Clinton's Weinstein money
You've got to admire Hillary Clinton for steadfastly being, well, Clintonian. The former presidential candidate and her husband, the former president, have a well-earned reputation for lying, bending the truth, parsing words, changing the subject or deflecting when caught.
The most recent example came last week when Hillary Clinton finally acknowledged she knew Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood media mogul and sexual offender who threw her a fundraising birthday bash and has given her campaign, her family's Clinton Foundation and her political party hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Asked in an interview if she would call Weinstein a friend, she said, carefully, "I probably would have." But she couldn't imagine that anyone she knew, despite the parade of women victims coming forward, might have known of his proclivities.
As to giving back his dirty money, she first said "there's no one to give it back to," then said she, like others, would donate it to charity. So, just checking, she'll donate it all to charity? Here's where she got fully Clintonian.
"I give 10 percent of my income to charity every year," she said. "This will be part of that. There's no doubt about it."
So, taking her at her word, what she'll really give to charity out of her own pocket this year is much less than it would have been without Weinstein's dirty money.
Nice.
Proving a point
Author and pundit Dinesh D'Souza, in his new book "The Big Lie" and here at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last week, compared modern-day Democrats to the Nazis in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
Actor Seth Rogen, apparently a card-carrying Democrat, got a little sore at the comparison and wondered why big-box store Costco would sell the book.
"Costco," he asked in a recent tweet, "why do you sell books that compare left wing people like me to Nazis?"
In other words, why not ban books that don't agree with his worldview?
Well, that's been done before, as D'Souza himself pointed out via Twitter, the day before speaking in Chattanooga.
Posting a photo of Nazis burning books they didn't like, he wrote, "Seth Rogen wants to know why books such as 'The Big Lie' that compare the left to Nazis can't be burned & banned just like the Nazis did in 1933."
The Twitterverse came alive with responses to Rogen. One of those put it very simply, we thought.
"1. Costco is a business that sells stuff," poster Harley Ihrig wrote. "2. The book is 'stuff" and it is in demand. So ... 3. They sell the book."
Costco said it had no plans to remove the book.
Opening their eyes
We'll believe it when we see it show up in election results, but a recent survey showed signs the heavily reliable black women's vote for Democrats may be showing cracks.
One in five black women, for instance, according to the third annual Power of the Sister survey conducted by Essence and The Black Women's Roundtable, said the Democratic Party doesn't best represent them. Meanwhile, the percentage of black women who say the party does represent their best interests has dropped 11 percent since 2016.
In another survey by Cornell Belcher of Brilliant Corners Research, which was presented to the Congressional Black Caucus earlier this year, 63 percent of black Americans - especially black women ages 50 and up - feel taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
Earlier this year, more than two dozen black female elected officials and activists warned Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez about that very subject.
"The Democratic Party has a real problem ... ," the open letter said. "The Party's foundation has a growing crack and if it is not addressed quickly, the Party will fall even further behind and ultimately fail in its quest to strengthen its political prospects."
With the party moving rapidly farther left, shedding the working class voters it used to own, Democrats certainly have some trouble on their hands. But it hardly can afford to lose black women, the racial and demographic that voted at the highest level of all others during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
Today's assignment ...
What would you want your sixth-grade student to learn in health class? In the DeKalb County (Ga.) School District, some of the questions on a recent homework assignment asked students what "a man who is attracted to men" is called, what "a woman who is attracted to women" is called and what someone is called "when a person's gender identity doesn't match the sex ... the doctor said they were when they were born."
Those were among 10 questions asking students to identify various sexual preferences or ways people identify.
For goodness' sake, said Octavia Parks, her sixth-grader is still watching Nickelodeon.
"I'm not ready to explain what these words are nor what they mean," she said.
The district said the teacher properly used the district's Family Life and Sexual Health curriculum. It further said parents were fully informed of the curriculum, but Parks said she'd been told by the teacher "this sort of thing would not happen."
Nevertheless, the parent and others like her were able to opt their children out of the assignment.
"If a kid wants to know about the gender or know about ... sex preference," another mother said, "it should come from the parents not from the school."