Friday, May 31, 2019
How much do you care about politics?
How much do you care about politics? That is the question NewNeoCon poses to her readers. She gets lots of interesting comments on that subject from her readers. I wish I had commenters on this blog, like I use to have. I think I did something wrong in setting up the layout and connecting to an email on Gmail that I never use. I will check to see if I can rectify the situation. Meanwhile, here is the thread I referred to above.
"...nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance."
NewNeoCon also read Ace of Spade's summary of Bill Barr's answers in the CBS interview this morning. This was her favorite Barr answer:
I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that’s antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life it really doesn’t make any difference.
Yes, they are known for their STEM accomplishments, but they do pretty well in Language Arts, too!
Did you know that Indian Americans have won every Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2008? This year's contest ended in an eight-way tie. The spelling bee ran out of words! Here are this year's champions.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Toronto takes a one game lead over Golden State
Did you, like me, miss game one of the NBA finals? Here are the highlights of that game. The next game is Sunday night.
Eleven people killed in Virginia Beach
AP reports,
A longtime city employee opened fire at a municipal building in Virginia Beach on Friday, killing 11 people before police shot and killed him, authorities said.Read more here.
Six other people were wounded in the shooting, including a police officer whose bulletproof vest saved his life, said Virginia Beach Police Chief James Cervera. The city’s visibly shaken mayor, Bobby Dyer, called it “the most devastating day in the history of Virginia Beach.”
Trump tries to wake up Mexico's officials
President Trump has put a tariff of five percent on any goods coming into the United States from Mexico effective June 10. Jill Colvin and Colleen Long report in AP, that Trump's purpose is
to pressure the country to do more to crack down on the surge of Central American migrants trying to cross the U.S. border.Read more here.
He said the percentage will gradually increase — up to 25% — “until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied.”
U.S. no longer number one in competitiveness
Megan Henney reports in Fox News that the U.S. is no longer the world's most competitive economy. Singapore is number one, Hong Kong is number two, and we are number three. China is number 14.
The United States no longer has the most competitive economy Opens a New Window. in the world, according to annual rankings compiled by the Switzerland-based business school IMD.Read more here.
To determine the results, the study incorporated 235 indicators from each of the ranked 63 economies, taking into account statistics like unemployment, GDP and government spending on health and education, as well as issues like social cohesion, corruption and globalization.
...The U.S. dropped down to third on the list, thanks to higher fuel prices, weaker high-tech exports, fluctuations in the value of the dollar and the fading impact of President Trump’s massive tax overhaul.
...Here’s a look at the 20 most competitive economies, according to IMD.
1. Singapore
2. Hong Kong SAR
3. United States
4. Switzerland
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Netherlands
7. Ireland
8. Denmark
9. Sweden
10. Qatar
11. Norway
12. Luxembourg
13. Canada
14. China
15. Finland
16. Taiwan, China
17. Germany
18. Australia
19. Austria
20. Iceland
He's had enough!
On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied,..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2019
"They have completely reversed American law and the media lets them get away with it!"
Rudy Giuliani tells us that "Joe Biden's son got $1.5 billion dollars for a startup private equity fund while the old man was giving us away to China!" The son had just been tossed out of the military for being a drug addict! Did they give it to them because Joe had caved into them on the islands, on tariffs...The media is not covering that...and you tell me these people are honest? It is the classic common law crime of bribery!"
"I just found out that Hillary Clinton got hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukrainian oligarchs. Do you think they gave that money without getting something in return? They are pretty tough guys!
"I just found out that Hillary Clinton got hundreds of millions of dollars from Ukrainian oligarchs. Do you think they gave that money without getting something in return? They are pretty tough guys!
Barr sits for an interview and answers questions (unlike Mueller)
In Anchorage, Alaska, Attorney General William Barr sat down for an exclusive interview with Jan Crawford for "CBS This Morning."
Ace of Spades spent considerable time highlighting sections of the interview here.
Ace of Spades spent considerable time highlighting sections of the interview here.
Is America losing the tech war to China?
David Goldman (Spengler) writes in PJ Media,
As things stand, America is likely to lose the tech war with China. The stock market should be sending a message to President Trump. U.S. semiconductor stocks are down 20% in the past month, and the broad market has been in freefall for a week. This is a war we can win, by mobilizing American ingenuity to produce technology that will crush the competition. No-one ever won a war by trying to stop someone else from doing something. I'm an Always Trumper, and I want the president to win another term. But he's risking the U.S. economy and his re-election chances on a poorly-conceived offensive.Read more here.
...We might slow Huawei down by banning exports of U.S. technology--although I doubt we will slow it very much--but we can't stop China from becoming the world's dominant producer of high-tech products unless we rebuild our own high-tech industry.
...Just why has the trade war morphed into a tech war?
...Telecom hardwire providers serve their national intelligence agencies. It would be naive to imagine that China's giant Huawei Technologies, the world's largest provider of telecom equipment, doesn't have ties to its country's intelligence service, as American officials allege. I'm sure of this, because that's exactly what our National Security Agency did with Cisco, formerly America's premier supplier of Internet routers and related equipment. The NSA installed "back doors" in Cisco equipment according to documents leaked to the public by renegade NSA consultant Edward Snowden. Yes, the NSA knows where your phone is, even when it's turned off, and when it's turned on, it can listen to your conversations. Whether it actually does or not is a matter of conjecture.
Much as I fear abuse of power by U.S. intelligence, and suspect "deep state" participation in an attempted coup against President Trump, I want the United States to maintain its advantage in electronic eavesdropping. The problem is that we don't produce any telecom hardware. Zilch. We used to. Cisco was the market leader, but has pretty much abandoned the hardware business (it makes more money in software).
The U.S. economic expansion is at risk. In April the purchasing managers' surveys produced by the research organization Markit fell off a cliff. At barely above the 50 mark, they show that almost as many businesses were contracting as were growing. The trade war is partly to blame: Businesses have postponed capital investment until the shape of global supply chains is clear. The Atlanta Fed is now projecting 2nd-quarter growth at just 1.3%, and JP Morgan is predicting 1%. That's a big drop from the preliminary 3.2% number for the 1st quarter (and that was probably inflated by fluff). Bond yields are in free fall, at their lowest level in 17 months, as investors anticipate economic weakness.
...We've licked this problem before, when John F. Kennedy set the Apollo moonshot in motion and Reagan led a massive, tech-intensive defense buildup. We can do it again. But what we are doing now will sooner or later be a losing strategy.
Now he wants privacy
In PJ Media, Debra Heine reports,
Newly released investigative files from the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax show that the Empire star used Venmo to pay his accomplices for pot, ecstasy, and cocaine. The documents, which were made public on Thursday, a week after a Cook County Circuit Court judge ordered their release, reveal in detail how the Osundairo brothers described the staged attack.Read more here.
"Mueller pulled a Comey!"
In the Morning Rant at Ace of Spades, Oregon Muse writes,
"So, Mueller pulled a Comey. You all remember Comey's infamous statement to the press that went like this, "Yeah, Hillary is probably guilty of all kinds of sh* that would land anyone else behind bars in a Federal PMITA prison, but I'm not going to recommend prosecution." And then he invented a whole new legal standard out of thin air: it was because they couldn't prove that she had 'criminal intent' when she did her illegal activities. This lame excuse had legal analysts from coast to coast scratching their heads. Fast forward to Mueller's statement to the press. He said that that Trump wasn't exonerated because they couldn't prove he didn't do things to collude or obstruct justice. Like Comey, Mueller just pulled a whole new legal standard right out of his a$$. If you're Hillary, they have to be able to prove you intended to break the law and you knew you were breaking it before a guilty verdict could ever be considered. And if you're Donald Trump, you're guilty until proven innocent. Again, these are new legal standards, never seen before, and what relates them to each other is that both were invented so the corrupt left can get what it wants. They cloak themselves in a veneer of legitimacy to disguise their grab for power. That's why, when they write books, they usually manage to work in words such as 'truth' or 'higher' or 'duty' or 'loyalty' in the title. As if their lofty intentions are all so noble and pure. But it's all a sham. I'd sooner trust a Scientology affidavit than believe any of these progressive corruptocrats are telling the truth about anything."
Thursday, May 30, 2019
"This is about raw political advantage and the destruction of the presidency. A disgraceful abuse of prosecutorial discretion, giving Democrats license to impeach."
Laura Ingraham interviews Joe diGenova on her radio program. Regarding Mueller's comments yesterday, Joe says, "This isn't about the law any more. This is about raw political advantage and the destruction of the presidency. A disgraceful abuse of prosecutorial discretion, giving Democrats license to impeach."
Dershowitz on Mueller allowing himself to be used for partisan advantage for the Democrats
Alan Dershowitz writes in the Hill,
...By putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice, Mueller has revealed his partisan bias. He also has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.Read more here.
...Remember that federal investigations by prosecutors, including special counsels, are by their very nature one-sided. They hear only evidence of guilt and not exculpatory evidence. Their witnesses are not subject to the adversarial process. There is no cross-examination. The evidence is taken in secret behind the closed doors of a grand jury. For that very reason, prosecutors can only conclude whether there is sufficient evidence to commence a prosecution. They are not in a position to decide whether the subject of the investigation is guilty or is innocent of any crimes.
That determination of guilt or innocence requires a full adversarial trial with a zealous defense attorney, vigorous cross-examination, exclusionary rules of evidence and other due process safeguards. Such safeguards were not present in this investigation, and so the suggestion by Mueller that Trump might well be guilty deserves no credence. His statement, so inconsistent with his long history, will be used to partisan advantage by Democrats, especially all those radicals who are seeking impeachment.
No prosecutor should ever say or do anything for the purpose of helping one party or the other. I cannot imagine a plausible reason why Mueller went beyond his report and gratuitously suggested that President Trump might be guilty, except to help Democrats in Congress and to encourage impeachment talk and action. Shame on Mueller for abusing his position of trust and for allowing himself to be used for such partisan advantage.
The Awan cybersecurity scandal
Ben Weingarten had Luke Rosiak on his podcast to discuss his book entitled Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats.It is about the Awan cybersecurity scandal. The transcript of the podcast is here.
Do you really mean to suggest that citizens can actually prevail when they stand up to government officials?
In Town Hall, Bob Barr reports,
...But something odd was happening at many of the intersections monitored by red light cameras. Even as the number of citations issued for running a red light at such locations increased dramatically, so too did accidents. Studies of this counter-intuitive phenomenon revealed that at camera-monitored intersections, accidents were occurring because drivers – fearful of being caught on camera slipping through a light just before it changed from yellow to red – were slamming on their brakes, and either rear-ending the vehicle in front of them, or being rear-ended themselves by the car following them.Read more here.
...The practice appears headed for the graveyard of bad ideas that sounded good at the time.
In ten states, the use of red-light cameras is now banned outright; and, in Texas, a bill awaits the governor’s signature to add the Lone Star State to that list.
The reversal of a program that served as a virtual cash cow for so many local governments for so long, is astonishing. The episode presents a rare but welcome example, that if citizens exert continued legal and political pressure on governments against an inherently unfair and defective program, they can prevail. It doesn’t happen often enough, but it is sweet indeed when it does.
His gifts have strings attached
In Al.com, Abbey Crain reports,
Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., the University of Alabama’s largest donor, has called for a boycott of Alabama -- school and state -- over the state’s latest near-total abortion ban law.Read more here.
But the UA System and Culverhouse have been in an ongoing dispute over the millions he has donated to the law school unrelated to the abortion legislation, vice chancellor for communications Kellee Reinhart said. In an emailed statement, Reinhart said Culverhouse asked the school to return $10 million, “repeating numerous demands about the operations of the University of Alabama School of Law."
University of Alabama System Chancellor Finis St. John recommended the Board of Trustees return the $21.5 million in donations the law school it has actually received, and restore the name to “The University of Alabama School of Law” in a memo sent to board members yesterday. It was renamed in September 2018 to Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law after the Florida businessman pledged to donate $26.5 million to the university.
“After numerous conversations and communications involving President (Stuart) Bell and (School of Law Dean Mark) Brandon, it is apparent that University and law school leadership will not be able to meet the donor’s expectations and do not share the same vision for the future,” said St. John. "It is my recommendation that we comply with the request to return the recent gift, as well as the prior gifts, and restore the name ‘The University of Alabama School of Law.’ Returning the gifts and renaming the law school are Board decisions and can only happen by Board action.”
Did your waste management company "recycle" that plastic, or send it to Asia?
In 2015, the problem of marine litter climbed to the very top of the list of global environmental problems after a landmark study suggested that there are 100 million tonnes of plastic in the oceans. Regrettably, the study overlooked the share of the blame that can be put on the recycling industry, which has exported 106 million tonnes of plastic waste to China over the past 20 years or more. A significant proportion of this is thought to have ended up in the oceans.Read more here.
Last June, I sounded the alarm about the impact of recycling on marine pollution and revealed how unscrupulous operators were making the situation worse. Soon afterward, the UK audit office came to similar conclusions and the media started to give the issue some attention.
There is now a global congestion in waste management systems, because China’s decided to close its doors to imported plastic waste. There has also been a rapid increase of piles of plastic scrap in rich countries, as recyclers have found it increasingly difficult to find anyone who will accept it in China’s place. Even poor countries have been starting to refuse to take it because, with their poor waste management system, they are unable to cope with what they have taken already, let alone the increased volumes that western exporters would like them to take. Much of this material is ending up in the oceans.
Earlier this month, however, an obscure United Nations conference surprised the world by agreeing a global deal to curb the dumping of dirty plastic waste, often camouflaged as ‘recycling’, from rich countries to the developing nations, such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, who have become the chief importers of plastic waste now that China has closed its doors. The huge volumes of waste that have previously gone to Asia will now have to be dealt with at home, by a waste management industry that is already struggling to keep its head above the rising tide of rubbish.
Remarkably, there has been virtually no attention given to this important decision. Green NGOs and politicians are keeping quiet because they fear that their role promoting bad policies in the past will come under scrutiny. The media, however, which has parroted green dogma about recycling for years will struggle to avoid mentioning the problems that the industry is facing in the wake of this UN decision. The plastic situation is now deteriorating rapidly, especially in rich countries.
Buttigieg's brother-in-law disputes Washington Post fake story
In the Washington Examiner, Rob Crilly dispells a fake news story run by the Washington Post. The Post had run a story about Buttigieg's brother-in-law who is accusing the gay Democratic presidential hopeful of hijacking his family’s history for political advantage by crafting a bogus backstory of poverty, homelessness, and homophobia. Read more here.
"A day that will live in infamy"
Dov Fischer writes in Spectator,
...Understand this: The craze of the Millennials became unstoppable. More American girls in the United States now are named “Khaleesi” than are named “Betsy” or “Nadine.” For new Moms, it became a more popular choice than “Gloria,” “Anne,” or “Julie.” You will be meeting them everywhere in the years to come, as they grow old enough to interact and tweet. In classrooms. As contestants on game shows. In police line-ups. All these American girls named “Khaleesi.” Oh, what a beautiful name!Read more here.
And then came the last episode-and-a-half of the eight-year drama. If you do not know, you can look it up.
At least the Khaleesi Kids probably will not have to fill out forms when they grow up. We are down to evaporating instruction in how to write in cursive. Soon there will be no SAT exams. No spelling, just texting: ka lee c. And with the politically correct history education they now receive in high school and college, they will grow up to take pride in being named for the transgendered leader who liberated America from Trump in the Civil Vietnam World War II of 1812, a day that will live in infamy: Khaleesi Kamala-Kortez.
"Twitter banned a researcher dedicated to mapping out AntiFa’s connections to journalists and the SPLC."
In Human Events, Ian Miles Cheong reports,
Twitter banned a researcher dedicated to mapping out AntiFa’s connections to journalists and the SPLC.Read more here.
Former teacher and analyst Eoin Lenihan has been banned from Twitter after revealing major links between so-called “anti-extremism” campaigners and the hard-left AntiFa group.
Lenihan published his findings in Quillette, revealing links between journalists who write for the the Guardian newspaper, HuffPost, Al Jazeera, and various other publications to the hard left group.
Lenihan was suspended early Wednesday morning, prompting speculation about the ban.
Andy Ngo, a Wall Street Journal contributor and editor at Quillette, alleges that Lenihan was suspended following mass reports by members of AntiFa on Twitter.
It has long been suspected that establishment journalists maintain close ties to far-left activists including AntiFa. Until now, these connections remained largely in the realm of speculation.
The researcher identified over a dozen verified “national-level journalists,” who were in his estimation never “markedly critical of AntiFa in any way” in their coverage of leftist political violence.
"Getting Trump is all they live for—and all they have left."
In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes that Democrats are suffering from a collective poverty of ideas.
...The Democratic Party has no plan to secure the borders other than to be against whatever Trump is for. They would not build a wall, deport illegal entrants, end sanctuary cities, fine employers or do much of anything but allow almost anyone to enter the U.S.Read more here.
The homeless crisis is reaching epidemic proportions in our cities, almost all of them run by progressive mayors and city councils. None have any workable plan to clean the sidewalks of needles and human excrement. None know what do with the hundreds of thousands who have camped out in public spaces, endangering their own health and everyone around them due to drug addiction and inadequate sanitation and waste removal.
On abortion, the new Democratic position seems to be that the unborn can be aborted at any time the mother chooses, up to and including the moment of birth.
The Green New Deal has been endorsed by most of the current Democratic primary candidates, even though they privately know its utopian fantasies would shut down the U.S. economy and destroy the present prosperity fueled by record energy production, deregulation, and tax reform and reduction.
Abroad, were Democrats for or against abrogating the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and prodding China to follow reciprocal trade rules? How do they propose to deal with North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles that seemed to suddenly appear as Barack Obama left office?
Have Democrats proposed canceling the new pipeline construction that Trump has fast-tracked? Would they scale way back on the natural gas and oil production that has made America energy-independent and on the cusp of becoming the world’s greatest energy exporter?
Democrats have occasionally talked of implementing reparations for slavery, a wealth tax and free college tuition, and of eliminating college debt, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Electoral College. Yet they have never spelled out exactly how they would enact such radical proposals that likely do not appeal to a majority of the population.
Would they reverse Trump tax cuts, stop hectoring NATO members to pay their promised defense contributions, restore NAFTA or revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement?
For now, no one has much of an idea what Democratic candidates would actually do, much less how they would do it.
Instead, the fallback position is always that “Trump stole the 2016 election,” “the Mueller report did not really exonerate Trump of collusion and obstruction,” and “Trump must be impeached or somehow stopped from finishing his first term.”
When the Mueller report found no collusion and no indictable grounds for obstruction of the non-crime of collusion, for a moment progressives suffered an identity crisis. The temporary paralysis was prompted by the terror that without a crusade to remove Trump, they might have to offer an alternative vision and agenda that would better appeal to 2020 voters.
The Democratic establishment has become something like novelist Herman Melville’s phobic Captain Ahab, who became fatally absorbed with chasing his nemesis, the albino whale Moby Dick. The great white whale once ate part of Ahab’s leg, and he demands revenge—even if such a never-ending neurosis leads to the destruction of his ship and crew.
Democrats can never forgive Trump for unexpectedly defeating supposed sure winner Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then systematically—and loudly—undoing the eight-year agenda of Obama.
So far, Trump seems to have escaped all of their efforts to spear and remove him before the 2020 election. Trump, like Moby Dick, seems a weird force of nature whose wounds from constant attacks only seem to make him more indestructible and his attackers even more obsessed with their prey.
Even if the quest to destroy Trump eclipses every other consideration and entails the destruction of the modern Democratic Party, it seems not to matter to these modern Ahabs.
Getting Trump is all they live for—and all they have left.
Is it now okay for a prosecutor to smear a person not charged with a crime?
In PJ Media, Liz Sheld has a lot to say about Robert Mueller's press conference yesterday.
Read more here.
A compromise had to be made because the Democrats' planned narrative was derailed with Barr's cut-to-the-chase press conference. But this time, Mueller delivered for the Democrats by insinuating that his team could not charge Trump because of DoJ's regulations not to bring charges against a sitting president...but would have if not for the regulation.
AG Barr testified under oath otherwise about the DoJ regulation. Barr said that Mueller told him three times it was not the case that the OLC regulation prevented him from bringing charges. I believe Barr, who made this assertion under oath, over Mueller, who does not want to make any statements under oath. There were also witnesses to this conversation. I wonder what they have to say.
...If you noticed, Mueller completely inverted the foundation of the American judicial system — that citizens are innocent until proven guilty. Instead, Mueller changed the principle from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until exonerated. Do you see how dangerous this man, the former director of the FBI, is? How many other people have been persecuted and abused by these malefactors at the DoJ? Anyone who watches the lawyer shows on TV knows that prosecutors do not "exonerate" people They either bring charges or not and Mueller did not bring charges. And concerning Mueller shrouding himself in the OLC regulation, there's also a regulation that prohibits prosecutors from smearing people who are not charged with a crime. What about that regulation, Bob?
Read more here.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
"Pelosi's Paradise"
Pelosi's paradise is America's #shithole sanctuary for thieves, vandals, drug addicts, illegal alien criminals, and outdoor defecators. https://t.co/BKpEx8S3KS
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 26, 2019
Major drug corridor shut down in one weekend!
"We Build the Wall" Closes Off Human and Drug Smuggling Corridor in One Weekend! $100,000 a day Drug Pipeline SHUT DOWN (Video) https://t.co/ifAt9vJeAt via @gatewaypundit @BrianKolfage @KrisKobach1787 @RealDonaldTrump @AnnCoulter @MichelleMalkin @JackPosobiec @DonaldJTrumpJr
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) May 28, 2019
Buyer Beware!
In FrontPage Magazine, Dennis Prager asks,
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO PLAY RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH YOUR CHILD'S VALUES?Read more here.
Most Americans are not aware how morally and intellectually destructive American colleges — and, increasingly, high schools and even elementary schools — have become. So, they spend tens of thousands after-tax dollars to send their sons and daughters to college.
But today, to send your child to college is to play Russian roulette with their values. There is a good chance your child will return from college alienated from you, from America, from Western civilization and from whatever expression of any Bible-based religion in which you raised your child.
...Those who still believe that one of the primary purposes of American public (and most private) schools is to Americanize students should know this is no longer the case. On the contrary, most American high schools now celebrate every identity except American identity (which the left brands a euphemism for white supremacy).
...Conservatives are not the enemy of liberalism; the left is.
...And of course, college students across the country are increasingly taught, often from their first day at college, that being male and female is a choice, not a biological fact.
Other than Hillsdale and a handful of other colleges and religious colleges, the American university has become nothing more than a left-wing seminary.
Buyer beware.
Babies bursting forth!
When taking a walk on a New Mexico mesa top as I did today, be sure to look out for baby wildflowers bursting through the soil everywhere. In another month the hills will be alive in full color.
The Obama/Clinton Coup and Coverup
JJ Sefton introduces a portion of his morning links this way today:
Good morning kids. Midweek so here we go. In the Obama/Clinton Coup and Coverup - at this point, it's beyond any doubt that that is what it can now be officially called - Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called "dossier" (though I think he merely aggregated/interpolated the words of the real author who I believe was Sidney Blumenthal), is now refusing to cooperate with the DoJ investigation. Good. Slap him with a stiff fine and chuck his traitorous ass in prison. And before the trolls start screaming about the President refusing to cooperate with Congress and ordering staff not to testify, what the hell have he and they been doing for over two years already? QED and GFY. Elsewhere, Margot Cleveland at the Federalist tells us that the spying on the Trump campaign might have started as early as 2016 but Joe Di Genova says the Russia Hoax was engineered to cover up Obama's spying operations going back to 2012. Yeah, I know people have mixed feelings about Di Genova and his prognostications, but all things considered, it would not surprise me but it certainly does shock and disgust me if it turns out to be verified. And it makes this whole thing more serious by orders of magnitude. Also, Betsy McCaughey assures us that the attempt to get at Trump's taxes will fail, what the hell, I thought John Brennan's security clearance was already pulled, and a look at all of this in context of the Judiciary, the bureaucracy and Deep State and what AG Barr and the President have ahead of them in draining that particular swamp to prevent this from ever happening again.
"They are going to get more Trump, good and hard!"
Oregon Muse writes in the Ace of Spades blog,
"Trump is known as a builder, but if there's anything really Trump likes to do, it's breaking things. Trump broke Kathy Griffin. He broke her really badly. He broke Michael Moore. He reduced Hillary Clinton to a bitter old drunk. He broke both Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels. He broke Rosie O'Donnell. He broke his former aide Omarosa. He's in the process of breaking the anti-Trump progaganda network CNN completely. Everyone who goes up against Trump loses. It's uncanny how some celebrity or athlete goes off on an anti-Trump rant and then fails professionally in some fashion, sometimes in unrelated ways. Just look at this schadenfreudelicious list. And now I hear that there are supposedly a whole bunch of anti-Trump movie scripts that have lately been floating around Hollywood. It reminds me of the height of the Iraq war when Hollywood released a bunch of anti-Iraq war movies. They were abysmal failures at the box office. They must've thought that most Americans were against the Iraq War. But at that time, most Americans supported the war. What a bubble they must live in. They must think that most Americans hate Trump. But that's the way to get more Trump. And they're going to get more Trump. Good and hard."
Where does he stand?
In Breitbart, Joel Pollack catalogs fifty years of flip-flopping by Joe Biden. Pollack shows how Biden reversed his positions on abortion, the Iraq war, immigration, women, desegregation, guns, drugs, and gay marriage.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Making up the rules as you go
Biographer Jad Adams wrote in the Independent in 2012 about the sex life of Gandhi.
Is there a danger in having heroes?
Roger L. Simon writes in PJ Media about the latest revelations about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
What are we to make of the disturbing news about Martin Luther King? Should we change the name on every school, park, and boulevard across the nation named after him as if he were the inverse of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis? There must be tens of thousands of them.Read more here.
He was one of the indisputable heroes of American history, the great civil rights leader who inspired our country with his non-violent protests and who so memorably told us: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
How different is that from today's civil rights movement (lower case deliberate) where reactionary identity politics rules the day. What was once an idealistic crusade for equality and integration is now a movement for segregation with Harvard (among many colleges) holding separate graduation celebrations for African Americans. Go figure. The crypto-fascist concept of intersectionality dominating our campuses deliberately pits racial, religious and age groups against each other in a victimhood competition that does nothing but encourage people to hate each other. We are going backwards fast, with the Democratic Party instigating much of it.
...Of course, this whole confusing situation plays out against something equally despicable. It was the FBI itself, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, that was monitoring King and recording this. They were just as sexist as he was, doing absolutely nothing about the rape in progress in the next room from their listening post in Washington's Willard Hotel. Let the woman or women handle it themselves. Their way of dealing with it was later to try to get King to commit suicide.
The blog I read first every day
Here are the headlines of stories Ace of Spades writes about today:
Read all the stories here.
Eric Felten: As the Russia Coup Attempt Unravels, Factions Are Throwing Each Other Under the Bus
Gun Control Lobbyist Arrested for Assault, Domestic Violence, and False Imprisonment;
For Some Reason, the Leftwing Media Takes No Interest
Colin Quinn on CNN: We Need a National Divorce
#Woke Corporatism: Gillette, Hot Off Its Genius Branding of Labeling Its Main Customers as Toxic and Violent, Now Pushes Female-to-Male Transgenders as the Male Ideal
Obama Says He's "Writing" a New Book, Ratf**cks His Wife By Telling People Michelle Obama Used a Ghostwriter For Hers
Arrests Made in Lyons Nail-Bomb Attack
—Ace of Spades
American news media is hiding from you what you suspected.
Washington Post Reports That Elizabeth Warren Billed Clients $675 Per Hour in the 2000's; Alexandria Donkey-Chompers Accuses the Two Female Reporters of Sexism Against Women Making a Lot of Money
Read all the stories here.
Business plan: boycott your viewers!
We have gone from citizens boycotting corporations to corporations boycotting the citizenryhttps://t.co/AgIQKWQxw2
— Matthew Schmitz (@matthewschmitz) May 28, 2019
Ratcliffe: "The FISA Court was at the mercy of the people who verified this information!"
At the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance comments
This comment from Sundance comes after he gives us another of his brilliant analyses of the Spygate story. He is so clearly the person on the web who has given the best analysis of the whole sordid affair. I frankly don't understand why other brilliant blogs like Instapundit and Maggie's Farm don't link to him regularly.
Fusion GPS was not hired to research Trump, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations.
Fusion-GPS gave them the justification they needed for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier. Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier is so important; without it, the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse as outlined by John Ratcliffe.
This comment from Sundance comes after he gives us another of his brilliant analyses of the Spygate story. He is so clearly the person on the web who has given the best analysis of the whole sordid affair. I frankly don't understand why other brilliant blogs like Instapundit and Maggie's Farm don't link to him regularly.
Monday, May 27, 2019
Finally, a book that gives Reagan the credit he deserves
In FrontPage Magazine, Bruce Bawer praises a new Reagan biography by Larry Schweikart, Reagan: The American President.
When, a couple of months into his presidency, he was shot by John Hinckley, he found, on the way to the hospital, that he couldn’t bring himself to ask God for help “while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed up young man who shot me,” and so he “prayed for Hinckley’s soul.”Read more here.
The downside of this goodness was that Reagan, while no fool, was, like Anne Frank, ingenuous enough to believe that most people were essentially good. As Schweikart observes, his sunny view of humanity led to an “idealistic view that the US government was more or less pristine”; while he criticized faceless “bureaucracy” and “big government,” he was reluctant to confront the reality of “human corruption, lust for power, and petty jealousy,” not least in the inside-the-Beltway purlieus that we now, quite rightly, call “the Swamp.” As president, writes Schweikart, “Reagan all too frequently believed the liberals would in the end ‘play fair’ and let their humanity surface. One of the great ironies of Reagan’s presidency was that he had more success appealing to that human quality with the Soviets than he did with his Democrat opponents.” Brilliant point.
When Reagan’s film career waned, he found success in the new medium of television, serving as host of the anthology series General Electric Theater. As part of his deal (the biggest yet for a TV performer) he delivered talks at GE plants, where he revealed and honed a very particular set of skills that, it turned out, outshone his not inconsiderable acting talent – among them an ability to connect naturally with the common man and woman, to convey a genuine interest in their lives and concerns, and to communicate complex social and economic ideas largely by means of easily comprehensible anecdotes and jokes. Far from being a simpleton who, once in the White House, took direction from his cabinet, aides, and speechwriters, Reagan was, by his GE days, fully formed ideologically and very much his own man – one who’d concluded that appeasing the Soviet Union amounted to telling captive peoples to relinquish “hopes of freedom because we’ve decided to get along with your slave masters,” and who, having read the works of von Mises, Hazlitt, Hayek, and Bastiat, understood the vital importance of the free market.
...It’s stunning to learn that after Reagan left Sacramento, Walter Cronkite offered him a twice-weekly five-minute slot on CBS to voice his views; later, under Carter, the same network gave Reagan free airtime to respond to a presidential speech on the Panama Canal, “something,” Schweikart rightly observes, ”that today would be unheard of.” As Schweikart sums it up: “Reagan in 1981 had a monumental edge that Donald Trump would not have in a similar situation thirty-five years later: while the media was overwhelmingly liberal and oppositional, it still played the game by the basic rules of journalism (or, at least, tried to appear to play by such rules).”
As this book counts down the years to Reagan’s presidency, it also gives us glimpses of the administrations he’s living through – of LBJ’s Great Society, which boosted welfare dependency and undermined the black family; of Nixon’s opening to the Kremlin, about which Brezhnev bragged in 1973: “We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist”; and of Ford, who, scared of offending Brehnev, refused to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, leading Reagan (who generally eschewed even the mildest profanity) to refer to him as a “goddamned horse’s ass.” Then there’s Carter, who gets a whole chapter to himself – a delicious indictment of “the first president in American history to blame the American people themselves for whatever problems they faced.” Not only did Carter, in his inaugural address, congratulate Americans for shaking off their “inordinate fear of communism” (this, Schweikart points out, “at the very time the Soviet empire was expanding”); his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, actually bragged to Time that Carter and Brezhnev had “similar dreams and aspirations about the most fundamental issues.” In any event, it was the accumulated social and economic consequences of these predecessors’ policy blunders, capped off by Carter’s utter incompetence and passivity, that delivered the White House to Reagan – a beneficiary, as Schweikart puts it, of the same “populist boil against the ‘Establishment’” that would later lead Trump to victory.
...Soviet officials would later admit he was right: they had been running an evil empire. Know-it-alls in the U.S. thought Reagan’s rhetoric threatened to “destabilize” U.S.-USSR relations (“stability” being, then and now, the Deep State’s top desideratum); but in fact that very rhetoric shook Soviet elites’ self-esteem to the core. Similarly, the U.S. media mocked Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which they nicknamed Star Wars – but it, too, unsettled the Soviets. So did the decisiveness with which he fired America’s striking air-traffic controllers in 1981 and responded to the 1983 Cuban invasion of Grenada. Schweikart quotes an internal Soviet document which acknowledged that Reagan had “restored Americas belief that it is capable of achieving a lot” and that he was “giving America what it has been yearning for. Optimism. Self-belief. Heroes.” How interesting that the Kremlin had his measure then – and feared and respected him accordingly – whereas many on the American left, even now, continue to dismiss him. For so effectively setting the record straight, and for giving Reagan the credit he deserves for setting aright the American Ship of State, Larry Schweikart deserves our immense gratitude.
Mocking political opponents is now suddenly bad
In TownHall, Kurt Schlichter writes,
We have the lib poohbahs and their mainstream media Renfields in full spazz effect because Trump proposes to declassify info attesting to the antics of the Deep State moles who tried to spur the failed soft coup in part by…leaking classified info. Wait, so now exposing classified info is…bad? Didn’t Hollywood just make an eponymous movie about the brave firefighters of the WaPo defying the government to bring the people the truth by publishing the classified Pentagon Papers? Well, maybe – I don’t know because I don’t watch pinko self-slobberfest movies. I do know that the libs were all giddy when The Lightbringer/Dogeater gave underserved clemency to Bradley Manning for leaking classified material to Julian Assange, who the media now hates for publishing confidential material that hurt Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit.Read more here
...And Trump is a master of exploiting our elite’s combination of moral bankruptcy and intellectual sloth. Do you think he did not know exactly what he was doing when he tossed that “treason” grenade into the Democrat’s circle of investigatory onanism? He anticipated the freak out and, sure enough, the freaks duly complied by outing themselves.
Trump tweeted a funny video of Nancy Pelosi channeling Foster Brooks like a boss, and now funny videos mocking political opponents are suddenly bad. Actually, the President of the United States was doing the Slurrer of the House a righteous solid. By accusing her of being drunker than screw-top Chardonnay aficionado Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit on November 10, 2016, he was providing an explanation for the silly things she’s been babbling of late. It was a kindness. After all, if she wasn’t Schiff-faced, then what’s her excuse?
“PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE” pic.twitter.com/1OyCyqRTuk
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2019
Less of a superhero and more of a human being
In American Thinker, Monica Showalter tackles the subject of the new information we learned about Martin Luther King this week.
King was and remains a great leader despite this shadow because he led the civil rights movement for legal equality and equal opportunity. He remains great for the things we know he was great for: Having his children judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character. Having favored one set of laws for everyone, not two-tier systems.Read more here.
Great personalities often have great flaws, and people with the big egos needed to be drawn to political things can often be guilty of appalling acts in private life, which might be one way of explaining King. The awful details on King's private behavior, culled from illegal surveillance, doesn't change the good that he did. It just gives some context and raises a note of humility, making him less a superhero and more of a human being.
...it's increasingly coming to light that Democrats aren't on the same page as King. He's no hero to them. Not only was King a lifelong Republican, his vision for the U.S., with equality of opportunity rather than equality of results, of judging each person individually rather than by members of their color-matched group, of a single set of laws for everyone, is a quintessentially a conservative American idea. Democrats, remember, were his biggest opponents during his heyday, and in way, they still are now.
96-years-old!
96-year-old World War II veteran Pete DuPré played the national anthem on a harmonica before the @USWNT match 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/TP3ggIF3z9
— ESPN (@espn) May 26, 2019
Americans respond with love for their country!
Energy workers and citizens be damned!
In Fox News, Daniel Turner reports that one state has already embraced and signed into law the green new deal. That state is New Mexico. Read more here.
Who can say no?
Look at everything from judicial sabotage in America to the Brexit saga and European resistance to insane migration policies, and you can see that only the elite have the power to say "no." They can say "no" to virtually anything voters demand, no matter how huge the margin.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) May 27, 2019
No coincidence
How the hell did Brennan and Comey, who both admitted previous support of communism, ever make it to the top of CIA and FBI respectively?
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) May 27, 2019
Something very wrong there https://t.co/kjn9keDdTy
They must be "kept comfortable"
In USA Today, James Robbins writes,
A spate of new state abortion laws are attacking the framework established by Roe v. Wade from both sides of the spectrum. The flurry of litigation that is certain to follow may provide the Supreme Court with an opportunity to revisit the landmark 1973 case and potentially formulate new guidance on regulating the abortion industry.
Last week Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law a bill that could punish doctors who perform abortions with up to life in prison. This followed a law in Georgia that would make performing an abortion illegal once a heartbeat is detected, usually around 6 weeks. Similar laws have been passed in Ohio and Mississippi, and the Missouri House has passed a bill to ban abortions at the 8th week of pregnancy.
At the other end of scale, New York enacted a law that extended legal abortion into the third trimester in some circumstances. Virginia was also considering such a law, but it was tabled after its sponsor, Delegate Kathy Tran, admitted that under her proposed legislation a baby could be aborted even at the moment of birth. Virginia Democratic Governor and pediatric neurosurgeon Ralph Northam hardly helped matters when he explained that in such cases "the infant would be delivered” and “kept comfortable” while the decision was reached whether or not to kill it.
Critics say the Alabama law is clearly unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade, but its backers say that is the point. Gov. Ivey noted in her signing statement that the law was probably unenforceable but that the law “may bring about the best opportunity … for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit this important matter.”
Yet even the late term abortion laws could be tossed out under the logic of Roe. While the Supreme Court made legal first term abortions, it specifically rejected the argument that pregnancies could be terminated “at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason” the mother chooses. The “compelling point” for the Court was viability, defined as “the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.”
Regardless of when life begins, when it is viable, the state has a compelling interest in protecting it. Thus, when Hillary Clinton said in 2016 that an unborn child had no rights under the Constitution even up to the point of natural birth, she was basically arguing against the Roe v. Wade framework.
Democratic political strategists have welcomed the Alabama law as a way to fire up their base and reset the abortion argument going into the 2020 election. But the simultaneous push for late-term abortion clearly works against them. In a February Marist poll, pro-life sentiment surged, erasing a 17 point gap and drawing even with the pro-abortion position. The poll showed 71% opposing abortion after 20 weeks, and even among Democrats opposition was 59%.
Perhaps more alarming for the Democrats is that younger people moved in greater proportion towards the pro-life position than older age cohorts. And a May 2019 Hill-HarrisXsurvey found that 55% of those polled found a Georgia-style six-week abortion ban either “just right” or “too lenient.” Again, broken down by age group, it was those aged 18-34 who “were most likely to say the abortion bans did not go far enough.”
So rather than benefiting Democrats, the new battle over abortion may be a replay of the 2003 debate over “partial birth abortion” which benefited George W. Bush in his reelection bid. Democrats have predictably denounced the new restrictive abortion laws while showing no signs of being willing to accept any particular time limits on terminating pregnancies. For his part, President Trump has criticized the Alabama abortion law for going too far while also strongly denouncing New York’s highly permissive approach. Advantage Trump.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court will be able to monitor a variety of lower-court challenges to these new laws which will in time give the justices an opportunity to select the specific case or cases they might use to rewrite Roe. At which point Democrats will have to be “kept comfortable” while the decision is reached whether or not to terminate it.
Defending Camille Paglia
In the National Post, Rex Murphy comes to the defense of Camille Paglia in reaction to attacks on her by her students at UArts in Philadelphia.
self-confessed immature and ignorant students should, in all matters outside the curriculum they have chosen to follow in university, conduct themselves in silence and humility, till at least the time that they may make a plausible claim they have learned something, and have minimum capacity to present real arguments and the wit to appreciate the arguments of those who oppose them.Read more here.
"The zeal to remove Trump by any means necessary justified colluding with Russians, obstructing justice, undermining his administration abroad, and chronic leaking."
In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes about
Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists.Believe it or not, there is much more brilliant analysis here.
Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory. After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Russian “collusion”—thanks initially to efforts by Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to go after Michael Flynn and the successful attempts of the CIA and FBI to seed the bogus Steele dossier among the government elite—became a club to destroy the incoming Trump Administration.
How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.
The entire so-called Uranium One caper had hinged on ex-President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their Clinton Foundation uniting with Russian or Russian-affiliated oligarchs to ease restrictions on the sale of North American uranium reserves to a Russian company with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Coincidentally what followed were massive donations from concerned Russian parties to the foundation, as well as a $500,000 honorarium to Bill Clinton for a brief Moscow speech. Note that no more money has been forthcoming from Russia to either of the Clintons or their foundation.
Had Donald Trump been caught, as President Obama was in Seoul in March 2012, on a hot mic assuring the Russians that he would be more flexible with Russia after the 2020 election (“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved—but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space”) he would likely now be facing real impeachment charges.
Imagine the cries of outrage from Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) had Trump inadvertently blurted out to the world that he was willing to warp U.S. security interests to fit his own reelection agenda. (Remember: “This is my last election . . . After my election, I have more flexibility.”) Such a stealthy quid pro quo certainly would have been the crown jewel of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The locus classicus of Russian collusion, however, is Hillary Clinton’s effort in 2016. The facts are not in dispute. Using the three firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign paid a foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to compile a smear dossier against Clinton’s then-opponent, Donald J. Trump.
Steele then bought Russian and Russian-related sources to produce supposed dirt on Trump. None of these Russian-generated smears would ever be verified. In fact, almost immediately most slurs proved to be outright lies and completely made up in their details—if not the stuff of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Nonetheless, Steele seeded his contracted dirt during the 2016 election, and later during the Trump transition and presidency, among the highest Obama Administration officials at the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA. After more than three years of ex-Obama officials’ obfuscation, stonewalling, and chronic lying, we now know Clinton used Russian fake sources both to generate damaging anti-Trump media stories and to prompt government investigations designed to hamstring his governance. Again, if there is such a thing as “Russian collusion,” then Hillary Clinton is its font.
Mueller spent more than $34 million and wrote over 440 pages to inform the American people that Trump could not realistically be indicted for obstructing justice, mostly because the underlying crime—“collusion”— never existed in the first place. Moreover, Mueller and other officials were never actually hampered in their investigations. No matter: “obstruction” was supposedly the key to destroying the Trump Administration after collusion imploded. To this day it remains the battle cry of the impeach-Trump Left.
But what exactly would real obstruction of justice look like it? It might be a deliberate effort by government officials to mislead and impede the proper conduct of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in an effort to spy on an American citizen deemed useful in proving “collusion.”
That is, James Comey, Sally Yates and others signed FISA requests when they knew, but did not dare disclose to the court, that their sources of evidence—the Steele dossier and news accounts in circular fashion based on it—were unverified, products of Hillary Clinton’s bought oppositional research, and written by a contractor at the time fired by the FBI for unprofessional conduct.
Had Comey simply told the court that Clinton had paid for his evidence, that the Yahoo News account was not independent but based on the dossier, that he had fired Steele as an FBI collaborator, and that nothing in the dossier had been verified, then the court never would have granted him permission to spy on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. In other words, top FBI and Justice Department officials deliberately obstructed and essentially destroyed the normal protocols necessary to protect the sanctity of legal surveillance, during the election, the Trump transition, and the early Trump presidency.
Or maybe obstruction would be defined as the efforts of a recused attorney general like Loretta Lynch, who had stepped aside from the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails, to have met secretly on an airport tarmac with the spouse of the target of her department’s investigation.
Or would obstruction be classified as Lynch supposedly ordering the FBI not even to use the word “investigation” when it was investigating Clinton? Or would obstruction constitute deliberately destroying more than 30,000 emails under subpoena, in the fashion that Clinton ordered her aides to “bleach bit” her correspondence and destroy mobile communication devices?
Or would obstruction be classified as deleting emails germane to an investigation of the collusion scam in the fashion of Nellie Ohr erasing emails received from her husband’s government email account, or perhaps in the manner of Mueller team staffers who wiped clean the mobile phones of the fired Lisa Page and Peter Strzok?
Or would obstruction characterize the brag of the anonymous New York Times guest editorialist? He preened in a September 5, 2018 column that he was an unnamed high administration official and NeverTrump Republican who, along with like-minded “resistance” leaders, was trying his best to disrupt his own president’s governance. What would anonymous’s obstruction entail—deliberately ignoring legal mandates? Failing to follow new federal guidelines? Trying to subvert nominations? Illegally leaking to the press? Obstructing anything he did not like, whether in legal or illegal fashion?
...What have we learned about the Left’s moralistic talk of Trump’s supposed collusion, obstruction, Logan Act violations, and leaking?
One, that these are all projections of real resistance behavior. The zeal to remove Trump by any means necessary justified colluding with Russians, obstructing justice, undermining his administration abroad, and chronic leaking.
Two, these deep-state and media elites are narcissistically delusional. So inured are they to deference that they really believed they should have the power, indeed the right, to subvert democracy, to overturn a U.S. election on the justification that the wrong voters had voted for the incorrect candidate and both needed to be corrected by the right people. All that is why the last 28 months have been both scary and dangerous.
Real coups against democracies rarely are pulled off by jack-booted thugs in sunglasses or fanatical mobs storming the presidential palace. More often, they are the insidious work of supercilious bureaucrats, bought intellectuals, toady journalists, and political activists who falsely project that their target might at some future date do precisely what they are currently planning and doing—and that they are noble patriots, risking their lives, careers, and reputations for all of us, and thus must strike first.
A familiar tune
In linking to this article in the Examiner by Byron York, Instapundit's Stephen Green observes, "Why, it’s almost as though classification had become little more than a scam to protect powerful interests."
Do you know where popcorn comes from?
Late yesterday evening I went outside to see if I could get a view of the sunset. Instead, I stumbled on to what looked like a popcorn plant!
Sunday, May 26, 2019
"And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe."
From Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm comes today's lectionary.
John 14:23-29
14:23 Jesus answered him, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
14:24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
14:25 "I have said these things to you while I am still with you.
14:26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
14:28 You heard me say to you, 'I am going away, and I am coming to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.
14:29 And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.
John 14:23-29
14:23 Jesus answered him, "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
14:24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
14:25 "I have said these things to you while I am still with you.
14:26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
14:28 You heard me say to you, 'I am going away, and I am coming to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.
14:29 And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.
Release of the American Taliban
Gutfeld on the release of the 'American Taliban' scumhttps://t.co/89510z6NNb
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) May 23, 2019
They are going after those rich white people!
Net worth-
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) May 25, 2019
Nancy Pelosi: 100 million
Elizabeth Warren: 10 million
Joe Biden: 5 million
Bernie Sanders: 2.5 million
I love how the party that claims we need to go after rich white people is conveniently run by rich white people.
They think their voters are stupid!
"Whoever controls 5G will be able to surveil and control the planet."
Richard Fernandez writes in PJ Media,
China's growing surveillance state has made the news again. The NYT described a "God's-eye" -- perhaps better described as a State's-eye -- view of Chinese society as seen from the millions of networked devices that are blanketing the country.Read more here.
At the click of a mouse ... the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera ... passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.
The combination of ubiquitous sensors and database fusion has allowed the Communist Party to create "virtual cages" for millions of people. It's easy with Internet of Things technology to turn off an individual's credit card, phone, car, refrigerator, etc., should he stray into a proscribed zone.
...Whoever controls 5G will be able to surveil and control the planet. Those in charge of the network could be omniscient and potentially omnipotent over unprotected man-made systems. To guard against China ruling this kingdom, the Trump administration has banned U.S. companies, most notably Google, from selling technology to Chinese giant Huawei.
The urgency of the challenge was underscored by The Hill's comparison of the situation to Apollo. "We are in another innovation race right now. The race to 5G [is] a contest that could have more far-reaching effects than the race to the moon. The Trump administration deserves credit for articulating a policy that aims to see America win the race to 5G." Steve Bannon had an even more extreme formulation: “It is a massive national security issue to the West. The executive order is 10 times more important than walking away from the trade deal. It [Huawei] is a major national security threat, not just to the US but to the rest of the world. We are going to shut it down.”
"So let’s call it what it is. A coup."
Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness,
...I conclude that the term “hoax” is wholly inadequate to describe the enormity of the political scandal that was perpetrated against Donald Trump, against the office of the president, and ultimately against the American people.Read more here.
For one thing, the word “hoax” implies something jocular or prankish. The joke might be malicious, but it is still intended to be humorous. There was nothing at all humorous about what just happened in our political life, though the hysteria of the anti-Trump chorus—the pussy-behatted females complaining about how “crude” Trump was, the “comedian” who paraded about with a bloody doll’s head representing the president, the tears and imprecations and jeremiads disgorged by the press and by Trump’s political enemies: all that did have a sort of ghastly if pathetic humor about it.
But when we step back and consider what actually happened over the past three years—and, more, what almost happened—it is clear that the word “hoax” does not begin to cover the reality of what I have been calling for many months the greatest political scandal in the history of the American republic.
...The word I have in mind is “coup.”
Again, I know that that is a dramatic, maybe a melodramatic, word. But I think it accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”
Remember how long it took before we learned that Steele had been paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary campaign, and that his dossier was not just “unverified” and “salacious,” as James Comey put it, but was in fact nothing but a scurrilous piece of opposition research made up out of “random” scraps of gossip that Steele had assembled from highly dubious sources? Nevertheless, it was the dossier, and nothing but the dossier, that provided the unverified “evidence” for the supposedly “verified” FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page, an American citizen, and hence to spy on the campaign and then the administration of Donald Trump.
And on and on this kaleidoscopic onion has gone, as one layer after the next has been peeled back only reveal another layer and additional personalities.
Finally, however, I believe we are nearing the hollow center of the onion. The dogged Attorney General William Barr is proceeding methodically, inexorably to lay bare the origins of the spurious Russia investigation.
...We should face up to that unpleasant fact and call things by their real names. The actions taken by the Obama Administration threatened not just Donald Trump and his presidency but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States. As L.J. Keith observed, “Even in the most contentious elections and after disputed results, there was never been this sort of dangerous, systematic, deliberate rejection of the will of the people. The abrogation of the constitution to use extrajudicial methods to destroy the incoming president. It is the very definition of a coup.”
"That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason,"
Liz Cheney does not get sidetracked by Martha Radditz of ABC.
Rep. Liz Cheney: "We had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement ... saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States."
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 26, 2019
"That sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason," she adds https://t.co/tzEmm40vCp pic.twitter.com/RhAVMWRfBU
Peter Robinson interviews Thomas Sowell
Peter Robinson is one of my favorite interviewers. Here is a brief segment of an interview he did with Thomas Sowell.
FBI takes down Martin Luther King Jr.
Why is it that when something sensational happens in America the publications bringing us the story are British? Most often it is the Daily Mail. Today it is also Standpoint and the Sunday Times, two other British publications. Author David Garrow, who has written several books on Martin Luther King Jr. claims that there are
secret FBI tapes that accuse Martin Luther King Jr of having extramarital affairs with '40 to 45 women' and even claim he 'looked on and laughed' as a pastor friend raped a parishioner.Read more here.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
Fewest babies in 32 years
In his Sense of Events blog, Donald Sensing brings us bad demographic news. Instead of the replacement level of 2.1 children per family, we are now at 1.7.
Simply put, a shrinking population means a bleaker, poorer, and less sustainable future.Read more here.
Time to close the southern border
In Town Hall, Beth Baumann explains why it is time to close our southern border and the loopholes migrants have been using. Read the whole thing here.
One of my favorite reads
Motus A.D. has become one of my favorite blogs to read. Today she has stories about crime and coverup, weaponized news, AOC live-tweeting the weather, how Boomers invented the Happy Face which Millennials appropriated and turned into Frowny Face, and much more. In addition, the commenters have a lot to say.
Enjoy here.
"There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance."
Roger Kimball writes in The New Criterion, as posted by Scott Johnson in PowerLine,
Looking around the cultural landscape today, I conclude that we are in the midst of a sort of negative religious revival: let’s call it America’s First Great Awokening.Read more here.
...Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.
There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.
...The mantra is “Diversity.” The reality is strictly enforced conformity about any ideas that might disturb the heavy moral slumber of wokeness.
...And here’s an irony: when the free speech movement started at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall in 1964, it was a left-wing movement that demanded tolerance and challenged conventional behavior and mores. Today the Left espouses the opposite—not tolerance and free speech but conformity and censorship.
...Conservatives have rightly lamented the assault on free speech that is such a conspicuous and disfiguring reality of life in America today. But that loss only achieves its true significance in the context of a more fundamental erosion: the erosion of that shared political consensus, that community of sentiment, which gives life to the first-person plural, that “We, the People,” which made us who we are. Should we lose that, we shall have lost everything.
They saved all of their ire for Trump!
John Merline reports in Issues & Insights that Obama administration spying on the press was far more extensive than previously known. Read more here.
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
Chris Arnade is the author of a book being published on June 4 entitled Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. First Things excerpts it here.
Finding it Hard to Care
Guest post by Suzann Darnall
I have not been writing as many WoolyMammoth.Org essays lately ‘cause #1 I am finding it hard to care about politics and #2 I am too busy and/or too tired to take the time to write about much of anything. As oft times happens, real life necessities have taken priority over the plans I made while I thought I was still in charge of what happens during my days.
But, I have to admit that the first reason, finding it hard to care about politics, is the predominant cause of me not writing so much. While I am very much concerned about the future of our country, I just have such an overwhelming amount of concerns on my plate that some things have to be shoved aside and politics are among those that lose out to caring for my sick husband, my aging Great Dane, and my exhausted self. Not to mention family, grandkids, church, friends, other animals, property, and house.
I spend my days in a seemingly endless cycle of caring for someone or something. It starts about 7:30 am and runs until about 11:30 pm, with a scheduled wake-up call at 1:30 am to dispense meds and a snack. So, doing anything political, beyond occasional posts, comments, or likes online is just beyond me most days and many weeks.
However, I know that what I am doing is the most important work I can do in my life. I am caring for my eternal sweetheart and husband. I am also caring for my longtime canine companion. They both are in great need of my love and service. I am honored to be there for them. Putting my life a little bit on hold is a small price to pay for their continued health and quality of life.
I do care about politics, I just care about Pete and Blue a whole lot more. I am sure some people will find it odd that I am including my dog right up there with my husband, but anyone who knows us would understand. Pete worries about Blue more than he does about himself. And, Blue, frets over Pete when Pete’s having a bad day. So, in our little circle of life and love, we are all caring for one another. In fact, as I sit writing this in Pete’s library, I have a dog next to me as close as he can get and Pete is sitting reading in a chair behind me.
Politics fade fast when compared to Pete and Blue, and all my other personal real life concerns. Especially with the idiotic political scene we have right now where most of government and media are just focused on stopping a President who is actually improving life for Americans. Wow! How can I really care about that fiasco? The best I can do is care for my family, pray for my country, and vote for Trump in 2020. Life happens and so do miracles. I am hoping we get a miracle in 2020 and Trump gets the support he needs to keep improving our lot.
I have not been writing as many WoolyMammoth.Org essays lately ‘cause #1 I am finding it hard to care about politics and #2 I am too busy and/or too tired to take the time to write about much of anything. As oft times happens, real life necessities have taken priority over the plans I made while I thought I was still in charge of what happens during my days.
But, I have to admit that the first reason, finding it hard to care about politics, is the predominant cause of me not writing so much. While I am very much concerned about the future of our country, I just have such an overwhelming amount of concerns on my plate that some things have to be shoved aside and politics are among those that lose out to caring for my sick husband, my aging Great Dane, and my exhausted self. Not to mention family, grandkids, church, friends, other animals, property, and house.
I spend my days in a seemingly endless cycle of caring for someone or something. It starts about 7:30 am and runs until about 11:30 pm, with a scheduled wake-up call at 1:30 am to dispense meds and a snack. So, doing anything political, beyond occasional posts, comments, or likes online is just beyond me most days and many weeks.
However, I know that what I am doing is the most important work I can do in my life. I am caring for my eternal sweetheart and husband. I am also caring for my longtime canine companion. They both are in great need of my love and service. I am honored to be there for them. Putting my life a little bit on hold is a small price to pay for their continued health and quality of life.
I do care about politics, I just care about Pete and Blue a whole lot more. I am sure some people will find it odd that I am including my dog right up there with my husband, but anyone who knows us would understand. Pete worries about Blue more than he does about himself. And, Blue, frets over Pete when Pete’s having a bad day. So, in our little circle of life and love, we are all caring for one another. In fact, as I sit writing this in Pete’s library, I have a dog next to me as close as he can get and Pete is sitting reading in a chair behind me.
Politics fade fast when compared to Pete and Blue, and all my other personal real life concerns. Especially with the idiotic political scene we have right now where most of government and media are just focused on stopping a President who is actually improving life for Americans. Wow! How can I really care about that fiasco? The best I can do is care for my family, pray for my country, and vote for Trump in 2020. Life happens and so do miracles. I am hoping we get a miracle in 2020 and Trump gets the support he needs to keep improving our lot.
Friday, May 24, 2019
Muslims throw rocks at Tommy Robinson supporters
YouTube has banned sharing this video exposing British Muslims throwing rocks at Tommy Robinson. Watch it and retweet.
— Shireen Qudosi (@ShireenQudosi) May 24, 2019
I hope Tommy wins by a landslide. I’ve spoken w/ him. He’s not the monster the media are making him out as. https://t.co/9FYOEAvw32
"Silicon Valley has picked a side in the 2020 elections"
Michael Van Der Galien writes in PJ Media,
It's clear: liberal Silicon Valley has picked a side with regards to the upcoming 2020 elections. All those who dare disagree are at risk of losing their accounts and therefore their audience.Read more here.
Did Pelosi just reelect Trump?
Roger L. Simon writes in PJ Media about a huge mistake made by Nancy Pelosi yesterday.
...Nancy Pelosi's out-of-control behavior—accusing Trump of a cover-up before meeting with him (sheesh), demanding his family stage an intervention (double sheesh), etc.—clearly forced the president finally to issue a memo giving Attorney General Barr authority to declassify the 2016 campaign surveillance documents.Read more here.
The memo requires all agencies to "promptly provide such assistance and information as the Attorney General may request in connection with that review." That includes the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, and Energy as well as, importantly, the director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA.
Result: game changer. The re-election of Donald Trump will be dated from the evening of May 23, 2019. And the supposedly politically-savvy Ms. Pelosi will be marked down as the instigator.
So we will be saying good-bye to the obstruction meme. How do you obstruct an investigation that not only came up empty (i. e. no collusion) but is certain to be revealed as a treasonous set-up from the start?
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Baker, etc., etc., not to mention, Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud and a number of self-righteous clowns in MI-6 and Australian intel. You can add on Samantha Power (wait until the "unmasking " information comes out), Susan Rice, even Mueller (his whole investigation will be revealed as farce—you can bet he'll never testify) and, needless to say, Barack Obama.
"The race-baiting Al Sharpton signed the White House visitors’ book more than did any other visitor during the Wasted Obama Decade."
Writing about Kate Smith in the American Spectator, Dov Fischer asks,
...How can all her life’s work be obliterated so instantly by the kind of Truth Squad that tears down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while elevating the race-baiting Al Sharpton to democracy’s kingmaker?Read more here.
It is the kind of bald-faced hypocrisy and double standard that sometimes makes me rue the day I took an interest in the public sphere. The race-baiting Al Sharpton signed the White House visitors’ book more than did any other visitor during the Wasted Obama Decade. He ended up with his own television show. He portrays himself as a civil rights leader, and others complicit with the fraud, even though they have to know better in their inner selves, pay dutiful obeisance. Obama turned to Sharpton as he began his second Presidential campaign. Yet Sharpton has blood on his hands. He has been convicted in court of defamation. This is the Mad Kingmaker, the wormy Littlefinger, to whom every single Democrat seeking the Presidency first must turn for approbation and blessing, beseech, beg, and bend the knee?
All while Kate Smith’s recorded voice now is banned from belting out “G-d Bless America” from public arenas and stadia that played her rendition every day until a month ago.
This is the Metaphor of Hypocrisy for the New Age. May we in this land that we love see this long night end with the light from Above.
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