Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Berkeley
- FNC
- Men
- Ossoff
- Excuse
- Art
- Fraud
1. Berkeley. University of California at Berkeley is about to get its next opportunity to support free speech with an invitation by the College Republicans to Ann Coulter for a speech. This did not set well with the Brown Shirts (calling them leftist brown shirts would be redundant as all brown shirts are leftists), who started posting anonymous fliers calling for lynching Berkeley College Republicans. So much for the birthplace of the free speech movement 60 years ago. The enablers in the college administration did their level best to defuse the problem by banning Coulter and cancelling her speech. She happily announced that she was going to come to Berkeley and speak anyway. The university tried to levy all manner of security requirements that they never levy on any other speaker (anyone other than conservatives). Coulter agreed to three of them and requested that local law enforcement not tell their men to stand down and ignore lawless rioters and that UC Berkeley announce in advance that any students participating in mayhem, violence and heckling in order to prevent an invited speaker from speaking would be expelled. Their response was to ban the speech. As of this writing, there have been several head fakes on whether the speech is going to take place, but it looks like Coulter is going to speak and will be bringing her own security along with her. The February riots in response to Milo Yiannopoulos caused around $100,000 in property damage to the university and around half a million in downtown Berkeley. There is going to be pushback on this. Final thought is that the Berkeley College Republicans are not the prototypical snowflakes. They are not flinching. They are not retiring from the confrontation. They are standing up to bullies, brown shirts and cowardly university administrators. Note that I may be giving the administrators a break by calling them cowardly, for they are all screaming leftists and fully supportive of the mayhem past, present and future. Anything is reasonable (in their eyes) as long as it shuts up voices of opposition. Back to the College Republicans – these kids are going to be ok and fully steeled in standing up to the fascist left. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/04/19/uc-berkeley-bans-ann-coulter/
2. FNC. Fox News is changing, and not for the better. Rupert Murdoch’s children took over operations a year or two ago and are making internal changes in the network to more closely align with their leftist worldview. First over the side was Bill O’Reilly of the O’Reilly Factor who was summarily released following a series of sexual harassment complaints and network payments of $13 million to women. O’Reilly was targeted by a coordinated campaign against Factor advertisers. This campaign flooded their complaint lines with demands that they withdraw their sponsorship from the Factor. And enough of them did so as to give the new management at FNC the excuse they needed to dump O’Reilly. For his part, O’Reilly is standing up an operation on social media and is promising that the truth will come out. Having collected their initial scalp, the same group started targeting Sean Hannity with the same campaign – charges of sexual harassment followed by a coordinated campaign against advertisers. Hannity fought back immediately against the first sexual harassment charge and seems to have swatted it aside at least temporarily. We are not far enough into the orchestrated campaign against advertisers to tell how well it is working. My sense is that it only has to work a little bit, as that is all the new management needs to pull the trigger. FNC as we have known it is going away. And the marketplace is ripe for another organization that will do what it used to do. http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/04/heres-why-rush-survived-pressure-on-advertisers-while-oreilly-didnt/
3. Men. Feminism has been a half century war on men, particularly young men and boys. A measure of how successful feminists have been and how successful the O’Bama regime was in destroying the economy came out last week via the Census Bureau which announced that more Americans between the ages of 18 – 34 now live with their parents than with a spouse. In 1975, 31.9 million in that age group lived with a spouse. In 2016 that number is 19.9 million. The number of young living with their parents rose from 14.7 to 22.9 million over the period. Essentially our children are not growing up and being self-sufficient until their 30s. Worse is that more young men are falling to the bottom of the income ladder. In 1975, only 25% of men aged 18 – 34 had incomes less than $30,000 / year. By 2016, that number increased to 41% (incomes in both years were figured in 2015 dollars). Worse, it is not going to get better any time soon, as today there are more women than men graduating with college degrees including advanced degrees. In 1975, more men than women had degrees. With this, we have another example of what the left does. Rather than raising up our wives and daughters, the left used the levers of power to step on and punish young men. They played a zero-sum game, having to take away from men and boys in order to raise up women. The war on women does not exist. It never did. Rather, feminism is used as an excuse (and a vehicle) to punish an entire sex for ill-perceived Sins of Their Fathers. This will not improve society. It will not improve families. It is ultimately aimed at crushing the hopes and dreams of as many of our sons and grandsons as humanly possible partly to get even and partly to convert them into a compliant, dependent, predictable voting block that will pull the levers for democrats from now until doomsday. It is what they have done to young black men. It is what they are going to do to us all given the chance. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/04/20/report-americans-18-34-live-parents-spouse/
4. Ossoff. There was a special election in Georgia to replace Representative Tom Price, who Trump selected to run HHS. The seat is in a solid conservative district and used to have Newt Gingrich representing it. The election had a field of some 20 Republicans and a single democrat, one pajama boy Jon Ossoff, who lives with a longtime girlfriend (reread last item as a reminder of young men not stepping up to do their societal duty). Democrats poured a boatload of money into the race in an attempt to give Trump and congressional Republicans a black eye and shape the narrative that Trump is being rejected. The way election law works in Georgia for these sorts of races is that if any candidate gets 50% +1 votes, he or she wins outright. Pajama Boy was a couple percentage points short, though he and the media did everything humanly possible to claim and cheerlead his victory. He is forced into a runoff with a State Legislator (female) in a few weeks. Over 95% of the $10 million spent in his behalf came from out of the district. Most of it came from out of state. As it turns out, he does not actually live in the district and acknowledged the fact when confronted in the days before the election. His excuse is that he was born in the district and is outside for a little while, planning on moving back as soon as the girlfriend graduates from medical school. http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/18/if-you-cant-vote-for-jon-ossoff-in-georgias-6th-district-dont-worry-neither-can-he/
5. Excuse. Anyone remember the “dodgy dossier” compiled by a contractor of unsubstantiated allegations about President-elect Trump? It was outed as the fever swamp product of anti-Trump people on both sides of the political divide. John McCain even got himself involved passing it along to the FBI. Having finally got it in their hot little hands, the O’Bama political appointees in the FBI and (In)Justice used it as an excuse, perhaps even the fundamental excuse, to request the FISA warrant to investigate members of the Trump campaign. Wasn’t much of an excuse, but when you are breaking the law, you don’t need a lot of top cover. http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/04/18/cnn-fbi-used-trump-dossier-to-obtain-fisa-warrant-against-carter-page/
6. Art. University of Alaska Anchorage Assistant Professor, Painting Department of Art, Thomas Chung inserted himself smartly into the ongoing budgetary wars here in Alaska with a moderately outrageous painting displayed in his department. It was a full frontal view (naked) of the actor who plays Captain America in the Marvel movies holding the severed head of President Donald Trump in one hand while a woman with Hillary’s face (minus the cankles) wraps herself around the opposite leg. The painting was intended to stir up all the expected outrage and did pretty well in its job. For his part, Chung came to UAA from San Francisco Art Institute and Yale, where he graduated in 2013. He hasn’t been up here this long and was hired as someone who does field work to study indigenous tribes. Being young and dumb is one thing, and channeling your inner Robert Maplethorpe is another. The thing is, why does he get to do this on the public dime? Perhaps it is time that Chung and the people who hired him get back in touch with their inner Dan Aykroyd who so famously noted in Ghostbusters some 47 years ago noted the following”
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect *results*.”
http://mustreadalaska.com/severed-head-of-a-president-and-other-indignities-of-art/
7. Fraud. One of the things the O’Bama regime did well was bury bad and embarrassing news. They did it continually and were good at it. Story comes out of the FCC which was instructed by the WH to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a vote to expand the O’BamaPhone program. The Commissioners were told not to approve a Notice of Apparent Liability until April 1, 2016, the day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program to include broadband. Commissioner Ajit Pai made the charge after a vote on the issue was taken. His fellow commissioners claimed that the timing was coincidental. The problem was that cellular provider Total Call Mobile was enrolling thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketing the extra subsidies to the tune of nearly $10 million since 2014. That’s a lot of palm greasing. The company ignored warnings from its own employees, compliance specialists that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud. The expansion vote was taken on March 31 with the announcement the next day. As this took place during the Trump administration, it appears that there has so far been insufficient house cleaning. Faster, please. http://freebeacon.com/issues/fcc-kept-obamaphone-fraud-wraps-expanded-program/
More later –
– AG