In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.
The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.
“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.
And far from perfect means it was stuffed with egregious special interest pork. Pelosi, of course, tried to block it because it just didn’t have nearly as much special interest pork as she would like.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency order barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order Tuesday restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine comes after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment for the virus.
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
Snip.
January 15: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
The Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
Add in the proximity of a Level 4 virology lab nearby Ground Zero of COVID-19, which fueled Internet conspiracy theories; the weird rumors about quite strange animals such as snakes and pangolins birthing the infection in primeval open meat markets stocked with live animals in filthy conditions in cages; and pirated videos of supposed patients dropping comatose in crowded hospital hallways. With all of that, we had the ingredients of a Hollywood zombie movie, adding to the frenzy.
Plus, 2020 is an election year — echoing how the 1976 swine flu was politicized. The Left and its media appendages saw COVID-19 as able to do what John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, the Mueller team, and impeachment could not: destroy the hated Trump presidency.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
It is only since the outbreak of the pandemic that Americans have come to learn that China is the major supplier for U.S. medicines. The first drug shortages, due to dependence on China, have already occurred. Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence, but nothing has changed in this most vital of supply chains.
The medicine story is repeated throughout the U.S. economy and the world. The unparalleled economic growth of China over the past generation has hollowed out domestic industries around the globe and also prevented other nations, such as Vietnam, from moving up the value-added chain. Many industries are quite frankly stuck with Chinese companies as their only or primary suppliers. Thus, the costs of finding producers other than China, what is known as “decoupling,” are exorbitant, and few countries currently can replicate China’s infrastructure and workforce.
The world never should have been put at risk by the coronavirus. Equally, it never should have let itself become so economically dependent on China. The uniqueness of the coronavirus epidemic is to bring the two seemingly separate issues together. That is why Beijing is desperate to evade blame, not merely for its initial incompetence, but because the costs of the system it has built since 1980 are now coming into long-delayed focus. Coronavirus is a diabolus ex machina that threatens the bases of China’s modern interaction with foreign nations, from tourism to trade, and from cultural exchange to scientific collaboration.
Xi can best avoid this fate by adopting the very transparency that he and the party have assiduously avoided. Yet openness is a mortal threat to the continued rule of the CCP. The virus thus exposes the CCP’s mortal paradox, one which shows the paralysis at the heart of modern China. For this reason alone, the world’s dependence on China should be responsibly reduced.
ere are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.
The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage. Yet, in a time when millions of Americans are at risk of dying as a direct result of ChiCom conspiracies and the bizarre need of its serfs to eat any weird thing that crawls or slithers within reach of their chopsticks, our useless elite is fixated on making sure we don’t hurt the feelz of the very people who stuck us in this predicament.
Our elite is full of self-important morons who contribute nothing but more dumb in a time when the only thing we have a surplus of is dumb. The real hero is the guy who trucks in a load of whole wheat bread, ribeyes, and low-priced cabernet to the Trader Joe’s, not the Prius-piloting sissy with a Maddow fetish who shops there. The people our elite laughed at, scoffed at, poked at, are the very people who are going to rescue us from the mess that same elite helped make.
Hmm: “Fun facts about Covid Act Now, the org that is mobilizing press, politicians, & citizens to rally behind mass quarantine/lockdown: 1) They were founded by Dem activists. 1 of them, Igor Kofman, works full time to defeat Trump in 2020. Another is a Dem legislator.”
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. The model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and American governments — were undertaken.
After just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
“After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
That’s right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009… when Barack Obama was president.
A different story from the Los Angeles Times published last week goes into more detail about what happened after the swine flu pandemic depleted the supply. According to their story, “After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks […] be replenished by the stockpile.” The problem is that didn’t happen. According to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, about 100 million N95 respirator masks were used up during the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, but, he said was unaware of any “major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”
A place that once gave Democratic native sons Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale 4-1 voting wins and considers the late Sen. Paul Wellstone a local hero has begun to embrace a president who bears little resemblance to them, except that he reversed the “injustice” of an Obama-era order that would have brought the nickel-copper project to a 20-year standstill. On top of that were the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed on most foreign steel, which provided an initial boost to the 5,000 miners still employed in the region’s numerous iron-ore mines that have served as the backbone to the region’s economy.
All of that put Ely in the middle of a political transformation that makes Minnesota the president’s top target among states he lost in 2016 — and potentially a pivot point in the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost the state by 45,000 votes in 2016, a remarkable feat considering how entrenched Democrats have been in the state.
Remember Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Medal of Honor winner I highlighted last Veterans Day? The Navy just commissioned a ship named after him. “The Medal of Honor presented to Williams by President Harry S. Truman two months after the end of World War II is now enshrined in the galley of the ship named in his honor…The Williams, built at a cost of about $500 million, is the second of three Expeditionary Sea Base ships.” ESB ships are interesting multi-use ships built on oil tanker hulls:
The ESD and ESB ships were originally called the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the MLP Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), respectively. In September 2015, the Secretary of the Navy re-designated these hulls to conform to traditional three-letter ship designations.
The design of these ships is based on the Alaska class crude oil carrier, which was built by General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO). Leveraging commercial designs ensures design stability and lower development costs
The USNS Montford Point (T-ESD 1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD 2) are configured with the Core Capability Set (CCS), which consists of a vehicle staging area, vehicle transfer ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) vessel lanes to support its core equipment transfer requirements. With a 9,500 nautical mile range at a sustained speed of 15 knots, these approximately 80,000 tons, 785-foot ships leverage float-on/float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability. Additionally, the ships’ size allows for 25,000 square feet of vehicle and equipment stowage space and 380,000 gallons of JP-5 fuel storage.
USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), the first ESB delivered, along with follow ships Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) and Miguel Keith (ESB 5), are being optimized to support a variety of maritime based missions including Special Operations Force (SOF) and Airborne Mine Counter Measures (AMCM). The ESBs include a four spot flight deck, mission deck and hangar, are designed around four core capabilities: aviation facilities, berthing, equipment staging support, and command and control assets.
I would think this little tidbit would get more play, since the media repeatedly assured us that Wokescold Moppet was The Most Important Person In The World.
Still more efficient and straightforward than ObamaCare:
Thanks everybody for their entries and nominations…..but there’s one clear winner of the internet today…..round of applause please people…#WINternetpic.twitter.com/ToNA7bitpQ
Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)
In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…
The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.
It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.
Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”
But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.
How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…
As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.
Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.
Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.
The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.
Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.
This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”
Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).
But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.
There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.
By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.
Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.
Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.
On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.
Snip.
The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.
The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.
True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:
In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.
The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.
And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.
But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.
And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.
Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.
The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.
While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.
In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.
Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.
Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
A rifle firing .50 BMG is the highest caliber weapon you can own without a special permit. The MK211 Raufoss is a heavy-core/explosive/incendiary .50 BMG round usually employed for anti-matériel and long-range sniping purposes. I was unabale to find any for sale online, but in one of the videos, he said they typically go for $65 a round.
What happens when this round reaches out and touches something?
Bad things for the recipient. Let’s take a look.
.50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. Hummer window glass and a ballistic gel dummy head (which is a cool thing and and of itself):
.50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a quarter-inch steel plate mounted to a van:
.50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a tactical dummy:
.50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round (plus various armor piercing rounds and a SLAP round) vs. 3 inches of steel plates:
The Raufoss round starts about 4 minutes into the video, whereas the SLAP round starts around 5 minutes in.
And finally, a .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a running V8 engine:
So Bernie Sanders won 6,000 more votes than Pete Buttigieg, but by the amazingly fair and in no way flawed or crooked process Mayor Pete won two more “state delegate equivalents” in Iowa than Bernie. How many actual national delegates get apportioned to who remains to be seen. Elizabeth Warren came in third, while Joe Biden came in fourth with just enough votes to put him over the 15% threshold to win delegates.
Speaking of weird Iowa voting artifacts, enjoy a long, detailed, borderline tedious discussion of how “satellite” voting sites counting methods might or might not have screwed Sanders depending on which type of rounding is used.
This morning’s official Cornoavirus totals:
Total Infected:31,522 (up from 9,776 last Friday)
Total Deaths: 638
Total Recovered: 1,741
Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 29 (China (including Hong Kong), Singapore, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Germany, the United States of America, Malaysia, Vietnam, Macau, Canada, France, United Arab Emirates, India, Italy, Russia, Philippines, UK, Cambodia, Finland, Napal, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Sri Lanka; there’s also an “Others” which I assume is Chinese territory, but not mainland China or Hong Kong)
In the U.S. Coronavirus cases have been spotted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Benito (CA), Seattle, Phoenix, Madison, Chicago and Boston, plus London, Ontario and Toronto. No deaths in U.S. locations.
Of course, all that assumes that China isn’t lying about the extent of infections there. Briefly leaked graphics from China tech conglomerate Tencent suggests that deaths may be two orders of magnitude higher than what China has admitted to.
More on the same theme from ZeroHedge, also inconclusive. I don’t have the deep biological background to remotely evaluate the technical claims. “Plausible but thus far unproven” seems to be the most logical stance based on what we currently know.
Speaking of ZeroHedge, they were suspended by Twitter for fingering the identity of Wuhan biolab researcher Dr. Peng Zhou. Awfully shady, Twitter…
The NeverTrumpers all follow and retweet each other, creating an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing their Trump Derangement Syndrome. As Bush establishment Republicans, they would be delighted with the open borders and the endless wars of past Republican presidents. When confronted with a truly conservative presidential administration, they run like scalded dogs.
Boom! Another al Qaeda leader dirtnapped, this time “Qasim al-Rimi, a founder and the leader of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and a deputy to al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” taken out in Yemen.
“Cook Political Report Shifts Alabama Senate Race to Lean Republican After Doug Jones Votes to Convict.” Wait, how was it not already Leans Republican based on the facts that: A.) It’s Alabama, and B.) It’s Alabama?
Former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi has died. He was a corrupt and mildly brutal scumbag, but far from the worst on the continent, and he prevented Kenya from descending into the violence and instability that plagued Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe (among many others).
I was on vacation awhile, avoiding the news. How’d the #Mueller thing work out? The #impeachment scam? Who won the #Iowa caucuses? Is #MichaelAvenatti still a contender for the Democratic nomination for President? How’s #JeffreyEpstein doing?
Massive “monster” galaxy has died (i.e., it stopped producing new stars). Or rather, it did this some 12 billion years ago, due to that pesky “speed-of-light” thing. I blame Thanos. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, 49, is the son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, and Republicans have called for him to testify during the Ukraine-related Senate impeachment trial against President Trump.
On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election.” “‘When the Founders wrote that founding document thing, they never imagined there would be electoral outcomes that Democrats did not agree with.’ Democrats also said they even have hard evidence that the 2016 election was compromised by Republicans voting for Trump.”
Final Brexit bill passes. The EU is reportedly quite eager to hurt its largest trading partner to spite its face…
Giant warehouse explosion in Houston. No reports of injuries, but the explosion was said to be heard 20 miles away… Update: Now hearing it was a manufacturing facility, with a propylene tank as the suspected cause, with two dead and one missing.
The Chinese government has placed the city of Wuhan under quarantine in an attempt to stop the spread of the deadly, pneumonia-like virus called 2019-nCoV.
According to a Chinese news bulletin, all passenger transportation out of the city has been temporarily suspended. That means that the city’s 11 million residents, hundreds of whom have fallen ill and at least nine of whom have died from the viral outbreak, are trapped unless they receive special permission to leave.
The virus quickly spread to nearby Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, and a traveler from Wuhan also carried it to the U.S.
In the face of a global outbreak, the Chinese government has been trying to maintain control of the narrative, censoring media and deleting social media posts that don’t align with its official statements.
Last coronavirus death count is 26 people, with more than 30 million people under quarantine. By contrast, the 2014-2016 west African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people.
Smear someone as a “white nationalist” on the says so of the SPLC, just because they want to enforce border control laws? Enjoy your $5 million lawsuit.
Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”
Media estimates of 22,000 for the Second Amendment rally are probably too low. “I think when all is said and done, the crowd of gun rights supporters attending Lobby Day on Monday probably was double the official figure and approached 50,000.”
In addition to Steve Adler all but personally inviting every transient drug addict in the state to take up residence in Austin, the killer was out on personnel recognizance bond after committing a burglary, thanks to yet another Austin City Council decision.
Amazon sues to stop to stop Microsoft $10 billion “war cloud” project for the Pentagon, evidently because President Trump is a big meanie who didn’t let them get the contract. Eh, Pentagon procurement bidding is pretty opaque under the best of circumstances, much less under the zillions of possible variations on setting up a cloud infrastructure. There’s no way whether to determine this is a real grievance or just sour grapes over losing a big contract.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald charged with hacking in Brazil. Though in this case, “hacking” seems to amount to “publishing embarrassing information about members of the Brazilian government.”
In praise of Christopher Tolkien. It’s probably only a matter of time until Disney buys the Tolkien estate now…or someone far worse.
What if they had a Second Amendment rally in Virginia and and nobody got shot?
You and I know that there was never going to be any violence coming from Second Amendment advocates, and that if any started it was going to come from antifa. But oddly enough, antifa didn’t seem interested in showing up to confront armed opponents.
Funny how that happens.
It must have been a great blow to an MSM falsely accusing the event of being a “white supremacist” rally.
Everything Northam, many in media, and gun control advocates tried to hype ahead of Virginia’s rally didn’t happen. Second Amendment advocates aren’t like violent Antifa, yet barely a peep of condemnation of those frequent, violent actions. Shameful. https://t.co/HB8dx7YULE
“Nobody has so much as fired a shot. This is an unbelievable tragedy,” said one teary-eyed MSNBC reporter, clearly caught up in the anguish of the moment. “It’s tragic that we live in a country where reporters who are just minding their own business trying to push a narrative can have everything ripped away from them in an instant when protesters refuse to shoot at people.”
(Do I actually need to flag the preceding from the Babylon Bee?)
The media was hoping for a second Charlottesville, but without paid agitators and a police force willing to channel two sets of protestors into each other, it never materialized.
Again, funny how that happens. There were also too many non-white attendees to pass it off as a “white supremacist” rally:
I waited to see if any police were going to say anything to a black guy open carrying during Lobby Day today. Didn’t happen once. Not one side eye and I had plenty of black men enter our gun giveaway for a Taurus 1911. We have away a Diamondback AR-15 last month.
Iran news, analysis, etc. dominates today’s LinkSwarm!
“The targeting of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force and arguably the second most powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a major blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran. His death will likely result in a devastating chain of suspicion and insecurity in Iran’s nodes of power.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
This week, President Donald Trump launched a global round of teeth gnashing when he ordered the killing of the greatest terrorist leader in the modern Middle East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was unquestionably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and thousands of others throughout the Middle East — mostly Muslim. His global terror network ran from South America to Europe to Africa to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Soleimani was an unparalleled organizer and a pitiless murderer. His death was richly earned.
But for many in the media and on the domestic and international left, Trump’s action was precipitously “provocative.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Soleimani’s killing — which came directly after a Soleimani-approved terror assault on America’s embassy in Baghdad and amidst reported further plans for escalated terror against American targets — “disproportionate.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested that Trump, not the Iranians, had “escalated” the situation. Former Vice President Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”
This reaction has been magnified by the media, many of whom have been speculating about the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Think pieces have been written about whether the United States will reactivate the draft (spoiler alert: No, we won’t). Musings have filled the newspapers about the supposed conflagration prompted not by Iranian evil but by Trumpian reactivity.
All of this smacks less of legitimate concern about what comes next than it does of sheer panic that Trump has overturned a decade of American and European appeasement of the Iranian regime. Ben Rhodes, former President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, architect of the Iran deal and an overt liar who told the American public that Iran was on its way to moderation if only the United States would loosen economic restrictions on the terror state, has placed blame for volatility squarely before Trump. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser during the Iran deal and another overt liar who told the American public that Islamic terror against our Benghazi embassy was rooted in anger over a YouTube video, soberly informed Americans that “Americans would be wise to brace for war.” Biden suggested that in throwing out the Iran deal, Trump had paved the way for war — and, oh, by the way, the Iran deal was “airtight.”
This is a deliberate misreading of history designed to absolve the Obama administration of its Iran policy debacle. The administration pursued a policy of strengthening Iran economically — and did so while openly acknowledging that Iran would use that newly gained economic strength to pursue terrorism and ballistic missile testing. In speaking of the sanctions relief given to Iran, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained in January 2016, “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”
Snip.
Then Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani. Suddenly, we have been informed by dishonest Democrats and their media allies, Iran has gone rogue.
Nonsense. Iran has been rogue for decades. The Iran deal was simply an attempt to whistle past the graveyard with the terror regime — to pay it off long enough so that President Barack Obama could declare the problem handled. This was, after all, the Obama strategy in Crimea and Syria: Declare a red line; run away from it; pretend that pusillanimous inaction is bravery and deterrence provocation.
Besides Rosenstein, the other defendants named in the complaint are Shawn Henry, Sean Wesley Bridges, Robert Clarke, and Ryan White.
In 2010, then FBI Director Robert Mueller named Shawn Henry as the executive assistant director (EAD) of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch (CCRSB).
Henry left the FBI in 2012 and now is president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm hired by Democratic National Committee to examine its computer network in 2016 after it had been hacked. Crowdstrike ultimately determined Russia had hacked the DNC emails.
Shaun Wesley Bridges served as a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for approximately six years, according to the complaint.
Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, including drugs.
In 2015 and 2017, Bridges was convicted of corruption related to his government work, and is now serving a prison sentence.
Defendant Robert Clarke was also a member of the Silk Road Task Force and Ryan White worked as an undercover informant for the DOJ.
White also worked as a contractor operating out of the Baltimore office under a group supervised by Rosenstein, according to the complaint.
Lots of interesting information here, especially the Crowstrike connection. Funny how the same names just keep coming up again and again when it comes to Justice Department abuse of power under Obama… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hey look, it’s another Democratic Party dark money group! “Mind the Gap, the secretive group quietly reshaping big-money politics in Silicon Valley, is aiming to spend as much as $140 million to boost Democrats in the 2020 election.”
Waiting for President Donald Trump in Toledo:
JAW-DROPPING:
Look at how massive the line is for the #TrumpRally in Toledo tonight!
No longer news: Mexicans kill four other Mexican. Why it should be news: In Kansas City.
Some places in the United States have a long history of Latino settlement, with communities stretching back for generations, even centuries. One is not surprised by the large Mexican-American populations in California, Arizona or Texas, and we’re accustomed to Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans in New York, etc. However, on does not think of Kansas City this way, so when the headlines inform us that three guys named Villanueva-Morales, Alatorre and Caballero are charged with killing a combined total of seven people named Meza, Calderon, Anaya, Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Rodriguez and Rodriguez-Santilla in Wyandotte County, Kansas — well, what the heck is going on here? It appears, for example, that two gunmen can open fire in a Kansas City bar without risk that any of their bullets will hit someone who was actually born in America.
As evidence that our immigration problem is absolutely out of control, this situation in Kansas City is rather conclusive, but notice that this criminal mayhem in Kansas is just “local news.” If some deranged “alt-right” white guy had shot four Mexicans in Kansas City, CNN would be providing around-the-clock updates, but because it’s Mexicans killing Mexicans, nobody at the networks seems to care.
“Black voters ‘abandoned’ by Democrats warm to Trump.
Former NFL player Jack Brewer once raised campaign money for President Barack Obama, but now he’s among the increasing number of black voters who support President Trump.
“There is an awakening going on right now in the country,” Mr. Brewer said of black voters who traditionally support Democrats. “I’m going to take the guy who’s actually putting in the policies that are going to make life better for my young black son and my young black daughter, versus somebody who gives me lip service — like, unfortunately, the Democrats have done for our community for years.”
Mr. Trump and his reelection team are aggressively courting black voters amid a strong economy that has reduced black unemployment to 5.5%, lowest in history. The Trump campaign launched its “Black Voices for Trump” coalition in Atlanta last month.
Snip.
There’s some evidence that the president’s policies and campaign outreach are making inroads with black voters. Three polls in November showed Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating among black voters in the 30% to 35% range, a significant increase over other surveys that have generally shown black voter support of less than 10%.
“I’ll remind you, the president received 8% of the black vote in 2016,” said a senior Trump campaign official.
The president and his campaign advisers know that poll numbers and approval ratings don’t always translate into votes, but they think Mr. Trump has a good chance to significantly increase the level of support he receives from black voters in 2020.
“If you look at how they attacked him for being a racist during the [2016] campaign, I think his policies have [produced] results for the black community that have been extraordinary,” the campaign official said during a recent briefing.
Said another Trump adviser, “One thing the president’s done is to try to govern for everybody. Even those who didn’t vote for him in the last election are now seeing a lot of results in their communities, and we’re seeing the poll numbers amongst all those groups grow in a way that creates a lot of opportunities.”
Trump advisers point to other policies that are helping, such as criminal justice reform that lets more offenders win early release from prison and a second chance, and increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Mr. Brewer, a lifelong Democrat and entrepreneur who played for three NFL teams, said Mr. Trump is working much harder than any Republican candidate in his lifetime to reach out to black voters.
“Donald Trump will get over 20% of the black vote,” Mr. Brewer said in an interview. “That is what’s going to win the election. Why? Because there hasn’t been a Republican to even try to go in and talk to the black community. They don’t go there. They don’t even try. I think he’s trying, finally.”
It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.
Snip.
Plenty of better writers than me—Douglas Murray, John Gray—have debunked the notion that the only reason low-income voters embrace right-wing politics is because they’re drunk on a cocktail of ethno-nationalism and false hope (with Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin taking turns as mixologists). It surely has more to do with the Left’s sneering contempt for the “deplorables” in the flyover states as they shuttle back and forth between their walled, cosmopolitan strongholds. As Corbyn’s policy platform in Britain’s election showed, left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss. Get woke, go broke.
Will the Democrats learn from Labour’s mistake and make Jo Biden the candidate—or even Pete Buttigieg? I wouldn’t bet on it. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face. As I said to a friend last night after the election results starting rolling in, fighting political opponents like Jeremy Corbyn is a bit like competing in a round-the-world yacht race against a team that thinks the earth is flat. It can be kind of fun, even exhilarating. But until they acquire a compass and learn how to read a map, it’s not really a fair fight.
The Babylon Bee explains impeachment. “Trump has committed some very serious offenses, from not being a Democrat to being a Republican. He also won the 2016 election, which rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Last week, a must-count indictment was unsealed against Ahmad Khawaja, the CEO of an online payment processing company. He and several others were charged with making and concealing improper and excessive campaign contributions, most related to the 2016 election cycle. Specifically, Khawaja is charged with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of making conduit contributions, three counts of causing excessive contributions, 13 counts of making false statements, 13 counts of causing false records to be filed, and one count of obstruction of a federal grand jury investigation.
Among the recipients: Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Adam Schiff and Amy Klobuchar. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Israel has a new laser system to shoot down incendiary balloons launched from Gaza.
Seattle waitress now unemployed thanks to minimum wage laws. “Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.” Just like conservatives predicted.
I think I’m gonna end up seeing Rise of Skywalker on an airplane at some point, on the back of the seat in front of me. That’s about my interest level. There were inklings of it in the first movie, if you want to go back that far, but it really seems like the new trilogy wasn’t conceived of as a trilogy at all. It’s genuinely hard to believe. And not just because of what Disney managed to accomplish with their Marvel project, making an ecosystem of movies in different genres and then somehow crafting a kind of metamovie to conclude it. Obviously, they can do it. That they didn’t – and that they expected us to go along with it – is incredible.
Star Wars isn’t Holy to me. Like a lot of people who grew up when I did, I do like it. But there’s a hard cap on precisely how disappointed I can be in it. Seeing the whole thing transformed into some kind of cultural shibboleth when it can barely hold itself together narratively film to film, it’s like… these movies aren’t up to the task. It doesn’t even matter what task you had in mind. A full-throated defense of these things is either unconscious, freelance PR, corporate ring-kissing, or invertebrate worship of a graven idol. They shouldn’t come back to theatres until they can deliver something that isn’t such a gruesome indictment of their hegemonic cultural control.
Speaking of Disney cultural hegemony, Hollywood box office is is down 4% from last year, despite Avengers: Endgame. Just imagine the horrific 2020 Hollywood is going to enjoy in 2020 without a big tentpole and TDS-suffering actors suppressing box office with wokeoffs during the 2020 election. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A Sydney resident came home to find a massive huntsman spider being dragged away by a spider wasp—and snapped this terrifying picture of the incident. https://t.co/NxcgV3DSqMpic.twitter.com/gGv4FWy9nP
A Texas resident grabbed his shotgun and shot and killed three men when they allegedly broke into his home, authorities said.
Early Monday morning, one of the two residents of a trailer home in Channelview — about 20 miles east of Houston — heard a “commotion” outside, according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. He then saw several men in dark clothing — possibly one armed — force their way inside, the sheriff said at a news conference.
That resident ran to hide, while his roommate, armed with a shotgun, exchanged gunfire with the suspects, Gonzalez said.
The armed resident shot and killed three suspected home invaders, Gonzalez said.
A FedEx driver suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach before he pulled out his own gun and killed the armed robber who attacked him, police said.
The incident occurred in the 600-block of Unruh Avenue at approximately 7:10 p.m. on Tuesday night, WPVI reported.
The 32-year-old FedEx driver had just finished making a delivery at a home when he was confronted by the 27-year-old armed suspect, according to WCAU.
The robber stole multiple packages from the FedEx truck before he shot the driver in the abdomen, police said.
That’s when the driver pulled out his own gun and retired fire, hitting his attacker multiple times.
The suspect made off with several packages as he fled the scene, while the wounded FedEx driver jumped back into the delivery truck and drove to a nearby ACME store to get help, WPVI reported.
Driver was stabilized at the hospital. The perp? Not so much:
Meanwhile, officers located an unconscious man in an alley in the 1400-block of Creston Street suffering from gunshot wounds to his back and chest, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
He was carrying packages that had been stolen from the FedEx driver, according to WCAU.
The suspect was transported to Einstein Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Also in Pennsylvania: “A man was sent to an area hospital after being shot while trying to burglarize a home in Fayette County Friday night.”
Next up: Would-be armed robber dirtnapped by bystander:
Although I know much of the Midwest has already been blessed with several feet of global warming, winter doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. In the meantime, finish up your Christmas shopping (if you haven’t already) and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
Brexit bill passes by huge majority. Britain is set to leave the EU by January 31, 2020. I’m putting this first because Brexit is far more important in the long run than the impeachment farce.
The amazing psychic powers of Instapundit. From 2017: “Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait. They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.”
But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.
Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?
The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?
Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?
The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?
The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?
Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.
Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.
Ironically, Trump’s opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.
If you want to know how it’s playing out in America, check out this tweet from PolitiBunny, who was so hardcore #NeverTrump she voted for Egg McMuffin in 2016:
No amount of persuasion, begging, or even outright harassment could convince me to vote for Trump in 2016.
Democrats not only made me a Trump voter last night, but I’m officially ready to do what I can to help him get re-elected.
The House passes the USMCA free trade deal, and I expect senate approval to be quick. USMCA will have longer and more lasting consequences than the silly theater the Democrats put on Wednesday.
Of the 65 deadliest cities in America, over 90% have Democratic mayors, and over 70% have not had Republican mayors in a long, long time. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans left office in 1872… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.
In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”
But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.
Snip.
The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way. Marxist? St. Greta? Well, let’s take a look at what was carved on the tablets she recently brought down from Mount Socialism:
“Schoolchildren, young people, and adults all over the world will stand together, demanding that our leaders take action, not because we want them to, but because the science demands it,” she said. “That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.”
Wait, “the science demands” that we “dismantle” all our “[c]olonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression?” Now, what science exactly is that? Is it geology? Physics? Phrenology maybe?
How stupid do they think people are? Very. And to judge by the judges at TIME, they’re often right. Maybe Greta never heard of Siberia or Cambodia, but we have. Screw that – if she wants to impose her masters’ Marxist fantasies on us, she’ll need to be packing something deadlier than “How dare you!”
Muslims across India staged angry protests over new legislation that grants citizenship rights for refugees fleeing Islamist persecution in the neighboring countries.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed by the Lower House of the Indian parliament by 293 to 82 votes, opens the path to naturalization for the followers of six faiths, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, but excludes Muslims.
Muslim mobs took to streets in several Indian cities, setting fire to vehicles, throwing stones, and hurling home-made bombs at security forces called in to restore order, Indian newspapers report. Left-wing student groups joined the protesters. They blockaded campuses in India’s capital New Delhi.
On the one hand, 95% of the time it is in fact Muslims who are persecuting the members of other religions. On the other, the trend in India under Modi has been toward a Hindu religious-ethno state, and things there could turn very bad, very quickly for the Muslim minority there. Muslims constitute only 14% or so of India’s population, but 14% of 1.3 billion is still some 182 million people. And by “very bad” I mean “possibly Rwanda-level bad,” only at 10 times the scale…
“Poland may have to leave EU, Supreme Court warns.” Hey, I bet I know at least a couple of countries who would be happy to sign free trade deals if they did…
I do not think it is a secret that Vox Media’s employment model has long been unsustainable. They use “contractor” designations to avoid all sorts of labor laws, including providing minimum wage and benefits — and they well exceed the intended use of “contractor.” I’ve published 1,304 articles in 8 years at Clips Nation. That’s not contract work. When I am on the site every day and have day-to-day oversight from corporate, that’s not contract work. Everyone, including SB Nation, has known that this model is unsustainable. While I won’t publicly disclose the numbers, and SB Nation limits our access to a lot of data, I am certain that Clips Nation generates enough revenue to support multiple employees, even when you account for the money that needs to support other aspects of the site (marketing, software, etc).
The state of California is cracking down on companies like SB Nation who are exploiting the “contractor” loophole, as it well should. Unfortunately, Vox Media is predictably unwilling to cease being greedy. In order to attempt to protect their disproportionate and exploitative revenue share from team sites, Vox has decided to eliminate about 200 of these contractor positions — every contractor in California, including myself, Robert, and our staff writers, editors, and podcasters in paid roles — and replace them with a handful of full-time employees who are going to work as a team to run SB Nation’s 25 team sites in California.
I doubt he knows how profitable Vox is. It’s entirely possible it loses money, like many online “media empires.” But I sincerely doubt Vox held a gun to his head those eight years. If he feels exploited for work he voluntarily agreed to do at the wages offered, he only has himself to blame. This is not to say that Vox doesn’t suck; it does. But this situation sucks not due to Vox, but due to the California state laws of which this freelancer so obviously approves.
Here’s an interview with Burt Ward, Robin on the 1960’s Batman TV show, about some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Nowadays he and his wife run a dog rescue center, where they’ve eventuality saved the lives of more than 15,000. Good on you, Burt.
