Images | Commentary | Digital Scrapbook
Sarah Hoyt:
“…Please? Because I want to write without worrying about what insanity they’re going to impose on all of us next. And oooh, boy, every time I think they’ve reached peak insane they go “Hold my beer and watch me falsely accuse someone of rape while wearing a vagina costume.” So…. please? I write SF/F and even my mind can’t imagine the new depths of crazy they’ll plumb next…”
From the Victory Girls:
“…A vote for a Democrat, any Democrat, is to reward some of the most divisive, hysterical, irrational behavior in modern politics.
Roll up your voter’s guide, point to the corner and send every Democrat you can into a long time-out. This cannot continue. Do not let it continue.
Just do it, while we still can…”
Neo-neocon:
“…Nobody knows anything, but dear LORD. Even if you hate your local GOP knucklehead, even if he is a RINO loser…. do you want Nancy “Grey Goose” Pelosi in charge of the House again? Do you want those idiots on the left to think — as they have since they successfully demonized the squishy GWB — that they need to keep turning up the insanity and drama and lies? They’re already too crazy. Worse, do you want them to enact their contract on America, from higher taxes to throttling our energy production? Are you NOSTALGIC for the Obama years? I for one would like a chance to dig myself out of the financial hole those years left me in. Vote for your local Republican knucklehead. Even if you’d like someone better. You go to war with the underwear you got on. Vote against the democrat lunatics. It’s important…”
https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/11/05/tomorrow-is-election-day/
Ann Althouse:
“…You might think Trump has set the midterms up as a referendum on himself, and I think that’s true. But if the GOP wins, Trump antagonists are not going to give it to Trump and say his referendum passed and bow to democratic choice. They’re going to say that racism won, and resisting and fighting is even more important now that we know so many Americans have been caught up in Trump’s horrible scheme…”
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/11/you-know-what-democrats-are-going-to.html
Here is another image that brings back great memories and foretells good times this year.
I am absolutely jam-packed at work and trying to get all my stuff done before the upcoming holiday. I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving in Yosemite. I love the memories and I love the place. Here is a photo from Thanksgiving 2014.
Karlyn Bowman:
“…As political pundits and the general public prepare for the 2018 midterm elections this fall, it’s a safe bet that pollsters will undergo fresh scrutiny. Questions are still being raised about their performance in the 2016 presidential election, and the results from some major 2017 contests did little to allay those concerns. Few polls, for example, predicted the size of Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s nine-point victory last November. And in the special election last December for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, the final polls ranged from a nine-point victory for Republican Roy Moore to a 10-point victory for Democrat Doug Jones. Jones won by one and a half percentage points…”
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-polling
Frank Bruni:
“…Too many Democrats spend too much time trumpeting Clinton’s popular-vote victory, blaming the Russians or combing the shadows for anything that absolves them of error. They dismiss Trump as an accident, a freak or a fad. It’s consoling, sure. It’s also an invitation to his next inauguration…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/midterms-democrats-trump-2020.html
Gail Herriot:
“…Its operative clause states: “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
The hope of many Proposition 209 supporters was that the measure would reduce the effects of mismatch. And during the years it was adhered to, it appears to have done exactly that: Minority graduation rates rose rapidly, and minority on-time (four-year) graduation rates rose even faster. At the same time, minority science and engineering rose by about 50%, while the number of minority students majoring in ethnic studies or communications fell by 20%. And minority GPAs increased…”
“…Modern America is characterized by an intense grassroots distrust of American elites — with red America especially disdainful of progressive elite institutions. Much ink has been spilled explaining the reasons for this distrust, and I don’t intend for a single short piece to encompass the whole of the argument, but I do think we underestimate the extent to which prolonged exposure to a flawed and biased elite-ordered and elite-controlled education system is profoundly dispiriting and embittering for millions of Americans.
Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.
As for higher education, its gatekeepers are often explicit ideological radicals. At their worst, they attempt to micromanage a freshman class’s racial and socioeconomic background (and sometimes its political composition) based on theories about privilege that are utterly at odds with the lived experience of the American families at their mercy…”
“…I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.
But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.
Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is couched in unwavering commitment to a supposedly noble, transcendent cause. For the Living Word Fellowship, that meant “the Lordship of Jesus Christ”; for academia, “the production of knowledge.” In both cases, though, faith ultimately amounts to mastering the rules of the leaders, whose infallibility — whether by divine right or endowed chair — excuses all else.
Looking back, the evidence was everywhere: I’d seen needless tears in the eyes of classmates, harangued in office hours for having the gall to request a letter of recommendation from an adviser. Others’ lives were put on hold for months or sometimes years by dissertation committee members’ refusal to schedule an exam or respond to an email. I met the wives and girlfriends of senior faculty members, often former and sometimes current advisees, and heard rumors of famed scholars whisked abroad to sister institutions in the wake of grad student affairs gone awry. I’d first come in contact with such unchecked power dynamics as a child, in the context of church. In adulthood, as both a student and an employee of a university, I found myself subject to them once again. . . . The Ronell scandal should alert us to the broader ways in which the 21st-century university is an absolutist institution, a promoter of sycophancy and an enemy of dissent…”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-test-of-trump-midterms-could-result-in-a-mixed-verdict-1541336400
Summary of Investigation, page 3, 4th paragraph:
“…After an extensive investigation that included the thorough review of all potentiallycredible evidence submitted and interviews of more than 40 individuals with information relating to the allegations, including classmates and friends of all those involved, Committee investigators found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against Justice Kavanaugh. In other words, following the separate and extensive investigations by both the Committee and the FBI, there was no evidence to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault made against Justice Kavanaugh…”
Jim Geraghty:
“…The national media started sending correspondents to hang out with O’Rourke, and just about all of them fell in love with him: Vanity Fair, Town and Country, Spin, GQ (twice!), BuzzFeed, Yahoo News, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time, the Washington Post (twice!), the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, the BBC . . .
Correspondents seemed oddly fixated on his sweat. Politico swooned, “Sweat pours off his lean, 6-foot-4-inch frame.” In Vanity Fair, Peter Hamby described him “sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls.” The BBC wrote, “His toes are well over the edge of the boards” of the stage “and his suede shoes are soaking up dark splashes of sweat from his brow.”
It’s Texas. It’s summer. It’s hot. Everybody sweats at outdoor events.
Beyond their not-so-hidden partisan preference, many reporters want to discover the southern Democrat with national potential — Bill Clinton 2.0 — and write the first glossy profile piece of a future president. The piece will double as a book proposal, and the book will allow its author to spend the latter half of his or her career as a quasi-historian expert on a particular president.
Reading through all of these profiles as they emphasize the same points over and over again — He was in a punk-rock band! He skateboards! He’s handsome! He’s Kennedyesque! He speaks fluent Spanish! — one keeps waiting for the section that describes what makes O’Rourke actually unique among Democratic candidates. And that section never arrives…”
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/long-shot-beto/
Economy adds robust 250,000 jobs in October in last employment report before election. “The unemployment rate was unchanged at a near 50-year low of 3.7 percent. Annual wage growth topped 3 percent for the first time in nine years.”
Related: Is America Running Out Of Workers? “It’s fashionable in media circles to laugh at President Trump’s non-stop salesmanship about the performance of the U.S. economy on his watch. But there’s no doubt that workers are benefiting from a historically tight labor market. Companies are eager to hire.”