January 30, 2016

The Hill: "Clinton already has more than half of all Democratic super-delegates"

Can we admit the media is hyping a foregone conclusion and Hil has to pretend to be worried about Bernie for a few months?

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/267450-is-media-driving-bernie-momentum

January 4, 2016

How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/04/how-the-p-c-police-propelled-donald-trump.html

The American left created Donald Trump. When I say “the left,” I do not mean the Democratic Party—or, solely the Democratic Party. Rather, the pestilence that is the Trump campaign is the result of a conglomeration of political, academic, media, and cultural elites who for decades have tried to act as the arbiters of acceptable public debate and shut down any political expression from Americans with whom they disagree. They, more than anyone else, created Donald Trump’s candidacy and the increasingly hideous movement he now leads.


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To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump.

I am not referring here to the daily political correctness that became normal after the 1970s... Today, however, we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike. This form of political correctness is distinctly illiberal; indeed, it is not liberalism at all but Maoism circa the Cultural Revolution.

The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center. Topics in American life that once were the legitimate subjects of debate between liberals and conservative are now off-limits and lead to immediate attack by the cultural establishment if raised at all. Any incorrect position, any expression of the Constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job. (Just ask Brendan Eich.) There is a huge vacuum left by this leftist attack on speech, and it Trump is filling it.

October 15, 2015

The Mother Who Wants Politicians to See Photos of Her Child’s Bullet-Riddled Body

Source: The Trace

Scattered among the crowd at a gun violence prevention rally in Washington, D.C. last month were family members of shooting victims clutching photos of their loved ones. One grieving mother, Nardyne Jefferies, stood off to the side holding up an 8½-by-11-inch full-color photograph of her 16-year-old daughter, Brishell Jones, who was fatally shot on South Capitol Street on March 30, 2010. This image was different: It was an autopsy picture, showing Jones’s flesh split below the collarbone, peeled back to reveal bone and muscle. Jones was killed by bullets from an AK-47 as a group of young men opened fire on a Washington, D.C. crowd in retaliation for an earlier murder over a lost fake-diamond bracelet.

Jefferies has hoisted the grim image aloft at city council meetings and sit-downs with lawmakers and watched as they turned their heads. She’s shown it to reporters who decline to include it in their stories. Jefferies says she’ll put the photo on a T-shirt if it means jolting the American public into action.

“I just can’t see myself talking about gun violence without showing what gun violence is,” Jefferies, 45, tells The Trace. “This image is burned into my memory bank. It doesn’t make sense for me to keep showing pictures of what she looked like before.”

Read more: http://www.thetrace.org/2015/10/gunshot-victim-photos-nardyne-jeffries/

October 12, 2015

Basic Gun Violence Research Is Seriously Underfunded

Source: Huffington Post

NEW YORK (AP) — Amid the bloodbaths of 21st-century America, you might think that there would be a lot of research into the causes of gun violence, and which policies work best against it. You would be wrong.

Gun interests, wary of any possible limits on weaponry, have successfully lobbied for limitations on government research and funding, and private sources have not filled the breach. So funding for basic gun violence research and data collection remains minuscule — the annual sum total for all gun violence research projects appears to be well under $5 million. A grant for a single study in areas like autism, cancer or HIV can be more than twice that much.

There are public health students who want to better understand rising gun-related suicide rates, recent explosions in firearm murders in many U.S. cities, and mass murders like the one this month at an Oregon community college, where a lone gunman killed nine people.

But many young researchers are staying away from the field. Some believe there's little hope Congress will do anything substantive to reduce gun violence, regardless of what scientists find. And the work is stressful — many who study gun violence report receiving angry emails and death threats from believers in unrestricted gun ownership.


Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/basic-gun-violence-research-is-seriously-underfunded_561aa218e4b0dbb8000ef5f0

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Preventing the fifth biggest killer of Americans under 64 gets less than $5M a year funding! How is this possible?