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Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on November 12, 2015 52 Comments
"The movement, the Million Student March, is a movement for a more equitable and fair system of education as opposed to the really corporate model that we have right now," said Keely Mullen, Million Student March Organizer, on Neil Cavuto's show Thursday. Their "three core demands," (yes, demands) are simple: free public college, cancellation of student debt, and $15 an hour minimum wage for campus workers. All was well and good until Mullen was asked the obvious -- how exactly will those three demands be paid for? [Blank stare] "Great question. Uh, I mean, you know, so, I'm not sure if you're talking on like a national level or at particular schools, I can sort of touch on both," said Mullen. And it actually got worse from there:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on November 05, 2015 17 Comments
If you've been waiting for the first rap ad of the primary season, your wait is finally over. Republican presidential frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson's campaign released a rap ad that will run on stations in some of the country's largest markets. ABC News reports:
Dr. Carson is launching a new 60-second urban radio advertisement scheduled to air Friday in eight markets. His new $150,000 radio ad buy, called “Freedom,” will air for two weeks in Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee and Little Rock, Arkansas. The ad, specifically targeting young black voters, uses rapper Aspiring Mogul and is interspersed with portions of Carson’s stump speech throughout the 60-second ad.

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 31, 2015 32 Comments
As a member of Generation X, I was lucky enough to enjoy Halloween as a child in the 1970's before progressives began trying to ruin it with politics. What used to be a fun night of costumes and "trick or treat" with your friends has become the latest casualty of political correctness. In case you haven't heard, many costumes are no longer acceptable. There is some good news though, kids. You can dress up as a solar panel. The Daily Caller reports:
DOE Wants Kids To Dress Up As Solar Panels and Windmills For Halloween The Department of Energy (DOE) is celebrating Halloween by carving DOE themed Jack-O-Lanterns and instructing kids to dress up in “energy themed” costumes. The DOE official website includes instructions on how kids can dress up as a solar panel, a wind turbine, an “energy vampire,” a particle accelerator, or Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.

Posted by Sarah Rumpf on October 30, 2015 15 Comments
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) was officially sworn in as Speaker of the House on Thursday, and the sign over the doorway to the Speaker's Office wasn't the only change. The "Hey Girl, It's Paul Ryan" Tumblr, first launched in April 2012 with a seemingly endless supply of memes highlighting the Congressman's boyish good looks and penchant for fiscal policy, started posting new updates again. The photo blog was inspired by the many internet memes dedicated to actor Ryan Gosling and launched before former Gov. Mitt Romney tapped Ryan as his running mate. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="250"] From a May 2012 post on Hey Girl, It's Paul Ryan. Used with permission.[/caption]

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 30, 2015 10 Comments
Police in three cities are now boycotting filmmaker Quentin Tarantino for his participation in a recent anti-cop rally, during which he accused police of being murderers. Tarantino's charges are particularly ironic considering the fact that he's built a career producing extremely violent films filled with gun violence and acts of murder. The latest police force to join the boycott is in Philadelphia. Christopher Rosen of Entertainment Weekly reports:
Philadelphia police join call to boycott Quentin Tarantino movies All 14,000 Members of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 have joined officers in New York and Los Angeles in calling for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s films.

Posted by New Neo on October 29, 2015 42 Comments
The moment I heard they were perfecting the self-driving car, it gave me very serious pause. Maybe that's because in some essential way I don't trust handing over the decision-making process to a machine, even though I don't like driving all that much and even though the evidence is that self-driving cars would almost certainly result in fewer accidents and fewer deaths overall. There's just something very basic about the thechnology that I don't trust, and it may be the very same very basic thing in me that makes me especially concerned with protecting liberty and autonomy. But I hadn't spent all that much time thinking about the details. It turns out others have---they must, if they're going to program these cars. And it's no surprise that there are some knotty ethical problems involved. Here's one hypothetical:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 26, 2015 32 Comments
Discussing Paul Ryan's bid for Speaker of the House Monday, Melissa Harris-Perry made an unusual claim about the term, "hard worker." Alfonso Aguilar, Director of the conservative organization American Principles Project’s Latino Partnership said:
"But let's be fair. If there's somebody who is a hard worker when he goes to Washington, it's Paul Ryan. He not only works with Republicans but with Democrats. You know very well that I work on immigration issues, trying to get Republicans to support immigration reform. Paul Ryan is somebody who has supported immigration reform, has worked with somebody like Luis Gutierrez. Luis Gutierrez is very respectful, speaks highly of Paul Ryan, this is somebody who is trying to govern.
At which point Harris-Perry interrupted Aguilar and then proceeded to wander down a completely unhinged tangent about slavery.
"Alfonso, I feel you. But I just want to pause on one thing, because I don't disagree with you that I actually think Mr. Ryan is a great choice for this roll. I want us to be super careful when we use the language "hard worker," because, I actually keep an image of folks working in the cotton fields on my office wall because it is a reminder of what hard work looks like. So I feel you that he's a hard worker, I do, but in the context of relative privilege... and I just want to point out that when you talk about work-life balance and being a hard worker, the moms who are working, who don't have health care, we don't call them hard workers, we call them failures, we call them people who are sucking off the system."

Posted by Amy Miller on October 25, 2015 10 Comments
On Friday, President Obama unsheathed his mad internet skills and used them to bat at his Republican counterparts in Congress and on the campaign trail. Comparing GOP politicians to "Grumpy Cat," he lamented that anyone would dare display skepticism of the direction in which his administration has chosen to steer the country. From The Hill:
“Overall, we are making enormous progress. And it does make you wonder why is it that Republican politicians are so down on America?” Obama said. “I mean, they are gloomy. They’re like Grumpy Cat.”

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 25, 2015 8 Comments
Billionaire, dark money overlord, Charles Koch, dressed as Stars Wars super villain Darth Vader. Sadly, Koch doesn't dress as Vader everyday, but decided to do so after an NPR interviewer described him as, “pretty much Darth Vader.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 17, 2015 15 Comments
A new commercial for KIA Motors which recently hit the airwaves is getting noticed on the internet for challenging the concept of participation trophies. In the ad, a father and son walk to their car after a sporting event. The father is stunned to see the word "participant" engraved on the award since his son's team won every game. He asks himself "Are we going to start ending games with hugs instead of handshakes?" Before getting in the car, he tears off the participant label and uses a magic marker to inscribe the word "champs" then hands it to his son with congratulations.

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 14, 2015 13 Comments
Playboy Magazine has announced a rather drastic change to its business model. Starting next March, the classic pinup mag will no longer feature women in the nude. Ravi Somaiya reports at the New York Times:
Playboy to Drop Nudity as Internet Fills Demand Last month, Cory Jones, a top editor at Playboy, went to see its founder Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion. In a wood-paneled dining room, with Picasso and de Kooning prints on the walls, Mr. Jones nervously presented a radical suggestion: the magazine, a leader of the revolution that helped take sex in America from furtive to ubiquitous, should stop publishing images of naked women. Mr. Hefner, now 89, but still listed as editor in chief, agreed. As part of a redesign that will be unveiled next March, the print edition of Playboy will still feature women in provocative poses. But they will no longer be fully nude. Its executives admit that Playboy has been overtaken by the changes it pioneered. “That battle has been fought and won,” said Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 11, 2015 57 Comments
Did inmates stop liking bacon, or something? Did pork products spike in price so much that the pork-laden government had to cut back. Why in the world would the federal prison system eliminate all pork products? Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reports:
Finally, the government has decided to eliminate pork — from the menu in federal prisons The nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the federal government abruptly removed bacon, pork chops, pork links, ham and all other pig products from the national menu for 206,000 federal inmates. The ban started with the new fiscal year last week. The Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for running 122 federal penitentiaries and feeding their inmates three meals a day, said the decision was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences: They just don’t like the taste of pork.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 07, 2015 23 Comments
Over at College Insurrection, we posted a story about Harvard's recent debate loss to a team of inmates from New York. Fox News reported Tuesday that the inmates who beat Harvard's team are gaining quite the reputation having also beat teams from West Point and the University of Vermont. Unlike most debate squads, the inmates had no Internet access to assist in their debate prep.
A group of New York inmates has toppled Harvard's prestigious debate team. It took place at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch. The Ivy League undergrads were invited last month to debate the inmates who take in-prison courses taught by Bard College faculty. Harvard's team won the national title this year and the world championship in 2014. But the inmates are building a reputation, too. The club has notched victories against teams from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont. Against Harvard, the inmates were tasked with defending the position that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents came to the U.S. illegally. Harvard's team responded, but a panel of neutral judges declared the inmates victorious.
Tuesday, hosts of ABC's Good Morning America covered the story, only to mock the inmate debate squad:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 05, 2015 8 Comments
Manhattan's first Chick-fil-A opened this weekend and despite liberal misgivings of the closed-on-Sundays fast food chain, the demand for chicken sandwiches wrapped around the block.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 01, 2015 32 Comments
Facing pressure from activists, Grocer Whole Foods recently announced that by April of 2016 they'll no longer been selling products made from prison labor. Not only is the Texan grocer's move disappointing, it's also misguided. According to NPR, the groups targeting Whole Foods decried prison labor as "slave labor" and "exploitation."
The move comes on the heels of a demonstration in Houston where the company was chastised for employing inmates through prison-work programs. Michael Allen, founder of End Mass Incarceration Houston, organized the protest. He says Whole Foods was engaging in exploitation since inmates are typically paid very low wages. "People are incarcerated and then forced to work for pennies on the dollar — compare that to what the products are sold for," Allen tells The Salt. Currently, Whole Foods sells a goat cheese produced by Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy in Longmont, Colo., and a tilapia from Quixotic Farming, which bills itself as a family-owned sustainable seafood company. These companies partner with Colorado Correctional Industries, a division of the Colorado Department of Corrections, to employ prisoners to milk goats and raise the fish."
Exploiting inmates? What about providing them with trade skills, social skills, or teaching work ethic and purpose? That's exactly what Colorado Correctional Industries does. "Every participant is not only encouraged, but expected to contribute ideas, effort and commitment," says CCI.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 01, 2015 3 Comments
FrackNation director Phelim McAleer released a short film Wednesday ahead of Josh Fox's new film, GASWORK. Known for his film, Gasland, GASWORK is a short, fictional film that supposedly, “investigates the dangerous working conditions in the oil and gas fields.” McAleer's short is here:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on September 24, 2015 12 Comments
Gallup released an interesting poll this week showing that nearly half of all Americans view government as "an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens."  Interestingly, this is "similar to what was found in previous surveys conducted over the last five years"; however, "when this question was first asked in 2003, less than a third of Americans held this attitude." Gallup reports:
The latest results are from Gallup's Sept. 9-13 Governance poll. The lower percentage of Americans agreeing in 2003 that the federal government posed an immediate threat likely reflected the more positive attitudes about government evident after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The percentage gradually increased to 44% by 2006, and then reached the 46% to 49% range in four surveys conducted since 2010. The remarkable finding about these attitudes is how much they reflect apparent antipathy toward the party controlling the White House, rather than being a purely fundamental or fixed philosophical attitude about government.
It's no accident, for example, that when Democrats start and/or renew pushes for gun control, gun and ammo sales skyrocket. Of course, this isn't just about gun control; it encompasses everything from government surveillance to over-regulation to fundamental First Amendment rights.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on September 22, 2015 4 Comments
As the United States is preparing for the visit of Pope Francis, security efforts are focused on a potential terror plot:
On the eve of Pope Francis' historic first visit to the United States, law enforcement officials are concerned terrorists could disguise themselves as police officers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians to carry out attacks, according to a report from NBC News Monday. A memo titled "First Responder Impersonators: The New Terrorist Threat," from the Pennsylvania State Police's Criminal Intelligence Center and sent to law enforcement, warned that terrorists could falsely identify themselves as first responders to enter secure areas and carry out attacks. "The impersonators' main goals are to further their attack plan and do harm to unsuspecting citizens as well as members of the emergency services community," the memo read, according to NBC News.
This contrasts to a security incident that occurred in 2013, during the papal visit to Brazil:
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