The Queen's Decree: The Speech Is the Interview!
The interview-free campaign. Hillary Clinton, who has aggravated reporters with her limited press availabilities, will not take questions after her speech at Texas Southern University on Thursday, the school informed reporters Wednesday. The University's guidance: "There will be NO opportunities to interview Hillary Clinton; her speech will be her interview." While that guidance did not come from the Clinton campaign — spokesman Nick Merrill told Bloomberg the language was not approved by the campaign — the sheer absurdity of the statement was not necessarily a departure from the candidate's general attitude toward the press. Indeed, her campaign recently made a similar move when it tried to suggest that questions from voters were a substitute for questions from reporters. The Clinton camp has frustrated reporters at almost every turn. Since her campaign's launch in April (although now her campaign apparently "officially" launches on June 13 in New York), she hasn't sat down for a formal interview with any media organization. Before answering questions from the press in New Hampshire and Iowa last month, Clinton had gone 28 days without answering a single question from the media. Look, big-time media. The only way this stops is if you put your foot down and stop covering her photo-ops. Ace: So, she won't be answering questions, but she is Officially Deeming her pre-written platitudes as interview answers. TSU will be offering the woman who runs from the press and from voters a leadership award. That's another thing fascists like to do -- making words mean the exact opposite of what they previously meant. He reminds us of the anti–Hillary Clinton version of the Apple 1984 ad: 
A Terrible Candidate with a Terrible Idea, by Any Metric Ladies and gentlemen, the worst idea from any presidential "contender" in a young cycle that has already offered many of them. [Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln] Chafee also pledged to end capital punishment, re-think the war on drugs, and adopt the metric system.
What is it with these big-government liberals? You give them an inch centimeter, and they take a mile kilometer. You shut your big ten-centimeter wide mouth, Lincoln Chafee. You will get my American system ruler when you pry it from my cold dead hand -- and that's cold in Fahrenheit, not Centigrade! If somebody tries to force me to change every form of measurement I have, I will pound kilogram them into the ground! They will feel my foot meter on their tush! Hello?! Even the good progressives at Yuppie Acres Hectares won't accept this! Look, I'm not gonna read Ray Bradbury's Celsius 232.78. You can't make the Proclaimers walk 804 kilometers and make them walk 804 kilometers more. We will not watch an HBO series about morticians entitled 1.83 Meters Under. Trent Reznor's band is not going to be 22.86 Centimeter Nails. You go tell Eminem that he's from 12.87 Kilometers, see how that works out for you! And if Sammy Hagar can't drive 55, he sure as heck can't drive 88.51! It's enough to drive a man to drink; I could use a pint right now. You know what comes in "kilos"? Drugs. Every other line of dialogue from Edward James Olmos's Lieutenant Castillo on Miami Vice featured him gravelly and tersely announcing how many kilos were being moved in the upcoming drug deal or how many kilos had been found at the bust. 
Look at this man. He's miserable because he has to use the metric system all day. If I have to get stuck talking to somebody at a party, give me the relentless European soccer enthusiast, bring me the gal who uses foreign phrases for no particular reason, call over the guy who has to mention he studied abroad in every conversation. Just spare me the Metric System Evangelists. Being a vocal enthusiast for the metric system is just about the biggest hipster-indicator imaginable. "I use a really obscure measurement system, you wouldn't have heard of it. It's really big in Europe. I mean, ten times as big." You know why I don't want to have to figure out what everything is under metric measurements? Because I like knowing that the weather is good when it's 70 degrees outside, that my kids will go through a gallon of milk a week, that you don't see 1,000-yard rushers in the NFL very often anymore, that a 400-foot home run is a monster, and that my Fitbit is going to say good job when I've walked five miles. I am not doing math a hundred times a day in every aspect of my life so that Lincoln Chafee can suck up to Europeans. Metric-system advocates keep insisting that their system is easier -- but it clearly is not "easier" when the vast majority of the population has to abandon the entire measurement system and frame of reference they've used since childhood and recalculate every distance, every weight, every volume, and every area they encounter. You know why Chaffee wants to destroy our feet, miles, and inches? Because before President Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, he defeated the Metric System. Frank Mankiewicz: By 1980, after playing a major role in the presidential campaigns of Reagan in 1976 and 1980, Lyn became the assistant to President Reagan for political affairs. So, during that first year of Reagan's presidency, I sent Lyn another copy of a column I had written a few years before, attacking and satirizing the attempt by some organized do-gooders to inflict the metric system on Americans, a view of mine Lyn had enthusiastically endorsed. So, in 1981, when I reminded him that a commission actually existed to further the adoption of the metric system and the damage we both felt this could wreak on our country, Lyn went to work with material provided by each of us. He was able, he told me, to prevail on the president to dissolve the commission and make sure that, at least in the Reagan presidency, there would be no further effort to sell metric. It was a signal victory, but one which we recognized would have to be shared only between the two of us, lest public opinion once again began to head toward metrification. Seth Stevenson: It's no shock that a conservative fellow like Tom Wolfe would become the customary measures' knight in shining white linen. Those old-school measures are ancient and organic. Metric (or, as it's officially known, the système international) is a modern invention imposed by big, bureaucratic governments. Metric's origins are—sacré bleu!—French, dating to the 18th century, a product of the pie-eyed idealism of the revolutionary age. Enlightened intellectuals decided they knew best, and that metric could replace those displeasingly irrational, higgledy-piggledy systems of yore. To hell with any confused peasants who failed to adopt it. "To savants," writes Marciano, "the fault lay not with the metric system but the people who refused to accept it. Any criticism—such as suggesting that the prefix system was too complicated for the average citizen—was met with harsh rebuke." The elites were convinced that unified standards of measurement would promote smoother trade and bring the world together. And they weren't wrong. But that continental arrogance didn't play as well in America. Particularly in wounded, late-1970s America, at a time when the economy was hurting and the nation's pride had taken a few hits. The big push to impose metric under the Ford administration was met with resistance based in part on pragmatism (the taxpayer costs of switching; the general lack of enthusiasm in the populace) and in part on defiant nationalism. "There were those who considered metric conversion to be unpatriotic," writes Marciano. No less a figure than the director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame declared metric was "definitely communist." Really, when you see a headline like this . . . It's quite clear that Lincoln Chafee doesn't really want to bother with topics like the national debt; crappy public schools; the breakdown of the family; a gargantuan, complicated tax code; energy independence; border security; or any of that. No, no, he's going to save us from inches, gallons, and miles. If You Want to Make Money, Son, Go into Medicine The good doctor's doing pretty well! Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and his wife, Candy, earned between $8.9 million and $27 million in a recent 16-month period, largely fueled by book royalties, speaking engagements, and Mr. Carson's service on the board of directors for two big companies. The figures were included in Mr. Carson's personal financial disclosure, a copy of which was viewed by the Wall Street Journal. From the start of 2014 through May 3 of this year, Mr. Carson delivered 141 paid speeches, earning just over $4 million, according to the disclosure. Since announcing his campaign last month, the retired neurosurgeon has continued to deliver paid speeches that were contracted prior to his candidacy, his spokesman said. Mr. Carson will deliver four more speeches this year, the last one in November. The vast majority of these speeches are fine and dandy -- and small potatoes compared to, say, Bill and Hillary Clinton. But when you're the world's best-known pediatric neurosurgeon, sometimes companies with not-so-good reputations will try to use that image to help themselves -- and playing along is either naïve or cynical. And giving speeches for money while running for president . . . well, it seems like an easy way to work around the donation restrictions, doesn't it? (Huckabee did this back in the 2008 cycle as well.) ADDENDA: Today, at 2 p.m., Kurt Schlichter and I will be in-studio for Cam and Company on NRANews.com. Brace yourselves; we tend to get a little out of control. | 
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