Monday, June 1, 2015

Gifts in Kitchen & Dining

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Bernie Sanders' Foul Socialist Odor

From Michelle Malkin, at FrontPage Magazine:


Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger.

Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves.

In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood on Tuesday, Sanders detailed his grievances with an overabundance of antiperspirants and footwear. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.”

Try to suppress a snicker: Sanders, Decider of Your Sanitary and Footwear Needs, is casting himself as the Everyman in touch with “ordinary Americans” to contrast his campaign with Hillary “my Beltway lobbyist and foreign agent operator Sid Blumenthal is just a friend I talk to for advice” Clinton.

Blech. By the looks of the 2016 Democratic presidential field, liberals really do practice the anti-choice principles they preach.
More.

Plus, from yesterday's morning talk shows, "Bernie Sanders Addresses 1972 Sex, Rape Fantasy Essay on Meet the Press."

He's a freakin' crackpot.

Tony Hawk Remembers His First 900 Air at the X-Games

This is really cool.



Barack Obama’s Anti-Semitism Test

From Caroline Glick, at FrontPage Magazine:
Is U.S. President Barack Obama an anti-Semite?

This question has lingered in the air since his first presidential bid in 2008. It first arose due to the anti-Semitic sermons that Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for more than 20 years, made as Obama and his family sat in the pews.

Throughout the six-and-a-half years of his presidency, Obama has laughed off the concerns.

But he has not dispelled them. And this failure has hurt him.

So last week, Obama went to significant lengths to answer the question about his feelings toward Israel and the Jewish people once and for all.

The timing of his charm offensive wasn’t coincidental.

Obama clearly believes he has to dispel doubts about his intentions toward Jews and Israel in order to implement the central policy of his second term in office. That policy of course is his nuclear deal with Iran.

Obama’s agreement with the mullahs is supposed to be concluded by the end of next month.

Obama argues that his deal will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained in his address before the joint houses of Congress in March, from what has already been revealed about the nuclear deal Obama seeks to conclude, far from preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, the deal will provide several pathways for Iran to at a minimum become a threshold nuclear state, capable of developing nuclear weapons at the drop of a hat. If Iran cheats on the deal, it can develop nuclear weapons while the agreement is still in force. If it abides by the agreement, it can develop nuclear weapons as soon as the agreement expires.

Beyond his desire to conclude a nuclear deal that will empower a regime that has pledged to destroy Israel, there are Obama’s reported plans for changing the way the US relates to Israel at the UN Security Council.

For the past half-century, the US has used its veto power at the Security Council to prevent substantive anti-Israel draft resolutions from passing. But Obama and his top advisers have hinted and media reports have provided details about his intention to end this 50-year policy.

Obama reportedly intends to enable the passage of a French draft resolution that would require Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.

As these two policies, which bear directly on Israel’s ability to defend itself and indeed, to survive, near implementation, Obama is faced with the fact that he has a credibility problem when it comes to issues related to the survival and existence of the Jewish state.

In a bid to address this credibility problem, last week he invested significant time and effort in building up his credibility on Jewish issues. To this end, he gave an extensive interview to Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, and he gave a speech before Adas Israel, a large, liberal Conservative synagogue in Washington, DC.

To a degree, Obama was successful. He did put to bed the question of whether or not he is anti-Semitic.

In his interview with Goldberg, Obama gave a reasonable if incomplete definition of what anti-Semitism is. Obama said that an anti-Semite is someone who refuses to recognize the 3,000-year connection between the Jews and the Land of Israel. An anti-Semite is also someone who refuses to recognize the long history of persecution that the Jewish people suffered in the Diaspora.

According to Obama, an anti-Semite is someone who refuses to understand that this history of persecution together with the Jews’ millennial connection to the Land of Israel is what justifies the existence of Israel in the Land of Israel.

Moreover, according to Obama, anti-Semites refuse to understand that Israel remains in mortal danger due to the continued existence of anti-Semitic forces that seek its destruction.

And that isn’t all. As he sees it, even if you do understand the legitimacy of Israel’s existence and recognize the continued threats to its survival, you could still be an anti-Semite.

As Obama explained to Goldberg, there is still the problem of double standards.

In his words, “If you acknowledge those things, then you should be able to align yourself with Israel where its security is at stake, you should be able to align yourself with Israel when it comes to making sure that it is not held to a double standard in international fora, you should align yourself with Israel when it comes to making sure that it is not isolated.”

To his credit, Obama provided a clear, well-argued and constructive definition of anti-Semitism.

But there’s a bit of a problem. Right after Obama provided us with his definition of anti-Semitism, he endorsed and indeed engaged in the very anti-Semitism he had just defined.

As Goldberg, who is sympathetically inclined toward Obama, put it, Obama “holds Israel to a higher standard than he does other countries.”

Both in his interview with Goldberg and in his speech at the synagogue, Obama judged Israel in accordance to what he defined as Jewish values.

According to Obama, Jewish values require Jews to prefer the interests of others over their own interests in order to “repair the world.”

As Obama reads Israeli history, the state’s founders didn’t only seek to build a Jewish state.

They set out to build Utopia.

Obama explained, “I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of… kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We’re repairing it. We are going to do it the right way. We are going to make sure that the lessons we’ve learned from our hardships and our persecutions are applied to how we govern and how we treat others. And it goes back to the values questions that we talked about earlier – those are the values that helped to nurture me and my political beliefs.”

In his address at the synagogue, Obama made his expectations of Israel explicit. As he sees it, Israel’s concerns for Palestinians should outweigh its concerns for itself.

“The rights of the Jewish people… compel me to think about a Palestinian child in Ramallah that feels trapped without opportunity. That’s what Jewish values teach me.”

In other words, when Obama thinks about Israel, he cannot avoid blaming Israel for the feelings he assumes Palestinian children feel.

It is important to mention that in neither of his attempts to address concerns about his perceived biases regarding Jews did Obama note the behavior of the Palestinian Authority. He ignored its endemic corruption and authoritarianism.

He ignored the wild anti-Semitic incitement and indoctrination practiced at all levels of the Palestinian governing authority. He ignored the longstanding Palestinian refusal to accept an independent state that would peacefully coexist with the Jewish state.

So in the end, Obama’s charm offensive did provide a clear answer to the question of whether he is anti-Semitic.

It bears noting that the fact that Obama failed his own test of anti-Semitism doesn’t necessarily mean that he hates Jews. It is certainly possible that he likes Jews.

But loving Jews and being an anti-Semite are not mutually exclusive...
Still more.

Obama hates Israel and the Jews. All this, seriously, is an exercise in futility. Don't give him the benefit of the doubt. The sooner the Democrats are out of power the safer Israel will be.

General Stanley McChrystal (Ret.) on the Battle to Defeat #ISIS in Iraq

From CNN's State of the Nation yesterday:



Sunday, May 31, 2015

Carly Fiorina on Fox News Sunday, May 31, 2015 (VIDEO)

I still don't expect her to get too far, mainly because she'll be destroy by the media, and ultimately, she'll be subjected to the Herman Cain treatment --- although I expect, having run for office previously, Ms. Fiorina's much more prepared for the left's character assassination.

In any case, she's extremely well-informed and loquacious.



More from Ashe Schow, at the Washington Examiner, "Carly Fiorina breaks top 10 of 2016 GOP candidates in latest national poll."

And from Katie Pavlich, at Town Hall, "While Rick Santorum Whines About Rules, Carly Fiorina Steps Up To GOP Debate Challenge."

Michael LaCour and the 'Endemic Problems' of Political Science

From Steven Hayward, who is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy 2014-2016, at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.

He's a cool dude!


And ICYMI, "Michael LaCour, 'Gay Canvassers' Fabulist, Responds to Attacks on Retracted Homosexual Marriage Study."

Roasting 'Progressives of Palor' LOL!

You gotta love Twitter!



TV's 'Golden Age' Won't Last Because You're Not Watching Enough

A lot of times after I've watch a ball game or a favorite show I'll just turn off the tube and cruise my iPhone and Twitter. I can go for a couple hours easily, especially if all my apps are working properly, heh. (LAT's app was screwed up for awhile and wouldn't load, but it's been working beautifully lately.)

In any case, here's this a Bloomberg, "Quality, expensive TV shows need more viewers to be sustainable, but audiences are dwindling":
The entertainment industry will air more than 400 original TV shows this year, lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on top talent and exotic locations in the hopes of creating the next “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones.”

The gusher of quality programs has prompted TV critics to proclaim a Golden Age of Television. But as any viewer knows, keeping up with all the shows is impossible. You’d have to watch TV 24 hours a day for at least eight months to catch every scripted series that aired last year, according to a Bloomberg calculation. With too many shows chasing too few viewers, say industry executives, most original programs lose money and half the shows now running probably will disappear by next year.

“The market is flooded with too many people chasing the same prize,” said Jeff Wachtel, president of NBCUniversal’s cable unit, which includes the USA and Syfy channels. “What used to be the golden age of television has now become a gold rush.”

With production costs soaring and shows being canceled with increasing frequency, executives say many niche channels will vanish as networks with the most popular shows swallow rivals that fail to create enough hits of their own.
More.

Yu Tsai Emily Ratajkowski Photo Shoot for Sports Illustrated

Lovely.



The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Fat Lesbians vs. the ‘Heteronormative Gaze’

At the Other McCain:
Does the “fat acceptance” movement “destabilize the heteronormative gaze”? Can women overcome “gender inequality” by a “radical rejection of beauty as feminine aspiration”? Those possibilities are suggested by two Canadian sociologists in an article, included in a leading Women’s Studies textbook, that compared Dove’s “Real Beauty” advertising campaign to a protest by lesbian activists in Toronto.



The Obama 'Recovery' Stalls Again — U.S. Economy Shrank 0.7 Percent in First Quarter!

Yay progs!

At WSJ, "U.S. Recovery Stumbles Yet Again":

The U.S. economy shrank during the first quarter as another brutal winter highlighted the fragility of the nearly six-year-old expansion, a historically choppy stretch during which the nation has struggled to thrive in an uneven global environment.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the U.S., contracted at a 0.7% annual rate during the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday.

That was far worse than the agency’s initial estimate that showed 0.2% growth, marking an abrupt reversal from the prior nine months when growth surged and the economy appeared on the verge of a long-delayed breakout.

The economy has now contracted in three separate quarters since the recession ended in mid-2009, a series of disappointments unmatched since the expansions of the 1950s.

Harsh weather, a strong dollar and a labor dispute at West Coast ports appeared to be the biggest culprits this time, all sapping demand for American goods at home and abroad.

“When you’re this weak, little things can knock you off course, whether it’s the Arab Spring…or ‘Snowmageddon,’ ” said Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at brokerage firm BTIG. “We have an incredibly weak economy that’s susceptible to momentary interruptions.”

The Federal Reserve has viewed the first-quarter stumble as due largely to transitory factors—such as the stronger dollar—that will dissipate in coming months. The central bank is looking for signs of a rebound soon as it plots when and how quickly to raise short-term interest rates, which have been near zero since December 2008 to stir economic growth.

Economists generally expect the economy to bounce back this spring, as it did after first-quarter contractions in 2011 and 2014. But they warned growth will likely remain modest, in line with the roughly 2% overall pace of recent years. The first half of 2015 is shaping up to be one of the weakest six-month stretches of the expansion, with economists predicting annualized growth of between 2% and 3% during the current quarter. By comparison, the economy grew more than 3% a year on average between 1983 and 2007.

Further complicating the outlook is that other signs point to the economy humming along at a steady, though modest, growth pace. Company layoffs are exceptionally low and hiring across the U.S. remains solid. Mortgage applications are up amid other signs of growing housing demand.

“We’re still growing at a relatively steady pace, although one that just doesn’t feel satisfying,” said Richard Moody, chief economist at Regions Financial Corp. “Six years into the recovery, we still really haven’t absorbed all of the idle capacity in the economy. When your underlying trend of growth is so slow, it doesn’t take much to just kind of stop the train.”

Some of the strongest headwinds facing the U.S. are tied to economic woes around the globe, including the U.S.’s biggest trading partners. Canada reported Friday that its economy unexpectedly contracted at a 0.6% annual pace in the first quarter. Mexican officials recently slashed their forecast for growth this year after reporting that the economy grew in the first quarter at the slowest pace in more than a year.

The stronger dollar, which makes U.S. goods more expensive abroad, also hasn’t helped. Friday’s GDP report showed that U.S. exports of goods fell by the most since early 2009, during the waning months of the recession. While a key measure of U.S. corporations’ after-tax profits grew 3.1% over the period, it wasn’t on pace to match the growth of the prior two years.

“We have a macro-slowdown around the world,” Stephen Angel, chief executive of industrial gas supplier Praxair Inc., told analysts this past week. “There’s less capital investment. China is decelerating…so there’s less proposal activity.”

His company, based in Connecticut, is one of many being hit by depressed oil prices. While the price of oil—around $60 a barrel—is up in recent months, it’s far from the 2014 peak of $107.26.

The oil-price drop has boosted consumers’ finances by lowering their gasoline bills, a development expected to boost the economy throughout this year. But the most dramatic effect thus far has been a drop in business investment, with energy companies holding off on drilling and equipment purchases as they deal with squeezed profits.

A measure of business spending on construction, machinery, and research and development fell at a 2.8% pace in the winter. That was the biggest decline since late 2009.

The strength of an economic rebound will hinge largely on the health of consumers. Consumer spending, representing more than two-thirds of overall economic output, grew at a 1.8% rate in the first quarter, far slower than the fourth quarter’s 4.4% growth. Household spending on long-lasting manufactured items was the weakest in nearly four years...

'Ted 2' Star Jessica Barth 'Very Sexy' for Playboy

I expect "Ted 2" has got to be one of the stupidest movies ever, but then Jessica Barth is a smokin' hottie, so I'll forgive her for foisting this demented leftist drivel.

Watch: "Jessica Barth Taps Into Her Sex Appeal for Playboy."

Former Marine George Hood of Carlsbad Sets Abdominal Plank Record of 5 Hours and 15 Minutes

The video's cool. They're down at the Oceanside Pier, at the amphitheater.

He went 5 hours, 15 minutes, and 15 seconds.

Watch: "Local man sets new record for longest held plank."

And at the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Marine vet obliterates 'planking' record."

Bob Schieffer's Final Commentary at CBS 'Face the Nation'

He's a lefty, but a good patriotic lefty, a throwback to an earlier era. I'm going to miss him.



More at LAT, "Bob Schieffer signs off from 'Face the Nation' and 46 years at CBS News."

Radical Feminism and the 'Rape Culture' Lie

From Heather Wilhelm, at Commentary, "The ‘Rape Culture’ Lie":
In September Barack Obama launched the “It’s on Us” campaign, designed to fight what he called the “nightmare” of campus sexual assault. “An estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years,” Obama announced, pausing for emphasis. “One in five.” America, the president went on to argue, suffers from a “quiet tolerance of sexual assault,” all too often blaming victims, making excuses, or looking the other way. To combat sexual violence, he said, we need a “fundamental shift in our culture.”

With these words, the president of the United States went all in on the idea that America’s academic institutions have been taken over by a “rape culture” —a culture that normalizes, trivializes, and quietly condones male sexual assault against women, blaming female victims while subtly celebrating male predators.

Once rather obscure and confined to sociology and women’s studies departments, the term “rape culture” has slowly invaded the national consciousness. According to Google search analytics, the topic generated almost no traffic in 2005 or before. After 2011, its popularity slowly began to rise—as we’ll later see, this is no accident—and then, beginning in 2013, it spiked, the graph forming a hockey stick that would make global-warming doomsayer Michael Mann proud.

The idea that one in five college women has or will be sexually assaulted is mind-boggling and horrifying. It’s also not true. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe pointed out in December, the statistic—together with two other dubious studies that, just for the heck of it, upped the ante to one in four—would “mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”

Both the “one in five” and “one in four” sexual-assault numbers, it turns out, have been repeatedly and resoundingly discredited. The former statistic comes from the 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study, an online survey of students at two college campuses that reportedly compensated respondents and categorized actions such as “kissing” and “rubbing up against” someone as sexual assault. (Even the author of the study, Christopher Krebs, told Yoffe that “one in five” is not “a nationally representative statistic.”)

“One in four” has proved even more resilient, given that it first popped up in a 1988 Ms. Foundation study by an Ohio State professor named Mary Koss—a survey later dismantled by Christina Hoff Sommers in 1994 based on work originally conducted by the Berkeley social-welfare scholar Neil Gilbert. As Sommers wrote, “For Gilbert, the most serious indication that something was basically awry in the Ms./Koss study was that the majority of women she classified as having been raped did not believe they had been raped. Of those Koss counts as having been raped, only 27 percent thought they had been; 73 percent did not say that what happened to them was rape.”

A more recent “one in four” study, conducted by the Department of Justice in 2000 and subtly titled “The Sexual Victimization of College Women,” went even further afield. Its initial results were within the boundaries of reason; it estimated that 2.8 percent of college women had been victims of rape. After performing some serious statistical voodoo, however, the authors estimated that one in four women “might” be raped—but, they admitted, “these projections are suggestive.” Oh. Well, OK. Good thing we don’t have a national panic on our hands.

Well, cancel that last thought: Actually, we do.

This month, CNN Films, in partnership with the Weinstein Company, is slated to release The Hunting Ground, which the Sundance Film Festival has called “a piercing, monumental exposé of rape culture on campuses.” The film’s promotional poster, as the New York Times noted, “resembles an ad for a horror movie.”

This follows the release of yet another “study,” thrown into the pack in January. It declared—allow me to paraphrase—that men are soulless, earth-ravaging ogres. “Nearly one-third of college men admit they might rape a woman if they could get away with it,” Newsweek reported, breathless and giddy. As it turned out, this new survey, which was eagerly splashed across international media, had a sample size of 83, a participation number of 73, highly questionable survey methods, and was conducted solely using volunteers seeking extra credit at the University of North Dakota.

If your professional dream is to concoct a completely biased yet well-received and well-publicized study, congratulations: It’s apparently fairly easy. If you wish to soberly present facts and data, well, good luck. The latest Department of Justice hard data on sexual assault, released in December 2014, estimates that 0.61 percent of female college students are the victims of sexual assault. That’s 6.1 cases per 1,000 women. Curiously, these new numbers, which come from the Obama administration, aren’t making headlines at the Obama White House’s official website. In fact, in a special public service announcement broadcast during February’s Grammy awards, the president informed the nation that “nearly one in five women in America”—not just college students—”has been a victim of rape or attempted rape.”

Speaking of culture, what does it say about ours when such clearly preposterous statistics are so easily believed? More important, what does it mean that discredited and long-debunked rape “statistics” are repeated, over and over, all the way up to the bully pulpit of the highest political office in the country?

In fact, if the latest official statistics are accurate—the unfortunate yet not-so-dramatic 0.61 percent that many feminists seem intent on ignoring—then America seems to have the opposite of a “rape culture.” Rather than pushing actual rape under the rug and celebrating male predators, in other words, we’re inventing fictional rapes and throwing actual men under the bus.

“Rape culture,” in other words, is an idea that swings, cocky and unhinged, from media and campus chandeliers. It dodges logical bullets, performs backflips around statistical cannonballs, and waltzes right through ground-leveling factual nuclear bombs. Much like an Olympic diver, it’s an idea that easily slices, clean and quiet, into the crevices of supple brains.

And once it’s settled in, it’s hard to pry it out. Like a poorly stabbed and strong-limbed B-movie villain, it refuses to die. This is, in part, because it’s an idea with a long, storied provenance, dating back more than 40 years. It has been a central feature of American feminism for nearly as long: “Feminism,” as legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon wrote in a 1988 book, is “built on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.”

But the enduring power of the rape-culture concept comes from another source as well. It addresses, albeit in a scrambled and unjust fashion, a deep problem in contemporary American life—a huge cultural resistance to the fact that sex is a profoundly serious business.
Well, Heather Wilhelm is a rape apologist!

But keep reading, heh.

Woman Killed Falling 36 Feet to the Ground at San Bernardino County Fair (VIDEO)

Man, this is a bizarre.

And extremely sad.

At LAT, "Woman dies after falling from San Bernardino County Fair attraction."



Angels Hit Five Home Runs in 8-6 Win Over Tigers

Last night's was them most enjoyable game I've watched in a while --- even better than the beating the Angels gave Boston last weekend. Angels pitcher Jerod Weaver was smokin' last night. All the parts were humming against Detroit. And Game 4 is tonight, on ESPN. It's going to be a good one. Angels have a chance to sweep the Tigers!

At LAT:
KEY MOMENT: The Angels had already hit four solo homers against Tigers starter Shane Greene — including back-to-back, second-inning shots by Matt Joyce and Carlos Perez — when Albert Pujols came to the plate later in second with two outs and two runners on. Pujols blasted a homer to left field to give the Angels a 7-1 lead.
The was freakin' sweet!

More.

And at ESPN, "5/30/15: Five home runs help Angels beat Tigers, 8-6."

Ann Coulter Takes On Pro-Amnesty Media

From Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, at NewsBusters:

Ann Coulter has another best-selling book coming out, provocatively titled Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. One major target of Coulter barbs is our “objective” media.

Lord knows Coulter understands they deserve the hectoring. News reports are slavishly sensitive to the Latino Left’s political correctness. Start with the terminology. The factual term “illegal immigrants” is somehow an extremely mean-spirited description, even though that’s 100 percent accurate. They claim to prefer less loaded lingo. Like “Dreamers.”

Coulter took exception to a New York Times story from last November reporting that a Mexican-themed restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado called “Illegal Pete’s” was hounded by leftists to change the name, even though it was named for the Anglo business owner’s father.

A group calling itself “Race Forward” bizarrely claimed in the Times that “illegal immigrant” is “a tactical term promoted by anti-immigration groups starting in the mid-2000s. The epithet, the group said, is dehumanizing, but quickly moved into the mainstream.”

This is preposterous. Coulter reported a quick search of Nexis found 3,000 uses of the term “illegal immigrant” in The New York Times alone before the year 1990. It’s like pretending the term “Hispanic” emerged in news accounts in 2005.

Then there’s the loaded media polls. A November 2014 NBC-Wall Street Journal poll used this typical lingo: “If a proposed pathway to citizenship allowed foreigners staying illegally in the United States the opportunity to eventually become legal American citizens if they pay a fine, any back taxes, pass a security background check, and take other required steps,” would you favor it?

With all those conditions, 74 percent said yes. But Coulter points out that these kind of provisions for back taxes or background checks have been summarily eviscerated by government agencies in past “reform” laws, like the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill signed by Ronald Reagan...
Here's the link to Coulter's new book, Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.

Conservatives Are Much More Likely to Vote Than Leftists

Heh, "Much more."

From David Leonhardt: