It’s been an odd week, for a number of reasons, so I’m a bit late on the “Washington Post cartoonist draws Ted Cruz’s 5 and 7 year old daughters as monkeys” story. Because nothing says “reasonable” and “rational” like attacking children because you dislike the politics of their father. On the off-chance you missed it, it featured Cruz as an organ-grinder and his daughters as monkeys on leashes. The ostensible rationale for the doodle was Cruz featuring his daughters in that parody Christmas ad that ran during Saturday Night Live, making them “fair game.”
Right.
Though the Washington Post editor took the doodle down (calling it a cartoon would suggest there was an actual attempt at humor), we all know that if someone attempted the same drawing featuring Obama and his daughters, it would have been denounced as racist and the cartoonist fired so fast they wouldn’t have been allowed to pack their desk. Of course, the MSM have always been hypocrites when it comes to different standards for Democrats and Republicans. Anything that hurts Republicans is fair game, while anything that hurts Democrats is a source of high moral outrage.
The question is: Will cartoonist Ann Telnaes pay any price for such a gross transgression of basic decency?
This time next month, @AnnTelnaes will be drawing blackboard doodles for the daily specials before her shift at Starbucks. @BoundaryStones
The irony is that the episode provided a palpable boost to the Cruz campaign, which had an outraged fundraising mailer (“They attacked my children!”) out within hours. I bet they raised at least $1 million off of it.
Given that the French political establishment continues to ignore widespread French desire to stem Islamic immigration, is it any wonder Marine Le Pen’s National Front did so well in early voting?
Remember that ACLU board member that called for murdering Trump supporters? Turns out that calling for the assassination of political opponents is just a tad too extreme for the ACLU.
Nothing says “rational” and “reasonable” quite like calling Ted Cruz Satan incarnate. Thanks for proving that Hollywood celebrities aren’t overwrought drama queens, Cher…
I have drafts of both a new Texas vs. California Update and a new LinkSwarm bubbling along, but the jihad-related news just keeps coming down the chute:
What has decades of Islamic immigration done to tolerant Sweden? Made life suck. “No Apartments, No Jobs, No Shopping Without a Gun.”
During the last few decades, Swedes have had to get used to the government (left and right wing parties alike) prioritizing refugees and migrants above native Swedes. The high tax level (the average worker pays 42% income tax) was been accepted in the past, because people knew that if they got sick, or when they retired or otherwise needed government aid, they would get it.
Now, Swedes see the welfare system failing them. More and more senior citizens fall into the “indigent” category; close to 800,000 of Sweden’s 2.1 million retirees, despite having worked their whole lives, are forced to live on between 4,500 and 5,500 kronor ($545 – $665) a month. Meanwhile, seniors who immigrate to Sweden receive the so-called “elderly support subsidy” — usually a higher amount — even though they have never paid any taxes in Sweden.
Worse, in 2013 the government decided that people staying in the country illegally have a right to virtually free health and dental care. So while the destitute Swedish senior citizen must choose between paying 100,000 kronor ($12,000) to get new teeth or living toothless, a person who does not even have the right to stay in Sweden can get his teeth fixed for 50 kronor ($6).
The injustice, the housing shortage, the chaos surrounding refugee housing units and the sharp slide of Swedish students in PISA tests — all these changes have caused the Swedes to become disillusioned.
You know who those fun-loving newlyweds slaughtered in San Bernardino slaughtered? The same people who had thrown them a baby shower.
Startling insight from the paper of record: “Couple Kept Tight Lid on Plans for San Bernardino Shooting.” As opposed to all those Islamic terrorists who announce the time and location of their atrocity in advance. “Do you think Syed Forook carried out the massacre?” “Oh definitely! It was all he ever talked about!”
San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik passed an DHS background check. You can bet all those “Syrian refugees” will be vetted just as thoroughly…
No link, but just how did CAIR have a news conference with the family members within minutes of the official announcement of the San Bernardino jihadists’ identities?
To the surprise of absolutely no one except liberals, Farook was a devout Muslim. Says his father: “He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”
Also: “Co-workers said Farook had traveled to Saudi Arabia and returned with a new wife he met online, according to reports.”
More than one observer noted that this attack doesn’t fit many classic patterns. And indeed it doesn’t.
But “workplace violence” incidents don’t end like this one did. “Honey, San Bernardino County has insulted me for the last time! Let’s both of us load up with guns and our already-prepared pipe bombs and go down there and shoot every last one of them, leaving our baby behind!”
A law enforcement source told Fox News that the couple were each carrying an AR-15 rifle and a pistol when they were shot and killed by police after a brief chase in their black SUV about 2 miles from the initial shooting site. The source said the vehicle also contained so-called “rollout bags” with multiple pipe bombs, as well as additional ammunition. The couple also had GoPro cameras strapped to their body armor and wore tactical clothing, including vests stuffed with ammunition magazines.
“That’s a military tactic for a sustained fight,” the source told Fox News of the rollout bags.
That’s the sort of thing you bring if you want to make videos to terrorize other people, and rally others to their cause or ideology… it also would explain why they left the scene instead of staying to shoot it out with police at the social services facility. They intended to live to tell the tale, at least for a while.
This was a jihad attack Farook had obviously been planning (or at least contemplating) for a long time.
Blathering about climate change, passing pointless gun control legislation, and letting in more “Syrian refugees” will do absolutely nothing to prevent the next Syed Farook from going out in a blaze of radical Islamic martyrdom.
Thanks to some fabulous work by American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen digging through on Tuesday e-mails from Clinton State Department staffer Philippe Reines, he found that suspended CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott had communicated with Reines on multiple occasions to the point of taking marching orders over what she tweeted.
Amidst the e-mails obtained by Gawker (which included Politico’s Mike Allen promising soft pieces on Chelsea Clinton), Kerpen unearthed a series of instances where Labott (in words of Kerpen) “tweet[ed] on request” for the Clinton camp, ranging from so-called acts of transparency in her State Department to when exactly Clinton would depart her post in 2013.
This will no doubt be a great shock to anyone who didn’t already consider CNN an extension of the Democratic Party…
I’m not a huge fan of Cornyn, whose turned into bit of a squish, but I’m not even remotely buying that a guy who was born in 1952, and who went to school at Trinity University and St. Mary’s Law, got anywhere near the Klan, which was already a joke by the 1970s. Even assuming Cornyn was An Evil Racist (he’s not), unlike West Virginia in the early 1940s, the Klan was not on any ambitious politician or lawyer’s plans by the 1970s, and the only people joining by then were strictly white trash rural losers.
Moreover, we’re given to understand that these names were culled from email membership lists, which suggest that Cornyn joined, when, 1995 or so? When he was already on the Texas Supreme Court? Because joining a bunch of white trash losers was totally more important than avoiding scandals and winning elections.
To begin with, the Ku Klux Klan is pathetically small compared to the overall white male population of the South and Midwest. Membership estimates range from 3,000 to 5,000. The likelihood that four separate members of the Klan could find their way into the ranks of the Senate are astronomically low, even if you assume that your average Klansman is coherent enough to manage it (spoilers: they aren’t).
Or to put another way, you’d have to believe that a Klansman is roughly 10,000 times more likely to become a senator than the average American. Or, put even another way, there are supposedly twice as many Klansmen as Princeton grads in the Senate. Now that’s an alumni network.
But even a cursory look at the lives and voting records of the accused should have clued people in. One, for example, voted for Martin Luther King Jr. Day to become a national holiday, a proposal that a sizeable minority actually opposed back in 1983. Why would a Klansman go out of his way to vote for a holiday that promotes racial harmony, instead of joining the 90 Congressmen who voted against it?
Another of the accused senators is Catholic. While the Klan’s anti-black activities are much more rampant and widespread, they are also virulently anti-Catholic.
Oh, and did I mention one of the accused mayors is openly gay? I don’t think that’s the kind of “flaming crosses” the Klan has in mind.
As Ayn Rand once noted: “The Ku Klux Klan is not a Republican issue or problem; its members, traditionally, are Democrats; for the Republicans to repudiate their vote would be like repudiating the vote of Tammany Hall, which is not theirs to repudiate.” As far as the historical record shows, Sen. Robert Byrd (Democrat, West Virginia) is the only U.S. Senator elected after World War II to have been a member of the Klan.
Even the most base liberal propagandist should be ashamed to spread such pathetically laughable bullshit…
Right now Austin is enjoying our traditional “two weeks of flooding following three months of drought” fall. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
“In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him.”
Paul Ryan elected Speaker of the House. If Ryan decides to govern as an actual Republican, he could be a very effective Speaker…
At the most recent Republican Presidential debate, Sen. Marco Rubio said the H1-B visa program is badly in need of reform. One tiny problem: Sen. Rubio’s own H1-B bill doesn’t implement any of the reforms demanded by Presidential Candidate Rubio. “It does not require recruitment of American workers. It does not require employers to ‘pay more than you would pay someone else’…Rubio’s bill would provide Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his comrades ‘a huge increase in the supply of lower-cost foreign guest workers so they can undercut and replace American workers.'” Indeed, Rubio’s bill “would triple the number of H1-B foreign workers admitted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
How to fix the Republican debates: “First, cancel the rest of the debates. Instead, announce that the RNC will host the debates and pick the panel of questioners. Allow any news organization that wishes to broadcast it.”
Feminism is “a War Against Human Nature aimed at using the coercive power of government to bring about an androgynous ‘equality’ that ignores the actual differences between men and women. Feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it — and feminists say so themselves.”
Saturday Night Live did a skit on the Democratic Presidential debate:
On the surface it’s a skit that ostensibly takes a shot at everyone equally (and even touches on Hillary’s email scandal). However, take a look at one central visual fact:
Hillary Clinton, who is 67 years old (68 on October 26) is played by Kate McKinnon, who is 31 years old.
Bernie Sanders, who is 74, is played by Larry David, who is 68.
So Sanders is played by someone Hillary Clinton’s age (old), and Hillary Clinton is played by someone half her age (young). The skit is constructed to reinforce the false Sanders old, Clinton young impression, which suggests the reason why SNL choose non-cast-member Larry David to play Sanders. David did write for the show during the 1984—1985 season (where he worked with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who he would later cast in Seinfeld); to put it another way, David worked on SNL the same year McKinnon was born.
Why Hillary’s email scandal (still) matters: “Ignoring the fact that ordinary people are deciding that Hillary Clinton is an untrustworthy liar won’t actually make that issue go away for the Democrats.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz continues to work her special brand of magic at the DNC. “I’ve begun to deeply question whether she has the leadership skills to get us through the election. This is not just about how many debates we have. This is one of a series of long-running events in which the chair has not shown the political judgment that is needed.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)