Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.
The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.
For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.
The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?
There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”
There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.
It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…
Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”
he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.
As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.
Republican, bad.
Democrat, good.
Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.
There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.
There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.
Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.
“It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.
And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.
A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.
Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.
From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.
Snip.
“Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”
So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…
Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.
And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.
The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.
Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).
Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.
Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.
“I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”
Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:
PROSECUTOR: "You decided you needed to run because of the fire?
Text I got from a friend re: The Rittenhouse Judge
“So we’re in essence at a place now where news is so filtered you have to find some random dude in Ohio who posts the entire clip on YouTube sans any commentary, any editing, any title cards, etc to really know what happened.” pic.twitter.com/f92L7lSraZ
These Antifa dumbfucks were literally chasing a guy who was carrying a rifle. Then they threw him to throw ground and tried to shoot him. What did they think was going to happen? pic.twitter.com/4EMJRDM9lN
Why are so many Democrats advocating for Kyle Rittenhouse to be found guilty of murder and locked up the rest of his life? Regardless of the evidence. Why?
I don’t think the progressive out there really understand how much the rioting was a turn off to moderates or just left of center types, and left leaning news media coverage was attempting to gaslight us while we watched it all on tv and social media for ourselves
After you learn you have been duped by the left-leaning press on the Kyle Rittenhouse story, do an Internet search on "Fine People Hoax," first on DuckDuckGo and then on Google. Compare.
Make sure to wear a hat because your head is about to explode.
Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.
Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”
Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.
Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.
While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.
Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.
“Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.
We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”
Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)
We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.
The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.
The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.
The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.
The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.
Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:
The genocidal Chinese government and the insecure tyrant behind it all XI JINPING must not be allowed to host the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
Biden flogs the Fine People Hoax yet again, wants to lock down the nation yet again, more DNC fallout, and a look at Biden’s foreign policy team in waiting (and how some got paid by China). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
There are a few safe bets in life – the sun will rise in the East, the mainstream media will tongue-bathe the Dems, the Never Trump sissies of the Ahoy crew will die alone, forgotten, and unloved – but there is no safer bet than on Joe Biden not taking the debate stage with Donald Trump.
If he does debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is toast. And if he doesn’t debate Trump, Grandpa Badfinger is also toast. Either way, that post-moderate muppet is a breakfast entrée. Dodging the debate is merely his least bad choice, sort of like going with chlamydia over syphilis.
The media and the Biden campaign are doing everything they can to avoid the moment where the public consensus coalesces around Biden’s obsolescence. You know how that goes. One day, a politician is defined by his positions. The next day, there’s a moment in time when a new perception gets locked in stone, where the mere mention of his name gets people nodding and a single word seems to define him forever. With Biden, the word will be “senile,” just like with Bill Clinton the word is “humidor.”
And Trump is going to define Slow Joe mercilessly, but not quite yet. Those of us swimming in the cesspool of politics every day see Trump’s gentle pokes about Rip van Wrinkled’s manifest mental deterioration, but it’s clear that Trump is holding his big guns in reserve for the moment. Why? Well, Trump certainly wants the Democrats to go all-in and formally nominate Joethuselah before he unleashes hell like Maximus upon my uppity German tribesman ancestors. Further, you don’t want to lower expectations so much that Oldfinger gets pronounced competent simply by appearing in public without drooling all over his bib.
But mostly, Trump knows that normal people aren’t paying attention yet. In September, they will take a break from trying not to be bankrupted by stupid pols panicking over the flu and from dealing with how their kids are not going to school because teacher unions members can’t take the same minimal risk that Trader Joe’s baggers have been enduring since Day One. When people start paying attention after Labor Day, they will be expecting to see Share A Beer Joe and instead see Share An Ensure Joe.
And the Dems know that Trump will then paint Biden in all the colors of the dementia rainbow.
Even as he was leaving office, Vice President Joe Biden and his cohorts carved out their own fiefdom within the empire of liberal philanthropy and academia. They await the time when they will be able to use the trappings of public office to spread largesse and grease palms once again. As the presumptive nominee struggles to maintain a presentable and coherent front in public, the phalanx of aides and stooges around him provide an example of how lifelong politicians build personal machines using donor money, some of it from offshore strategic rivals like China.
Snip
But then there are the benchwarmers, who lack the name recognition or ambition to hack it on their own. For them, it was announced on February 1, 2017, a mere week and a half after Biden left office, that there would be the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement(PBC), a name that perhaps Derek Zoolander brainstormed for them. But rather than have the PBC on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, it was announced at the outset that its location would be in Washington, D.C. with only a satellite office back at Penn.
The PBC’s address is 101 Constitution Ave. N.W., putting it across the street from Capitol Hill and within the sixth most expensive real estate market in the United States, averaging $32 per square foot—more than Philadelphia. Biden himself would be called the “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor,” whatever that means. In its announcement, the Penn Biden Center claimed that it “promises significant impact for both Penn’s teaching and research missions. As the Presidential Practice Professor, Biden will hold joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences, with a secondary affiliation in the Wharton School.”
Biden does have a profile on Annenberg’s site as a member of the teaching faculty, but according to Philadelphia magazine in 2019 he never taught a single course despite earning $775,000 in salary over two years, almost twice the annual income of the average Penn professor.
So what exactly does the Penn Biden Center do? Looking into its staff, the PBC appears to be a cushy green room for old Obama Administration aides waiting for new gigs once Polident Joe gets back into office. It doesn’t have a class or event schedule, and only two events are listed on its Facebook page history, the last one being in Chicago in November 2017. Its Twitter account mostly retweets articles by and interviews with members of its staff on niche websites for international affairs specialists like World Politics Review and Balkan Insider. In effect, the University of Pennsylvania has loaned its branding to become an expensive PR firm for Joe Biden’s foreign policy. Luckily for Penn, it’s a win-win situation for them in terms of revenue.
In May the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint against the PBC alleging that Penn had violated federal law by not disclosing the source of $22 million in anonymous donations from China (out of a total of almost $70 million from there). When this relationship was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a spokesperson for the American Council on Education complained that there is not enough guidance from the Department of Education about how to report the donations.
ACE, a lobbying group for colleges and universities that two months later lobbied Capitol Hill for a “floor” of $47 billion in coronavirus relief, apparently thinks that demanding disclosure of the giver’s identity for a donation of over $250,000 is a “gotcha.” And who are the people who actually run the PBC?
Ariana Berengaut (Director Programs, Partnerships, and Strategic Planning)—former speechwriter for Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and, before that, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.
Spencer Boyer (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and National Intelligence Officer for Europe.
Michael Carpenter (Managing Director)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, White House foreign policy advisor to Biden, and Director for Russia on the National Security Council.
Dan Erikson (Senior Fellow)—former special advisor to Biden and senior advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department.
Juan González (Senior Fellow)—former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, special advisor to Joe Biden, and National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere.
Colin Kahl (Strategic Consultant)—senior advisor to both Obama and Biden on foreign policy and national security affairs. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from 2009 to 2011, National Security Advisor to Biden.
Jeffrey Prescott (Strategic Consultant)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States for the NSC.
Caroline Tess (Senior Fellow)—special assistant to Obama and senior director for legislative affairs at the NSC.
More details:
In 2016 Michael Carpenter, while still serving at the Defense Department, agreed with a report by the Rand Corporation that Russia could defeat NATO in less than three days. Carpenter is a staunch supporter of increasing U.S. confrontation with Russia. In 2017 he recommended deploying a combat brigade to Eastern Europe as a deterrent in his testimony before Congress’s joint Helsinki Commission hearing, a move that the Trump Administration has agreed with through steps such as deploying 500 soldiers to Lithuania in 2019. Carpenter consistently lobbied for the successful expansion of NATO to Montenegro, while warning of “Russian influence” on its election. With an active duty military numbering only 2,400, an air force consisting largely of converted civil aircraft along with a remnant of the old Yugoslav Navy, Montenegro’s membership in NATO is more a liability than an asset.
Daniel Erikson also happens to work for Blue Star Strategies, a strategic consulting company that worked with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which Biden’s son Hunter served as a no-show board member earning at least $50,000 a month. Senate Homeland Security Committee members accused Blue Star of dragging its feet in producing documents to the committee regarding its dealings with Burisma. In June Ukraine’s anti-corruption prosecutor announced that Burisma’s founder had attempted to bribe an official probing the company in order to drop the investigation.
Potentially the most controversial PBC bullpen member is Colin Kahl, who in September 2012 defended the Obama Administration against critics from the Mitt Romney campaign about its performance during the Arab Spring in the wake of the Benghazi terror attack earlier that month. He claimed that Iran had failed to take advantage of the Arab Spring earlier that year in an op-ed for Foreign Policy. The irony of the statement is that a result of that wave of uprisings is the replacement of two autocratic but stable regimes in Yemen and Syria with bloody proxy conflicts where Iran is deeply involved.
There is apparently bad blood between Kahl and the pro-Israel community. In September 2012, Kahl was blamed by Democratic insiders for a flap at the party convention in which it was omitted that the party seeks to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In 2015, while serving as Biden’s advisor on the Iran Nuclear Deal, Kahl spoke to War on the Rocks—a national security insiders’ podcast—to defend the agreement. He brushed aside criticisms that it would lead to increased terror activity by Iran. He also dismissed criticism that the deal would encourage nuclear proliferation elsewhere.
Just six months later North Korea successfully tested its fourth nuclear weapon, thereby validating those fears. In 2018 an Israeli spy firm Black Cubewas alleged to have tried to lure Kahl and fellow PBC fellow Catherine Tess into providing information on Iranian assets that could be seized as part of civil litigation. It has been reported by Al-Monitor that Kahl is handling the Iran brief on the Biden campaign after having condemned the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, and bemoaoning subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. In May 2019 he joined Rachel Maddow in order to hype fears of a U.S. invasion of Iran by President Trump, which of course later events proved was the opposite of the president’s goal. His inclusion in a future administration is sure to lead to friction with both Israel and the Sunni monarchies on the Persian Gulf if the new administration seeks to reimpose the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Joe Biden’s response to the virus makes Trump’s look masterful. Biden and his team made a series of statements in the first few months of the year that denied the seriousness of the virus and criticized President Trump for taking steps to prevent its spread.
This, too, was to be expected. Hack that he is, Biden has been wrong on almost every national security issue for as long as anyone can remember. He even advised Barack Obama against undertaking the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Karl Rove put together a list of Biden’s greatest misses on the coronavirus. He presented it on one of the Fox News programs last night.
Here is Rove’s list:
1) Jan. 31: In response to Trump’s travel ban, Biden says “this is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia.”
2) Early February: Biden public health advisory committee member says the coronavirus is less lethal than the SARS virus and a top aide says this “is probably not a serious epidemic.”
3) Mid February: Top Biden adviser says “we don”t have a Covid epidemic, we have a fear epidemic.”
4) Late February: Biden health adviser Zeke Emmanuel says many experts view the virus “like the flu” and expect it to dissipate with warmer weather moving to the southern hemisphere. Masks will not help, he adds.
5) Early March: Biden holds a mass indoor rally and criticizes the European travel ban as ineffective and “counterproductive.”
6) Mid March: Regarding Trump’s January 31st decision to close travel to China, Biden says “stop the xenophobic fear mongering.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor David Muir on Friday that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.
“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Before Trump, cartoonist Scott Adams seemed like something of a centrist. But Trump’s persuasion and Democrats clinging to the Fine People Hoax seems to have red-pilled him all the way:
If Asshole Joe Biden really believes the Fine People Hoax, he's too dumb to be president. If he knows it is fake and is using it to divide the country, he is too evil to be president.
Neither of those flaws is cancelled out by his ability to read in public or ride a bike.
If you watched Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the other big, headline speeches at the Democratic convention, you might be forgiven for thinking that you had stepped into a meeting of old-time Democrats. There was less woke, radical rhetoric than in the primaries, more invocations of old-fashioned patriotic Americana, and more efforts to sound conservative themes and reach out to small-businesspeople and churchgoers. What you might have missed was the far-reaching agenda of the Biden–Harris Democrats.
Biden talked about “ending loopholes” and rolling back Trump-era tax cuts. His actual proposal would raise $3.8 trillion in new individual and business taxes and result in a tax hike, on average, for taxpayers in every income quintile.
He spoke vaguely about climate and energy. He’s actually proposing a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” in a “clean energy future,” just as a first step. This is the “Green New Deal” in all but name, on top of a vast expansion of health-care entitlement spending from a government-run “public option” of the sort that was left out of Obamacare for being too far left. Overall, Biden is proposing some $7 trillion in additional spending, most of it permanent, which will eventually require even more enormous tax hikes than the ones he has so far detailed.
Rose McGowan brings the fire:
What have the Democrats done to solve ANYTHING? Help the poor? No. Help black & brown people? No. Stop police brutality? No. Help single mothers? No. Help children? No. You have achieved nothing. NOTHING. Why did people vote Trump? Because of you motherfuckers.
Any focus on abortion would have invited a discussion of Joe Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde amendment, the measure that since 1976 has banned federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients. For four decades, Biden portrayed his support of the Hyde amendment as a fundamental matter of conscience, only to abandon it under pressure from Democratic activists in June 2019.
The Hyde amendment has been America’s most important pro-life policy for four decades: By one estimate, it has saved 50,000 lives from abortion each year. It is also popular: A poll on the eve of the 2016 election showed Americans supported it 58 percent to 36 percent.
Democratic presidential contenders snubbed from the DNC include Tulsi Gabbard. “Gabbard was the only candidate to be denied a speaking slot despite winning delegates.”
Also not speaking at the DNC: Julian Castro, who complained about the lack of Hispanic speakers. Democrats seem to be taking Hispanics for granted this year in all-out effort to pander to black voters and woke white radicals.
Democrats have said, “we care more about the woke mob than we do about standing with cops or firefighters or working men and women,” and “are the party of the rich, they’re the party of coastal elites, they’re the party of Manhattan and San Francisco.”
Cruz said, “I think what we saw tonight was the beginning of the collapse of Joe Biden’s basement strategy. Joe Biden has been hiding in his basement since he won the nomination, but tonight was Bernie Sanders’ night. Tonight — so, John Kasich is promising voters, don’t pay attention to all the craziness on the Democratic side. Joe isn’t that crazy. Well, you know who didn’t believe John Kasich? Bernie Sanders didn’t believe John Kasich. Because Bernie Sanders stood up there and said, our radical, socialist agenda has won. We’ve taken over the Democratic Party, and Joe Biden is ours. And that really underscores the stakes of this election. If the Democrats win, you are looking at Bernie in ascension. You’re looking at AOC. You’re looking at, mark my words, Elizabeth Warren as treasury secretary. Bernie might be secretary of state. These are radicals, and that’s where the Democratic Party is.”
While I tend to view “Flight 93” thinking as hyperbolic, [Harris] does present a major threat to the constitutional order, to the economy, and to established norms. Moreover, she stands an excellent chance of succeeding Biden to the presidency should their ticket be elected in November. Kamala Harris poses a far greater danger to the Republic than Hillary Clinton. Anyone who calls himself a conservative should recognize this.
Harris’s platform is so far to the left of the mainstream that she makes Mrs. Clinton, a hero to the Left for several decades, look moderate. Clinton, for instance, said that illegal immigrants should be allowed to purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges but without subsidies, which is Joe Biden’s position (according to his platform, though Biden himself often seems confused about this when publicly discussing the issue). Kamala Harris backs a single-payer federal health-care plan and did not equivocate when asked whether illegal immigrants would be covered: “Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.” This would mark an end to the distinction between people who are here legally and illegally and would signal to the world’s poor that it’s time to make their break for the United States. Harris also compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to the Ku Klux Klan and said we should decriminalize unauthorized border crossings. (“I would not make it a crime punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue but not a criminal enforcement issue.”)
So: a parking ticket for coming in illegally? How is that to be seen as anything other than an engraved invitation to would-be migrants? In a Senate hearing, Harris suggested ICE should be more of a welcome wagon than an enforcement agency: “Are you aware,” she said to Ronald Vitiello, acting director of ICE, “that there is a perception that ICE is administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants? And specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America?” Neither the culture nor the federal fisc is prepared for the massive disruption likely to be unleashed if an American president so encourages illegal migration. Way back in 1994, when the Democratic Party was still concerned with what the center of the country thought and felt, Mrs. Clinton said in a House hearing that her Hillarycare plan would not be available to illegal entrants: “We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country,” she said, adding that “we know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is.”
Kamala Harris laughed uproariously at Joe Biden’s suggestion that a president is constrained by the Constitution from ruling by executive fiat. This clip ought to nauseate any constitutionalist: Even Hillary Clinton would not have gone so far as to treat the Constitution as a joke. Harris, moreover, has the most extreme position on abortion imaginable. And when an undercover journalist, David Daleiden, made the abortion lobby look bad by accurately exposing the inner doings of Planned Parenthood executives, she brought the full force of the state down on his head, raiding his home and launching a vendetta that would result in nine felony charges against him. Former Obama speechwriter and leftist pundit Jon Favreau calls it “hilarious” that anyone thinks Harris is a moderate because “she has one of the most liberal records in the U.S. Senate.”
Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.
American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.
Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases.
Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was laying subpoenas on organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a conservative-leaning group that is critical of Democratic global-warming proposals. She demanded private information that the organizations were not legally obliged to disclose, including financial information and donor lists, in order to be able to subject the supporters of right-leaning groups to legal and financial harassment. This was, as a federal judge confirmed, an obvious and unquestionable violation of the First Amendment.
It was also a serious abuse of power. Harris’s actions were coordinated with those of then attorney general Eric Schneiderman in New York, who argued — preposterously — that Exxon’s taking a different view of global warming was a form of securities fraud. This isn’t a conspiracy theory: They held a press conference and organized their effort into a committee, which they called AGs United for Clean Power.
The Wikipedia war over Kamala Harris’ race. “The battles over Harris’s Wikipedia page played out primarily over the specific term African American.”
Hey look, it’s the hoary old “the Republican who’s now voting for a Democrat has been a Democrat all along” trick. Gets trotted out every presidential election.
During Joe Biden’s presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, both his personal YouTube page and the Democratic Party’s YouTube page saw strong, negative reactions from live audiences. In fact, “Dislikes” outnumbered “Likes,” in real time.
Yet both pages’ “Dislikes” mysteriously dropped in the hours after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had concluded. The changing statistics led some on social media to wonder if the Google-owned YouTube platform was protecting Biden.
The number of Democratic convention stream “Dislikes”–or people pressing a button saying they did not like the content onscreen–dropped on Friday below where they stood on Thursday last night.
Biden as McCain:
Biden is the Democrat's 'McCain.' He is the throw-away candidate they know can't win who has been knocking on the door for the nod for a long time. They knew McCain wasn't going to beat Obama, just like they know Biden won't beat Trump.
Michelle Obama had a lot of guts rolling out the old “kids in cages” talking point. Doesn’t she know that was an Obama/Biden policy? https://t.co/hoBJX1uv5A
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.)
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! We’ve entered the portion of the year where everything gets compressed, rushing to finish up before Christmas or the new year, and work gets weird because everyone starts taking vacation. Yesterday I remember thinking “Hey, looks like I’ll finally have time to finish up that huge book catalog I’m working on!” only to have life pop up and go “Psych!”
Evidently Adam Schiff can make private phone records public…even those with a man’s lawyer. Evidently privacy laws are non-existent if they inconvenience a Democrat…
Lawyers from a Fort Worth hospital are harassing a conservative organization in North Texas as part of their plan to combat a judge’s interference in killing a 9-month-old baby.
Tinslee Lewis was born with congenital heart disease. She is currently at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth and relies on a ventilator to live. On October 31, against the objections of Tinslee’s mother, the hospital announced it would remove the ventilator from Tinslee on November 10, thus killing her. No reasons relating to bodily health were given by the hospital. Instead, only a vague “quality of life” argument was provided.
Fortunately, Cook Children’s Medical Center’s plans to murder a nine month old baby are currently on hold thanks to judicial intervention.
Speaking of medical horror stories, this harrowing tale of a back-injury operation gone wrong on a major league baseball closer is both horrifying and infuriating.
The “Never Trump” crowd lack the political skill necessary to successfully run a winning primary campaign and yet, when all of their schemes to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination came to naught, the “Never Trump” crowd didn’t blame themselves for this failure. Instead, they blamed — well, you, if you voted for Trump.
Among other things, this is poor sportsmanship. Auburn beat Alabama on Saturday, but Auburn wasn’t to blame — no, ’Bama lost that game, far more than Auburn won it, and no player on the Crimson Tide could deny that they failed, both individually and as a team. So, in 2008 and 2012, Republicans could have nominated anyone for president, but instead they nominated first John McCain and then Mitt Romney. Well, who is to blame that those two losers lost? Did John McCain ever admit his own political incompetence? Did Mitt Romney ever accept responsibility for his role in re-electing Obama? No, of course not. John McCain (and his supporters, including Nicolle Wallace) made a scapegoat of Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney . . . well, he spent six years campaigning for the GOP nomination (counting the two years he put into his failed bid for the 2008 nomination) and you might have thought that somewhere during that time he might have gotten a clue. But no, he was clueless the whole time and — hang on, I’ll check — yeah, he’s still clueless.
What is it that these #NeverTrump losers don’t understand? Well, OK, everything — they’re completely without a clue. But what they specifically don’t understand is that Bushism is over. It’s finished. It failed. It’s “pining for the fjords,” so to speak. The so-called “center-right” strategy of Bush-era Republicanism (i.e., be nice and try not to offend liberals) never actually worked. Recall that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and that Bush just barely edged John Kerry in 2004. The illusion of “success” for the center-right strategy is what inspires the tantrums of the #NeverTrump crowd, who want to go back to what they see as the Golden Era of Republican prestige, when we had half-a-million troops in Iraq and middle-class suburbanites were all re-financing their homes and investing with Lehman Brothers. What Trump did in 2016 was to throw away the Karl Rove playbook and go after the votes of people who were sick and tired of “nice” Republicans.
And, oh, by the way, how many kids does your typical Republican have? Because somewhere along the line, it seems that America developed a shortage of children, and this in turn led to the idea that we should just import foreigners as substitutes for children Americans weren’t having. Did John McCain or Mitt Romney — or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush — ever say anything about demographics?
Much discussion of crashing white demographics snipped. I’m a lot more concerned with the GOP’s apparent inability to convince Asians and other nonwhite Americans of the value of their platform.
Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff was arrested for child pornography. Ryan Loskarn was into “sexually explicit” videos of little boys. Loskarn committed suicide at age 35. That’s an extreme example of the degeneracy among Republicans in D.C., but less extreme cases are a dime a dozen. The extent to which the GOP machinery is staffed with drunks and perverts is not trivial. And, to return to my theme, this problem is related to the sociopathic tendency of some Republicans to scapegoat others for their own failures. There are a lot of people earning six-figure incomes as Republican operatives who are fundamentally incompetent, and who resort to blame-game rationalizations to explain away their failures. Bullies and backstabbers proliferate in the toxic environment of GOP politics, where consultants care more about getting paid than they do about winning elections.
And I omitted the Ted Bundy comparison…
“Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps – Yet Again!”: “According to the FBI, over 200,000 background check requests associated with the purchase of a firearm were submitted to the agency on Black Friday, marking the second highest gun sales day ever.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“Hunter Biden’s lawyer abruptly quit on Monday after the former Vice President’s son and Ukraine energy expert failed to show up for a child support hearing regarding his out-of-wedlock child with a D.C. stripper from Arkansas.” He’s really padding his lead in the “Father of the Year” standings…
In recent years, I have watched sex-work activism of the type PACE practices become co-opted by social-justice ideology, whose elements include intersectional feminism, critical race theory and radical socialism. The same hypocrisy that was captured on video when Jabbour denigrated an Asian event attendee plays out, writ large, in the way some activists now regularly prioritize their own moral grandstanding over a reasoned and tempered approach to advocacy. While sex-worker activism once was its own unique activist subculture, deeply informed by women with real experience in the field, it now has become just another branch office of the generalized, Twitter-mediated progressive movement that has colonized liberal politics. And sex workers are suffering for it.
EU court upholds restrictions against private gun ownership. You would think that most Europeans have already seen this movie, and aren’t going to like how it ends. At least they’re not calling the law Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden this time around…
Convicted murderer Lee Hall executed. Hall chose to die by the electric chair, which is still an option in Tennessee. Since he burned estranged girlfriend Traci Crozier alive, there’s a certain symmetry to his exit…
Saudi Arabia’s oil production has been severely disrupted by drone attacks on two major oil facilities run by state-owned company Aramco, reports say.
Sources quoted by Reuters and WSJ said the strikes had reduced production by five million barrels a day – nearly half the kingdom’s output.
The fires are now under control at both facilities, Saudi state media say.
A spokesman for the Iran-aligned Houthi group in Yemen said it had deployed 10 drones in the attacks.
The spokesman, Yahya Sarea, told al-Masirah TV, which is owned by the Houthi movement and is based in Beirut, that further attacks could be expected in the future.
Snip.
Aramco is not only the world’s biggest oil producer, it is also one of the world’s most profitable businesses.
The Khurais oilfield produces about 1% of the world’s oil, and Abqaiq is the company’s largest facility – with the capacity to process 7% of the global supply. Even a brief or partial disruption could affect the company, and the oil supply, given their size.
There was a sharp intake of breath as analysts I spoke to today digested the information that reports suggest that half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production could have been knocked offline by these attacks.
The country produces 10% of the world’s crude oil. Cutting this in half could have a significant effect on the oil price come Monday when markets open.
However, Aramco has yet to confirm the scale of the damage.
The success of the drone strike shows the vulnerability of its infrastructure, at a time when it is trying to show itself in its best light while gearing up to float on the stock market.
And it raises concerns that escalating tensions in the region could pose a broader risk to oil, potentially threatening the fifth of the world’s supply that goes through the critical Strait of Hormuz.
It’s burning pretty well:
My tabula rasa expectation is that, absent gross Saudi mismanagement, all those facilities will be back online in a few weeks. The global oil industry is extremely robust at recovering from disasters, either natural or man-made.
The situation in Yemen will remain intractable as long as the Iranians continue to fund the Houthis and Saudi Arabia is unwilling (or unable) to expend the resources to crush them completely. The quickest past to peace in Yemen is continuing the pressure of sanctions until the Islamic Republic regime gives up their meddling or collapses.
Or to put it another way, everything in the Middle East is blowing up slightly more than usual:
Hajin, reportedly the last Islamic State stronghold in Syria, has come under sustained attack by coalition forces. There are supposedly some 4,000 heavily dug-in Islamic State fighters there, but that number sounds way too high, being about the number of Islamic State fighters who defended the much larger Raqqa. Hajin is described as a “small city,” but it really looks more like a large town, perhaps on the order of a county seat for a mid-sized Texas county. It’s hard to imagine 4,000 besieged defenders holding out in a such a small area for the eight months since the fall of Deir Ez-Zor, just on the logistical difficulties of maintaining food and ammunition. But anything close to that number would explain why that Islamic State pocket has been so hard to eradicate. But the area is now being pounded with Syrian Democratic Forces artillery and coalition airstrikes, while SDF ground forces push into Hajin.
There was a report that “More than 30 soldiers and officers of the pro-Assad forces, including 13 officers, were killed by aerial bombardment in attempt to seize Hajin.” Since the Islamic State has no air force beyond the occasional drone, that would mean the coalition was bombing pro-Assad forces because they were on the east side of the Euphrates. But at least one Tweet suggests that report is false. “There was no attack by the Syrian Arab Army towards Hajin and there are no clashes between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Syrian Arab Army. These attacks are only happening on social media.”
The SDF has also been making a large (and largely under-reported) push to roll-up what remains of the Islamic State in sparsely-occupied eastern Syrian along the Iraqi border, capturing a string of tiny villages as they push south.
Widespread unrest has broken out across southern Iraq (with a few outbreaks elsewhere), including strikes, protests and street blockages over government incompetence at providing basic services like electricity and water.
Finally, Israel and Hamas went at it again. Hamas fired a bunch of projectiles into Israel, and Israel walloped a bunch of Hamas assets in Gaza. You know: the usual. But the Israel retaliatory raids were reportedly the biggest on Gaza since 2014.
Saudi Arabia opened its airspace for the first time to a commercial flight to Israel with the inauguration of an Air India route between New Delhi and Tel Aviv.
Flight 139 landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport after a seven-and-a-half hour journey, marking a diplomatic shift for Riyadh that Israel says was fuelled by shared concern over Iranian influence in the region.
To be sure, it’s not Israeli air traffic, but baby steps. Combine this with Friday’s story about Saudi Arabia purging Muslim Brotherhood members from the country, and signs that he wishes to loosen the restrictive dress code on omen (hat tip: Instapundit), and it appears that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is ushering in real reform in the kingdom. To be sure, the results will not remotely resemble modern western liberal democracy, but they will mark a vast improvement over the status quo that prevailed before his ascension.
Speaking of Saudi Arabia, they also shot down seven ballistic missiles launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the shrapnel from one killing an Egyptian citizen. Pretty much everyone believes the missiles are manufactured and supplied by Iran. Do you think Egypt is going to take that lying down? I rather doubt it. Egypt supports the Saudis in Yemen, but have avoided intervention due to their own unpleasant history there.
Reform in Saudi Arabia is potentially one of the biggest stories this year, and the mainstream media is barely covering it at all.
I’m hardly the most astute of Saudi-watchers, but a tremendous amount of upheaval has wrecked Saudi Arabia in a very short period of time:
Dozens of the Saudi royal family have been arrested on corruption charges, presumably for opposing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who seems hellbent on dragging Saudi Arabia into at least the 15th Century. (When he starts arresting or sidelining Whabbist clerics, I’ll start believing that he’s a real reformer.) The Saudi government is sayng that these anti-corruption moves are just a start.
In a remarkable coincidence, roughly the same time arrests were being made, a helicopter carrying “Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, the deputy governor of Asir province,” crashed while he was returning from an inspection tour. Given that Mansour was the son of Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, a former intelligence chief who was crown prince between January and April 2015, before Mohammed bin Salman’s father King Salman pushed him aside for his own son, the chances that this was a mere coincidence would seem remote.
Saudi Gulf Affairs Minister Thamer al-Sabhan stated that Lebanon has “declared war” against the kingdom, which is more than a little loopy. The tiny kernel of truth here is that Hezbollah is, in fact, part of the current ruling Parliamentary majority in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah is backing Assad and Iran in the Sunni-Shia civil war that’s raging across multiple fronts. This followed the resignation of Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s Saudi-backed prime minister over the weekend.
The Saudis are also threatening open war (rather than the current proxy war) with Iran over the Houthi in Yemen firing long range missiles at them. Can’t say as I blame them.
So what’s going on? Here’s my half-assed guess:
The Saudis are getting their asses kicked on two fronts:
They’re slowly losing the proxy war against a newly emboldened Iran, which is breathing much easier thanks to the billions Obama foolishly handed them and the sanctions he lifted not so much for a handful of magic beans, but rather the vague promise that Iran might possibly send him a picture of said magic beans.
Their plan to drive American oil sands frackers out of the market by ruthlessly driving down prices backfired, and now they’re hurting on the oil revenue front as well.
Because America is the Saudi’s unipolar patron and main weapon supplier, there’s fark all they can do about Problem 2. Either they need to take the war directly Iran, or they need to buy themselves some economic breathing room and hope oil prices rise again.
My guess is that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is about to lay a serious perestroika-style smackdown on the largely hidebound, stagnant Saudi economy, along with just enough glasnost to make the whole thing palatable to the non-royal Saudi masses. If this theory is correct, the “hey, woman can drive” thing was actually a trial balloon designed to smoke out the most fervent traditionalists out of the woodwork so he can sideline them while he puts his plan into action.
Of course they could very well be bracing for more direction action against Iran as well. There’s a lot more they could do against Iran, including more direct support for the largely-Sunni Kurds.
The Saudis are not our friends, just the least bad of various options in the region (just imagine theocratic Iran or a revitalized Islamic State in charge of Mecca). It will be a significant improvement if Mohammed bin Salman can merely make them a bit less loathsome.
For many Democrats, President Trump’s joint address was the first time they actual heard and saw him unfiltered. “He just crushed the Drive-By [Media] last night. He just crushed them. He just blew up every narrative they’ve established on the guy. And they don’t even realize it.”
“As one might imagine given the Democrats’ breathtaking electoral collapse, there is basically nothing but bad news for Democrats across the board. The data showed that the voting patterns of key demographic groups shifted dramatically downward from 2008 through 2016.” More: “Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is a ‘sleeper statute’ (aka, a secret weapon) in that its practical application took 20 years to enter the realm of viable possibility. The CRA allows Congress to overturn executive regulations by a simple majority—and this is the moment it’s been waiting for.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Members of an elite Baltimore Police Department squad charged with getting guns off the streets gets hit with federal racketeering charges and held for trial without bail. More: “In one case, four of the officers are alleged to have stolen $200,000 from a safe and bags and a watch valued at $4,000. In July 2016, three officers conspired to impersonate a federal officer in order to steal $20,000 in cash.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The NYT and the Washington Post have a motivation to ally with the Democratic Party in its last-ditch effort to Watergatize Trump after Trump’s endless criticisms of them. And this anti-Trump approach may get them a spike in readership, even as it repels some readers like me.
I’m missing the sense that I’m getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you’d cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.
Snip.
The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.
Austin police have charged Matthew Bartlett, 21, and Catronn Hewitt, 36, with felony possession of marijuana, police said in a news release.
Ja’Quan Johnson, 25, was charged with federal charges in connection with the thefts. Johnson is a contract baggage handler at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and is believed to have been behind the thefts, according to police and the Justice Department.
Buying pot? Likely misdemeanor charge. But stealing guns from airport luggage is likely an interstate federal gun trafficking felony. Also: Our airport security is in the best of hands!
Houston Chronicle to move its call center from the Philippines to Dallas. 1. Who thought it was a good idea to move it to the Philippines in the first place? 2. “The move will result in 130 new jobs for Texas.” Why does the Chronicle need 130 people in its call center? 3. Dallas? Really? Because it’s evidently impossible to locate a call center in the 4th largest city in America…
SEC charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dismissed. A state felony trail is pending, but given that the state charges are based on the same issue as the SEC case just dismissed, chances of a conviction would appear to be very slim. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NYT repeated as truth Claire McCaskill's lie that she never met or spoke to Russia's ambassador, then stealth deleted it w/o any note. pic.twitter.com/1adhWZdksE
Indeed, “Russia!” is now the go-to move for the media the same way a bad video game player will just use the same button combination over and over again:
Trump has an AMAZING well-received speech, the Market breaks 21,000, so the Media and #morningjoe CLOWNS return to RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA!😂 pic.twitter.com/Xw0VJnZxGi
