Obama says Americans are better off now than when he came into office
By Rick Moran
Sure,
he can say that. After all, isn't it better to kick back and relax at
home rather than have to go to work? Daytime TV can be quite
stimulating.
And with wages stagnant over his terms of office, you might ask who needs more money? Not I.
National debt? Who cares? Medicare and Social Security ready to implode? Not my problem.
All in all, helluva job, Barry.
President Obama said Americans were “better off now than when I came into office,” during a fundraiser Monday night outside of Washington.Obama also slammed congressional Republicans for their focus on the terror attack in Benghazi and the implementation of ObamaCare.The president told attendees at the high-dollar soiree in Potomac, Maryland that his Republican opposition in Congress had been “captured by ideologues” whose principal focus was on “how to make people sufficiently skeptical, so they can win the next election.”“The debate now is about what?” Obama asked. “Benghazi? ObamaCare? It becomes this endless loop.”Obama told donors that he preferred a robust Republican Party — “I come from the Land of Lincoln” — but that the current iteration of the GOP did not believe “that government can get anything done.”Obama’s remarks came at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the home of Jeffrey Drenzer, a medical training and technology executive. Tickets to the event, billed as an “intimate dinner,” ranged from $10,000 per person to $32,400 per couple.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) joined a sizable contingent of House Democrats at the event, including Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and fellow Maryland Democrats Elijah Cummings, Chris Van Hollen, Donna Edwards, Dutch Ruppersberger, and John Delaney. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) was also in attendance.On his way to the fundraiser, Obama stopped to chat with a group of little league teams at a Northwest D.C. baseball field. The president posed for pictures and quizzed the co-ed teams on their drills.
One
thing for sure; DC caterers are better off. All these fundraisers makes
it boom times for DC eateries. And let's not forget how much better off
unions, big banks, corporate lobbyists, and other Obama cronies and
supporters are thanks to him steering a lot of pork their way.
So Obama can truly say that America - his America - is a lot better off since he took office.
For the rest of us...not so much.
Obama Again Claims He 'Just Learned' about a Scandal from TV
By Warner Todd Huston
Once again, the Obama administration is claiming that it has "just
learned" from television about a scandal engulfing his administration:
the Veterans Administration scandal.On the same day that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed that President Obama and his office were never informed about the growing scandal of secret wait lists at the Veterans Administration, lists that are being blamed for the deaths of up to 40 veterans who were denied healthcare services, other information emerged proving that Obama was told about this problem up to five years ago.
During Monday's press conference, Carney responded to a question about when the Obama learned about the VA scandal, and Carney claimed it was only last week when TV reports surfaced.
"We learned about them through the reports. I will double check if that is not the case. But that is when we learned about them and that is when I understand Secretary Shinseki learned about them, and he immediately took the action that he has taken," Carney said.
But uncovered documents reportedly found that authorities in Washington knew about this scandal at the end of the Bush administration and that news of the problem was re-transmitted to Obama after his election in 2008, that Obama's administration has been fully informed about this problem during his entire presidency, and nothing has been done about it.
This claim that Obama only learned about a scandal by watching news reports on TV is a common refrain for this President.
He made this claim when the IRS scandal involving the agency's harassment of conservative groups erupted and started airing on TV. "I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this," he said on May 13, 2013. "I think it was on Friday. And this is pretty straightforward."
He made the same claim in 2011 when news of Fast And Furious, the FBI's failed gun walking program, a program responsible for the deaths of many Mexicans and several American agents, went viral. "There have been problems, you know," he said. "I heard on the news about this story that--Fast and Furious, where allegedly guns were being run into Mexico, and ATF knew about it, but didn't apprehend those who had sent [the guns]."
He KNEW! Obama told of Veterans Affairs health care debacle as far back as 2008
By Jim McElhattonThe Obama administration received clear notice more than five years ago that VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely health care — problems that have turned into a growing scandal.
Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.
...The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.
...In particular, the 2008 transition report referred to a VA inspector general recommendation to test the accuracy of reported waiting times.
Such tests, the report noted, could prompt action if results reveal “questionable differences” between the dates shown in medical records and dates in the Veterans Health Administration’s scheduling system. It’s unclear whether that recommendation was adopted because VA officials have not responded to request for comment.
Obama routinely shocked, angered by things happening within his own administration
By Guy Benson...This White House’s “we found out on the news” formulation has become such predictable boilerplate that Allahpundit didn’t even have to spell it out in his earlier headline, and the “anger” charade is its inevitable counterpart. Nobody is madder — “madder than hell” in this case — than the president, you guys. But as MKH noted last week, the president’s ostentatious fury generally recedes into “we can’t comment on an ongoing investigation” territory, followed by “only wing-nuts are still talking about this phony scandal — which, by the way, happened a long time ago, brah.”
...The media swears that this is the scandal, finally, that will really hurt the administration. They’re all over it. But they were “all over” previous scandals, too, before they lost interest and eventually started playing defense for the administration. Will (at least) dozens of dead veterans hold the press’ attention long enough to leave a lasting mark? We’ll see, but in the meantime, please excuse my skepticism. I’ll leave you with two tweets. You’ve already seen the first one, circa Obama’s first presidential campaign. Four years later, more promises:
It’s almost as if Team Obama’s pressing and solemn commitment to our veterans becomes somewhat less pressing and solemn after election season passes, at which point numerous recommendations, red flags and overt failures go unnoticed or un-addressed. Without his knowledge, natch. Weird.
Obama Insider Tells Creepy ‘Joke’ During Commencement Address
By Bryan Preston
While delivering a commencement address at Pomona University over the weekend, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett told a somewhat ghoulish joke about how the Obama administration routinely invades Americans’ privacy.
The worst part, after Jarrett tells the students that “We know everything you’ve been doing online,” may be when she admits that she wasn’t even trying to be funny. It wasn’t a joke. She was going for the stalker angle, and got a nervous laugh out of the crowd instead.
Thought experiment: Why is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice so controversial that she was protested at Rutgers, but Jarrett, who has presided over an administration that crushes privacy and routinely sends flying robots out to kill people overseas, isn’t?
Sarah Palin Mocks Media's Hypocrisy on Hillary's Health
By Tony Lee
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whom liberals and the mainstream
press have maligned with glee while intrusively trying uncover the most
sensitive personal information and who has been accused of faking a
pregnancy, mocked liberals who complained about Hillary Clinton's health
being scrutinized.After Karl Rove clumsily suggested that Clinton had brain damage, Republicans made the point that Clinton's health would be fair game if she became a presidential candidate in 2016. Clinton reportedly fell due to a serious blood clot and suffered a concussion before she was scheduled to testify in 2012 on Benghazi. Her husband, Bill Clinton, revealed last week that Clinton had to undergo six months of therapy after the incident.
..."Nope. This just doesn’t happen at this respectable level of American politics," she said, dripping with sarcasm. "Just ask me. And Trig."
She continued:
Hey! Hillary’s brain is off-limits! Leave her health records alone! Democrats are right – scouring records of a female candidate is just politics of personal destruction, and for the media to engage in it would be unfair, unethical, and absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. You can’t probe a woman like that because, well, it’s a war on women!
Bunch of sexist, big meanies engaging in something heretofore unheard of, for shame.
America, you deserve fair and consistent coverage of relevant issues before deciding a Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, so have faith the agenda-less media will refuse to push whispers and wildly inaccurate information about a partisan politician’s body part. Goodness, no one credible would print lies, continually harass a candidate’s doctor, disrupt local hospital staff, or even offer to pay locals to give
"quotes" about her health records to be included in a “research book” by a public university professor (your tax dollars at work?) which the candidate’s attorney will need to respond to.
Palin then cited a 2008 article from Politico with the headline, "Mission for anti-Palin movement: Expose her." She referenced a Salon article discussing the specious Truther theories in addition and provided links that offered cash about for information about Trig's birth. Palin even linked to a Breitbart News report in which President Barack Obama admitted that one of his favorite writers was Andrew Sullivan, who was the leading Trig Truther. She then mockingly wrote:
Thank goodness liberals are consistent in refusing to apply double standards, thanks to their disdain for hypocrisy – so they’ll come through once again! Rest assured these self-designated protectors of what they obviously believe is the “weaker sex” needing protection in the political arena will elevate political discourse. Apparently, Democrats demand their next chosen one’s brain must be absent. Opposition – go there exploring a liberal’s brain and you find nothing; or, find something and you’re just trying to distract voters from the REAL issues.
Palin mockingly wrote that since "the country’s just swell under the
Obama regime (which includes any cabinet member who’d lie and prove
ineptitude by shining the boot that’s now on America’s neck)" and there
are "enormous issues to debate before choosing a Presidential/Vice
Presidential ticket," voters should "have confidence no mean-spirited
salaciousness will be pushed by 'real journalists.'"
"Nope. This just doesn’t happen at this respectable level of American politics," she said. "Just ask me. And Trig."
"Nope. This just doesn’t happen at this respectable level of American politics," she said. "Just ask me. And Trig."
Will Republicans Fight Obamacare's Illegal Insurance Company Bailout?
By Conn Carroll...Stuck with a broken website, and facing intense pressure from congressional Democrats, Obama announced in November that he would allow insurance companies to temporarily keep people on their existing health care plans.
But the insurance companies were unhappy with this fix since they were counting on people with cancelled plans to buy more expensive Obamacare-compliant plans. If Americans were allowed to keep their old, less expensive, non-Obamacare-compliant plans, then insurance companies could lose billions.
Enter Obamacare's risk corridor program which, in theory, can help a steady nascent insurance market by spreading risk among insurers. On paper, the program requires insurers who set their premiums too high to pay into a government fund. Insurers who set their premiums too low would then be able to draw from that fund. If some insurance companies pay into the fund at the same rate that others are draw out of the fund, then the program is not a taxpayer bailout.
But, if insurance companies, as a group, all price their insurance premiums too low (to gain market share for example), then nobody would pay into the fund. Then, when insurance companies try to make claims on the program, there would be no insurance company funds to pay them. Taxpayers would be on the hook. That would be a taxpayer bailout.
Recognizing this threat to taxpayer funds, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced legislation that same month that eliminated the risk corridor program entirely. After Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR) introduced similar legislation in the House, the government agency in charge of running the risk corridor program, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, issued a proposed rule limiting payments out of the program to what insurance companies had previously paid in.
This caused panic among insurance companies, prompting the industries lead lobbyist, America's Health Insurance Plans, to issue a letter to CMS demanding, "Risk corridors should be operated without the constraint of budget neutrality." And by "operated without the constraint of budget neutrality" what the insurance industry really meant is they want a taxpayer bailout guarantee.
....In other words, if insurance companies as a whole claim more money from the risk corridor program than they paid in, CMS just promised they would use taxpayer dollars to bail them out.
But there is just one hitch: according to a January 2014 Congressional Research Service memo, it would be illegal for Obama to make risk corridor payments to insurance companies without an explicit appropriation from Congress.
This means that Republicans do not need Rubio's legislation to stop a taxpayer bailout. It is already illegal for Obama to use taxpayer funds to pay insurance companies through the risk corridor program.
Unfortunately, from his war in Libya to his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Obama has a well established history of flagrantly breaking federal law. And progressive activists are already urging Obama to ignore federal law and illegally bailout the insurance companies through the risk corridor program anyway.
CMS Stonewall FOIA Requests about Do-Nothing Obamacare Contractor
By Jillian Kay Melchior
Serco, a British-based company that received an Obamacare contract worth up to $1.34 billion, is paying employees to sit idle, nap and play Pictionary on the taxpayer dime, according to recent reports by St. Louis’s KMOV-TV.
But charting the scope of the waste may be impossible, given the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ recent stonewalling. KMOV investigative reporter Chris Nagus tells me CMS has ignored the response deadlines mandated in the federal open-records law, refusing to tell him just how many applications have been processed at Serco’s facilities in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma.
“I think it would be fair to say that we’ve been waiting for this information for weeks with no specific response to our questions, and we feel like enough time has passed that we’d like to get an answer,” Nagus says. “We think this is important to the public, and we’re concerned by the lack of transparency.”
KMOV-TV submitted its original request to CMS on April 8. Though the Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to produce records within 20 business days, CMS is now nearly two weeks late in its response. Because Serco is a contractor, it has no obligation to respond to media inquiries, either.
CMS should be embarrassed, and not just because it’s stonewalling the media over records that are very clearly public. Despite numerous scandals involving Serco’s performance elsewhere in the world, the company was awarded the contract after spending more than $1 million on lobbying and political activities in recent years.
But embarrassment isn’t a valid excuse for a federal agency to withhold public records. The longer CMS delays, the more sketchy it looks.
The IRS Scandal: Another Unforeseen Consequence of the 16th Amendment
By Jeffrey L Scribner
....This
is undoubtedly not the first time the IRS has been used for political
purposes. The point to be made is that the IRS is a tempting and
powerful weapon that might be used for political gain, and this activity
may be hidden for a long time.
The
Constitution as originally written would not have permitted an agency
with the power of the IRS, or most of the taxes the IRS is supposed to
collect. Article I, Section 9 of the original Constitution provides:
“No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion
to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” The
Census was and still is used to apportion the seats in the House of
Representatives among the states. Thus, the original Constitution
provided for direct taxation only if it followed representation. The
federal government lived under this arrangement (with a few temporary
and questionable diversions) from 1789 to 1913, when the Sixteenth
Amendment was ratified on February 3 of that year. The Sixteenth
Amendment provides: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect
taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment
among the several States, and without regard to any census or
enumeration.”
Taxation
was divorced from representation. This has predictably led not only to
higher taxation and more government spending, but also to abuses of the
taxing authority such as, but not necessarily limited to, those
currently being investigated.
...We
are becoming concerned that our government knows too much about us.
The awareness of this has grown up around the activities of NSA and
other intelligence-gathering arms of government. But every year we tell
the government (via the IRS) how much we made, where it came from,
where most of it went, what investments we have, how many children we
have, how much medical expense we had, and, soon, whether we have health
insurance. If we are indeed a free people, why do we, as individuals,
give so much personal information to our central government every year?
It
would be relatively easy to prevent further abuse of the taxing power
and institute a more rational system of funding the federal government.
Repealing the Sixteenth Amendment, repealing the current federal tax
code, and closing the current IRS are all necessary parts of this
solution.
...However,
all other revenues of the federal government would come from levies
upon the states in proportion to their population (that is, to their
representation in Congress). How the states collect this tax would be a
matter for them to decide. They could raise the money by taxing real
or personal property; by taxing transactions (as in the sales tax); by
taxing incomes and excises; or by any other form of tax that their
legislatures would enact. This would soon cause competition between the
states to see which could have the lowest or most efficient tax
system. It would also permit individuals to vote with their feet and
move from a high-tax or inefficient low-growth state to a low-tax or
high-growth state. The states would be interested in pursuing
business-friendly high-growth policies because the federal levy would
have to be by population, not state GDP. The corporate tax could be
levied only by states, and revenue therefrom could be used to satisfy
the federal levy, just as any other tax the state could legitimately
levy within its own territory. However, states that want more corporate
activity would tax corporations less, and those who don’t want
corporate operations and jobs would tax them more. This would shake out
fairly quickly.
....Most
of all, the Congress would be reminded that they are spending the
people’s money, which comes to them as representatives of those people,
and they might wake up and be better stewards of the Treasury.
The National Popular Vote would make a travesty of presidential elections.
By Tara Ross
Nancy Pelosi famously declared of Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” The same could be said of the National Popular Vote (NPV), a piece of anti–Electoral College legislation that has been stealthily working its way through state legislatures. Just last month, New York became the latest state to join the effort.
Most Americans are unaware that ten states, plus the District of Columbia, have approved this measure. Indeed, the proposal already has 61 percent of the support it needs to go into effect. The country’s presidential-election system is on track to be radically altered, yet most voters have no idea that change is afoot.
National Popular Vote is a California-based group that has been working since 2006 to change the way Americans elect their presidents. NPV supporters are aware of the many failed past efforts to enact a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College. Such an amendment would require the support of two-thirds of each house of Congress and three-quarters (38) of the states. Their objective — eliminating the Electoral College — simply does not have enough support to achieve this goal.
But NPV supporters aren’t going to let a little thing like the Constitution get in the way of a good progressive idea. They have hatched a new scheme, which they say is merely making creative use of constitutional provisions. Creative, indeed! NPV’s idea is so creative that it claims the ability to implement the direct presidential election system that was specifically rejected by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
NPV’s plan is simple: It asks each state to change its laws regarding allocation of presidential electors. Today, most states give their electors to the presidential candidate who won their own state’s election. For instance, Barack Obama obtained 55 electors from California in 2012 because he won the popular vote in California. NPV instead asks states to commit themselves, in advance and (supposedly) irrevocably, to award their electors to the winner of the national popular vote.
Participating states sign an interstate compact committing them to this new system. It goes into effect when states totaling 270 electors — enough to win a presidential election — have signed on. In this way, participating states are guaranteed that the winner of the national popular vote will be chosen as president. The Electoral College would still technically exist, but it would merely ratify the national popular-vote winner.
With NPV in place, California still would have appointed 55 Democratic electors for Obama in 2012, because he won the popular vote nationwide. But in 2004 the pact would have required California to appoint 55 Republican electors for George W. Bush, even though John Kerry won 54 percent of the California vote, because Bush won the nationwide popular vote.
Does anyone really think that California would tamely submit and appoint 55 Republican electors in such a situation? Are we really to believe that it would give its electors to Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz? Doubtful. Litigation would surely follow to determine whether California’s legislature could appoint Democratic electors after all. (The Constitution says: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .”) The chaos that would follow is just one of the many unanticipated ramifications of NPV’s plan.
Other unintended consequences are certain to follow this attempt to circumvent the constitutional-amendment process.
Tucker Carlson Speechless as Former Army Colonel Tears Apart the Concept of ‘White Privilege’
By Greg Campbell
In an interview with Fox News’ Tucker
Carlson, former Army Colonel Kurt Schlichter discussed his recent
Townhall article that refutes the liberal argument that so-called “white
privilege” generates success for white people.
In
a bold discussion, Schlichter, a Colonel-turned-lawyer, vehemently
refuted the left’s notion of “white privilege.” Carlson noted that
Schlichter, in his Townhall piece, wrote, “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.” Carlson asked what Schlichter had meant by that.
Schlichter enthusiastically clarified:
“Have you ever seen or heard anybody babbling about privilege that has any kind of track record of success? I didn’t become a partner in a law firm because my great-great-great grandfather came over from Bavaria, okay? I started out mopping-out stalls at McDonalds. On the military side, I didn’t become a full-Colonel because somebody liked my skin tone. I started out as a Private 27 years ago this Tuesday.All of us have worked; all of us have achieved something and that’s how we measure character; that’s how we measure what the value of a person is. Not some arbitrary category imposed by some ponytailed grad students who’ve taken too many gender studies seminars.”
Unable to hold back his delight at Col. Schilchter’s answer, Carlson chuckled and admitted, “That’s just fantastic!”
Schlichter
admitted that his position on “white privilege” often solicits the
kinds of responses he wants: “Either slack-jawed amazement or
unreasoning anger.”
The Weaponization of the Federal Bureaucracy
By Victor Keith
Upon
the heels of the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service where
conservative groups were specifically targeted before the 2012 elections
comes this story from the Washington Times discussing
the current movement on the part of the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation to intimidate banks by discouraging the giving of lines of credit,
freezing assets, and prohibiting online sales of federally licensed
firearms dealers. The FDIC is listing gun dealers as high risk in the
category of porn stores and drug paraphernalia shops. An interesting
comparison, involving as it does the legal sale of a product guaranteed
to the public under the Constitution. The current administration, of
course, has expressed its dissatisfaction with that particular
institutional document which the president ostentatiously swore an oath
to upon his inauguration.
This move has gone hand in hand with Justice Department launching Operation Choke Point, a credit card fraud probe focusing on banks and payment processors. This added pressure has led many banks to cut ties with gun retailers no matter the status of their licenses or credit
history. The involvement of the Justice Department in this effort is
almost a sick joke when considering their hand in Operation Fast and
Furious, where they walked thousands of guns to Mexican drug lords that
resulted in hundreds of deaths, including at least two federal agents.
Eric Holder laughed at the notion of any accountability and holds his
contempt of Congress charge as a badge of honor. Fast and Furious
featured the DOJ encouraging reluctant licensed gun dealers to go ahead
with illegal sales -- the same gun dealers who are now viewed as
unsavory businessmen by the federal government actually showed more
character and civic responsibility than our government officials.
Consider
these efforts by Washington along with the use of the EPA to crush
businesses and the order of the Department of Agriculture for several
submachine guns to enforce the monitoring of crops as an indication that
virtually every bureaucracy of the federal government is being
weaponized to attack political, economic and cultural enemies of
progressivism and big government. By circumventing the Congress and the
voters, the effects of this movement is to steadily eat away at the
cultural and political roots of the country. At this rate, with two and
half years to the next presidential election, even a change of
administration will likely hand the new president a country that was
unrecognizable from a just a decade ago.
Democracy Alliance fills the coffers of liberal activist groups
By Rick Moran
Interesting report from the Washington Free Beacon
on the shadowy Soros-backed group Democracy Alliance, who plan to spend
nearly $40 million this year funding liberal political and policy
groups.
The documents reveal for the first time the Democracy Alliance’s full portfolio of supported organizations, a large network of powerful liberal groups looking to win key electoral and legislative victories.The Democracy Alliance connects major Democratic donors with some of the largest and most influential liberal activist groups in the country. Previous beneficiaries, such as the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America, are set to get millions more in 2014.The list also reveals DA support for newer organizations, such as Organizing for Action, the advocacy group that succeeded President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. That group has received official sanction from the White House, and operates websites and social media accounts branded with the president’s name.In all, the document reveals, the Democracy Alliance hopes to provide $39.3 million to 20 organizations this year. If it meets those fundraising targets, it will likely be responsible for one out of every five dollars in those groups’ 2014 budgets.Alliance-supported organizations will spend more than $175 million in 2014, according to budget projections contained in the document.The Democracy Alliance is highly secretive in all of its operations. The donors it solicits and the organization to which it directs their financial support are prohibited from speaking publicly about its operations.
....Read the whole article for a breakdown in which far left groups are being heavily funded by secretive billionaires.
Reading can be dangerous, some young people seem to believe.
"Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as 'trigger warnings,' explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans," the New York Times reports.
The Times notes that the warnings "have their ideological roots in feminist thought." At first glance this looks like just the latest politically correct excess, but it's distinct in some ways. For one, the faculty is resisting: "The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate." Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells the paper: "Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom. . . . The presumption . . . that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous."
Students have demanded trigger warnings at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and George Washington University as well as UCSB. The Times reproduces an excerpt from an Oberlin "draft guide," which reads: "Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other Issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand." ("Cissexism" refers to prejudice in favor of men and women who identify themselves, respectively, as men and women.)
In a recent piece for The New Republic, Jenny Jarvie writes that "some consider [trigger warnings] an irksome tic of the blogosphere's most hypersensitive fringes." They started "in self-help and feminist forums to help readers who might have post traumatic stress disorder to avoid graphic content that might cause painful memories, flashbacks, or panic attacks." They've "been applied to topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-blaming, alcohol, blood, insects, small holes, and animals in wigs. . . . Even The New Republic"--actually a TNR writer named Molly Redden--"has suggested the satirical news site, The Onion, carry trigger warnings."
But trigger warnings have come in for criticism and mockery even on the left. Jarvie concludes her piece with this sensible observation: "Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them." She reports that the feminist website Jezebel, "which does not issue trigger warnings, raised hackles in August by using the term as a headline joke: 'It's Time To Talk About Bug Infestations [TRIGGER WARNING].' " And Susannah Breslin provoked outrage in 2010 when she "wrote in True/Slant that feminists were applying the term 'like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.' "
The Times reports that targets of campus trigger-warning demands include F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (for "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence"), Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" (suicide).
"Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as 'trigger warnings,' explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans," the New York Times reports.
The Times notes that the warnings "have their ideological roots in feminist thought." At first glance this looks like just the latest politically correct excess, but it's distinct in some ways. For one, the faculty is resisting: "The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate." Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells the paper: "Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom. . . . The presumption . . . that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous."
Students have demanded trigger warnings at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and George Washington University as well as UCSB. The Times reproduces an excerpt from an Oberlin "draft guide," which reads: "Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other Issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand." ("Cissexism" refers to prejudice in favor of men and women who identify themselves, respectively, as men and women.)
In a recent piece for The New Republic, Jenny Jarvie writes that "some consider [trigger warnings] an irksome tic of the blogosphere's most hypersensitive fringes." They started "in self-help and feminist forums to help readers who might have post traumatic stress disorder to avoid graphic content that might cause painful memories, flashbacks, or panic attacks." They've "been applied to topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-blaming, alcohol, blood, insects, small holes, and animals in wigs. . . . Even The New Republic"--actually a TNR writer named Molly Redden--"has suggested the satirical news site, The Onion, carry trigger warnings."
But trigger warnings have come in for criticism and mockery even on the left. Jarvie concludes her piece with this sensible observation: "Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them." She reports that the feminist website Jezebel, "which does not issue trigger warnings, raised hackles in August by using the term as a headline joke: 'It's Time To Talk About Bug Infestations [TRIGGER WARNING].' " And Susannah Breslin provoked outrage in 2010 when she "wrote in True/Slant that feminists were applying the term 'like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.' "
The Times reports that targets of campus trigger-warning demands include F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (for "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence"), Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" (suicide).
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