Well, great, Rick Santorum has the solution – tell the kids to stop whining and just learn first aid for when their shooter arrives. Right?! Goddam lazy kids expecting other people to pass reasonable gun control laws.

CNN commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested students protesting for gun control legislation would be better served by taking CPR classes and preparing for active shooter scenarios.

“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Totally! Kids today are so spoiled, looking to legislators to pass legislation. Kids shooting up schools with automatic weapons are their problem, not ours! God, grow up, willya?

“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” Santorum said. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?’… Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s how I’m going to help the situation,’ instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.'”

Absolutely. It’s the same with hurricanes, you know? People expect someone to help them when their city floods, instead of taking action to say, “How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?” An individual can bail whole buckets full of water in a day. I have no idea where they would put all that water, but that’s their problem, as an individual.

Last week Mississippi passed a law making abortion illegal after 15 weeks.

On Monday, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1510 into law, making it immediately illegal for a woman to obtain an abortion after 15 weeks gestation. Mississippi’s previous law restricted abortion access within the state to 20 weeks. The state’s sole abortion clinic, Women’s Health Organization, located in Jackson, does not perform abortions past 16 weeks.

On Tuesday a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order to stop the law from going into effect.

Meanwhile, Mississippi is the poorest state in the country.

Organizers estimate 800 thousand student protesters in DC.

The protest stretches for miles.

John Lewis was there.

https://twitter.com/BlackGirlMagix/status/977666643072610304

We march for those lost to gun violence. We march in solidarity with survivors across the country. We march for those in our schools and those not yet old enough to attend. Marching together, our voices rising together, we can be the change we need. #MarchForOurLives pic.twitter.com/4fqnVWuhZq

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 24, 2018

Photos from the #MarchForOurLives protests around the world https://t.co/FlH4sFfhhY pic.twitter.com/wOnW0db6Ql

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 24, 2018

Jennifer Hudson gave a moving performance at #MarchForOurLives

She lost her mother, brother and nephew to gun violence

pic.twitter.com/x1LRkDR9Jy

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) March 24, 2018

https://twitter.com/CASwinney/status/977619318023139328

NEW: An emotional Emma Gonzalez stands in silence after reading out the names of her classmates who were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. #MarchForOurLives https://t.co/3kn1iCtJjo pic.twitter.com/92kFSH6Qxh

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) March 24, 2018

Let’s go back back back in time to see why a Republican-led Senate committee in 2005 refused to approve John Bolton as Bush’s ambassador to the UN, because now he’s in a job that doesn’t need Senate approval.

One moment singularly derailed his nomination. Testifying before the usually staid Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2005, Carl W. Ford Jr. — the former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research — called Mr. Bolton a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” and a “serial abuser” of people beneath him in the chain of command. Mr. Ford — a self-described conservative Republican and Bush supporter — made vivid an emerging portrait of Mr. Bolton as a bully who repeatedly sought retribution against career intelligence analysts with the temerity to contradict him.

No wonder Trump likes him. “Kiss-up, kick-down” exactly describes Trump. Smooch Pootie, kick almost everyone else.

Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.

That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected.

He insisted Cuba was developing biological weapons; people who knew more about it disagreed; Bolton tried to get them moved to other jobs.

Mr. Bolton also was accused of attempting to inflate the dangers of Syria’s biological and nuclear weapons programs, by trying to sneak exaggerated assertions into speeches and congressional testimony before being called on it by intelligence officials. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage reportedly issued an extraordinary decree that required Mr. Bolton to clear all of his public utterances with Mr. Armitage himself.

That sounds very Trump-like too. Trump tells shameless lies, and seems to have no qualms about it whatever.

Then in 2002, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bolton helped orchestrate the removal of the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (which would win the Nobel Peace Prize more than decade later). His crime? Trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq. (Mr. Bolton said he was fired for “incompetence.”) Those inspectors might have debunked claims that Saddam Hussein retained a stockpile of chemical weapons and was pursuing a nuclear arsenal — the justification for the following year’s invasion.

He tried to get other people fired. He frequently demanded the identities of US officials whose names were hidden in sensitive intelligence; some on the Committee worried that was because he wanted to retaliate against them.

Other witnesses came forward to allege abusive behavior by Mr. Bolton during his time as a lawyer in the private sector — screaming, threatening, throwing documents and, in the words of one woman, “genuinely behaving like a madman.”

All of this ultimately proved too much for Senator Voinovich. In a remarkable speech to his colleagues on the committee, a visibly pained Mr. Voinovich explained his decision to vote against Mr. Bolton, effectively killing the nomination. We’ve heard, he said, that Mr. Bolton is “an ideologue and fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. He does not tolerate disagreement. He does not tolerate dissent.”

“This is not,” he continued, “the behavior that should be endorsed as the face of the United States to the world.” President Bush used a recess appointment to make Mr. Bolton the ambassador without Senate approval.

We are about to find out whether this sort of behavior is any more appropriate for a president’s national security adviser, arguably the most powerful, sensitive and demanding job in the administration short of the president’s — and one that requires an honest broker, willing to present the president with ideas and analyses he does not agree with.

Bad moon.

Benjamin Wittes shares a bit of hate-mail.

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/977564639990026240

It’s the usual fever-dream nonsense, but what caught my attention was “Joe DiGenova is good old Irish-Italian stock.” Good old what? Since when is Irish-Italian considered a “stock”? (Jokes about minestrone with extra potato occur to me, but I push them aside.) Since when is Irish-Italian treated as a US ethnic grouping? Since never, that’s since when. Wittes’s correspondent is apparently just thinking “good old immigrant stock, the kind who immigrated so long ago that nobody thinks of them as immigrants any more, your Kennedys and McCarthys and Scavinos and Scaramuccis.” That’s nice, but he’s an idiot if he thinks those immigrants were welcomed with champagne and excellent housing. Like hell they were. They were greeted with hostility and tenements and crap jobs. It’s just a matter of time passing that makes them seem to Abusive Emailer like old, respectable, patriotic, normal, ok “stock.” Just a shot in the dark here but I wonder if one of his parents is of Irish background while the other is of Italian. Wild guess.

Anyway the point is, guess what, genius, time does wonders for injecting Respectability into once-hated immigrant groups provided they are white.

There’s also his bashful list of the things he likes best about his girlfriend, but that’s another story.

As reporters and commentators are always saying, there is so much terrible flooding out of the Trump Trainwreck that we overlook a lot of important stuff because there are only so many hours in the day. For instance there is the work they’re doing to prevent members of NAFTA from putting warning labels on unhealthy processed foods. That’s not the incineration of the planet, but it is very shitty and callous.

Urged on by big American food and soft-drink companies, the Trump administration is using the trade talks with Mexico and Canada to try to limit the ability of the pact’s three members — including the United States — to warn consumers about the dangers of junk food, according to confidential documents outlining the American position.

The American stance reflects an intensifying battle among trade officials, the food industry and governments across the hemisphere. The administration’s position could help insulate American manufacturers from pressure to include more explicit labels on their products, both abroad and in the United States. But health officials worry that it would also impede international efforts to contain a growing health crisis.

Which is more important? The health of millions, or the profits of people who make junky “food”?

[T]he Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is leading the Nafta talks on the American side, is trying to head off the momentum. It is pushing to limit the ability of any Nafta member to require consumer warnings on the front of sugary drinks and fatty packaged foods, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

The American provision seeks to prevent any warning symbol, shape or color that “inappropriately denotes that a hazard exists from consumption of the food or nonalcoholic beverages.”

“Inappropriate” if you want to make those foods or beverages with all their sugar, salt and fat.

Proponents of more explicit labels said the Trump administration’s proposal and the corporate pressure behind it hold the potential to handcuff public health interests for decades.

“It is one of the most invasive forms of industrial interference we have seen,” said Alejandro Calvillo, the founder of El Poder del Consumidor, or Consumer Power, a health advocacy group in Mexico that was illegally targeted with government spyware when it fought for a soda tax in Mexico. “The collusion between the industry and the government is not only at the level of spying — it reaches the level of the renegotiation of Nafta and the nation’s own policy against obesity.”

The American proposal conflicts with the guidance from Mexico’s national health institute and from the World Health Organization. Both have recommended that Mexico pass regulations to help combat diabetes, which claims 80,000 lives a year there. That is one of the highest rates in the world — and more than double the record number of homicides in the nation in 2017.

Yes but profits! What do 80 thousand diabetes deaths in Mexico matter compared to profits?!

Heading off pressure for more explicit warnings through the Nafta negotiation is especially appealing to the food and beverage industry because it could help limit domestic regulation in the United States as well as avert a broad global move to adopt mandatory health-labeling standards.

“It kind of kills a law before it can be written,” said Lora Verheecke, a researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, a group that tracks lobbying efforts. “And once you put it in one trade agreement, it can become the precedent for all future deals with future countries.”

And then more profits!

Yesterday:

A Wisconsin judge Thursday ordered Gov. Scott Walker to call special elections to fill a pair of legislative seats vacated by fellow Republicans, handing a victory to Democrats who have pushed for the elections to be held.

A national Democratic group led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder filed the lawsuit on behalf of voters who argued they were disenfranchised by Walker’s decision not to call elections to fill the vacancies that occurred on Dec. 29.

Attorneys for Holder’s groups, the National Redistricting Foundation, argued that Walker has a legal obligation to call special elections as soon as possible. Democrats said the governor is afraid Democrats will win the seats, but Walker contends the lawsuit is a partisan, special interest effort to waste taxpayers’ money and he’s under no legal obligation to hold the elections.

Partisan. To expect vacated seats to be filled in a timely fashion.

Today:

Republican legislative leaders in Wisconsin called lawmakers back to the Capitol Friday afternoon to change state law governing special elections.

The move comes a day after a court ruled that Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, must hold a pair of special elections, which Walker has sought to avoid.

Democrats called the plan to change the law an “attack on democracy.”

Remember that Supreme Court vacancy that the Republicans wouldn’t let Obama fill? Remember how the Republicans just came right out and said they wouldn’t even hold hearings on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland or of anyone else Obama nominated either?

They fight dirty.

Libraries. Cherish the libraries, save the libraries, stock the libraries, fund the libraries.

https://twitter.com/SarahGPerry/status/976953197108563968

The Times editorial board offers detail on why Bolton will be dangerous.

The national security adviser is the person who makes sure the president hears the views of all the national security agencies, including the State Department and Defense Department, and drives policy toward a decision. It is hard to see Mr. Bolton playing the honest broker. Mr. Bolton is known to play a ruthless inside game as he maneuvered to win bureaucratic battles and freeze out people he thinks crossed him. He has been such a lightning rod that he couldn’t get confirmed as United Nations ambassador in 2005 so President George W. Bush gave him a recess appointment, and he stayed in the job about a year. It was considered unlikely that the Senate could have confirmed him as secretary of state, but the national security adviser job doesn’t require confirmation.

Bringing on the fiery Mr. Bolton now, at a delicate moment with North Korea, is a terrible decision. While Mr. Trump has often threatened North Korea with military action, he accepted Mr. Kim’s invitation to a summit, brokered by South Korea’s president, who is eager for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis.

Mr. Bolton, by contrast, told Fox News earlier this month that talks would be worthless and has called South Korean leaders “putty in North Korea’s hands.” On February 28, he insisted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.”

Enjoy your day.

Fuming about woke students shutting down right-wing speakers can be a nice little earner, Mari Uyehara points out.

Bari Weiss for instance.

Weiss’s column titled “We’re All Fascists Now” highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a “self-identified” feminist and a “registered” Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers’s more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D’Souza among its past fellows.

If I’ve seen Sommers described (pugnaciously) as a feminist I’ve seen it…several times. It’s her shtick. Sure, she’s a feminist in the most minimal sense, but her whole career now is devoted to disputing and making fun of anything that goes beyond the most minimal. She’s a “feminist” who spends much of her time inciting social media hatred of feminism and feminists.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a “factual” one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn’t know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she’s been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance.

Damore memo anyone?

Sommers likes to be no-platformed, because it’s fuel for the fire.

At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her “a fascist,” among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black “Stay Woke” jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read “No Platform for Fascists.” It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, “Black lives matter,” Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.

…

The number of students who resort to these tactics is fairly small—Sommers regularly gives talks at universities without incident. But the number of publications and prominent journalists willing to cover them is quite high. The news of Sommers’s slightly curtailed lecture was hyped in at least 11 outlets, including Breitbart, the National Review, and two separate opinion pieces in The New York Times. Sommers herself tweeted about the event’s coverage at least 70 times and scored a Wall Street Journal piece out of the ordeal. It’s not difficult to intuit why she beamed at her videographer as the no-platformers chanted.

Andrew Sullivan has written about it many times; so has Jonathan Chait; Bret Stephens and David Brooks chimed in; Weiss has written at least three op-eds on it.

The enthusiasm to defend those [who are] triggering libs makes the Free Speech Grifters uniquely susceptible to right-wing propagandists. In her last op-ed, Weiss featured an obvious parody Antifa Twitter account, run by alt-right trolls, and YouTuber Dave Rubin fell for the same gag. In 2016, Sommers unwittingly did a full hour on a Swedish white-supremacy podcast. And the same year, in a since-deleted tweet, she announced she would be “defending free speech and reason” with Milo Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed by BuzzFeed for working with white nationalists to smuggle their ideas into the mainstream. He also appeared alongside Maher, railing about free speech, on Real Time. This isn’t all complete ignorance. Columbia University College Republicans invited Tommy Robinson of the far-right English Defense League, while the new Canadian free-speech club Laurier Society for Open Inquiry announced white nationalist Faith Goldy as its first speaker. In the National Review, Elliot Kaufman chided fellow campus conservatives for purposely giving the alt-right a platformin an effort to bait the left into doing something “silly and destructive,” so that they could play “martyrs for free speech on campus” and draw media coverage. “The left-wing riots were not the price or downside of inviting Yiannopoulos,” he wrote. “They were the attraction.”

This is what I’m saying. Inviting a Faith Goldy to a university is a kind of entrapment, and it’s dubious because she’s not a scholar or a public intellectual or a legit columnist or anything other than a self-made flamer. Yes, free inquiry is a good; no, a Faith Goldy is not a good example of free inquiry.

As Adam Serwer in The Atlantic and Jamelle Bouie in Slate have pointed out exhaustively, there are many more deeply disturbing threats to free speech, namely those enforced by the state. (Technically, First Amendment protections apply to guarding against the state imposing on the free speech of people, not the battleground of ideas at universities.) Examples include laws that ban positive portrayals of homosexuality in public schools, and police unions urging their members to retaliate against private citizens who have lodged complaints of misconduct. At Trump’s inauguration last year, an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march called J20 resulted in mass arrests, including of journalists, medics, and legal observers. Originally, 239 people were charged with felony inciting to riot, facing up to 60 years in prison. Houses were raided. The ACLU got involved. And not a peep in an entire year from any of the so-called free-speech warriors. Ditto this past week, when a Wisconsin school administrator was fired for allowing black students to hold a discussion about white privilege in a district that is 90 percent Caucasian. How peculiar.

I think maybe the focus on the woke kids no-platforming comes from the sense that they are in some sense colleagues, while Trumps and cops are not. Maybe not; maybe I’m giving the Sommers types too much credit; but it feels to me like an internecine dispute, while reporting on police crackdowns does not.

According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization with ties to the Koch brothers, from 2000 to 2017, there were anywhere from six to 35 self-reported disinvitation attempts annually and 40 percent of them came from the right, while Heterodox Academy, an organization devoted to increasing viewpoint diversity, finds that the majority of successful disinvites came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as “the psychology of progressive hostility.” Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization.

Certainly Peterson has done well out of the monetization thing.

In America, there’s always been a contemptuous crowd thirsty to pick off the extremists in and caricature movements for social change. We see it in the old cartoons painting suffragettes as red-faced old spinsters or black people as shiftless watermelon eaters, and in taunts of anti-war activists as dirty hippies and commie pinkos. SJWs are the new SDS; Stay Woke jackets and BLM T-shirts the new long hair. As young people agitate for much-needed change, be it on racial bias, rampant sexual harassment, or gun control, there will always be behind-the-curve commentators getting paid to do nothing but lecture “Respect First.” The left would do well by not showing up to play character actors in fake free-speech theater. But the Free Speech Grifters never seem to be concerned with exactly whom they are entertaining with their performative indignation and why. It’s kayfabe for those who are perfectly comfortable with enforcing the status quo.

Another free speech – teach the controversy – open inquiry – shut it down – listen and learn Item. Lindsay Shepherd invited a right-wing commentator to debate / speak at Laurier University, there were protests, Laurier declined to stop the event. Once the event got started someone pulled a fire alarm and that shut it down.

The talk was set to start at 7:15 p.m. ET. At approximately 7:20 p.m, a fire alarm was pulled and police evacuated the building, preventing anyone from entering the Paul Martin Centre.

Event attendees then moved to Veterans’ Green park, on the other side of campus, where Lindsay Shepherd, the organizer of the event, announced the talk was cancelled.

Shepherd, the co-founder of the campus group Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, said she’s “super disappointed” at the outcome.

According to Goldy’s Twitter account, the fire alarm was pulled before she was even introduced and presented on stage.

The speaker Faith Goldy tweeted “MARXISTS PULL ALARM” – which seems pretty stupid. Marxists? Not in any sense Marx would recognize.

“My view of these college leftists is more damaged than it used to be,” Shepherd said to CBC News, assuming the person who pulled the fire alarm was someone who opposed the talk.

“I had faith that we’d have a nuanced discussion where people can challenge the speaker at the end — obviously that was too much to hope for,” said Shepherd.

I think this is all a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I mostly share the general fatigue with students wanting to ban every single thing they disagree with, but on the other hand…nuanced discussion? With Faith Goldy? It seems vanishingly unlikely. And more broadly – there just isn’t any necessity to invite racists or misogynists or xenophobes to give speeches in order to find out what they think and have a debate with them. It’s easy to find out what they think, and to dispute it, without summoning them in the flesh. It’s easy to argue with racism or misogyny without face to face confrontations. What’s the point of the in person thing? Why Faith Goldy in particular? Is she a scholar?

Wikipedia doesn’t describe her as one:

She received her formal education at Havergal College and studied at Huron College at the University of Western Ontario. Goldy later graduated in politics and history from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, minoring in philosophy and physics. Goldy also began a Masters of Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance.^[12] Goldy is a Christian, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.^[13]

Goldy has been employed by a number of press and broadcast media organizations, including The Catholic Register, the Toronto Sun, TheBlaze, Bell Media, Zoomer Media, and the National Post. She is a former reporter with the Sun News Network and was employed by The Rebel Media, an online political and social commentary platform, where she presented political commentary in regular YouTube videos and a weekly show called On The Hunt with Faith Goldy.^[14] On August 17, 2017, The Rebel Media fired her for being interviewed on The Krypto Report, a podcast produced by the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer.^[15][16]

She has some graduate education and she worked as a reporter. I can’t really see the need to invite her to talk at a university in order to have a nuanced discussion, just as I don’t see the need to invite Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh to talk at universities.

I guess part (or maybe most or all) of the reason was to make the point that universities should welcome diversity of thought, and choosing someone conspicuously provocative was necessary to that. I think I see the reasoning, but I also think I don’t agree with it. It’s a stretch to call what “personalities” like Goldy do “thought,” so she’s not really a good example of diversity of thought. Shepherd has very good reasons for being sick of people who say “You can’t say that!” but I still don’t think that’s a reason to invite professional trolls to university (or student society) events.