Mike LaChance has been covering higher education and politics for Legal Insurrection since 2012. He has also written for American Lookout, Townhall, and Twitchy.
Since 2008 he has contributed work to the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Center for Security Policy, the Washington Free Beacon, and Ricochet.
Mike is a Generation X, New England lifer who describes his political views as conservative and libertarian.
You can find him on Twitter @MikeLaChance33
George Will Explains How Obamanomics Really Works...
GOP 2016ers on Ebola: Panic For once, President Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Rick Perry are on the same page. At separate briefings on the Ebola crisis, Obama administration officials and Perry have delivered the same message: Don’t panic — the health authorities know what they’re doing. But for other Republicans — and conservative media outlets — it’s time for panic. The likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates — except for Perry — are practically lining up to warn that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to keep Ebola out of the United States, now that Dallas is dealing with the nation’s first confirmed case.
MSNBC Blasts Sen. Reid As Hypocritical: ‘Sad And Pathetic’ To Call Koch Bros Un-American Even MSNBC is turning against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.). Reid has repeatedly criticized the Koch brothers and other big-money Republicans on the Senate floor. In March, Reid called the Koch brothers un-American, immoral, and dishonest for their hefty donations, even though Reid’s Senate Majority PAC has been the biggest spender of the midterm elections. It is “sad and pathetic when somebody calls a person un-American, especially when they are bigger offenders of the action he defines as ‘un-American,’” Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said on Friday.
Ted Cruz Asks FAA About Ebola Flight Ban Sen. Ted Cruz is asking the Federal Aviation Administration what it’s doing to prevent the spread of Ebola after the first U.S. diagnosis, which came in his home state. “Given the severity of this virus and the fact that its spread to Texas has been associated with travel, it is imperative that the FAA take every available precaution in preventing additional cases from arriving in the United States. As you may be aware, several African nations have already restricted or banned air travel to countries with confirmed cases of the Ebola virus,” the Texas Republican wrote in a letter to FAA chief Michael P. Huerta. “British Airways, Emirates Airlines and Kenya Airways have also suspended flights due to the rising death toll and deteriorating public health situation in Ebola-stricken countries.”One recent voice on CNN, an author named David Quammen believes doing such a thing would be wrong because of slavery. I kid you not. Brendan Bordelon of National Review has the story:
CNN Guest: ‘How Dare We’ Cut Off Liberia Flights When ‘American Slavery’ Created That Country An author on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program Thursday said the United States is uniquely obligated to maintain air links with the Ebola-ridden nation of Liberia, claiming it would be immoral to quarantine a nation created through “American slavery.”
Your weekly dispatch from the bizarre world of higher education....
28 words that Democrats really wish President Obama didn’t say today Here are the four sentences that will draw all of the attention (they come more than two thirds of the way through the speech): "I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them." Boil those four sentences down even further and here's what you are left with: "Make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them." You can imagine Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas or Sen. Kay Hagan in North Carolina or Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky grimacing when they heard those 28 words. That trio has spent much of the campaign insisting that this election is NOT about Barack Obama, that it is instead about a choice between themselves and their opponents.
Pelosi: Dems will take Congress, WH in '16 House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predicted a Democratic sweep in 2016. If Republicans keep the House in November, Pelosi said they wouldn’t hold their majority for long. “Their days are numbered. I know that in two years, I know we’ll have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president,” she told reporters at her weekly press conference. “I’d like it to be in two months,” she added. Asked if she was conceding that Republicans would hold the House in November’s midterms, Pelosi insisted, “No, I’m not." “I think we’ll do okay,” said Pelosi, who was headed to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to discuss the elections. Pelosi compared November’s midterms to the Olympics, in which the final result can come down to a matter of inches or seconds. “Five weeks from today, we can have no regrets,” she said.Nothing is set in stone and Republicans shouldn't be overconfident but Red State editor Erick Erickson sees one sign that shows Democrats are very worried.
For next attorney general, reach across aisle Having a Defense secretary from the other party makes war bipartisan, and reassures members of the opposition that the powers of the sword aren't being abused. Likewise, naming an attorney general from the opposite party would tend to make the administration of justice bipartisan, and would provide considerable reassurance, as Holder's tenure in office emphatically did not, that the powers of law enforcement were not being abused in service of partisan ends. In an age of all-encompassing criminal laws, and pervasive government spying, that's a big deal.While I think that's a good idea, this suggestion in the Washington Post from Dan Emmett, a secret service expert and former Marine, is a great idea.
The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist We’re being had. Again. For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name. Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade. Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group. The who? There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize. You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it. The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda.Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. As we all know, the Obama administration loves to fuss with nomenclature.
It's just workplace violence, disconnected from anything....
Why I Hope to Die at 75 An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly Seventy-five. That’s how long I want to live: 75 years. This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.
Attkisson on Media Fast and Furious Coverage: ‘We Should All Be Embarrassed’ Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson thinks the media “should all be embarrassed” for not holding the Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department accountable for their lack of transparency in the Fast and Furious gun walking scandal. Appearing on WMAL radio in Washington, D.C., Friday morning, Attkisson provided a detailed account of Thursday’s court decision forcing the DOJ to finally reveal a list of documents the administration has concealed from Congress via a claim of executive privilege. The court order released on the same day as Holder’s surprise announcement of his resignation has led many to speculate that, perhaps, the two stories are not unrelated. When I asked Attkisson about the fact that the Holder has been forced to reveal the documents only after a FOIA request from the non-profit advocacy group Judicial Watch (the same group that successfully compelled similar disclosures in the Benghazi scandal as well as the IRS scandal) Attkisson turned her focus on the media’s apparent abdication of their traditional investigative role as the country’s Fourth Estate.Here's the audio:
Ah, Progressives! You really have to – well, not admire them exactly – but if not admire them then at least grant them a grudging respect for the tenacity of their beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the Socialist utopia is a Cryptid, which, according to Wikipedia’s serviceable definition, is “a creature whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the scientific community.” Here’s another example of a cryptid: it’s called the Loch Ness Monster. Like the socialist utopia, the Loch Ness Monster requires a lot of magical thinking. Magical thinking is not wishful thinking. “It sure would be cool if there was a Loch Ness Monster!” That’s wishful thinking.From there, Whittle examines the Socialist states progressives often point to as models of success such as Sweden and then knocks down those examples like a house of cards. In a particularly eloquent moment, Bill points out:
Join us for another journey into the strange world of higher education....
NBC’s Chuck Todd: Self-Professed Activist Eric Holder ‘a Very Non-Political Person’ The host of NBC’s Meet the Press considers resigning attorney general Eric Holder — who once proudly declared himself an “activist attorney general,” called America a “nation of cowards” about race and took heat from his own White House for pursuing politically sensitive initiatives – ”a very non-political person.” “He did a lot of the tough stuff that you would say, ‘Hey, the attorney general has to do tough stuff, this is not a forgiving job, you have to do tough stuff,’” Chuck Todd told MSNBC’s Tamron Hall on Thursday. “But, what’s interesting about him, he is a very non-political person. And I think people used to mistakenly think that this guy was this long-time political operative who happened to be an attorney general. That’s not him at all.”Todd's declaration set off a firestorm on Twitter.
Obama’s Iraq Is Not Bush’s Iraq Last week, a Politico reporter phoned me to ascertain my thoughts on the new war. Among the questions: Was there concern among liberals that Barack Obama was in some sense now becoming George Bush, and did I see similarities between the current war and Bush’s Iraq war that, come on, be honest, made me squirm in my seat ever so slightly? My answer ended up on the cutting-room floor, as many answers given to reporters do. But since I’m fortunate enough to have a column, I’d like to broadcast it now, because the answer is a reverberating no. In fact it’s hard for me to imagine how the differences between the two actions could be starker. This is not to say that they might not end up in the same place—creating more problems than they solve. But in moral terms, this war is nothing like that war, and if this war doesn’t end up like Bush’s and somehow actually solves more problems than it creates, that will happen precisely because of the moral differences.
Jacking Up J-School Tuition A proposal to raise tuition at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism has some faculty members, alumni and students worried about destroying the school’s distinctive character. Faced with a half-million-dollar budget gap, Dean Edward Wasserman announced plans to recommend a tuition increase for the 2016-17 academic year in a memo to campus members earlier this month. He said the increase is necessary given the school’s financial standing, and that the amount students pay doesn’t actually cover what it costs to provide that education. He also said that the school would remain devoted to affordability and dedicate a large portion of the sum raised through the new fee to financial aid. Much of the online response to the idea has been negative, with several people questioning how journalists can afford to pay an additional $20,500 over two years for a degree in a troubled industry with historically low pay.One student quoted in the column knows she won't make much money in journalism but she's focused on the bigger picture.
Who could have predicted such a thing? One blogger did....
