Category Archives: Media Criticism

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary’s Email

29 Comments

She’s been getting away with this kind of thing for decades. Why wouldn’t she think she can continue?

…the episode already confirms what attentive observers have long known: If the Clintons return to the White House, we can expect more suspicious secrets, stonewalling, and opaqueness, much as we’ve seen in the past. Voters have been given ample warning.

Yup. And unlike the nineties, when the media was able to continually cover for them, there are a lot more ways of getting the news.

[Update a couple minutes later]

“Sure looks like an attempt to evade federal law.”

[Update mid-morning]

Archive of Hillary’s emails discovered.

Heh.

[Late-morning update]

Chappaqua, we have a problem:

Well, all these things are horrible, but then we knew (Nos. 1 and 2) that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s ethical compass has been broken for years and that they consider laws and transparency to be for the little people. I would argue, however, that it is the third that is really the worst if Hillary Clinton intends, as everyone is certain she does, to run for president. This is, of course, the most important national security issue of our time, and if she has neither the courage nor conviction to tell us what she thinks, she arguably shouldn’t be running for the job as commander in chief.

Needless to say, the political media are focused on the e-mails and not the nukes, but then foreign policy is only superficially considered and dimly understood. Whatever the emphasis, however, it is hard to escape the flashing red lights in front of party regulars and activists: Do you really need Clinton so badly that you would crown her now as the nominee? Wouldn’t it be better to have someone with no responsibility for the most egregious foreign policy disaster of our time (i.e. allowing Iran to gain a nuclear weapons capability)?

They don’t think it would be a policy disaster.

[Afternoon update]

The Clinton email scandal highlights the utter inadequacy of all the Benghazi investigations.

I think that Congressman Gowdy is going to have some interesting questions for her Highness.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Hillary’s email story keeps getting worse and worse.

I was wondering if she (or a minion) was running her own server. That would make it much harder to know which emails she released and which she didn’t.

[Bumped]

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

“Liberal” Academia

Kurt Schlichter has a modest proposal:

Understand that the purpose of modern American “education” is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students is hard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism. In the liberals’ ideal world, the universities would simply fester with leftist nonsense and not even bother with trying to teach their charges anything at all. And today, it’s pretty close to being the liberals’ ideal world.

…As I discuss in my book Conservative Insurgency, and as others like Glenn Reynolds have observed, with modern academia we normal Americans are paying to support a suppurating abscess in our culture that, left untreated, will kill its host. We need to lance this boil and drain the leftist pus.

Except there’s nothing liberal about them.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is the kind of thing he’s talking about: Leftists outraged that a university won’t police the attire of students off campus.

As I said, there is nothing liberal about this. It’s totalitarian.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Value Of College Degrees

High risk, high reward.

Anyone who talks about the ROI of a degree without talking about the type of degree, or the relative value of one school over another, is either profoundly ignorant, or fraudulent. The fact is that there are a lot of degrees for which one would have to be a fool to put themselves deep into undischargeable debt to obtain. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that, and are the most likely to get those worthless degrees.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Willie Soon

Strikes back against the inquisition.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the full statement:

I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.

“If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.

A double standard in the media. What a shock.