Beware the Ides of March! Also beware the Clinton Family (and their fixer functionaries John and Tony Podesta), who keep refusing to fade from public sight:
So what do you do when you have a potentially useful and informative piece, but don’t trust the source? Report it with a caveat, namely that this comes from Infowars: “Russian Bank Docs Show How Putin Laundered Money to Hillary & Podesta“:
Congress may want to examine concrete evidence showing Russian President Vladimir Putin paying Hillary Clinton and John Podesta for a long time before the mainstream media goes even more overboard trying to fabricate a tie between Putin and President Donald Trump.
The money trail hunt begins with a document Infowars has obtained from the Russian Central Bank “Registry of Significant Control,” known generally as the “RSC Registry.”
This document traces the ownership of Metcombank, a relatively small Russian-domiciled bank located in the Russian Ural Mountains, to ownership by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian billionaire with close ties to Putin.
As we shall see this document provides evidence of the circuitous path the Russian government has been using since Hillary Clinton was secretary of state to make large financial payments to John Podesta and to the Clinton Foundation.
As the RSC Registry makes clear, Vekselberg has been paying Clinton and Podesta through a complicated money laundering scheme involving Metcombank in Russia, with payments tracing back to the Renova Group, a Russian-based energy and investment international conglomerate also owned by Vekselberg.
Evidently some of the money flowing to Podesta is coming via the previously mentioned Joule Unlimited:
In the summer of 2011, while he was advising then-Secretary Clinton on State Department policy, John Podesta joined the board of three Joule entities: Joule Unlimited, a small Massachusetts-based energy company; its holding company, Joule Global Holdings, N.V., which was based in the Netherlands; and Joule Global Stichting, which appears to be the ultimate controlling entity.
Podesta, it turns out, has been paid an undisclosed amount, starting in 2011, for serving on the executive board of Joule Unlimited that he neglected to report to regulatory authorities in the U.S., as well consulting fees from the Wyss Foundation, a group controlled by Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, an investor in Joule Energy.
In an Aug. 2016 report entitled “From Russia with Money,” the Government Accountability Institute noted that Podesta consulted for a foundation run by one of the investors in Joule Energy, Hansjörg Wyss, who in turn was a major Clinton Foundation donor.
Podesta was evidently paid $87,000 by the Wyss Foundation in 2013, according to federal tax records.
The GAI report also documented the Wyss Charitable Foundation has given between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Some of the information here is new (or at least new to me), while other bits accord with what we already know about Podesta ties to Putin. I would still like to see external verification from a more reliable source for the new information.
“In pushing its Manchurian-candidate-Trump narrative, the media fail to mention the much deeper ties of Democratic lobbyists to Russia. Don’t worry, the media seems to say: Even though they are representing Russia, the lobbyists are good upstanding citizens, not like the Trump people. They can be trusted with such delicate matters.”
The media’s focus on Trump’s Russian connections ignores the much more extensive and lucrative business relationships of top Democrats with Kremlin-associated oligarchs and companies. Thanks to the Panama Papers, we know that the Podesta Group (founded by John Podesta’s brother, Tony) lobbied for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. “Sberbank is the Kremlin, they don’t do anything major without Putin’s go-ahead, and they don’t tell him ‘no’ either,” explained a retired senior U.S. intelligence official. According to a Reuters report, Tony Podesta was “among the high-profile lobbyists registered to represent organizations backing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.” Among these was the European Center, which paid Podesta $900,000 for his lobbying.
That’s not all: The busy Podesta Group also represented Uranium One, a uranium company acquired by the Russian government which received approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department to mine for uranium in the U.S. and gave Russia twenty percent control of US uranium. The New York Times reported Uranium One’s chairman, Frank Guistra, made significant donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for one speech from a Russian investment bank that has “links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.” Notably, Frank Giustra, the Clinton Foundation’s largest and most controversial donor, does not appear anywhere in Clinton’s “non-private” emails. It is possible that the emails of such key donors were automatically scrubbed to protect the Clinton Foundation.
Let’s not leave out fugitive Ukrainian oligarch, Dymtro Firtash. He is represented by Democratic heavyweight lawyer, Lanny Davis, who accused Trump of “inviting Putin to commit espionage” (Trump’s quip: If Putin has Hillary’s emails, release them) but denies all wrongdoing by Hillary.
There’s just one tiny little problem: “Democratic super lobbyist Tony Podesta failed to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when he agreed to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.”
“Five Clinton-Russia Bombshells Progressives Yawned Over.” Including much already covered here, although I might have missed this one: “Ian Telfer, the head of the Russian government’s uranium company, Uranium One, made four foreign donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation, as the New York Times reported.”
“State Department Inspector General officials edited out passages of a high-profile report in 2013 that could have embarrassed Hillary Clinton just days before she quit President Obama’s Cabinet.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Three of the five top strategists behind the March are key Clinton staffers: De’Ara Balenger, Meredith Shepard and Sarah Sophia Flicker. And three lower-level Women’s March staffers (Mariam Ehrari, Hannah Rosenzweig and Caitlyn Ryan) were essential members of Clinton’s extended campaign staff.
Balenger was Huma Abedin’s right-hand woman, reporting directly to Clinton’s top deputy and closest friend. Before joining Clinton’s campaign, she worked directly with disgraced State Department aide Cheryl Mills, who was at the center of Clinton’s private email server controversy, and was accused of wielding the power of the State Department to benefit the Clinton Foundation’s top donors.
She is not a thing. Stop trying to make her a thing. She is not going to be the Savior of the Democratic Party, because no one wants to vote for a Clinton anymore. Everyone is tired of the Clintons. You can’t find any buzz about any of them outside of Peter Daou’s timeline, and that has devolved into pretty much just openly weeping at this point.
It’s incredibly difficult to take a news site that constantly posts Chelsea Clinton’s every thought as news serious. The Hill is little more than a joke right now pushing a punchline no one finds funny.
Welcome to Friday! (And welcome Instapundit readers coming in off Stephen Green’s link to yesterday’s border security roundup.)
First up: Liberalism’s continued idée fixe on the “Russians hacked the election” fantasy.
If Trump had actually been in the pay of the Russians, Wayne Barrett, who worked the Trump beat for the Village Voice for 40 years, would have known about it. “Wayne Barrett had this file for 40 years, and if neither he nor the reporters he trained got this story, it’s not a story.”
This obsession with Russia conspiracy tales is poisoning all aspects of U.S. political discourse and weakening any chance for resisting Trump’s actual abuses and excesses. Those who wake up every day to hype the latest episode of this Russia/Trump spy drama tell themselves that they’re bravely undermining and subverting Trump, but they’re doing exactly the opposite.
This crazed conspiracy mongering is further discrediting U.S. media outlets, making Washington seem even more distant from and irrelevant to the lives of millions of Americans, degrading discourse to the lowliest Trumpian circus level on which he thrives, and is misdirecting huge portions of opposition energy and thought into an exciting but fictitious spy novel – all of which directly redounds to Trump’s benefit.
Snip.
Above all else, it’s because it’s an offensive assault on reason. This kind of deranged discourse is an attack on basic journalistic integrity, on any minimal obligation to ensure that one’s claims are based in evidence rather than desire, fantasy, and herd-enforced delusions. And it’s emanating from the most established and mainstream precincts of U.S. political and media elites, who have processed the severe disorientation and loss of position they feel from Trump’s shock election not by doing the work to patiently formulate cogent, effective strategies against him, but rather by desperately latching onto online “dot-connecting” charlatans and spewing the most unhinged Birther-level conspiracies that require a complete abandonment of basic principles of rationality and skepticism.
Nate Silver at 538: “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble.” Silver comes to many of the same conclusions about MSM blinders that conservatives have been making for years. A few samples:
“Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent.”
“In a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite7 for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.”
“The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans.”
“All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink.”
The headline is “Battle for Manbij shows Syria’s civil war is almost over – and it looks like Bashar Assad has won.” And that’s part of it. But there’s a lot of information on just how complex the Syrian-Iraqi battlespace is:
Winners and losers are emerging in what may be the final phase of the Syrian civil war as anti-Isis forces prepare for an attack aimed at capturing Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital in Syria. Kurdish-led Syrian fighters say they have seized part of the road south of Raqqa, cutting Isis off from its other territory further east.
Isis is confronting an array of enemies approaching Raqqa, but these are divided, with competing agendas and ambitions. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose main fighting force is the Syrian Kurdish Popular Mobilisation Units (YPG), backed by the devastating firepower of the US-led air coalition, are now getting close to Raqqa and are likely to receive additional US support. The US currently has 500 Special Operations troops in north-east Syria and may move in American-operated heavy artillery to reinforce the attack on Raqqa.
This is bad news for Turkey, whose military foray into northern Syria called Operation Euphrates Shield began last August, as it is being squeezed from all sides. In particular, an elaborate political and military chess game is being played around the town of Manbij, captured by the SDF last year, with the aim of excluding Turkey, which had declared it to be its next target. The Turkish priority in Syria is to contain and if possible reduce or eliminate the power of Syrian Kurds whom Ankara sees as supporting the Kurdish insurrection in Turkey.
“The U.S. military is sending an additional 2,500 ground combat troops to a staging base in Kuwait from which they could be called upon to back up coalition forces battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.” So instead of following Obama’s strategy of losing slowly and expensively, President Trump’s goal appears to be to crush the Islamic State entirely.
“Marine Le Pen: ‘France Isn’t Burkinis on the Beach, France is Brigitte Bardot.'” France is a lot of things, but they could certainly do worse than Brigitte Bardot…
School restages Trump-Clinton debates, but with a woman playing Trump and a man playing Hillary. Result: Hillary loses even more badly than before. “It seems to me that Hillary’s gender actually covered up her flaws, such as inauthenticity, scriptedness, recitations of pablum, and fake-smiling, while, when she was played by a male actor, those flaws were suddenly very visible to the people who think of themselves as ‘gender-woke’ but maybe should just think of themselves as gender partisans.”
“100 of the 544 Women’s March partners received a total of $246,637,217 from [George] Soros between 2000 and 2014. Soros gave more than $1 million to 36 of those partners, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, MoveOn.org, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Washington Examiner writer finds the perfect place to visit on the “Day Without Women”: Hooters. I guess that’s an excuse to break out this classic:
Lawsuit of man wrongly expelled from Amherst for a “rape” that consisted of him receiving a blowjob while he was passed out can move forward after a judge’s ruling.
“Defense contracting firm owners Jeffrey Harrington and Michael Mayer, and employee sisters Kimberlee Hewitt and Natalee Hewitt, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in California to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and file false claims for using their companies — Veteran Logistics, Inc., Industrial Xchange, Inc., and Boston Laser Technology, Inc. — to sell the government $45 million worth of mostly incorrect and overpriced products.” As far as I can tell, this naval contracting scandal is unrelated to the Fat Leonard naval contracting scandal. Did the Navy just forget to hire auditors?
Radio Shack to close another 187 stores. In other news, Radio Shack still has stores to close. I also ask your forgiveness in advance when I rerun this joke next year. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
What happens when you actually start enforcing the law? Oddly enough, lawbreaking goes down.
The same is true of enforcing laws for border control and immigration.
There’s been a lot of news on the border control and immigration front, starting with President Trump issuing a revised executive order banning travelers from terrorism-exporting nations. This version is more narrowly tailored, excludes Iraq, and spells out that it does not apply to existing visa and green card holders.
Daniel R. DePetris at the National Interest thinks the new Executive Order is much improved. “Overall, the second version of the ‘Presidential Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’ is far and away a better product than the first. It’s more detailed, comprehensive and bureaucratically vetted than the original.”
Other border control news:
Illegal alien border crossings were way down during President Trump’s first month in office. “In January, 31,575 individuals were taken into custody between ports of entry on the southwest border. That contrasts with an average of more than 45,000 for each of the previous three months, according to a CPB report released Monday.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
And that trend appears to be continuing. “The Homeland Security Department said Wednesday night that people caught crossing the border illegally had plummeted from 31,578 in January to 18,762 in February.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Likewise, the illegal aliens themselves are “panicking” over the possibility of being deported. Let’s let Professor Rock break down how people may avoid this fate:
Further: If you’re already breaking the law, maybe you shouldn’t appear at a pro-illegal alien press conference and tell people how you’re breaking the law, or you might get deported.
The crackdown has led to what conservatives have said would happen all along: self-deportation. “Trump talks tough about a crack down on illegals and a step up of deportations. ICE goes out, does a few raids and deports a few illegals and the dolts in the press publicize it everywhere, wholly unaware that they have become unwitting allies of Trump. Illegals witness the hysteria in the press and decide to turn tail and run.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
It seems that a lot of sanctuary cities that loudly proclaimed they were going to defy President Trump over border enforcement are backing down. “Miami-Dade county rescinds ‘sanctuary’ status over Trump’s threat to withhold federal funds.”
Although increased enforcement is attracting all the attention, another big part of President Trump’s immigration reform is selecting immigrants based on skill rather than family preferences.
Pacheco supports Trump even though he’s one of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who could be deported. “Trump for me is a good president,” he says. “He has to fix things here. There’s a lot of drugs being sold around here. A lot of people sell drugs. And they hide within the workers. They even come here, or hide other places around here. They hide among us.”
As promised at his joint address, President Trump has created Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement, an office to serve U.S. victims of illegal alien crime.
Illegal alien arrested for chopping off his own mother’s head. “Oliver Funes-Machado, 18, is originally from Honduras and is accused of repeatedly stabbing his 35-year-old mother in their Zebulon home Monday. He allegedly beheaded her and then walked outside, holding her head in one hand and the knife in the other as he waited for Franklin County deputies to arrive. He was the one who called 911.” No word on whether he was one of Obama’s “Dreamers” or not… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
In case you missed the news, author and sociologist Charles Murray was physically attacked at Middlebury College in Vermont:
A violent “mob” attacked controversial author Charles Murray and a Middlebury College professor as they left a campus building Thursday night following a chaotic attempt at a lecture, a college spokesman said.
Professor Allison Stanger was assaulted and her neck was injured when someone pulled her hair as she tried to shield Murray from the 20 or 30 people who attacked the duo outside the McCullough Student Center, said Bill Burger, a vice president of communications at Middlebury College.
Burger said people in the crowd, made up of students and “outside agitators,” wore masks as they screamed at Murray.
Snip.
“The demonstrators were trying to block Mr. Murray and Professor Stanger’s way out of the building and to the car,” Burger said. “It became a pushing and shoving match, with the officers trying to protect those two people from demonstrators — and it became violent.”
“This was an incredibly violent confrontation,” added Burger, who described the crowd a “mob.”
For many Democrats, President Trump’s joint address was the first time they actual heard and saw him unfiltered. “He just crushed the Drive-By [Media] last night. He just crushed them. He just blew up every narrative they’ve established on the guy. And they don’t even realize it.”
“As one might imagine given the Democrats’ breathtaking electoral collapse, there is basically nothing but bad news for Democrats across the board. The data showed that the voting patterns of key demographic groups shifted dramatically downward from 2008 through 2016.” More: “Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is a ‘sleeper statute’ (aka, a secret weapon) in that its practical application took 20 years to enter the realm of viable possibility. The CRA allows Congress to overturn executive regulations by a simple majority—and this is the moment it’s been waiting for.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Members of an elite Baltimore Police Department squad charged with getting guns off the streets gets hit with federal racketeering charges and held for trial without bail. More: “In one case, four of the officers are alleged to have stolen $200,000 from a safe and bags and a watch valued at $4,000. In July 2016, three officers conspired to impersonate a federal officer in order to steal $20,000 in cash.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The NYT and the Washington Post have a motivation to ally with the Democratic Party in its last-ditch effort to Watergatize Trump after Trump’s endless criticisms of them. And this anti-Trump approach may get them a spike in readership, even as it repels some readers like me.
I’m missing the sense that I’m getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you’d cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.
Snip.
The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.
Austin police have charged Matthew Bartlett, 21, and Catronn Hewitt, 36, with felony possession of marijuana, police said in a news release.
Ja’Quan Johnson, 25, was charged with federal charges in connection with the thefts. Johnson is a contract baggage handler at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and is believed to have been behind the thefts, according to police and the Justice Department.
Buying pot? Likely misdemeanor charge. But stealing guns from airport luggage is likely an interstate federal gun trafficking felony. Also: Our airport security is in the best of hands!
Houston Chronicle to move its call center from the Philippines to Dallas. 1. Who thought it was a good idea to move it to the Philippines in the first place? 2. “The move will result in 130 new jobs for Texas.” Why does the Chronicle need 130 people in its call center? 3. Dallas? Really? Because it’s evidently impossible to locate a call center in the 4th largest city in America…
SEC charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dismissed. A state felony trail is pending, but given that the state charges are based on the same issue as the SEC case just dismissed, chances of a conviction would appear to be very slim. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NYT repeated as truth Claire McCaskill's lie that she never met or spoke to Russia's ambassador, then stealth deleted it w/o any note. pic.twitter.com/1adhWZdksE
Indeed, “Russia!” is now the go-to move for the media the same way a bad video game player will just use the same button combination over and over again:
Trump has an AMAZING well-received speech, the Market breaks 21,000, so the Media and #morningjoe CLOWNS return to RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA!😂 pic.twitter.com/Xw0VJnZxGi
A Texas man whose life sentence on drug charges was commuted by former President Obama is back behind bars after cops caught him with more than two pounds of cocaine following a high-speed chase, according to a report.
Robert M. Gill, 68, had been imprisoned in 1990 for for cocaine and heroin distribution before Obama set him free along with other non-violent federal inmates in 2015, the San Antonio Express News reported.
Really, who hasn’t been arrest with two pounds of cocaine in their car?
Could happen to anyone.
Whether drug dealers or jihadists at Guantanamo Bay, our 44th President had a gift for releasing those with a penchant for recidivism…
It’s no coincidence that the most vocal outcry against President Trump’s measures have come from urban elites and the corporations that cater to them. It’s easy to spot the class divides in the scoffing at Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company behind Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, getting a cabinet position instead of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg who had been tipped for Treasury Secretary by Hillary.
Carl’s Jr and its 4 Dollar Real Deal are a world away from Facebook’s Gehry designed Menlo Park headquarters. Or as a WWE tournament is from Conde Nast’s Manhattan skyscraper.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer contrast between coastal elites and the heartland, and between the new economy and the old. On the one side are the glittering cities where workforces of minorities and immigrants do the dirty work behind the slick logos and buzzwords of the new economy. On the other are Rust Belt communities and Southern towns who actually used to make things.
Facebook’s top tier geniuses enjoy the services of an executive chef, treadmill workstations and a bike repair shop walled off from East Palo Alto’s Latino population and the crime and gang violence. And who works in Facebook’s 11 restaurants or actually repairs the bikes in the back room? Or looks through the millions of pictures posted on timelines to screen out spam, pornography and racism?
Behind the illusion of a shiny new future are Mexicans getting paid a few dollars an hour to decide if that Italian Renaissance painting you just shared violates Facebook’s content guidelines.
If you live in the world of Facebook, Lyft, Netflix and Airbnb, crowding into airports shouting, “No Borders, No Nations, Stop The Deportations” makes sense. You don’t live in a country. You live in one of a number of interchangeable megacities or their bedroom communities. Patriotism is a foreign concept. You have no more attachment to America than you do to Friendster or MySpace. The nation state is an outdated system of social organization that is being replaced by more efficient systems of global governance. The only reason anyone would cling to nations or borders is racism.
The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite.
This isn’t a revolution. The revolutions happened in June in the UK and in November in the US. Brexit and Trump were revolutions. The protests against them are a reaction.
In the midst of freaking out, Instapundit notes that our elites are displaying why they’re unfit to rule:
Why all the anger over Trump?
As I’ve pondered this, I’ve gone back to Tyler Cowen’s statement: “Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.”
I think that a lot of the elite hatred for Trump, and for his supporters, stems from just such a sentiment. For decades now, the educated meritocrats who ran America — the “Best and the Brightest,” in David Halberstam’s not-actually-complimentary term — have enjoyed tremendous status, regardless of election results.
An election’s turn might see some moving to the private sector — say as K street lobbyists or high-priced lawyers or consultants — while a different batch of meritocrats take their positions in government. But even so, their status remained unchallenged: They were always the insiders, the elite, the winners, regardless of which team came out ahead in the elections.
But as Nicholas Ebserstadt notes, that changed in November. To the privileged and well-educated Americans living in their “bicoastal bastions,” things seemed to be going quite well, even as the rest of the country fell farther and farther behind. But, writes Eberstadt: “It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then — and broke down very badly.
“The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it.”
Well, now they’ve heard it, and they’ve also heard that a lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
You have to read this Glenn Greenwald piece on what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. “The more alarmed one is by the Trump administration, the more one should focus on how to fix the systemic, fundamental sickness of the Democratic Party. That Hillary Clinton won the meaningless popular vote on her way to losing to Donald Trump, and that the singular charisma of Barack Obama kept him popular, have enabled many to ignore just how broken and failed the Democrats are as a national political force.” Never mind that Greenwald ignores one of the big elephants in the room (the Social Justice Warrior/victimhood identity politics brigade doing such a bang-up job alienating American voters). His description of the other elephant in the room, the party’s fundamentally corrupt and anti-Democratic nature, is fairly acute.
All the Trump Derangement is masking the Democratic Party’s own civil war. “There is no Barack Obama among the ranks of current Democrats. He simply does not exist. That truth, and Hillary’s defeat, means the years ahead will be ones of rebuilding and rebranding. So far, it’s not going well.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Seven days in February. “Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press?” Also this: “The Democratic party has been absorbed by its left wing and is beginning to resemble the impotent British Labour party. Certainly it no longer is a national party.”
“The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number.”
“This is what Chuck Todd and others like him fail to accept or comprehend: The mainstream media have delegitimized themselves. Republicans and independents watched for eight long years as Todd and others of his ilk did their best to help and support the last administration; not only refusing to hold President Obama to account (the way they are imploring each other to do with Trump) but providing cover for him.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Turns out that patiently explaining to the deplorable redneck freaks of JesusLand why they’re ignorant rubes that need to be ruled for their own good doesn’t win votes.
Marine Le Pen is winning over French women. In addition to refusing to wear a headscarf, “Le Pen again vowed to protect French women after the mass sexual assault by groups of men in Cologne, Germany, just over a year ago in an op-ed that tied together immigration and women rights.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Cahnman’s Musings has a roundup of what various school district Superintendents make. It’s an interesting list, though I personally would not have broken it up by Texas House committee chairman. I’m not surprised that they average a low six figures, or that the Superintendents of Houston and Dallas ISD make in excess of $300,000. Why I don’t understand is why the Superintendent for Galena Park ISD, a working class school district with 22,549 students and a single 4A high school, makes $270,531, or 90% of the what the HISD Superintendent makes…
Feminist derangement syndrome: “I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women” says ex-WNBA player Candice Wiggins, who says she was bullied and harassed for being straight. This is not exactly a surprise, thought that 98% number may be slightly high. I casually followed the WNBA back when the Houston Comets were dominating the league, but haven’t paid attention since they folded. Today half of the teams still lose money. But I’m sure their popularity will skyrocket any day now…
God looks out for children, drunks, the United States of America, and Donald Trump.
Trump is like a magic machine that instantly creates hubris in his enemies just for it to be clobbered by nemesis in short order. Like this week:
Trump: Whoa, look what happened in Sweden last night!
Liberals: Ha ha, there was no Swedish incident! Trump is a moron! A rube! A—
Sweden: BOOM!
Right after liberals had picked up several more pallets of smug from Sam’s comes word of riots breaking out in the Stockholm borough of Rinkeby, with those delightful Muslim immigrants we keep hearing so much about throwing stones and burning cars.
If Rinkeby sounds vaguely familiar, that’s where a 60 Minutes film crew was assaulted last year:
“There are no 55 declared no-go zones in Sweden.” A Swedish resident confirms what it’s like to live in one (all spelling [sic] from the original Swedish source):
Some claim that it is really dangerous to go to specific areas in Sweden. There is a term being used in Sweden that is ”no go zones”. I live in an area often described as that and well, i can go outside any time I want and walk around the area and nothing special will happen. But, at the same time, lots of people still does not feel safe in this area. Some of them is security personell and police officers.
And car owners. There is a lot of cars being set on fire. I have not a perfect answer yet to why this is happening. Some cars that are set on fire is about insurance fraud. I would say that more of those fires is about keeping the police busy. Just a few blocks away, there is lots of drugs being sold on the streets. If there is a police with resources to act, it means bad business for the local druglords. So lots of cars being set on fire is related to this, just to keep the police busy.
Some claim that cars being set on fire is about some muslim takeover or some kind of jihad. There is no evidence at all for that. I have never really seen anything than confirms such a claim.
But what is true is that the police get attacked in some of these no go zones. I have seen, and filmed that, myself. Immigrant kids throw rocks and even molotov-cocktails towards police officers during riots. The most known riots was those in Husby in northern Stockholm in 2013. Such riots does not happen very often, but there is definately tensions just below the surface in these areas, so we can most probably expect somewhat similar stuff going on in the future.
And working as a police officer in these areas means you often need back up from your colleagues. It happen more and more often that police officers are getting physical attacked. In an area nearby where i live someone threw a hand grenade towards the police who was sitting in a van. It was pretty much pure luck that they didn’t get injured. At other occasions there is molotov cocktails being thrown at the police and other stuff that can seriously harm, or even kill, a police officer.
So, well, you can’t totally deny that for some people these areas could be considered ”no go areas”. And, oh yes, some of these areas is pretty much ”no go” if you are trying to film or takes photos. There is a big chance that you will be attacked. It have happened to me and a lot of others as well.
Sweden’s admirable humanitarianism is outstripping its capacity to absorb newcomers. Nothing if not an earnest and well-meaning society, Sweden has always accepted more than its share of refugees. Immigration was already at elevated levels before the latest influx into Europe from the Middle East, which prompted Sweden to try to see and raise the reckless open-borders policy of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Sweden welcomed more than 160,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, including nearly 40,000 in October of that year alone. For a country of fewer than 10 million, this was almost equal to 2 percent of the population — in one year. The flow doubled the number of asylum-seekers at the height of the Balkans crisis in 1992.
The foreign-born proportion of the Swedish population was 18 percent in 2016, double that of 1990. As of 2015, the most common county of origin for the foreign-born was Finland, which makes sense as it is a neighboring Scandinavian country. Next are Iraq and Syria.
Predictably, it isn’t easy to integrate people who don’t know the language, aren’t highly skilled, and come from a foreign culture. Sweden’s economic policies don’t help. As a report of the Migration Policy Institute put it politely, Sweden is “an interesting case” because “the state is committed to fostering large-scale immigration despite huge integration challenges in the labor market.”
There is a stark gap in the labor-force-participation rate between the native born (82 percent) and the foreign born (57 percent). As the Migration Policy Institute points out, Sweden is an advanced economy with relatively few low-skills jobs to begin with. On top of this, high minimum wages and stringent labor protections make it harder for marginal workers to find employment, while social assistance discourages the unemployed from getting work.
None of this is a formula for assimilation or social tranquility. In a piece for The Spectator, Swedish journalist Tove Lifvendahl writes, “A parallel society is emerging where the state’s monopoly on law and order is being challenged.”
And the fiscal cost is high. According to Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji, the country spends 1.5 percent of its GDP on the asylum-seekers, more than on its defense budget. Sweden is spending twice the entire budget of the United Nations High Commissioner responsible for refugees worldwide. Pressed for housing, Sweden has spent as much on sheltering 3,000 people in tents as it would cost to care for 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan.
