Because I'm kinda tired and sick tonight. And because sometimes words suck.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:50 PM | Comments (844)
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Good recap at US News & World report.

First, what’s perhaps most notable about Warren’s book is that she even includes a section called “Native American,” in which she reportedly writes, “Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry. My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

This is ironic because, until the Boston Herald first broke the news in April 2012 that Harvard Law School had repeatedly promoted Warren as a Native American faculty member, Warren never once mentioned these stories of her upbringing in a single press interview, speech, class lecture or testimony at any point, ever, in her decades-long career. What's more, Warren was not listed as a minority on her transcript from George Washington University where she began her undergraduate education, nor did she list herself as a minority when applying to Rutgers University Law School in 1973.

In fact, it was not until she was in her 30s and focused on climbing the highly competitive ladder of law school academia that Warren apparently rediscovered her Native American heritage. ItÂ’s important to note that entrance and advancement in the law school profession is governed by the Association of American Law Schools, which requires registrants interested in teaching at law schools to fill out a questionnaire detailing their education, experience, bar passage and, yes, ethnicity. This information is then disseminated to law schools around the country that, as Warren surely knew, are always on the lookout to add to the diversity of their faculty.

A copy of Warren's questionnaire currently resides in the Association of American Law Schools archives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, only Warren herself has the authority to release the complete copy of her questionnaire and to date, she has refused to do so.

Her opposition to such transparency can perhaps be understood in the documented fact that in the years thereafter, starting in 1986, Warren began self-reporting herself as a "minority professor" in the Association of American Law Schools staff directory that lists all law school professors around the country. As the former association chairman told the Boston Herald, the directory once served a tip sheet for law school administrators, in the pre-Internet days, who were looking to identify and recruit minority professors.

Remarkably, Warren's explanation to the Boston Herald was that she listed herself as a minority in the hopes that she would be invited to a luncheon so she could meet "people who are like I am" and she stopped checking the box when that didn't happen. Perhaps it "didn't happen" because at no point, at any of the schools she attended or worked at, is there any evidence that Warren ever joined any Native American organizations on campus or in any way interacted with anyone in the Native American community.

The left's claims on this are, as usual, atrocious. They defend Warren (to the extent they'll even address the issue) by claiming that Warren honestly thought she was 1/64th (or was it 1/128th?) Cherokee.

But our "diversity" regime was not set up simply to act as a racial spoils system. The idea behind it is that minorities had themselves likely been harmed in some way by their race in the past -- whether victims of actual racism or not having many advantages in life due to, for example, one's great-great-grandparents being slaves and therefore having started out with almost no money whatsoever and sharply limited earning capacity.

For Elizabeth Warren to Play Indian when it suited her purposes is disgustingly self-serving. She is obviously one of two things:

100% White,

or, by her claim, merely 99.2% white.

Either way, she is White, and her parents were White, and her grandparents were White, and even her great-grandparents were White. I think you have to go to her great-great-grandparents before you find the one (1!) nonwhite contributor to her racial legacy.

In no way has Elizabeth Warren ever suffered the sting of racial animus from White People due her race (which is White), nor have missed out on job opportunities due to her race (which is White), nor does her family start out in a Racial Ditch due to discrimination against its race (which, in case I didn't mention this, is White).

Elizabeth Warren took advantage of racial set-aside employment opportunities for disadvantaged minorities despite never for one second in her entire life being disadvantaged by her race (which is White).

Has she ever been a victim of racism? How would a racist even know to discriminate against her, unless she busted out her "family lore" and showed pictures of her grandmother with her "high cheekbones" and convinced the skeptical racist that she was anything other than a White Person In Good Standing?

Her one "story" (I love how all of this is about "stories" and "feelings" and "narratives") of discrimination is her claim that her great-great-great-grandparents had to elope due to the extreme racial hostility her distant ancestor once allegedly experienced.

And yet those same great-great-great-grandparents had their wedding party right in their home town.

I guess somehow the town got over its extreme hatred of mixed Indian marriages in the few hours between the ceremony and the party.

She could disprove that she took advantages of programs designed to help minorities who are identifiable as such -- you know, people you could actually discriminate against based on appearance because they're, unlike Elizabeth Warren, not Completely, Blindingly, Albino's-Ass-in-Winter White -- but of course she refuses to release her "personal records."

No, she won't release the facts to you.

But she will keep offering up her "stories."

Posted by: Ace at 03:51 PM | Comments (509)
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I haven't seen this much buzz and hype about a product America had no particular desire for since Cop Rock.

But, as Steve Jobs said, how does the customer even know what he wants? I guess that's the theory of a Jeb Bush bid.

From Politico, via @drewmtips:

Jeb Bush on Wednesday was the most vocal heÂ’s been about considering a run for the White House in 2016.

The Republican told a crowd of about 200 people at a Catholic Charities fundraiser in New York that he is “thinking about running for president,” according to an attendee.

The response came to one of the first questions posed to Bush at the Union League luncheon. After his answer, the room went wild, and then someone [who I will speculate is Jen Rubin-- ace] said they hoped he would take the step.

I don't get this, I just don't. Larry Kudlow was ecstatic.

Bush was praised by Kudlow for his focus on immigration reform and urged not to back down.

“Why would I back down from it? It’s the right thing to do…we’ve got to be an inclusive party,” Bush said, according to the attendee.

On his support of Common Core educational standards, Bush noted, “I’m getting hit from both sides on this one.”

I dunno. Jeb seems to be one of those politicians who has a set of ideas he's not willing to compromise with the base on, nor is he willing to make basic efforts at persuading him of his ideas. "Act of Love" isn't persuasion. It's a very weak effort at emotional shaming, which is (rightly) perceived as a hostile form of communication.

So this is what the Establishment has cooking, huh?

Meanwhile, Rand Paul states the obvious -- the law on abortion won't be changed until the public's consensus opinion on abortion has changed -- but that sort of concession probably won't be well-received by those for whom the pro-life cause is of paramount importance.

This sort of "Pro-Choice in my heart but not as a practical governing platform" may read as centrist to some, and will gain some votes and lose others.

AllahPundit notes Paul has similarly made centrist noises on gay marriage...

[Q:] Right. But it seems what theyÂ’re saying is that the Republican Party should stay out of issues like gay marriage.

[A:] I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues. The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who donÂ’t want to be festooned by those issues.

This may be a good thing, and this may be a bad thing: But the Republican Party is currently so divided on so many things I'm not really sure what the Republican Party is any more.

That isn't necessarily bad. Maybe it's a sign of openness and adaptability.

But all of my instincts are in favor of someone that "unites the base," and I'm not sure who the hell can even do that any longer.

Is such a thing possible?

Maybe my basic notion that we need a candidate who "unites the base" (and hence papers over deep philosophical differences) is just wrong, and such a thing is impossible, and we actually cannot avoid an actual intramural war to decide what this party actually is. Maybe we will have to have Losers and Winners.

Posted by: Ace at 02:59 PM | Comments (323)
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Yeah, guys, I dunno.

Is there any way we can get him to do a new "character" where he plays someone who's comfortable on camera and occasionally funny?

By the way, I can't help but see the Corporate Messaging Strategy here. Colbert talks a lot about his family (and Dave obligingly asks about it), which is probably all with the design of "humanizing" the new expensive hire and making him palatable to viewers.

At 10:10, he reads the top ten list he and his writing partner submitted when they applied to be writers on the show 17 years ago.

Yeah, it's not good. When he realizes it's bombing, he says "17 years ago," to remind people it's dated comedy, as if America has made quantum leaps since then in the technology of the Top Ten List.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:28 PM | Comments (296)
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I see a lot of hands shooting up quickly.

Yeah, I know, it's kind of obvious.

As I write this, Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is #1 on Amazon....

The book, as you probably know, has also sparked nonstop conversation in political and media circles. Though itÂ’s best to let economists debunk PikettyÂ’s methodology and data, it is worth pointing out that liberal pundits and writers have not only enthusiastically and unconditionally embraced a book on economics, or even a run-of-the-mill leftist polemic, but a hard-left manifesto.

Now, I realize weÂ’re all supposed to accept the fact that conservatives are alone in embracing fringe economic ideas. But how does a book that evokes Marx and talks about tweaking the Soviet experiment find so much love from people who consider themselves rational, evidence-driven moderates?

...

Piketty also advocates for a 60-percent tax rate on those making $200,000 and an additional worldwide tax on wealth...

Fact is, the tax hikes offered by even the most progressive elected Democrats wouldn’t alter the dynamics of “fairness” in a society with a $16 trillion GDP. To put it into perspective, ending Bush-era cuts may net the treasury $80 billion yearly. If Piketty’s clairvoyance is to be trusted, and I’m assured it can — we will need to transfer trillions of dollars from one class to another just save our society from disaster. And none of this, according to the author, will destroy economic growth.

...

[P]iketty’s utopian notions and authoritarian inclinations — ones that I’m pretty sure most Americans (and probably most Democrats) would still find off-putting — do not seem to rattle the left-wing press one bit....

So if his popularity tells us anything, it’s that many liberal “thought leaders” have taken a far more radical position on economic policy than we’re giving them credit for.

"We're not Marxists, and it is paranoid (and perhaps prosecutable) for you to call us Marxists," said the Marxist, then he went back to masturbating righteously over his Marxist manifesto.

Our politics is corrupted and retarded at every step by lies the dominant class requires us to tell.

And the Middle Class. Well, the Middle Class won't be helped by any of these schemes, of course.

Neither will the poor, for the matter.

I am not disputing that something unhappy is going on in the global economy. Nor am I disputing that this unhappiness is unequally distributed. But the proportion of this unhappiness due to income inequality is actually relatively small -- and moreover, concentrated not among the poor, but among the upper middle class, which competes with the very rich for status goods and elite opportunities.

If we look at the middle three quintiles, very few of their worst problems come from the gap between their income and the incomes of some random Facebook squillionaire. Here, in a nutshell, are their biggest problems:

Finding a job that allows them to work at least 40 hours a week on a relatively consistent schedule and will not abruptly terminate them.

Finding a partner who is also able to work at least 40 hours a week on a relatively consistent schedule and will not be abruptly terminated.

Maintaining a satisfying relationship with that partner over a period of years.

Having children who are able to enjoy more stuff and economic security than they have.

Finding a community of friends, family and activities that will provide enjoyment and support over the decades.

This is where things are breaking down -- where things have actually, and fairly indisputably, gotten worse since the 1970s. Crime is better, lifespans are longer, our material conditions have greatly improved -- yes, even among the lower middle class. What hasnÂ’t improved is the sense that you can plan for a decent life filled with love and joy and friendship, then send your children on to a life at least as secure and well-provisioned as your own.

...

I suspect that PikettyÂ’s plan would actually work best for the pretty well off. It would knock the consumption of the ultrawealthy down to the consumption of a professional near the top of his field, who earns a large income but has comparatively little wealth. Because those people are being priced out of top schools and delightful real estate by people who can afford to have a nice apartment in five different world cities, they would strongly benefit from this plan.

This is an interesting idea I've written about before: That the "solutions" proposed by wealthy-but-not-actually-rich "mindworkers" of the upper-middle to middle-upper classes are not for the benefit of the lower classes, but for themselves.

We talked about this on the podcast with Matthew Continetti -- there is a class struggle going on here, to be sure, but the class struggle is between the upper-middle-to-middle-upper income levels against the upper-upper income levels.

Those in the mere middle-upper-to-upper-middle income ranges feel a bit down because they're being outpaced by their competitors -- the upper-uppers -- and so propose laws to take away the upper-uppers' income advantage.

Someone observed -- wryly but accurately --that the media/academic class thinks the highest income one should be able to earn just so happens to coincide with their maximum yearly salary at their job, in their industry.

If they could earn $300,000 per year, why then $300,001 per year constitutes the threshhold at which we must begin confiscating estates.

Tom Brokaw probably earned, who knows, $2 million per year. So what's his idea of the ultra-rich, the filthy rich the grand rentiers? Why $2 million and one dollars per year.

This is a squabble between the Marxist members of one pampered class which looks longingly at all the Stuff possessed by a somewhat more pampered class.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (420)
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Maybe one of the most important cases in a long time.

Rep. Steve Driehaus voted for Obamacare. The Susan B. Anthony List wanted to put up billboards that said, “Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion," and ran a similar radio campaign.

The billboard was never put up, because Dreihaus had threatened to sue -- not the SBA List, but the company managing the billboard.

Dreihaus claimed the message was false, and Ohio forbids "false" claims about a politicians' voting record.

The Ohio Elections Commission found, in a preliminary vote, that the message was indeed "false," but ultimately a full prosecution never went forward, because Dreihaus was defeated for reelection and the point became moot.

Note that Dreihaus claims that this message was "false" because he claimed refuge in Obama's completely-fake claim that Obamacare would not mandate abortion coverage by employers who were conscious objectors to the practice.

We now know that Dreihaus' claim was in fact the false one -- Obama's alleged guarantee on this score was worth as much as his claim that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

And yet here was -- is -- a government organization purporting to declare the truth to be false and a falsehood to be true, chilling citizens' right to speak the truth.

A federal judge dismissed the case in such a way that made it impossible, essentially, to challenge Ohio's law in advance of an actual prosecution. Apparently they didn't consider that threats of prosecution have a chilling effect, and that the factual record in this case includes, in fact, a real case of a citizen censoring himself for fear of prosecuction.

Consider, for a moment, how dangerous this is. In this case, you have Dreihaus making a claim which is supported by the government -- a claim which is false. And you have citizens making a claim which is disfavored by the government -- their claim being true.

Dreihaus wished to rely on the president's promise that Obamacare would never be interpreted this way; SBA List looked at these same facts and came to a contrary conclusion -- that Dreihaus was, no matter what he or Obama claimed, actually voting for the proposition that the government should mandate that employers provide birth control coverage to employees (and some of those can be characterized as abortifacients) and even coverage for abortion, no matter what the employers' honestly-felt religious or philosophical beliefs on the matter.

Dreihaus had the whole of the government on his side, and surely, a majority of the government bureaucracy, which we are lately discovering to our chagrin has its own political agenda and is not shy about promoting that agenda in their day-jobs.

But government wishes the power to say what is true and what is false -- even on hotly disputed points, where people are arguing, basically, whether a promise will be observed in the future. Something that can't actually be determined in the present.

And, as events would have it, it turned out the SBA was right.

But the fact that the SBA was right shouldn't control the issue here. Rather, it should illustrate how dangerous it is to have agents of the government deciding what is True and what is False on behalf of citizens, with prosecutions and other legal consequences flowing from their decisions.

George Will discusses the case here.

Driehaus says insurance companies must collect a “separate payment” from enrollees and segregate this money from federal funds. The SBA List says money is fungible, so this accounting sleight-of-hand changes nothing.

Yes, and they're right.

...

The Ohio Elections Commission has pondered the truth or falsity of saying that a school board “turned control of the district over to the union,” and that a city councilor had “a habit of telling voters one thing, then doing another.” Fortunately, the Supreme Court, citing George Orwell’s 1984, has held that even false statements receive First Amendment protection: “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.”

This case, which comes from Cincinnati, where the regional IRS office was especially active in suppressing the political speech of conservative groups, involves the intersection of two ominous developments. One is the inevitable, and inevitably abrasive, government intrusions into sensitive moral issues that come with governmentÂ’s comprehensive and minute regulation of health care with taxes, mandates, and other coercions. The Supreme Court will soon rule on one such controversy, the ACA requirement that employer-provided health-care plans must cover the cost of abortifacients. The other development is governmentÂ’s growing attempts to regulate political speech, as illustrated by the Obama administrationÂ’s unapologetic politicization of the IRS to target conservative groups.

These developments are not coincidental. GovernmentÂ’s increasing reach and pretensions necessarily become increasingly indiscriminate.

There's a politico-economic theory with a very anodyne name that greatly undersells the theory itself: Public choice theory.

The standard way of thinking about political outcomes before public choice theory was to imagine the government as a disinterested referee, a neutral judge, hearing this or that claim from this or that constituency.

Public Choice Theory posits instead that the government itself -- its bureaucrats, its politicians -- is in fact an interested party with its own economic and political agenda for the country, and makes decisions on that basis, just like anyone else.

This is certainly the correct theory of government behavior.

What the hell is the government doing claiming to have the power to use force and deprivation of liberty in deciding political disputes in which the government itself has an unacknowledged selfish interest ?

It's critical that this ugly law be voided as unconstitutional. Otherwise, the progressives have their foot in the door for deciding what is True on behalf of the country, with prosecutors and cops and wardens as their enforcement agents.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (384)
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I guess so.

This is one of those things that a lot of people oppose -- whether because of the affront to federalism, or the juvenilzation of adults, or on basic liberty grounds -- but such people suspect there is too strong a lobby for the other side, or, maybe, too much inertia about it, and so while people may agree this is kinda bullshit, they won't actually take any action to change it.

Paglia makes most of her case on culture -- that drinking is part of it.

Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in growing up — as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s home-made wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity. Beer was a nourishing food in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and wine was identified with the life force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (in wine, truth). Wine as a sacred symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service. Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — Ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.

...

As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and will-power and can produce physiological feminization in men.

I like her point that there are limits to the degree can actually control what it deems "Bad Behavior." Forbid 18 year olds from drinking, and they'll turn to more easily portable, more easily concealable mind-altering substances like pot, pills, or worse.

Posted by: Ace at 09:44 AM | Comments (324)
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Smart power!

In the summer of 2012, American Green Berets began refurbishing a Libyan military base 27 kilometers west of Tripoli in order to hone the skills of LibyaÂ’s first Western-trained special operations counter-terrorism fighters. Less than two years later, that training camp is now being used by groups with direct links to al Qaeda to foment chaos in post-Qaddafi Libya.

Last week, the Libyan press reported that the camp (named “27” for the kilometer marker on the road between Tripoli and Tunis) was now under the command of Ibrahim Ali Abu Bakr Tantoush, a veteran associate of Osama bin Laden who was first designated as part of al Qaeda’s support network in 2002 by the United States and the United Nations. The report said he was heading a group of Salifist fighters from the former Libyan base.

That probably wasn't the original plan, huh?

This is why I'm so down on the interventionist wing of the GOP. They never seem to think through what happens after they get what they want. We simply don't understand enough about the internal realities of these countries, especially the ethnic and tribal relationships and loyalties (remember the State Department was counting on local militias to help protect the Benghazi compound? And how did that work out?).

It's this bomb first, "figure out what comes next....never" attitude that had me down on Syria. I'm not saying there's never a time for the US to use military power, I'm saying let's not pretend the domestic fissures of other countries are always solvable or even improved by the application of American firepower.

I admit non-action can carry as much risk as action in the long run but a little humility about lessons learned in the last decade or so seems to be in order.

By the way, speaking of Syria....

Secretary of State John Kerry touted on Tuesday the fact that Syria had given up almost all its declared chemical weapons and would finish the process by the end-of-April deadline.

“We now have the majority percentage of chemical weapons moved out of Syria, and we’re moving on schedule to try to complete that task,” he said at a State Department event.

But events in Syria paint a more complicated picture of AssadÂ’s continued ability to kill civilians with chemical weapons.

Earlier this month, the Assad regime allegedly used chlorine gas — a weapon Syria is not required to relinquish — against civilians in the town of Kafr Zita, causing victims to suffocate, choke, vomit, foam at the mouth and develop hypertension, according to a letter from the head of the Syrian Coalition, a Western-approved opposition group, to the United Nations Security Council.

Oops.

It's almost as if when faced with existential threats to their regimes and their own lives, ruthless dictators will do whatever it takes to win and international agreements be damned.

The only way you are going to get Assad to stop using chemical weapons or killing people is to topple his regime. And if you topple his regime, well, see the story above about Libya.

There are no good answers in these hellholes. We should ruthlessly pursue our interests and security and that means keeping them fighting as long as possible.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:35 AM | Comments (601)
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A concise portrait of every debate you've ever held with a Liberal.

Facts do not persuade.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:58 AM | Comments (199)
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Happy Wednesday.

Wow, I don't think anyone expected Vox to be quite so unprofessional. Partisan, yes, but even partisan hacks on the left like to preserve their illusions of professionalism.

Here's a good recap of the Supreme Court action yesterday in the political campaign false statements case. "A serious First Amendment concern with a state law that requires you to come before a commission to justify what you are going to say," said Justice Kennedy.

Oh, and the self-proclaimed "perfect affirmative action baby" on the high court wrote a strident dissent in the college affirmative action case in which she equated supporters of ending racial preferences in college admissions with supporters of Jim Crow. She also attacked the Chief Justice for his 2007 statement "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." In response, he chides her: "People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate."

Prominent same-sex marriage advocates sign open letter rejecting the mob-mindedness that claimed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (691)
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