RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/02/02/interview-fred-siegel/
In the wake of World War I, there was a “tremendous intellectual upheaval,” Fred Siegel tells me, talking about his new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. American intellectuals, led by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and heavily influenced by H.G. Wells, came to see “the American middle class as their enemy.” It’s “the beginning of the Europeanization of American politics. And what these writers want, they want to be more like Europe. They want a more stratified, more hierarchical society. They dislike American small-d-democracy. And they talk about this at great length. This is not a conjecture.”

But it’s been largely forgotten, since in both academia and the media, the left has largely written the story of American history of the 20th century. Fortunately, Fred has done yeoman archeological work, bringing the early history of the American left to light once again, in a book that anyone who was enlightened by Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism will also find absolutely intriguing.

During our interview, we’ll discuss:

● The largely forgotten racism of H.G. Wells and Woodrow Wilson.

● Sinclair Lewis’s absurd yet highly influential It Can’t Happen Here, and its paranoid vision of American fascism rising up from the benign members of the all-American Rotary Clubs and Elks and Moose Lodges.

● When did “Progressivism” become “Liberalism,” and why?

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/02/02/of-motes-beams-bridgegate-edition/?print=1

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

–Matthew 7:3

Unlike many of my friends, I am not a particular fan of Chris Christie. Sure, I enjoyed watching him take apart that preposterous teacher [1] who, with tremulous voice, complained that the state of New Jersey wasn’t paying enough of her bills. Delicious, I think, and sound policy to boot.

But notwithstanding his embarrassing protestations to the contrary [2], I think he is a bully. That’s not the reason I am not part of [3] the Christie fan club, though. To my mind, Christie has about as much chance of being president as all those other establishment candidates who have been paraded before us as “mainstream,” “not divisive,” etc. Remember Bob Dole? Remember John McCain? Remember Mitt Romney? We were supposed to rally round them and eschew other candidates because the other candidates were “extreme” or “unelectable.”

Let’s grant that the establishment candidates were not “unelectable.” But none was elected. Will we never learn?

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/beat-up-gop/?print=1 On almost every contemporary issue there is a populist, middle-class argument to be made against elite liberalism. Yet the Republican class in charge seems ossified in its inability to make a counter-argument for the middle class. Never has the liberal agenda been so vulnerable, a logical development when bad ideas have had five years […]

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-affordable-cell-phone-care-act.html Groucho Marx had many great monologues and spiels, but this is one of his finest:   The nickel today is not what it was fifteen years ago. Do you know what this country needs today?…A seven-cent nickel. Yessiree, we’ve been using the five-cent nickel in this country since 1492. Now that’s pretty near a […]

http://econwarfare.org/ Western media coverage of Egyptian politics seems to focus almost entirely on the depredations of the military-backed interim government, with a strong residue of sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. There is no mention of the Brotherhood’s totalitarian and terrorist agenda. Reuters‘ February 1, 2014, coverage of Mohammed Morsi’s trial, is a good example: “Egypt court adjourns Mursi […]

It’s the bogus statistic that won’t die—and president deployed it during the State of the Union—but women do not make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html

President Obama repeated the spurious gender wage gap statistic in his State of the Union address. “Today,” he said, “women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”

What is wrong and embarrassing is the President of the United States reciting a massively discredited factoid. The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers. In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/02/israel-boycotter-danske-bank-linked-to-north-korea-missiles-shipments-to-iran/ Danske Bank last week cut off banking business with Israel’s Bank Hapoalim on “legal and ethical grounds.” What are Danske Bank’s ethics? According to Wikileaks cables, Danske Bank helped finance Tanchon, a North Korean trading company that sold ballistic missiles to Iran: Tanchon has been involved in financing ballistic missile sales from KOMID to […]

WHAT IS IT WITH NEW JERSEY AND GOVERNORS?

REMEMBER 2002?

Following Governor Christine Todd Whitman’s resignation to become head of the EPA, Richard Codey was one of three different Senate Presidents along with Donald DiFrancesco and John O. Bennett, and Attorney General John Farmer to serve as Acting Governor for the one-year period between Whitman’s resignation and Jim McGreevey’s inauguration. DiFrancesco served as acting governor for all but the last week of this period, until his term as senate president ended. Farmer, Bennett and Codey then divided the last week of the term among them, with Codey serving for three days, from January 12, 2002, to January 15, 2002, leading to a situation in which the state had five different people serving as governor during a period of eight days.

Then on August 2004, Governor Jim McGreevey resigned- and, enter Richard Codey again who served as Governor until Senator Corzine was elected in 2006. In April 2007 he was severly injured in an automobile accident. Guess who stepped in as acting Governor? In accordance with the New Jersey State Constitution, New Jersey Senate President Richard Codey assumed the position of acting governor for the short period from April 12 until May 7, 2007.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2014/02/01/dsouza-debates-ayers/

It’s a testament to Dinesh D’Souza’s mettle that he even showed up for his scheduled debate at Dartmouth (his alma mater and mine) with Bill Ayers last Thursday. D’Souza is only recently under what is apparently selective prosecution by the federal government for campaign law violations (see “Amnesty, but Not for D’Souza” [2] by Andy McCarthy) and that was probably some of the reason the pundit/filmmaker seemed off his game.

He fared much better debating the existence of God [3] with the late Christopher Hitchens. But that was in part because Hitchens played fair, enjoying the intellectual jousting and search for truth between two exceptionally bright people. D’Souza’s Thursday adversary, Mr. Ayers — former Weatherman revolutionary and retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he held the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar — did everything but.

Allow me to be a bit personal. Despite being a child of the sixties and having participated in all sorts of protests back in the day, this was the first time I had ever seen Bill Ayers talk at length. It gave me nightmares — literally. I went to sleep minutes after watching a video of the debate to dream that I was cut off from my family in some distant Mediterranean village with my car missing. Stumbling on a hidden garage, I encountered a gang (Weathermen?) led by a younger Bill Ayers who had stolen the car and were disguising it unrecognizably. I tried to stop them, but I was outnumbered, kicked in the stomach and groin. I woke up before being killed or maimed.

But I wasn’t relieved. I had a dizzy, depressed feeling that awakened a disturbing, almost otherworldly, sense memory. Then I realized when I had had the same emotion. It was the time several years ago when I stood five feet away from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [4]. Yes, it was that bad.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The media spends almost as much time covering various debates about how to “fix the news” as it does itself and the treatment of Ezra Klein’s announcement that he is leaving the Washington Post to create a political blog for Vox Media (co-founded by the creator of Daily Kos) is a perfect example of […]