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The former president appeared angry as he poured scorn on his wife’s opponent, portraying the Sanders campaign as dishonest and his healthcare proposals as unrealistic.

Being called dishonest by Bill Clinton is like being called ugly by a frog.

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Seemingly because contemporary American universities don’t already do enoughabout so-called social justice and diversity, Brown University’s Office of Campus Life and Student Services held a day-long “professional development” on the topics, and attendance topped 150 participants.

Called the “Social Justice Retreat: An Engaging and Open Space for Discussing Power, Privilege and Oppression,” both the morning and afternoon workshops during the January 19 affair “were packed with staff members,” according to Associate Dean Mary Grace Almandrez.

This is like mandating racial sensitivity training for the Obama White House. ‘Coals to Newcastle’ is the applicable cliche.

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As I mentioned the other day, stand-up comedians employ what they call “runners,” which are themes and punch lines they set up for recurrent laughs. Think of Jerry Seinfeld’s “did you ever notice. . .” or “not that there’s anything wrong with that” schtick.

Only days after the New York Times pranked us with their endorsement of John Kasich for the GOP nomination, they have returned with another of their comedy “runners,” in which they offer up “the conservative case” for a liberal idea, as though the Times really thinks we’ll fall for their good wishes for conservatism to prosper. They’ve done this repeatedly with bad ideas for climate change, criminal justice reform, tax increases, etc. The shorter version of all of these articles can be rendered “Why Conservatives Should Change Their Mind and Agree with Us.”

…

The ultimate in government regulation is empowering the government to regulate the process by which it is constituted by the people. The government is itself today the largest interest group in the nation—a fact that would horrify the founders. Giving the government more power to regulate political speech is to cement in place forever the primacy of the administrative state. Who thinks the government would regulate political speech against its own interest? Show of hands??

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Well, duh. I predict that the Russians will give this complaint all the consideration it deserves, i.e. none.

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A Voice of the Crust wags his finger. Unasked: Would it even want to?

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Sarah Lahm, a freelance journalist who has been an education fellow for The Progressive magazine, writes that “what passes for acceptable school choice rhetoric, behind closed doors, is frightening.”

This a nice opening to a hit piece on NSCW, especially to describe a public event that was held at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Not a lot of closed doors at that event, I’m guessing, especially since it was free and open to the public, but details, shmetails, right?

Lahm also clucks that the panel was all-white even as she notes that one of the intended participants was African American but he “was not able to make it.” And there’s this slag: “But that’s not all. The whole room was white, as far as I could see.” That would include Lahm, by the way.

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Slate, a once-semi-readable website,published a 2,925-word tome on Tuesday by a guy who is really sad because he managed to rack up $200,000 in student loan debt by getting a useless degree at a fancypants private college and then, by borrowing more cash to be a graduate student.

Lesson: Don’t waste your time in college getting a useless degree unless you have a trust fund that will support you while you whine about your First World problems.

Garner’s tale of woe and world-historical budgetary stupidity begins — as he tells it, in excruciating detail — when he was a high school senior. He was a “consumer” of the “vacuous platitudes” on college brochures, and so he excitedly applied to Connecticut College — a school which currently charges a comprehensive fee of $62,965 per year.

“My siblings and I had the privilege of expecting we would attend private colleges,” Garner explains, even though his family had become “financially stressed” when he was in high school.

As Robert A. Heinlein always used to say, ‘Stupidity is always a capital crime.’ Think of it as evolution in action.

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The American pika is thought by many biologists to be a prime candidate for extirpation as the planet continues to warm, done in by temperatures too severe for this small mammal native to cold climates.

But a new study, published this week in the journal Global Change Biology, paints a different, more complex future for this rock-dwelling little lagomorph – the same order that includes rabbits and hares. Pikas may survive, even thrive, in some areas, the researchers say, while facing extirpation in others.

The research is important because pikas are considered a sentinel species for climate change impacts.

‘Sentinel species’ in eco-speak means ‘bloody shirt to wave to promote hysteria’. Just so you know.

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Better the crook you know than the fool you don’t?

The L.A. Times illustrates why newspapers are dying.

Less obvious, or at least less discussed, is the parallel conundrum Trump poses for self-styled progressives. How far can they go in decrying Trump’s support among white blue-collar workers without seeming to write off what was once regarded as a core progressive constituency?

The delusion that blue-collar workers were ever a ‘core progressive constituency’ marks this as a prime Voice of the Crust moment. Who do they think voted for Nixon? and Reagan?

It could be argued that the writing-off has already occurred. There has long been a shift in left-liberal politics away from any broad identification with “the workers” — narrowly conceived as white, male and straight — in favor of specific social and environmental issues that pose no threat to existing economic structures. In that regard, Trump’s blue-collar support might be viewed as a vindication: Workers of the world, take a hike. We never liked you much anyway.

Well, that at least is honest enough. But they say it just to try to deny it, which means that they’re still delusional.

Still, there remains the vexing question of how a billionaire demagogue can win the loyalty of the very people whose class interests he opposes.

The assumption here is a cultural Marxist one, that ‘a billionaire demagogue’ has ‘class interests’ opposed to those of the working-class. It also harps on the traditional ‘progressive’ theme that if the workers only knew what their true class interests were, they’d vote for socialists. This is an article of faith, not fazed by facts on the ground.

What possible sense can we make of blue-collar workers of any age, gender or race supporting a man whose very existence rests on their exploitation and, increasingly, on their obsolescence?

Gee, that doesn’t fit the Narrative, so of course it can’t be true. And yet it is. Who can square this circle?

The usual answers — fear of terrorism, resentment of immigrants, disgust with the Washington establishment — are sound enough, but they don’t go very deep.

In other words, the facts don’t match the Narrative, so it can’t be that the Narrative is wrong — something else must be going on there. Now we’re getting into Conspiracy Theory territory.

It’s as if the impossibility of depth were a given.

As it is, in the religion of the Progressive. When facts don’t agree with Belief, the Belief is right, so there must be something wrong about the facts.

Fisking the remainder of the article is left as an exercise for the reader. It won’t be very difficult.

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And that sure explains a lot. Anybody who thinks that Marx is any sort of economist is an idiot; they might as well call Thomas Aquinas an economist.

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Faith schools have been accused of adopting an approach bordering on  “religious racism” by turning away pupils simply on the grounds of their religion.

I am not making this up. I’m curious as to what part of ‘faith schools’ these people don’t understand. Certainly their understanding of language leaves a lot to be desired.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

And that’s it, in a nutshell — by controlling the words we use, these people are trying to control us. Understand what they’re doing, and resist.

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Well, economists who agree with the New York Times that ‘wealth inequality’ is ipso facto a horrible injustice.

These people — the top one-quarter of 1 percent of the country’s employed population — have enjoyed explosive gains in income and wealth in recent decades, even as salaries and wages stagnated for the typical American worker.

Note the use of the term ‘enjoyed’, as if this income had just dropped into their laps as they were somehow passing by on the street. No team of wild horses could get Nelson D. Schwartz to use the more accurate term ‘earned’, since that would be contrary to The Narrative.

Note that the entirety of the article is devoted to how much inequality is increasing — not one word attempts to justify the assumption that ‘wealth inequality’ is a Bad Thing.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

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James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, is one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that mass shootings have not been getting substantially more common. It isn’t “the nature and number of incidents” that have really changed, he once wrote; it’s “the extent and style of news coverage.”

Read it.

I am not making this up.

n an early scene of the new documentary “Weiner,” former Congressman and scandal subject Anthony Weiner is biking through New York City.

“Are you somebody I’m supposed to know?” a passerby asks.

“Believe me, no,” Weiner says.

Like it or not, a lot more people are going to know a lot more about Weiner with this movie.

Although why anyone would want to defies explanation. Few people are more appropriately named than Mr Weiner.

Jonah Goldberg turns over a rock.

Charles and David Koch are billionaires. They own a very big company. They also are very prominent philanthropists, giving hundreds of millions to cancer research, concert halls, and other worthy causes. But what makes them hated and feared by progressives such as Mayer is their political work. They help fund some organizations and foundations, some purely educational, some partisan.

Liberal Democrats really hate the idea that there might somewhere, somehow, be a rich person who is not a Liberal Democrat. (It’s okay to be rich and a Liberal Democrat, like the Clintons and George Soros and the entire executive suite at Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.)

“What people need to understand is the Kochs have been playing a very long game,” she told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And it’s not just about elections. It started four decades ago with a plan to change how America thinks and votes. So while some elections they win and some elections they lose, what they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.” Dear God, it’s worse than I thought! They want to change the conversation! They want to persuade Americans to vote differently! The horror, the horror.

Oh, and Liberal Democrats really don’t like freedom of speech for anybody who doesn’t agree with them. Really hate it.

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

That just proves how sneaky they are.

They are members of the radical Right for the simple reason that they don’t like big government and spend money to make that case. Full disclosure: I’ve given paid speeches to some Koch-backed groups, despite the fact that I have my disagreements with the Kochs. They haven’t changed my mind, and I haven’t changed theirs. But the conversation continues. And that’s their great sin. Liberals are constantly talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)

Yup. Free speech for me and not for thee, that is the ‘progressive’ motto.

Read it.

Rather than condemning the rapes in Europe, this feminist calls people racists for noticing.

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Portland Community College has designated April “Whiteness History Month” (WHM), an “educational project” exploring how the “construct of whiteness” creates racial inequality.

“‘Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences, and Change’ is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins, and heritage,” PCC states on its website. “Scheduled for the month of April 2016, the project seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.”

This from the