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Mike Huckabee was more stupid than usual last week. Charles Krauthammer tries to undo some of the damage.
What is it about women that causes leading Republicans to grow clumsy, if not stupid? When even savvy, fluent, attractively populist Mike Huckabee stumbles, you know you’ve got trouble. Having already thrown away eminently winnable Senate seats in Missouri and Indiana because of moronic talk about rape, the GOP might have learned. You’d think.
Huckabee wasn’t quite as egregious, just puzzling and a bit weird. Trying to make a point about Obamacare mandating free contraceptives, he inexplicably began speculating that the reason behind the freebie was the Democrats’ belief that women need the federal government to protect them from their own libidos.
Bizarre. I can think of no Democrat who has ever said that, nor any liberal who even thinks that. Such a theory, when offered by a conservative, is quite unfortunately self-revealing.
In any case, why go wandering into the psychology of female sexuality in the first place? It’s ridiculous. This is politics. Stick to policy. And there’s a good policy question to be asked about the contraceptive mandate (even apart from its challenge to religious freedom). It’s about priorities. By what moral logic does the state provide one woman with co-pay-free contraceptives while denying the same subvention to another woman when she urgently needs antibiotics for her sick child? …
US News OpEd, reviewing the coverage of Sarah Palin, GOP, and Wendy Davis, Dem, suggests the real war on women is the mainstream media treatment of Republican women.
… when National Journal writes that there is a lack of women moving up in GOP leadership – they blame the party. At what point though, do we question the media’s double standard against women? What woman in her right mind would want to run the media gauntlet that they’d face running for office as a Republican?
I grew up in a family of four girls. There were no limits placed on us as kids; we were never told what we could or couldn’t be. In fact, I vividly remember my grandfather telling me that I should become the first woman president.
As a single mom to two girls, I find it interesting that I never tell my daughters that they should run for president. Not to say that they’ll adopt my political persuasion – but if they did – would I want them to run for office? I don’t think so. And it’s not because I fear the GOP.
Who wants to watch their daughter be subjected to the press? Not this Republican woman.
Stephen Moore tours Grand Rapids and parts of Michigan that are not Detroit. Surprise! Things are going well.
… This area has long been known for its productive agriculture, landmark companies like Amway, Steelcase and Herman Miller, and world-class medical facilities such as the Van Andel Research Institute along the “Medical Miracle Mile” off I-96 in Grand Rapids.
Still, the region is not fully independent of the boom-and-bust cycles of the domestic auto industry. Many of the local business owners I met grimace when recalling the 30%-50% crash in factory orders during the crisis years of 2008-10.
Fred Keller, president of Cascade Engineering, which employs more than 1,000 workers assembling truck and auto parts, recalls how the more senior factory workers volunteered to take lower pay and a cut in hours during the depths of the recession to avoid the misery of layoffs of younger workers with families to support. Others logged extra hours without pay to help pull their employers through the darkest hours of the crisis.
This workers-united attitude would rarely be seen in a United Auto Workers plant. But unions are scarce in this part of the state, and that may be a key to its success. Collecting unemployment benefits and welfare is still frowned upon—and the notion in Washington that handouts for doing nothing are an economic “stimulus” draws hearty laughs.
Gentex, with its 4,000 employees, is a corporate anchor in the region. The company’s skilled workers operate tens of millions of dollars in state-of-the art machinery. The brain center of the facility is a lab with physicists, chemists and designers who are constantly developing new technologies, such as high-tech dimming windows for airplanes, a new Gentex product line. The company owns more than 600 patents.
But Gentex, like most of the state’s biggest employers, has had its share of struggles. Fred Bauer, the company’s founder and CEO, remembers that when he opened for business in 1974 the office was across the street from a graveyard. “Believe me, there were many times we thought we would end up buried in that cemetery,” he says. …
Jonathan Tobin posts on Scarlett Johansson’s pro-Israeli decision between Oxfam and SodaStream.
The (Palestinian) BDS campaign against SodaStream took an unexpected turn yesterday when actress Scarlett Johansson announced her resignation as a representative of Oxfam. The British-based coalition of philanthropic groups had condemned Johansson’s role as a commercial spokesperson for SodaStream, an Israeli soda machine manufacturer, because of its location in the Jerusalem suburb of Maale Adumim in the West Bank. Initially, Johansson sought to remain with both organizations, but it was soon clear that she had to choose and released the following statement through a spokesman:
“Scarlett Johansson has respectfully decided to end her ambassador role with Oxfam after eight years,” the statement said. “She and Oxfam have a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She is very proud of her accomplishments and fundraising efforts during her tenure with Oxfam.
In response, Oxfam thanked Johansson for her service but made it clear that her decision with SodaStream meant she was no longer welcome:
While Oxfam respects the independence of our ambassadors, Ms. Johansson’s role promoting the company SodaStream is incompatible with her role as an Oxfam Global Ambassador. Oxfam believes that businesses, such as SodaStream, that operate in settlements further the ongoing poverty and denial of rights of the Palestinian communities that we work to support.
Oxfam is opposed to all trade from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law. Ms. Johansson has worked with Oxfam since 2005 and in 2007 became a Global Ambassador, helping to highlight the impact of natural disasters and raise funds to save lives and fight poverty.
This is a remarkable turn of events. For Johansson, a prominent Hollywood liberal who has campaigned for Democrats and progressive causes, Oxfam was a perfect fit because of her interest in poverty-related causes. But as one of the most visible international charities, it was also a good match for a career in that it added a touch of gravitas to an actress who might otherwise be trivialized as the only woman to be named the sexiest woman in the world by Esquire twice. One might have thought that in terms of an immediate monetary reward, Johansson would choose SodaStream over Oxfam because one pays her and the other doesn’t. But in terms of positive publicity and maintaining her status as a member in good standing of the Hollywood liberal establishment, Oxfam might have been the more sensible choice. …
Kudos to Johansson from the editors of The Daily News.
Actress Scarlett Johansson should need no introduction. She’s glamorous and much in demand as a personality who can lend star power to commercial projects and charitable causes.
One of the latter has been Oxfam, a not-for-profit organization that “works to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive.” So says its annual report.
Now, though, Oxfam has forced Johansson to quit as one of its global ambassadors after she refused to adhere to the rabid, anti-Israel malice of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. In stepping down, she sets a powerful moral example. …
And from Jennifer Rubin.
… Johansson declared, “SodaStream is a company that is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights.”
SodaStream’s CEO David Birnbaum responded to the flap: “I’m getting encouragement from her that we should stay the course, and keep on doing the right thing and helping people. She is not only a superhero in her movies, she is a superhero in real life.”
For standing up for the actual interests of Palestinians and Jews, resisting the BDS bullies and for risking the ire of the anti-Israel left, Johansson deserves praise and support. SodaStream deserves praise as well, and a bump in sales.
Heather Mac Donald thinks Bill de Blasio will re-break NY City’s windows.
Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty of New York by running a demagogic campaign against the New York Police Department. He has now compounded the injury by dropping the city’s appeal of an equally deceitful court opinion that found that the department’s stop, question, and frisk practices deliberately violated the rights of blacks and Hispanics. De Blasio may thus have paved the way for a return to the days of sky-high crime rates.
Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling against the NYPD last August was built on willful ignorance of crime’s racial reality. Scheindlin invented a new concept, “indirect racial profiling,” in order to convict the department of unconstitutional policing, despite lacking the evidence to do so. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals challenged Scheindlin’s appearance of impartiality last October when it found that she had steered stop, question, and frisk cases to her courtroom. The Second Circuit panel removed her from the case and stayed her opinion while the city pursued its appeal. Now, however, thanks to de Blasio, Scheindlin’s tendentious ruling will stay on the books (unless the NYPD’s police unions succeed in their own appeal), setting back the cause of public safety not just in New York, but across the country.
The least of the opinion’s problems is the unnecessary bureaucracy it inflicts on the NYPD, including a federal monitor, burdensome reporting requirements, and left-wing advisory panels, all overseen by the plaintiffs’ attorneys. The most serious problem is Scheindlin’s statistical test of racial profiling, which compares police stops to population data, rather than crime data. Scheindlin found the NYPD guilty of biased policing because blacks make up a little over half the subjects of the department’s pedestrian stops, though they are just under a quarter of the city’s population. She ignored the fact that blacks commit nearly 80 percent of all shootings in New York and two-thirds of all violent crime.