Patterico's Pontifications

1/25/2016

Mizzou Professor Charged with Assault

Filed under: General — JVW @ 4:25 pm



[guest post by JVW]

The interminable saga of University of Missouri Assistant Professor of Communication Melissa Click reached a new milestone today when the Columbia, Missouri City Prosecutor formally charged her with third-degree assault for swatting at a student journalist who was photographing a Black Lives Matter gathering on campus this past November. Recall that Click was also caught on video asking for “some muscle” to come and forcibly eject the photographer. She faces up to 15 days imprisonment if found guilty.

Meanwhile, the university is either taking due diligence or dragging their feet (depending upon one’s disposition to Click’s actions) in reaching a decision about Melissa Click’s continuing status on the faculty. This was the year that Click was to come up for tenure review, and according to the local ABC News affiliate she remains under consideration:

Interim Chancellor Hank Foley announced Monday afternoon that Click will keep her job while a task force determines whether she will receive tenure.

Foley said she is currently working from home and will continue to do so the rest of the week.

Foley said a task force made up of scholars, MUPD, administrators, and students will sort through everything that happened on November 9.

“When we deviate from our processes, we tend to make mistakes. We have our ways of doing things that are not hasty,” said Foley in regard to the task force process.

“People are held accountable for their actions at the University. This is not being looked over.”

Foley said “Dr. Click is frankly aggrieved by this. I doubt she would do anything like this again.” [emphasis added]

Is it just me, or does Foley sound like he would absolutely love to find a way to forgive and forget and grant Click tenure? I guess Mizzou simply can’t do without her ground-breaking research into the Fifty Shades of Grey novels and “Thomas the Tank” television series.

Anyone have any bright ideas for Chancellor Foley as to how he and his colleagues can grant Professor Click tenure without being the laughingstocks of academia?

– JVW

Ted Cruz Cheats at Golf?

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:43 am



Matt Labash has a long profile of Ted Cruz, with a startling revelation: Ted Cruz cheats at golf.

Americans are a forgiving people. They’ll forgive a guy who cheats in business or on his wife. (Cruz has been accused of both.) But will they forgive a man who cheats at golf? According to the Washington Post’s Ben Terris, Cruz is in trouble if they don’t.

Despite Cruz’s allegedly having a 4 handicap, he plays about as straight as a corkscrew. When Alice Cooper was asked who is the worst celebrity golf cheat he’s ever played with, he responded, “I played with Ted Cruz one time. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Sportswriter Rick Reilly, who played golf with Cruz for his book Who’s Your Caddy?, gave Cruz an 11 on a 10-point cheating scale, telling the Post that Cruz fabricated scores on his scorecard, called gimmes on chip shots, and conceded putts to himself by raking his ball into the hole rather than actually putt-ing. “He rakes like my gardener!” Reilly said.

When Mark Mulvoy, then-managing editor of Sports Illustrated, played golf with Cruz in the mid-’90s, the two were forced to take cover when a storm rolled in. After the rain subsided, Mulvoy returned to the green to see a ball that he didn’t remember 10 feet away from the pin. When he asked whose ball it was, Cruz replied, “That’s me.”

“Give me a f—ing break,” Mulvoy told Cruz. “You’ve been hacking away in the .  .  . weeds all day. You do not lie there.” According to Mulvoy’s recollection to the Post, Cruz responded: “Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time. I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”

Cruz, for his part, denied knowing who Mulvoy is, claimed never to have played with Alice Cooper, and of Reilly, he said, “I always thought he was a terrible writer. I absolutely killed him, and he wrote very inaccurately.”

Of course, you have probably figured out by now that this story isn’t about Ted Cruz at all. It’s about Donald Trump. I just changed the name in the passage from Trump to Cruz — to make a point.

If a story like the one above actually came out about Cruz, people would be very confused. Ted Cruz cheats at golf? That certainly comes as a surprise. And what is all this about him cheating at business? And on his wife? It would really throw people for a loop.

But a story like this about Donald Trump? Well, that’s different. Cruz supporters will sigh and say: yeah, that’s the type of guy I already knew Trump was. And Trump supporters can get busy rationalizing it away. Everybody cheats at golf. Why, it’s a good thing that Trump cheats at golf. It shows he wins! In fact, I’m not angry at Donald Trump for cheating at golf. I’m angry at Patterico for repeating a story about how Donald Trump cheats at golf!

OK, you don’t like stories about golf? Then how about suing people? Labash has that covered too:

A (very) incomplete list of people or entities Cruz or Cruz minions have either sued or threatened to sue includes: NBC, ABC, the BBC, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal for suggesting he had cash-flow problems, his biographer, a rapper who name-checked him, the Palm Beach airport for making too much noise, the Club for Growth, Jeb Bush’s super-PAC, John Kasich’s super-PAC, Rosie O’Donnell (she called him a “snake-oil salesman,” he called her “a fat pig”), Bill Maher (for not ponying up on a $5 million “bet” that Cruz could not prove he’s not the “spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan”), a Twitter user who duped him into retweeting a tribute to serial killers, a Scottish offshore wind farm that would infringe on the view at one of his golf courses, his first wife for publishing a novel that resembled their marriage, his second wife’s bodyguard, a financial analyst for predicting his casino would fail (it basically did), and the Onion for publishing a satirical piece, under Cruz’s fake byline, titled “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead in About 15 or 20 Years.”

Oh, dear: there I go inserting Ted Cruz’s name there again, just to show how incongruous it would appear for Ted Cruz to be acting like such a thug.

Even though threatening frivolous lawsuits is not even arguably innocent activity, like cheating at golf could be argued to be, this kind of thing will also be waved away. He uses the legal system! What’s wrong with that?! Anyway, well, um . . .

. . . I don’t like these posts. PATTERICO, YOU ARE SUFFERING FROM TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!

Here’s the point. There is a guy running for President right now who, if elected, would turn Washington upside down. His name is Ted Cruz. Nobody thinks he cheats at business. Nobody thinks he cheats on his wife. Nobody thinks he would sue the Onion for writing a satirical piece about him. He would laugh it off, because he has a even-keeled temperament.

Yet there appears to be a real danger that he will be knocked out of the race by someone Big Media keeps pumping up. Why does Big Media seem to eager to pump Trump and lower the status of Cruz? Here’s a hint:

Screen Shot 2016-01-25 at 7.32.50 AM

As the polls stand now, Cruz would beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. Trump would not.

And Ted Cruz is the only person who seems to have a realistic shot of defeating Trump in the primary.

This is a critical time for our nation, and this post gives you some facts to evaluate one of the two major candidates: Trump’s penchant for lawsuit thuggery, his dishonest personality, and the fact that he would lose to Hillary Clinton. Obviously I have done a bad thing here, and am suffering from TDS. Please commence killing the messenger. Thank you.


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