“Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Who, exactly, is in charge of these cities and city agencies about which African Americans do have many legitimate complaints? Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago: Not exactly famous enclaves of conservative Republican political dominance. Because Dallas is in Texas, people sometimes forget that it is a city like any other American city, and Democrat-dominated. In Dallas, as in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, that Democrat domination is due in great part to a black Democratic voting bloc.
Eventually, someone is going to figure out that the black progressives protesting municipal arrangements in places such as Baltimore are protesting the municipal arrangements created by black progressives working for the interests of the Democratic party. Dallas’s racial politics aren’t as one-sided as Detroit’s, and neither are its party politics; it is Democratic, but not as lopsidedly Democratic as, say, Philadelphia. It even has had a Republican mayor (the office is technically nonpartisan) within living memory. No doubt somebody in Dallas already is trying to figure out a way to blame that mayor for the murder of those five police officers.
“Friends and family tell us that Alton Sterling was a great guy. That may well be the case, but he is also a convicted sex offender felon with a violent temper, who had six arrests for battery, two domestic violence charges, multiple illegal weapons charges, and who had fought with police over weapons before.”
SuperGenius tries to rob gas station, ends up shooting himself in the groin. I also wonder if he’s the towering intellect that managed to clip his own driver’s side mirror at the pump in the video…
This week’s roundup of Clinton Corruption is being headlined by Guccifer 2.0 revelations. The stuff released so far is interesting, but (and I say this as someone who thinks Hillary Clinton should be in prison) pretty weak sauce.
Oh sure, it’s nice to have documented proof that the DNC and the media were out to support Clinton and to screw Bernie Sanders, but everyone already knew that.
There are dozens of Clinton shoes (especially from Hillary’s own email server and the Clinton Foundation) still to drop…
Rush Limbaugh thinks that Donald Trump’s speech slamming Clinton’s corruption was effective. “She is the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”
Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft.
She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund – doing favors for oppressive regimes, and many others, in exchange for cash.
Then, when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests – in less than 2 years – secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public.
Together, she and Bill made $153 million giving speeches to lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments in the years since 2001.
They totally own her, and that will never change.
Clinton’s incompetence caused the State Department to turn off email protection for State systems to accommodate her. Interestingly, the sentence “They were trying urgently to resolve an apparent conflict between the server’s built-in email delivery features with a version of “ScanMail for Exchange” security software from Trend Micro Inc. that had been installed on her server.” has been removed from the original AP story…
“Why it’s called a ‘modern sporting rifle‘ and not an ‘assault weapon.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit, who notes “Remember, none of this is about saving lives. It’s about the cultural domination of the people in flyover country, by their coastal ‘betters’ who get a near-erotic thrill out of such domination, and who are reduced to blind rage whenever their efforts at domination fail.”)
Aside: Is the Washington Examiner paying Ashe Schow enough? She’s like some indefatigable writing machine…
“Right now the debate seems choked with people who don’t know, are proud of not knowing, and think you’re a redneck gun-nut asshole if you want them to know because they feel very strongly about this.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
No charges for officer Brad Miller. He’s the one who shot the “unarmed teen” who had driving his Jeep through a plate glass window and was in the process of vandalizing cars.
And here’s a police shooting where the use of lethal force was clearly justified.
JFK and LSD. Meh. It’s not that I think Kennedy wouldn’t have dropped acid given a chance, but Timothy Leary was basically a con man, and we already know that Nina Burleigh is irrational.
Wow, believe it or not, still another reason to never visit Oklahoma. “I’m going to need your driver’s license and all the money on your prepaid debit cards.”
Your auditor finds huge cost discrepancies in Houston ISD construction costs. Does HISD: A.) Call in an outside auditor, B.) Launch a criminal investigation or C.) Suspend the auditor who found the problems?
Here we are, the final day of the primary season, when Democrats in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota go to the polls to (theoretically) put Hillary Clinton over the top.
Why did Hillary want to hide her communications from the public so badly? “The most frightening explanation is that she sold foreign policy favors to the highest bidders to the Clinton Foundation and/or her husband. Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, argues that we can’t understand the “server” story unless we look carefully at the Clinton Foundation. In his opinion, some of Hillary’s policy decisions were linked to contributions to the Clinton Foundation.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The Debate between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is on no off, no on, no off no…let me get back to you.
Inside David French’s non-run for President. Which is indeed off, if you hadn’t heard.
“Hillary Clinton wore $12,495 Armani jacket during speech on inequality.” Of course, the amazing thing about Hillary is her ability to pick a $12,495 Armani jacket that still makes her look like a frumpy restaurant cashier… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Another week, another Texas flood. Try to stay dry and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Paglia on Clinton: “If it were a Republican in the crosshairs, Hillary’s shocking refusal to meet with the Inspector General (who interviewed all four of the other living Secretaries of State of the past two decades) would have been the lead item flagged in screaming headlines from coast to coast. Let’s face it—the genuinely innocent do not do pretzel twists like this to cover their asses.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
New York Magazine massively re-edits article on why Hillary won’t debate because the original wasn’t fawning enough.
Eight reasons Hillary sucks. Including Obama: “she does not seem to want to run on Ben Rhodes’s foreign policy, Jonathan Gruber’s Obamacare, Lois Lerner’s IRS, Lisa Jackson’s EPA, Eric Holder’s Justice Department, or Barack Obama’s racial healing. And yet she needs Obama’s hard-left base. So far she has rejected her 2008 Annie Oakley, Reagan-Democrat schtick, gambling that her Black Lives (alone) Matter and transgenderism pandering can ensure that she will match Obama’s historic share of the minority vote. But so far it seems just as likely that she will lose more voters among the white working class than she can lease from Obama’s core.”
More on the same theme. Alas, this morning I just don’t have time to explicate all the manifest idiocies on display by the Social Justice Warrior Campus Cadets…
For those still on the “Oh God, Hillary is going to slaughter Trump” express, now might be a good time to start making your way to the exits.
David S. Bernstein lays out four ways Hillary can lose. Fortunately for Trump, she seems to be managing them all:
“Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted.” Trump needs only for Hispanic voting to return to 2008 levels to win in Florida.
“Step 2: Alienate the young.” You can’t assume all those young Bernie Sanders voters who are seeing Clinton shamelessly cheat her way to the nomination are going to magically put aside their bitterness and vote for Granny Crooked McCankles.
“Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go.” Not sure about this one, as I see #NeverTrump as more an online/insider issue than one that could deliver significant numbers of disgruntled Republican voters to Hillary.
“Step 4: Fumble on trade.” Never mind that protectionism is loser economics, Hillary’s been on every side of just about every trade agreement, and her vital union allies are more than a little tired of it.
It’s not hard to see how quickly this could start costing her Electoral College votes in the Rust Belt, where Trump hopes to improve on past Republican performance. (And where, you may remember, Clinton had to apologize for threatening to put coal companies out of business.) In Ohio, for example, 22 percent of 2012 voters came from union households, and 60 percent of them voted for Obama. In Wisconsin, a similar share of the electorate voted 2-to-1 for Obama over Romney. In 2016, both states went for Sanders over Clinton in their primaries. In Pennsylvania, where Trump is planning a major effort, union households provided Obama more than half his net margin.
Read the whole thing.
Missing from the analysis: The dead certainty that Hillary will not do as well among black voters as Obama did. But that’s an analysis for another day…
There are a lot of good, somber Memorial Day posts around the blogsphere today. I don’t think I have anything profound to say on that topic that hasn’t already been said far better by others, so by way of counter-programming, here’s Scott Adams on Bill Maher explaining just how Donald Trump’s persuasion techniques work, and why Hillary sucks so hard as a candidate.
Donald Trump has reached the number of delegates needed to clinch the GOP presidential nomination, securing his status as the presumptive Republican nominee and avoiding a contested convention, according to a delegate count released Thursday by the Associated Press.
The AP reports that Trump was has reached 1,238 delegates, put over the 1,237 needed to win the nomination by a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who said they would support him at the convention. Trump will most likely add more delegates to his total before the convention in Cleveland, giving him a comfortable victory.
North Dakota is the state that put Trump over the top.
Trump steps up attacks on Bill Clinton and Hillary’s enabling same. Naturally the press is miffed; they spent two decades burying news of Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey’s sexual assault allegations against Bill Clinton to protect Democrats, and now Trump is forcing them to mention their names again. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Liberal commentator Van Jones on how in-the-tank DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz is for Hillary. “Debbie, who should be the umpire, who should be the marriage counselor, is coming in harder for Hillary Clinton than she is for herself. That is malpractice. I wish [RNC Chair] Reince Priebus was my party chair. He did a better job of handling the Trump situation than I’ve see my party chair handle this situation.”
Democratic strategists who prophesy a Hillary landslide over Trump are blowing smoke. Hillary is a stodgily predictable product of the voluminous briefing books handed to her by a vast palace staff of researchers and pollsters—a staggeringly expensive luxury not enjoyed by her frugal, unmaterialistic opponent, Bernie Sanders (my candidate). Trump, in contrast, is his own publicist, a quick-draw scrapper and go-for-the-jugular brawler. He is a master of the unexpected (as the Egyptian commander Achillas calls Julius Caesar in the Liz Taylor Cleopatra). The massive size of Hillary’s imperialist operation makes her seem slow and heavy. Trump is like a raffish buccaneer, leaping about the rigging like the breezy Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, while Hillary is the stiff, sequestered admiral of a bullion-laden armada of Spanish galleons, a low-in-the-water easy mark as they creak and sway amid the rolling swells.
Dennis Prager responds to the #NeverTrump crowd: “In the 2016 presidential race, I am not interested in moral purity. I am interested in defeating the left and its party, the Democratic Party. The notion (expressed by virtually every #NeverTrump advocate) that we can live with another four years of a Democratic president is, forgive me, mind-boggling.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
David Limbaugh: “There is almost no chance that Clinton would ever govern otherwise than repugnantly. There is a chance that Trump could govern as a conservative on some issues, even if that’s not his natural instinct.”
Sony Pictures already had enough problems with its dreadful-looking Ghostbusters reboot without Hillary Clinton honing in on the action.
And as long as we’re on the subject, Milo Yiannopoulos weighs in on why it looks so dreadful: “There’s a clichéd cast, clunky dialogue and the outlines of a woefully unimaginative story. The visual effects are Scooby Doo-esque (and not in a good way), and it seems as though — at least from the footage we’ve seen so far — the Ghostbusters reboot will have none of the original’s carefree charm. Even if the cast wasn’t made up of unsexy lesbian janitors, there would be plenty for fans of the franchise to dislike.”
Faced with a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a lot of conservatives (myself included) will consider voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. Well, isn’t this a pisser? “He’s Not Conservative and Not Even All That Libertarian.”
“The National Rifle Association threw its weight Friday behind Donald Trump, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee personally assured the group’s members he would protect Second Amendment rights if elected – and claimed that likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton would threaten them.”
Will it help unify the Republican Party behind Trump? Some. Gun owners and Second Amendment activists are a significant part of the GOP coalition. But Clinton and the Democratic Party are so clearly hostile to civilian gun ownership that it’s hard to imagine any NRA members voting for her, and culturally most gun owners seem to hail from the fraction of GOP primary voters which has already embraced Trump.
Trump’s official policy statement on Second Amendment rights is fine, and whoever wrote it (clearly not Trump) has a firm grounding in the issue, and Trump has even said he has a concealed carry license himself. Whether Trump follows through or not remains to be seen, but he already starts so far ahead of Clinton on the issue that I’m not sure his past support of the idiotic “assault weapon” ban some 15 years ago really matters anymore. (And even then he was saying “Democrats want to confiscate all guns, which is a dumb idea because only the law-abiding citizens would turn in their guns and the bad guys would be the only ones left armed.”)
If Trump wins in November, Republicans will almost certainly retain the House and possibly the Senate, which means no anti-Second Amendment legislation will be headed to his desk for at least two years. Trump could do absolutely nothing on guns during his presidency and still be a vast improvement over Obama or either Clinton.