Posts Tagged ‘Palestinians’
Friday, September 18th, 2020
Democrats are behaving badly (as usual), peace is breaking out in the Middle East (not as usual), how Soros and company are funding violent unrest, some Wuhan coronavirus shenanigans, and some unexpected stealth fighter news. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Borepatch on how Democrat Party elites have screwed every single faction of their coalition:
- The Elite has stiffed Bernie (twice), alienating his supporters.
- The Elite has sent their (white) radical street muscle into Black neighborhoods, burning and looting black businesses.
- The Elite hasn’t really done anything at all for the hispanic community. Their support for communists has hurt them in Florida where Donald Trump is outpolling Joe Biden among hispanics (!).
- The Elite has pushed outsourcing (most recently the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty which Trump killed). Private sector unions have noticed.
- The Elite has pushed the virus lockdown which has thrown millions of restaurant employees out of work. Many of these folks belong to SEIU. Now that emergency unemployment benefits have run out – and restaurants are going out of business because of the continuing lockdown – you have to wonder if these people will start to wonder why they support the Democrats.
- Public Sector employees have done well, but the areas that locked down hardest are the areas where the government budgets are most in trouble. New York City is going to lay off 40,000 employees. The Elite has hoped that Biden will win and bail out the states and cities. Good luck with that.
- Lastly, suburban women are hit with a Democratic Party double whammy: schools remain closed in many (especially Blue) areas. Women see their family lifestyles massively disrupted, and potentially are forced to consider giving up their own job to home school their kids. At the same time they see radical rioters entering suburban towns. Rioters are filmed telling people to get out of their homes which will be taken as “reparations”.
From The Department of Duh: “Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter.” Further: “The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
House Democrats are not as keen as Nancy Pelosi is on committing political suicide by refusing to pass a Wuhan coronavirus relief package.
President Donald Trump: Cut it out with the Social Justice training. CDC: LOL. Trump: Don’t make me come over there.
The dark money network behind plans for mass unrest after President Trump’s reelection:
The point person for the Fight Back Table, a coalition of liberal organizations planning for a “post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario,” leads a progressive coalition that is part of a massive liberal dark money network.
Deirdre Schifeling, who leads the Fight Back Table’s efforts to prepare for “mass public unrest” following the Nov. 3 election, founded and is campaign director for Democracy for All 2021 Action, a project of Arabella Advisors’ Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a dark money network that provides wealthy donors anonymity as they push large sums into the left’s organizational efforts.
The connections suggest that post-election mobilization isn’t just the project of a liberal fringe, but that powerful Democratic Party interest groups are also involved.
Created in 2019, Democracy for All 2021 Action includes more than 20 labor union, think tank, racial justice, and environmental groups that push for automatic and same-day voter registration, prohibiting voter ID laws, and removing “barriers” to naturalization, among other initiatives. While the Sixteen Thirty Fund does not report Democracy for All 2021 Action in its D.C. business records, the group acknowledges that it is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund at the bottom of its website. The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been used as an avenue for donors to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to state-based and national groups in recent years. In 2018 alone, $141 million was passed through the fund to liberal endeavors.
A complete list of groups that make up the Fight Back Table is not publicly available, but Schifeling’s group appears to be an integral part of its efforts. Beyond being the point person for the Fight Back Table’s election war games, Schifeling has ties to two of the Fight Back Table’s founding groups, Demos and Color of Change, which are part of Democracy for All 2021 Action. Schifeling’s group is also a part of Protect the Results, a separate coalition that is collaborating with the Fight Back Table on mass mobilization to “protect the results of the 2020 elections” in more than 1,000 locations across the United States.
The post-Election Day prep follows other doomsday planning scenarios by liberal activists. The Transition Integrity Project released a 22-page document that mentioned “violence” 15 times, “chaos” 9 times, “unrest” 3 times, and “crisis” 12 times. The Fight Back Table, likewise, is preparing for extreme outcomes, including violence and mass mobilization efforts following the elections.
Snip.
Schifeling’s group is just one of dozens that fall under funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors. The funds have facilitated more than $1 billion in anonymous funding since President Donald Trump took office.
Funds affiliated with Arabella Advisors act as a “fiscal sponsor” to liberal nonprofits by providing tax and legal status to the groups. This setup means that the nonprofits do not have to file individual tax forms to the IRS, which include information such as board members and overall financials.
Some of the most prominent groups on the left fall under these funds, including Demand Justice, which fights Trump’s judicial nominations, and numerous prominent state-based groups. Funds at Arabella are also used to push grants to outside groups not contained within their network, including David Brock’s American Bridge, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy, and America Votes.
“Three Soros Campaigns to Further Advance the Left’s Radical Agenda“:
Three new George Soros campaigns to further advance the left’s radical agenda have been uncovered in separate news reports published this week. Keep in mind that the U.S. government subsidizes the Hungarian billionaire’s deeply politicized Open Society Foundations (OSF) that work to destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions of higher education and orchestrate refugee crises for political gain. Details of the financial and staffing nexus between OSF and the U.S. government are available in a Judicial Watch investigative report.
With the help of American taxpayer dollars, Soros bolsters a radical leftwing agenda that in the United States has included: promoting an open border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts; fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist racialist organizations; financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations involved in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri; weakening the integrity of our electoral systems; promoting taxpayer funded abortion-on-demand; advocating a government-run health care system; opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts; promoting dubious transnational climate change agreements that threaten American sovereignty and working to advance gun control and erode Second Amendment protections.
The list extends even further, with Soros tentacles—money—reaching previously unknown domestic and foreign causes that promote a broad leftwing agenda at various levels. It turns out Soros donated $408,000 to a Political Action Committee (PAC) that supported Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose office just dropped felony charges against the actor who fabricated a hate crime earlier this year. The actor, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was attacked in Chicago on his way home from a sandwich shop at 2 a.m. He said two masked men shouted racial and homophobic slurs, beat him, poured bleach on him and tied a rope around his neck. Smollett blamed the crime on white Trump supporters. When the hoax was uncovered, prosecutors charged him with 16 felonies but Foxx dropped all the charges this week. Illinois campaign records provided in the news report show that Soros personally contributed $333,000 to Foxx’s super PAC before the March 15, 2016 primary was over and an additional $75,000 after she became Cook County’s top prosecutor. “Soros has been intervening in local races for prosecutor, state’s attorney, and district attorney — often backing left-wing Democrats against other Democrats in doing so,” according to the article.
Another report published this week reveals that a Soros foundation gave $1 million to a nonprofit that favors choosing the president by popular vote. The group, National Popular Vote Inc., gets millions from leftist groups to push its purported agenda of ensuring that “every vote in every state” matters. Another group, Tides Foundation, that raises money for leftwing causes, also contributed to the popular vote nonprofit. Soros’ OSF’s have given millions of dollars to the Tides Foundation, according to records provided in the story. Based in San Francisco, the group envisions a world of shared prosperity and social justice founded on equality, human rights, healthy communities and a sustainable environment. The nonprofit strives to accelerate the pace of social change by, among other things, working with “marginalized communities.”
The last article documents what Judicial Watch has reported for years—Soros’ huge influence in the U.S. government, specifically the State Department. The agency pressured Ukraine officials to drop an investigation of a Soros group during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Barack Obama’s U.S. ambassador actually gave Ukraine’s prosecutor general a list of people who should not be prosecuted. “The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev,” the article states. “Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.” The piece further reveals that internal memos from Soros’ foundations describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key U.S. government agencies such as the departments of Justice and State.
“Legality Questions Plague Leftist Fundraising Giant ActBlue as New Analysis Reveals Over 48% of Its Millions of Donors Are Allegedly Unemployed.”
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: “Woe is to us! We’re a racist institution! We repent of our white privilege!” Department of Education: “Well, if you’re a racist institution, I guess we’re going to have to investigate you for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and possibly pull your federal funding.”
Nashville’s Democratic Mayor John Cooper caught trying to hide low Wuhan coronavirus infection rates from bars and restaurants. No wonder Americans don’t trust the political class anymore.
“Bureaucrats ‘deny the evidence, Hydroxychloroquine reduces death by 73 per cent.'”
If you want to know why the vast majority of initially Trump-skeptical conservatives have embraced the president, one reason is that he’s actually willing to name the enemy and take the fight to them:
Minneapolis city council members who voted to defund the police are now complaining that there’s not enough police presence to keep citizens safe.
You may not have noticed, since the media tried desperately to bury the story, but the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, formally recognizing Israel. If Obama had done this, it would be the leading MSM story for weeks, with our ruling class insisting he deserved another Nobel Prize.
Speaking of the Obama Administration’s incompetence:
Other Arab nations are in talks to follow suit. “Those in advanced talks with the US over Israeli relations are though to include Oman, Sudan and Morocco.” And possibly Saudi Arabia.
Speaking of which:
A recent sermon from one of Saudi Arabia’s leading clerics called for Muslims to avoid, quote “passionate emotions and fiery enthusiasm” towards Jews.
It’s a marked change in tone from Imam Abdulrahman al-Sudais, compared to previous emotional statements he’s made about the plight of the Palestinian people.
In the past the cleric had prayed for Palestinians to have victory over what he called “invader and aggressor” Jews — a nod to Israel.
However, Sudais’ new remarks referenced a relationship between them and the Prophet Mohammad.
“He treated the Jews of Khaybar equally and treated his Jewish neighbor well.”
All by itself, the softening of the hard-line stance against Israel among leading Wahhbist clerics in “The Land of the Two Holy Cities” is huge, arguably a bigger shift in Muslim thought than all the Arab-Israeli peace treaties combined.
Democrats love Palestinians so much that they’re imitating their failed policies:
The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir summed up the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East decades ago when she said: “Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us. We can forgive them for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with them when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Prime Minister Meir’s sentiments 50 years ago were the result of numerous occasions where Arab leaders rejected very favorable territorial agreements and other peace settlements and opted for war instead. The very clear message was, and has always been, that the Arabs would rather die fighting the Jews than thrive while living alongside them. Just think about the seething hatred an entire group needs to have to sustain such a disastrous outlook. It truly boggles the mind.
Are today’s Democrats much different? Their single-minded hatred of President Trump and his supporters knows no bounds. They oppose every policy he puts forth, contradict his every statement, and try to undermine his very humanity just like Islamic radicals regularly attempt to dehumanize Jews in Israel and all over the world,
They don’t even like to refer to him as “President Trump,” as they immaturely prance around on TV and social media calling him “45” as if referring to him solely as the 45th president is some kind of serious insult. Palestinians and other Israel-haters pull a similar move when they refuse to call the land “Israel.” They instead opt for nasty Orwellian terms like “Zionist entity.”
And now they are running a presidential campaign with the sole message of “get Trump.” There’s not one person really planning to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden; they’re all just Trump-haters. None of those voters can truly articulate the slightest argument for Biden without talking mostly or all about Trump. It’s the most hateful campaign against an incumbent since the pro-slavery Democrats tried to unseat Abe Lincoln in 1864, and that’s saying something.
All of this hate has been in place of what could have been four years of deal making with Trump, who came into office with no real orthodoxies to maintain and without a long political career filled with masters to oblige.
Like the wasted 72 years of Palestinian stubbornness in the face of so much Israeli success since 1948, Democrats have chosen a scorched earth policy rather than acknowledge their defeat in the last election or take advantage of any policies they could have pursued with this president on infrastructure, health coverage, and ending U.S. involvement in unending wars.
Plus hoaxes and blood libels.
Department of Justice orders Al Jazeera Plus to register as a foreign agent of Qatar. Good.
The Kenosha riots did $50 million in damage.
“Seattle Mayor May Face Federal Charges Over ‘Autonomous Zone’ Fiasco.” As well she should.
#BlackLivesMatter protestors take over a Trader Joe’s in Seattle to protest “lack of access to grocery stores.”
Aurora, Colorado police stand-down twice rather than trying to halt a violent felon on a rampage.
Two campaign team members for Lacy Johnson, the Republican running against Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, shot, one fatally.
Comedian Chris Rock says that Democrats were too focused on the impeachment farce to properly handle the Wuhan coronavirus.
An F-35 fighter now costs less to build than an F-15 EX. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
But wait! A secret sixth generation Air Force stealth fighter already completed a test flight after only a single year of development?
Dispatch from the newspaper of record:
In the “old news is so exciting” category, I had missed that Tony Gonzalez has finally won the Texas 23rd Congressional District Republican runoff over Raul Reyes, and will face Democratic nominee Tina Ortiz for the seat Republican Will Hurd is retiring from.
Are Asian illegal aliens on illegal pot farms causing problems on New Mexico Navajo reservations?
More Google autocomplete shenanigans. It will autocomplete “Donate Biden” but not “Donate Trump.” (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
Lessons in Social Justice Warrior tolerance:
Rosie and Ellen shows featured toxic work environments where staffers were required to work 80-90 weeks.
Alan Dershowitz sues CNN For $300,000,000 in defamation lawsuit. “The Harvard Law professor emeritus is demanding $300,000,000 in compensatory and punitive damages from CNN for misrepresenting his legal arguments in the Trump impeachment trial.”
Life on Venus?
“New Netflix Movie Actually Murders Puppies To Teach That Murdering Puppies Is Bad.”
“Following California’s Plagues Of Darkness And Fire, Pacific Ocean Turns To Blood.” “I figured it was just a murdered hobo, but there was way too much blood. You’d have to have killed at least a thousand hobos, and that hasn’t happened out here since the ’90s.”
I chuckled:
Tags:#BlackLivesMatter, 2020 Election, 2020 Presidential Race, Abdulrahman al-Sudais, Abraham Accords, ActBlue, Air Force, aircraft, Al Jazeera, Alan Dershowitz, antifa, Arabella Advisors, Aurora, Bahrain, California, campaign finance fraud, Christopher Eisgruber, Civil Rights, CNN, Colorado, coronavirus, Critical Race Theory, Deirdre Schifeling, Democracy for All 2021 Action, Democrats, Department of Education, Department of Justice, dogs, Ellen DeGeneres, F-15, F-35, fundraising, George Soros, Google, hydroxychloroquine, Ilhan Omar, impeachment, Israel, J.K. Rowling, Jenny Durkan, John Cooper, John Kerry, Judicial Watch, Kim Foxx, Lacy Johnson, LinkSwarm, marijuana, media bias, Media Watch, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Military, Minneapolis, Morocco, Nancy Pelosi, Nashville, National Popular Vote Inc., Navajo, Netflix, New Mexico, Oman, Palestinians, police, Princeton, Protect the Results, Qatar, Republicans, riot, Rosie O'Donnell, Saudi Arabia, Seattle, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Social Justice Warriors, Sudan, Texas 23rd Congressional District, Tides Foundation, Tony Gonzales, Trader Joe's, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Venus, Wahhabism, Wuhan
Posted in Democrats, Economics, Elections, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 29th, 2020
President Donald Trump has unveiled Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Let me summarize:
Blah blah blah two state solution blah blah blah land for peace blah blah blah settlement building freeze blah blah blah $50 billion in aid.
What, too cynical? So is the plan. In one way it (like all the previous Middle East peace plans) is a serious plan, in that if the Palestinians accepted and implemented it, it would bring enduring peace and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The cynical part is that there’s no way in hell the kill-crazy death cults in charge of Gaza and the West Bank will ever agree to it.
And indeed, it’s worse than previous peace plans they rejected, including the 2008 Olmert plan where they got 94% of the West Bank and got compensated with another 6% elsewhere. But that’s what happens when you spend the last 12 years sucking, Israel completes a strong security barrier, and the entire Middle East landscape falls out from underneath your feet. Most of the other Arab countries are tired of the Palestinian bullshit, and Egypt, UAE, Bahrain, Oman and the Saudis have been dropping hints they should take the deal, or at least start negotiating based on it.
I suspect President Trump offered it as a win-win-win situation, which is to say he wins no matter what the Palestinians do. If they take it, great! He brought peace to the Middle East! If they don’t, he can say he made a serious proposal, backed by Israel and supported by other Arab countries. (And he know Democrats will call him an evil racist trying to screw their pet Palestinians no matter what.) And if the Palestinians don’t take the deal but use it as a starting point, he’s provided Israel with a very strong opening position.
Further, he got signoff on the deal both of the aspirants to the Israel PM seat, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz…
Sorry, wrong Gantz
…which would insulate him from charges of favoring Netanyahu if Democrats weren’t so reflexively hostile to Israel.
Palestinians reacted to the proposal in the traditional way: By burning stuff.
This peace proposal will be rejected by Palestinians because it’s a peace proposal, and it doesn’t achieve their “river to the sea” goal of the complete eradication of Israel. Other Arab countries will not backing the proposal will make noises about “returning to the 1967 borders,” which is about as likely as the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire.
No matter how good Donald Trump’s persuasive skills may be, this peace plan won’t succeed because the Palestinians are led by crazy and/or corrupt scumbags, who will never make peace as long they continue getting paid not to.
The Middle East peace process is all process and no peace.
Tags:Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Israel, Jihad, Mahmoud Abbas, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Palestinians
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | 4 Comments »
Friday, September 20th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
Flash flooding hits the Houston area from Tropical Storm Imelda. “Gov. Greg Abbott has declared a state of disaster for 13 counties.” Plus a post office roof collapsed and I-10 was closed in both directions for a while east of Houston.
Democrats remain stuck on stupid:
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
How New York Times ignored the real bombshell in the Kavanaugh book:
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
And Pogrebin still doesn’t get what she did wrong:
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
Trump’s Kulturekampf:
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Democrats are lying about healthcare. For starters: How much ObamaCare sucks. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
Chronicle of an apocalypse foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Why Britain should ditch the EU:
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
“Fmr DNC Chair Donna Brazile: ‘I get in trouble’ when I refuse to say that Trump is a racist.”
“‘Rats, All of You!‘ Comedians Bill Burr, Spade, Schneider Slam Cancel Culture.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A tweet on the racist history of gun control:
How to get emails in a freedom of information act request from the LAPD. Bonus: In 2015, they were still using Groupwise… (Hat tip: Amy Alkon.)
Here’s a long study on the effects of red meat consumption. Conclusion?
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
(Hat tip: Powerline.)
Bill Gates says not to break up tech giants. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
Speaking of Gates, here’s a list of all the connections between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. Plus lots of denials.
First Blood author David Morrell on the meta-genius of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which I highly recommend seeing if you haven’t already.
Baby Shoggoth found.
“Snopes: ‘The Claim That Trump Is Hitler Lacks Concrete Evidence But Alludes To A Deeper Truth.'”
“Millennial Diagnosed With Tragic Inability To Even.”
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: 
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Tags:2016 Presidential Race, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Atkins, Babylon Bee, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Burr, Bill Gates, Blue and White (Israel), Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Christine Blasey Ford, comedy, Crime, David Spade, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, environmentalism, EU, flooding, Foreign Policy, Green New Deal, gun control, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Houston, Israel, Israeli Elections, Jeffrey Epstein, Jihad, LAPD, Leland Keyser, Likud, Microsoft, ObamaCare, Palestinians, Rob Schneider, Robin Pogrebin, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, technology, UK, vegans, Victor Davis Hanson, weather
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Friday, May 10th, 2019
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Obama took Hillary’s loss as a personal insult:
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The Midwest’s broken blue wall:
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
After the Mueller report, former FBI Director James Comey knows he’s in trouble:
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
Luke Rosiak is on the case of corruption in Flint, Michigan:
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
“What part of No Collusion is hard to understand?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Democrat slips up, admits that “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this President, he will be reelected.”
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Remember how sure all those economic “experts” were that Trump would tank the economy if he got elected? Good times, good times…
A lot of what you think you know about gun control in Australia, New Zealand and the UK is probably wrong.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
The FBI’s New York office forms a squad dedicated to MS-13.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy raids fund for fallen firefighters.
Followup:
New York: No new pipelines. Gas company: OK, that means no more gas hookups for new buildings because we’re at capacity.
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
“U.S. Seizes North Korean Freighter Violating U.N. Sanctions.”
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Facebook Allows Terrorist Who Beheaded Canadian Tourist To Keep Account & Actively Post.” That would be Bhen Tatuh of the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
“Facebook SWAT Team Arrests Man For Illegal Possession Of Conservative Views.”
“Man Whose Headless Body Was Found Floating in Fish Tank Was Murdered.” That’s some mighty fine forensic analysis there, Lou… (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)
“Nation’s Politicians Mock Trump For Only Wasting A Mere Billion Dollars.”
“That’s not a knife!” (Unleashes Hellfire missile with 100 pounds worth of blades.) “Now that, that’s a knife!”
Entire New Orleans Times-Picayune staff laid off after paper sold to competitor. Among other things, they did that fine story on the homeless Super Bowl player.
Speaking of football: “XFL Reaches Deal With Fox, Disney To Broadcast Games.”
How a World War II field kitchen worked.
The return of the giant knotweed.
The 106 greatest crime films of all time, as ranked by Otto Penzler (still in progress).
“Is that an alligator in your pants, or are you just happy to see me.” Bonus: Florida Woman.
“Ilhan Omar Blasts Israel For Refusing Palestine’s Generous Gift Of Rockets.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
Tags:2020 Election, Abu Sayyaf Group, Alabama, Bhen Tatuh, Border Controls, China, Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, FBI, Florida, Gaza, Hellfire missile, homeless, Houston, Huawei, Ilhan Omar, impeachment, Indiana, Iowa, Israel, James Comey, Jews, Jim Goad, John Rodgers, Justin Fairfax, LinkSwarm, Louis Farrakhan, Luke Rosiak, Media Watch, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Military, MS-13, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York, NFL, North Korea, Palestinians, Phil Murphy, Philippines, Ralph Northam, Seattle, Social Justice Warriors, technology, Virginia, Welfare State, Wisconsin, World War II, XFL
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 2 Comments »
Friday, January 11th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! At least those of you not among the millions dead from the shutdown, assuming you already survived the tax cut and the end of Net Neutrality…
If you ignore the MSM-generated drama, 2018 was a great year for America:
In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer
Since Trump took office, the United States has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers.
It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.
In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century—”energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo”—no longer exists.
Near-total energy self-sufficiency means the United States is no longer strategically leveraged by the Middle East, forced to pay exorbitant political prices to guarantee access to imported oil, or threatened by gasoline prices of $4 to $5 a gallon.
The American economy grew by 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2018, and by 3.4 percent in the third quarter. American GDP is nearly $1.7 trillion larger than in January 2017, and nearly $8 trillion larger than the GDP of China. For all the talk of the Chinese juggernaut, three Chinese workers produce about 60 percent of the goods and services produced by one American worker.
In 2018, unemployment fell to a near-record peacetime low of 3.7 percent. That’s the lowest U.S. unemployment rate since 1969. Black unemployment hit an all-time low in 2018. For the first time in memory, employers are seeking out entry-level workers rather than vice versa.
The poverty rate is also near a historic low, and household income increased. There are about 8 million fewer Americans living below the poverty line than there were eight years ago. Since January 2017, more than 3 million Americans have gone off so-called food stamps.
Abroad, lots of bad things that were supposed to happen simply did not.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States exceeded the annual percentage of carbon reductions of most countries that are part of the agreement.
North Korea and the United States did not go to war. Instead, North Korea has stopped its provocative nuclear testing and its launching of ballistic missiles over the territory of its neighbors.
Despite all the Trump bluster, NATO and NAFTA did not quite implode. Rather, allies and partners agreed to renegotiate past commitments and agreements on terms more favorable to the U.S.
The United States—and increasingly most of the world—is at last addressing the systematic commercial cheating, technological appropriation, overt espionage, intellectual-property theft, cyber intrusions, and mercantilism of the Chinese government.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
President Donald Trump visits the Texas border.
“The longer Donald Trump wrangles with his two superannuated cartoon antagonists, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the stronger the president’s position becomes.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“If the Dems Want to Lose the Wall Fight, All They Have to Do Is Keep Talking.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Secretary of State Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notes that Obama’s Cairo speech was full of shit.
Nobel Peace Prize secretary admits that giving the award to Obama was a mistake. In other news, Peter Dinklage will not be the starting center for the New York Knicks. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“There is one thing that Palestine obsessives never seem obsessed with: the opinions of Palestinians. There’s no mystery here—asking what Palestinians believe exposes a fundamental problem with the liberal approach to the peace process, which is based on the belief that Palestinians are willing to live peacefully beside Israel.”
Flashback: How a Boris Yeltsin trip to a Randall’s in Clear Lake helped end the cold war.
The very first bill pushed by House Democrats takes aim at the First Amendment:
House Democrats are up and running, and their first bill is instructive. Couched as an anti-corruption and good-government measure, it is really an attempt to silence or obstruct political opponents.
A central part of H.R. 1 is “campaign-finance reform,” no surprise given the progressive fixation with money in politics, which oddly turns to mist when Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending. The House bill requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues.
The goal is to identify donors who don’t genuflect to progressive views, then bully or harass them to stop giving. Recall how the Mozilla CEO was driven out after he donated to California’s referendum opposing same-sex marriage.
(Hat tip: MQ Sullivan on Twitter.)
“WaPo’s embarrassing indulgence in hyperbole describing the attendance at Democratic candidates rallies.” Remember: Trump filling arenas is nothing, but when 200 Democrats turn out, it’s “filled to the rafters.”
Second dead black man found in the home of prominent gay California Democratic donor Ed Buck. I guest the first was just a “gimme” under California law.
“Hey officer, I have a dead body in my apartment, along with a bunch of illegal drugs.” “It’s cool. No worries.”
Tam suggests that people do not need to clean their gun as frequently as the old military guys suggest.
Laws are for the little people: “He’s been a staunch supporter of gun control measures for decades, but in a surprising twist, federal prosecutors revealed Thursday that nearly two dozen firearms were discovered in Ald. Ed Burke’s offices during their raids in November.” (Hat tip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
Woe unto those who own a house inadvertently mapped as a default location for unmapped IP addresses.
Being anti-communist is now evidently a hate crime in Seattle. (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)
Twenty-one bodies found in north Mexico after gang clash near Texas border.
Media Matters head and Hillary Clinton crony David Brock says that Bernie supporters must be silenced in 2020.
Brazil:
Jair Bolsonaro is “far right” and the media means that as a pejorative.
Turns out he favors the private sector and wants to get rid of government owned industry.
He favors expansive gun rights as a way to combat crime and let people protect themselves. This has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
He favors conservative social policy including a rollback of the LGBT agenda in Brazil. Again, this has led to massive media backlash in the United States.
Most damning in the eyes of many in western media, he favors abandoning restrictions on private property that could threaten Amazonian forest growth, i.e. he’s bad for climate change.
The media has focused a lot on Bolsonaro talking favorably about Brazil’s American backed military dictatorship that ruthlessly exterminated communists and other dissident groups from the 1960’s into the early 1980’s. They suggest Bolsonaro might bring it back.
So far, the only thing Bolsonaro seems to be doing is keeping his campaign promises to fight corruption, roll back progressive social policies his socialist predecessor supported, and expand gun rights. But the American commentariat can do nothing but see everything through the lens of Trump and if you hate Trump, you must hate Bolsonaro apparently.
Cahnman says cut Will Hurd some slack on some meaningless political posturing. I tend to agree, especially since here he might actually be voting the way his constituents favor.
Dan Crenshaw seems to be settling into his new job nicely:
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke Instagrams his trip to the dentist. Because that’s what voters really want to see.
Related snark:
Open office plans suck. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“I’m attacking the Death Star…and I’m not wearing any pants!” (Link corrected.)
Tags:Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Border Controls, border fence, Boris Yeltsin, Brazil, Cairo, China, Chuck Schumer, Cold War, Communism, Crime, Dan Crenshaw, David Brock, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, Ed Burke, Eqypt, Guns, Instagram, Israel, Jair Bolsonaro, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Matters, Media Watch, Mexico, murder, Nancy Pelosi, Palestinians, Soviet Union, Star Wars, Tamaulipas, Texas, Washington Post, Will Hurd
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, August 31st, 2018
Just when I think the Catholic Church can’t make itself look any worse in the wake of the burgeoning child rape scandal, they prove me wrong:
Papal spokesman on the Catholic Church’s spiraling child rape scandal:
In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.
“The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.
Evidently Pope Francis and company were doing their darnedest to imitate the Babylon Bee.
Related: “Pope Starting To Suspect He Might Be Antichrist.”
How ObamaCare was designed to force independent doctors out of business. (Hat tip: Ian Murray at Instapundit.)
ICE arrests over 100 illegal alien workers at Load Trail LLC in Sumner, north Texas.
The U.S. share of mass shootings is actually lower than the global average.
President Trump’s Iran sanctions are working.
“There’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Remember Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank? They were going to build 2,300 of them. Now? 132. And that number is split between the T-14 and the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, which shares the same chassis. Which means Russia will have to continue to rely on older T-72 and T-90 tanks as the mainstays of their armored forces for the foreseeable future. By comparison the United States has over 1,500 M1A2s and over 4,000 M1A1s, both of which proved capable of taking out T-72s in the Gulf War. As Stalin once put it, “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” And the essential brokeness of Russia is why I’m not worried about their costly adventurism in Syria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
John McCain was admired by liberals; that is, when they weren’t calling him a senile plutocrat warmonger.
How Chicago 68 destroyed the Democratic Party:
Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
The Missouri Democratic Party does not need any of you stinking moderates. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Biased liberal news sites hate being called biased liberal news sites. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
Philadelphia is bankrupt. So naturally the liberal mayor is trying to ignore the obvious. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Cahnman looks at gang rape in the Baylor football program. Add to this the news that Baylor planted moles in sexual assault survivor groups to report back on cases involving student athletes, and you start to wonder whether the NCAA out not to revive the “Death Penalty” for Baylor’s football program…or maybe their entire athletic department.
CNN lied, they know they lied, and they can’t stop lying.
Washington Post: “Russia hacked the election!” Also Washington Post: “We’re going to court to fight election transparency advertising law!” (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
Speaking of liberal mouthpiece newspapers, both the editor and the publisher for the Austin American Statesman are retiring.
This just in: Greece is still boned.
“If he’s cute, it’s flirting. If he’s ugly, it’s sexual harassment.”
“Abbas to close banks in Gaza, cut off all salaries.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Lancaster Independent School District violates state law with illegal electioneering.
Dick’s Sporting Goods move away from guns hurt their bottom line. “The anti-gun crowd must not buy a lot of sporting goods.”
ESPN finally seems to understand that they should get out of politics and stick to sports. Took them long enough…
Chicanery at the Llano police department. Bad cop! No ribs!
“Eat Steak and Live Longer.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Snowflake Kansas professor cancels office hours because concealed carry is no legal. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
There can be only one…going to prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
How ballpoint pens killed cursive.
Tags:Baylor, Blase Cupich, Border Controls, Catholics, Chicago, CNN, college, Crime, Democrats, Dick's Sporting Goods, ESPN, Foreign Policy, Guns, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John McCain, Kansas, Lancaster ISD, Llano, M1A2, Mahmoud Abbas, Media Watch, Military, ObamaCare, Palestinians, Philadelphia, Pope, Pope Francis, Russia, T-14 Armata, tanks, Texas, Waco
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, ObamaCare, Texas | 2 Comments »
Sunday, May 6th, 2018
So says this report on Fox, based on Israeli news outlet Maariv:
Former Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly tried to meddle in Middle East peace talks, allegedly telling a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to “yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Israeli news outlet Maariv reported on the apparent meeting between Kerry and Hussein Agha in London, where the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee also reportedly floated a possible encore bid in 2020.
But in the conversation, Kerry reportedly told Agha to share a message with Abbas – urging him to “hold on and be strong” during talks with the Trump administration and “play for time … [and] not yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Kerry, who served as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state during his second term, also reportedly told Agha that Trump would not be in office for long, suggesting he could be out in a year.
According to the report, Kerry used derogatory terms when referring to Trump, and offered to help the Palestinians create an alternative peace initiative. He reportedly asked Abbas not to attack the U.S. or the Trump administration, but rather focus attacks on the president himself.
(Caveat: I don’t know enough about Maariv to judge the veracity of its sources (it’s generally described as “centrist” and critical of the Netanyahu government), and the report includes those “allegedly” and “apparent” words that are so frequently the hallmark of fake news in American media outlets.)
I would say this is a new low for Kerry, but the Iran deal is still more idiotic and there was little indication that the intransigent dumbasses running the Palestinian state were even remotely interested in making peace with Israel anyway. But trying to thwart any chance at peace in the Middle East because you hate President Trump, hate Israel, and treat the terrorism-loving Palestinians as some sort of progressive victimhood identity politics totem for Democrats is plenty low indeed.
This would also appear to be a clear violation of the Logan Act, everyone’s favorite unenforced statute from 1799 that criminalizes freelance negotiation by American citizens with foreign governments hostile to the United States.
Hillary Clinton was running a crooked pay-for-play graft machine out of the State Department and yet, somehow, she was only Obama’s second-worst Secretary of State…
(Hat tip: Fred Reitman on Twitter, via Steve Berman and Instapundit.)
Tags:Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hussein Agha, Jihad, John Kerry, Logan Act, Maariv, Mahmoud Abbas, Media Watch, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Palestinians
Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 30th, 2018
Scott Adams said that Donald Trump’s election was going to change a lot of things about the way we view the world. One of the things it seems to be killing is the delusion that the current Palestinian ruling class is any way, shape or form a “partner for peace.”
President Trump has threatened to withhold all aid to the Palestinians until they engage in peace talks with Israel.
“That money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace, because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, and they’re going to have to want to make peace too or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer.”
Despite all the gnashing of teeth and wailing in outrage from American leftists that President Trump’s decision to finally follow the law and move America’s embassy to Jerusalem would derail any peace talks and spark widespread Palestinian violence. That didn’t happen. Instead, just as President Trump and many conservative observers predicted, the Arab world started to move toward more realistic goals:
Last week in Istanbul, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) recognized East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. They made the announcement with a barrage of angry rhetoric, of course. Israel is a “racist” state, and the Trump administration’s recognition earlier this month of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is “an attack on the historical, legal, natural and national rights of the Palestinian people, a deliberate undermining of all peace efforts, an impetus to extremism and terrorism, and a threat to international peace and security.”
Look past the bombast at the main point. By recognizing East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, the OIC is effectively ceding West Jerusalem to the Israelis and implicitly recognizing it as Israel’s capital.
Snip.
Plenty of Palestinians want the conflict to end and will grudgingly live alongside Israel even if it means giving up the dream of sovereignty over the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. According to a survey published in August, 53 percent of Israelis and 52 percent of Palestinians support a two-state solution.
At least some in the Palestinian National Authority leadership are among that 52 percent. If President Mahmoud Abbas—who is currently finishing up his twelfth year of a four-year term—could push a button that magically created a Palestinian state that roughly corresponds to the 1967 armistice lines and leads to an enduring and stable era of peace with the Israelis, he would probably push it.
He has never agreed to peace terms with Israel, though, nor is he even open to serious peace talks, because a huge number of Palestinians—especially the armed total rejectionists in Hamas—would brand him a traitor. The dream, the fantasy, of destroying Israel hasn’t died yet. The notion that the so-called Zionist Entity is an ultimately temporary imposition remains all-too powerful in the Palestinian national narrative. Peace is not yet nigh, and Mahmoud Abbas knows it.
Even the two-staters would blow a gasket if Abbas were to sign a peace treaty and concede what the Israelis would force him to concede—no “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” who have never even set foot in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza; and Jewish sovereignty over the Western Wall. Odds are high that Abbas would be killed or driven into exile and that yet another war between the Israelis and Palestinians would break out soon after.
Israel’s permanence needs to be part of the story Palestinians tell themselves about their place in the world and in history, and right now, it’s not, at least not among enough of them. The Palestinians, as a whole, aren’t likely to be honest with themselves about this before the wider Islamic world is honest about it first and pressures them to say yes and build the sovereign state that is actually possible rather than continue to pine and sometimes fight for a castle in the air.
Most of the Arab states have quietly set the conflict aside, but they’re afraid to speak truth to the Palestinians, afraid to be branded betrayers, afraid to risk popular wrath and go the way of Egypt’s assassinated Anwar Sadat, afraid to apply the kind of pressure on Palestinian negotiators that ultimately will be necessary. In an alternate universe, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a post-Soviet-style frozen conflict, but in this one, the Syrian and Iranian regimes keep poking it with a stick by funneling guns, money and even missiles to terrorist armies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
That’s why it matters that the OIC just implicitly recognized West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. They didn’t say it in a way that will get them in trouble back home, but the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah absolutely took note that the OIC thinks only East Jerusalem, and not the whole thing, belongs to the Palestinians. They would not have done this had the United States not done it first. It’s a small step, sure, so don’t go popping any champagne corks just yet, but it’s still a step.
Combined with other positive developments, the Middle East has improved more in one year with President Donald Trump in office than eight with Barack Obama.
Whether America’s increasingly Palestinian-phillic Democratic Party will give up their delusional view of them as saintly victims is another question. Signs point to no. Social Justice Warrior-style victimhood identity politics increasingly makes up the ideological core of the Democratic Party, and Palestinians are the victimest. This is the real reason why Democratic support for Israel is at an all-time low. Hatred for Israel is a core-value of the SJW campus left, and from there it has seeped into the heart of the Democratic Party.
That victimhood identity politics is why Democrats have to pretend the likes of Hamas and the PLO are suitable “partners for peace” and why they’re so congenitally soft on jihad. Conservatives want to destroy jihadists, jihadist sanctuaries, and any government supporting jihadists. Liberals want to address “root causes,” which amounts to dumping still more money on corrupt Arab kleptocrats and pretending that if Israel were suddenly wiped off the map, conflict in the Middle East would magically cease to exist.
The Iran Deal is precisely the sort of delusional bullshit liberals try when you leave them running a foreign policy without adult supervision.
Finally, a bit off topic from this essay, but tying in this and yesterday’s post, here’s Ed Driscoll Roger Simon pointing out that Democrats are acting like Palestinians when it comes to immigration reform:
Just as the Palestinians twenty-five years and four significant offers after Oslo have demonstrated they really don’t want a two-state solution with the Israelis, Democrats have now revealed they don’t want to solve the U.S.e immigration problem.
As with the Palestinians, it’s all a shell game.
Donald Trump just offered the Dems an agreement on DACA that gives two million “Dreamers” a pathway to full citizenship after 10-12 years — something not even done by Barack Obama! — and the Dems didn’t even want to discuss the proposal. All that happened was their increasingly unhinged minority leader screamed Trump was “making America safe for white people!”
Paragraph on Pelosi’s mental state omitted.
Pelosi revealed herself to be a repellent racist… or racialist (someone who plays the race card no matter what). More importantly, the Democratic Party unmasked themselves as not all that interested in the “Dreamers” as people. They just want to make the Republicans look, well, racist and lose elections. Otherwise they would be jumping up and down for this proposal.
Call this “projection politics.” Play it long enough and you turn into the very thing you claim the other is. Of course, the Democrats have been playing this so long they really could have been called the Race Party years ago. Other than racial and sexual name calling, they appear to have no policies whatsoever, except opposition to the current administration, no matter what that administration proposes.
Tags:Democrats, Donald Trump, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Nancy Pelosi, Palestinians, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 7th, 2017
Wednesday President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, finally fulfilling the terms of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. (Trivia: It passed the Senate by a vote of 93-5. The only Democrat to vote against it? Sen. Robert Byrd.)
The usual idiots are in full poo flinging mode. “Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Mr Trump was ‘throwing the region into a ring of fire.'” Yes, because the Middle East was such a garden of peace and understanding before the announcement.
Those notorious peace lovers in Hamas stated that President Trump’s move had “opened the gates of Hell. Which is sort of their go-to move:
Maybe they can turn it into a tourist attraction: “Be there at sunset to see Hamas open the Gates of Hell!”
I guess we’ll have to live with Hamas abandoning the peaceful, reasonable, constructive engagement with Israel that’s been their hallmark.
And there’s the usual gnashing and wailing over the blow to the mythical “peace process” that’s all process and no peace.
As one official notes: “Delaying the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has done nothing to achieve peace for more than two decades.”
Naturally the Palestinians are rioting because it’s the only thing they’re good at. Maybe they’ll launch Intifada 3: Little Bombers. The Second Intifada did manage to ramp the annual deaths of Israelis into the low hundreds, but that was before Israel built most of its security wall. (They’re also far along in building an underground wall around Gaza to thwart those Hamas Peace and Happiness kidnap tunnels.) So the scope of Israeli killing they can accomplish is probably fairly constrained.
In the Netherlands, Muslims responded by smashing the windows of a kosher restaurant, trying to ensure those blintzes never oppress Palestinians again.
Meanwhile, a bill to cut off payments to the Palestinian government for supporting terrorism sailed through the House.
Being hypersensitive to the tender sensibilities of Palestinians and the “Arab street” has gotten the United States exactly jack over the years (unless you count dead ambassadors). Let the Arab street rage and boil over Jerusalem this week. Next week it will be something else. And the week after. And the week after. And the week after.
Tags:Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Israel, Jerusalem, Jihad, Middle East, Middle East Peace Process, Netherlands, Palestinians, Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
Sunday, November 19th, 2017
Want to know what’s happening in the Middle East and why?
Ha! Good luck with that.
But this roundup will should at least elevate you to a slightly higher level of informed incomprehension.
Syrian Army takes Abu Kammal again.
The Syrian army and its allies took complete control over Albu Kamal, Islamic State’s last significant town in Syria, a military news service run by Hezbollah said on Sunday.
The army had declared victory over Islamic State in Albu Kamal earlier this month but the jihadists then staged a counter-attack using sleeper cells hidden in the town.
What’s going on in Lebanon? Even Michael Totten doesn’t seem to know.
Saudi Arabia and its allies are meeting in Cairo to talk about what to do about Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah. “The emergency Arab foreign ministers meeting was convened at the request of Saudi Arabia with support from the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait to discuss means of confronting Iranian intervention, Egypt’s state news agency MENA said.”
“The Trump administration said Friday it will shut down the Palestinian Liberation Office (PLO) in Washington, D.C., unless the Palestinians get serious about peace talks with Israel.”
Iraqi Kurds are backing down off their demands for independence.
No link, but suddenly the entire Washington MSM seems to be wringing their hands about the Saudi blockage of Yemen in precisely the way they weren’t when Iran was destabilizing the country with a proxy war the last three years.
Confused? You probably will be, even after this week’s episode of Soap…
Tags:Abu Kammal, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hezbollah, Iran, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Kurds, Lebanon, Michael Totten, Middle East, Palestinians, PLO, Saudi Arabia, Syria
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | 1 Comment »