The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.
Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.
But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”
“Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleads guilty to stealing $87K from youth basketball nonprofit he founded.” Hey, which political party do you think Mr. Gilliam is a member of? Let’s start scanning the article and see if we can guess. Headline? No. First paragraph? No. Second paragraph? No. Look, I’ll save you the suspense: You have to go all the way down to the eleventh paragraph to learn what you already assumed: Mr. Gilliam is a Democrat.
The whole “white nationalist” charge against President Donald Trump and his supporters was always garbage.
Saying goodbye to the extremely consequential GOP class of 1994, the first Republican House majority in 40 years, the one that ran on the Contract With America and passed welfare reform.
A very malevolent incarnation of Florida Woman: Rich Democrat wife files police report over man using a meme on Facebook. “Beth Jaffe, who is the wife of city commissioner Bryon Jaffe, felt that the meme was threatening her life. Ms. Jaffe contacted the district office of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and asked for them to investigate Van Antwerpen.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Ahem! I said I can’t possibly imagine how Sports Illustrated might have alienated their core—
The Guardian: “Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever – and they’re all closing down.” There’s this thing called “causality.” Maybe publishers should look into it while they still can… (Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
The real cause of these abuses is failure of university trustees to meet their fiduciary obligations, which in the case of public schools is to taxpayers. Weak boards allow university administrators to limit oversight of admissions. The administrators are allowed to see admissions criteria, but not the trustees who are supposed to be in charge. Board members who want admission favors for their own children or their friends go along, while others turn their heads to avoid the wrath of powerful alumni and politicians who benefit from the workarounds.
I witnessed this while serving as a member of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. My actions to expose the admissions scandal at UT-Austin, our flagship campus, resulted in impeachment hearings against me by the state legislature and even efforts to convince a grand jury to indict me. While neither worked, the university continues to hide all of the documents that would have exposed the scandal. Even the FBI knows only a fraction of the real corruption.
Details of the larger problem at the Austin campus were uncovered in a private investigation commissioned by our then-Chancellor and a minority of Board members. The problem is, our university president teamed up with a new Chancellor and the state’s most powerful elected officials to keep the findings sealed. The un-redacted report, which explains how hundreds of unqualified students manage to occupy spots in UT programs—including our law school—is locked in a courtroom after my lawsuit to make it public was challenged by the university. Every one of those students owes his or her presence on campus to a politician who controls state spending at the university, or to a well-connected donor or faculty member.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted her plans to put a resolution on the House floor Wednesday to investigate President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, a process that will likely grow into an impeachment inquiry as Democrat demands for impeachment grow ever more insistent.
“Confirmed: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planning to put a resolution on the House floor tomorrow to address the Ukraine issue as there are increasing calls by Democrats to start the impeachment process for President Trump,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted.
In an interview with CNN Monday night, Pelosi declined to say whether or not she would fully endorse an impeachment inquiry, but she suggested a move toward impeachment proceedings was certain. “We will have no choice,” she said.
The renewed push for impeachment gained steam following reports that President Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in cooperation with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would release the full transcript of the call, during which he reportedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden no fewer than eight times.
Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian firm Burisma Group when Joe Biden served as secretary of State. During his tenure, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Yes, a scandal where a sitting Democratic Vice President withheld aid from a foreign country unless they stopped investigating his crooked son’s crooked deals is somehow Trump’s fault. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrat party is covering up a pattern of corruption involving high level members of the Obama cabinet. The multi-million and billion dollar pay-for-play is mind boggling. Biden Family sale of office to Ukraine was not the only one or the most egregious. Slimy Joe is not alone.
Let this sink in , The democrats want to impeach our President for exposing the crimes that they have committed . SMH Joe Biden needs to be impeached .#Trump2020LandslideVictory
Democrats want to impeach a president with a 53% approval rating based on a whistleblower with ZERO firsthand knowledge of the Trump-Ukraine phone call
It’s ironic that this so-called whistleblower scandal is going to be the thing that kicks off an actual impeachment inquiry, since it looks like just another nothingburger in a long line of nothingburgers:
The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.
This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.
The way the House is going about sounds less like an impeachment proceeding than a clown show:
BREAKING: Speaker Pelosi was shot down by her caucus in her bid to form one impeachment committee, similar to the Hyde Committee or the Rodino Committee, and capitulated to no fewer than 6 committee chairs to jointly "lead" the investigation, including volatile Rep. Maxine Waters
Perhaps because it’s obvious that the entire thing is politically motivated by Democrats’ irrational hatred of President Trump:
Nancy Pelosi suggests that Democrats have to impeach Trump because they desperately want to prevent him from getting re-elected: "He can't win, that is very serious" pic.twitter.com/JTS2mYIm1u
Democrats seem not to have noticed that Trump thrives in environments of opposition and chaos. There are a lot of people (not just among Republicans) who believe that actual impeachment is several bridges too far, that Br’er Trump is going to thrive in the impeachment brier patch, and that instead of derailing President Trump’s reelection, it’s going to ensure it.
So, you guys are just going to feed another roll of quarters into the dick punching machine on this impeachment thing, eh?
Lefties are tweeting about impeachment but have no idea what impeachment means. If they think that the 2/3 of the Senate would vote out Trump, they’re crazy. & if they do sincerely believe that, I hope they’re ready for President Pence, because we all know how much they love him
But it’s also possible that this is just a mime show for the hard left rubes, that Pelosi has no intention of allowing an actual a vote on impeachment:
Pelosi did not and has not promised a floor vote on impeachment. This is just the launch of an "inquiry." I'm told she deflected on the question of a floor vote in caucus today.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
So evidently TWO dead black men is the absolute limit for rich gay white Democratic Party donors to get away with before attracting the attention of California law enforcement! THREE times is just one too many!
JFK, even Clancy Wiggums would have slapped the cuffs after death #2
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: . Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Welcome to a Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Try to avoid hockey-mask-wearing serial killers today.
Although I feel slightly dirty putting up a link to Vox, this piece on how Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend warps the politics of the state is worth reading, even if you have to factor in Vox’s anti-conservative bias. And I was unaware that Alaska now has the highest unemployment rate in the country…
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York are among the worst-run cities in the country, and residents are leaving. If only there was one single common (D)enominator to all those cities…
President Trump seeks a ban on flavored vaping. This is a very stupid approach to something that is largely a non-problem. It’s not the government’s purpose to protect people from themselves, even if it were vaping is several orders of magnitude less dangerous to your health than smoking, and this is appropriately handled at the state or local (not national) level. Plus there is a sufficient framework of laws to making sales to minors illegal anywhere they’re not already illegal. President Trump is simply wrong here.
Brexit is already changing the British economy. For the better.
The economy overall expanded by 0.3 per cent in July, significantly faster than the 0.1 per cent expected, and better than most of our main rivals. Next, we found out that the trade deficit narrowed slightly as imports fell. Finally, we learned that employment was at record highs and that wages were still growing at record rates. Add in a Chancellor who is about to start spending money with carefree abandon and there is no reason why it shouldn’t improve from here. It isn’t fantastic. But it is a decent performance from a mature economy facing what is meant to be its biggest economic challenge in a generation.
The best data we have suggest that the vast majority of Americans view political correctness as a problem, and that, contra the claim of many progressives, this is not a battlefield consisting of resentful ranting whites on one side and oppressed people on the other, the latter simply asking to be treated and spoken of with decency. In fact, the people most enthusiastic about intense forms of language-policing tend to be more privileged and more white, according to a national political-correctness survey conducted by the firm More in Common that made headlines last year. As Yascha Mounk wrote in his writeup in The Atlantic, “While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.” Moreover, “Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness.”
Now, people have criticized that survey on the grounds that if you ask people whether “X is a problem,” where X is a culture-war buzzword, you’re likely to get a lot of positive responses. I think there’s something to this critique, but the numbers are too overwhelming to fully discount it. I also think that if you’re going to argue that PC is just a synonym for “being a decent person” you should then explain why so many Americans think that concept is a problem. Are Americans that invested in indecency?
Plus, it would be one thing if this survey were some sort of strange outlier, but if you look at the data we have on specific culture-war blowups of relevance to the PC and/or cancel-culture debates, you find the same pattern over and over. Almost always, the opinions most commonly represented in mainstream progressive outlets are not held by the masses, including by the groups seemingly with the most at stake. I’ve written about this before: On issues ranging from Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal to the Washington football team name to what term(s) should be used to refer to people of recent Latin American descent, woke-progressive opinion is often very out of line with that of the majority of members of the groups in question. Not only do the wokest progressives not speak for Americans; they don’t speak for the groups they’re claiming to want to protect. A 40-year-old American Indian from Oklahoma — that paragon of wealth and privilege and white resentment, of course — made this point pretty succinctly when he was interviewed for a focus group which accompanied the release of the More In Common survey: “It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.”
“It’s new,” Stone says of cancel culture, the term used to refer to boycotts started (usually via social media) when a person or group is offended by a star or brand. “I don’t want to say it’s the same as it’s always been. The kids are fucking different than us. There’s a generational thing going on.” Currently, Dave Chappelle is in the crosshairs for his latest Netflix stand-up special, Sticks and Stones. “I know some people have been canceled for genuinely, like, personal behavior, but Dave is not getting canceled anytime soon,” Stone says, joking that South Park and Chappelle are “grandfathered” out of the culture.
Stone also shared his theory as to why critics were so hard on the latest Chappelle special, while viewers seemed to enjoy it far more. “I feel bad for television critics and cultural critics,” he explains. “They may have laughed like hell at that, and then they went home and they know what they have to write to keep their job. So when I read TV reviews or cultural reviews, I think of someone in prison, writing. I think about somebody writing a hostage note. This is not what they think. This is what they have to do to keep their job in a social media world. So I don’t hold it against them.”
Also:
One of the most notable aspects from last season was the lack of any political dealings, specifically the nearly total absence of Donald Trump via the Mr. Garrison persona. “It was nice for us,” Parker says. “It was nice to not come in and talk about Donald Trump. And I think it was nice for people to watch and go, ‘Oh, yeah, there is still comedy outside of fucking Donald Trump. There is still funny shit as the world goes on.’ And you can get your Trump comedy on so many other shows.”
Every segment they air is selected because they think/hope it will damage President Trump and disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who voted for and support him. They don’t report news. They select only stories that they think will damage President Trump, and ignore or otherwise downplay and dilute the stories that don’t.
MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Snip.
Financial institutions are supposed to ignore or reject payment instructions that don’t comport with precise formatting required by the National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA), the not-for-profit organization that provides the backbone for the electronic movement of money in the United States. But Slavkin said a number of financial institutions ended up processing both reversal requests, meaning a fair number of employees at companies that use MyPayrollHR suddenly saw a month’s worth of payroll payments withdrawn from their bank accounts.
Fake influencer exposed. Oh wait, let me rephrase that: More fake than usual influencer exposed. I’m not on Instagram, and I’m incredulous that “influencer” is even a thing. Maybe I could start an “anti-influencer” channel, with just videos of me reading a book while occasionally sipping from a can of off-brand diet root beer. Maybe I could get famous brands to me not to wear their clothing…
Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
(Hat tip: Greg Benford on Facebook.)
Poland frowns on Greenpeace’s shenanigans:
No messing about 💪
Armed Polish border guards board Greenpeace 'Rainbow Warrior' ship blocking the delivery of coal to the port of Gdansk.
Greenpeace have accused Polish authorities of using excessive force.
Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.
Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.
While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.
Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”
The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.
The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.
Snip.
“I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.
Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.
The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.
But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.
Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.
Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.
The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.
Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.
But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.
The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.
But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.
Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.
In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.
Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.
Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.
As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!
Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?
So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.
Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:
You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.
Monsters!
Fascists!
Meanies!
Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
Drink in their pain.
Drink it all in.
Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.
Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).
This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.
Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.
Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:
After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:
Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.
No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.
First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.
And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.
Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.
“There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”
The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.
Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
“Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
“When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Ah, the good ol’ days of . . . April, or so, when conservative critics of the Democratic party could still count on being lectured to about the enduring moderation of Team Blue and chastised for paying so much attention to such figures as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and Senator Bernie Sanders (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) and claiming that these self-described socialists are the socialists they describe themselves as being, who want to “abolish capitalism” (the stated mission of the Democratic Socialists of America) and the traditional family to boot (“democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations,” in the words of the Democratic Socialists of America), all of which, the usual media scolds tut-tutted, was unfair. “The Democratic party is the party of moderates,” as Politico magazine editor Bill Scher argued.
Somebody must have slipped some psilocybin into the Democrats’ potato salad at this year’s May Day picnic. Open borders? Check! Eviscerating the Bill of Rights? Absolutely, with one of those weird barbed Uncle Henry gut-hook knives! What else? I hope that whichever debate moderator finally presses this crew about the limits of late-term abortion is over 35, because Elizabeth Warren was pretty clearly ready to roll up her sleeves and perform an impromptu D&E right there underneath the Art Deco adornments and heavy brocade curtains of the Fox Theater in beautiful downtown Detroit.
Speaking of the Democratic Socialists of America, Stephen Green looks in on those lunatics. “No perfume in the quiet room, no misusing doors, no talking to cops, no talking to the press, always display your credentials, beware of right wing infiltrators.” Plus the usual lunacy about pronouns, and triggering, and singing “The Internationale.”
Monthly apprehensions of migrants in Mexico have begun to slow down, indicating that its government’s recent border crackdown is yielding results.
Authorities in Mexico apprehended 18,758 migrants in July, according to preliminary data from Mexico’s immigration agency, reported by The Wall Street Journal. While this number is more than double the amount detained in the same month last year, it is a decline from the record-setting 31,573 apprehensions in Mexico in June.
“China Wants to Hit Back at Trump. Its Own Economy Stands in the Way.”
China’s imports from the United States only a fraction of the trade going the other way, so it cannot match Washington tariff for tariff. Much of that trade consists of agriculture goods like soybeans, as well as specialized products like Boeing jetliners or the American-made chips for the smartphones China makes.
There are several things China could do. It could call for a boycott of American goods or stop buying Boeing planes. It could devalue its currency, which would in effect partially nullify American tariffs. It could make life much harder for American business and executives in China, or it could exercise its power over key parts of the global supply chain, like its dominance over key manufacturing minerals called rare earths.
Some investors on Friday signaled they expect at least one of those moves. China’s currency, the renminbi, fell to its weakest point so far this year. Shares of rare earths companies rose, while Boeing’s shares fell more than the broader market on Thursday.
But each of these measures has drawbacks. Perhaps the biggest among them is that China’s economy is growing at its slowest pace in 27 years. Many of the arrows Beijing has in its quiver could ricochet and hit its own factories and workers.
Plus the perils of weakening the renminbi. Also: “As they consider their moves, Chinese officials will also try to parse Mr. Trump’s negotiating strategy. Experts said his capricious style had flummoxed Beijing.”
The manifesto is insane. Part of it discussed commonly debated issues such as the environment and the economy in ways that are well within the boundaries of political conversation going on today — indeed, that might have come out of the New York Times or many other outlets. Other parts of it mixed in theories on immigration from far right circles in Europe and the U.S. Then it threw in beliefs on “race-mixing” straight from the fever swamps. And then it concluded that the solution is to murder Hispanic immigrants, going on to debate whether an AK-47 or an AR-15 would best do the job. By that point, Crusius had veered far from both reality and basic humanity.
But the question is, was he inspired by President Trump? It is hard to make that case looking at the manifesto in its entirety.
Crusius worried about many things, if the manifesto is any indication. He certainly worried about immigration, but also about automation. About job losses. About a universal basic income. Oil drilling. Urban sprawl. Watersheds. Plastic waste. Paper waste. A blue Texas. College debt. Recycling. Healthcare. Sustainability. And more. Large portions of the manifesto simply could not be more un-Trumpian.
This is a colossal fraud, and it won’t work. The public doesn’t buy it; the candidates aren’t talking about it; when Congress returns in September, Lindsey Graham’s Senate Judiciary Committee will grill the authors of the politicization of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Obama Justice Department as well as the propagators of the false Steele dossier and the fraudulent FISA warrant applications. Graham (R-S.C.), will get the publicity, and the bare-faced liars who chair the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), will be talking to themselves about their “solid evidence” of the president’s crimes. Weissman and the lesser Democratic Torquemadas couldn’t find them; Nadler and Schiff can’t declare what their evidence is (because there is none).
This is the last echo of this attempted rape of the Constitution and no one will be listening when the Congress returns in September. They will listen to the Graham committee’s exposés of the Democrats who acted corruptly, and they will notice the indictments when the special counsel, (John Durham, who unlike Mueller does have full retention of his faculties), starts bringing them down.
The president deliberately has escalated the controversy by attempting to make the four extremist freshman Democratic congresswomen the real face of the Democrats, and by pointing out, in the case of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the inappropriateness of Cummings’ assault on the integrity of the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
The president undoubtedly knows that he is playing with fire assaulting the most holy of the taboos of political correctness so explicitly, though his grasp of the political arithmetic is almost certainly correct. I assume he can reassure his own followers and whatever independent voters may be left in this fierce partisan crossfire that he is not racist. In sober times, it would be clear that no case whatever exists that he is a racist. But these are not sober times and he has contributed something to their insobriety, though—one must remember—in reaction to immense provocations.
Last year, cops in MD serving a red flag removal order, killed a 61 year old man who got upset when they came for his guns. He was flagged because his sister called after they had a political disagreement. These “laws” will continue to be abused like this. https://t.co/rc09rEAuh0
Active shooters are a rounding error. “If you feel the need to take training to protect your life and the lives of your loved ones, take a Defensive Driving Course.” (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
“AT&T employees took bribes to plant malware on the company’s network. DOJ charges Pakistani man with bribing AT&T employees more than $1 million to install malware on the company’s network, unlock more than 2 million devices.”
But here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds. Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks). And as my belly fat has reduced, I do feel better and more energetic.
The weight-loss and triglyceride reduction mirrors my own experience when I first went on Atkins.
New York Times revenues continue to decline. I’m sure that somehow this is all Russia’s fault…
Leftwing protestors call for the murder of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Naturally Twitter suspended the account…of his reelection campaign, for showing videos of leftwing protestors calling for his murder:
Here are the messages that McConnell's re-election campaign received from Twitter telling them that they could not expose the hatred coming from the Democrat Party directed at McConnell pic.twitter.com/sECCRXRYYd
What President Donald Trump’s detractors don’t seem to realize (or refuse to realize) is his genius in instinctively identifying wide-open attacks avenues against the Democratic Party that previous Republicans were too scared to undertake for fear of being called racists. Trump simply doesn’t care what they say about him, since he’s such an accomplished rhetorical counterpuncher, and his latest target is calling out Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings over how horrible parts of Baltimore have become.
The huge advantage Trump starts out with is bedrock truth, given that not only is Baltimore been a declining city with a high crime rate for a long time now, but that major TV networks have been driving this point home with shows like Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire.
So sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people of Baltimore. Statistically, Baltimore ranks last in almost every major category. Cummings has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry, but the public is getting wise to the bad job that he is doing!
….a look, the facts speak far louder than words! The Democrats always play the Race Card, when in fact they have done so little for our Nation’s great African American people. Now, lowest unemployment in U.S. history, and only getting better. Elijah Cummings has failed badly!
Don’t forget that Baltimore is also the city that had a one hour documentary about its rat infestation. When you see how abandoned trash is left for weeks and the city refuses to pick it up, you can see why.
He claims to care about children & their future, however in West Baltimore you will find abandoned homes on every block. Many filled with trash, rodents & homeless looking for shelter. Children live on these streets seen here. This district belongs to @RepCummings. More to come.. pic.twitter.com/8z7tfIHU0q
Let's walk through a typical abandoned row house in West Baltimore. You will find at least one of these on every street. According to residents, there is an uptick in homeless thanks to the increase in drug inventory post 2015 riots. This is @RepCummings district, more to come… pic.twitter.com/KOu87Mqlys
8 blocks of row houses in West Baltimore are currently using water through a system hooked to the fire hydrants. Please listen to Michelle, a life long resident, discuss the water & her message to city officials. This is @RepCummings district. More to come… pic.twitter.com/jBHBzYxtaA
Residents constantly call the city to remove trash, no one shows up for months. Rats & roaches are a problem in almost every home. Illegal immigrants at the border live in better conditions than Americans in West Baltimore. This is @RepCummings district.
Let's continue to expose the truth. This is a neighborhood filled w/families that have small children. West Baltimore is filled with trash thanks to dumping. A problem city officials should have addressed years ago. This is @RepCummings district. @realDonaldTrump
It is so sad to see @VictorBlackwell & @CNN turn the light currently shining on #WestBaltimore into a race issue. This could result in a positive change. @RepCummings could help get his district in order. Listen to one of his constituents explain the "rats & rodents" problem. pic.twitter.com/LTG8AnT27x
In this video, @RepCummings constituents explain how clean Coppin State University is kept, while their neighborhood is used as a dumping ground. I was told if trash was not in marked green cans, the city refused to remove it. More abandoned row houses. #WestBaltimorepic.twitter.com/wuSNoiNJED
More trash. More concerned residents. People live in the home with the silver van. This is @RepCummings district. This has nothing to do with race. Let us all pray the city removes the trash & install cameras to catch the individuals dumping on the property. #WestBaltimorepic.twitter.com/CCaRH5c0aO
How long has the city been ignoring West Baltimore? Here’s a video of an abandoned row home there. There’s a tree in the vacant lot between two row homes where another used to stand that’s now taller than the row home.
Just to be clear I have more videos
I filmed this video to show how long many of the row houses have been sitting abandoned. The tree in this home is taller than the actual home itself. This has nothing to do with race, I was trying to show the plight. Also, I am black 🤷🏽♀️ pic.twitter.com/qlqc1PCCoc
A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband’s committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.
Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state’s gubernatorial race last year. The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.
Rockeymoore runs two entities, a nonprofit group called the Center for Global Policy Solutions and a for-profit consulting firm called Global Policy Solutions, LLC, whose operations appear to have overlapped, according to the IRS complaint filed by watchdog group the National Legal and Policy Center on Monday. The complaint states that the arrangement may have been used to derive “illegal private benefit.”
Global Policy Solutions received more than $6.2 million in grants between 2013 and 2016, according to tax records. Several of the nonprofit group’s financial backers — which included Google, J.P Morgan, and Prudential — have business interests before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Cummings has served as Democratic chairman of the committee since January and previously served as ranking member.
The largest contributor to the nonprofit organization was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a company that is regulated by Cummings’ committee. The foundation, which gave a total of $5.5 million to Rockeymoore’s consulting firm and $5.2 million to her nonprofit group, ceased supporting her groups in 2017.
It’s not like the Democratic Party hasn’t had ample opportunity to clean up Baltimore. The last Republican mayor of Baltimore left in 1967. Since Spiro Agnew resigned in 1969 to serve as Vice President, a Republicans has been governor of Maryland for just over eight years out of those fifty.
So somehow it’s not racist to have government so dysfunctional that its residents have to to live with rats and garbage the government refuses to do anything about, but it is racist to have President Trump point it out.
Democrats evidently believe that they can continue to continue running American cities into the ground and skimming off the patronage without black Americans finally declaring they’ve had enough. President Trump has calculated that the louder Democrats complain about what his statements on Baltimore (and by extension other dysfunctional Democrat one-party cities), the more black Americans will pay attention and realize he’s right.
This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
Snip.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:
Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”
Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.
That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.
Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.
Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.
Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.
The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.
While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.
Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.
Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.
Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.
Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.
In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.
First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.
Snip.
Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.
In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.
On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
TX-10 — Mike McCaul
TX-21 — Chip Roy
TX-22 — Pete Olson
TX-23 — Will Hurd
TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
TX-31 — John Carter
Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.
For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.
Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.
Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:
Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.
That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.
The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.
That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.
While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.
Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) filed articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday under a process that will force a House floor vote by the end of this week.
Green introduced his articles of impeachment after the House passed a resolution largely along party lines condemning Trump for suggesting that four progressive freshman congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — should “go back” to their countries.
Green said that the House should go beyond condemning Trump and move to remove him from office.
It will be the third impeachment floor vote forced by Green in the last two years, but the first since Democrats took control of the House.
Green previously forced procedural votes on articles of impeachment against Trump in December 2017 and January 2018. Both efforts drew the support of about 60 House Democrats.
A total of 84 House Democrats currently support launching an impeachment inquiry, as well as Independent Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), according to The Hill’s whip list. But Democratic leaders — and the majority of the caucus — are not yet on board as they seek to continue ongoing investigations of the Trump administration.
A floor vote will force all House Democrats to go on the record about an issue on which they have yet to reach consensus.
If Nancy Pelosi thought she had a decent chance of successfully impeaching and removing President Trump from office, she’d call a vote in a hearbeat. But not only is there no way the Senate will convict, but after the Mueller vindication and with the strong economy, she probably doesn’t even have the Democratic votes to pass articles of impeachment. A lot of moderate House Democrats (such as they are these days) resent being yoked to the likes of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and pressured by Tom Steyer to vote for impeachment, as they see the issue as a political loser.
Despite clear evidence Bill Clinton lied under oath, impeachment was a political loser for Republicans in 1998, and there’s no evidence it will be any more popular for Democrats in 2020. President Trump is forcing Pelosi hold a vote that pro-impeachment Democrats are probably going to lose, and one that forces moderates to pick between the perpetually outraged nutroots (and big money donors like Steyer) and their own constituents. Moreover, it makes Pelosi looks weak in the face of demands from “the Squad” (as people are calling the radical House members Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley). And, as mentioned previously, Trump knows that AOC’s Squad is extremely unpopular with independent voters.
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
