To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging resistance.
Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.
You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.
You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.
And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?
You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.
And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.
NOOOOOOOOO!!!
In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.
For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.
Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.
Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. “But Gorsuch” indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.
If we had listened to Never Trump, we’d have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she’d be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren’t in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Let’s leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn’t have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.
Snip.
The remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That’s their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It’s because Donald Trump is so…so…so…oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump’s aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can’t get the White House to return their calls.
Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don’t want to know them or what they do. We’d take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don’t want to be seen hanging around with them.
We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, “I’m a minor duke of the world!”
They’ve been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status – “Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation” – was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.
My father always thought it was remarkable how, despite the bias against Jews in higher education, so many Jews of his generation, and the generation before his, still managed to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Why did it happen? Because it was a cultural imperative imposed at the family level. If Harvard wouldn’t take you, try Yale. If Yale said no, try Cornell. If none of the Ivies wanted you, try the University of Michigan (my Dad’s alma mater). The stereotype of Jewish families placing an enormous emphasis on education is a stereotype for a reason.
Asian Americans have a similar stereotype, and it too has a basis in reality.
Anyway, here’s my theory. According to reports, Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants because they had “bad” personalities. Wesley Yang has a moving op-ed in the New York Times today on the subject. He recounts how Casey Pedrick, an assistant principal at (the ruthlessly meritocratic) Stuyvesant High School in New York City was brought to tears by the evidence that Harvard discriminated against high-scoring, high-achieving, Asian-American students. Yang writes:
Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.
Asian students come from families that put an enormous emphasis on education as a bulwark against poverty and as a ticket to economic prosperity (not always the same thing). Contrary to some reporting, this doesn’t mean they don’t spend time on extra-curricular activities. The Asian students had more extra-curricular activities than white applicants. But, I would bet that the Asian kids were more focused on education as high-end vocational training. The white kids come from a milieu where college is seen as a place for making social connections and a rite of passage. The Asian kids want careers, specifically careers in STEM professions.
So here’s my theory: It’s not that these kids don’t have good personalities, it’s that they don’t have fully “woke” personalities. They don’t speak the language of cosmopolitan, secular noblesse oblige that so often takes the form of political correctness — at least not with sufficient fluency. They don’t know the shibboleths that demonstrate they understand what higher education is really for.
Moreover, their inability or unwillingness to care enough about such stuff is an indication of what they want out of college. Perhaps there are a bunch of Asian-immigrant parents out there who would be perfectly happy to have their kids go to Harvard and major in gender theory or some such. But I suspect not.
As I recently recounted, my father-in-law had the kind of practicality that comes from being a refugee. His favorite response to self-indulgent ideas about what to do for a living was, “Yeah, but can you eat it?” What he meant was that careers, education, and business ideas should be grounded in something real, something useful. I suspect that there are many Asian-American Paul Gavoras out there.
If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.
“The Left is turning against the First Amendment because absolute respect for freedom of speech is not consistent with tearing down capitalism.”
Merkel blinks, to set up immigration screening centers on border to keep her coalition together.
Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, and six of his followers were executed in Japan for their role in the sarin gas attacks against the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12, in addition to another 24 or so victims of other cult attacks. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Federal agents arrested a legal permanent resident from Mexico who bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition for smuggling into the Mexican border city of Matamoros — the scene of large-scale internecine Gulf Cartel gun battles.
The arrest took place over the weekend when 48-year-old Ruben Ramos Beltran went to a local gun store and bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. Authorities describe the man as a Mexican national who is a legal resident in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations was carrying out a surveillance operation at the local gun store and spotted Ramos pick up an order of 5,000 rounds of 7.62×39 ammunition, a type typically used in AK-47 type rifles which are heavily favored by cartel gunmen.
5,000 rounds is not a small amount, and at current prices that works out to a bit over a grand. On the other hand, if that’s your primary gun, and you’re a “100 rounds at the range every week” sort of guy, that’s not that far off the curve… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Rolling Stone writer gets trolled into wearing MAGA hat in search of an interview. “I directed Ms. Robb up the hill and to a pleasant location near the lake in the nearby State Park where I imagine that I might have waited, had I actually left my house, which I hadn’t.”
Richard Overton just turned 112 years old in May, making him America’s oldest living veteran and the oldest living man in the country, period. He’s a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking national treasure who still lives in the same modest home he built in Austin, Texas after serving in the Army during World War II. Unfortunately, some morally depraved dirtbags decided to rob him, cleaning out his bank account.
According to CBS Austin, Overton’s family told reporters that the thieves got access to his Social Security Number and bank account information, which they used to purchase savings bonds, eventually nearly emptying out the account.
Spectrum News Austin spoke to Overton’s cousin Volma Overton, Jr., who said that on Wednesday he went to the bank to deposit a check for Overton, and then noticed the discrepancy when he checked the account balance and a significant amount of money was missing. The bonds were purchased from a company called Treasury Direct in four separate payments over the past few months.
Fortunately there’s a GoFundMe page for Overton to help with his in-home health care expenses. I threw in a few bucks, and you can do the same.
And here’s hoping police catch the lowlife scumbags who ripped him off.
Democrats should also understand that these public tantrums and other slights are simply bad politics. Voters don’t respond well to angry chanting losers harassing people, or to vulgar celebrities, or to threats verging on intimidation and violence. There is nothing inspirational about it, and it makes the targets of the anger look that much more reasonable. If Democrats think this crazed behavior will generate a “blue wave” in November, they are mistaken.
How did we get here? Two tracks converged to deliver us this dysfunction. The first is narrowly political. The Democrats, confident that they were on the right side of history, thought there was no harm in accelerating the rush to total victory. For years, Democrats practiced the rule that all is fair in judicial-confirmation battles, starting with the war on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Then, under the leadership of Barack Obama and then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, they did away with the filibuster on judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court, opening the door for Republicans to nudge it slightly more wide open.
The second track is longer. Starting over a century ago, progressives began emphasizing ends over means. If the Supreme Court could deliver wins unattainable at the ballot box and unsupported by the Constitution, so be it. Thus was born the “living Constitution” — the doctrine that holds that the magical parchment should mean whatever progressives need it to mean at any moment. This was how Anthony Kennedy became an (apparently temporary) gay-rights hero. After consulting his feelings, he found a constitutional right no one had found in the text before.
This idea that the Supreme Court is there to serve as a Praetorian Guard around progressive policies was on full display this week. Prior to Kennedy’s retirement announcement, the court issued a 5–4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public-sector unions can’t compel nonunion members to pay fees for union representation, thus violating the First Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan caustically disagreed. For her, the problem with the decision was that “public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support.”
“The First Amendment was meant for better things,” Kagan concluded in her dissent. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”
In short: The Supreme Court isn’t there to protect the meaning of the First Amendment; the Supreme Court is there to protect a secure source of financial support for public-sector unions. If the First Amendment gets in the way, that’s okay.
The panic unfolding across the progressive landscape stems from the creeping fear that the Supreme Court might start doing its job — and not the job progressives have assigned it.
What will the #NeverTrump coalition in the Beltway (with an annex in New York) say now?
For a while, before tax cuts and regulatory reform boosted the economy, before defense spending increased, before Jerusalem was recognized as Israel’s capital, and before a “maximum pressure” campaign led to a detente with North Korea, #NeverTrumpers were fond of mockingly summarizing Trump supporters’ arguments as “But Gorsuch.”
This bit of childish taunting always struck me as an unknowing admission of ignorance about the role assumed by the Supreme Court in modern American governance. Even when 21 appeals court judges took their seats — orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues — still the one-note pundits played on, only louder: President Trump was so awful and evil, and conservatives who supported him had done so for one lousy seat on the Supreme Court.
The implication from all the noise and a thousands posts was that “Gorsuch” wasn’t worth it. Now, after Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s first year on the court, it will be impossible to overstate what his confirmation has meant.
While Justice Kennedy was usually a moderate conservative, there were areas of the law in which Justice Kennedy was not particularly moderate and others in which he was not particularly conservative. Particularly in areas touching on the freedom of speech and personal liberty, Justice Kennedy would swing for the fences. Justice Kennedy was easily the most speech-protective Justice on what was a quite speech-protective Court. Whether the speech at issue concerned political campaigns or product pricing, “offensive” messages or dishonest claims about military service, Justice Kennedy believed in uncompromising First Amendment protection. By some accounts it was Justice Kennedy who pushed the Court (and a reluctant Chief Justice) to invalidate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and this would be entirely consistent with what we saw in his First Amendment opinions.
Speech was not the only freedom that mattered to Justice Kennedy. He had a deep concern for Due Process, as shown in his embrace of habeas rights for alleged enemy combatants, his concerns about the application of capital punishment to some classes of criminal defendants, and his embrace of constitutional limits on punitive damages. He also, perhaps most famously, believed that due regard for individual liberty barred the government from adopting laws prohibiting or disregarding same-sex relationships, as in Lawrence, Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell. In these areas, there was nothing modest, moderate, or minimalist about Justice Kennedy’s views or the doctrinal rules he would embrace.
Given the makeup of the Roberts Court, as went Justice Kennedy, so went the Court. Where Kennedy was a moderate conservative favoring a minimalist approach, the Roberts court would tend to adopt a moderate conservative opinion. Where Justice Kennedy favored a more muscular approach, on the other hand, there were almost always at least four votes to go along. (NFIB v. Sebelius being a notable exception.) If Justice Kennedy wanted to recognize same-sex marriage or preclude the use of the death penalty for those convicted of non-lethal crimes, the liberals would agree. If Justice Kennedy wanted to protect campaign-related or commercial speech, the conservatives were there. so the Roberts Court was generally as conservative and as moderate as Justice Kennedy wanted to be.
Kurt Schlichter on the insanity gripping the Democratic Party:
There’s no sign of sanity. This week they turned the hate up to “11,” then cranked it to “17.” There are not many places to go once you reach “You are real live Nazis murdering children by not letting aspiring Democrat voters flow into the country at will!” At some point, instead of a few wild-eyed randos with crummy aim trying to off libs’ political/cultural opponents, they are going to start collectively going to go for the throat.
Our collective throat. Which I do not anticipate us Normals responding to in a huggy, loving kind of way.
Snip.
We’re already seeing it play out. The mainstream media quit even pretending to be honest – it’s in full scale fib mode. Look at the Time magazine cover of the little girl whose scumbag mom dragged her across the desert to help her break our laws (apparently without daddy’s permission and not for the first time). That Time cover is a lie, but it’s no surprise. The only surprise is that Time magazine is still a thing.
In fact, the whole manufactured outrage over Democrat-preferred criminals being treated like every other criminal was a lie. And the media not only doesn’t care but actively and consciously supports lying to you to support its liberal allies. But no one cares anymore. They can lie and lie and lie, and do, and we just smile and buy more guns and ammo.
So the leftists attempt to intimidate us into submission, showing up at people’s houses and screaming at them in restaurants. Take that, Sarah! The idea is since the leftists can’t convince Normals with the power of their ideas – because leftists’ ideas inevitably involve Normals ceding more of their rights and money to leftists – the left wants to make submission and obedience the price for being able to participate in the culture. But what’s inevitable is that us newly militant Normals, whose power is political rather than cultural, are going to respond pursuant to the New Rules and demand that leftists bake us a cake.
The craziness among Democrats can be explained by the behavior of cultists after a prophecy fails: the moderates, the ones who were the biggest brake on untrammeled lunacy, are the ones out the door first.
The more lukewarm Democrats are either keeping their mouths shut or are disappearing from the Party. The ones who remain are the ones who are more committed (translation: barking mad moonbats) who are the ones we hear talking about impeachment, banishing Trump supporters from the public square, protesting at Republican’s houses, etc.
It also explains why Democratic Party big wigs are losing primary challenges to candidates of the more barking mad persuasion (e.g. Joe Crowley, one of the biggest of the Democratic House big wigs who lost to someone who can only be described as a commie).
Speaking of which, the House’s fourth-ranking Democrat just got knocked off by a woman who wants to abolish ICE. “The objection of the hard Left is not to the current style or kind of immigration enforcement; their objection is to the existence of immigration enforcement.”
Mega Turbo Democrat Dumbass: “I’m going to find the Congressman’s kids and kill them. If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t.” Yeah, that last bit turned out to not be the case: The FBI arrested him within hours.
A judge ordered a do-over of a contested Democratic primary runoff race in South Texas after invalidating the runoff results due to voter fraud. The runoff was decided by six votes.
Ofelia “Ofie” Gutierrez contested the results of the May 22 Democratic primary runoff for Kleberg County Justice of the Peace Precinct 4 after losing to incumbent Esequiel “Cheque” De La Paz by a vote of 318 to 312.
Gutierrez alleged that more than six illegal votes were counted, cast by people who didn’t reside within Precinct 4 and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the election.
On Tuesday, visiting Judge Joel Johnson threw out seven of the 16 ballots Gutierrez challenged in court. All seven were cast by voters related in some way to De La Paz.
Speaking of Iran, protests there continued for a sixth day following a currency collapse. “On Sunday, the rial plunged 15 percent to IRR 89,000 against the dollar on the black market. Since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal on May 8, the rial has lost more than 40 percent of its value.”
The dumbasses at the Austin City Council approved building a soccer stadium. Because subsidizing a popular sport just wasn’t insulting enough to taxpayers…
What it’s like to service an SR-71. “Our last structural integrity review was in 1987, and it declared that the aircraft was about 180 percent stronger than the day it was made. The higher and faster you flew it, the stronger the titanium became.”
Black man being arrested for shoplifting calls police Nazis. So they charged him with a hate crime. All hate crime laws are stupid, but those that criminalize free speech are an order of magnitude stupider. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A Tweet with some numbers from the latest Harris poll:
Wow! Even after last week's fever pitch smear of the Trump administration, 70 percent say we need STRICTER enforcement of our immigration laws. Only 30 percent say looser.
When I realized that the left was trying to convince me that all my non-left family members were hateful, racist, sexist xenophobic bigots, I had to #WalkAway
Multiculturalism Watch: Excavating the Aztec’s ceremonial skull rack, which the Spanish conquistadors estimated as holding 130,000 skulls from human sacrifices. “Gomoz Valdas found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed.”
The whole “OMG, we lock up illegal alien kids!” panic the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have ginned up is a sign of just how good the economy is under President Donald Trump, and just how desperate Democrats are to find an issue to run on in November. Faced with the prospect of running on tranny bathrooms, gun control and calling ordinary Americans racists (yet again), they hit upon screeching about the fate of some 2,000 illegal alien minors as the only naked emotional appeal left in their arsenal.
Here it is, folks: the only tactic Democrats could agree to run on this fall.
So naturally, President Trump defused the issue he inherited from Obama with an executive order, causing Democrats to turn on a dime from “OMG, this is the most important moral crisis of our time!” to “That’s not good enough, you heartless monster, we want immediate full amnesty or we keep screaming our heads off!” Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz’s legislative fix, which was instantly labeled a “cynical ploy.” You know, just like Democrats manufacturing the whole issue.
Expect Democrats to to start bloviating about something equally ludicrous but completely different with the same overheated emotional furor next week…
Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Manuel Padilla says the entire problem stems from Obama-era laxness:
“It’s a very complex situation,” he told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King. “When you have high levels of activity, and a lack of resources – personnel, technology, infrastructure – it creates this kind of chaotic environment.”
I know this is complicated for you and your team, but what people are talking about is cruel and inhuman behavior, is how it’s perceived,” said King. “Do you actually agree with this policy?”
“I do agree that we have to do something. We created this situation by not doing anything,” Padilla said. “So what happened with zero tolerance is, we were exempting a population from the law. And what happens when you do that, it creates a draw for a certain group of people that rises to trends that become a crisis.”
“I’m going to give you an example: Because we were releasing family units, May 2, just last month, we had a full-blown MS-13 (gang member) accompanied by his one-year-old child. He thought he was going get released into the community; that was not the case.”
Congressional Democratic candidates are more left-wing than ever. I’m sure a platform of repealing tax cuts will go over swell among ordinary voters… (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Actor Peter Fonda (who you may remember as The Devil in Ghost Rider) went off on an “unhinged even by the standards of blue checkmark liberals on Twitter” rant in which he called for Barron Trump to be raped by pedophiles. To which reporter Juan Williams said Fonda’s rant was “poorly worded.” Oh really? Just how should someone word an appeal that the children of one’s political opponents be raped by pedophiles? Where does Miss Manners stand on this vital issue of 21st century American etiquette?
Related tweet:
Within the last two days, the anti-Trump Resistance has endorsed the brutal murder of ICE agents, the stalking of their children, the public mobbing of a DHS official, and the doxxing of White House officials. And also they're very worried about civility and norms you guys.
Eric S. Raymond on the mathematics of gun confiscation. “The critical fraction of American gun owners that would have to be hard-core enough to resist confiscation with lethal violence in order to stop the attempt is lower than 1 in 317. Probably much lower. Especially if we responded by killing not merely the doorknockers but the bureaucrats and politicians who gave them their orders. Which would be more efficient, more just, and certain to follow.”
The Small Arms Survey estimates there are 393,300,000 civilian-owned firearms in the United States. The survey, performed by the Graduate Institute of Geneva, estimated the United States military has about 4.5 million firearms. It put the number of firearms owned by police throughout the United States at just over 1 million.
That means American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement.
Federal Bureau of Investigation background check records suggest that civilians bought more than 2 million guns in May alone, which means civilians purchase more than double the number of firearms owned by police departments. The number of gun-related civilian background checks in May and April, at over 4.7 million, is greater than the number of firearms currently owned by the American military.
The FBI reported processing more than 25.2 million gun-related civilian background checks in 2017, which is more than the 22.7 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are currently held by every law enforcement agency in the world combined. Between 2012 and 2017, the FBI reported conducting more than 135 million civilian gun checks—more than the 133 million guns the Small Arms Survey estimates are in all the world’s military stockpiles.
The Small Arms Survey estimated there are about 1 billion firearms currently in circulation throughout the world. By its estimate, about 85 percent are owned by civilians and American civilians own nearly 40 percent of all the guns in the world. Researchers said worldwide firearms ownership was up since the last time they studied the issue about a decade ago.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”
Roberts was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This is the rare case where I side with the court’s liberal wing against its conservative wing. If there is a constitutional right to privacy, then surely metadata, which reveals your minute-by-minute physical location, among many other things, should be covered.
Federal court rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional for exercising executive authority but putting its director beyond the each of Presidential power.
Turkish jihadist scumbag president Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls a snap election, a tactic that could backfire.
Portland feminist bookstore closing. Naturally they blamed their poor business decisions on white male patriarchy. Insert your own Portlandia joke here.
Everyone’s talking about the the Inspector General Report on the Hillary Clinton email probe, which I’ve not only not been able to read, I haven’t even properly skimmed the summaries yet. But I was already planning to do a Clinton Corruption Update next week, so I’ll try to grapple with it then.
50 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era. Just 50? Here’s a taste: “June 4, 2017: NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.”
Samantha Bee has never to my knowledge said anything that is funny. Her business is the sort of thing that would be of keen interest to those monkeys in the Duke study: the ritual raising and lowering of status — which, as Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling and others have argued, is what politics is mostly about. The same holds true for media criticism, which is of course only another form of politics. Professor Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.”
Samantha Bee does not sell humor or satire: She sells status adjustment. She got her start on The Daily Show, which of course is nothing more than an extended, tedious, witless exercise in concentrated status-lowering: hence all that chest-pounding excitement every time Jon Stewart destroyed! somebody or another, which is precisely the sort of thing that gets the ol’ chimp juices flowing.
Calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” on television is a win-win for Bee et al.: One possibility is that Ivanka Trump offers no response, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to endure outrageous insults by a relative nobody on TBS; the second possibility is that she responds, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to condescend to respond to the outrageous insults of a relative nobody on TBS. The proverb holds that the problem with wrestling a pig is that you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. Samantha Bee is that pig.
Since Trump’s election victory in 2016, the left has lost their goddamn minds. The left has become a national freakout movement and they think that his election legitimizes their complete childish and vulgar meltdown on the national stage. On their side, there is no one telling them that they’ve gone too far- they will simply ramp up the violence all the way to the fall. There’s no one to stop their post-election temper tantrum.
Let’s be honest, though. This didn’t happen overnight. The left has absolved itself from any cultural responsibility the moment they gave Bill Clinton a pass for raping people. And then used cultural outlets like The Daily Show to mock everyone who isn’t on their side and delegitimize civil discourse.
Come the mid-term elections, the more crass and racist stunts that they pull (and get away with), the more people are going to drift into the right-of-center Trump camp. The Democrats were already demographically in trouble with 2018, but the further they push the cultural envelope with mean and childish antics (let alone actual political violence) they are going to get a cultural backlash that makes 1968 look like child’s play.
And what really is bad news for the left is that they’re already at peak jerk levels. What the heck will they do for an encore leading up to November?
If you had been making predictions based on these different movies, Movie 1, predicted that President Trump would not be popular with Israel, and he wouldn’t take the bold step of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. But both of those outcomes are compatible with Movie 2.
Movie 1 would have predicted there is no way President Trump would grant a posthumous pardon of African-American boxer Jack Johnson because it wouldn’t fit the racist dog whistle script. But Movie 2 is compatible with the pardon. Same with the pardon of Alice Johnson.
Movie 1 would have predicted that President Trump would underplay the fact that black unemployment reached its best level in the history of America. That’s the sort of accomplishment that would make his racist supporters stop hearing the secret racist dog whistle. It doesn’t fit. But President Trump’s frequent highlighting of gains for African-American citizens fits Movie 2 perfectly.
I realize no one reading this post will change movies because of it. My only point today is that mainstream Trump supporters are not knowingly supporting someone they believe to be a racist. It only looks that way to the folks trapped in Movie 1.
Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports.
Sharp, Australia’s foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton’s band, Cream.
Ellis was a political commentator, write and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays.
And speaking of statutory rape, here’s the inside story of the night Roman Polanski raped a child. Includes details of just how he set about deliberately seducing a girl he knew went to middle school.
Mueller’s indictments not only don’t indicate Russian collusion on part of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, they actually indicate the opposite, says notorious right-wing shills at…The Nation?
AT&T/Time Warner merger approved. Can’t think that this is a good thing, given how much of the local broadband market are government-enforced monopolies…
The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that, for the first time in its history, the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.
Important safety tip: If you’re a popular band, never play Indonesia. Among the worst incidents: multiple cases of death, and Deep Purple’s manager being dropped down an elevator shaft. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In Austin news, Interim Police Chief Manly is no longer interim. Dwight thinks it’s a good move.
Speaking of basketball games no one will be willing to pay $99 a ticket for, Ted Cruz will play Jimmy Kimmel a one-on-one basketball game in Houston Saturday, with the loser coughing up $5,000 to the winner’s non-political charity of choice.
Somebody had a really shitty day:
Punchy punches Dem chances:
My 5 year old daughter heard Robert DeNiro say “Fuck Trump” and asked me what does “Fuck Trump mean daddy”? I told her it means the Republicans just won the 2018 mid terms and Trump will be President until 2024.
At some point I will grapple with all the unraveling Clinton/Mueller/Fusion GPS/FISA/Brennan Scandularity…but not today.
Democrats, rather than maximizing their chance at a blue wave, have insisted on electing far left-wing candidates over more-electable party moderates. Those national results replicate what the Texas Democratic Party did to themselves: Push moderates out of the party. Result: More Republicans elected. They appear hellbent on replicating those results at the national level…
Former New York speaker of the House Sheldon Silver found guilty of a kickback scheme yet again. The first conviction was overturned on appeal over a technicality.
“The people who’ve lost their way are the liberals and civil libertarians, blinded by their rage for Trump, who have dropped their principles in a moment of political threat and are taking out their anger on a man who has been their staunchest ally. Maybe the question isn’t what happened to Alan Dershowitz. Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else.” Caveat: Writer suffers from usual “Fox News and Trump are the Devil” derangement. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
President Donald Trump: “Members of the violent MS-13 gang are animals.” MSM: “Trump just said all undocumented immigrants are animals!” Also: “Trump supporters are fleeing the media not because they want cheerleaders, but because they are tired of a secular, coastal, liberal press that not only cannot relate to heartland voters but thinks it is beneath them to even try.”
China, Russia and other scumbag authoritarian countries are lying about their GDP. This is my shocked face. This also why you should take all those “OMG China’s economy will overtake the U.S. in 20XX!” panics with several grains of sand.
Seattle thinks that golden goose would taste mighty fine cooked in a white wine reduction.
Class-action lawsuit filed against Facebook over revelations that the company logged users’ text and call logs using the Facebook smartphone app on Android phones. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
EU: here’s a statement condemning the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania: LOL, no. BLOCKED. (Hat tip: Pat Condell on Gab.)
Jason Shoumaker, the law school’s facilities director until November 2017, is the subject of an ongoing probe by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Rangers. Though Shoumaker was taken into custody Thursday over tampering charges, he is at the heart of a major fraud investigation – one that potentially involves “several million dollars of questionable expenses,” a source familiar with the probe said….During multiple pay periods, Shoumaker logged regular 8-hour days with the university while he was actually cavorting out of state, according to the affidavit.
Nancy Pelosi says she wants to be Speaker again. How nice of her to fire up the Republican base for midterms…
Democratic advantage on generic congressional ballots down to 1.2%. And that’s from Reuters, which is not known to be particularly Republican or Trump friendly…
I’m thinking that the Democrats who are making such a big deal out of these ads really don’t themselves believe in democracy. They have been going on and on for a year and a half about how Donald Trump shouldn’t be President. Personally, I want to believe in democracy, and what I saw back in November 2016 is that the American people voted Donald Trump into office. I accept that he is rightfully President because he won the election. It bothers me tremendously that so many people won’t do that. I think they do not believe in democracy. And I know they are leaning very hard into the argument that what happened wasn’t real democracy. Look at those stupid ads they’ve made such a big deal about!
AND: Please don’t tell me about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote. What if Donald Trump had held rallies in upstate New York and various places in California, etc. etc.? He won the election that was held. She won an imaginary election that he wasn’t competing in.
Baghdad now has thriving night life and bars again. Plus men sport hairstyles that look like they’re auditioning to play the next alien race on Star Trek. Also this: “As the war against ISIS wound down, [Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-]Abadi began removing the drab, ugly concrete blast walls that once divided neighborhoods. The government is moving many of these barriers to the Syrian border, where it is creating a wall to keep out ISIS militants.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Bret Easton Ellis on Kayne West’s redpilling: “As someone who considers themselves a disillusioned Gen-X’er, I think there IS a backlash brewing against leftist hysteria…What I used to semi-align myself with has no answers for anything right now, just constant bitching and finding ways to delegitimize an election.” And if you can’t trust the author of American Psycho to offer unbiased political commentary, who can you trust?
“Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It’s a feature. It’s part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats.”
Uber software decided pedestrian was a false positive. Result: Dead pedestrian.
Since Dick’s Sporting Goods has decided to lobby for gun control (just how does that increase shareholder value for a sporting goods company?), Springfield Armory has cut ties with them.
Now some links from the “Old News Is So Exciting!” file:
Since I was distracted primary week by a dying dog, this bit of news slipped under the radar and I only recently realized I forgot to report it: Democratic State Rep. Dawnna Dukes went down in flames back in March, along with fellow Democratic state reps Roberto Alonzo of Dallas, Tomas Uresti (brother of convicted felon and former state senator Carlos Uresti) of San Antonio, and Diana Arevalo of San Antonio.
From 2015: “Police find 3,700 knives, satanic shrine in mobile home of Florida woman who tried stabbing an officer.” I think that’s taking your cosplay too far. Also, unless your ID card says “Sarah Kerrigan,” you don’t get to be the Queen of Blades…
This Penny Arcade post is actually from several years ago. I thought it was a swell piece of writing then, and since Tycho relinked to it recently, I read it again, and still think it’s a swell piece of writing. I commend it to your attention.
The other thing I hear training officers say: they’re dealing with entire generations of people who have never been in a fistfight. They have no idea what it’s like to take a punch, or get into a physical confrontation. Not only have they never done it, they’ve been actively discouraged from doing it all of their life. And the academy has to teach them to get past and through that. You can’t quit if you hurt a rib or got punched in the face. You have to keep going, or else you will die. Or your partner will die. Or both of you will die.
I’m not one of those people who blindly says “Oh, the cops have a dangerous job” as an excuse for bad behavior. Yes, it is dangerous (not so much so as commercial fishing, for example) but I still want my police to behave properly, and treat everyone with dignity and respect up until the point they forfeit that right. Then I want them to end the threat as efficiently and humanely as they possibly can. To steal an old CHL saying, “Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
On the criminal side of the ledger, here’s the first part of an in-depth look at a Detroit drug gang known as the Seven Mile Bloods, who made rap videos and put death lists up on Instagram.
Since 2003, prosecutors say gang members targeted for death dozens of rivals on Instagram hit lists, participated in more than 14 shootings, at least four homicides, 11 attempted murders and drug crimes that eroded the quality of life on the gang’s home turf, known by locals as The Red Zone.
“The SMB made The Red Zone into a war zone,” U.S. Department of Justice Trial Attorney Julie Finocchiaro said.
More than 1,000 pages of federal court records and trial testimony illustrate how prosecutors used Facebook and Instagram posts, YouTube videos and rap lyrics to try and topple a social-media savvy gang that had a death grip on both the opioid drug trade and violence on the east side of Detroit.
Five defendants in the Seven Mile Bloods case face possible death sentences under federal law, even though Michigan has abolished the death penalty. The five face possible death sentences because prosecutors say they were involved in homicides and violence as part of an organized criminal enterprise that operated a pain-pill pipeline between Detroit and Charleston, West Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s opioid crisis.
The court records and testimony also provide a street-level look at life and death in the The Red Zone. The gang’s turf is in the northeast corner of the 48205 ZIP code between Seven Mile and Eight Mile roads, east of Gratiot and west of Kelly.
The ZIP code is so dangerous some locals call it the 4820-Die.
Plus a gang murder that occurred because members of rival gangs ran into each other seeing their parole officers…
Talk of drawing down America’s presence in the Middle East should not obscure the fact that there are many American soldiers still in harm’s way over there, including Master Sgt. Johnathan J. Dunbar of Austin, who was killed by an IED in Syria:
The Defense Department on Saturday identified the American soldier supporting Operation Inherent Resolve who was killed after an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated near his patrol.
That soldier was Master Sgt. Johnathan J. Dunbar, 36, of Austin, Texas, who was assigned to Headquarters, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He died from injuries sustained during the IED attack, the Pentagon said.
Two U.S.-led Coalition personnel were killed on Thursday, and five others wounded, in Mangij [AKA Manbij], Syria.
Dunbar’s death marks the first death of an American service member in Syria or Iraq this year.
Manbij is in the Aleppo Governorate in northern Syria. It is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces but is close to Turkey’s incursion.
This was “the second U.S. combat death in Syria. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott C. Dayton, was killed by an improved explosive device in November 2016.”
Condolences to his friends and family, and best wishes for the other U.S. military personnel to quickly achieve complete victory and come home safely.
The 24-year-old suspect accused of setting off a string of violent devices in the Austin-area is dead after detonating a device and killing himself, Austin police has confirmed. Austin police are warning the public that there may be other devices out there and to remain vigilant.
The Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said the suspect, identified as a 24-year-old white man, was identified by police in the past 24 hours as a person of interest. The man then became a suspect.
Authorities said they used surveillance video from the FedEx store on Brodie Lane in South Austin to lead them to the suspect, according to KVUE’s Tony Plohetski. Authorities also got information from Google and from the suspect’s computer history that confirmed the suspect was looking at information on where to go to ship devices, according to Plohetski’s sources.
WFAA’s Jason Whitely said law enforcement had identified the suspect at approximately 9 p.m. Tuesday and were closing in on him based on packages he sent from FedEx. Whitely added that police wanted to surprise the man.
Authorities located the vehicle the suspect was known to be driving, and found it at a hotel in Round Rock, Manley said.
Multiple officers from the Austin Police Department and federal agencies took positions around the hotel as they awaited the arrival of tactical teams, Manley said.
The vehicle started to drive away, and authorities followed the suspect. Manley said the suspect’s vehicle stopped in a ditch on the side of the road. As a SWAT team approached the vehicle, the suspect detonated a device, Manley said. The explosion knocked an officer back, causing the officer to suffer minor injuries. Another officer who Manley said has been with the department for 11 years then fired at the vehicle. That officer has been placed on administrative duty, per standard procedure.
The suspect was then confirmed dead. Manley said they are not naming the suspect until next of kin has been notified. KVUE’s Plohetski reports that the suspect is from Central Texas.
Police do not have a motive yet and do not know if the suspect was planning on delivering another bomb at the time of his death.
Manley said at a press conference shortly after the suspect’s death that “it’s been a long almost three weeks,” and this is the culmination of the hard work of multiple agencies.
Chief Manley said they “don’t know where the suspect has been the past 24 hours,” and that there may be other devices out there. The public must remain vigilant and call 911 if they see anything suspicious.
Update: Police have identified the no-deceased Austin bomber as Mark Conditt, 23, of Pflugerville. Not seeing any mention of any radical political or religious affiliation.
Developing…
Update 2: Was he posting to Reddit?
Mark Anthony Conditt was posting on Reddit under #AustinBombing
Screenshots believe. When I read these on Reddit, my antennas were raised big time. pic.twitter.com/qykZlJnvwH
