Bristol and Dakota couldn’t be more thankful for the love and support of family and friends over the past months... http://t.co/gpu7xgwXNy
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) May 18, 2015
Starting in late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter convulsed the country. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement claimed that blacks are still oppressed by widespread racism, especially within law enforcement. The police subject black communities to a gratuitous regime of stops and arrests, resulting in the frequent use of lethal force against black men, according to the activists and their media and academic allies. Indeed, America’s police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, the protesters charged. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son may face from “officers who are paid to protect him.” Less than three weeks later, a thug from Brooklyn, inspired by the nationwide anti-cop agitation, assassinated two New York police officers.Keep reading.
The protest movement’s indictment of law enforcement took place without any notice of the actual facts regarding policing and crime. One could easily have concluded from the agitation that black and white crime rates are identical. Why the police focus on certain neighborhoods and what the conditions are on the ground were questions left unasked.
The year 2014 also saw the publication of a book that addressed precisely the questions that the Black Lives Matter movement ignored. Alice Goffman, daughter of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman, lived in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood from 2002 to 2008, integrating herself into the lives of a group of young crack dealers. Her resulting book, On the Run, offers a detailed and startling ethnography of a world usually kept far from public awareness and discourse. It has been widely acclaimed; a film or TV adaptation may be on the way. But On the Run is an equally startling—if unintentional—portrait of the liberal elite mind-set. Goffman draws a devastating picture of cultural breakdown within the black underclass, but she is incapable of acknowledging the truth in front of her eyes, instead deeming her subjects the helpless pawns of a criminal-justice system run amok.
At the center of On the Run are three half-brothers and their slightly older friend Mike, all of whom live in a five-block area of Philadelphia that Goffman names Sixth Street. Sixth Street, we are told, isn’t viewed as a particularly high-crime area, which can only leave the reader wondering what an actual high-crime area would look like. In her six years living there, Goffman attended nine funerals of her young associates and mentions several others, including one for “three kids” paid for by local drug dealers, eager to cement their support in the community.
Goffman contends that it is the legal system itself that is creating crime and dysfunction in poor black communities. Young men get saddled with a host of allegedly petty warrants for having missed court dates, violated their parole and probation conditions, and ducked the administrative fees levied on their criminal cases. Fearful of being rounded up under these senseless procedural warrants, they adopt a lifestyle of subterfuge and evasion, constantly in flight from an increasingly efficient and technology-enhanced police force. “Once a man fears that he will be taken by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family life . . . that allows the police to locate him,” Goffman writes. “A man in legal jeopardy finds that his efforts to stay out of prison are aligned not with upstanding, respectable action but with being a shady and distrustful character.”
Goffman’s own material demolishes this thesis. On the Run documents a world of predation and law-of-the-jungle mores, riven with violence and betrayal. Far from being the hapless victims of random “legal entanglements”—Goffman’s euphemism for the foreseeable consequences of lawless behavior—her subjects create their own predicaments through deliberate involvement in crime...
U.S. Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez apologized Sunday after a videotape surfaced showing her making a whooping cry in reference to Native Americans that brought her a cascade of reprimands from fellow Democrats to posts on Twitter.More.
Speaking to party activists at a state Democratic convention Sunday, Sanchez described herself as a longtime champion of civil and human rights who has Native American blood in her mother's family. She said she had a hectic day of speeches and handshaking at the convention Saturday and was not the type of politician routinely managed or sheltered by "handlers."
"It's hard to put yourself out there and to do what leaders need to do — day in and day out — and yes, sooner or later we make mistakes," she told the delegates. "In this crazy and exciting rush of meetings yesterday, I said something offensive and for that I sincerely apologize."
Unable to withstand criticism from their shameful attacks on Jewish students and pro-Israel activists exposed by Frontpage, the Jewish Federation of Orange County (JFOC) has taken to the media to slander our publication. These calumnies must not go unanswered.Leftists are terrible people, but you knew that.
On May 4th, Frontpage made public serious reports of misbehavior on the part of the JFOC at a student-run pro-Israel event held at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). One of the most notable revelations of the piece was a report that JFOC representative Lisa Armony was witnessed attempting to move pro-Israel activists waving Israeli flags away from anti-Israel protesters who ambushed the event.
Writing on behalf of the JFOC in the Jerusalem Post, Armony’s primary complaint was that Frontpage’s coverage was based on “unsubstantiated” information from “unnamed sources.”
In fact, the information directly related to Lisa Armony and the JFOC in this incident was based on a named eyewitness’ account of Armony’s activity. Gary Fouse, a lecturer at UCI and credible witness, confidently affirmed to Frontpage what he saw. We subsequently reported this eyewitness account, taking the utmost care with the accuracy of its presentation. As such, accusations that Frontpage’s coverage of this incident was flawed are simply false.
Of course, the JFOC’s reprehensible behavior as detailed in Frontpage’s May 4th report involves much more than just flags. Of note is what the JFOC did not deny in its article in the Post. JFOC President and CEO Shalom Elcott engaged in an unhinged verbal attack on the 21-year-old female student president of Anteaters For Israel (AFI), the student group that hosted the campus pro-Israel event at UCI. Numerous witnesses recounted to Frontpage Elcott screaming at this young pro-Israel leader, bringing her to tears in the middle of the public event. The student herself, Sharon Shaoulian, confirmed this to Frontpage.
The mistreatment of Shaoulian is deeply disturbing and warrants a public apology. While the JFOC decries Jews “turning against one another” in its Post article, the first place to start to remedy this is clearly at the federation itself.
Also conspicuously absent from the denials issued by the JFOC is the report, witnessed last year by Shaoulian, of a student being screamed at by another representative of the federation after she called police following her injury from anti-Israel protesters. Such behavior should only be expected from an organization that donated tens of thousands of dollars to a campus group, the Olive Tree Initiative, that arranged a secret meeting between students and a leader of the terrorist organization Hamas in 2009. This same campus organization exposes students to indoctrination by world leaders in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the terrorism-supporting International Solidarity Movement (ISM). This, again, was neither denied nor explained by the JFOC in its attack on Frontpage in the Post.
Without a doubt the JFOC has much to answer for. The JFOC can be assured Frontpage will continue our no-holds-barred coverage of its brazen attacks on Jewish students and pro-Israel activists without apology.
Nine dead, now that's a shoot out. https://t.co/RWe5nzu6S1
— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) May 17, 2015
As the demand for tech labor grows, ambitious teenagers are flooding into San Francisco. There’s no official tally of the number of teens who work in tech, but Fontenot estimates that there are as many as a hundred recent high school dropouts working on startups in the city. Some were too distracted by programming projects and weekend hackathons to go to class. Others couldn’t pay for college and questioned why they should go into debt when there is easy money to be made. Still others had already launched successful apps or businesses and didn’t see why they should wait at home for their lives to start. In Facebook groups for young technologists, they saw an alternative: teens lounging in sunny Dolores Park (dolo, as they call it), teens leasing expansive South of Market office space, teens throwing parties whenever they want. And so they moved to San Francisco, many of them landing in houses like Mission Control.RTWT.
Their parents watch from afar, some more supportive than others. “We just miss him. We miss him a lot,” Tanya Latta, Zach’s mom, told me. “But the ultimate goal for us as parents is to have our kids be able to be self-sufficient and happy. So when we saw that he’s reached out a little early, we were really happy that he’s in his element. But it happened so fast.”
FUNNY VIDEO: Too cute!! Baby does not like first avocado experience http://t.co/ea1mdgPwP1 pic.twitter.com/rwZYCauo2K
— Leanne Suter (@ABC7Leanne) May 16, 2015Some of the dynamics likely to animate the U.S. Senate campaign in the months ahead were evident at the state Democratic Party convention in Anaheim on Saturday.. More, "Loretta Sanchez's public image a factor in Senate race":
Immediately after state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris held an afternoon news conference, she was asked by reporters to respond to a joke that U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez had made about the difference between Indian Americans and Native Americans.
Sanchez had tapped her hand to her mouth in an imitation of a Native American "war cry," a reporter said, causing Harris' eyebrows to lift.
Outside, Sanchez's Mambos and Margaritas event was getting underway, but the festive mood was undercut somewhat when she was asked about the joke.
"I got a call from somebody ..., and he said I want to talk to you about having help from the Indian community, and I thought he meant the American Indian community, in the sense of the Native American Indian community," Sanchez explained.
One reporter asked her if the "war cry" gesture was appropriate.
"Well, I think Native Americans have an incredibly great history, and a great presence in our country, and many of them are supporting our election," Sanchez said before turning her back on him.
One of the first questions facing Rep. Loretta Sanchez in her newly announced U.S. Senate bid is whether the kind of attention she has won while in Congress could weigh down her campaign."Eccentricities."
On occasion, the Orange County Democrat has made fellow party members wince.
In 2000, Sanchez embarrassed party leaders and presidential nominee Al Gore by scheduling a fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
Joe Andrew, then party chairman, told Sanchez in a public letter that Democrats and women’s groups found the planned gathering at the Holmby Hills estate of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner to be “neither appropriate nor reflective of our party’s values.”
At Gore’s behest, the party took away Sanchez’s convention speaking slot. Before long, Sanchez backed down and moved her sold-out event to B.B. King's Blues Club at Universal Studios' CityWalk.
Sanchez has also made headlines with cheeky Christmas cards. For years, they featured Gretzky, her white cat. One card showed Sanchez, wearing pink flannel pajamas, snuggling in bed with Gretzky. Another showed the congresswoman in a tank top on a motorcycle, with Gretzky perched on the handlebars.
Sanchez’s public image has left some party strategists skeptical of her prospects in a race against state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, the top Democrat in the contest so far.
“There’s a genuine hunger for a history-making Latino candidate in this race, but Loretta Sanchez is probably not the answer to that hunger,” said Democratic strategist Roy Behr, a former campaign advisor to Sen. Barbara Boxer.
“One could call her actions eccentric, or courageously charting her own path, or bad political judgment. But they’re not actions that enhance someone’s ability to run a credible Senate campaign. They won’t help with donors. They won’t help with other elected leaders,” Behr said.
Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, differed, suggesting that Sanchez fit California’s tradition of sometimes defying political conventions. He recalled the election of semanticist S.I. Hayakawa to the U.S. Senate in 1976 and of Hollywood dancer and actor George Murphy in 1964.
“You need to capture the public’s imagination, and I think her eccentricities will really help her,” said Guerra, who nonetheless described Harris as the favorite...
Mohamed Morsi sentenced to DEATH over jail breaks. http://t.co/9DZdlXTJkf Now get the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood.
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 16, 2015"Mad Max: Fury Road" will leave you speechless, which couldn't be more appropriate. Words are not really the point when it comes to dealing with this barn-burner of a post-apocalyptic extravaganza in which sizzling, unsettling images are the order of the day...More.
This is how bad our schools are getting. Now schools want to teach our children that there is no such thing as a human gender and that we are all open to “gender fluidity.”
Todd Starnes of Fox News is reporting that public schools in Virginia want to start teaching kids about “gender identity.” The school wants to teach that there is no such thing as gender except that which the individual decides.
Fairfax County Public Schools released a report recommending changes to their family life curriculum for grades 7 through 12. The changes, which critics call radical gender ideology, will be formally introduced next week.I have said it a million times, we need to tear down our “schools,” eliminate liberals from them, and re-build them into something useful. Our schools are an international laughing stock and this story is yet another example of why.
“The larger picture is this is really an attack on nature itself – the created order,” said Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council.
“Human beings are created male and female. But the current transgender ideology goes way beyond that. They’re telling us you can be both genders, you can be no gender, you can be a gender that you make up for yourself. And we’re supposed to affirm all of it.”
The plan calls for teaching seventh graders about transgenderism and tenth graders about the concept that sexuality is a broader spectrum — but it sure smells like unadulterated sex indoctrination.
Beverly Grove woman faces off with hissing opossum living in her laundry room http://t.co/Ol9iJydmQZ pic.twitter.com/RvEy0MfxTk
— KTLA (@KTLA) May 16, 2015WASHINGTON—Hillary and Bill Clinton earned more than $25 million in the past year and a half delivering more than 100 paid speeches, and Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, collected more than $5 million from her book “Hard Choices,” an official for the campaign said Friday.They're in the top 1 percent, but they're virtuous one-percenters, because they have the correct ideology.
The Clinton campaign released the figures on the same day it filed a personal financial disclosure statement going back to the beginning of 2014, which it said is required by the Federal Election Commission. The information provided by the campaign was a preview of the full financial disclosure, which had yet to be released, and didn’t include the Clinton family’s total assets and liabilities.
The Clintons’ disclosed income since the beginning of 2014 would place them among the highest earners in the top 1% of the population. That is likely to serve as a reminder of the couple’s wealth, at a time when she is positioning herself as a champion of struggling middle-class families.
Earlier in May, Mr. Clinton, the 42nd president, said he would continue to give paid speeches. “I gotta pay our bills,” he told NBC News. “I work hard at this. I spend hours a day just doing the research. People like to hear me speak.”
The Clintons paid an effective federal income-tax rate in 2014 of more than 30%, the campaign official said. They also since early 2014 opened up a Vanguard mutual fund linked to the S&P 500 stock index, the couple’s only investment during this period, the official said.
Mr. Clinton said in the NBC interview that he gives 10% of his speech revenue “off the top every year” to the family’s charitable foundation and that Mrs. Clinton in the time she was at the foundation gave 17% of her proceeds.
Mrs. Clinton left the foundation after she announced her candidacy in April...
Islamic State fighters seized the government compound in the city of Ramadi on Friday and besieged hundreds of government forces nearby, coming closer to controlling the capital of Iraq’s largest province, officials said.More.
The compound’s capture marks a setback to the government’s offensive against the extremist group in Anbar, the Sunni province that borders Baghdad, and complicates the Shiite-led government’s ties with the province’s Sunni tribes as they cooperate to expel the militants.
Many of Anbar’s leaders have pleaded for more help from Baghdad to stave off recent Islamic State gains in their province, Iraq’s Sunni heartland. But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has calibrated his support, sending security forces and arms, but not the powerful Shiite militias that have in recent months helped to drive Islamic State out of central Iraq, including the city of Tikrit.
Anbar’s Sunni tribes are split on whether they need the Shiite militias, and some U.S. and Iraqi officials fear their participation would inflame sectarian tensions and undermine the government.
“The government response has been very weak,” said Rajeh Barakat, an Anbar tribal leader and member of the local provincial council.
Iraqi’s parliament speaker, Salim al-Jabouri, warned on Friday that Ramadi might fall to Islamic State, saying that its collapse “would have consequences on the national security level.”
U.S. officials played down the development, characterizing the Islamic State gains in Ramadi, as well as in the fight to control the oil refinery in Beiji, in Salahudeen province, as ephemeral victories that are likely to be reversed sooner or later. The difficult fights in both places haven’t yet sparked any high-level concern about the U.S. strategy, American military officials said on Friday...
Storm drenches #Fresno and Valley; lightning, flooding reported http://t.co/ryc3IcX288 pic.twitter.com/HwZ5fYDlFj
— Fresno Bee (@FresnoBee) May 15, 2015#UPDATE Large thunderstorm hits Fresno and surrounding areas, causes major flooding --> http://t.co/qOfpFeGsZt pic.twitter.com/HHxQBEz9jI
— ABC30 Fresno (@ABC30) May 15, 2015BREAKING NEWS: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be sentenced to death for the Marathon bombing http://t.co/Ico3dl5rQd
— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) May 15, 2015TSARNAEV GETS DEATH!
#Justice
#BostonBomber
#Tsarnaev pic.twitter.com/t1MNpD33Kt
— Linda Suhler, Ph.D. (@LindaSuhler) May 15, 2015Drudge. http://t.co/AUhk9FF8Dv pic.twitter.com/xAooxEEJLb
— J. Freedom du Lac (@jfdulac) May 15, 2015George Stephanopoulos cloaked his undisclosed Clinton Foundation donations in charity. That half-hearted apology isn’t going to suffice if he wants to keep his anchor chair.
In a non-apology apology that is unlikely to appease the referees of press ethics, let alone his Republican detractors—and may just baffle morning television viewers who haven’t paid attention to the blossoming scandal within the media-political complex—the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton put the very best face possible on his lapse in judgment in not disclosing $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation when he conducted a contentious April 26 interview with foundation critic Peter Schweizer on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, ABC News’s Sunday show.More.
Although Stephanopoulos’s case is very different from—and nowhere near as serious as—the embellishments of suspended NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, his explanation of his mistake on Friday morning was much in the same vein as Williams’s claim last February that he made up a story about a helicopter ride in Iraq simply in an innocent, good-hearted attempt to honor America’s fighting men and women.
Willams wrapped himself in the flag; Stephanopoulos cloaked himself in charity.
His 48-second statement, which he read near the end of GMA’s first block, went as follows: “Now I want to address an issue you may have seen about me. Over the last several years, I’ve made substantial donations to dozens of charities, including the Clinton Global Foundation. Those donations were a matter of public record, but I should have made additional disclosures on air when I covered the foundation, and I now believe that directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake. Even though I made them strictly to support work done to stop the spread of AIDS, help children, and protect the environment in poor countries, I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. I apologize to all of you for failing to do that.”
It is hard to argue that asking tough questions of a charity’s critic on the air—as Stephanopoulos did last month with Schweizer, whose much-publicized book Clinton Cash has been the target of war room-level pushback from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—without bothering to mention that you’ve donated to that charity, is anything other than a serious breach of accepted journalistic standards. Or that letting viewers know about such a potential conflict of interest is “going the extra mile.”
Apparently Stephanopoulos still fails to grasp that there is nothing “extra” about what should have been a common-sense disclosure. What’s more, on GMA Friday morning, he didn’t see fit to mention the sheer size of his donations; no doubt many of his viewers would consider $75,000 real money, even for a television personality reportedly making double-digit millions...
Let me be blunt: For George to give money to the Clinton Foundation, out of all possible charities, knowing full well that Hillary was gearing up to run, is a grave error in judgment. For him not to disclose this to his network or to viewers—especially when he was aggressively interviewing “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer about that very foundation—is unthinkable. And for ABC to brush this off as an “honest mistake” is embarrassing.
B.B. King, the singer and guitarist who put the blues in a three-piece suit and took the musical genre from the barrooms and back porches of the Mississippi Delta to Carnegie Hall and the world's toniest concert stages with a signature style emulated by generations of blues and rock musicians, has died. He was 89.More.
The 15-time Grammy Award winner died in Las Vegas, his attorney said. He had struggled in recent years with diabetes.
Early on, King transcended his musical shortcomings — an inability to play guitar leads while he sang and a failure to master the use of a bottleneck or slide favored by many of his guitar-playing peers — and created a unique style that made him one of the most respected and influential blues musicians ever.
“B.B. King taps into something universal,” Eric Clapton told The Times in 2005. “He can't be confined to any one genre. That's why I've called him a ‘global musician.’”
King spent decades honing the craft that helped him escape the poverty of the Deep South, where he grew up on a Mississippi plantation as the son of a sharecropper who became a teenage sharecropper himself before singing and playing his way out of the cotton fields.
He was an indefatigable performer who seldom left the concert trail for more than a few days at a time. In 1956 he played 342 shows and even in his later years kept a schedule that would test the endurance of musicians half his age.
He tapped his music and oversized personality in transcending the limitations of a genre that rein in most blues musicians, forging an international identity as a beloved cultural ambassador. King collaborated with hundreds of musicians in most fields of pop music, culminating with his 1989 teaming with U2 on the Irish rock quartet's single “When Love Comes to Town,” which brought him to the attention of millions of young rock fans when he was in his mid-60s.
Decades earlier, when black audiences largely moved away from listening to the blues in favor of R&B and soul performers such as James Brown and Ray Charles, King's flagging career was resuscitated when the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Clapton, Van Morrison and other white rockers of the British Invasion started singing the praises of King and other American blues musicians to their young fans.
“The Left’s error was its usual one: to assume a moral superiority, to treat conservatism as a kind of mental disorder, to define the campaign as a test of voters’ ‘compassion’. As Ed Miliband kept putting it, ‘This election is about values’. Labour’s core vote lapped it up: plenty of Leftists define their ideology by whom they loathe. But others found it off-putting. In a column shortly before polling day, the actor Tom Conti explained why he had switched sides. ‘Labour, I realised, was built on hatred’.”And ICYMI: "Democrats and Leftists Should Learn Lesson from British Labour's Election Debacle."
PHILADELPHIA—An Amtrak train involved in a fatal crash here was traveling at more than 100 miles an hour, twice the speed limit, as it entered a sharp curve where it derailed Tuesday night, federal officials said Wednesday.More.
As rescue personnel picked through the train’s wreckage and local hospitals cared for injured passengers, the National Transportation Safety Board said a “black box” data recorder put the train’s speed at 106 mph just before the curve. The train’s engineer applied emergency brakes, but several seconds later, the train’s speed was only down to 102 mph, when the data recorder stopped.
“As we know, it takes a long time to decelerate a train,” said NTSB member Robert Sumwalt in a news conference.
Referring to the application of the brakes before the crash, he added, “You’re supposed to enter the curve at 50 miles an hour. He was already in the curve.”
A law-enforcement official identified the engineer as Brandon Bostian of Queens, N.Y. Mr. Bostian wasn’t at home Wednesday, and it couldn’t be determined if he had retained an attorney.
At least seven people were killed in the crash, including a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy and a technology company CEO. Eight others were in critical condition, and 30 remained hospitalized.
“We are heartbroken at what has happened here,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said during a news conference.
Passengers described a chaotic and frightening scene that began 10 to 15 minutes after Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train 188, en route from Washington, D.C., to New York City, left Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station at 9:10 p.m. on Tuesday.
Andrew Brenner, 29, a public-relations expert who lives in Washington, said he was relaxing and texting in the last car with his shoes off. He said he noticed that the train seemed to be taking a curve rather fast, but that it didn’t cause much alarm.
Then, the train jolted and swayed. Within moments, Mr. Brenner said he and other passengers were tossed around cars as seats were ripped from the train floor.
“I got thrown like a penny,” said Mr. Brenner, who said he weighs 250 pounds. “That is how violent this was.”
After the crash, Mr. Brenner said he was transported along with other passengers by bus to a hospital, where X-rays showed damage to his vertebrae.
Of the total 243 people on the train, which included five crew members, more than 200 were injured, city officials said.
The locomotive and all seven passenger cars of the train went off the tracks at a tight curve at Frankford Junction, just northeast of Center City, where the Federal Railroad Administration said trains aren’t authorized to exceed 50 mph.
Mr. Sumwalt of the NTSB said it was too soon to determine if the excessive speed caused the derailment. Investigators don’t know whether the train accelerated steadily or suddenly to 106 mph, he added.
The NTSB was studying other factors, such as track and mechanical conditions, and train signals, Mr. Sumwalt said.
Look. I agree with Senate Democrats for once in my life! #SayNoToTPP #NoFastTrackForObama ==> https://t.co/Ie02n9s94q
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 12, 2015Statist Orrin Hatch is melting down on Senate floor over failure of TPP. Once again, I commend Senate Democrats for making this happen.
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 12, 2015TPP peddler Orrin Hatch is mad that more Senate Democrats won't join him & Obama in carrying water for cheap labor-hungry Big Business.
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 12, 2015President Obama collided with his own party Tuesday when Senate Democrats stalled consideration of a trade measure that would give the administration greater authority to negotiate more freely with other countries.More.
The Senate vote was a sharp blow to the president’s efforts to win approval for a new Asia-Pacific trade bill that has emerged as a top agenda item for Obama. Only one Democratic senator, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, voted with the president Tuesday.
Administration officials and Republican leaders immediately said they would bring a measure back to the Senate floor.
But the setback highlighted the president’s failure to convince Democratic lawmakers, labor union leaders and environmental groups that the 12-nation trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership would help the U.S. economy. Obama has argued that the pact would open markets, promote better labor conditions abroad and protect endangered species and the environment.
Obama has made the trade deal one of his top priorities, and to bolster his ability to finish negotiating the still-secret terms of the accord, he has asked Congress to give him “fast track” trade authority. But a procedural motion to open up debate of the fast-track legislation failed by a 52-to-45 vote, falling short of the 60 votes needed to begin consideration of the complex Pacific trade accord.
Ahead of the vote, White House press secretary Josh Earnest played down crumbling support for the legislation as a “procedural snafu” — a phrase he repeated 10 times — that could be worked out in the coming days. Earnest said fast-track authority was “critically important to the future of our economy.”
But in the Senate, the measure’s failure seemed to be more than a procedural glitch. The trade accord has sparked a Democratic revolt and laid bare a spat between Obama and liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). And it has embittered labor union leaders who feel they helped elect Obama and have received little for their efforts.
Moreover, Senate Democrats — including the handful who have supported Obama’s trade push — said they were not inclined to move forward with debate unless Republican leaders provided assurances that related pieces of legislation would move in tandem...
Tomorrow morning, in what marks a tectonic shift in the publishing industry, the New York Times is expected to officially begin a long-awaited partnership with Facebook to publish articles directly to the social media giant, a source with direct knowledge of the talks told me. According to people familiar with the negotiations, the Times will begin publishing select articles directly into Facebook's news feed. Buzzfeed, NBC News and NatGeo are said to be also joining the roll out, among others.ADDED: At Facebook, "Introducing Instant Articles." Plus, commentary at Memeorandum and Mediagazer.
The deal raises all sorts of knotty questions for the Times....
The talks have been dragging out for weeks as Times CEO Mark Thompson has pushed for the most favorable terms. According to one source familiar with the talks, a major sticking point for the Times has been ensuring that any Facebook deal protects its paid digital audience, which is crossing the crucial one-million subscriber mark. "The New York Times' obsession with this product is their subscribers," the source said. "They shouldn't kill their subscriber business and the data around that.” Officials with the Times and Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.
As much as anything, the Facebook deal is a concession by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that the paper's app strategy failed to produce the turnaround the company hoped for. Now the Times is throwing its fate into Facebook's hands. "This is really about the crown jewels," a senior media executive familiar with the deal told me. "The stakes are that high."
Over the next few weeks 3.5 million of you will graduate and try to find jobs. We’re sorry to tell you that achieving success will be more difficult than it was for your parents or grandparents. Not because you’re less intelligent, or lazier or less deserving of realizing the American dream. The primary reason why today’s graduates face a daunting future: Government is making life more difficult for you...More.
Ana Navarro, a former aide to ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), said on CNN Tuesday that the potential presidential candidate told her he'd misheard a question about the Iraq War.More at NYT, "Jeb Bush, Ana Navarro and the Question That May Have Been Misheard."
Navarro, who was Bush's director of immigration policy in the governor's office, said on CNN's "New Day" that she'd emailed Bush on Tuesday morning for clarification about his comments.
"I emailed him this morning and I said to him, 'Hey, I'm a little confused by this answer so I'm genuinely wondering did you mishear the question?'" Navarro said. "And he said, 'Yes, I misheard the question.'"
Bush gave the answer in a sit-down interview with Fox News host Megyn Kelly that aired Monday night. The question came after reports surfaced last week that he sought advice on the Middle East from his brother, President George W. Bush.
"Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Kelly asked.
"I would," Bush answered.
On Tuesday morning, Navarro she wasn't sure whether he would clarify the answer.
Bush has taken heat from both conservative radio host Laura Ingraham and the Democratic National Committee since the remark went live.
Fellow guest and Democratic strategist Paul Begala chimed in after Navarro's answer.
"I didn't know he had a hearing impairment and we pray for his swift recovery," Begala said.
Dems should learn lesson from U.K. elections, says @USATODAY's Michael Wolff http://t.co/tV5RDAeW8W (Getty photo) pic.twitter.com/mlWo0E0fsC
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) May 11, 2015LONDON — Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.More.
Rather than endorsing this leftward shift in politics — a view arguably now animating the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in the U.S. — voters returned the Conservative Party to No. 10 Downing St. with a heretofore unimaginable majority.
It was, in Britain, a conservative revolt, an unwillingness to play loose with hard-won economic stability, or risk the gains, however small, that have been made over the last few years.
The Conservatives painted a picture of a country that was moving steadily forward in place. The Labour opposition painted a picture of a floundering nation that needed to be overhauled and rescued by new spending plans paid for by new tax-the-rich schemes — a view rejected in almost every way.
Labour not only got the mood of the country wrong, but so did the news media. Indeed, part of Labour's problem was likely to have only seen its future, and understood the ambitions of the electorate, through its own favored media. The left-leaning BBC was wrong; the left-leaning Guardian was wrong; digitally centric Buzzfeed, trying to make inroads in Britain by targeting news to a young audience, was wrong.
The American pollster Nate Silver, famous for his 2012 U.S. polling, also got it wrong. Conservatives, at least those in Britain, don't necessarily like to admit they are conservatives. And Obama campaign consultant David Axelrod, hired to advise Labour for $500,000 and offering a strategy of economic populism, was wrong.
In a sense, the Internet itself was wrong: Many polls promising a tight race or a Labour win were conducted online. Those done by phone, reaching a less digitally inclined electorate, were more accurate.
Perhaps the high point of wrongness in the campaign was in the week before the vote. It was the well-publicized, middle-of-the-night meeting of Labour's leader and would-be prime minister Ed Miliband with Russell Brand, the entertainer famous for pseudo-revolutionary positions, 9/11 conspiracy theories and a big social media following. The Brand meeting was reportedly an Axelrod idea designed to court the youth vote. Indeed, there was a surge of youthful registration, but with few of those votes going to Labour.
It was the U.K. Independence Party, the far-right, anti-immigration party that was once assumed would undercut the Conservative vote, that in fact siphoned off many more votes from Labour. UKIP's Labour votes were a kind of replay of 1980's Reagan Democrats.
Labour's leftward position was not only a wrong move but also a carefully calculated one. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, the British political grail had been that Labour only had a hope of ruling the country if it forsook its trade union roots and found a centrist, business-tolerant tone. That was the success of Tony Blair's new Labour — 13 years in power as Bill Clinton-esque centrists.
Miliband's promise, on the other hand, was to take Labour back to its left-wing roots and offer voters a clear choice. And Labour's rejection and rout seemed to be a rather striking demonstration of how, as the right-leaning Daily Mail put it, "Middle England rose up to humiliate the pollsters and save the nation from Red Ed."
In the aftermath of the jihadist attack in Garland, TX, leftists and Islamic supremacists are moving swiftly to blame Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for their American Freedom Defense Initiative/Jihad Watch Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest for supposedly “provoking” the violent attack. Once again, advocates of free speech are being slandered while any attempts to examine the real motives of the ISIS-linked terrorists who tried to slaughter them are being labeled as unjustified and “Islamophobic.”Keep reading.
To combat this pernicious tactic and the toxic delusion that impoliteness about the prophet, and not planned Islamic terrorism, is somehow the cause of the attack in Garland in particular and the global jihad in general, FrontPage is running the Freedom Center’s pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, written by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer.
The authors reveal how the word “Islamophobia” is used by the Muslim Brotherhood to inhibit opposition to jihad terror, and detail how the portrayal of Muslims as victims after every Jihadist attack is a carefully planned and skillfully executed program with the ultimate goal of curtailing the West’s freedom of speech and allowing the jihad to advance unimpeded.
In 50 years of making bourbon barrels, no one had ever offered Leroy McGinnis more than what he charged for them. But over the past six months, multiple distillers have offered to pay him $250 a barrel—a 70% premium above the $150 list price.Keep reading.
The offer illustrates just how scarce bourbon barrels have become. As bourbon sales have soared, both barrel production and the lumber industry have struggled to keep up.
Mr. McGinnis’s Missouri-based company, McGinnis Wood Products Inc., gets about four email requests a day for barrels. He turns most down. Like many of his competitors, he has only enough capacity and wood to fill orders from longtime customers. The rest go on a waiting list, perpetuating a bourbon barrel shortage now entering its third year.
“There’s never been nothing like there is today, and I don’t see it letting up,” said Mr. McGinnis, whose Cuba, Mo., company will sell 150,000 bourbon barrels this year.
The shortage reflects a supply-chain conundrum. Upstream, barrel makers face a wave of demand because a half dozen established bourbon distilleries and 300 new, craft distilleries are increasing production amid a bourbon boom. Downstream, they face a shortage of white oak wood used in barrels because the lumber industry hasn’t rebounded from the housing market’s collapse...
“The thief, the male and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed as a deterrent from Allah. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.” (Qur’an 5:38)
Not that this has anything to do with…uh…
West Germany could have hunted down Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of the Holocaust, as early as 1952, eight years before Israeli agents caught him in Buenos Aires, according to a newly released document that suggests postwar Germany was unready and unwilling to put him on trial.And see Doron Geller, at the Jewish Virtual Library, "Israel Military Intelligence: The Capture of Nazi Criminal Adolf Eichmann."
The revelation has been described as a sensation, and it sheds light on West Germany's reluctance to confront its past in the decades following the Holocaust...
"American Idol" cancelled, will officially end next year http://t.co/c3SmUHtBmo #AmericanIdol
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 12, 2015
Not long ago, "American Idol" was such a ratings juggernaut that a rival TV executive dubbed it a "monster" that should be killed. That wish has now been granted, with Fox executives announcing Monday that they will end the record-breaking singing contest after it finishes its 2016 season.More.
Fox executives had long vowed that "Idol" could run for years past its peak, like "Survivor" or "The Amazing Race." "Idol" was the top-ranked show for eight years, with audiences in its heyday regularly topping the 30-million-viewers mark.
But the show has been staggering for years. This season, the viewership has shrunk to barely 10 million, and the show — once a virtual mint for Fox — has seen its huge profits disappear, industry experts say.
It's a humble end to a show that changed television during the first decade of the 21st century, proving that broadcasters could still be relevant in an age of media fragmentation and helping spawn a wave of hit talent shows, including "Dancing With the Stars" and "America's Got Talent."
"This was the biggest show on television by a mile, not like the normal 'biggest show,' " said Mike Darnell, a veteran reality TV executive who helped oversee "Idol" for years at Fox and now works in a top role for Warner Bros. "For about six years there, it was 30% or 40% above the next biggest thing on TV. An absolute phenomenon.''
"But eventually, any show is going to start to erode. Nothing lasts forever," Darnell added. "It's sad. It feels like the end of an era. … I don't honestly believe anything will ever approach the numbers it was getting at its peak."
The first decade of the new millennium was a golden age for reality TV, with shows such as "Survivor" and "The Apprentice" dominating the headlines. But no show so eclipsed its competitors like "Idol," which started unassumingly as a limited summer series on Fox in 2002. It was an Americanized version of "Pop Idol," a British series that ran for two seasons on ITV.
"American Idol" proved an instant hit. The trio of original judges — the British-born music executive Simon Cowell along with former '80s pop queen Paula Abdul and bassist and record producer Randy Jackson — blended with an appealing on-screen chemistry. Cowell became a star with his wisecracks and sometimes nasty put-downs of aspiring singers.
Audiences turned up to see an ingenious two-part process in which a wide variety of contestants — some great, some terrible — turned up for open auditions, followed by a grueling winnowing process down to the finals, telecast live.
"It established a format that is everywhere now," said Robert J. Thompson, a TV expert and director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "It didn't invent the talent competition … this format of the three judges, the potentially snarky comments, allowing lots of people in who may not be very good — we see that everywhere now. It's not just singing competitions."
Rivals found "Idol" in its zenith nearly impossible to compete with.
"If somebody would kill that show, I'd appreciate it," CBS boss Leslie Moonves said at a media conference in 2008.
As it turned out, "Idol's" slow fade had already started by that time. The median age of "Idol" viewers crept higher as teenagers and young adults began to drift away....
For a party established to defend working-class interests, Labour has remarkable difficulty relating to ordinary people. Of course, the primary reason is that the idea of a Labour Party is a strange anachronism in modern Britain.Yeah, well.
There is really no place today for a party funded and effectively dictated to by the trades unions. But in seeking to reinvent itself and recapture relevance, the Left concocted a bizarre mixture of old-fashioned socialism and bleeding-edge American social justice, fomented in tired old Tory hatred and the politics of envy and grievance.
In other words, because Labour doesn’t have an interest group to protect any longer, it has reimagined itself as a party with a higher moral purpose. Yet the morality it aspires to appeals to few outside of the media and universities and its economic principles have not been deployed since Soviet Russia...
#Oakland auto shop damaged in #MayDay protests uses artistic flair to call out city leaders: http://t.co/foV9rceVxT pic.twitter.com/f4gRHtAkqi
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsBayArea) May 12, 2015
War Against Human Nature: 100% Failure http://t.co/kDIVZf2uRn via @rsmccain pic.twitter.com/57EKysvJt5
— Þe Political Hat (@ThePoliticalHat) May 12, 2015#ICYMI: A photo saved a toddler's life by helping to reveal a rare form of cancer:
http://t.co/hYu7wyxhBj pic.twitter.com/lNU2NONmOc
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsBayArea) May 12, 2015It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue.A reminder of how close it came in Garland. And also a reminder that the left would have cheered the deaths of Pamela, Robert and their allies. I said exactly the same thing the other day.
If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this year - first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car. The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons, although one should always treat American media reports with a high degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of "assault weapons" and "AK47s". Nonetheless, from this reconstruction, it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that in Paris they knew how to use their guns and in Garland they didn't. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard's foot.
The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training overseas - as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for it.
