Thursday, May 31, 2018

Roseanne gets fired; Samantha Bee gets an award from the Television Academy!

Emily Zanotti reports in The Daily Wire,
The Television Academy, the same group that puts on the yearly Emmy Awards, is set to award Samantha Bee's show, "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," for its contributions to social change, even after Bee let loose on the program Wednesday night, calling Ivanka Trump a "c***" and implying Ivanka and her father are in an incestuous relationship.

According to CBS, the Academy has not announced that it is revoking Bee's award, which the Academy says she's earned for her "inspirational" content.

“For its dedication to making the audience laugh while making it think, the Television Academy is proud to include Full Frontal with Samantha Bee in the Television Academy Honors," reads Bee's nomination statement. The show "serves up current political and social facts with a side of satire."

"The Emmy winning team at "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee" works to decipher facts from exaggerations and distractions, flagrant lies and accidental half-truths, and helps viewers lift their wool-covered glasses to expose a clearer vision of what is really going on in the world," the Academy gushes on its website. "'Full Frontal with Samantha Bee' doesn't just serve to inform and amuse. What Toronto native Bee and her team are doing is far more important and complex than just delivering the news or just writing a funny joke about a politician."

Bee was forced to apologize for her "joke," which took a week to author, and which was scripted, recorded, and edited days before the program aired, but was, apparently, objectionable to Bee and the rest of the crew only when advertisers began pulling sponsorships from her TBS program, and friends on the left — including several CNN headliners — called the joke "reprehensible."

The Television Academy is set to present Bee with her award Thursday evening in a catered affair at NeueHouse Hollywood.

There is a reckoning on the horizon

In The Chicago Tribune, Victor Davis Hanson writes,
After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama administration’s national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveiled. Many of those names then were leaked to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump — largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

Few are upset that former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lied under oath to Congress on matters pertaining to surveillance. Rather than being investigated by the media, both are now making frequent media appearances.

The FBI cannot remain credible when its former director, James Comey, leaks confidential memos about meetings with the president to the media — with the expressed intent of leveraging the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who turned out to be a longtime friend of Comey’s.

Why have the former guardians of civil liberties flipped in the near half-century since Watergate?

One, both the media and the liberal establishment believed that the outsider Trump represented an existential danger to themselves and the nation at large — similar to the way operatives in the Nixon administration had felt about far-left presidential challenger George McGovern in 1972.

But this time around, liberals were not out of power as they were in 1972. Instead, they were the establishment. They held the reins of federal power under the Obama administration. And they chose to exercise it in a fashion similar to how Nixon’s team had in 1972.

Second, pollsters and the media were convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected. As a result, members of the FBI, CIA and other federal bureaucracies apparently assumed that any extralegal efforts to stop the common menace Trump would be appreciated rather than punished by a soon-to-be “President Clinton.”

Three, those in the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign and the media formed an echo chamber. All convinced themselves that any means necessary to achieve the noble ends of precluding a Trump presidency were justified.

The danger of such groupthink continues; even now they are unaware of the impending bomb that is about to go off.

Public opinion has radically changed. A majority of Americans believe the Mueller investigation is politically motivated, according to a CBS News poll.

The inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email scandal is soon due. It will likely detail violations of ethics and laws among Obama administration officials and may include criminal referrals.

Already, a few liberals and former Clinton supporters are warning the left that it is on the wrong side of history and about to reverse the entire post-Watergate liberal tradition.

There is a reckoning on the horizon. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, the traditional, self-appointed watchdogs of government overreach have turned into the carnivores of civil liberties.

How did this happen?

Sometimes our kids turn out great in spite of who their parents are. That was the thought that crossed my mind when I read an article in Fox News by Caleb Parke.

John David Rice-Cameron, the son of Susan Rice, is an outspoken pro-Trump, conservative leader at Stanford University. (Reuters/Courtesy of John David Rice-Cameron)

Parke writes,
...Rice-Cameron, who is a sophomore, is president of the College Republicans on campus and the activism director for the California College Republicans. Like his mother, who is a Stanford alumnus, he does not shy away from controversy.

Rice-Cameron hosted controversial expert on radical Islam Robert Spencer, pushed for a professor with ties to Antifa to resign, pressured the school to reverse its decision on banning American flags on their club t-shirts, and Tuesday the group hosted Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens for a “Make Stanford Great Again!” event.

...Rice-Cameron said his parents, both Democrats, encouraged debate and discussion, which unwittingly put him on the path to conservatism by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, host of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News Channel.
Read more here.

More insanity from Google!

Tyler O'Neil reports in PJ Media,
On Thursday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) shared a screenshot of Google listing "Nazism" as the "ideology" of the California Republican Party.

"Dear Google, This is a disgrace. Stop The Bias," McCarthy tweeted.
Read more here.

Losing the Nobel Prize, A Trump and Kim summit, The Left has no way of dealing with defeat or debate

A Trump and Kim summit (Kim Kardashian). Andrew lists several things the two Kims have in common.

The Left believes their ways are the moral ways. Anyone who disagrees is evil. Andrew shows a clip of Obama buddy Ben Rhodes on election night shattered and speechless. He plays it again, accompanied this time by Simon and Garfunkle singing The Sounds of Silence. The Left has no way of dealing with defeat or with debate.

Roseanne Barr is off t.v. Samantha Bee calls Ivanka Trump a cunt for tweeting a beautiful photo of herself holding her young son. Samantha Bee is still on t.v.

The Viet Nam War expanded because the Democratic presidents JFK and LBJ were buddies with the Democratic press, which failed to probe. The Pentagon Papers is a story of journalistic failure.

The press failed to cover Obama, yet their hatred of Trump colors every story they write.

Andrew's guest is Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize.


Brian is a professor of physics who studies the Big Bang. He talks about the fact that our universe is expanding. The origin of life occurred shortly after the Big Bang, which took place 13.82 billion years ago!

Google's conformist PC agenda

Does Google have a plan for thought control? Robert Tracinski writes about it at The Federalist.

Where is the call for Rosenstein's recusal?

Referring to this article today in the New York Times, Ace of Spades writes,
We have here an allegation by the former Deputy Director of the FBI that Rosenstein participated in a cover-up of Trump's alleged obstruction of justice (consisting of the firing of Comey). In McCabe's view, Rosenstein's memo was written just to justify an illegal act.

And Rosenstein went along with it.

And McCabe has passed this memo along to Mueller -- who is, technically, Rosenstein's subordinate.

That puts Rosenstein in the same position that Sessions was in when he recused himself -- overseeing an investigation in which he himself might become a subject, and whose presence in the chain of command would be read as a "back off' signal to any subordinate digging into his role.

Sessions recused himself.

Why hasn't Rosenstein?

Where is the call for Rosenstein's recusal?

Right to Try

Rush Limbaugh reports on President Trump's signing the Right to Try bill.


RUSH: As we speak, President Trump is on the verge of signing legislation that would give terminally ill patients the right to experiment with drugs, experimental drug treatments. And I think it’s the… The name of the act is actually called Right to Try. And believe me, this… You know, this is the kind of thing… It may appear to be insignificant to some people, but this is the kind of legislation that’s gonna just connect with people.

You know the number of people who are diagnosed with terminal diseases who are willing to try anything — it’s their life — and all of the new things that are in experimental trials are just that. They’re in trials. They’re very difficult to get into, they are risky, and medical professionals try to talk you out of them. So people end up going to Mexico and Sweden, Switzerland, what have you. People have been willing to take these risks. And there’s been the concern about quackery in all of this, which is a legitimate concern.

But this appears to be relatively tightly regulated. It’s the kind of thing that, once again, is going to just solidify the connection that Donald Trump has with people. This is something that the powers that be have routinely denied people who want to try this, and yet now it’s happening. Little things. They appear to be little things like this. And once people learn about them and associate them with Trump, he just keeps, as I say, solidifying the relationship or the bond that he has with his supporters.
Read more here.

The Clinton Protection Racket

Ann Coulter writes,
...The liberal protection racket for sexual predators was always intimately intertwined with the Clintons. The template used to defend Bill Clinton became a model for all left-wing sexual predators. They all hired the same lawyers and detectives and counted on the same cultural elites to mete out punishment to anyone who stood in the way of their Caligula lifestyles. It was Total War against the original #MeToo movement.

Even Teddy Kennedy never plotted revenge on reporters or smeared his sexual conquests as bimbos, trailer park trash and stalkers. That was the Clinton model.

Showing how incestuous it was, in 2000 -- two years after Clinton's impeachment -- Weinstein used his publishing company, Talk/Miramax, overseen by Tina Brown, to take revenge on anyone involved in Clinton's impeachment.

The publishing house commissioned a book by John Connolly to dig into the private sex lives of the people who had helped expose Bill Clinton, e.g., the lawyers behind Paula Jones' lawsuit, Ken Starr's staff, Linda Tripp lawyer Jim Moody, Matt Drudge, reporter Michael Isikoff and so on.

...Not one Senate Democrat voted to remove Clinton from office for various felonies related to his sexual assaults.

The message was clear. Liberal men got a pass for any sexual misconduct, even rape. But woe be to those who accused them. (Even last year, NBC News was still following the old rule: It fired Ronan Farrow rather than publish his Weinstein expose.)

...It's hard to avoid the impression that a big part of the reason Weinstein was finally exposed is that the Clinton machine is dead. Trump killed it. Would anyone have called out Weinstein if his good friend Hillary Clinton were "Madame President"? I doubt it. The Clinton protection racket would have gone on and on and on.
Read more here.

A slew of good news, A tough talking blowhard, Gallingly duplicitous, The MS-13 lover, The phony witch hunt

JJ Sefton provides us with links to articles of relevance to the burning issues of the day. Before he gives us the links he gives us his own thinking about the stories he links to. It is called the Morning Report.
Good morning kids. Thursday and the top story is the succumbing of Trey Gowdy to a bad case of swamp fever. It had been a slow and agonizing illness. That is, slow and agonizing to the American people who once looked to him as a wicked-smart conservative legal eagle and defender of the Constitution. But after a series of bad haircuts and questionable sartorial decisions (not to mention being nothing more than a tough-talking blowhard when you get right down to it), he decided it would be better to be seated on a panel with Kaptain Kristol, the cruise director than serve the people. His defense of the FBI for its criminal spying on the Trump campaign was just the absolute last straw. Mark Levin, who at one point IIRC was an ally of the man, lit into him as did Rush Limbaugh, albeit mellower as is his wont.

Although we are still not privy to many of the details, the facts are undeniable: the top echelons of our Federal law enforcement and intelligence communities led an illegal, covert spying operation against an American presidential candidate with the intent of sabotaging the campaign. After that failed, the goal was to manufacture false evidence of a crime to oust and/or kneecap him as a means of covering up their crime. The only thing yet to be confirmed is was all of this at the behest or direct involvement of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.

For Trey Gowdy, who is a seasoned prosecutor as well as a veteran of Washington DC to not only not see this but to effectively parrot James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan means he is either incredibly stupid or gallingly duplicitous. It's the latter, and considering who I had thought he was for the past few years makes his betrayal that much more bitter a pill to swallow. And now, those of us with TV will have to endure this two-faced Judas for a long time to come. Meh. It's Washington.

Still, the phony witch hunt grinds on. In stating he wants Mueller to wrap it up before the Midterms, Rudy Giuliani is either really dumb (and he ain't) or prepping the rhetorical battle space, there's a report that Deep State stooge Andrew McCabe wrote the memo about firing Comey, a 2012 Holder memo of guidelines about these kinds of investigations during election season may (or may not) loom large as November draws near and Daniel Greenfield has another good piece about conspiracy theories and it turns out the FBI violated its own rules in recruiting the spy. No comment from Gowdy on that one, I guess.

Meanwhile, noted horticulture enthusiast and woman abuser Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on rape (as in "rape-rape") charges and Ann Coulter ties him in nicely with his pals the Clinton Crime Family.

In immigration, it turns out those poor illegal alien kids kept in cages were actually paid $670 a week out of your tax dollars, and a dreamy twice-deported illegal alien is accused of killing a teen while driving drunk. Thou shalt have open borders, eh Tom Donahue? Segueing nicely into politics, the President has tagged Nancy Palsi as "MS-13 lover" which is going to definitely leave a mark considering the RNC ad I linked to yesterday. Brutal, baby. A GOP congressman from Virginia citing his alcoholism will not seek reelection, and Barack Obama really is a disturbed, narcissistic little titty-baby, isn't he?

Some good analysis of the frightening situation of Tommy Robinson, who is effectively a political prisoner inside the land that gave us Magna Carta and the Scottish Enlightenment. Also, discussion of the rank hypocrisy of the Media vis a vis the treatment of the President and the weaponization of Roseanne Barr's remarks on Valerie Jarrett's lineage.

On the international scene, Secretary of State Pompeo sat down for dinner with the NorK representative ahead of a full day of preparatory meetings for the upcoming summit between PDT and Whoa, Fat!, some analysis from IBD about the Italian electoral crisis and its effect on the markets and some takeaways about Israel's response to the latest round of Hamas attacks from Gaza. Unlinked but noteworthy was Nikki Haley's ripping of the UN for its silence about Hamas. And see the link about The Economist.

Related to the latter in the Islam section, our efforts in Afghanistan, a sad yet unsurprising report from the State Department and a related Mark Steyn essay from 2010 that I really recommend. Depressing as hell but a necessary read IMHO for a host of reasons.

Looking to home, we have a slew of good news. Scott Pruitt is bullish on oil production, SCOTUS gave a huge win for the pro-life movement, PDT has signed a bill giving broad access to experimental drugs for critically ill people, Justice Gorsuch may have signaled a huge decision in neutering the power of rogue Hawaiian judges and airline pilots have shocked the Teamsters and organized labor by voting to decertify their union.

From hither and yon, we have links about two new documentaries; one a Wim Wenders propaganda piece about Francis the Talking Pope and another dismantling a new cinematic fable about the Pentagon Papers. Finally, the great Shelby Steele rips the race hustlers preying upon and perpetuating white guilt for fun and profit.
Go here to read the stories to which he links.

The Uni-Party trots out Trey Gowdy and Marco Rubio

At National Review, Andy McCarthy sarcastically notes, Trey Gowdy and Marco Rubio evidently paid little attention to testimony before their own committees on how Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. McCarthy writes,
Well, well, well. The bipartisan Beltway establishment has apparently had its fill of this “Trump colluded with Russia” narrative — the same narrative the same establishment has lustily peddled for nearly two years. The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate — and, more to the point, to smear — its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies — the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation — want you to know the president and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree.

...To be sure, no sensible person argues that the FBI should refrain from investigating individuals suspected of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is: How should such an investigation proceed in a democratic republic whose norms forbid an incumbent administration, in the absence of strong evidence of egregious misconduct, from directing its counterintelligence and law-enforcement powers against its political opposition?

That norm was flouted by the Justice Department and the FBI, under the direction of the Obama administration’s senior political leadership. Representative Gowdy, Senator Rubio, and General Clapper maintain that the Justice Department and the FBI were just doing what we should expect them to do, and that we should applaud them. But this claim is based on the easily refuted fiction that the Justice Department and FBI were not investigating the Trump campaign. The claim also ignores the stubborn fact that, if all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few bad apples with suspicious Russia ties, this could easily have been done by alerting the Trump campaign and asking for its help.

Instead, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
Read more here.

"Canada and Mexico (NAFTA), as well as the EU, have been unwilling to reach reciprocal and balanced trade agreements with the U.S. and will now be subject to the tariff."

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,
Amid ongoing trade stalemates with NAFTA and the EU, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has announced the U.S. Commerce Department will no longer provide exemptions for the European Union, Canada or Mexico.

As anticipated, during a telephone briefing with reporters Secretary Ross announced at midnight tonight the 25% steel, and 10% aluminum, tariffs on imported goods will begin.

The imposition of the import tariffs will likely break the impasse on current trade negotiations with multiple countries – as they will now move to try and get their products exempted.

Australia, Brazil and South Korea (KORUS) have completed trade agreements with the U.S. and will remain exempt from any countervailing steel and aluminum duty. Japan is close to signing a similar trade agreement. However, Canada and Mexico (NAFTA), as well as the EU, have been unwilling to reach reciprocal and balanced trade agreements with the U.S. and will now be subject to the tariff.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce representing Wall Street multinational interests will likely go bananas. Those DC politicians who are fully purchased by the U.S. CoC lobbyists will likely attack the administration….. all predictable.
Read more here.

"I'm off the plantation, bro!"

Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens at Stanford University at a Make Stanford Great Again event. One black male student shows his appreciation and knowledge of truth. Watch the video here.

"Evidently, as is so often the case when it comes to free speech, no one cares except us “right-wingers.”

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine about the arrest of Tommy Robinson, who was arrested, charged and sentenced within five hours!
This is obviously not the American way, and I seriously doubt whether it is the British way in any case that doesn’t involve Islam. But evidently, as is so often the case when it comes to free speech, no one cares except us “right-wingers.”
Read more here.

Never a dull moment with Rudy!



The full transcript of this interview available here.

Mike Pompeo: "We are committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began the first meeting with North Korean emissary Kim Yong-chol today in New York. Over the next two days the two leaders are anticipated to discuss terms of North Korean denuclearization and the possibility of a summit in Singapore between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un.


Pompeo arrives for talks on denuclearization of North Korea

Kim Yong-chol, is one of the most influential North Koreans outside of the Kim Jong-un family. Premier Kim Yong Chol has been closely involved in with talks with South Korea and is the most senior DPRK official to set foot in the US since 2000.

Over the next two days Secretary Pompeo and Premier Kim Yong-chol are anticipated to discuss the granular details of North Korea giving up all nuclear weapons. There is a great deal of responsibility on the shoulders of Pompeo to ensure clarity of expectations in advance of any further diplomatic meetings.

Pompeo tweeted, "We are committed to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Who paid him off?

What a huge lesson! Conservatives stand for freedom, courage, virtue, beauty, and, most of all, truth. We know we should not put our total faith in any one man or woman, because that's a sure way to arrive at disappointment. Many conservatives put their faith in Trey Gowdy, because he was such a good questioner of phony people like Hillary Clinton. Now many of us are waking up to the fact that putting faith in Trey Gowdy was a huge mistake.



Mollie Hemingway writes in The Federalist,
Trey Gowdy Didn’t Even See Documents He Claims Exonerate FBI On Spygate!

Gowdy claimed that the FBI's use of spies against the Trump campaign was perfectly proper, but multiple reports indicate he never even saw the full records Congress subpoenaed on the matter.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) recently suggested the FBI did nothing wrong when it used at least one government informant to secretly collect information on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Public reports indicate, however, that Gowdy never even reviewed the relevant documents on the matter subpoenaed by Congress. In fact, a spokeswoman for Gowdy told The Federalist that the congressman doesn’t even know what documents and records were subpoenaed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

The briefing Gowdy and other lawmakers attended was scheduled at the behest of the White House after the Department of Justice (DOJ) obstructed the subpoena. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein likened HPSCI’s constitutionally obligated congressional oversight of DOJ to “extortion.”

Although Gowdy intimated that the information he received in a briefing last week made clear the FBI did nothing wrong, numerous reports from multiple news outlets indicated that the lawmakers DOJ invited to the briefing were not given access to all of the records HPSCI subpoenaed. Other comments Gowdy made during recent television interviews raise questions about how firm a grasp he has on the investigation and concerns the investigation has raised.

The May 24 briefing was held after tensions flared over the Justice Department’s refusal to comply with the congressional subpoena. DOJ initially claimed President Trump backed its obstruction efforts, a charge refuted by the White House and President Trump himself.

According to government sources who leaked information to The New York Times and Washington Post, the subpoena dealt with an individual who was secretly gathering information on the Trump campaign on behalf of the federal government. Media outlets had reported government officials’ claims they couldn’t comply with the subpoena because revealing any details about the individual would cause loss of life and grave threats to national security. The same media outlets then used leaks from government officials to report the individual’s personally identifying information — up to and including his name.

Along with Gowdy, HPSCI Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) received a classified briefing on the subpoenaed information. Seven other members of Congress did as well. However, multiple press reports indicate the classified briefings reportedly did not satisfy the subpoena.

“Sources tell me Gowdy and Nunes did not receive the documents they requested during the noon meeting at DOJ, despite pleas for openness from [White House chief of staff John] Kelly and [Trump attorney Emmett] Flood,” CNN reporter Sarah Westwood wrote.

...Whether or not you call informants on criminal investigations spies, there is no doubt that you refer to secret government operatives in counterintelligence investigations as spies. Regardless, arguments over whether use of the word “informant” is for some reason preferable to the word “spy” are entirely semantic and don’t speak to whether government agents sending someone undercover to extract information from the Trump campaign was an abuse of power.

Gowdy, who has repeatedly praised Special Counsel Robert Mueller and said he should be allowed to complete his criminal and counterintelligence investigations unimpeded, also admitted he didn’t know the scope of the Mueller probe.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Hey, these are supposed to be photos of Manhattan!

My daughter took lots of photos of Manhattan today, but the one I liked best was this mug shot of her 16-year-old brother!

Roseanne, immigration, pardons, Kardashian

The first segment was on the Roseanne controversy. Many good observations.

The second segment was on Trump's Nashville speech, which focused heavily on immigration and MS 13 gangmembers and Nancy Pelosi.

Kim Kardashion is at the White House asking Trump to pardon a woman. A black man from Tennessee is also seeking a pardon after he was sent back to prison by a judge who said he was wrongfully released from prison!


Roseanne, Tommy Robinson, Clinton's failure to take out Bin Laden, shutting people up

Andrew is publishing a video dictionary called the Leftese Dictionary. One new show will be performed every other week. We start with A for Antifa. It is hilariously well done and accurate!

There is too much silence in America. Too much shutting people up. The standard should be freedom, tolerance, argumentation, as opposed to shutting people up.

ABC canceled Roseanne, but they also canceled another hit, Last Man Standing, which will now be on Fox. They also canceled "The Path to 9-11," which showed that Clinton could have taken out Osama bin Laden, but chose not to. It was a ratings monster, but you cannot get it on DVD.

The cancellation of Roseanne was about Trump and anyone who voted for Trump.

Tommy Robinson livestreamed a trial of Muslim rape gangs. The end of European civilization. Jeremy Paxton interviewed Tommy Robinson. They want to silence the voice of those who are not the elite.

Andrew opens the mailbag, in which he answers viewers questions. He says Jane Austin is the greatest female author of all time. Dry and witty, she observes the power of money as it relates to a woman's role in finding a husband. Her heroines rise above the money and sex to establish and live in Christian virtue.

Andrew's wife married a liberal Jew and is now living with a conservative Christian! She is a Christian. Both Andrew and his wife have allowed each other to grow. Control and love don't really go well together.

Another question about marriage. "We fight all the time! Should we get married?" Andrew: not good! Don't go forward with it!

The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions!

Pink

Would a man get off for this?

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit wonders "if a man would get off for that." He is referring to this story at The Mirror in which a
Lesbian mum who viciously beat bride walks free after telling court she has high levels of "male hormones".
Read the story here.

U.S. no longer will be pushed around by China

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,
Buried in a Wall Street Journal article outlining their shock and horror over President Trump following through with a Phase-I trade penalty of $50 billion, you find the following quote from Captain Obvious at Cornell University:

“The Trump administration is clearly signaling, ahead of Wilbur Ross’s trip to Beijing, that the gloves are off given China’s unwillingness to agree to a trade deficit reduction target or to make broader trade concessions,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor of international trade. In addition, the “hardline stance may partly reflect the perception that China played a part in nearly derailing the Trump-Kim summit.” (link)

The White House announced today it will clarify by June 15 a final list of $50 billion in imports from China that would be subject to tariffs of 25%, with the duties implemented “shortly thereafter.” Additionally, future investment restrictions aimed at preventing Chinese acquisition of American technology will be announced by June 30.

♦ YEARS OF UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES: China has consistently taken advantage of the American economy with practices that undermine fair and reciprocal trade.

For many years, China has pursued industrial policies and unfair trade practices—including dumping, discriminatory non-tariff barriers, forced technology transfer, over capacity, and industrial subsidies—that champion Chinese firms and make it impossible for many United States firms to compete on a level playing field.

China’s industrial policies, such as its “Made in China 2025” plan, harm companies in the United States and around the world.
China imposes much higher tariffs on United States exports than the United States imposes on China.
China’s average tariff rate is nearly three times higher than the average United States rate.
Certain products are even more imbalanced, for instance the United States charges a 2.5 percent tariff on Chinese cars, while China currently maintains a 25 percent tariff on cars from the United States.
China has banned imports of United States agricultural products such as poultry, cutting off America’s ranchers and farmers from a major market for their goods.
China has dumped and unfairly subsidized a range of goods for the United States market, undermining America’s domestic industry.
♦In 2018 alone, the Trump Administration has found dumping or unfair subsidies on 13 different products, including steel wheels, cold-drawn mechanical tubing, tool chests and cabinets, forged steel fittings, aluminum foil, rubber bands, cast iron soil pipe and fittings, and large diameter welded pipe.

♦In January 2018, the Trump Administration found that China’s overproduction of steel and aluminum, and the resulting impact on global markets, is a circumstance that threatens to impair America’s national security.

♦The United States has run a trade in goods deficit with China for years, including a $375 billion deficit in 2017 alone.

♦ UNDERMINING AMERICAN INNOVATION AND JOBS: China has aggressively sought to obtain technology from American companies and undermine American innovation and creativity.

The cost of China’s intellectual property theft costs United States innovators billions of dollars a year, and China accounts for 87 percent of counterfeit goods seized coming into the United States.
United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) Section 301 investigation identified four of China’s aggressive technology policies that put 44 million American technology jobs at risk:
•Forced technology transfer;
•Requiring licensing at less than economic value;
•Chinese state-directed acquisition of sensitive United States technology for strategic purposes; and
•Outright cyber theft.

China uses foreign ownership restrictions, administrative review, and licensing processes to force or pressure technology transfers from American companies.

China requires foreign companies that access their New Energy Vehicles market to transfer core technologies and disclose development and manufacturing technology.

China imposes contractual restrictions on the licensing of intellectual property and technology by foreign firms into China, but does not put the same restrictions on contracts between two Chinese enterprises.

China directs and facilitates investments in and acquisitions of United States companies to generate large-scale technology transfer.

China conducts and supports cyber intrusions into United States computer networks to gain access to valuable business information so Chinese companies can copy products.

♦ STANDING UP TO CHINA’S UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES: President Trump has taken long overdue action to finally address the source of the problem, China’s unfair trade practices that hurt America’s workers and our innovative industries.

In January 2018, the President announced his decision to provide safeguard relief to United States manufacturers injured by surging imports of washing machines and solar products.

This was the first use of Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs in 16 years.

These actions responded to injurious trade practices by China and other countries, including attempts to avoid legally imposed antidumping and countervailing duties.

Following the decision, Whirlpool announced 200 new jobs in Ohio.

USTR and the Department of Commerce are working together to defend the right of the United States to continue treating China as a non-market economy in antidumping investigations until China makes the reforms it agreed to when it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).

President Trump’s Administration has successfully litigated WTO disputes targeting unfair trade practices and upholding our right to enforce United States trade laws.

In February 2018, USTR won a WTO compliance challenge against China’s unfair antidumping and countervailing duties on United States poultry exports and China announced the termination of those duties.
♦PROTECTING AMERICAN INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY: President Trump has worked to defend America’s intellectual property and proprietary technology from theft and other threats.

In August 2017, the Administration initiated a Section 301 investigation into China’s practices related to forced technology transfer, unfair licensing, and intellectual property policies.

After USTR completed its Section 301 report in March 2018, the President directed the agencies to explore numerous actions to protect domestic technology and intellectual property.

Under President Trump’s leadership:

The United States will impose a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China containing industrially significant technology, including those related to the “Made in China 2025” program. The final list of covered imports will be announced by June 15, 2018.

USTR will continue WTO dispute settlement against China originally initiated in March to address China’s discriminatory technology licensing requirements.

The United States will implement specific investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese persons and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology. The list of restrictions and controls will be announced by June 30, 2018.

A symbiotic conspiracy between Islamophobia, Incorporated and law enforcement

Ace of Spades reports on the latest act of Islamic terrorism in Belgium.
Surprise: Attack in Belgium That Had All the Hallmarks of Islamic Terrorism Was In Fact Islamic Terrorism
—Ace of Spades
No one could have seen this coming except everybody.

From the AP:

The man who killed four people in the Belgian city of Liege this week carried out an act of "terrorist murder" and likely intended to cause more carnage, prosecutors said Wednesday, as authorities tried to establish whether he acted alone.
Benjamin Herman, an inmate on a two-day prison furlough, attacked two female police officers from behind with a knife on Tuesday, stabbed them repeatedly, stole their handguns and shot them as they lay on the ground, officials said. Crossing the road, he shot to death a 22-year old passenger in a car. Herman then took a cleaning woman hostage at a nearby school. When police closed in, he ran out onto the sidewalk firing and police fatally shot him. Four officers were wounded. Officials confirmed that Herman had also killed a fourth person Monday.


He yelled "Allahu akbar," the Arabic phrase for God is great, several times during Tuesday's rampage, including when he ran out to face police the last time, prosecutors said.
Yes, he was on a two day prison furlough.

John Sexton has more at Hot Air.

Although this isn't explicitly stated, it seems like authorities are hedging on whether or not this is really terrorism-terrorism, despite the killer shouting "Allahu Akbar" and telling a hostage to think about the Palestinian martyrs. The pretext for casting doubt on whether or not this is terrorism-terrorism is the (apparent) lack of any larger network or overseas connections.

I repeat, once again, that this is a criterion that is only employed to say that clear Islamic terrorism is not Islamic terrorism.

Anders Behring Breivik acted alone, and yet no one questions at all that this was a "right-wing" terrorist attack.

So why, when it comes to Islamic terrorism, do the authorities always insert this nonsensical requirement that there must be an extended network of terrorist plotters and overseas connections for it to be Islamic terrorism?

The answer is obvious: So that they can keep the Islamic terrorism numbers artificially low.

This is a symbiotic conspiracy between Islamophobia, Incorporated and law enforcement: Islamophobia, Inc. is in the business of claiming there is virtually no Islamic terrorism, and law enforcement and intelligence services equally want to pretend that there's no Islamic terrorism so that they can explain away their failures to stop Islamic terrorism by saying "Oh, that wasn't Islamic terrorism, you see."

The FBI does this every single month, and no one says boo about it.

Permanent adolescents

Roger Kimball writes at PJ Media,
...The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.

...If America’s cultural revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more, it was a glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it: “We’re permanent adolescents.” The real victory of the “youth culture” of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its demands were met but in the fact that its values and attitudes were adopted by the culture at large. Rubin again: “Satisfy our demands, and we’ve got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we got.” Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth -- that is to say, of immaturity -- over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes.

...The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of adult virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint.

...In addition to its general coarsening effect on cultural life, this triumph of vulgarity has helped to pave the way for the success of the twin banes of political correctness and radical multiculturalism. The abandonment of intrinsic standards of achievement creates (in Hermann Broch’s phrase) a “value vacuum” in which everything is sucked through the sieve of politics and the ideology of victimhood.

...That ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture, even our courts and the rule of law; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.

...Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips. But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. “I think I know man,” Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” In the Confessions, he claimed to be “drunk on virtue.” And indeed, it turned out that “virtue” for Rousseau had nothing to do with acting or behaving in a certain way toward others. On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who followed him, “feeling good about yourself” was synonymous with moral rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a sign of “inauthenticity” because it suggested a concern for conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely distinguishable from moral intoxication. Anyone who has contemplated the suppression of free speech in the name of sensitivity and identity politics on our college campuses will understand what I mean.

To an extent scarcely imaginable thirty years ago, we now live in that “moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” The long march of the cultural revolution of the 1960s has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of all but the most starry-eyed utopians. The great irony is that this victory took place in the midst of a significant drift to the center-Right in electoral politics. The startling and depressing fact is that supposedly conservative victories at the polls have done almost nothing to challenge the dominance of left-wing, emancipationist attitudes and ideas in our culture. On the contrary, in the so-called “culture wars,” conservatives have been conspicuous losers.

...It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long march of the cultural revolution has been.
Read more here.

"Broadcasting their own incompetence"

Oregon Muse writes at Ace of Spades,
"John Brennan and James Clapper have been caterwauling for over a year that Russia somehow influenced the election in Trump's favor. But think about that for a second. These were the guys that Obama put in charge of National Intelligence, the CIA, NSA, etc. So my question is, why didn't they know about this Russian plot in advance? It was their effing *job* to know about this stuff in advance. It was their effing *job* to protect the American people from machinations of foreign powers. That's what they were being paid for, right? Now, obviously, they're lying through their teeth about this. It's all just an attempt to try to damage the president. But they're too stupid to realize that the more they wail about the Russians helping Trump, the more they're broadcasting their own incompetence."

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

New York, New York!

My kids and their mom are in New York today helping their stepsister get situated for her new job. Looks like they might have also done some sightseeing! I apologize for the sideways photo. I don't know how to fix it and I am tired and want to go to bed soon. Just turn it sideways!

"If those ignorant hicks only knew, they'd agree with me."

At PJ Media Charlie Martin writes about people who have an
underlying apparent motivation which pretty clearly could be summed up as "If those ignorant hicks only knew, they'd agree with me."

This attitude, that the issue in any dispute isn't a difference in opinion but just invincible ignorance, seems to me to underly a whole lot of the arguments we have politically today, and an awful lot of time it's an unfounded assumption.

...All of them seem to be based on the hidden assumption that people are ignorant hicks who must be protected and made to think the right thoughts.

Of course, the most obvious place for this right now is in politics. The legacy media, the Obama FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice all decided that it was just ignorant hicks who would vote for Trump and that it was their responsibility to construct an "insurance policy" against it. When that failed, they decided it was their responsibility to #Resist, acting as if merely being elected by a majority in the Electoral College didn't make Trump the legitimate President.

Their problem now: those ignorant hicks have caught on, and they're no longer falling for it.
Read more here.

Virtue signaling brought to you by fear

The first segment is about Roseanne's dumb tweet about Valerie Jarrett.

Segment two: the liberal media busted for spreading fake news about Trump. Journalists cannot even check dates on photos! Pictures of immigrant children in steel cages were four years old! Who was president then? Greg gives two other examples. Greg and Dana agree that Trump should do more policy-oriented speeches which would drive news for 48 hours.

Segment three: Could Special Counsel Mueller swing the mid-term elections to the Democrats? Marie Harf is tonight's Democrat on the panel. She is not as irritating to me as are Juan Williams and Richard Fowler, who loudly use sarcasm to drown out other panelists.

Segment four is about Trump and North Korea. Jesse does a great job of listing Trump's accomplishments and energy into denuclearizing the peninsula.

The last segment was about Starbucks' anti-bias training. Greg disagreed with all the other panelists, who were praising Starbucks. Greg reacted to the "unconscious bias" aspect of the training Starbucks is doing tonight. Who knows what thoughts another person has? This is virtue signaling brought to you by fear.



Headline writers confused, Trump always wrong about North Korea, If we can become culturally illiterate, then we can be taught to hate America

Andrew starts today's show by noticing the headlines written by liars and buffoons in the media. He even offers some helpful advice to journalists who are too confused to know what headline to attach to their stories.

Did you know that during the Jim Crow days blacks actually improved their standing in the economy, their marriages were holding together, crime was descending as more of them moved into the middle class? Then the radicals came along and pretended things were still as bad as they had been. Since LBJ's Great Society, all those trends reversed.

No matter what Trump does with regard to North Korea, the media always portrays him as wrong.

Michael Walsh is Andrew's guest. He was an early Trump supporter. He has written a book defending western culture in which we are all heroes of our own story.


Michael wants us to read books! He wants us to start with Homer and Aristotle, then, Beauty and the Beast, then, 1001 Arabian Nights. Our notions of sexual equality come from Aristotle and Aquinas. If we can become culturally illiterate, then we can be taught to hate America, and that is what Michael believes is happening with the Left's control of the culture. Question: Where in the world do women have it better than in the west?



Roseanne show is canceled.

ABC has taken Roseanne off the air. Read why here.

Neil Gorsuch

In an article at New York Magazine entitled "Little Scalia," Simon van Zuylen-Wood takes a long look at Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Trump threw a pebble at a global glass house. Cracked glass shatters easily.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson asserts that the Post-War Order is Over.
The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

...For over a decade Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insidiously destroyed Turkey’s once pro-Western and largely secular traditions; he could not have done so without at least majority popular support....By any standard of behavior — Ankara just withdrew its ambassador from the U.S. — Turkey is a de facto enemy of the United States. It supports radical Islamic movements, is increasingly hostile to U.S. allies such as Greece, the Kurds, and Israel, and opposes almost every foreign-policy initiative that Washington has adopted over the last decade.

Instead, Turkey is analogous to Pakistan, a country whose occasional usefulness to the U.S. does not suggest that it is either an ally or even usually friendly.

...China is by design a chronic international trade cheater. Trade violations have been its road to affluence. And it seeks to use its cash as leverage to re-create something like the old imperial Japanese Greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere. U.S. trade appeasement of Beijing over the last decades no more brought stability to Asia than did nodding to Tokyo in the 1930s.

There is also nothing sacred about the European Union. ...The often-crude imposition of a democratic socialism, pacifism, and multiculturalism, under the auspices of anti-democratic elites, from the Atlantic to the Russian border, is spreading, not curbing, chaos. The EU utopian mindset has altered European demography, immigration policy, energy production, and defense. The result is that there are already four sorts of antithetical EUs: a renegade and departing United Kingdom, an estranged Eastern European bloc worried over open borders, an insolvent South bitter over front-line illegal immigration and fiscal austerity, and the old core of Western Europe (a euphemism now for German hegemony).

...About the only metaphor that works is that But that is not a morality tale about the power of pebbles, but rather about the easy shattering of cracked glass.
Read more here.

Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and Spygate

At The American Spectator, George Neumayr writes about the "Three Stooges of Spygate." On James Clapper:
...his I-know-nothing routine didn’t stop him from serving as an authority on the knowledge levels of others: “No one in the White House knew. Certainly the president didn’t know.” But amidst all this defensiveness, Clapper worked up a sweat defending the spying as a “good thing,” which raises the obvious question: If it was all so normal and praiseworthy, why not tell Obama?

...Just as Clapper’s denial of FISA warrants on the Trump campaign disintegrated, so too will that one. Sooner or later it will come out that Obama knew damn well that the Trump campaign was under surveillance and signed off on it. How could he not have? After all, we’ve been told repeatedly that spying on the Trump campaign was a national security matter of unspeakable gravity. How could such a matter be withheld from the person most responsible for national security?

So what did Obama know and when did he know it? Brennan could give the precise date; he was personally briefing Obama on “Russian interference,” Brennan’s euphemism for his paranoid hunch that Putin’s agents had recruited Trump campaign officials. All the hush-hush dynamics around Brennan’s “taskforce” make no sense if he and White House officials were just sitting around discussing Facebook ads. No, what made it an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive issue,” in Brennan’s words, was that they were spying on an opposing party’s presidential campaign.

The doublespeak around this spying has been comically pitiful. We’re told by the three stooges and their media propagandists that Halper — who tried to get a position in the campaign, spent over a year shadowing Carter Page, and tried to entrap George Papadopoulos — “wasn’t spying.” Halper was just “observing,” “assisting an FBI investigation” (as the Washington Post desperately put it), or, in the words of John Brennan, seeking “insight.”

George Orwell would have laughed at that one. “Political language,” Orwell said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In this case, it is an all-hands-on-deck propaganda effort to make spying on political opponents respectable — a ruination of reputations, careers, and bank accounts of Trump campaign officials undertaken “for their own good,” we’re told. Liberalism claims a monopoly on everything, particularly language, and liberals will let us know when we can and can’t use “spying” to describe obtaining information secretly.

Once a story starts cutting against the Democrats, reporters drop it. But if that becomes impossible, as in the case of Spygate, the next best thing they figure is to saturate the airwaves with semantic quibbles and hope the public abandons the story out of sheer confusion. And if that doesn’t work, if the unwashed want to keep watching the game, they just steadily move the goal posts back — they say Trump hasn’t “proven” the undesirable story or they give one of his tweets a literalist tsk-tsking, as if the seriousness of the story hangs exclusively on the precision of his tweets. It is hilarious to watch the “clarifications” of CNN, which always amount to distinctions without a difference, presented in the most ludicrously solemn tones by the likes of Jim Sciutto, who apparently went to anchorman school after his stint as an Obama political appointee. Halper, he intones gravely, was not a spy but a “confidential human source.”

If you are one of the three stooges, you preface such denials of reality with a ponderous platitude, such as “facts matter.” That was Comey’s tack in a tweet, before launching into one of his rank-pulling, jargony descriptions of FBI investigations, which was aimed at concealing the facts. The flimflammery of it all was reminiscent of Comey sending his aides out to deny Trump’s tweets about intercepted communications at Trump Tower while FISA warrants that allowed the FBI to reach into Trump Tower sat on Comey’s desk.

“As best as I can tell,” Comey said to Conan O’Brien in reference to Halper, “it is made up. I don’t know where [Trump] is getting that from.” He was getting it from Comey’s old subordinates, who had no choice but to confirm the infiltration attempt, albeit on their own self-serving terms, before Nunes uncovered it.
Read more here.

On the receiving end of "diversity"

Mark Steyn writes,
...in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally "shooting the messenger".

Britain has banned reporting on the arrest and, within hours, imprisonment of Tommy Robinson after Tommy was live streaming a rape trial in which the alleged rapists were Muslims. Mark was on an Australian broadcast and his interviewers were adhering to the ban! Mark continues,
On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for "grooming" - the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media.

...You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he's one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of "diversity" and seeks to do something about it.

...So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not "investigating officers" called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled - at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding "any report on these proceedings" (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that's Robinson's real name).

Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.

The justification for this is Robinson's previous conviction in a previous Grooming Gang of the Week case at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion, the judge sentenced him to three months' imprisonment suspended for eighteen months. That was almost exactly a year ago - so, suspension-wise, he came up six months short when the plods collared him on Friday. That doesn't explain why Judge Marson in Leeds added an additional ten months (ie, he quadrupled his sentence) and disregarded a point that Judge Norton last year took into account - that the British state insists on banging up Robinson in gaols full of Muslim blokes who violently assault him.

Supposedly Judge Marson ordered a media blackout because news reports would "prejudice" the trial of the groomers. Surely the opposite is true - that widespread reporting of the arrest of Robinson would lead to fewer citizens attempting to "prejudice" the trials of groomers. At the very least, when a man loses his liberty and is gaoled immediately without due process on an instantly quadrupled sentence, it would be nice to think that a free press would be free enough to mull the pros and cons of such an action. But Geoffrey Marson seems to have been minded to teach a more basic lesson - that in England, as in Argentina under the junta, you can be disappeared by the state, and it won't even make the papers.

And the lesson is not lost on those few who question the cozy bipartisan multiculti consensus: Best to fall into line - or at least pipe down.

...it is a fact that in 21st-century England - in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties - child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.

And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson's ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as "Muslim child rapists", one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years ...because officialdom has chosen to prioritize "Islamophobia" over real crimes.

One more thought from my trip to Rotherham:

The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.

...and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.
Read more here.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Economic consequences looming for China

Here is more from Sundance on China, Trump, and the dancing Korean brothers!
It’s a smart strategy for Team USA to engage with Team Rocketman while a Chinese trade visit from U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross looms on the Beijing calendar, June 2nd. Given the tenuously adversarial position Chairman Xi has boxed himself into, the dragon would be unwise to stir the pot until after Secretary Ross delivers his trade terms.

Chairman Xi has only one way out of the current box. However, if Xi were to move Kim into an aggressive proxy position too soon, like now, Secretary Ross would likely unload on the economic consequences come June 2nd. Rut roh,… dragon thrashing amid panda box.

China has recently violated the terms of the August 2017 U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea. Economic Panda is naked to his enemies. The consequences outlined and enhanced by the U.S. in support of those U.N. sanctions was a threat to cut off any violating country from the U.S. banking system and economic engagement therein.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Ross and POTUS Trump didn’t respond to the recent China/DPRK violations because Rocketman was moving in the right direction. However, the economic consequences now loom like a sword of Damocles if Chairman Xi attempts to move Kim Jong-un again.

In the big picture we can see how President Trump has moved Xi away from having influence. Against this strategic success, with Chairman Xi sidelined, President Trump is now in position to be more assertive in his presentations toward a Korean peace process.

Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un can play happy sandwich makers and without knowing it they are quietly protected by the strategy President Trump has constructed.

If Xi attempts to break up the happily dancing Korea brothers, President Trump tells Secretary Ross to cut the horsehair and the sword of Damocles falls on the Chinese economy.

Brilliantly played.

Read more here.

Trump's strategy for dealing with North Korea

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance digs up this excerpt from one of the Republican primary debates with a focus on what to do about North Korea. Trump's answer? China is in total control of North Korea. China is who we need to persuade to take action! Just as he is now doing!

Fascinating interview regarding Electro Magnetic Pulse threats

This is the second one of these Mark Levine interview shows I have watched, and both have been very informative. Today's guest is Peter Pry, an expert in Electro Magnetic Pulse and Director of our national EMP Task Force. He has written a book entitled "Blackout Wars."

Did Obama give any attention to the possibility of a nuclear explosion in our atmosphere that would result in 90% of us dying? No! Why? It did not fit into their narrative (Iran nuclear deal). Mr. Pry said he and other experts believe Iran already has the bomb and has had it for some years! Obama didn't want it known and didn't want to talk about!

North Korea has two satellites flying over America several times a day at an altitude above our nuclear defense capabilities! They could make an EMP field and detonate a satellite that could already be nuclear armed! The EMP Commission has recommended that these satellites be shot down!

We have no prevention capability south of America because we assumed any attack would come from Russia or China!

Russia, Iran, North Korea and Iran have all been poking around to test our capabilities.

Mr. Pry tells of two cyber attacks that have been undertaken against our military, one by China and one by Russia. Another interfered with White House communications for about a week! We have not taken precautions to protect ourselves! We have known how to protect our entire national grid against a nuclear attack for fifty years, but the $2-3 billion dollars required has not been approved (until Trump stopped it, we gave away $2 billion dollars every year to Pakistan!)

Why hasn't this been done? The electric power industry doesn't want to do anything to prevent EMP. They have very deep pockets and own half of K Street. They are the last critical infrastructure that regulates itself!

Pry gives President Trump an A+. Obama never let the Commission meet with anyone in his administration!

Rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police and social workers

At Forbes, Roger Scruton tries to help us understand the Rotherham, England situation in which 1,400 British children were abused by Pakistani gangs. It is a must read here.

I like this photo

A social justice warrior took this photo of shoppers ignoring the NRA protestors at a Publix store in Florida.

No National Anthem? We'll see about that!

Joel Pollak reports at Breitbart,
A crowd attending the Central Section Division I softball championship in Fresno on Friday evening burst into The Star-Spangled Banner after being told by the announcer that there would be no national anthem before the game.
The Fresno Bee reported:

Before Clovis High played Buchanan Friday night for the Central Section softball championship, the announcer representing the section stated there wouldn’t be a national anthem prior to the game.

Those in attendance at Fresno State’s Margie Wright Diamond weren’t having any of that.

Following a loud chorus of boos, the patriotic crowd stood up and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” a cappella.

Many removed their hats and placed their hands over their hearts. Others simply stood tall with pride.

Players stopped their pregame warmups to turn around and face the American flag that waved beyond the center-field wall.

When the song was over, the crowd burst into a round of applause.

According to the Bee, the game’s organizers acknowledged that they had made a mistake.

A fan posted a video of the crowd singing the national anthem here.

A school-shooting video game!

At The Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra reports,
A popular online video game platform is set to release an extremely controversial video game on June 6 called "Active Shooter," which gives users the opportunity to be a mass shooter and go on shooting sprees inside schools.

The BBC reports:

According to its listing on the Steam video game store, the software lets players "slaughter as many civilians as possible" in a school environment...

...The school-shooting game is described as "realistic" and "impressive". And the developer has suggested it will include 3D models of children to shoot at.

Users are given on-screen stats informing them of how many civilians and law enforcement officials they have killed during their shooting spree.

Charity Infer Trust called on Valve, the company behind Steam, to remove the game before it goes on sale in a couple of weeks.
Read more here.

Exposing corruption

At Fox News, Newt Gingrich tries to wrap his head around the scandals in Washington.
The current Robert Mueller-Justice Department-Russia mess is almost impossible to understand because it is made up of five parallel scandals.

For months, as I wrote my new book, “Trump’s America,” I tried to better understand news as it emerged from the Justice Department – and I still am trying. There are so many moving parts, personalities and dates that it is difficult to track. However, as a trained historian, I began creating an orderly outline for people, dates and events.

I realized that the scandal is so big, so complex, and involves so many people with power that codifying it really required me to draw from my experience writing novels. There are so many egos and there is so much manipulative behavior, dishonesty (and dishonesty about the dishonesty) that it is very difficult to explain it as a straightforward history. It could be more easily explained as a narrative of ambition, illegality and criminal plotting.

Finally, it hit me that the real problem is that there are five parallel and often interlocked scandals going on in concert:

1. The Clintons have been breaking the law and getting away with it at least since Hillary Clinton made nearly $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures in 1978-1979. For 40 years the Clintons have acted as though there were no laws that applied to them. They have surrounded themselves with lawyers and simply muscled their way through every scandal. The scale of Clinton illegal activity is so large and so widespread that no one has been able to fully describe it – although Peter Schweizer made a pretty good start with his book “Clinton Cash.”

2. The extraordinary deep state defense of Hillary Clinton, combined with the systematic avoidance of exposing and dealing with her illegal behaviors while protecting her staff members when they support and participate in her illegality, is beyond anything we have seen in American history.
The reason for this deep state resistance is simple. Transparency is going to get a lot of people in trouble – and it goes to the very top.

3. The calculated effort to undermine and discredit then-candidate and now-President Donald Trump is actually a continuation of a deep anti-Republican bias in the Justice Department. This Justice Department tradition is well catalogued in Sidney Powell’s stunning book, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.”

If you have any illusions about the Justice Department’s objectivity, keep in mind that employees of this department gave 97 percent of their 2016 campaign donations to Hillary Clinton – while the department was supposedly investigating her for illegally using a private email server to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. With each passing week, we are learning more about the extraordinary abuses of power designed to undermine President Trump and punish his supporters (a direct contrast to the treatment of Clinton and her staff). The aggressive abuse of power has led both Alan Dershowitz and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn to warn that limitless police power is a danger to all of us.

4. The scandal of the deep state resistance to accountability and transparency has also been astounding. As a career deep state member, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has consistently resisted inquiries by Congress. Documents requested by the Senate Judiciary Committee were heavily redacted for supposed national security reasons – which turned out to have nothing to do with national security (including the fact that the FBI had spent $70,000 on a conference table).

Meanwhile, more than 1 million documents were withheld from the House Judiciary Committee for so long that the committee had to issue a subpoena. The reason for this deep state resistance is simple. Transparency is going to get a lot of people in trouble – and it goes to the very top. When Lisa Page wrote Peter Strzok in September 2016, “POTUS wants to know everything,” there is a good reason to believe President Obama was the one she was referring to as POTUS. If President Obama wanted to know everything, given the way his White House worked, it is very likely his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett knew everything. The more we learn, the bigger the scandal web gets.

5. Panic is breaking out among senior people who engaged in illegal activities because they thought President Hillary Clinton would protect them. Suddenly, they find themselves in danger of criminal charges. That is why people like former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan grow increasingly hysterical in their TV appearances.

I did my best to succinctly capture this moment in American history in “Trump’s America,” but each one of these five scandals is worthy of its own detailed book. Taken together, they are a mound of illegalities, abuses, dishonesty, and manipulation – on a scale that has never before occurred in America.

I suspect when all these scandals are unraveled, a political and cultural reckoning in Washington will follow.

From a closet in Manhattan to a mansion in Memphis

At The Daily Mail, Valerie Bauman takes the time to compare the buying power of $200,000 in various cities across America.

Read more here.

Britain's gag order helps spread the story of Tommy Robinson's arrest and immediate imprisonment

At the Powerline blog Scott Johnson reprints an article by Bruce Bawer from Gatestone Institute about the arrest and immediate imprisonment of Tommy Robinson in the UK.
The upside — and the irony — of this case is that the gag order, while silencing the British news media, has caused people around the world to take notice. To be sure, a quick tour of major mainstream newspaper websites in Western Europe, North America and around the Anglosphere turned up nothing. But on alternative news sites around Europe, the story was front and center. The Fox News website reported on Robinson’s arrest — but even Fox, frustratingly, insisted on calling him a “right-wing activist.”

Judi McLeod, editor of the Canada Free Press, began her article:

“Where is Tommy Robinson? A question whose answer should be demanded rather than merely asked…. Modern day Merry England has become far more nightmare than fairytale, as it steadily works its way toward ugly police state status.”

McLeod also challenged Fox’s label for Robinson: “‘Right wing activist’? How about civil rights activist or humanitarian activist?”
Read more here.

Do we really need children?

At American Thinker, Tom Trinko reports,
To maintain a stable population the fertility rate, the number of children an average woman has, needs to be about 2.1. In 1960 the American fertility rate was about 3.6 and in 2015 it was about 1.8.

This is a big deal; a similar problem is what is driving the Islamification of Europe. Contrary to some conservatives, Frau Merkel didn’t invite millions of poorly educated sharia law-loving Muslims into Germany just because she likes Islam. She did so because you can’t sustain a welfare state when your population is shrinking. The fertility rate in Germany has always been lower than the U.S., about 1.5 in 2015, so Germany is facing a serious problem due to a lack of Germans.
Read more here.

Overhearing Kerry's secret partner


At The Daily Caller, Peter Hasson reports,
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, a key architect of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, was caught on camera chanting “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Israel,” Israeli outlet Ynetnews reported on Saturday.

Zarif participated in the violent chants on Thursday after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a speech in Tehran, according to Ynetnews.

Zarif’s call for the destruction of America came less than two months after he secretly met with former Secretary of State John Kerry in mid-April to try and save the Iran nuclear deal.

Kerry’s “unusual shadow diplomacy” was ultimately unsuccessful, as President Donald Trump announced on May 8 the U.S. would be withdrawing from the deal. Iranian lawmakers responded that same day by setting an American flag on fire on the floor of parliament and chanting, “Death to America!”
Read more here.

Enjoy the warm weather!

Gregory Wrightstone writes at Lifezette,
...The blessed rise of temperature that we are experiencing is lifting us out of the death-dealing cold of the horrific Little Ice Age, when half the population of Iceland perished. The beginning of this warming started in the late 1600s, long before man could have had any effect on temperature.

In fact, the rate of warming over the first 40 years of the trend, extending into the early 1700s, was several times the rate of the 20th-century warming and was 100 percent naturally driven.

At least the first 150 years of our current warming trend were also entirely naturally driven — and contributed about the same amount of warming as the past 150 or so years, during which we have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

The question is not whether the planet is warming. It is, and demonstrably so. We know this from both direct measurement and thousands of historical records.

Related: Closed Enviro Minds Lead Massachusetts to Buy Russian Gas

The real question is, did the natural forces that were driving the temperature increase in the 17th century or, for that matter, over the past hundreds of millions of years, suddenly stop for some reason in the 20th century? Of course not, but that is what the ayatollahs of alarmism want you to believe.

So why the media firestorm and portrayal of the latest data as dangerous? H. L. Mencken warned us of imaginary “hobgoblins of alarm” that governments needed to create to frighten the population into accepting onerous regulations such as the Paris climate accord. Climate change today is one of those hobgoblins of alarm used to convince people that our current warming is “unusual and unprecedented” when it is neither.

Six hundred million months of below-average temperature, or 400 months of above-average temperature? Both are true, depending on which metric you choose to use, but the media are publicizing what is designed to best promote the political agenda of catastrophic climate alarm.
Read more here.

Can we be trusted?

FH Buckley writes at The American Spectator,
Put yourself in Kim’s shoes. He doesn’t need the nukes to protect himself against his own people. If he has a problem with someone he’ll rip them apart with a machine gun. He did that to a Defense Chief who fell asleep during one of his speeches.

And he’s not about to initiate a nuclear war with the United States. He’d be signing his death warrant, and he knows that.

So why does he need the nukes? Why, to protect himself from America idealism. His nukes are defensive. What he’s telling us is that he’ll attack us if we try to depose him.

As we did in Libya. It’s all about Libya. It’s always been about Libya.

Remember how the Obama administration greeted the “Arab Spring”? It brought down some American friends such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, as well some deranged miscreants such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It replaced them in Egypt with the Moslem Brotherhood and in Libya with the people who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Ah, Libya. It was supposed to give us a democratic Arab nation, one as firmly committed to human rights as any San Francisco Democrat. The then-Secretary of State was so gung-ho for it that the Washington Post called it “Hillary’s War.”

What it got us instead was blackest chaos. The death of our ambassador and the death of Gaddafi.

Which is what’s going on in Rocket Man’s mind. He doesn’t need nukes to defend himself against his own people. He needs nukes to defend himself against the way in which American foreign policy idealism threatens him.

That’s why Trump has gone out of his way to signal a return to realism in foreign policy. We’re no longer in the business of regime-change, of nation-building, he’s announced. That was George W. Bush. That was Hillary. It’s not us.

If that promise were credible, Kim wouldn’t need his nukes. He only needs them against a Hillary Clinton.

So the question for Kim is, do I trust the United States?

Well, ask yourself. Would you trust us? Have we shown ourselves so consistent in our foreign policy, so credible, that we’ve earned the right to be trusted?

We didn’t make ourselves more credible by appointing John Bolton as National Security Advisor. I know, Bolton tells us he no longer believes in nation-building. But he carries a lot of baggage from the failed George W. Bush administration. With that kind of a history, he should be going out of his way to signal a return to realism, but old habits die hard with someone so imperious, so cocksure, so war-loving as Bolton.

Kim fears Bolton. He’s right to do so. What a spanner Bolton threw into the works when he mentioned Libya last week. Trump’s goal is to ensure that we’re not threatened by North Korea’s nukes. Kim’s goal is to ensure that he’s not threatened by the United States. To get there, we need to take the example of Libya off the table. By raising the issue Bolton reminded us of twenty years of American foreign policy failures and of how we can’t be trusted.

Which is why, in Trump’s shoes, I’d think of firing Bolton. Or at least of signaling to Kim that Bolton doesn’t speak for us. Trump needs to remind everyone of how he promised realism in our foreign policy.

Some liberals have expressed surprise that we aren’t seeking regime change in North Korea. That’s because they’re idiots. Realism, and the abandonment of foreign policy idealism is precisely what Trump has promised for the last two years.

Some conservatives have defended Bolton as the administration’s “bad cop.” We don’t need a bad cop, however. What is needed instead is realism, cynicism, and a recognition that both we and the Norks have a credibility problem. Bolton doesn’t help. He’s not dumb and he’s not especially sharp. He’s just a ventor cloaca.
Read more here.

Who is better than Branco?