Immigration drains the government, sapping as much as $296 billion a year from federal, state and local taxpayers while depressing wages, at least in the short run, according to an authoritative study released Wednesday by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.Read more here.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Drains the government, depresses wages
Stephen Dinan reports at the Washington Times,
Feminist: childbirths biggest cause of global warming
Claire Chretien reports at Life Site News,
Gloria Steinem helped Planned Parenthood launch a $12 million fundraising campaign last week by saying “nothing is more important” than expanding abortion and “forced childbirth is the single biggest cause of global warming.”
Comparing GDPs
Mark Perry writes at AEI, 
Read more here.
As I’ve reported many times before, it’s difficult to easily comprehend the enormous size of America’s $18 trillion ($18,000,000,000,000) economy. Here’s one more way to help us understand how big the US economy really is, by comparing the GDP of US states like California, and of six groups of US states to the GDPs of entire countries, which are all among the world’s 15 largest economies.
Read more here.
Smoking Gun in Clinton email scandal
Do we have a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton email scandal? The Daily Caller:
The posts prove intent to obstruct the production of evidence to Congress, either through deception or deletion, and that these events took place after the evidence was requested. There is no legitimate reason for anyone to act this way if the emails merely contained information about yoga poses and wedding invitations.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/22/how-reddit-ruined-the-hillary-clinton-campaign/#ixzz4L8IskDRo
Funny or Die
"I'd love to meet the person who makes your pantsuits." "Oh, Really?" "Yeah, because for Halloween I wanted to go as a librarian from outer space."
"This has bee a lot of fun, Mrs. Clinton. We should stay in touch. What's the best way to reach, email?"
"This has bee a lot of fun, Mrs. Clinton. We should stay in touch. What's the best way to reach, email?"
Extremely unlikely confluence of events
Robert Shibley of the Foundation for Indivual Rights in Education (FIRE) weighs in on the "investigation of Glenn Reynolds' tweet.To find Glenn's speech unprotected,
one must also believe:Read more here.
that drivers on the affected area of I-277 in Charlotte were reading Twitter while driving;
that they were followers of the @Instapundit account;
that they saw the tweet itself; and
that Reynolds had a substantial enough level of control or influence over those drivers that they would be likely to immediately follow his advocacy.
This confluence of events seems—to put it mildly—extremely unlikely.
Corruption in the Palace of Justice
The plot sickens, as they say. Who ordered Combetta to do the bleaching? Doesn't the public have a right to know? Isn't it time for the FBI -- or some decent agent or agents -- to fess up to save the rapidly declining reputation of their organization? That the Bureau has been under attack of late for failure to identify terrorists because of overweening political correctness has only exacerbated the public perception that all is far from well in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.Read more here.
...This amounts to what the great Italian playwright Ugo Betti referred to as Corruption in the Palace of Justice. Besides being totalitarian in essence, the obfuscatory policies of Lynch and Comey have made certain that Hillary Clinton, should she win the presidency, will never have anything close to the consent of the governed. She will never be reliably cleared and an extremely high percentage of the public will never believe her -- and will be correct in doing so.
We live under a dictatorship of the moral narcissist bourgeoisie. They think they know more than we do and can do anything they wish. Actually, they know little and could care less. All they want is power and will cling to at it any cost, even the truth and basic morality. And we are their victims.
Army of Davids, front and center!
Here is the email and phone number of the Chancellor of the University of Tennessee. Let him know there is an Army of Davids out there who support Glenn Reynolds.
Support Glenn Reynolds!
Sure enough, Glenn Reynolds is being "investigated" by the University of Tennessee. I liked this commenter's suggestion,
Another commenter:
Here's a thought: Put the Dean and those "concerned" in a university minivan and send them to investigate by driving around the more riotous parts of Charlotte. I'll be interested in what they have to say when they get back. Assuming they survive, of course.
Another commenter:
If the university is truly against violence and comments that might lead to violence, I expect they will be condemning the "protesters" any moment now, right? I mean, a crowd of angry people chanting "no justice, no peace" seems a bit more likely to lead to violence than a tweet, wouldn't you think?
What are they afraid of?
writes in PJ Media,
WASHINGTON — Families of the victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack along with supporters of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) came to the White House on Tuesday to protest President Obama’s threat to veto the legislation.Read more here.
If signed into law, the JASTA bill would allow U.S. courts to rule on cases that deal with claims against a foreign state for “injuries, death, or damages” that happen within the U.S. from terrorism that is carried out by a foreign state or foreign official.
After the release of the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 commission report, families of 9/11 victims argued that the bill would bring them justice because they could sue Saudi Arabia for alleged involvement in the attacks.
Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
...Bruce Todd, who attended the protest, criticized Obama for not supporting the bill.
“I think [Obama] does not have an ounce of humanity in him. He certainly does not deserve to be the president of a country that stands for the idea of justice and a Constitution,” he said.
Unmerited grace
David Goldman
Andrew Klavan's response is here.
One excerpt:
What is the difference between Christianity and Judaism? It isn’t love versus law, or works versus faith; those are canards. It isn’t Incarnation as such; my late teacher Michael Wyschogrod showed that Incarnation is a Jewish idea, specifically that God’s presence (Shekhinah) dwells in the flesh and blood of the people Israel (Christians, he quipped, concentrate that into one single Jew). It isn’t even the different persons of God in the Trinity. Judaism teaches different attributes of God, particularly the Attribute of Justice and the Attribute of Mercy, although we do not of course regard them as different “persons.”Read the rest of "Spengler's" letter to Andrew Klavan here.
The great gulf fixed between Jews and Christians is the notion of unmerited grace. Unmerited grace is meaningless in the Jewish context. It isn’t that YHWH is a more demanding deity than Jesus of Nazareth. Jews are expected to be God’s partners, and Imitatio Dei for Jews means participating in the continuing work of creation. We do not wait for the Kingdom of Heaven; we build heaven into the minutia of daily life. Performance of the mitzvoth (commandments) is not a means to accumulate sufficient points to win a place in heaven; it is the construction of heaven on earth. The Sabbath is a foretaste of the World to Come, a portion of eternity separated from quotidian time.
Andrew Klavan's response is here.
One excerpt:
Among the obstacles to my baptism was my deep desire never to seem to have denied my Jewish heritage. In truth, I never knew myself as a Jew at all until I knew myself in Christ. I know why that offends some Jewish people, but it shouldn't. At his call, I turned toward Christ. I never turned away from His brother and sister Jews, and never will.
"Handing out immunity deals like candy" “No wonder they couldn't prosecute a case.”
Debra Heine reports at PJ Media,
A top Hillary Clinton aide and two other staff members were granted immunity deals in exchange for their cooperation in the now-closed FBI investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) told the Associated Press on Friday.
Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that Clinton's former chief of staff and counselor Cheryl Mills gave federal investigators access to her laptop only on the condition that the findings couldn't be used against her.
"This is beyond explanation,” the exasperated congressman said in a statement. “The FBI was handing out immunity agreements like candy. I've lost confidence in this investigation and I question the genuine effort in which it was carried out. Immunity deals should not be a requirement for cooperating with the FBI.”
Chaffetz told the AP, “No wonder they couldn't prosecute a case.”
Superbugs
Sabrina Tavernise reportss in the New York Times,
World leaders agreed Wednesday on steps to curb the rapid rise of drug resistance, the first global effort to stop the spread of dangerous superbugs that are fast becoming immune to many of the most critical medicines.Read more here.
Infectious disease doctors have long warned that overuse of antibiotics in people and in animals puts human health at risk by reducing the power of the drugs, some of modern medicine’s most prized jewels. The problem is global, because the bugs are mobile. Overuse in pig production in China, for example, has spawned superbugs that have surfaced in the United States and Europe.
The numbers are sobering. Jim O’Neil, chairman of the British review on antimicrobial resistance, estimates that 700,000 people a year die from drug-resistant infections. In the United States, about two million people fall ill from drug-resistant bacteria every year and at least 23,000 die from those infections.
Why do you get out of bed?
Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,
What you are in love with decides what you live for.Read more here.
Sacrifice will always leave you the most satisfied.
Fall in love, stay in love, stay sacrificing, and you live the most satisfied.
What you are in love with in life —- decides everything about your life.
Love decides everything.
Not impeached; he should be imprisoned.
On day 1232 of the IRS scandal, Paul Caron reminds us
Caron does not believe IRS Commissioner Koskinen should be impeached. He believes he should be imprisoned.
Read more here.
When the feds couldn’t make ordinary criminal charges stick to the organized-crime syndicate that turned 1920s Chicago into a free-fire zone, they went after the boss, Al Capone, on tax charges. Under Barack Obama, the weaponized IRS has been transformed into a crime syndicate far worse than anything dreamt of by pinstriped Model-T gangsters — because Al Capone and Meyer Lansky did not have the full force of the federal government behind them.
Caron does not believe IRS Commissioner Koskinen should be impeached. He believes he should be imprisoned.
Read more here.
No room for moderates
Michael Barone writes in the Washington Examiner,
Two decades ago, lots of self-described moderates and even conservatives voted in Democratic primaries. Not so these days. The slump in Democratic primary and caucus turnout, from 38 million in 2008 to 31 million in 2016, was due to a sharp decline in turnout by self-described moderates.
Hillary Clinton's move from her husband's 1990s triangulation to her near-total acceptance this year of Bernie Sanders's left-wing platform was a rational response to changes in the Democratic primary electorate.
Likeability
Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media,
I know it sounds crazy to say in a presidential year when the two candidates are supposedly the two most reviled in modern history that one of them is going to win -- I think going away -- because he's vastly more likable, but it's true.Read more here.
And I say this not just because Donald Trump's rallies are better attended than Hillary Clinton's by a factor somewhere in the vicinity of 5000%. (No exaggeration. Donald routinely draws 10,000 people. A recent Hillary appearance at Temple University -- where she was supposed to make that final, serious pitch to nail down the votes of vacillating millennials -- attracted barely 200 out of a student body of 37,000.)
In my 'hood in the mega-blue Hollywood Hills where Hillary is certain to win upwards of 97% of the vote, there is nary a Hillary-Kaine yard sign to be seen, nor an "I'm With Her" bumper sticker blemishing a single newly minted Tesla. Four years ago the neighborhood was swarming with Obama signs and stickers. Nobody cares about Hillary. Everyone knows she's a sourpuss. Nobody wants to see her. They'll vote for her, if she'll only leave them alone. (Of course you won't find a Trump bumper sticker within miles of here. The few of us who support him don't want to get our cars keyed. And forget the yard signs. Staying on decent terms with your neighbors is a necessity in earthquake country.)
Possibly the most significant thing we're voting for in this contest is someone we want to hang with for the next four, possibly eight, years. Consciously or unconsciously, that is a heavy consideration for practically all of us when we walk into the voting booth. We want someone who will wear well.
...Now the conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton's "ground game" will overcome all of this. That's what they said about several people (Bush, Cruz) during the primary season. We know how that turned out.
Once a sociopath, always a sociopath
Is Hillary a sociopath? John Craig posted at Just Not Said
Dishonesty is one of the main hallmarks of sociopathy. Craig gives many examples of Hillary's dishonesty.
Craig summarizes each sociopathic trait and then gives examples of how Hillary exhibits those traits. I will just excerpt a few in this blog post.
Sociopaths always punch down, not up. And spewing bile at people whose job it is to protect and help you is a particularly low form of punching down.
Vindictiveness and spitefulness are two other sociopathic traits.
Being two-faced is another sociopathic trait:
As Kessler wrote, “When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously. As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident.”
Hillary's corruption is probably best illustrated by the way she made herself available as Secretary of State to donors to the Clinton Foundation, which basically serves as a slush fund for the Clinton lifestyle. The list of corrupt transactions are detailed here, and have been extensively cited elsewhere as well.
We all like money. But once you've known a sociopath or two, you realize that sociopaths worship mammon in a way that normal people do not. They lust after money with an intensity that is hard to imagine. And they will do anything to acquire more of it. Anything. Even selling out their own country, in acts that are essentially treasonous.
Hillary's cupidity extended to whom she would take money from. Hillary lambastes any political opponent who isn't fully onboard with the LGBTQ agenda, or the feminist platform. Yet she accepts money via her foundation from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Morocco, Kuwait, Brunei, and Oman, all of which put severe restrictions on women and persecute gays.
The love of money fits with Hillary's writing off of Bill's used underwear for four dollars (and long johns for twelve dollars) each while First Lady of Arkansas. It fits with taking money for pro-business speeches from Goldman Sachs, the quintessential Wall Street firm, even though she claims to stand against big money. (Did Goldman really think her speeches were worth a quarter million dollars to hear, or might they have been paying for future access?)
Hypocrisy, another hallmark of sociopathy, is closely related to the inability to feel guilt, or shame. (It's a lot easier to be hypocritical when you're immune to embarrassment.)
Discrediting, smearing, and ruining lives. No one is better at these things than a sociopath. And running a war room to quell "bimbo eruptions" hardly fits with a statement that all rape victims "have the right to be heard" and "the right to be believed."
The list of Hillary's flip-flops is too long for this post; but they are all indicative of someone who will say anything to gain power. And a sociopath's lust for power is similar to their lust for money.
Sociopaths are also all about secretiveness and subterfuge. Hillary certainly showed these traits when she was in charge of that ill-fated attempt to reform the nation's health care system in 1993. And really, that is what her alternate email system was all about in the first place: keeping her Clinton Foundation transactions hidden from public view.
Sociopaths are grandiose: remember all that "two for the price of one" talk? Has there ever been another First Lady in history who saw herself as co-President?
Another sociopathic trait is an inability to love.
Another hallmark of sociopathy is lack of self-control. Hillary's explosive temper is a perfect example. Former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne wrote a book about what he saw in the White House during the 1990's. The NY Post reviewed it:
The book claims she repeatedly screamed obscenities at her husband, Secret Service personnel and White House staffers — all of whom lived in terror of her next tirade.
This behavior shows the complete lack of inhibition characteristic of a sociopath.
Another sociopathic trait is a complete unwillingness to accept blame. Hillary has always been willing to point to a "vast right wing conspiracy" or whatever other scapegoat she can think of to explain away her mistakes. Benghazi was the fault of an obscure internet video. More recently she blamed Colin Powell for her email troubles.
With Hillary, there's no one big revelation that reveals her character. It's just the constant drumbeat of lies, hypocrisy, greed, entitlement, anger, secretiveness, and shamelessness that make her what she is.
Protest?
Tyler Durden writes at Zero Hedge,
Stealing and looting cash registers from local businesses is not a legitimate form of protestRead more here.
A “protester” shooting another “protester” is not a legitimate form of protest.
Physically attacking reporters is not a legitimate form of protest.
Throwing rocks off bridges at passing vehicles full of families is not a legitimate form of protest
Beating up innocent people in parking lots because they’re white is not a legitimate form of protest.
Smashing up apartment windows where black people live to “protest” in favor of ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not a legitimate form of protest.
Trashing your own neighborhood is not a legitimate form of protest.
Looting the Charlotte Hornets team store so you can steal basketball merchandise is not a legitimate form of protest
Attempting to hijack cars and terrify their innocent occupants is not a legitimate form of protest.
"State-sponsored actor"
Nicole Perlroth writes at The New York Times,
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo announced on Thursday that the account information of at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers two years ago, in the biggest known intrusion of one company’s computer network.
In a statement, Yahoo said user information — including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, security questions — was compromised in 2014 by what it believed was a “state-sponsored actor.”
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Caption This
VtheK is famous for inviting readers to Caption This. For example,
1. Escalating their passive-aggressive hate-relationship, Hillary squeezes out a side fart.
1. Escalating their passive-aggressive hate-relationship, Hillary squeezes out a side fart.
Advice for Trump
Pat Buchanan offers some good advie to Donald trump regarding Monday night's debate.
...Recall. Kennedy and Reagan, too, came into their debates with a crucial slice of the electorate undecided but ready to vote for them if each could relieve the voters’ anxieties about his being within reach of the button to launch a nuclear war.Read more here.
Kennedy won the first debate, not because he offered more convincing arguments or more details on the issues, but because he appeared more lucid, likable and charismatic, more mature than folks had thought. And he seemed to point to a brighter, more challenging future for which the country was prepared after Ike.
After that first debate, Americans could see JFK sitting in the Oval Office.
Reagan won his debate with Carter because his sunny disposition and demeanor and his “There you go again!” airy dismissal of Carter’s nitpicking contradicted the malevolent media-created caricatures of the Gipper as a dangerous primitive or an amiable dunce.
Even George W. Bush, who, according to most judges, did not win a single debate against Al Gore or John Kerry, came off as a levelheaded fellow who was more relatable than the inventor of the Internet or the windsurfer of Cape Cod.
The winner of presidential debates is not the one who compiles the most debating points. It is the one whom the audience decides they like, and can be comfortable taking a chance on.
Trump has the same imperative and same opportunity as JFK and Reagan. For the anticipated audience, of Super Bowl size, will be there to see him, not her. He is the challenger who fills up the sports arenas with the tens and scores of thousands, not Hillary Clinton.
If she were debating John Kasich or Jeb Bush, neither the viewing audience nor the title-fight excitement of Monday night would be there. Specifically, what does Trump need to do? He needs to show that he can be presidential. He needs to speak with confidence, but not cockiness, and to deal with Clinton’s attacks directly, but with dignity and not disrespect. And humor always helps.
...But the country will accept her, if the only alternative is the Trump of the mainstream media’s portrayal. Hence, the strategy of the Democratic Party for the next seven weeks is obvious:
Trash Trump, take him down, make him intolerable, and we win.
No matter how she performs though, Donald Trump can win the debate, for he is the one over whom the question marks hang. But he is also the one who can dissipate and destroy them with a presidential performance.
In that sense, this debate and this election are Trump’s to win.
"Right to Work"
Bookworm goes on to pick up Hillary's criticisms of "Right to Work" states.
The strongest — and only growing — unions in America are government unions that have become money laundering schemes for the Democrat party.read more here.
Government workers, regardless of their political beliefs, are forced to join unions and pay union dues. The union then funnels the dues to Democrat politicians. Once elected, the politicians “negotiate” with union leaders to impose ever greater burdens on taxpayers in the form of wages and benefits far in excess of those obtainable on the free market. And of course, a portion of those artificially inflated wages then get funneled right back to the Democrat politicians.
At the end of the day, non-Democrat employees and all taxpayers are forced into funding the Democrat party. This explains Hillary’s frenzied fanaticism. It’s not about protecting the workers. It’s about protecting herself.
Wishful thinking?
Bookworm wonders if Hillary's latest outburst ("Why aren't I 50 points ahead?") is similar to Howard Dean's campaign-ending outburst in Iowa in 2004.
Hillary knows that she was owed this election and she’s mad as Hell that she’s not getting it. She is an angry, self-entitled, and quite possibly unstable person — something entirely separate from the fact that she’s an utterly corrupt, dishonest, physically damaged old lady. At the Washington Free Beacon, Alyssa Canobbio picked up on Hillary’s ugly instability and produced an anger mashup:
An ignored campaign issue
Joel Kotkin writes,
In an election cycle full of spittle and bile, arguably the greatest issue --- the nature of governance and the role of citizens --- has been all but ignored. Neither candidate for president has much feel for the old American notion of dispersed power. Instead each has his or her own plans for ever greater centralization.Read more here.
This profound disregard for the restraints of federalism comes at a time when our economy is undergoing profound centralization. Regulatory and monetary policy has benefited those with access to the most capital, making this economy more concentrated than at any time in recent history. This is particularly true in the information sector, which is now dominated by a handful of firms able to devour any competitor without fear of anti-trust objections from Washington.
This centralization is not occurring by popular demand. By a wide margin — 64 percent to 26 percent, according to a 2015 poll — Americans say they feel “more progress” comes from the local level than the federal level. Majorities of all political affiliations and all demographic groups hold this same opinion.
The preference for localism also extends to attitudes toward state governments, many of which have grown more powerful and intrusive in recent years. Seventy-two percent of Americans, according to Gallup, trust their local governments more than they do their state institutions; even in California, the mecca for ever-expanding government, large majorities favor transferring tax dollars from Sacramento to the localities.
...The federal government, a source of pride in the days of the New Deal, the Second World War, the Cold War and the civil rights struggle, is now regarded by half of all Americans, according to Gallup, as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. A recent survey conducted by Chapman University found that more Americans now have a greater fear of their own government than they do of outside threats.
...President Obama has become one of the most prolific authors of executive power in U.S. history. Critically, this has occurred in a time of relative peace and no compelling national emergency.
We need to forge a new path that empowers the grassroots economy and polity, and respects the diversity of contemporary America. We can’t expect that this movement will draw much interest from Washington institutions, which gorge on centralization, but it could be propelled by local communities and people who still believe in the decentralized democracy envisioned by the Founders.
Where things stand at the moment: Nate Silver
Nate Silver writes at Five Thirty Eight,
Here at FiveThirtyEight, our favorite election-related chart is what we officially call the “winding path to 270 electoral votes” and unofficially call the snake. Designed by my colleague Aaron Bycoffe, it lines the states up from most favorable for Hillary Clinton (Hawaii, Maryland) to best for Donald Trump (Wyoming, Alabama) based on the projected margin of victory in each one. The snake is bisected by a line indicating 269 electoral votes: cross this line — meaning you get 270 electoral votes — and you win the election.Read more here.
Right now, Clinton is over the line by exactly one state. As of this writing, that state — what we also call the tipping-point state — is New Hampshire. But a group of states are closely lumped together, and Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wisconsin have all taken their turn as the tipping-point state in recent weeks.
If she wins all those states and everything toward the blue end of the snake, Clinton would finish with 272 electoral votes, even assuming she loses the 2nd Congressional District of Maine. (Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes by congressional district.) That’s two more than she needs to win the election.
But in different ways, that both understates and overstates how precarious Clinton’s position is. It understates it because Clinton has no margin to spare. Clinton’s polling has been somewhere between middling and awful in most of the other swing states lately, and they all at least lean toward Trump at the moment, narrowly in some cases (such as Florida) and more clearly in others (such as Iowa). If Clinton loses any of the states on the blue side of the snake without picking anything up on the red side, she’ll be stuck on 269 electoral votes or fewer.
On the other hand, Clinton’s leads in the states she needs to win appear to be pretty solid. As of late Thursday afternoon, she’s ahead in our forecast by 3.1 percentage points in New Hampshire, and by slightly more than that in Colorado (3.3 points), Pennsylvania (3.4 points) and Michigan (also 3.4 points).
...State polling averages have been pretty good for the past few presidential elections, but “pretty good” still provides for plenty of times when they miss by 2 to 4 percentage points. If one of those misses is in Trump’s favor in Pennsylvania or New Hampshire or Colorado, especially if the race shifts a bit further to Trump overall, then Clinton will go from being in a pretty good Electoral College position to having a total mess on her hands.
...how safe can Clinton feel in Colorado given her poor polling in Nevada? Can she be entirely comfortable in New Hampshire given that Maine is surprisingly close? Does the sharp tilt toward Trump in Iowa tell us that Wisconsin or Minnesota have the potential to turn red?
Primal female desire
Today Chateau Heartiste examines the phenomena of female volunteers going into refugee camps in Calais, France to have sex with the refugees. The romantic settings look like this:
Contrast: There are White beta males at this very moment paying for dinners and nights out in glittering cities to impress unenthusiastic dates, while women make pilgrimages to the Calais Sex Camp to volunteer as eager holsters for penniless, smelly migrant meatsticks. The Crimson Pills don’t get harder to swallow than that.Read more here.
Weak beta males have a studied aversion to placing any blame for women’s ill-conceived romantic choices on women themselves. To do so, in the beta male mind, would mean having their puritanical romantic idealism dashed against the rocks of the bitter reality of primal female desire.
Ritual self-abuse
Bookworm was also inspired by the Brangelina articles to write some thoughts about immigration.
When immigrants come, our officials and our dominant Leftist culture hasten to assure the new immigrants that they need not change one whit. Instead, America will not only bend and contort itself to conform to their norms and traditions, America will engage in ritual self-abnegation to apologize for all the horrible things it has done both at home and abroad. America, as Wayne and Garth would say, is not worthy. Those Americans engaged in this ritual self-abuse seem incapable of understanding that the primary reason immigrants come here is because their own culture failed them, whether economically, socially, or just in terms of keeping them safe.Read more here.
Love is not enough
Today Bookworm has some thoughts on parenting.
What got her going on this subject were the many articles being written about the Brangelina split.
Children thrive in a home in which, beginning as early as possible, they are instructed in the ways of the family. These are the families in which the parents say, “In our house, we don’t pee on the floor, throw food around, hit each other, torture animals, have screaming temper tantrums, etc. In our house we do speak politely to each other, clean up after ourselves, do well in school, treat people and animals with kindness, and so forth.” The kids, having crossed the border into the family, whether by birth or adoption, are expected to assimilate. The good parent encourages each child’s unique qualities but makes it clear that the children have to get with the family program.
What got her going on this subject were the many articles being written about the Brangelina split.
As the Brangelina experiment perfectly illustrates, when parents reject their children’s assimilation into family norms and, instead, allow the children to retain their own childish norms, you end up with a dysfunctional war zone. No one is happy, least of all the children.Read more here.
Business as usual in Clintonland
Once again Stephen Green helps us to understand something complex. He links to an article in The Citizens Audit alleging that Clintonite David Brock is running a money laundering scheme.
Say, for example, you donate $1,062,857 to Media Matters for America. This is how David Brock would have used your charitable donation in 2014:
1.Media Matters would receive your $1,062,857 donation
•The Bonner Group would earn a $132,857 commission
•Media Matters would retain $930,000
2. Next, Media Matters would give what’s left of your entire donation, $930,000, to the Franklin Education Forum
•The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $116,250 commission
•The Franklin Education Forum would retain $813,750
3. The Franklin Education Forum would then forward the remaining $813,750 to The Franklin Forum
•The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $101,718 commission
•The Franklin Forum would retain $712,031
In the end, Brock’s solicitor would have pocketed $350,825, almost a third of your initial donation! That’s a far cry from the advertised 12.5% commission.
As bizarre as that scenario may sound, this is exactly what David Brock did in 2014.
Read the whole thing. But rather than “bizarre,” the scenario sounds more like “business as usual” in Clintonland.
Two professors and Twitter
From Newsalert:
A Tale of Two Professors on Twitter.Twitter Prefers Professors That Want Gay People Put in Concentration Camps To Professors Who Suggest Defending Yourself Against Violent Rioters. The Difference Between Glenn Reynolds and Eric Alterman.
Everyone knows Twitter is part of the national security surveillance state. Twitter has become a de facto arm of the Democrat party with their employees acting as a quasi patronage army for Democrats. Twitter has a problem with Constitutional Law Professor Glenn Reynolds suggesting that people facing rioters need to defend themselves, so they suspended his account overnight. But , did Twitter have a problem with angry statist professor Eric Alterman calling for Andrew Sullivan to be put in a concentration camp ? Not at all. No enemies on the left for Twitter(Democrats-Not Upset With Professors Calling For Concentration Camps).
PCP found in car of Terence Crutcher on the night he was shot in Tulsa
PJ Media reports,
A Tulsa Police Department official has confirmed that PCP was found in the car of Terence Crutcher on the night he was shot. The attorney for Betty Shelby, the officer who shot Crutcher, said she suspected he might be under the influence of something.
Homicide Sgt. Dave Walker, who confirmed that a vial of PCP was found, declined to say where in the vehicle investigators recovered it, nor did he say whether officers determined that Crutcher, 40, had used it Friday evening.
The Medical Examiner’s Office is expected to provide toxicology information as part of a larger autopsy report.
Crutcher was shot in the upper right part of his chest and was unarmed, police have said.
Benjamin Crump, the attorney speaking for the Crutcher family, said, “If we started to condemn everybody to death who might have some drugs in their system, all our neighborhoods would be affected. And so we know that’s not correct.”
“Let us not be thrown a red herring and to say because something was found in the car that is justification to shoot him,” Crump said.
Officer Shelby came upon Crutcher while she was en route to another call. Police released two 911 calls that reported an SUV had been abandoned in the middle of the street, and one anonymous caller said they saw a man who might be "smoking something."
Attorney Scott Wood, who represents Shelby, told the World previously that his client believed that Crutcher was under the influence of PCP, based on things she learned during drug-recognition expert training. Helicopter camera footage also showed that an unidentified officer said Crutcher “looked like a bad dude” who “could be on something” shortly before he hit the ground.
Following the shooting incident and media coverage, it was revealed that Crutcher had a criminal record that includes more than one dozen encounters with police. In at least four of those cases, the police had to use force with Crutcher. One situation in 2012 involved Crutcher getting arrested for public intoxication, and in a probable cause affidavit Crutcher's father told law enforcement his son had a problem with PCP.
Technology made you superfluous
Here is an obvious point, but one that I wish people would pay more attention to. Kurt Schlichter writes at Town Hall,
...today’s technology allows us to ignore the people who would presume to tell us what we can and cannot know.Read more here.
...Now you media creeps are finding yourself ignored and irrelevant as America proceeds to do whatever the hell it pleases whether you like it or not. We don’t need you; we can and will get our information by ourselves. How I yearn to fill a hot tub with the salty, sweet tears of a thousand so-called journalists who decided to put their money down on progressive ideology instead of objectivity and public service.
...just when you thought you were going to become a Lord of the Fourth Estate, you idiots completely overplayed your hand right when technology gave people an alternative to your old school media monopoly. You pushed us past the point of toleration just as the web created other places for us to go. And now, look at you. You’re nothing. Just a bunch of pompous, boring, nobodies without reputations, without respect, without futures.
...If you ever had a shred of credibility, it’s long gone, like your monopoly on the free flow of information. Technology made you superfluous. Hey, I’m right here in my pad writing a column just like you, with three key differences: I’m not pretending to be unbiased, I don’t have to wear pants, and this time next year I’m not going to be looking for a new job at some place where the term “Frappuccino®” is a thing.
Support Glenn Reynolds now!
Our blogfather may be in trouble. Glenn Reynolds got temporarily suspended from Twitter, when, in response to the rioters in North Carolina blocking the interstate and surrounding motorists, Glenn wrote "Run them down." The left is leaping, and Glenn's law professor job at Tennessee may be in jeopardy. What can we do to show support for Glenn?
In the same moral universe
Does Anthony Weiner matter? Roger Simon writes at PJ Media,
Weiner was a political leader married to the constant companion of a woman running for president who herself continually excused the behavior of her husband, the president, and even lied flagrantly about him to save his reputation on multiple occasions. (Hillary Clinton, as we all remember, made that risible but essentially proto-fascistic claim that her husband's adulteries were a fabrication of the "great right-wing conspiracy.")Read more here.
...Anthony Weiner is clearly an aberrant, but not entirely accidental, offshoot of a thoroughly corrupt world, largely centered on the Clinton family and their cohorts and minions. The distance between his clandestine sexting on the Internet and some obscure paid operative (now given immunity) secretly wiping/bleaching tens of thousand of emails off Hillary Clinton's home-brew sever is not very much. It is in the same moral universe. The same group of people are doing it.
One of the biggest web attacks ever
From BBC:
One of the biggest web attacks ever seen has been aimed at a security blogger after he exposed hackers who carry out such attacks for cash.Read more here.
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was aimed at the website of industry expert Brian Krebs.
...Mr Krebs speculated that the attack could have been prompted by an article he published, in early September, that named two young men allegedly associated with a service called vDos that carried out DDoS attacks for cash.
Soon after the article was published, Israeli police arrested the two men named by Mr Krebs. Released on bail, the pair were barred from using the net for 30 days.
Buried inside many of the data packets despatched towards Mr Krebs' site was text calling for the release of one of the men named in that article.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Clinton's Washington: the deception strategy
Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair in 1999,
Hitchens writes about his friendship with Sidney Blumenthal, who we read a lot about in Hillary's emails. Blumenthal tried to persuade Hitchens that Monica Lewinsky was a stalker. Hitchens writes,
...I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety—these were symptoms of a psychopath. And it kept on getting worse and worse—but not for Clinton himself, who could usually find a way of sacrificing a subordinate and then biting his lip in the only gesture of contrition he had learned to master. (After reading the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick, I’ll never be able to think of his lip biting in the same way again. But no doubt Arthur Schlesinger will be on hand to assure us that all men lie about rape.)
Hitchens writes about his friendship with Sidney Blumenthal, who we read a lot about in Hillary's emails. Blumenthal tried to persuade Hitchens that Monica Lewinsky was a stalker. Hitchens writes,
A president, if you think about it for a second, just can’t be stalked in his own Oval Office.) However, as time went by, the significance of the conversation metamorphosed. I became convinced that, a few weeks before the lunch, Kathleen Willey had been threatened in person, had received threats against her children by name, and earlier had had her car brutally vandalized. I discovered that, within days of the lunch, she received a telephone call from a private detective named Jared Stern. Hired to invigilate her, he had sickened of his work and decided to give her an anonymous call warning her that she had influential enemies. It also appeared that Ms. Willey had been subjected to pressure by a politically connected tycoon named Nathan Landow, whom I knew by reputation as one of the less decorative members of Clinton’s soft-money world. (Asked by the grand jury whether he spoke to Ms. Willey about her testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit on his own behalf or on the president’s, Mr. Landow has taken the Fifth Amendment.) I refuse to believe for a second that Sidney knew anything about this, but in the week that we talked, the White House “found” and released Ms. Willey’s correspondence with Clinton. I say “found” because when these same letters had been subpoenaed in the Jones case in January 1998, they couldn’t be located anywhere. Just another day in Clinton’s Washington.Read more here.
...t hit me very abruptly, when I was having a drink with Erik Tarloff, Chris Buckley’s only rival as D.C.’s first satirical fictionist. As well as having contributed to speeches for Clinton and Gore, Erik is married to Laura D’Andrea Tyson, formerly Clinton’s chief economic adviser. He’s a shrewd guy, and he’s seen a lot of the Clinton M.O. “Notice how they always trash the accusers,” he said. “They destroy their reputations. If Monica hadn’t had that blue dress, they were getting ready to portray her as a fantasist and erotomaniac. Imagine what we’d all be thinking about her now.”
How, then, did the White House expect to get away with the lie? They expected to get away with it because they had made everyone complicit. In a city where the main “source” is the government, the etiquette about sources masks the plain fact that the government has a lock on the press. (One survey, which took 2,850 news stories from The Washington Post and The New York Times, found that 78 percent of the stories were attributed to government sources either on or off the record. Talk about ventriloquism. The state uses the media as a megaphone.)
Here’s what I mean. On January 23, Charles Ruff, the counsel to the president, told the Senate trial the following whopper: “The White House, the president, the president’s agents, the president’s spokes-persons—no one has ever trashed, threatened, maligned, or done anything else to Monica Lewinsky. No one.” (I know who the president’s spokespersons are, I recall thinking at the time. But who are these “agents”?) The following day, James Warren, the excellent Washington-bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, was asked to comment on CNN:
That comment by Ruff was so palpably untrue. If I had a buck for every person at the White House who bad-mouthed her to me last January I could leave the set now and head off to Antigua.
I barely know a single reporter who could not have sworn to the same. And indeed, I do know at least one reporter who was approached by the House Judiciary Committee and asked to testify. He said no. He has to live here, and he can’t commit his newspaper. I don’t have to live here. Still and all, I wish it had been Ruff rather than Sidney I heard putting the story about. As it is, the state now has a new weapon against the press. Don’t be calling the president a liar. You’ll be accused of snitching on his juniors.
When Susan Bogart, senior investigative counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, contacted me in the closing days of the trial, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer. I had put a version of the lunch with Sidney in print, in the London Independent of September 13, 1998. I had told many people. I was in the process of writing a column for a small, pro-Clinton weekly magazine, in which I was proposing to tell it again. Furthermore, the story had the merit of being true, and of being revealing of the squalid underside of Clintonism. Every time I told it, I now realize, I was placing a friend in potential jeopardy, but only because he had elected to join the president’s bodyguard. In order to disown the story, I would have had to join the general agreement about “putting this behind us and moving on.” Well, I didn’t want to join any bloody agreement about putting things behind us and moving on. I thought it was a disgrace to have a mock trial, invisibly sponsored by the stock market and the opinion polls, at which the defendant didn’t appear and at which all efforts to mention Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick were quashed. The stocks are sold, the press is squared—include me out. To disown the story, also, I would have had to risk committing perjury, in order to accuse myself of having lied in the first place, in order to safeguard a dirty tactic used by Clinton’s proxies. Well, thanks, but then again, no thanks. That would’ve been Clintonism squared or cubed. And why didn’t I run out the clock, people ask me, and get clever with lawyers and delaying tactics? That’s easy. The trial of Clinton was in its closing stages. If I strung the prosecution along, anything they later established from me could be used only against someone other than the Godfather.
So I said that, if need be, I would confirm the Lewinsky stalker stuff under oath. I also put in the material about Kathleen Willey, without being asked, so as to help establish the White House state of mind. By the time you read this, the name Willey may be much better known than it is now, and people will be ashamed that they ever spoke so fatuously about “consensual sex.” No one has bothered to notice that I went out of my way to include Willey in the affidavit, because Sidney hasn’t been asked about it under oath and doesn’t know much about it anyway, and therefore it doesn’t help the only story that people seem to care about, which is fratricide between Sidney and me. A silly town, as I said, and sometimes a spiteful one, too. A town where, as the Chinese say, when the finger points at the moon, the idiots look at the finger.
The rest of the conversation with the House Judiciary Committee—actually the bulk of the conversation—consisted of my making a moral stipulation. This affidavit was being given in the trial of one person only: the president. It was being given as a rebuttal to a White House strategy of deception. Since grand-jury testimony had elicited the fact that Clinton was the sole author of the “stalker” slander, that he had passed it to Sidney and probably others, and had seen it get into the press, I wasn’t doing more than filling in one blank. In Senate evidence, Sidney had said that he now felt he’d been lied to by his president. He wasn’t the only one who had that feeling. So it would obviously be grotesque to proceed against him for the mere offense of giving an evasive answer. Any use of my affidavit for this purpose, I said, would cause me to repudiate it and risk being held in contempt. I would testify again only about Kathleen Willey. There are no absolute guarantees in this world, but I do know that what I said was understood. Anyway, the offense of perjury has been so downwardly defined by the Clintonoids that it can’t seriously be charged against a perjurer’s apprentice. Morally, also, it has been defined by the Democratic leadership as an offense only slightly worse than telling the truth.
And for doing that, I have already been held in contempt. But in Clinton’s Washington, it is a positive honor to be despised.
Attkisson interview with Trump will air Sunday
Sharyl Attkisson caught up with Donald Trump in Fort Meyers, Florida. She interviewed him, and the interview will air Sunday on Full Measure. Look at the crowd for Trump in Fort Meyers!
Russia arrests robot at political rally!
You might be forgiven if you were under the impression that the Russian government is a bit behind the times when it comes to modern technology and its never ending desire to stifle every last bit of dissent possible. Between the bouts its had with internet censorship and some strange claims about how binge-watching streaming services are a form of United States mind-control, it would be quite easy to be left with the notion that this is all for comedy. Alas, blunders and conspiracy theories aside, much of this technological blundering is mere cover for the very real iron grip the Russians place upon free speech, with all manner of examples in technology used as excuses to silence its critics.Read more here.
And now it's no longer just human beings that need fear the Russian government, it seems. Just this past week, a robot was arrested at a political rally. And, yes, I really do mean a robot, and, yes, I really do mean arrested.
Mockery on the internet could get you fined
Mike Masnick writes at techdirt,
Italy Proposes Law To Make Mocking People Online IllegalRead more here.
from the what-a-stupid-fucking-law dept
Every so often, we see (probably) well-intentioned, but incredibly stupid, attempts to "fight" online harassment and bullying through laws that make saying things that are "offensive" against the law. In the US, such laws (if they actually get passed) are usually thrown out once someone makes a First Amendment challenge over them, but elsewhere in the world there's no First Amendment to fall back on. Over in Italy, some officials have proposed what may be one of the dumbest such laws in history, written so broadly that it will outlaw a lot more than the kind of "cyberbullying" it's supposedly intended to combat:
Under the proposed law, the "site manager" of Italian media, including bloggers, newspapers and social networks would be obliged to censor "mockery" based on "the personal and social condition" of the victim -- that is, anything the recipient felt was personally insulting. The penalty for failing to take action is a fine of €100,000. Truthfulness is not a defense in suits under this law -- the standard is personal insult, not falsehood.
Yes, mockery on the internet could get you a €100,000 fine. Mockery. The internet. The internet is made for mockery. And now is the time that everyone should be mocking this idiotic law -- and the politicians who proposed it without having the slightest idea of how such a thing would be abused all the time. As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing notes:
... what it will do is create a tool for easy censorship without due process or penalty for misuse. The standard proposed in the bill is merely that the person on the receiving end of the argument feel aggrieved. Think of the abuse of copyright takedowns: online hosts already receive millions of these, more than they could possibly evaluate, and so we have a robo-takedown regime that lets the rich and powerful routinely remove material that puts them in an unflattering light.
Trump opposes handing over internet to other nations
Dustin Volz writes at Reuters,
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opposes a long-planned transition of oversight of the internet's technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders, his campaign said in a statement on Wednesday.Read more here.
Congress should block the handover, scheduled to occur on Oct. 1, "or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost," Stephen Miller, national policy director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
ISIS attempts to use a weapon of mass destruction
Stephen Green writes at Instapundit,
GOOD THING THERE ARE NO CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN IRAQ: ISIS suspected of mustard attack against US and Iraqi troops.
The shell was categorized by officials as either a rocket or artillery shell. After it landed on the base, just south of Mosul, U.S. troops tested it and received an initial reading for a chemical agent they believe is mustard.
No U.S. troops were hurt or have displayed symptoms of exposure to mustard agent.
One official said the agent had “low purity” and was “poorly weaponized.” A second official called it “ineffective.”
Ineffective or not, ISIS doesn’t fear us enough to refrain from attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Twitter stormtroopers have their marching orders
Apparently both Vox and Chateau Heartiste have had their Twitter accounts closed involuntarily. Here is what CH had to say about it.
Yup. This is Twatter joining the Legion of the Leprous to assist carrying Hillary Parkinsons Clinton over the finish line in six weeks. Any pro-Trump voices with a significant audience will be silenced, comrades. The oligarchs have given their dopey shitlib stormtroopers their marching orders.Read more here.
Hare and Tortoise, or Suicide?
Victor Davis Hanson writes,
The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.Read more here.
When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.
...Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”
Trump’s hare-and-tortoise strategy, his mishmash politics, reinventions, mastery of free publicity, and El Jefe celebrity had always offered him an outside chance of winning. But he is most aided by the daily news cycle that cannot be quite contorted to favor Hillary Clinton. Last weekend, in a 48-hour cycle, there were “Allahu akbar” attacks in Minneapolis and New York, pipe-bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey, and shootings of police in Philadelphia — the sort of violence that the public feels is not addressed by “workplace violence” and “hands up, don’t shoot” pandering.
...When Barack Obama is reduced to begging African-American audiences, on the basis of racial solidarity, to vote for Hillary to preserve his ego and legacy, something is up.
All that news buzz is sandwiched by almost hourly reports of hacked e-mails, Clinton Foundation scandals, and violations of federal protocols — drip, drip, drip disclosures with more promised on the horizon. Some wondered, Why did not Hillary come clean and end the psychodramas? But that is like asking blue jays to become songbirds.
Cyber serpents have no ideologies other than anarchist ruin. Hackers give Hillary no more exemption, due to her professed progressivism, than they would any other sucker foolish enough to be famous, sloppy in electronic communications, and self-righteous, sanctimonious, and slippery. Ask the ambidextrous and once iconic Colin Powell.
...NeverTrumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments. That is simply not a sustainable proposition.
The more Trump grew unnaturally calmer, he became somewhat presentable, and the more he did, the more a flummoxed Hillary returned to her natural shrillness — and likewise became less viable.
...Is Trump uncooked all that much more odious than the sautéed orneriness of the present incumbent, who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials, serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi, ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school, oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA, and has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Trump on occasion did not recognize the “nuclear triad,” but then he probably does not say “corpse men” either or believe we added 57 states.
As for Trump’s bombast, I wish there was an accepted and consistent standard of political discourse by which to censure his past insensitiveness and worse, but there has not been one for some time. Examine, for example, the level of racial invective used in the past by Hillary Clinton (“working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”), Harry Reid (“light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”), Joe Biden (“first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”), or Barack Obama (his own grandmother became a “typical white person”), and it’s hard to make the argument that Trump’s vocabulary marks a new low, especially given that few if any liberals bothered much about the racist tripe of their own. Trump so far has not appeared in linguistic blackface to patronize and mock the intelligence of an African-American audience with a 30-second, manufactured, and bad Southern accent in the manner of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
...the supposedly misogynist Trump is the first Republican nominee to entrust his party’s fate to a female campaign manager and a female African-American national spokesperson.
Never NeverTrump Trump speaks at a campaign event in Daytona Beach, Fla., August 3, 2016. (Reuters photo: Eric Thayer) SHARE ARTICLE ON FACEBOOKSHARE TWEET ARTICLETWEET PLUS ONE ARTICLE ON GOOGLE PLUS+1 PRINT ARTICLE ADJUST FONT SIZEAA by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON September 20, 2016 4:00 AM @VDHANSON The Republican dilemma Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie. When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication. In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque. Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve? The Orangeman Cometh In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders. Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower. That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters. For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc. For all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.” Yet for all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Trump at his worst was never put away by Hillary at her best, and he has stayed within six to eight points for most of his awful August and is now nipping her heels as October nears. Fracking Populist Fury Trump’s hare-and-tortoise strategy, his mishmash politics, reinventions, mastery of free publicity, and El Jefe celebrity had always offered him an outside chance of winning. But he is most aided by the daily news cycle that cannot be quite contorted to favor Hillary Clinton. Last weekend, in a 48-hour cycle, there were “Allahu akbar” attacks in Minneapolis and New York, pipe-bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey, and shootings of police in Philadelphia — the sort of violence that the public feels is not addressed by “workplace violence” and “hands up, don’t shoot” pandering. Almost daily we read of these disasters that channel Trump’s Jacksonian populism, from closed Ford Motor plants moving to Mexico to yet another innocent killed by an illegal alien to more crowds flowing unimpeded across the border. Having Vicente Fox and Jorge Ramos spew televised animus at you is about as much a downside as Cher’s threats to leave the U.S. in 2016 or the plagiarist Fareed Zakaria’s frowns. When Barack Obama is reduced to begging African-American audiences, on the basis of racial solidarity, to vote for Hillary to preserve his ego and legacy, something is up. All that news buzz is sandwiched by almost hourly reports of hacked e-mails, Clinton Foundation scandals, and violations of federal protocols — drip, drip, drip disclosures with more promised on the horizon. Some wondered, Why did not Hillary come clean and end the psychodramas? But that is like asking blue jays to become songbirds. Hubris does finally earn nemesis — and at the most disastrous Oedipal moment. This time around, even the media is no defense against an entirely new 21st-century hydra. Cyber serpents have no ideologies other than anarchist ruin. Hackers give Hillary no more exemption, due to her professed progressivism, than they would any other sucker foolish enough to be famous, sloppy in electronic communications, and self-righteous, sanctimonious, and slippery. Ask the ambidextrous and once iconic Colin Powell. Trump’s electoral calculus was easy to fathom. He needed to win as many independents as Romney, enthuse some new Reagan Democrats to return to politics, keep steady the Republican establishment, and win at least as much of the Latino and black vote as had the underperforming McCain and Romney — all to win seven or eight swing states. He planned to do that, in addition to not stepping on IEDs, through the simple enough strategy of an outraged outsider not nibbling, but blasting away, at political correctness, reminding audiences that he was not a traditional conservative, but certainly more conservative than Hillary, and a roguish celebrity billionaire with a propensity to talk with, not down to, the lower middle classes. That the establishment was repulsed by his carroty look, his past scheming, his Queens-accented bombast, and his nationalist policies only made him seem more authentic to his supporters, old and possibly new as well. The more Trump grew unnaturally calmer, he became somewhat presentable, and the more he did, the more a flummoxed Hillary returned to her natural shrillness — and likewise became less viable. By late September, Trump had slowly mastered the electoral formula, in part due to his new campaign staff — ridiculed as amateurs by the handler establishment but who were versed in pop culture that may have made establishment politics this year obsolete. In good Obama (the erstwhile opponent of gay marriage and big deficits) and Clinton (the former free trader and closed-borders advocate) style, Trump became a version of the comic-book character The Flash: He left his critics far behind to shoot at empty silhouettes while he zoomed miles away to pause in his new incarnation. Never in My Name? The only missing tessera in Trump’s mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather the 10 percent or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1–2 percent in one or two key states and spell his defeat. Some NeverTrump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican party; barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial, spoilers in a 1–2 percent loss to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win. To be fair, NeverTrump’s logic is that Trump’s past indiscretions and lack of ethics, his present opportunistic populist rather than conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters (whom I think Hillary clumsily referenced as the “deplorables” and whom Colin Powell huffed off as “poor white folks”) make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives — or too gauche to admit supporting in reasoned circles. Perhaps. But the proper question is a reductionist “compared to what?” NeverTrumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments. That is simply not a sustainable proposition. Is Trump uncooked all that much more odious than the sautéed orneriness of the present incumbent, who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials, serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi, ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school, oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA, and has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Trump on occasion did not recognize the “nuclear triad,” but then he probably does not say “corpse men” either or believe we added 57 states. Did the scandals and divisiveness of the last eight years ever prompt in 2012 a Democratic #NeverObama walkout or a 2016 progressive “not in my name” disowning of Obama? Are there 50 former Democratic foreign-policy veterans who cannot stomach Hillary’s prevarications and what she has done to national security, and therefore will sign a letter of principled non-support? Did socialist idealist and self-appointed ethicist Bernie Sanders play a Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Jeb Bush, and plead that Hillary’s Wall Street and pay-for-play grifting was so antithetical to his share-the-wealth fantasies that he would stay home? Replying in kind to a Gold Star Muslim family or attacking a Mexican-American judge who is a member of a La Raza legal group is, of course, stupid and crass, but perhaps not as stupid as Hillary, before a Manhattan crowd of millionaires, writing off a quarter of America as deplorable, not American, and reprobate racists and bigots. As for Trump’s bombast, I wish there was an accepted and consistent standard of political discourse by which to censure his past insensitiveness and worse, but there has not been one for some time. Examine, for example, the level of racial invective used in the past by Hillary Clinton (“working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”), Harry Reid (“light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”), Joe Biden (“first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”), or Barack Obama (his own grandmother became a “typical white person”), and it’s hard to make the argument that Trump’s vocabulary marks a new low, especially given that few if any liberals bothered much about the racist tripe of their own. Trump so far has not appeared in linguistic blackface to patronize and mock the intelligence of an African-American audience with a 30-second, manufactured, and bad Southern accent in the manner of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Similarly, in the old days, any candidates who met with the press, held news conferences, were easily cross-examined, gave out their blood tests and EKG results (did Obama or Hillary?), had small staffs and few TV ads, raised little outside money, spoke extemporaneously, and were not prepped by legions of handlers were considered “different” in the sense that they were welcomed mavericks to an otherwise scripted campaign season. In a bankrupt Washington world in which “wise man” Colin Powell writes to a multimillionaire donor and lobbyist partner and other insiders about Bill Clinton “d***ing bimbos,” flashes the elite race card, namedrops the Hamptons and the Bohemian Grove, whines that Hillary’s greed drove down his own excessive speaking fees, unkindly attacks his own former promoters, and exchanges e-mail inane intimacies with a former foreign diplomatic official, the supposedly misogynist Trump is the first Republican nominee to entrust his party’s fate to a female campaign manager and a female African-American national spokesperson. An Overdue Reckoning Trump’s ball-and-chain flail, such as it can be fathomed, is in large part overdue. The old Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites. How conservative was a definition of free trade that energized European Union subsidies on agriculture, tariffs on American imports into Japan, Chinese cheating or peddling toxic products, or general dumping into the United States? For two decades, farmers and small businesses have been wiped out in rural America; that destruction may have been “creative,” but it certainly was not because the farmers and business owners were stupid, lazy, or uncompetitive. By this late date, for millions, wild and often unpredictable populist venting became preferable to being sent to the library to be enlightened by Adam Smith or Edmund Burke.
...In farming, I learned there is no good harvest, only each year one that’s 51 percent preferable to the alternative, which in 2016 is a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton hailstorm.
It may be discomforting for some conservatives to vote for the Republican party’s duly nominated candidate, but as this Manichean two-person race ends, it is now becoming suicidal not to.
Can we shed the fairy-tales?
David French writes at National Review,
Here is a plain, inarguable truth: A series of Muslim immigrants and “visitors” are responsible for killing more Americans on American soil than the combined militaries of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Two more attacks over the weekend left 38 Americans wounded, and it appears that both were carried out by Muslim immigrants.Read more here.
...Despite making up a tiny fraction of the American population, Muslims are responsible for exponentially more terror deaths than any other meaningful American community. Even if you use the Left’s utterly ridiculous standard of “terror deaths since 9/11” (why exclude America’s worst terror attack when calculating the terror threat?), Muslim terrorists have killed almost twice as many people as every other American faction or demographic combined.
Yet when any politician or pundit suggests restrictions or even special scrutiny applied to Muslim immigrants — especially Muslim immigrants or visitors from jihadist conflict zones — entire sectors of the Left (and some on the right) recoil in shock and horror. Whenever there’s a terror attack, there’s an almost palpable desperation to determine that the attacker was not Muslim and the attack had “no connection” to international terror, in spite of the fact that it is now ISIS and al-Qaeda strategy to inspire lone wolves.
...The Muslim world has a severe problem with anti-Semitism, intolerance, and terrorism. As I’ve documented before, using data from Pew Foundation surveys, it’s plain that more than 100 million Muslims have expressed sympathy for terrorists such as Osama bin Laden or for barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS. Hundreds of millions more express support for the most intolerant forms of sharia law. Telethons in Saudi Arabia have raised vast sums of money for terrorist causes, and jihadists have been able to recruit hundreds of thousands of fighters to deploy against Americans, Israelis, and our Muslim allies.
...That makes it all the more important that we double down on our support for proven Muslim allies. The Kurds, for example, are perhaps our most stalwart allies (outside of Israel) in the entire Middle East. The current Egyptian regime is a declared enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has called for a “religious revolution” within Islam. If we don’t want extensive American ground forces engaged in permanent ground combat in the Middle East, we need local allies. It’s that simple.
...Those who come from a jihadist-dominated region must be forced to provide a record of their alliance and affiliation with American values and interests before they are allowed in. This isn’t invidious discrimination; it’s evidence-based policy-making. It’s not bigotry; it’s national defense. When “diversity” brings death, it’s time to shed fairy-tale ideologies and recognize grim truth. The Muslim world has a problem. It’s time our nation responded accordingly.
An alien ideology
Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,
Read more here.
The ideology behind the attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota must be confronted forthrightly.
...Many Muslims embrace the Western culture of reason, liberty, and equality, and they flourish in our society, to which they are a real asset. Nevertheless, nothing is more alien and hostile to our society than Islamic supremacism — which, at its core, is sharia supremacism. Its adherents resist assimilation and seek to impose a totalitarian system that suppresses liberty and is systematically discriminatory against non-Muslims, women, apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and other groups.
Because we are trapped in a politically correct fantasy world in which terrorism has nothing to do with Islam and Islam is innately American, the political class can never admit that obvious jihadist attacks — such as those that just occurred in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota — are international terrorism. Indeed, we are in a state of such self-parody that, this weekend, it somehow became “intemperate” and “un-presidential” to conclude that attempts (some successful) to detonate IEDs — as in, improvised explosive devices, a.k.a. bombs — were in fact bombings.
The playbook has become so tired. Nothing can be considered terrorism, even a mass-casualty attack with the objective of intimidating a civilian population or government (the legal definition of terrorism) unless and until there is convincing evidence connecting it to a known terrorist organization — usually ISIS or al-Qaeda. It is acceptable, you see, to label as “terrorism” an attack connected to these organizations because the political class has pronounced them as non-Islamic (even anti-Islamic), since they do not adhere to the imaginary, relentlessly benign Islam that the political class has dreamt up and designated as the one and only “true” Islam.
Thus, when a terrorist attack happens, the first thing we must do is worry about evil, divisive haters (we know who we are) who dare presume to call it a “terrorist attack.” After all, they could stoke a “blowback” — i.e., “hate crimes” against Muslims, committed mainly by the white racists with which America teems.
This reaction stems from the political class’s designated representatives of the Islamic community in the United States. These are Islamist-activist groups, mostly sprung from the Muslim Brotherhood — CAIR being the most notorious. In point of fact, said groups are not representative of most Muslims in the West. In reality, they are hostile to pro-American Muslims, especially those who oppose sharia encroachment and favor a peaceful solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in which Israel’s right to exist is acknowledged.
Still, the Islamists, aside from being well funded by overseas sources, are loudest and leftist. Therefore, they are the ones who receive the political class’s sympathetic attention. Indeed, over the last two decades (and particularly in the Obama years), they have become government consultants who instruct policymakers on how to think about, and talk about, terrorism.
Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.
The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.
Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.
If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.
Read more here.
It turns out that Trump is not Hitler reincarnated.
Bookworm writes,
By the way, our seventh grade daughter reported to us that her art teacher referred to Trump as Hitler. Principal has been informed. Superintendent is next.
Politico.com decided to engage in actual journalism. Rather than viewing Trump as Satan in the Church of Leftism, Joshua Mitchell, a Georgetown professor looked at Trump’s actual platform and came up with some surprising conclusions.Read more here.
It turns out that Trump is not Hitler reincarnated. Instead, he’s breaking the existing political paradigm and coming up with new ideas in American politics (although I view some of them as tried-and-true traditional ideas that worked well for everyone before the Democrats in the old South and the new Progressive party perverted them):
If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.
By the way, our seventh grade daughter reported to us that her art teacher referred to Trump as Hitler. Principal has been informed. Superintendent is next.
Healing happens - if you let it.
At A Holy Experience Jenny Simmons writes about healing.
Sometimes healing happens in ways we never imagine.Read more here.
Healing happens — if you let it.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
The United States under Hillary
Bookworm writes,
The stabbing jihad at the Crossroads mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, ended with no civilian deaths and only nine wounded because, entirely providentially, Jason Falconer, a firearms expert and certified NRA firearms instructor, was on the scene to take out Dahir Adnan. Adnan, in the course of a few minutes, had already stabbed nine people. Thankfully for the people at Crossroads shopping center, Minnesota allows concealed carry and the mall made a minimal effort to enforce its “gun free zone” status.Read more here.
Israel’s experience in the last year shows that, in a fight between a gun and a knife, the gun prevails. In Israel, during the ongoing stabbing intifada, most of the terrorists have been quickly killed or disabled by gun shots from armed civilians, police, or members of the military. Israeli civilians weren’t always armed, although mandatory military training has meant they all know how to handle weapons. Israel, however, long ago realized that jihad takes seconds, but official responses can take a lot longer. It therefore substantially loosened its formerly strict gun control laws.
...The Democrat regime in Chicago has disarmed the law-abiding, leaving guns in the hands of feral young men who have no compassion, no empathy, and no conscience. We are one Supreme Court justice away from turning America into the United States of Chicago — and the next president gets to nominate that one justice. Hillary will nominate the justice who believes you are undeserving of a tool that allows you to defend yourself and others. And of course, if Hillary wins, it won’t just be guns that make us the United States of Chicago. It will also be government corruption, economic despair, high crime, and a whole bunch of other social and economic ills endemic to areas under total Democrat control.
Fart police will be armed with methane detectors.
Weasel Zippers links to a California story from KPIX. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation that regulates emissions from dairy cows and landfills for the first time as California broadens its efforts to fight climate change beyond carbon-based greenhouse gases.
Brown’s move Monday targets a category of gases known as short-lived climate pollutants, which have an outsize effect on global warming despite their relatively short life in the atmosphere.
Environmentalists hope that tackling short-lived pollutants such as methane now would buy time to develop new and more affordable technology to reduce carbon emissions.
The legislation lays out steep reductions in a variety of pollutants, including methane. It’s tied to $90 million in funding for the dairy industry and garbage collectors.
Republicans say the regulations will hurt agricultural businesses, despite concessions made to dairy farmers.
Maybe they think their viewers are deplorable
Ace of Spades observes,
...CNN buries this tidbit, deliberately, it seems to me:Read more here.
Rahami was born in Afghanistan and traveled home often -- common for immigrant families. He is married to a woman from Pakistan, who was in the United States recently but left just before the bombings.
CNN subscribes to the notion that the most important thing in any terrorism case isn't protecting American citizens, but rather downplaying highly curious facts in order to keep bloodthirsty American citizens from going into "backlash" frenzies.
If CNN thinks so little of its own audience as to have to bury highly, highly newsworthy bits of information for fear their audience will begin lynching people, maybe CNN's audience should consider seeking out another news outlet that holds them in higher regard.
Exhaling can feel like the beginning of a divine conversation.
Theology can be talked about on Sundays, recorded at conferences – but it’s lived in kitchens or it dies at tables.Theology can be talked about on Sundays, recorded at conferences – but it’s lived in kitchens or it dies at tables.Read more here.
...When you have an overwhelmed world, you don’t have to have an underwhelmed soul — if Christ fills the thoughts.When you have an overwhelmed world, you don’t have to have an underwhelmed soul — if Christ fills the thoughts.
Exhaling can feel like the beginning of a divine conversation.
...Every Christ-follower is in the same business — to kill busy-ness and make it your business to talk endlessly with God.Every Christ-follower is in the same business — to kill busy-ness and make it your business to talk endlessly with God.
It’s like the rhythm of breathing:
His presence. My gift. His presence. My gift.
Exhale.
...And there is light across the counters.
Across the table, across the cutting boards, across the potatoes —
there is this Light that can saturate anything.
Electoral College changes
Stephen Green has created some very interesting electoral college maps.
Clinton collapsed on video nine days ago in New York, but her collapse in the polls might be just beginning.Read more here.
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