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Afternoon Links: Oberlin Facing Budget Woes, Roy Moore & Evangelicalism, and Big Netflix

By Jim Swift

How we got here with Roy Moore. On Twitter, Alex Burns has a (sad!) look back at how the GOP arrived at today’s predicament with Roy Moore. It’s a choose your own adventure. Remember those? Except with this one, Republicans always lose.

Oberlin faces budget crunch. Yesterday, we shared the story of a small Ohio bakery suing Oberlin college. Today, Inside Higher Education reports:

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Oberlin College has been showing signs of strain as leaders of the well-off liberal arts college in Ohio seek to close a multimillion-dollar budget deficit driven by lower-than-expected enrollment this year. The strain became evident most recently when The Oberlin Review, the college’s student newspaper, obtained and published a letter written this summer by two faculty members objecting to a salary freeze. The letter, which the student newspaper published Friday as Oberlin’s Board of Trustees was scheduled to meet, said it is “inadequate and depressing that neither the board nor the administration has the leadership or imagination to address this crisis in any way other than by eliminating raises for faculty and staff.”

There’s more!

Conservative news outlets have delighted in Oberlin’s struggles. The college is generally considered one of the most liberal institutions in the country, and it is regularly the target of conservative media, some of the more extreme of which have attributed the college’s enrollment declines to politics. But they provided little in the way of firm evidence to support that link. Nonetheless, Oberlin has found itself at the center of several politically charged events of late. The Associated Press recently reported that Oberlin has been sued by bakery owners who accuse the institution and a dean of slandering their bakery as a racist establishment following a shoplifting case in 2016 — a charge the institution and dean denied. This fall, the college also put in place a policy under which it will not send out email notifications about hateful fliers unless there is suspicion of immediate danger or a larger pattern. National politics aside, Oberlin’s plan was clearly not to shrink this year, at least to the degree it has. So the cost-cutting moves it has put in place have rankled some faculty members.

I guess you could say I am delighted.

Peter Wehner, on “Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evangelical Republican.” At the NY Times, frequent TWS contributor Peter Wehner drops the mic on how some in the movement have sullied the party and their faith defending Donald Trump and Roy Moore:

I don’t mean to imply that politics and religion are a perfect fit. Often they’re not, and over the years Christians, myself included, have not gotten the balance right. But overall I felt that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement were imperfect forces for good, and I spent a large part of my life defending them. Yet the support being given by many Republicans and white evangelicals to President Trump and now to Mr. Moore have caused me to rethink my identification with both groups. Not because my attachment to conservatism and Christianity has weakened, but rather the opposite. I consider Mr. Trump’s Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I have concluded that the term evangelical — despite its rich history of proclaiming the “good news” of Christ to a broken world — has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.

Read the whole thing.

Now watch this trainwreck. Mrs. Kayla Moore bragging about their Jewish lawyer at Monday’s 11th hour campaign rally. Oh, or the part about where his friend talks about their brothel visit in Vietnam. It was a hoot.

Dilly Dilly! Bud Light sent a town crier to effectively provide a cease and desist order to a local craft brewer using their trademarked non-sensical term as a name for a beer. The beer barons also offered two Super Bowl tickets to the craft brewer’s best employees, so not to look like total meanies. Dilly Dilly!

This is not where I parked my boat. The Wall Street Journal has a quirky look at where Florida’s boats went during the recent hurricane season. What happens if they end up on your front lawn? Or you find a buoy from the USSR? Or a handmade canoe that’s potentially hundreds of years old? Or a city’s iconic sign? Find out!

Big Netflix is watching! Netflix is under fire for (what else?) a tweet: “To the 53 people who’ve watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?”

A Christmas Prince is a sappy journalism love movie (think How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) Netflix put out. Naturally, folks criticized Netflix for their tweet, but Netflix defended the tweet, saying: “This information represents overall viewing trends, not the personal viewing information of specific, identified individuals.”

This is like a drug dealer mocking his clients for being addicted to his product, which is to say, poor form. But a stark reminder of the perils of big data.

The missing cornerstone. One of my favorite things when showing friends around the U.S. Capitol as an aide was to bring up the missing cornerstone. This was back when the National Treasure franchise was still somewhat big in the public eye, so theories about Free Masons and historical lore were always fun fodder. Atlas Obscura has a write up, in case you’re not headed to boo your lawmaker anytime soon.

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