Not Sealed with a kiss
Oprah Winfrey has been given hours of media love since her speech last week after accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the 75th annual Golden Globes, but not everybody in the entertainment industry is going along with the love-fest.
Singer Seal, for instance, was not down with the talk show host’s words amid an event in which celebrities wore black and made speeches against the milieu of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct against women that some of them had willingly partaken of to get a job.
The singer posted two photos of Winfrey cozying up with Harvey Weinstein, one of the first and most nefarious perpetrators of sexual harassment to be called out during the dizzying #MeToo movement over the last several months. The first photo was captioned: “When you have been part of the problem for decades,” and the second “But suddenly they all think you are the solution.”
“Oh I forgot, that’s right,” he tweeted, “you’d heard the rumours but you had no idea he was actually serially assaulting young stary[sic]-eyed actresses who in turn had no idea what they were getting into. My bad.”
He added the hashtag #SanctimoniousHollywood.
Whoops, here’s the truth
Republicans have always known why Democrats push so hard to legalize young illegal immigrants – often called Dreamers – and supply them with all manner of government benefits, but Democrats will cop only to having compassion for those who choose to break the law to come into the country.
A recently leaked memo from the far left Center for American Progress (CAP), though, tells the truth.
“The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative,” it says, “it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.
“If Democrats don’t try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers,” the memo reads, “that will jeopardize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2018 and beyond. In short, the next few weeks will tell us a lot about the Democratic Party and its long-term electoral prospects.”
The memo was co-authored by Jennifer Palmierei, a former Hillary Clinton communications director for the George Soros-backed organization.
Without illegal immigrants, backers seem to be saying, the party will be in trouble. Let’s hope.
The first may be last
They may be at the top of the U.S. News & World Report’s list of top universities and liberal arts colleges, but many of them rank relatively low for viewpoint diversity, according to recent rankings by the Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges.
Higher scores indicate schools that welcome “intellectual diversity and dissent,” while lower scores represent those that have a history of suppressing divergent viewpoints.
Ivy League schools, for example, range – on a list from 0 to 100 – from 59 by the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University to 25 by Harvard University and Cornell University. Dartmouth College scored 41, Brown University 28 and Yale University 26.
Points were awarded for endorsing the “Chicago Statement” on free expression, earning positive ratings from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and holding on-campus events that promote free expression. Points were deducted for events that restricted free expression, as well as for each instance of violence directed against any form of free speech.
The University of Chicago topped the list with a score of 98, and the University of Oregon claimed the bottom with 10.
Of the 111 schools on U.S. News & World Report’s list that had sufficient data for ranking, only 20 public universities scored more than 50 points and 41 scored below it.
A recent Heterodex Academy survey suggested students could feel the lack of tolerance as 53 percent of all students “reported that they do not think their college or university frequently encourages students to consider a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives.”
Cash cab
A former Obama administration official says his use of government funds for more than 130 taxi rides over a two-year period and more than $15,000 in unauthorized purchases on his government credit card was all just a misunderstanding.
Vikrum Aiyer, a former senior adviser on the former president’s National Economic Council, resigned after the Office of Inspector General (OIG) began looking into his misdeeds before President Donald Trump took office a year ago.
Incredibly, he had been reprimanded by having his spending privileges revoked about a year after receiving his first government charge card in 2012 for “failing to pay the outstanding balance,” but he apologized and had his card restored. But he continued spending on “local bars, clubs, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and at least one liquor store,” and even was promoted to chief of staff in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Although his cab charges only amounted to $4,000, the OIG discovered he “knowingly used” the cab company “for impermissible purposes on a routine basis and took steps to conceal his unauthorized use … by providing false names and false location information.”
Now, though, Aiyer told the Daily Caller, “this misunderstanding … was brought to my attention two years ago” and he stands by a previous offer to repay the taxi agency.