Austin had a very, very wet spring, but August is shaping up in normal fashion: Bone dry and hot as hell. Try to keep cool and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Politicized or not, the DOJ will be increasingly boxed in by the FBI and intelligence community investigations. Normally, when the intelligence community finds classified materials in unauthorized locations, it seeks felony prosecutions. Gen. David Petraeus was sunk for keeping his own personal calendars in an unlocked drawer at home. The calendars were deemed classified, even if they lacked an official stamp. President Clinton’s CIA Director, John Deutsch, lost his job and security clearance for using his portable computer at home. It had classified material on it. Those violations are trifling compared to Hillary Clinton’s exposure.
Someone spilled millions of gallons of toxic waste into a river! Call the EPA! Oh wait, it was the EPA.
Islamic State executes 300 electoral civil servants in Iraq. Good thing we’ve got Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama sowing peace and stability to the Middle East rather than that warmongering bungler Bush… (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
China devalues the Yuan. This is Big Freaking News, but hard to conceptualize, since China’s economic statistics are have not even a nodding acquaintance with reality, and haven’t for at least a decade. So is China’s current bubble bad, or super mega world-shatterling bad?
Cop-killing inmate dies in prison riot. Alas, my electron microscope is being recalibrated, so I won’t be able to find the proper sized violin to commemorate this sad occasion… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Social Justice Warriors continue their war on comedy on campus.
Man arrested for shooting at police in Ferguson was completely unarmed. Except for his guns.
A gunman killed during his attack on an Islamic prophet Muhammad art show in Garland, Texas, reportedly bought a pistol through a botched federal firearm sting.
Nadir Soofi bought a 9-mm pistol at a Phoenix gun shop in 2010, one report said, that sold illegal firearms through ATF’s heavily criticized Operation Fast and Furious to track firearms back to Mexican drug cartels.
See, that’s the problem with the Obama Administration. You can pick something out of The Crazy Rightwing Conspiracy Book of Madlibs and have it turn out to be true…
Another month down! here’s one final LinkSwarm to finish off July:
“Donations to the Clinton Foundation by Swiss bank UBS increased tenfold after Hillary Clinton intervened to settle a dispute with the IRS early in her tenure as secretary of state, according to a published report.” What are the odds?
“The fact is that there is no point in arguing with liberal gun-control advocates because their argument is never in good faith….The liberal anti-gun narrative is not aimed at creating the best public policy but at disarming citizens the liberal elite looks down upon – and for whom weapons represent their last-ditch ability to respond to liberal overreach.”
Dice to sell Slashdot. They managed to take a thriving community and managed to drive much of it away with a combination of poor UI design (Beta, anyone) and pro-social justice warrior posts.
How #GamerGate shattered shattered Gawker’s myth of invincibility. Turns out that insulting your readers on behalf of social justice warriors isn’t a sustainable business model. Who knew?
Today will be full of Stuff. And Things. So enjoy a LinkSwarm!
Barack Obama, the MegaBanker’s friend. “Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.”
How Uber is taking on Bull De Blasio. Man, Democrats hate it when you threaten the profits of their favored entrenched monopolies.
Return to the joyous heydays of lesbian feminists collective. “Sitting in endless meetings, unable to reach agreements, and taking days to produce one leaflet because someone objected to the word seminal.” Can’t imagine why they didn’t take the world by storm…
All the people who should sue Gawker. It’s a lengthy list. Plus this: “Gawker is the kind of place where they hold up pictures of Sabrina Erdely and say: ‘Now this is how you do it!”
Think UK Muslim child rape stories couldn’t possibly get any more creepy or depressing? A gang in Croydon targeted Down Syndrome girls. (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, there are bruising primary battles heating up up between the party’s corrupt wing and the party’s insane wing. (Sure, National Journal uses the words “pragmatic liberal” and “progressive,” but we all know what they mean.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Different jobs, different perks. If you work at a high tech start-up, you may get free snacks and catered meals. If you work at the DEA, you might get orgies with prostitutes paid for by drug lords.
Via Instapundit comes updated news of Operation Choke Point, the Obama Administration’s unconstitutional attempt to force the banks and credit unions used by gun dealers (and other targeted businesses, most of which are entirely legal) to close their accounts. Bank regulator’s have denied they were doing this in the past, but now a gun business owner has recorded a credit union manager telling him the Feds have forced them to close his account.
Here’s a Fox News report on the case:
Imagine the media outcry if a Republican administration were using the same tactics against abortion clinics or gay bars.
The new congress should investigate this along with Fast and Furious…
So left-wing stalwart magazine The New Republic just let several long-time editors go, reduced their publishing schedule from 20 issues a year to 10, and put a former Gawker-person in charge as editor, which is just short of putting up a sign reading “Dead Magazine Walking.” John Podhoretz traces their decline to the age of Obama:
I think the answer is that there never was any Obamaism to champion; there was no serious vision of America and the world being laid out by the administration that provided fertile ground out for intellectual cultivation, for voices on the outside to make sense of that serious vision and help it cohere into an argument. (In the 1980s, ironically, it was the New Republic‘s own Charles Krauthammer who did just that in explicating the “Reagan Doctrine,” though even more ironically, he did it in the pages of Time Magazine rather than in TNR.)
What there was, instead, was the increasing reliance on the cheap-shottery of the Internet era—in which TNR and others were driven more by a kind of grinding loathing of the Right than by an effort to create a more effective and serious Center-Left. The magazine foundered because liberals foundered, because Obamaism was a cult of personality that demanded fealty rather than a philosophy that demanded explication.
Also: I was unaware that The Weekly Standard had twice the circulation of The New Republic. And you should check out the rest of that piece, not least for the perfect title…
And speaking of Podhoretz, his New York Post piece on why Hillary’s supposed cakewalk to the Democratic nomination is a sign of party weakness is well worth reading: “Hillary Clinton has no natural claim to her party’s nomination. She’s not even an especially gifted politician. Aside from the spectacular incompetence of her 2008 campaign, she is as gaffe-prone as Dan Quayle and as awkward as Bob Dole.”
For the left, the truth no longer matters. “For the Left, this is all tribal, white hats vs. black hats. Fraternity members and police officers are, in their view, by definition on the wrong side of every dispute.”
Mary Landrieu isn’t just going to get beat in Saturday’s runoff, she’s primed to get slaughtered, trailing in the latest polls by 24 points.
Wisconsin might be getting ready to pass right-to-work legislation. Hey Wisconsin unions: How’d that whole “recall” thing work out for you? “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
Evidently teenage boys have too many cooties to be taken in at the Salvation Army. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Rolling Stonestory of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity continues to unravel. If there was an actual gang rape, the perpetrators should be arrested and tried. If not, Rolling Stone has some editorial house-cleaning to perform…
Breitbart demolishes Lena Dunham’s “raped by a Republican” story. Plus this nugget from a liberal college administrator “‘Asking whether or not a victim is telling the truth is irrelevant,’ Ms. Hess proclaimed. ‘It’s just not important if they are telling the truth.'”
On the same theme:
So as I understand it, Atticus Finch is now the bad guy in "To Kill A Mockingbird," because he doubted a story about rape.
And speaking of Rand, her longtime disciple/lover Nathaniel Branden died at age 84. I’m sure he would be deeply offended at the suggestion he’s gone on to the afterlife…
I had an entire set of stuff lined up for yesterday’s LinkSwarm, but in the rush of amnesty-related news I managed to forget to paste it into the right file. D’oh!
So enjoy your rare complimentary Weekend LinkSwarm!
GamerGate: “A new, radical and dangerously illiberal left which marinates in a hideous quagmire of resentment, smugness, vacuousness and contempt for free discussion.”
Sure, it’s screwed over the many people who have lost their policies or seen their rates skyrocket, but besides Democratic Party functionaries, is there anyone who is happy with ObamaCare? Why yes, there is: Insurance companies
On the other hand: “U.S. Humanitarian Aid Going to ISIS: Not only are foodstuffs, medical supplies—even clinics—going to ISIS, the distribution networks are paying ISIS ‘taxes’ and putting ISIS people on their payrolls.” Let’s not do that…
A sign of how deadly Ebola is: “That Science article written by 58 medical professionals tracing the emergence of Ebola—5 of them died from Ebola before it was published.” (Hat tip: Jerry Pournelle via Instapundit.)
The Democratic talking points that “Republican budget cuts” helped create the Ebola outbreak are such obvious lies that the Washington Postgave it four Pinocchios.
Speaking of Ebola…
Ebola might seem scary, but you'll be okay as long as you follow the established protocols for protecting @BarackObama from criticism.
“Having Jimmy Carter out-hawk you is like having Joe Biden attack you for being verbally undisciplined…Doing nothing about the Islamic State was Obama’s foreign policy until the domestic political situation made his foreign policy untenable.”
Another Democratic Senate candidates refuses to say she voted for Obama. Hey, remember when all those Republican senate candidates refused to say whether they voted for Reagan? Me neither.
Is there any doubt that, under these new kangaroo court procedures, the innocent Duke lacrosse players would have been expelled labeled sex offenders? I suspect that for Social justice Warriors, this outcome isn’t a bug, but a feature…
Obama has finally twigged to the seriousness of the Ebola crisis and nominated Ron Klain, a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases and taught at Johns Hopkins, as “Ebola Czar.”
He used to be a columnist for Bloomberg View. Really, what screams “I’m an Ebola expert” more than “Keeping Working-Class Voters for Obama” or “How Democrats Can Make Their Case for Raising Revenue”?
He has a Twitter feed. You have to go back to October 2 to find a mention of Ebola: a retweet.
Did George W. Bush ever attempt such a tone-deaf nomination? Once, when he tried to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Except: 1. He quickly withdrew it, and 2. Miers was at least a lawyer. This is like Bush nominating Miers to be Surgeon General.
As Instapundit is wont to say, “the country is in the very best of hands.”
