A day has passed since Lois Lerner, director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS, appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and this much is clear:
—She cannot be fired. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto noted yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1956 decision in Slochower v. Board of Continue reading
Telegraph
Yuichiro Miura, an 80-year-old Japanese mountaineer, says he is feeling elated after becoming the oldest person in history to reach the top of Mount Everest.
Mr Miura, who has conquered the 8,850 metre peak twice before, when he was aged 70 and 75, reached the summit on Thursday morning.
He then phoned his daughter to tell her that he felt “on top of the world”.
“I never imagined I could make it to the top of Mount Everest at the age of 80,” he said. “This is the best feeling of my life.”
Despite the impressive achievement, his record as the oldest person to summit Everest may not last long, as 81-year-old Min Bahadur Sherchan from Nepal is preparing to scale the peak next week.
NY Post
Mayor Bloomberg went on a spitting-mad rant against a city cab-fleet boss who won a court victory over Hizzoner’s planned “Taxi of Tomorrow” — vowing to “destroy your f–king industry” when he leaves office, The Post has learned.
A fuming Bloomberg made the threat against Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman at Madison Square Garden’s private 1879 Club during last Thursday’s Knick playoff game, a witness said yesterday.
“It was like Gene had kidnapped his child. He used the f-word twice,” the witness said.
Freidman confirmed the blow-up to The Post, and said Bloomberg’s tirade included the warning that, “After January, I am going to destroy all you f–king guys.”
Nature
Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200 people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of the event, according to its organizers, was to explain why a new study about weight and death was absolutely wrong.
The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed ‘overweight’ by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of ‘normal’ weight over the same time period.
The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal’s study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.
In March of this year, during his Mideast charm offensive, Barack Obama declared that Israel has “no greater friend” than America. Maybe he meant “fiend.”
On Tuesday, a report presented to Congress by Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor showed that several NGOs (“non-government organizations”) in the region that receive U.S. tax dollars are hostile toward Israel and the peace process.
Family photo
It is no longer open season on those disgusting creatures that are the scourge of life in the Big Apple, to name one present-day urban center. No, the reference is not to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his crew. It is to cockroaches.
With apologies to Winston Churchill, it might be said of Sen. Barbara Boxer that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to rewrite it.” During a Senate floor speech Tuesday, The Daily Caller writes, the Democratic senator from California blamed the tornado that ravaged Oklahoma on global warming.
Newsbusters
As NewsBusters has been reporting, Americans are tiring of MSNBC.
Deadline reported Monday the liberal so-called “news” network’s ratings last week dropped to levels not seen since 2006:
After double-digit gains during last year’s presidential election, May 13-17 saw the progressive-aligned “Lean Forward” news network hit new lows as the IRS scandal erupted and revelations that the Justice Department secretly obtained AP records became public. With 350,000 viewers on average and 94,000 in the adults 25-54 demo, MSNBC had its least-watched and lowest-rated total-day results of the year last week. That was also the lowest total-day demo result the network has had since the week of June 26-July 2, 2006, when MSNBC pulled in just 83,000 viewers among adults 25-54, according to Nielsen data.
John Dean, Bloomberg
During President Barack Obama’s May 16 news conference, reporter Jeff Mason asked as part of his question: “And, more broadly, how do you feel about comparisons by some of your critics of this week’s scandals to those that happened under the Nixon administration?” The president responded, “I’ll let you guys engage in those comparisons, and you can go ahead and read the history, I think, and draw your own conclusions.”
Actually, reading the history of President Richard Nixon and Watergate might not make much difference for a couple of reasons. Even those familiar with that history are still misusing it, but more important, it’s certainly not the only history relevant to presidential scandals.
Start with those playing the Nixon card who understand this history, yet don’t seem to care that the situations aren’t truly analogous.
For instance, the Washington Post’s most celebrated Watergate reporter, Bob Woodward, knows better. On Nov. 18, 2012, Woodward appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to talk about “the Libyan scandal.” At that time he dismissed the thought that a Watergate-style investigation was necessary. The only real question was “what did Susan Rice know and when did she know it,” he said, referring to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who delivered the misleading statements about the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi,Libya. Woodward didn’t think the answer to that question ranked very high on the scale of what the public needed to know.
If there is anything positive that can be said about a workshop held at the University of Central Florida last month it is that you cannot contract gonorrhea by touching sex organs made out of Play-doh.
Campus Reform reports that the workshop was conducted by a “sex expert” (sexpert?) from a local adult toy store called Fairvilla. It is not clear what educational value is to be derived from learning to carve genitals out of modeling clay, but the event, titled “Finals? That blows,” also included a condom hunt.