URLs du Jour

2022-01-24

  • If it weren't for double standards… An I-have-the-screenshots tweet about the increasingly worthless ACLU. (See yesterday's post.)

    Send your suggestions for ACLU-NH name changes to … whoa, what I was about to type is an actual valid address. Seriously, don't bother Karen with smart-assery.


  • Brain ironing and folding services provided at taxpayer expense. Conn Carroll writes at the Washington Examiner about stuff that isn't being taught in the schools, and if it is, we'll just yank that evidence off the web: Twenty-one days to brainwash your child.

    The parents of Farmington Hills, Michigan (a suburb 25 miles outside of downtown Detroit), were none too pleased to discover recently that their school board was forcing students to take a “21-Day Equity Challenge” as part of the district’s "diversity, equity, and inclusion" curriculum.

    Parents brought their concerns to a public school board meeting last week, but the school board members were not responsive to their objections.

    "At some point, we have to say enough is enough and stop the indoctrination and actually let kids learn the things they are meant to learn," one unidentified protester said at the meeting.

    The school board has since removed the 21-Day Equity Challenge curriculum from its website, but school board members said they would continue using the program.

    Apparently (at least, apparent from a few seconds of Googling) the "21-Day Equity Challenge" is a creature of United Way. It was removed from the web in Farmington Hills, but you can get the general idea (and even sign up to get brainwashed yourself!) at the Central Iowa branch here.


  • For the record, Pun Salad is strongly against poet murder. Kevin D. Williamson (NRPLUS) writes on last year's poetry presentation at the Biden inauguration from Amanda Gorman:

    I have some good news for Amanda Gorman: Americans don’t murder our poets.

    Gorman, who embarked on her splendid career as a poet of the oppressed while studying at a $50,000-a-year private school in Santa Monica, Calif., and then carried the work on to Harvard with the financial support of the Milken Family Foundation, was named the nation’s first “youth poet laureate,” and read a poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration.

    It is not a very good poem, but Americans are not a very poetic people.

    Gorman writes in the New York Times (as all the downtrodden do) that she almost declined the invitation to recite her work at the inauguration, fearing for her physical safety. Friends advised her to buy a bulletproof vest. “My mom had us crouch in our living room so that she could practice shielding my body from bullets,” she writes. “A loved one warned me to ‘be ready to die.’”

    In the event, nothing happened.

    That’s how it usually goes.

    KDW goes through the (surprisingly brief) history of inaugural poetry, assassination attempts, And (as a bonus) quotes from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Difficulties of a Statesman":

    O mother
    What shall I cry?
    We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation
    RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN

    I recommend that be read at the next inauguration. (I also recommend you become an NRPLUS subscriber.)


  • Mundo paparazzi mi amore chicka ferdy parasol. The kids at Granite Grok like calling our Governor "Sun King". Ed Mosca looks at a Washington Examiner interview with the Guv, where he explains his reasoning for not running for the US Senate seat currently occupied by Maggie Hassan: Sununu Was Both Right And Wrong About Mitch And The Senate-GOP. From the interview:

    […] Sununu was “bothered” by Republicans’ seeming inability to answer this question: “I said, ‘OK, so if we’re going to get stuff done if we win the White House back, why didn’t you do it in 2017 and 2018?’” How did the Republicans Sununu spoke with answer his challenge? “Crickets. Yeah, crickets,” the governor said. “They had no answer.”

    Ed's explanation:

    The answer, OF COURSE, is that Paul Ryan, Mitch and their ilk did NOT support Trump’s America-First agenda. That is why virtually nothing got done by Congress except … wait for it, wait for it … BUSINESS TAX CUTS … during Trump’s first two years.

    There's (of course) SCOTUS justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

    Tip: Don't try to translate our classical headline reference.


  • Don't join cults. David French has an interesting take on this tweet:

    David looks at The Cult of Ideology vs. The Cult of Personality

    […] Hamilton’s tweet captures something that Drum’s chart doesn’t—the nature of radicalization on the right. Any fair reading of the right’s ideology would include the phrase “deeply confused.” After all, where does disproportionate resistance to vaccines come from? That wasn’t even on the right-wing radar before 2020, and to the extent that conservatives cared, they mainly saw it as a product of the crunchy, green weird left, not the populist right. 

    Right-wing ideology is so up for grabs that it’s hard to know “the right’s” position on everything from the size and role of government, the First Amendment (for example, it’s somewhat fashionable now for Republican governors to sign obviously unconstitutional bills regulating corporate speech), and foreign policy. After all, the right’s top cable host is now openly echoing the Kremlin’s line in its looming conflict with Ukraine.

    The right’s cult is different. Hamilton calls it a cult of personality. That can imply “Trump,” but I think it’s deeper (and Hamilton notes that it’s deeper). It’s a cult of a certain type of personality, one that is relentlessly, personally, and often punitively aggressive. The aggression is mandatory. The ideology is malleable.

    … explaining a lot about what's happened (see above item) to a number of Granite Grok posters.