U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges against Huawei, China’s largest smartphone maker, alleging it stole trade secrets from an American rival and committed bank fraud by violating sanctions against doing business with Iran. In a 13-count indictment unsealed in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon, the government alleged Huawei, two affiliated companies and its chief financial officer engaged in fraud and conspiracy in connection with deals in Iran.
A separate 10-count indictment in Seattle accused the company of stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile USA Inc. and offering bonuses to employees who succeeded in getting technology from rivals.
Snip.
The DOJ formally announced it was seeking the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder, who was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 on allegations that she committed fraud to sidestep sanctions against Iran. She has since become a flash-point in trade tensions between the U.S. and China; her release by the US and Canada was expected by some commentators who were confident the US would send a signal of goodwill to the US; instead Trump appears to be escalating the crackdown against Chinese technological theft.
Meng remains free in Vancouver, staying at her $4.2 million mansion with GPS monitoring, after posting bail of C$10 million ($7.5 million) as she fights extradition to the U.S. to face criminal charges.
The U.S., which had requested Canadian authorities arrest Meng, had to submit a formal extradition request by Jan. 30, which it did today. Canada’s justice minister now has up to 30 days to assess it. If she issues an “authority to proceed,” that means Canada is officially moving to extradition hearings. If so, they would likely be scheduled months later, even as relations between the US and China implode.
The fact that China’s government aides and abets intellectual property theft, including industrial espionage, is well documented, and the Trump Administration is right to go after it.
How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?
The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.
While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.
Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.
This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.
Snip.
They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.
It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.
“They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.
On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.
That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.
Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.
But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”
Snip.
When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.
Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)
Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.
You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.
The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.
What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.
Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.
Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.
Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!
David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
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…
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.
“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.”
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.
“Hey officer, I have a dead body in my apartment, along with a bunch of illegal drugs.” “It’s cool. No worries.”
How long would it take for police to arrest me if they found 24 syringes, meth, cocaine, other ILLEGAL drugs and paraphernalia AND a dead body in my home?
How long b4 prominent politicians like @HillaryClinton to distance themselves?
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.)
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.
Dan Crenshaw seems to be settling into his new job nicely:
HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO CUT STRAWBERRY SLICES FOR MY CEREAL BENNY??
But seriously, we are presented with a K-Bar knife at SEAL training graduation, engraved with the name of a fallen SEAL. Never Forget. https://t.co/ZEfI4M0dw3
The week between Christmas and New Years is always odd. Work slows down with so many people on vacation, but there’s always a personal rush to get things done before the end of the year.
If you want to see what a bunch of half-baked idiots and kettle-corn psalmists in a political march are up to, the easiest thing to do is to march around with them, as I did for a while in Portland. I do not look much like Tucker Carlson, and I remain, for the moment, able to blend in with such groups.
Which I did — and a funny thing happened: As the march began to peter out, a group of Antifa loitered for a bit on a street corner, and I loitered with them for a while, observing. And then I got tired and decided to bring my labors to an end and go on my merry. As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.
Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.
There has never been any vacuum in Syria (or Iraq). Sharia supremacism fills all voids. In focusing on ISIS, David discounts sharia supremacism as “an idea.” But it is much more than that. It is a cultural distinction — even, as Samuel Huntington argued, a civilizational one. It will always be a forcible enemy of the West. It doesn’t matter what the groups are called. You can kill ISIS, but it is already reforming as something else. In fact, it may no longer even be the strongest jihadist force in Syria: Its forebear-turned-rival al-Qaeda is ascendant — after a few name changes (the latest is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Levant Liberation Organization) and some infighting with other militant upstarts. There is a better chance that ISIS will reestablish ties with the mothership than fade away.
The fact that al-Qaeda, which triggered the “War on Terror,” does not factor into American clamoring about Syria is telling. The anti-ISIS mission David describes was not always the U.S. objective in Syria. First we were going to pull an Iraq/Libya redux and help the “moderates” overthrow Assad. But the “moderates,” in the main, are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very content to align with al-Qaeda jihadists — and our fabulous allies in Syria, the Turks and the Saudis, were only too happy to abet al-Qaeda. Syria had thus become such a conundrum that we were effectively aligning with the very enemies who had provoked us into endless regional war.
When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan).
Degrading ISIS into irrelevance would not degrade anti-American jihadism in Syria into irrelevance. If sharia didn’t ban alcohol, I’d say the old wine would just appear in new bottles. It was, moreover, absurd for President Trump to declare victory just because ISIS has been stripped of 95 percent of the territory it once held. Caliphate aspirations notwithstanding, ISIS’s mistake was the attempt to be an open and notorious sovereign. It was always more effective as a terrorist underground, and it still has tens of thousands of operatives for that purpose.
If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies; we can no more prevent it in Syria than in Burkina Faso. And I am not indifferent to the challenge David rightly identifies: terrorists occupying safe havens from which they can plot against the West. But that is a global challenge, and we handle it elsewhere by vigilant intelligence-gathering and quick-strike capabilities. We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root.
Trump campaigned on his promise to build a wall. He told Frisco Nancy and Chuck Odd that he would shut down the government if he didn’t get his wall money. The Republican establishment, which does not really want a wall because the GOP corporate donor class doesn’t want to turn off the spigot of cheap foreign peasant labor even though those illegals are all future Democrat voters, led Trump on and on. They put continuing resolution after continuing resolution in front of him, each time promising to really, truly, cross-my-heart-and-hope-you-die fight next time. He gave them a chance. He gave them too many chances. And they expected he’d go along again this time. But conservatives drew the line and Trump realized that he needed to do what he did best to get back inside the ruling class’s decision cycle.
He needed to disrupt, so he kept his promise. He refused to play along with the wall scam anymore. And the gleeful Dem senators singing carols as they expected to get away with another grift ended their serenade with a sad trombone. Now the government is going to shut down, and Trump has zero to lose by holding out.
Then he cranked up the disruption when he announced he was getting out of Syria, and it’s clear that Afghanistan is probably next. The establishment reacted with surprise and horror. It’s hard to understand the “surprise” part, since he campaigned on getting us the hell out of foreign hellholes and has always wanted to. Again, he played along, giving the establishment a chance. And another. And nothing happened. So now he’s done. He’s doing what he promised.
Is this withdrawal a good idea? That depends – we definitely need to provide for the safety of our Kurdish allies, and how that will happen remains unclear at this writing. ISIS is a danger; departing necessarily accepts risk. While the conservative anti-nation building attitude is blind to our successes doing it (like in Kosovo), neither Syria nor Afghanistan seem particularly fertile soil for it. And who is eager to dump more money into them after all the trillions we’ve wasted since 2001?
But beyond the substantive considerations is the fact that the overwrought reaction of the establishment to the idea of actually ending a war supports Trump’s plan. What is our objective anyway? What’s the endstate? In the War College they taught us we should have those things. But the screamers never tell us – instead, it’s always invective about how we love Putin, or how we are stupid or whatever, when we ask, “Okay, how much more in time, money and American lives should we devote to these projects?” We never get a timeline, or a dollar figure, or the number of coffins that they consider whatever their unarticulated objective happens to be is worth.
We keep hearing ISIS might return and we have to stay to stamp out those creeps again, and fine, killing jihadists is cool, but if the goal is to keep Mideastern jerks from being themselves then we will never, ever leave. The elite always denies it wants us to be the world’s policemen, but then it always demands that we keep walking a beat that never ends.
President Trump hasn’t destroyed free trade, he’s split it into two: One set of trading partners for us and our allies, and another set for China:
The status quo with China is crumbling. Businesses have grown disillusioned with China’s restrictions on their activities, forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at building up domestic competitors at foreign expense. Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are alarmed at increased military assertiveness and domestic repression under President Xi Jinping.
Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, personifies these broader forces reshaping the U.S. approach to the world. Mr. Sullivan has followed the rise of China for decades—as a Marine sent to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in a response to Chinese provocations; as an official in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and State Department; and for a time as Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources.
When Mr. Xi visited the U.S. in 2015, Mr. Sullivan urged his colleagues to pay more attention to China’s rise. On the Senate floor, he quoted the political scientist Graham Allison: “War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment.”
Last spring, Mr. Sullivan went to China and met officials including Vice President Wang Qishan. They seemed to think tensions with the U.S. will fade after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, Mr. Sullivan recalled.
“I just said, ‘You are completely misreading this.’” The mistrust, he told them, is bipartisan, and will outlast Mr. Trump.
While delivering one message to China, Mr. Sullivan gave a different one to the administration and its trade negotiators: Don’t alienate allies needed to take on China.
“Modernize the agreements but stay within the agreements,” he says he counseled them. “Then we have to turn to the really big geostrategic challenge facing our country and that’s China.”
His was one voice among many urging Mr. Trump to single out China for pressure. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush sought to change China’s behavior through dialogue and engagement. Obama officials had begun to question engagement by the end of the administration. Last year, in its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration declared engagement a failure.
The Trump administration regards economic policy and national security as inseparable when it comes to Beijing, because China’s acquisition of Western technology both strengthens China militarily and weakens the U.S. economically.
“We don’t like it when our allies steal our ideas either, but it’s a much less dangerous situation,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute whose views align with the administration’s more hawkish officials. “We’re not worried about the war-fighting capability of Japan and Korea because they’re our friends.”
Snip.
Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute scholar close to the Trump team who has long warned of China’s strategic threat, sees three plausible scenarios. At one extreme is a new cold war with drastically curtailed economic ties. At the other, the U.S. and China resolve their tensions, continue to integrate and run the world together.
Between those extremes, Mr. Pillsbury sees a more likely and desirable middle path—a transactional U.S.-China relationship of the sort that prevailed during the 1980s in which the two decide, case by case, when to do business and when to decouple.
Stray thought: With the U.S. disengagement with various Middle Eastern conflicts, there’s a possibility that the less-Trump Derangement Syndrome-besotted ranks of the neocons might pivot to back Trump against China. After all, there was no end to neocon Jeremiads against China prior to the 2016 election…
These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.
The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.
Speaking of scumbag sexual abusers, Kevin Spacey has finally been indicted for sexual assault. The one tiny bright spot is that it was an 18-year old man, so it’s slightly less reprehensible than the statutory rate charges made against him. [Insert innocent until proven guilty disclaimer here.]
Shocking news: Washington Post readers actually blame the illegal alien father who brought his son along as a pawn in his plan to enter the U.S., only to see him die. “Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump’s fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed.”
Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:
Wonders of modern medicine: Here I am just six days after my right hip was replaced. I’m still sore, but so grateful for the work of Dr. Anthony Unger and his team at Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C. Merry Christmas indeed! pic.twitter.com/onB87keKtT
Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, officials and experts said, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities.
A series of incidents in the past 18 months has pointed out the service’s weaknesses, highlighting what some officials have described as some of the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing.
Cyberattacks affect all branches of the armed forces but contractors for the Navy and the Air Force are viewed as choice targets for hackers seeking advanced military technology, officials said.
Navy contractors have suffered especially troubling breaches over the past year, one U.S. official said.
The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.
One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.
The hackers have also targeted universities with military research labs that develop advanced technology for use by the Navy or other service branches, according to analysis conducted by cyber firms as well as people familiar with the matter.
While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”
I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.
“I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.
On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”
As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters.
Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.
Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.
That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.
Drones shutdown Gatwick airport. When they find the asshole responsible, instead of trying him, they should just turn him over to the people whose flights he’s delayed…
“A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
MSBNC in action:
MSNBC anchors get completely rekt by their own reporter on the ground covering the migrant caravan.
ANCHOR: "It's innocent women and children right?"
REPORTER: "From what we've seen, the majority are actually men and some of these men have not articulated that need for asylum" pic.twitter.com/tWBTkeGmSE
In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.
Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.
We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.
Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.
No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.
Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.
Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.
So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.
People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.
Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.
Snip.
We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.
For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.
Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.
This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight — lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.
Welcome to the Friday before Thanksgiving! I hope you have your family gathering, gluttony and/or shopping plans all laid out. I tend to avoid Black Friday sales unless I happen to be near a used bookstore. (And speaking of booksales, I’ll be putting out a new Lame Excuse Books catalog after Thanksgiving, so drop me a line if you’re interested.)
Florida: DeSantis wins, Scott leads Nelson in senate race, where it goes to a hand recount. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Meanwhile, both Broward and Palm Beach counties, where most of the Democrat shenanigans occurred, missed the machine recount deadlines, so the initial tallies stood.
In all the bad recount news, here’s one bit of good news: Utah incumbent Republican congresswoman Mia Love is now expected to win reelection after recounts. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
A bit more analysis of the midterms:
Interestingly, the largest/highest profile misses were almost all in races where the Republican beat the polls:
– IN-Sen: polls D+2; actual R+8 – OH-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+4 – SD-Gov: polls D+3; actual R+3 – TN-Sen: polls R+5; actual R+11 – IA-Gov: polls D+2; actual R+3
Over 50 million Chinese apartments are empty. (Caveat: Some sort of malware on ZeroHedge is trying to do a drive-by DMS install on that page. They should look into that…)
Austin’s sick leave ordinance was just struck down by the 3rd Court of Appeals. “The requirement violates the Texas Constitution because it is pre-empted by the Texas Minimum Wage Act.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Who frontman Roger Daltry “detests Jeremy Corbyn (whom he, not without cause, calls a “communist”), supports Brexit, and says of the Labour party, ‘It pains me to say it, but in my life a Labour government comes in with incredible optimism and leaves the country in the sh*t.'”
Roy Clark, RIP. To TV viewers, he was that guy on Hee-Haw. To fellow guitarists he was a legend. Here’s a nice rendition of his signature piece:
William Goldman, RIP. The Princess Bride is a swell novel, and he penned more than his share of great Hollywood movies.
If you’re going illegally carry a concealed gun without a permit, maybe you shouldn’t make yourself look like The Joker. And yes, it’s exactly the state you think it is. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, replaced on at least an interim basis by his chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker. Very early on in the Trump Administration, I decided that there were two things I wasn’t going to pay much attention to: 1. Reports of dysfunction or “chaos” among White House staffers, and 2. Trump tweets slamming various people. (See any of my previous posts on Trump persuasion techniques.) I have no particular insight into intra-White House squabbles, and reporting on this issue is so bad or overblown that there’s too much noise for me bother to extract signal from. So go elsewhere for how Sessions fits into the “Deep State vs. Trump” narrative. (Over at Powerline, they put up both anti-Sessions and pro-Sessions pieces.)
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer wants House Democrats to impeach Trump. I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on them…
Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town.
These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in corruption at the highest level,” said Paxton in a prepared statement.
“Each illegal vote silences the voice of a law-abiding registered voter,” added Paxton. “My office will continue to do everything in its power to uncover illegal voting schemes and bring to justice those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas.”
The nine Hidalgo County residents arrested were Guadalupe Sanchez Garza, Jerry Gonzalez, Jr., Araceli Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, Cynthia Tamez, and Ruby Tamez. Online jail records show bond was set at $20,000 for both Garza and Ruby Tamez. A $10,000 bond was set for Gonzalez, Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Cynthia Tamez. Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez’s bail was set at $1,000.
Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.
But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump. Does Trump have a strategy that we can describe? Is Trump a return of Richard Nixon, of Ronald Reagan, or of something else entirely? After several months of watching the news without gaining any answers, I finally canceled my cable subscription and sought out other sources. I found some insights in unexpected places.
Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics.
Snip.
A third insight was from the unlikeliest place: the critically acclaimed animated show, “Rick and Morty.” During Trump’s campaign, his supporters frequently talked about how funny the candidate was. This humor was lost on most of my left-leaning peers. But “Rick and Morty” showed me what I have may been missing. Here is a popular TV show about a mad scientist Rick, an amoral, sociopathic man who considers himself the smartest man in the universe and tells dirty jokes in front of his grandson Morty. The slapstick, low-brow, and nihilistic insults and dirty humor of “Rick and Morty” — much like Trump — resemble some of the comedic greats from the decades prior to the 1990s: “The Honeymooners,” “Benny Hill,” “Abbott and Costello,” “The Three Stooges,” and “I Love Lucy.” These comedic devices can be traced back hundreds of years to Asian and European theater, which used slapstick, puns, insults, and innuendo.
Compare that oeuvre to the 1990s-2000s, during which comedy was more satirical, knowing, self-referential, meta, and smug. This idea is far from perfect, but examples of satire that use slapstick as well include “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Team America: World Police”, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodies. American society today seems to be witnessing a return of what columnist Noah Smith calls “goofy” humor and a decline of “knowingly sarcastic” humor. Even The New Yorker complained that the 2018 Emmys were too smug and later described Trump’s rallies unfavorably as a “vaudeville routine.” Perhaps our shift toward a reversion in history also means we are seeing a cultural reversion as well. Smugness has become politically tone deaf.
Snip.
The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insulting friendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette. Trump keeps his enemies even closer than his friends, while previous presidents did the opposite. Niccolo Machiavelli might have been familiar with these tactics.
Trump’s diplomatic method can be reduced to the four “B’s”: bullying, bargaining, burden-sharing, and bragging. He starts an interaction by bullying the subject — usually on Twitter, seeks a chance to sit down with the target to bargain as hard as possible toward what Trump may see as a more reciprocal relationship of burden-sharing, and then finally brags about whatever the results are. Trump treats all relationships as transactional, deploying tit-for-tat tactics toward achieving his goal of “reciprocity.” His message is that he wants to make America great again but does not spend much time lecturing or moralizing to foreigners. Finally, his use of insults, jokes, and slapstick, physical humor creates an image of honesty and authenticity with his supporters. Overall, these techniques and worldviews are becoming increasingly common around the world, including with the leaders of countries as diverse as Turkey, the Philippines, Russia, Israel, Mexico — and potentially Brazil.
Trump described his realpolitik-with-no-sacred-cows approach during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September: “America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again. This is true not only in matters of peace, but in matters of prosperity.”
Overall, Trump’s approach represents a reversion to a style of statecraft that flips previous approaches. Technocracy, meritocracy, and bureaucratic approaches are giving way to establishing top-level personal rapport, trust, and loyalty. Free trade ideology is giving way to trade as a means to enrichment. Building institutions gives way to questioning the utility of each institution. Moral diplomacy gives way to talking to anyone who will bargain. Careful speeches give way to saying anything that gets results. Saving sacred cows gives way to killing them or threatening to do so. Open markets give way to using U.S. markets, military, and migration as bargaining chips. Every relationship is subject to maximum leverage of what is possible.
West is nothing if not independent. He doesn’t need the approval of the Democratic establishment or the usual suspects among the liberal Hollywood elite. He is untethered from the traditional liberal gatekeepers in the same way Trump was untethered from the Republican establishment as a presidential candidate. There is a reason that the Democrats and their allies in the media insult, marginalize, ridicule and try to “Uncle Tom” West. It is obvious they are afraid of him and the discussion he might start.
“Beto O’Rourke Raised Record Breaking $38 Million in 3Q.” And he’s still losing. Just imagine if Democrats had used that money to protect endangered incumbent senators instead…
O’Rourke’s “extraordinary political success” is illusionary. His national popularity is contingent on aesthetics and mass of coverage. It is merely that Beto looks and acts like the type of guy producers at most cable news networks and talk shows think—or more precisely, wish—a senator would look and act like. Unlike, say, Cruz (nearly two years older than Beto), who is always blathering about the Constitution or whatnot.
It’s not as if O’Rourke is a special talent by any measure. His speeches and talking points are just as vacuous and predictable as those of any other middling politician. His positions on guns and abortion—and a multitude of other issues—are in lockstep with his party, not the state. O’Rourke has never offered any substantively impressive policy ideas. He’s not led on any notable issues in the House. He’s remarkably unremarkable.
The son of a onetime Republican county judge and a longtime furniture store owner, the Democratic congressman from El Paso married into the family of one of his hometown’s most prominent developers and has assembled real estate investments worth millions.
Congress is rife with rich people, but O’Rourke had a 2015 net worth of about $9 million, ranking 51st out of 435 House members, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than double the $3.8 million worth of his Republican opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, who ranked 41st of 100 senators.
Think Progress alum thinly disguised as a journalist does 50 Shades of Beto. Ick.
The hits keep coming:
The lies flow easily from 'Beto':
Beto O'Rourke's Mother, Who He Says Is A 'Lifelong Republican,' Donated To Obama, Voted In 15 Of 17 Democratic Primaries https://t.co/I5QC9SEjlF
The Russian government kills journalists, among others. I do not recall the Washington Post protesting on this basis the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Putin’s government or Obama’s promise to be more “flexible” with Russia after his reelection. Nor, as far as I remember, did the Post cite Russia’s murderous ways as a reason not to farm out to Putin enforcement of the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Cuba’s treatment of journalists and others has been atrocious. Yet, the mainstream media supported the Obama administration when it radically reset U.S. relations with Cuba without insisting on any change in the regime’s treatment of dissidents.
What are the differences between Russia/Cuba and Saudi Arabia? I see two. First, Russia and Cuba are adversaries of America. Saudi Arabia is an ally.
For the sane, this difference would, if anything, cut in favor of the Saudis. For the left, it cuts against them.
Second, the Trump administration has very visibly allied itself with Saudi Arabia as a means of countering Iran and achieving other American objectives in the Middle East. Thus, the Khashoggi slaying provides the mainstream media with the opportunity to do what it does best — hammer President Trump.
In my view, the Khashoggi slaying should not cause America substantially to alter its foreign policy. Our relatively close relationship with Saudi Arabia is predicated, as it should be, on mutual interests and mutual adversaries. Either the geo-political predicate justifies the relationship or it doesn’t.
1. Vilification (Alt-right, racist…) 2. Guilt by association ("Did the *Koch brothers* fund this?") 3. Misrepresentation ("So basically, you think trans ppl should just *die*…") 4. Reduction to privilege anxiety ("White fragility!") https://t.co/tOPJGl0zWp
Florida man does it again. Not only is he a registered sex offender who hired a federal informant for a mad-bombing spree aimed at target stores, he did it all for…making money off shorting the stock?
