David Bernstein:

“…No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them…”

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Dem?

Sis-Law

Emily Jashinsky:

“…As Variety noted in May, “Year to date, Fox News’ ‘Gutfeld’ has secured a bigger average viewership – more than 1.73 million – than any of TV’s late-night offerings except CBS’ ‘Late Show’ and NBC’s ‘Tonight Show.’” A Washington Examiner analysis of Nielson data for the year compared Gutfeld’s average audience on Fox News to his competitors’, and the results were illuminating:

Gutfeld’s show, which airs on Saturdays at 10 p.m. EST, has an average of 1.7 million viewers. Meaning his show averages more viewers than:

-HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” (1.5 million viewers)
-NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” (1.2 million viewers)
-CBS’ “Late Late Show with James Corden” (1.2 million viewers)
-HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (1 million viewers)
-TBS’ “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” (835,000 viewers)
-Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” (732,000 viewers)

The difference between Gutfeld’s show and the programs eating his dust is a steady drumbeat of media coverage inflating their cultural influence. Outlets regularly pluck clips from every late-night show trailing Gutfeld’s while virtually ignoring him, despite the gaps in viewership…”

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Joy Behar: Climate Change Could Prevent Joe Biden From Curing Cancer

Hard to tell?

Walmart Self-Checkout Machine Wins Employee of the Month Award Again

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…In my view, the main significance of the jury’s verdict is that is shows how normal people react when they are exposed to today’s campus leftism. You cannot sell to a normal person the idea that it is “racism” for a store to catch a student stealing a bottle of wine, and call the police, merely on account of the student’s skin color. Social justice warrior culture is insane, and is properly judged as such by normal people, who–luckily for them–tend not to encounter it often. The jury’s reaction to the demonization of Gibson’s bakery is, I think, a good indication of how most Americans will respond if, and when, they realize how depraved the Left has become…”

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J. Frank Bullitt:

“…At roughly the same time one Republican said he was thinking about co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill, another was tacitly telling Prince Charles to buzz off with his crackpot global warming theories.

Thankfully, the latter is president and can veto lousy legislation as well as withdraw from counterproductive international climate pacts.

Some Republicans in Congress, prominent among them Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, are warming (yes, warming) to the idea of enacting a carbon tax to do Al Gore’s work, which is “fighting” a windmill called “climate change.”

E&E news reports Romney is “considering co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill amid shifting attitudes in the GOP and increasingly strong advocacy for carbon pricing programs in corporate America.” The Wall Street Journal says “some Republican lawmakers” are breaking with their “party on climate change.” These congressmen “favor market-based solutions over government regulations.”

“Solutions” implies that there’s a problem. Can these GOP lawmakers clearly identify the problem? Where’s the evidence that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions are warming Earth? With what degree of certainty can any politician, scientist, or activist say that man is causing the climate to change in ways that threaten him? 100%? No one can say this. 75%? No serious person would make such a claim. 50%? A 50-50 chance simply isn’t worth the known costs of carbon taxes and other mitigation proposals (Green New Deal, for instance). 25%? No serious person should consider such low odds to be grounds for making significant policy changes — the unknown is too great.

Despite the 1994 revolution, the Tea Party protests, and the 2010 midterm turnaround, it seems little has changed in the GOP. It’s easily bullied by a hostile, agenda-driven media, and would rather incrementally surrender to Democrats’ big-government urges than put up a fight on principle.

But one Republican who has been a registered Democrat, and has even said “in many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” is refusing to give in to the demands that we have to let governments take over the global economy to neutralize a mirage. While on his recent visit to the United Kingdom, President Trump met with Prince Charles, who a decade ago said the we had “less than 100 months to act” to save the planet from irreversible climate change. Their scheduled 15-minute meeting went 90 minutes, during which, Trump said, the prince “did most of the talking.” Trump listened politely, but implicitly told the prince he wasn’t interested in joining him to bay at the moon.

Trump has said the global warming scare is a “Chinese hoax.” We don’t believe it’s a hoax, Chinese or otherwise. Or even a conspiracy.

It is, however, hysteria gone wild. Activists, politicians, and journalists want global warming. They have to have it. They can’t live without it. Nothing ever persuades them they might be wrong, not the deeply flawed warming models, not the unreliable and doctored temperature record, not the fact that multiple factors, not just CO2, affect the climate. Religious fervor overwhelms their rational thinking. They want to shame, shut up, and shun those who don’t share their mania.

This is the fanaticism that some Republicans have decided to give in to. We understand keeping an open mind, and we’re willing to change ours if the facts prove our skepticism wrong. But surrender is not a sound policy agenda. The GOP leadership needs to reel in its wayward lawmakers…”

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Cory Booker says elementary school yoga can help end the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ 

Can’t tell?

I have concluded that California is run by nincompoops, voted into office by a nincompoop majority, and doing the things that nincompoops do.

Nate Gartrell:

“…California inmates are now free to possess marijuana without fear of legal consequences by the state, thanks to a new appeals court ruling.

The 3rd District Court of Appeal overturned criminal convictions for five Sacramento defendants who had been caught with marijuana in their prison cells. The 20-page ruling says, “Consumption, not possession, is the act voters determined should remain criminalized if the user is in prison.”

The reason? The authors of California Proposition 64 — which voters passed in 2016, allowing recreational marijuana use — did not put anything in there that outlaws marijuana possession for incarcerated folks, the court ruled.

But the ruling comes with a major caveat: Consumption of marijuana by California prisoners remains a violation of the state penal code, and possession can still be punished as a rule violation by the California Department of Corrections. But if an inmate wants to keep a jar of weed next to his or her bunk, the district attorney can’t file charges, according to the ruling…”

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Jon Gabriel:

“…Politicians love fighting the last battle. Every four years, we see a slew of candidates relitigating the last presidential race, often using the same strategy that lost the previous time.

This trend is dominant in 2019 with the rise of Biden’s candidacy and the continuing rear-guard battle by anti-Trump Republicans. Joe’s main message is a return to the supposed normalcy of 2008-2016. “Know what I was most proud of?” Joe said Wednesday, “For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.”

Hey, there’s a lie right there. Has it never occurred to him that the Obama years are what created Trump?

Meanwhile, a handful of institutional Republicans are pushing their own return to normalcy. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan or former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld will save the GOP with center-left branding and Acela-approved personalities.

Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.

Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal…”

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