I believe he is far, far right on so many issues.” Schumer repeatedly asserted that the Kavanaugh nomination is somehow a threat to ObamaCare. Exactly how the Supreme Court affects healthcare legislation, Schumer didn’t specify, but he said that coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” which he described as “very popular” with the Democrat Party’s base, would be jeopardized if Kavanaugh is confirmed.
Because I don’t pay much attention to the paranoid fears of Democrats, it’s possible that Schumer is actually right about this. For all I know, there are cases pending in lower courts challenging elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which Democrats rammed through Congress on a party-line vote just a few months before they lost their majority in the 2010 midterm elections. The ACA’s mandate of coverage for “pre-existing conditions” was one of the worst job-killers in the bill. Requiring employers to provide insurance that covered whatever health problems the employee might have had before being hired meant that a lot of people simply couldn’t get hired, and this measure also sent health insurance rates skyrocketing, as insurers sought to compensate for the (often very expensive) treatments they were now required to cover.
One reason the economy started booming — and unemployment started declining — as soon as Trump was elected was that he promised to repeal ObamaCare and, by executive action, was able to limit the job-killing impact of this badly constructed legislation. If somehow the Supreme Court could render the entirety of ObamaCare null and void, good, although as I say, I’m not aware that this is likely, or even possible...
Since 2014, NATO has seen three consecutive years of growth in defense expenditure across European member states and Canada. https://t.co/Up5noxPWWs
— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 10, 2018
The question of equitable burden-sharing will not go away. @TomaszSiemoniak @IgorJanke @RadioFreeTom @irishspy https://t.co/fvxpZcVzOT
— Andrew A. Michta (@andrewmichta) July 10, 2018
A Strategic Reset for NATO > Donald Trump's criticism that the alliance isn't fit for form is valid. NATO needs an overhaul. < https://t.co/b5qOPSQQiQ
— Panzer Leader (@ArmorCavSpin) July 10, 2018
Could b pic.twitter.com/WBX8nKiqCb
— IHOP (@IHOP) June 6, 2018
Got petitioned to sign a ban on assault rifles. Lol. pic.twitter.com/3lmy4SqYqT
— Anna Paulina (@_annapaulina_) June 11, 2018
The brilliant follow-up to #FrancineProse's New York Times bestseller #ReadingLikeAWriter is out today! Click here to learn more: https://t.co/b4SGFNXlaf pic.twitter.com/XWVbkrEjCN
— harperbooks (@harperbooks) July 3, 2018
Francine Prose offers advice on what to read this summer in this excerpt from her new book, What to Read and Why: https://t.co/DXsGA7jO2M via @WBUR
— HarperCollins (@HarperCollins) July 9, 2018
Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that we can do. A book is a kind of refuge to which we can go for the assurance that, as long as we are reading, we can leave the worries and cares of our everyday lives behind us and enter, however briefly, another reality, populated by other lives, a world distant in time and place from our own, or else reflective of the present moment in ways that may help us see that moment more clearly. Anyone who reads can choose to enter (or not enter) the portal that admits us to the invented or observed world that the author has created.
I’ve often thought that one reason I became such an early and passionate reader was that, when I was a child, reading was a way of creating a bubble I could inhabit, a dreamworld at once separate from, and part of, the real one. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a kind, loving family. But like most children, I think, I wanted to maintain a certain distance from my parents: a buffer zone between myself and the adults. It was helpful that my parents liked the fact that I was a reader, that they approved of and encouraged my secret means of transportation out of the daily reality in which I lived together with them—and into the parallel reality that books offered. I was only pretending to be a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, when in fact I was a privileged child in London, guided by Mary Poppins through a series of marvelous adventures. I could manage a convincing impersonation of an ordinary fourth-grader, but actually I was a pirate girl in Norway, best friends with Pippi Longstocking, well acquainted with her playful pet monkey and her obedient horse.
I loved books of Greek myths, of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, and novels (many of them British) for children featuring some element of magic and the fantastic. When I was in the eighth grade, I spent most of a family cross-country trip reading and re-reading a dog-eared paperback copy of Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen, a writer who interests me now mostly because I can so clearly see what fascinated me about her work then. With a clarity and transparency that few things provide, least of all photographs and childhood diaries, her fanciful stories enable me to see what I was like—how I thought—as a girl. I can still recall my favorite passage, which I had nearly memorized, because I believed it to contain the most profoundly romantic, the most noble and poetic, the most stirring view of the relations between men and women—a subject about which I knew nothing, or less than nothing, at the time.
Very few times I’ve felt threatened while out in the field. The mood here tonight is very volatile. Law enforcement appears to be closing down 1st Street in front of SCOTUS.
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) July 10, 2018
Literally had to bail on our live show from #SCOTUS. Moving the show back to the safety of the studio. See y’all at 11p @FoxNews https://t.co/ChIOQdBBTU
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) July 10, 2018
Where Brett Kavanaugh sits on the ideological spectrum (#2 behind Justice Thomas) https://t.co/gvC7CsJq1T
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) July 10, 2018
Tomi Lahren breaks with conservatives: Pushing to overturn Roe v. Wade "would be a huge mistake" https://t.co/NzkatFSQm3 pic.twitter.com/vv4TmtsgXj
— The Hill (@thehill) July 7, 2018
THAT'S RIGHT! NO BLUE WAVE IS COMING FOR YOU, RED WAVE COMING!!!! pic.twitter.com/SsAduxLYZs
— Guy Gardner (@guygardnergreat) July 9, 2018
WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats, facing an uphill struggle to reject the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, opened a broad attack on Tuesday, painting him as an arch-conservative who would roll back abortion rights, undo health care protections, ease gun restrictions and protect President Trump against the threat of impeachment.More.
But the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, excoriated Democrats for engaging in what he called “cheap political fear-mongering,” and for declaring their opposition to Judge Kavanaugh even before his nomination was announced.
“They wrote statements of opposition only to fill in the name later,” the ordinarily staid Mr. McConnell said, growing exercised as he delivered his customary morning remarks on the Senate floor. “Senate Democrats were on record opposing him before he’d even been named! Just fill in the name! Whoever it is, we’re against.”
And a key Republican swing vote, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, quickly signaled just how hard it will be for Democrats to pull any Republicans into the opposition. “When you look at the credentials that Judge Kavanaugh brings to the job, it will be very difficult for anyone to argue that he’s not qualified,” she told reporters.
As Judge Kavanaugh arrived at the Capitol to meet with the Republican leader and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee’s Democrats and the Democratic leader took to the Supreme Court steps to deliver a direct appeal to Americans to rise up in opposition to his nomination.
“If you are a young woman in America or care about a young woman in America, pay attention to this,” said Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California. “It will affect your life.”
Breaking News: President Trump has selected Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. His confirmation would cement a conservative hold on the court. https://t.co/oU0Lj1nCxR— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 10, 2018
President Trump on Monday nominated Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a politically connected member of Washington’s conservative legal establishment, to fill Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court, setting up an epic confirmation battle and potentially cementing the court’s rightward tilt for a generation.More.
Presenting Judge Kavanaugh at the White House, Mr. Trump described him as “one of the finest and sharpest legal minds in our time,” and declared him a jurist who would set aside his political views and apply the Constitution “as written.”
The nomination of Judge Kavanaugh, 53, a federal appeals court judge, former aide to President George W. Bush and onetime investigator of President Bill Clinton, was not a huge surprise, given his conservative record, elite credentials and deep ties among the Republican legal groups that have advanced conservatives for the federal bench.
But his selection will galvanize Democrats and Republicans in the months before the midterm elections. Moments after the announcement, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, declared, “I will oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have.” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who leads the barest of Republican majorities, had expressed misgivings about his path to confirmation, but said he was a “superb choice.”
Justice Kennedy, who is retiring, held the swing vote in many closely divided cases on issues like abortion, affirmative action, gay rights and the death penalty. Replacing him with a committed conservative, who could potentially serve for decades, will fundamentally alter the balance of the court and put dozens of precedents at risk.
Judge Kavanaugh’s long history of legal opinions, as well as his role in some of the fiercest partisan battles of the last two decades, will give Democrats plenty of ammunition for tough questions. Nearly 20 years ago, working for the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, he laid out broad grounds to impeach Mr. Clinton — words that Democrats can now seize on to apply to Mr. Trump and the Russia investigation.
In choosing Judge Kavanaugh, the president opted for a battle-scarred veteran of Republican politics but also someone with close ties to the Bush family — a history that aides to Mr. Trump said he viewed as a strike against him and had to overcome.
Before serving Mr. Bush in the White House, Judge Kavanaugh worked for him in the 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida. When Mr. Bush nominated him in 2003 to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Democrats complained that he was too partisan. He survived a contentious confirmation hearing and was confirmed in 2006.
In his remarks, Judge Kavanaugh, who once clerked for Justice Kennedy, said he would “keep an open mind in every case.” But he declared that judges “must interpret the law, not make the law.”
Democrats are still bitter that Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick B. Garland to fill the last Supreme Court vacancy, created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. Republicans denied Judge Garland a hearing, arguing that the right to name a justice ought to be left to Mr. Obama’s successor...
Rita Ora relaxed in a bikini by the pool in France on a break from her European tour https://t.co/6qFhFU07yt— JustJared.com (@JustJared) July 5, 2018
It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.Keep reading.
By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.
The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting...
Announcement is scheduled for tonight at 6:00pm PST. #ScotusPick 🤗 https://t.co/h6WUdHlG6O
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 9, 2018
The word “mansplaining” was inspired (although not coined) by Rebecca Solnit, whose book Men Explain Things to Me became a bestseller. In this book, Ms. Solnit writes: “So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year — meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.”Keep reading.
Here we have an actual fact — that the U.S. annually records “well over a thousand homicides” in which women are killed by their male partners or ex-partners — supporting a dishonest insinuation, i.e., that “this particular kind of terror” is a pervasive reality of American life, a widespread form of oppression which our sexist society ignores.
It should not be necessary to say this: Murder is a rare crime, for which our criminal justice system metes out the harshest punishments.
Furthermore, criminal violence — including murder, including rape, including every species of crime against women — is disproportionately a phenomenon of the social and economic underclass.
This is not something that feminists like Ms. Solnit wish to acknowledge, because their political allegiance to the Left requires them to believe that members of the underclass (especially those who are black and Hispanic) are victims of systemic social injustice. After the Ferguson riots of 2014, for example, every feminist began hashtagging #BlackLivesMatter as a gesture of solidarity against allegedly racist police. It is asserted by feminists that the “intersectionality” of oppression in American society is such that women and radial minorities are both victimized by systemic injustice, thus uniting them in a common cause — the struggle against “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy,” in the words of Vanessa Diaz, former executive director of the University of Southern California Women’s Student Assembly.
Feminism’s devotion to an “intersectional” concept of oppression serves to obscure the messy reality of American life, which does not conform to such tidy ideological categories. Blaming all social problems on systemic causes (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.) is a way of denying individual responsibility for wrongdoing, while suggesting that every problem is political and can be solved by left-wing policies...
"As the Democrats’ political rhetoric and policy proposals have become more explicitly anti-white and socialistic, naturally white voters will look for a political home elsewhere." —Ian Henderson https://t.co/8WdAFYR3RI
— Brendon Peck 🍎 (@PeckPolitics) July 4, 2018
‘Abolish ICE’ is a sign of the left’s rising extremism https://t.co/hq7sAu8asz
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) July 5, 2018
To progressives, Trump became not an opponent to beaten with a better agenda, but an evil to be destroyed. Moderate Democrats were written off as dense; left-wing fringe elements were praised as clever.RTWT.
Voters in 2016 bristled at redistribution, open borders, bigger government and higher taxes, but progressives are now promising those voters even more of what they didn't want.
Furious over the sudden and unexpected loss of power, enraged progressives have so far done almost everything to lose even more of it.
And that paradox only leads to more furor.
Well, it finally happened: a class of mine got singled out in a "horrors of the left" thinkpiece! My friend even got quoted! WE DID IT!https://t.co/nMF9W5wqAQ
— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 4, 2018
The teacher of said class emailed this article to his former students being like "do you guys even remember this happening???" and I feel like there were maybe better ways to handle that.
— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 4, 2018
If a student writes an article for a public audience is it kosher for professors to send it out in a mass email to other students for scrutiny? https://t.co/fvJxS6OHMl
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) July 5, 2018
Thanks for the RT, but I'm just gonna take the liberty of blocking you now - I'm not down to inadvertently promote your shitty website, and I'm definitely not interested in debating the flood of randos you've unleashed upon my mentions.
— HANSA, the incredible melting man (@hansainallcaps) July 5, 2018
