Jan,
I am honored to inform you that your blog, Diogenes' Middle Finger, was recognized as one of the Top 20 Winners of the 2016 Paul Revere Award. The people have spoken.
Is This Awesome or What!!
Jan,
I am honored to inform you that your blog, Diogenes' Middle Finger, was recognized as one of the Top 20 Winners of the 2016 Paul Revere Award. The people have spoken.
"This episode is a neat little demonstration of just how topsy-turvy the moral universe of the Democratic party has become. What they are actually demanding, in the form of a 'no-buy' list of the sort proposed by Senator Chris Murphy in his filibuster last week is the abrogation of American citizens' Fifth Amendment rights in order to then strip them of their Second Amendment rights. Meanwhile, anyone who uses their First Amendment right to oppose this scheme is accused of wanting to sell guns to ISIS (as Murphy and Elizabeth Warren have both said). It would be difficult to think of a better demonstration of Democrats' wholehearted embrace of an ends-justify-the-means philosophy of governing." - Ian Tuttle
PJ Media - There is now a Republican-led effort for the Senate to confirm President Obama’s nomination of Carla Hayden to be the librarian of Congress. Her confirmation hearing proceeded without any serious review of her record, her views, or her qualifications.
The American people should be asking why any senator would be anxious to confirm a nominee who is not only unqualified, but whom The Nation magazine celebrated as a “radical librarian” who champions unrestricted access to pornography in public libraries.
Other members of Congress should be asking why there is such a hurry to put a non-scholarly political activist in charge of their research arm -- the Congressional Research Service, which is within the Library of Congress. The post of librarian of Congress has long been filled not by librarians, but by first-rank scholars and historians of national reputation.
The librarian of Congress is, in effect, the nation’s scholar-in-chief. Retired incumbent James H. Billington, who left the position in 2015, authored five books, dozens of scholarly articles, and was the former director of the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He also taught history at Harvard and Princeton. His predecessor Daniel Boorstin was a prolific scholar of the American experience -- his book The Americans won the Pulitzer Prize.And what are Carla Hayden's qualifications for such a prestigious post? She headed the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore since 1993. She has edited, not written, only one book: a bibliography of culturally diverse materials, and is neither a scholar nor a historian.
The post of librarian of Congress is of vital importance to the nation's cultural and intellectual life. However, she seems to have been nominated, according to National Review, because of the Obama administration's “yoke of identity politics.” Obama didn’t emphasize her qualifications as a scholar or historian when he nominated her because of “her meager scholarly credentials,” according to the Weekly Standard. Instead, Obama emphasized her gender and race:
"Carla Hayden would be the first woman and the first African American to hold the position – both of which are long overdue."