Have Republicans in Washington decided to "sit this one out?"

Why would voters reward those who do nothing to protect the country? Black Lives Matter has very little to do with black lives. If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you!

Dallas police officer sues Black Lives Matter and other rabble

Mark Ramirez reports at the Dallas Morning News,

A Dallas police sergeant has filed a federal lawsuit against Black Lives Matter and others for inciting race riots and anti-cop violence.

...The listed defendants include not only those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement but public figures such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Louis Farrahkan, George Soros, the New Black Panthers Party and even President Barack Obama and presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

...The suit accuses the defendants of inciting supporters and others "to engage in threats and attacks" against law enforcement officers around the country, including the July 7 murders of five Dallas officers by Micah Johnson after a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Update: Glenn Reynolds does some digging, as usual, and finds that the officer filing the suit is himself black.

Drowning out the truth about cities Democrats have run into the ground

Dan O'Donnell writes an exhaustive piece about how black lives have fared in cities run by Democrats. The piece is filled with relevant facts, and ends this way:

By every conceivable metric, black lives are worse off in Democrat-controlled cities.

Murder rates are higher, violent crime rates are higher, poverty rates are higher, child poverty rates are higher, black unemployment rates are higher, schools are worse, and populations are more segregated. Black lives are even more likely to be lost in police shootings in Democrat-controlled cities.

Yet politicizing police shootings is how the Democratic Party tells the nation that black lives matter, joining a chorus of misinformation that drowns out the truth about the cities that they have run into the ground: If black lives really mattered in those cities, then why haven’t black lives improved in the decades that Democrats have controlled them?

Read more here.

A police officer's job would be a lot easier if...

Ann Coulter writes,

The police are trying to get these criminal gangs off the street! And their job would be a lot easier without thugs like Mike Brown violently attacking them.

It would be a lot easier if they weren't being constantly harassed by BLM and their lunatic accusations of racist policing.

It would be a lot easier if they were not being targeted for assassination and mass murders by homicidal nuts ginned up by BLM. (Shooting deaths of police are up 78 percent so far this year.)

And it would be a lot easier without a group -- officially supported by the Democrats -- leading marches down city streets, chanting, "What do we want? DEAD COPS! When do we want it? NOW!”

Why does the Democratic platform endorse Black Lives Matter? And, most importantly, why was Mike Brown's mother on stage at the Democratic National Convention?

As absurd as BLM's other cases are, none have been so authoritatively disproved as the yarn about "gentle giant" Brown begging for his life from Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson before being shot in the street like a dog.

Within a few weeks of the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative being broadcast as fact from every media outlet, we saw the video of the "gentle giant" robbing a store and roughing up the clerk shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson.

This was followed by extensive investigations by both a grand jury and a Department of Justice led by the most racist, anti-police attorney general we've ever had, Eric Holder. But even Holder's Justice Department had to concede the whole "hands up don't shoot" story was a bald-faced lie.

Officer Wilson was completely cleared in the shooting of Mike Brown. As the investigations proved, Big Mike had violently assaulted Wilson, grabbed for his gun, and was charging the officer when Wilson shot and killed this raging behemoth.

However half-heartedly, Hillary claims to oppose cop-killing, so why is she using her convention to promote the biggest lie in the pantheon of anti-cop lies, and to celebrate a man whose most famous act was to violently assault a police officer?

Because of the despicable lies put out by BLM agitators, Wilson had to give up his career, move his family and will be forced to live in fear for the rest of his life. The town of Ferguson was destroyed, businesses burned to the ground, police officers attacked, people injured, the National Guard called in, and massive taxpayer money expended to contain the riots.

But at the Democratic Convention, Lezley McSpadden (mother of Mike Brown) was wildly cheered.

Eric Holder said Brown tried to kill a cop. Are Democrats insane?

If Brown's mother had done something noteworthy, apart from raising a hoodlum -- perhaps pioneering a cardiac stent that will save people's lives -- then one could understand her being a "headliner" at the Democrats' convention. But, as I understand it, her sole claim to fame is giving birth to, and then carefully nurturing, a violent, cop-assaulting criminal.

Donald Trump, along with every other Republican ever to run for president, is required to repeatedly "disavow" David Duke -- someone he's never met, never mentioned, never thought of— and certainly didn’t invite to speak at his convention.

But Hillary invites to her convention the mother of a man whose criminality destroyed a police officer's life, tore the country apart and gave birth to a murderous cop-hating movement. Will a single reporter ask Hillary to disavow that?

Facts and research-based

One of my favorite reads each week is Oregon Muse's book thread at the Ace of Spades blog. Today the muse writes about the war on cops, and how the left climbs to power on the backs of the poor.

#BlueLivesMatter

I've always liked Heather MacDonald's articles in The City Journal. Her work is scholarly, erudite, and facts-and-research-based. She's a conservative who I am glad is one my side, doing what she can to fight the good fight. Her latest City Journal piece, Chicago on the Brink is a cautionary tale of what happens to a city when the police back away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing, i.e. reduce their visible presence in a neighborhood to a minimum. What happens is that crime increases, which means that more black people die. And she demonstrates this using facts and logic.

But never mind that. #BlackLivesMatter!

Her new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, is a bestseller.

Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened.

This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate.
But never mind that. #BlackLivesMatter!

Slogans, not facts!

And for more on #BlackLivesMatter, there's Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry by Taleeb Starkes, who discusses

...a certain black-based industry — which specializes in nurturing comfortable lies while burying uncomfortable truths — propagates a notion that “racism” is the foremost issue facing black Americans, and white cops are blood-thirsty enforcers. Moreover, this cunning, race-peddling entity knows that it's easier to lie to blacks than to convince blacks that they've been lied to. Thus, black "lies" are good for business... black "lives" are good for nothing (except exploitation). And presently, business is booming.
And speaking of bad ideas, Heather MacDonald is also the author of The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society. What bad ideas? How about:

At a Brooklyn high school, students perfect their graffiti skills for academic credit. An Ivy League law professor urges blacks to steal from their employers. Washington bureaucrats regard theft by drug addicts as evidence of disability, thereby justifying benefits. Public health officials argue that racism and sexism cause women to get AIDS. America's premier monument to knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution, portrays science as white man's religion.
To these I would add the idea that a corrupt, cynical ex-Secretary of State who has peddled influence for cash, ran interference for her husband's sexual predation for at least two decades, and brazenly lied to the public about her carelessness in handling classified documents is qualified to be the next President of the United States.

Anyway:

And while these beliefs have damaged the nation as a whole, she observes, they have hit the poor especially hard.
See, that's thing. Progressives are always proclaiming their great concern for the poor, but all of their end up hurting the poor. The rich always have money and resources to shield themselves from the consequences of their folly. For example, driving while drunk is, generally, a Bad Idea, but if you're Ted Kennedy, your powerful friends will make sure that the authorities will buy your cock-and-bull story about how your abandonment of a drowning woman was not really your fault.

Or, more to the point, who is it exactly who started spreading around the pernicious idea that single motherhood is something to be praised? I don't know, but I have an idea: rich, liberal white women, who can afford to be stupid. If you're poor, though, being a single mom is really tough, and perhaps that kind of living arrangement ought not to be encouraged, wherever possible.

Of course, we know that progressives don't give a damn about the poor, they just want to them to bend over so they can climb up on their backs to reach the levers of power. That's all the poor are good for to the left.

Read more here.
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If black lives really mattered...

Bookworm writes,

Black lives don’t matter. How do I know this? Because if black lives really mattered, blacks would stop killing each other. Blacks would stop committing genocide against themselves by aborting more children than they allow to be born. Blacks would stop consigning generations to poverty by having the majority of their children out-of-wedlock. And blacks would stop treating education as punishment and instead treat it as an opportunity.

Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole “Black Lives Matter” movement, with its insistence that everyone has to change except for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claim black lives.

Read more here.

Her first loyalty remains Her

Did rhetoric from Black Lives Matters influence any of the recent murder sprees? Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review,

I keep repeating the old line: Behind every apparent double standard is an un-confessed single standard. The single standard here is that only the right people may politicize tragedy. Only the right people get to determine what sort of speech incites violence. Only the right people know when it’s a time for prayer and unity and when it’s time to take up action. Only the right people know when the blame falls solely on the murderers and when the murderers are simply a symptom of a larger problem. And when anyone disagrees with the right people, they reveal themselves to be the wrong people. Because you can only be right if you agree with the right people.

Goldberg goes on to something more amusing: the adventures of Super Hillary:

...she can do it all . . . except for one thing. She can’t handle the Internet. It’s her kryptonite. She’s helpless against its foreign ways.

All you have to do is say “e-mail” and she sheds IQ points faster than a Mr. Potato Head loses his facial features when thrown into an industrial blender. Giving her a computer is as pointless as giving an abacus to a basset hound. When asked if she wiped her server, she responded, “You mean like with a cloth?” In her initial statement about her server set up, she reassured the American people that the server was secure because “It was on property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches.”

...Comey was asked, “A few minutes ago, you also stated that you now believe that Hillary Clinton is not nearly as sophisticated as people thought. Is that correct?”

He replied, “Yeah, I think that’s fair — actually, no, not as people thought, but as people would assume about somebody with that background. I’m sorry, I should be clear about this, technically sophisticated. I’m not opining on other kinds of sophistication.”

...despite 30 years of government experience at the highest levels and a storied legal career, when it comes to e-mail and intelligence classifications, she might as well be a homeless lady pushing a cart full of cans while muttering about how the squirrels have no pants.

Obviously, I’m not buying this. Not entirely at least. I do believe she’s pretty incompetent about technology. But I also think she’s pretty incompetent about lots of things. I no more believe she’s the most prepared or qualified presidential candidate in history than I believe that bowel-stewing laugh of hers is sincere. But I think in reality she has less in common with Derek Zoolander than she does with Vinny “The Chin” Gigante.

The longtime boss of the Genovese crime family, Gigante pioneered the insanity ruse. He walked around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe muttering to himself in order to convince prosecutors he wasn’t fit to stand trial. It seems to me that Hillary “The Ankle” Clinton is playing a bit of the same game.

But, ultimately the real explanation is that Clinton just doesn’t care. Like her husband, what suits her needs is always more important than what the country needs or the party needs. Maybe Bill got on that plane with Loretta Lynch to lobby her on his wife’s behalf. Maybe not. I think both are equally possible. What I am sure about is that he didn’t care how it looked. That’s how he goes through life. And it’s how Hillary does too. It’s not that Hillary doesn’t care about the sanctity of classified information. It’s just that she cares more about herself. She’s plenty patriotic, just so long as doing the right thing for the country doesn’t interfere with doing the right thing for herself. Her first loyalty remains Her.

Read more here.

But then, of course, George Soros wouldn't fund that!

h/t Steve Reichert

Black Lives Matter and much more

Jonah Goldberg notices that Bill Clinton got upset at some Black Lives Matter protesters the other day. Jonah's thoughts on Black Lives Matter:

The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

Jonah further notes about Bill and Hillary,

One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Besides these comments, Jonah has many insightful things to say about such diverse topics as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, progressivism, Richard Nixon, classical liberalism, statism, and much more here.

Talking about race

I have a black friend with whom I have almost daily arguments. He is sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter argument about police treatment of blacks. I point out to him that blacks are mostly being killed by other blacks. John McWhorter writes at Daily Beast,

Yes, black lives taken by cops matter. But so do black lives taken by other blacks. BLM won’t win over America until it acknowledges this.

...It is considered the height of sophistication to declare that “America doesn’t want to talk about race.”

I say it’s time to retire this phrase. Imagine being from a foreign country and hearing that phrase, watching a room full of earnest people nodding warmly, after just the first eight months of this year. Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose, Sandra Bland, the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, the Charleston shootings, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Cosby, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, James Blake, and of course the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a country that “doesn’t talk about race”? Let’s face it—the assertion in itself is splendidly absurd.

...When someone says America doesn’t talk about race, they mean something much more specific: that America doesn’t think racism determines black lives to such an extent that the nation needs a vast upending of procedure.

...the black left and its fellow travelers have moved leftward of what unbiased observers, urgently seeking justice and dignity for black people, regard as politically and even morally convincing.

...racism alone is no longer the only, or often even the main, problem black people have.

...A movement cannot make a real difference in 2015 by pretending that it’s still 1965.

...black people in poor neighborhoods are in vastly more danger of being killed by young black men than by the occasional bad cop.

...This year alone, in Chicago almost 80 percent of the people killed have been black. In Baltimore the figure is 216 black people versus 11 white, in Philadelphia 200 black people versus 44 white. Most by other black people.

...One strategy could be that if the police were finally restrained from needless killing of black men, BLM could help forge new relationships between the cops and black communities, such that those communities would feel comfortable assisting cops in finding murderers. That is understandably often not the case under current conditions, and is surely as much a problem for a black person living in such a city than what white cops might pull. A Civil Rights movement for today rather than yesterday can’t focus only on racism. The issues have become too complex.

...Imagine if in 1965 when the Selma marchers walked across the Pettus bridge, black boys had been killing each other by the dozens over on the other side all summer, with that considered regrettable but ultimately “beside the point.” Black Lives Matter, I’m afraid, is on the path to making that scenario a reality. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Read more here.

Chaos on Broadway

Manhattan Infidel always seems to be on the scene to record events just when we need to know about them. Here he records what happened when one Black Lives Matter group encountered another Black Lives Matter group.