Sarah Palin was right,and the press never forgave her for it.

.. I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved.

(APPLAUSE)

I guess -- I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

(APPLAUSE)

I might add that, in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they're listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening.

(APPLAUSE)

No, we tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.

...

... I've learned quickly these last few days that, if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

To confront the threat that Iran might seek to cut off nearly a fifth of the world's energy supplies, or that terrorists might strike again at the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, or that Venezuela might shut off its oil discoveries and its deliveries of that source, Americans, we need to produce more of our own oil and gas. And...

(APPLAUSE)

And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We've got lots of both.

(APPLAUSE)

Our opponents say again and again that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems, as if we didn't know that already.

(LAUGHTER)

But the fact that drilling, though, won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.

(APPLAUSE)...

We need American sources of resources. We need American energy brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.

(APPLAUSE)

And now, I've noticed a pattern with our opponent, and maybe you have, too. We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers, and there is much to like and admire about our opponent.

But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the State Senate.

(APPLAUSE)

PALIN: This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word "victory," except when he's talking about his own campaign.

(APPLAUSE)

But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot...

(APPLAUSE)

... when that happens, what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

(APPLAUSE)

The answer -- the answer is to make government bigger, and take more of your money, and give you more orders from Washington, and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

America needs more energy; our opponent is against producing it. Victory in Iraq is finally in sight, and he wants to forfeit. Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions.

Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights....

My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.

(LAUGHTER)

Look at the time.

Is the Pope Catholic is not the question: is he Christian?

Pope Francis: 'There Is No Hell'

From Ace of Spades:

I'm not a Catholic, but seriously folks... Who honestly thought a South American Marxist would make a good religious head?

Christ died for our sins.  His followers through the ages have lived through persecution, even unto death.  It has survived and even thrived through bad leaders, but the faith lives on.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39 NIV)

And all the people said: AMEN.

A Rose Among the Thorns

Compare & Contrast

Sooner or later all commies look the same.

The Morning Rant

"Did you know that Hungary is being run by a bunch of eeevil Christian so-cons? I'll bet you didn't. But it's true. As such, Hungary has refused to assume responsibility to permanently feed and house the muslim thug refugees flocking in from the Mideast who will refuse to assimilate and contribute nothing except an increase in crime rates and the turning of their major cities into no-go hellholes. Naturally, EU globalist bureaucrats in Brussels are unhappy about Hungary for unapologetically trying to preserve their Christian culture (as well as the safety of their wives and daughters). So they've been trying to figure out how to impose sanctions to force Hungary to accept its "fair share" of violent muslim criminal refugees."

“It’s Different When We Do It”

As spotted by Jim Hoft, two Gray Ladies in one!

The news that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s motorcade was pelted with shoes and tomatoes by Egyptian protesters, who also taunted her by chanting “Monica! Monica!” as she left the U.S. consulate in Alexandria on Sunday, delighted conservative bloggers in the United States.

-- The New York Times, yesterday.

A day after an Iraqi television journalist threw his shoes at President Bush at a news conference in Baghdad on Sunday, his act of defiance toward the American commander-in-chief reverberated throughout Iraq and across the Arab world.
(snip)

In Syria, he was hailed as a hero. In Libya, he was given an award for courage.

Across much of the Arab world on Monday, the shoe-throwing incident generated front page headlines and continuing television news coverage. A thinly veiled glee could be discerned in much of the reporting…

-- The New York Times, December 16, 2008.

Mark Steyn on Clinton and the media

To reiterate: Trump became the GOP nominee because the boy scouts like Mitt all got trashed as monsters anyway. So the base grasped something that the donors, throwing their money away on Jeb, didn't - that the playing field is hopelessly tilted. The Democrats were crowning the kleptocrat enabler of a credibly accused rapist running a pay-for-play charity fraud whose only purpose was to enable them to live like heads of state in the interregnum between their first reign and the impending restoration. And the press had not a word to say about this.

The Kidman Doctrine Trumps George Will As John Bolton Rises

Conrad Black takes George Will and Richard Haass to the woodshed.

It is distressing to see my friend of nearly 40 years, George Will, writing such words of frenzied despair about the president and his national-security adviser-designate, John Bolton. It is also worrisome to see my cordial acquaintance of 20 years, Richard Haass, writing as mournfully as he did last week of the end of the Liberal World Order.

One expects, a year into an administration that went to war in the election campaign against the entire political class in both parties and among the national press (such as George Will) and the foreign-policy establishment (and Richard Haass is one of the best of them), that there will be panic below decks. One hears it every day from Joe Scarborough and Wolf Blitzer and their legions of screeching sound-alikes.

But George Will and Richard Haass are eminent men, flag officers on this ship. That George Will has a cultural and temperamental problem with Donald Trump is no surprise, and neither is Richard Haass’s concern that the Western Alliance is crumbling (though that, if true, has more to do with the Alliance-deaf previous two administrations and the flabby complacency of most of America’s so-called allies).

Read the whole thing, including the penultimate paragraphs:

This is bunk; Mr. Trump is returning to that policy. Richard also decries that “the U.S. is experiencing unprecedented attacks from its own president on the country’s media, courts, and law-enforcement institutions,” and relates this to the rise of “authoritarianism” in such places as Turkey, Russia, and China, and to Britain’s Brexit vote.

Mr. Trump isn’t the problem, but among the symptoms of the problem are that the director and deputy director of the FBI have been fired for cause as the Bureau virtually became the dirty-tricks arm of the Democratic National Committee, and that, as the Center for Media Studies and Pew Research have both recorded, 90% of national-press comment on Mr. Trump is hostile. Mr. Trump may have aggravated some of the current nastiness, but his chief offense has been breaking ranks with the bipartisan coalition that produced the only period of absolute and relative decline in American history.

Our All Consuming, Incomprehensible News Cycle

Richard Fernandez

Nassim Taleb observed that "the opposite of education isn't ignorance but miseducation." With miseducation your head is stuffed, but stuffed with nonsense. That is equally true of current events as it is of pedagogy. The dangerous opposite of information isn't the absence of a signal, but disinformation. The victims of miseducation and disinformation are both brimming with knowledge, only of the wrong kind....

Perhaps never in human history has the average man been bombarded with so many stories. Yet paradoxically, never has the public been in greater danger of strategic surprise. If it is caught at unawares, the reason for its blindness won't be lack of bandwidth but in all the things it imagined were important that weren't.

Here Are All the Reasons It’s a Bad Idea to Let a Few Tech Companies Monopolize Our Data.

From Glenn  Reynolds:

That influence comes in part from data. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and similar companies are “data-opolies.” By that I mean companies that control a key platform which, like a coral reef, attracts to its ecosystem users, sellers, advertisers, software developers, apps, and accessory makers. Apple and Google, for example, each control a popular mobile phone operating system platform (and key apps on that platform), Amazon controls the largest online merchant platform, and Facebook controls the largest social network platform. Through their leading platforms, a significant volume and variety of personal data flows. The velocity in acquiring and exploiting this personal data can help these companies obtain significant market power.

Is it OK for a few firms to possess so much data and thereby wield so much power? In the U.S., at least, antitrust officials so far seem ambivalent about these data-opolies. They’re free, the thinking goes, so what’s the harm? But that reasoning is misguided. Data-opolies pose tremendous risks, for consumers, workers, competition, and the overall health of our democracy. Here’s why.

And from the article, this is the issue that is the most concern:

Economic power often translates into political power. Unlike earlier monopolies, data-opolies, given how they interact with individuals, possess a more powerful tool: namely, the ability to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.

Many people now receive their news from social media platforms. But the news isn’t just passively transmitted. Data-opolies can affect how we feel and think. Facebook, for example, in an “emotional contagion” study, manipulated 689,003 users’ emotions by altering their news feed. Other risks of this sort include:

Bias. In filtering the information we receive based on our preferences, data-opolies can reduce the viewpoints we receive, thereby leading to “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.”
Censorship. Data-opolies, through their platform, can control or block content that users receive, and enforce governmental censorship of political or religious information.
Manipulation. Data-opolies can promote stories that further their particular business or political interests, instead of their relevance or quality.

Playboy Latest to Delete Facebook Amid Data Handling Fallout

The beginning of the death spiral of data mining by the tech giants.  The problem is that their entire business model is based on data mining.

Trump hates Amazon, not Facebook

When you take one side in the culture war, expect to get hit.  Facebook is getting the headlines but Google and Amazon are also in the data mining business.

In Venezuela, hungry child gangs use machetes to fight for ‘quality’ garbage

Where socialism always ends.

States scrambling to avert Obamacare sticker shock after Dems balk at stabilization effort

The end of ObamaCare.  It didn't have to be repealed.  It committed suicide.

NBC Tried to Claim There Were 800,000 Gun Control Marchers in DC — Not Even Close

Why you don't go to the MSM for the truth.

Hogg Hitler! The little dictator in the making.

The Republican Masters of the Universe

 Ace Of Spades

At some point, the Establishment decided on a Judge Smails response to the "Hobbits" and "Wacko Birds" of the Tea Party: You'll get nothing and like it!

They considered themselves Masters of the Universe and believed they could just steamroll the non-Establishment part of the party using the same techniques their close cousins, the Liberal Establishment Class, used against conservatives: Denigration, contempt, and delegitmization intended to convince dissenters that it was the Establishment's way or the highway.

The GOP would be refashioned into a much-less conservative party in order to appeal to surburban married women who were swing voters between Democrats and Republicans. The more conservative, more populist elements of the party would simply be denigrated as Obama denigrated them, as backwards backwoods racists who need to be educated and socialized into a more liberal, suburban/urban elite view of the world.

Did you know that Shooting "victim" David Hogg was not at Parkland during the shooting?

From Ace of Spades:

Oh, first of all, as some of you have pointed out (which I didn't hear until Charlie Brown's Implement sent me the tip): David "Camera" Hogg says he wasn't even at the school during the shooting, but "raced" there on his bike to get as much, get this, camera footage as possible when he heard about it on the news.

I previously questioned where he was during the shooting, wondering how close to danger he'd actually been. I wondered this because, despite the media's flood-the-zone coverage, they'd entirely skipped the easy (and important) story about where the spokesmoppets were during the attack. Put up a map of the school, show the spokesmoppets' location compared to the killer's.

Easy content -- and yet they hadn't bothered.

Hmmm. Wonder why.

When the media refrains from running an easy, clickbait story, it's because they're deliberately hiding something from the reader.

Turns out, he wasn't there at all. He has as much moral authority to speak about this as anyone else who viewed it on TV.

Maybe that's why he feels no shame about treating this entirely as a partisan political campaign: no actual emotional skin in the game.

About that $1.3 Trillion Dollar Spending Bill

Sitting here thinking about the hysterical reaction on the Right about the budget deal. 

Foremost among those saying that this is the end of the Trump presidency is Rush Limbaugh. I love Rush and admire his intellect and his instincts.  He reflects the opinion of millions of ordinary people, the people that elected Donald Trump.

So I decided to do a little research. I’m a number guy and when I heard about a budget deal that allocated $1.3 trillion dollars for the next six months I began looking for numbers.  That's a lot of money but what is the perspective?  We always want to ask: compared to what?

Total federal spending has been rising almost every year since 1900, the exception being the years just after WWI and WWII. Federal spending fell sharply after we were no longer at war.  In 2008 spending was $2.98 trillion and in 2009 that figure rose to $3.65 trillion, a 22% jump in one year. The Obama budget for 2017 was $4.15 trillion.

With that as background, it’s hard to determine just how bad the bill that Congress just passed was.  That $1.3 trillion funds the government through October.  Although I have not read the bill I’m willing to admit that the bill apparently funds just about everything that Democrats wanted. That’s just the rumor. Not in the bill  (I’m told) is funding for The Wall, something that Trump campaigned on, his supporters want, and most Congressional Republicans never really supported.

One thing it does is increase defense spending, giving the military an opportunity to rebuild after years of malign neglect by the Obama administration. In an increasingly dangerous world, with challenges from a resurgent Russia, an aggressive China, the global cancer of Islamo-Fascism, and a very dangerous nuclear armed North Korea, fixing the military should be the number one priority of the Trump administration.

But back to the topic: looking at this bill dispassionately, we may register disappointment that the Welfare state is getting a transfusion instead of shrinking, but we refuse to engage in apocalyptic pronouncements with all due respect to our hero, Rush Limbaugh. It could be as bad as he says, but I need to be persuaded that it’s time to give up on Trump.

As a parting thought, the guy in charge of all that spending, the holder of the $1.3 trillion dollar checkbook is none other than Donald John Trump. It will make a big difference.

You're not Facebook's customer. You're Facebook's product.

From Ed Morrissey in The Week

But should anyone really be surprised that Facebook allowed access to the personal data of 50 million people to outside firms? After all, Facebook has been selling such access to advertisers for many years — and no one forces users to provide the data in the first place. Of all Cambridge Analytica's alleged sins, the data grabbing may be the least of all.

Facebook remains one of the most valuable companies in the world. Where, we might ask, is that value derived? After all, its 1.4 billion daily active users pay nothing for access to the platform, no matter how much they use it. It's free from top to bottom. The money comes from ads. And Facebook's entire advantage in selling ads is that because its user base is so big, it can promise advertisers the ability to target virtually any demographic group it wishes. (Want millennial homeowners in Kansas? Facebook surely has them. Retirees in Japan? It has them, too.)

Facebook sells ads based on what it knows about you. That's its core business. To think otherwise is foolish.

Facebook’s sole reason for being is to gather the most intimate data on its users and sell it to people who want out influence you. It’s their reason for being. And if you didn’t understand that you self-identify as an idiot.

John Brennan’s Thwarted Coup

George Neumayr in The American Spectator

As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.

It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.

Trump has said that the Russians are “laughing their asses off” over the turmoil caused by Obamagate. No doubt many of the laughs come at the sight of Brennan, a supporter of Soviet stooges like Gus Hall, conducting a de facto coup from the top of the CIA and then continuing it after his ouster. Who needs Gus Hall when John Brennan is around? This time the Russians don’t even have to pay for the anti-American activity....

Trotsky would have understood the shorthand of all the tweets, polemics, and posturing perfectly. Nothing in this show trial bears any relationship to reality or justice. It is simply an expression of power politics, which doesn’t always end well for its exponents. As even an old Gus Hall supporter like John Brennan must know, and perhaps his fulminating panic indicates a dawning awareness of it, those who talk the loudest about their enemies heading for the ash heap of history often end up in it.

Read the whole thing.

Scandal Questions Never Asked, Much Less Answered

Victor Davis Hanson

Sometimes the hysteria of crowds causes them to overlook the obvious. Here is a series of 12 questions that do not seem to trouble anyone, but the answers to these should expose why so many of the people today alleging scandals should themselves be considered scandalous.

1) Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would we now even know of a Fusion GPS dossier? Would assorted miscreants such as Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, or Peter Strzok now be under a cloud of suspicion? Or would they instead have been quietly lionized by a President Clinton grateful for noble services in the shadows rendered during the campaign?

2) If Clinton had won, would we now know of any Russian-supplied smears against Donald Trump? ...

NOAA Data Tampering Approaching 2.5 Degrees

The coldest spring in memory needs lies to morph into the warmest.

NOAA’s US temperature record shows that US was warmest in the 1930’s and has generally cooled as CO2 has increased. This wrecks greenhouse gas theory, so they “adjust” the data to make it look like the US is warming.

 

The NOAA data tampering produces a spectacular hockey stick of scientific fraud, which becomes the basis of vast amounts of downstream junk climate science. Pre-2000 temperatures are progressively cooled, and post-2000 temperatures are warmed. This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895.

Most of these adjustments are due to simply making up data. Every month, a certain percentage of the 1,218 United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations fail to report their data, and the temperature gets estimated by NOAA using a computer model. Missing data is marked in the USHCN database with an “E” – meaning “estimated.” In 1970, about 10% of the data was missing, but that number has increased to almost 50%, meaning that almost half of the current adjusted data is fake.

Facebook Forces NYT to Quietly Delete Unflattering Reference to Sheryl Sandberg

OTOH the headline could well say that the NY Times and Facebook collude to cover up facts that are inconvenient to THE NARRATIVE.

The New York Times apparently offers powerful third parties the ability to edit away–that is, to delete from the internet–unfavorable coverage appearing in the paper of record’s online edition.

One such entity afforded the privilege is Facebook. And this has legal experts raising antitrust concerns.

It's why all of the MSM gives you the same version of a story.  They're not competitors, they're partners in propaganda.

Read the whole thing.

Britain ..."an entire nation that sits back and accepts that its women are to be preyed upon"

A nation of cuckolds: 

Nevertheless, I think we should make an exception to our general "cuck"-free-zone rule for the case of contemporary Britain, which is literally descending into the United Cuckdom - that is to say, an entire nation that sits back and accepts that its women are to be preyed upon. Eight days ago The Sunday Mirror reported on "Britain's 'worst ever' child grooming scandal". The headline editor's sub-quotes are most prudent: This is the "worst ever" at the time of writing, but who knows what'll come along next week? This time it's the Shropshire town of Telford:

Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED

If you're saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Telford? Surely you mean Rotherham? Or Rochdale? Or Oxford? Or [Your Town Here]?", well, yes, this story reads (especially for yours truly, who spent several days with the poor damaged young 'uns of Rotherham) with a certain numbing familiarity:

"Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men.

"The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.

"Days later, the ringleader turned up at my house and told me he'd burn it down if I breathed a word of what had happened."

Mark Steyn on "cuckservatives"

Mark comes up with as good a definition of the Modern Concervative as I have seen, but then he is a master wordsmith:

As the purveyor of a family-friendly website, I have been reluctant to join in the popularization of the epithet "cuck" - as in "cuckold", as in "cuckservatives", etc. Yes, yes, as a practical matter, most mainstream conservatives are hopeless squishes who haven't conserved a single thing and for whom, as I complained to John Oakley in Toronto the other day, no hill is ever the hill to die on.

The Coming Collusion Bloodbath

... while the Russians attempted mass chaos. The more serious scandal appears to have covered up criminal behavior, illicit manipulation of the FISA process, and an attempt to undo the quite serious results of an election.
Is there anything more sacred in our representative republic?

The scandal that goes mostly unmentioned began before the election had even occurred but appears to have continued well past the final results of election night, with one candidate winning 30 of 50 states, and racking up a 304 to 227 victory in the electoral college.

A victory that looks increasingly historic in light of what increasingly appears to be the collusion of the then current administration with one campaign, and in instance after instance attempting to push their thumb on the scale of the outcome.

The Democrats’ illicit partnership with the Obama Justice Department and what appears to be an increasingly corrupted leadership at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was yet one more logistical hurdle that President Trump would have to overcome in his surprising and transformational win.
Few remember, though my radio show discussed at length, the reports that surfaced in October of 2016. In reaction to the bizarre July 5th announcement by then FBI director James Comey, FBI officials revealed that members of the DOJ and FBI investigative teams that had worked the Hillary email case were “angered & disgusted” that the co-opted DOJ and FBI leadership ignored the very real analysis of evidence and decided against bringing criminal indictment against Hillary Clinton for the handling of top secret information. More than 100 FBI agents that worked the case, and more than 6 DOJ attorneys expressed their disgust, according to a source within the group.

Samantha Power Issues Veiled Threat At Trump After McCabe Firing

Power was first identified by the Washington Free Beacon last month as a central figure in a congressional investigation into efforts by senior Obama administration officials to obtain classified intelligence information in what many allege was an effort to undermine President Donald Trump and his incoming national security team.

Power is believed to be the anonymous official responsible for “hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” according to current and former U.S. officials who spoke to the Free Beacon about the ongoing investigation.

They seem to believe that they still run the government and can punish their enemies.

Cankles is STILL not my president

Gerard Vander Leun

Vile, raddled, drunk old shrike takes yet another tumble – If Trump never accomplished one single thing other than pulling this monstrous, power-mad harpy’s fangs for good, the nation would still owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. Instead of receiving even the slightest sympathy from real Americans, the Hildebeast ought to be attacked and/or mocked every time the opportunity presents itself—vigorously, venomously, and without mercy or hesitation, right up until the day when she takes yet another of her habitual dipsomaniacal tumbles and breaks her filthy fucking neck at last.

And from Cold Fury

Even statements such as those [in India], offensive as they are, don’t quite give the loathsome shrew her due. This is a woman who feels it her Divine Right to rule this nation—the ENTIRE nation, not just the coastal urban specks of it she’s so pleased and proud of having won. The rest of the country—you know, that vast but negligible (to her) part where the majority of us live, the part she famously dismissed as being “a basket of deplorables”—she hates down to her very marrow.

But no, to say she hates it doesn’t quite meet the case either. She DESPISES it, and all the people in it who also happen to be the people who make the country work. The people who, to quote dear old George Bailey again, do most of the living and the working and the paying and the dying in this country. The people who enable termagants like Hillary!™ to go right on sneering at them from the comfort, security, and luxury of their crumbling urban ratholes.

...

Sympathy for such an odious example of damned near everything wrong with not just feminism but “liberalism” itself? Not a chance. This is a woman who, had she been able to defraud her way into the White House, intended to A) disarm us; B) enact more strangling, prosperity-killing regulation; C) continue ignoring border security and importing more unassimilable hordes of unskilled Mexican perpetual dependents and Muslim killers; D) reinforce the Deep State status quo in any way she could contrive; E) never miss a single opportunity to lecture Normals about how “deplorable” we all are; F) forestall the energy independence we currently enjoy by harassing oil companies and propping up “green energy” scam artists with federal funds distributed in the most profligate fashion imaginable; G) extend and entrench the federal Leviathan’s power over us; H) in general, make the “American decline” she and her fellow shitlibs so fervently long for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sympathy? Sorry, not from here. Not ever. Fuck her. In her cirrhotic liver, with a rusty railroad spike. And her little dog Huma, too.

Here’s dash cam footage of the collapse of the bridge in Florida

Contreras Recusal Conflict – FBI Agent Peter Strzok Friends With Flynn Judge Rudolph Contreras…

For those following the increasingly curious case against General Mike Flynn, events take another unusual turn today. Congressional investigators have shared a set of unredacted text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his cohort DOJ Attorney Lisa Page which reveal a personal friendship between Agent Strzok and Flynn’s initial presiding judge Rudolph Contreras.

Read the whole thing.

Book: Obama Had Longstanding Relationship with FusionGPS, Employing Them in 2012 to Dig Opposition Dirt on Mitt Romney

Oh, Washington Consensus, tell me more about the straight-shooting hard-nosed investigative reporter Glenn Simpson and how you can totally trust everything his clients want you to print.

A new book claims former President Barack Obama hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Romney

Obama used law firm Perkins Coie to hide payment to Fusion GPS

The Clinton campaign would later do the same thing to investigate Trump

The Barack Obama presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS in 2012 to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a book released on Tuesday.

The Obama campaign hid its payments to Fusion GPS through its law firm, Perkins Coie. The arrangement is similar to the one that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee used to pay Fusion for its investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

...

"As had become standard practice in the shadowy world of 'oppo' research, the Obama campaign’s payments to Fusion GPS were never publicly disclosed; the money paid to the investigative firm was reported on campaign disclosure reports as legal bills to the campaign’s law firm, Perkins Coie," the book reads.

Mollie Hemingway: Diehard Conspiracy Theorists In Media and NeverTrump Can't Figure Out if Tillerson Was a Lapdog of Putin or a Dogged Opponent

Ace of Spades does a fairly good job of cutting Jonah Goldberg's nuts off.

Last night on Special Report, Jonah Goldberg insisted that the House Intelligence Committee report that there was no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump actually vindicated the "Washington Consensus," which he claimed only believed that Russia had interfered with the election, but did not believe anything about collusion.

Are you kidding me? Look through Mollie Hemingway's tweets from the Conspiracy Theorists -- all in the media, or formerly in the media, like Twitter activist Bill Kristol -- and try selling me on this jackass notion that the "Washington Consensus" has not been pushing the "Trump's a traitor and Manchurian Candidate in cahoots with Putin" line for sixteen long hysterical months.

But Jonah Goldberg did rise up vociferously to claim the "Washington Consensus," which must no doubt include his buddies at CNN who push this literally all day long, never really believed there was any "collusion," just interference on Russia's part but without any collusion with Trump.

It's insane. It's literally insane.

Does he literally never watch CNN? That would shock me -- I have a feeling he watches CNN a lot, in between watching MSNBC.

Mollie Hemingway comments:

Just last night I was told on national television that the general consensus in D.C. is that Russia is bad but that Trump and Russia didn't collude. That a treasonous collusion narrative isn’t even "remotely" the general consensus. Someone might want to tell... everyone in the media who has been pushing it non-stop for more than a year no matter the facts on the ground.

As the media reaction to Tillerson's nomination and firing show, we're witnessing the Unified Theory Of Russia Collusion at work. If it's true that the "general consensus" in D.C. is nothing remotely near the idea that Trump and Russia colluded to steal the 2016 election, people should stop pushing the theory. Better yet, if they buy into the theory -- as so many of our supposed media elites obviously do -- they should start to be more specific about the theory. And if they don’t, they should not nibble around the margins of the theory.

Hear, hear. Less "Just Asking Questions" about whether fire can really melt steel, and more straightforward declarative assertions about what Trump either did do or did not do.

There is a game in politics. The Truthers played this game; some politicians hoping to curry favors with the Truthers played it. Like John Kerry.

The game goes like this: While not explicitly endorsing a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence, you sort of talk it up to maintain its viability as a political attack point. You don't say definitively you believe it -- you just say, as Patterico says today, it raises "interesting" questions.

You keep your "Clean Skin" as far as being a Conspiracy Theorist, and yet you do all you can to suggest to the conspiracy-minded that the conspiracy is All Too Real.

It's a way to speak as Yasser Arafat did, to two different audiences telling two different stories. You encourage conspiracy theorizing, while (mostly) not committing yourself to any particular version of the conspiracy theory.

Just Askin' Questions, you know.

It's one thing for politicians to do this -- they lie.

But pundits and analysts and "thinkers" and "experts" are supposed to tell you exactly what they think.

If Jonah Goldberg, for lo these many months (sixteen or thereabouts) has known that the "Washington Consensus" was actually that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia, why did he keep that on the Q.T. and the D.L.?

Why didn't he tell people?

Why did he enable a conspiracy theory he's now telling us that those In-the-Know always knew was pretty much bullshit?

It's the equivalent of a guy who never quite declares that "Bush knew" that the 9/11 attack was coming but let it happen anyway to enable the PNAC warplan but who is careful never to pour cold water on such conspiracy theories to keep #TheResistance agitated and animated.

You are paid, supposedly, for the truth, and what you know, and what you don't quite know but think to a reasonable certainty.

If Jonah Goldberg is claiming that there is no, and was no, "Washington Consensus" about the Manchurian Apprentice conspiracy theory, why has he been so shy about saying so?

And why is he not throwing cold water on the various members of the Washington Consensus -- such as Patterico, Erick Erickson, Bill Kristol, and of course various and sundry members of the legacy media -- currently spinning out new conspiracy theories about Tillerson's long-expected firing?

If you don't believe in the Conspiracy Theory, then say so firmly.

And if you do believe in it -- then say that too. Do not hide your beliefs with equivocation, evasion, and insinuation.

Where's Jonah on this? Will he ever say? Will he just talk around it without doing his basic job -- You Had One Job, you know -- of telling his readers what he really thinks?

Those pushing this theory should stop being cowards and dishonest hacks and tell us what they believe the quid was in this collusion, what was the quo, and how it was all agreed to.

And, as bonus: They should clue us in as to whether US troops killing Russian troops in Syria was done on Putin's orders.

And as another bonus: Given that the House Intelligence Committee is set to announce no evidence of any collusion -- are they now part of the conspiracy?

Or are they, the people with first-hand knowledge of witness statements and reams of classified reports the average blogger or Twitter blowhard does not possess, somehow less informed by the Washington Consensus Elites?

MARK STEYN: Speakers Cornered

[F]ree speech is now so imperiled in much of the "free world" that simply scheduling a debate on a controversial subject will attract the attentions of the mob - and by "controversial subject" I don't mean Islam or abortion or gay marriage or climate change; a debate on the subject of free speech is now so provocative that, as I noted the other day, the "progressive" thugs will descend to break it up, throw smoke bombs, smash the windows of ancient listed buildings, and put the security guards in hospital.

As repulsive as these goons are, the reaction of officialdom is worse: They take the side of the mob, and thereby incentivize them. For example, Martin Sellner (of the Austrian wing of the European "hipster-right" movement Generation Identity) was originally scheduled to speak at a British free speech conference organized by UKIP's youth branch. However, this was canceled "due to security threats from the far left".

That's disgraceful: the heckler's veto turned pre-emptive and given official sanction.

So, instead, it was arranged for Herr Sellner to give a speech at Speakers' Corner at Hyde Park in London. Speakers' Corner has been a global symbol of free speech for a century and a half: Marx and Lenin both spoke there, and George Orwell and Marcus Garvey, and the first generation of African nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah. If I recall correctly, the only form of speech prohibited there was "insulting the Queen", but in a 1999 court decision Lord Justice Sedley removed even that genteel restraint.

Nevertheless, flying in from Vienna to give a speech on the very subject for which Speakers' Corner is famous - freedom of expression - Herr Sellner and his girlfriend Brittany Pettibone were detained upon the arrival of their flight on Friday. After twelve hours of separate detention at Luton Airport, the UK Border Force then moved them at 1am on Saturday to the main detention facility at Heathrow.

Austria is a member of the European Union, as is (almost two years after the Brexit vote) the United Kingdom. There is supposed to be freedom of movement between EU member states - Austrians, for example, have the right to work in the UK. Yet the same "Border Force" that breezily waves through the family of the Ariana Grande bomber, and the Parsons Green Tube terrorist, and the jihadist loon who killed a Japanese man in Dundalk will not even permit Mr Sellner and Miss Pettibone to set foot on UK soil to give a speech on free speech for fear that such an exercise of free speech might be too provocative to those who revile it.

So much for freedom of movement within the EU. What about freedom of movement within Her Majesty's Dominions? Lauren Southern, formerly of The Rebel and a Canadian subject of the Queen, has just been denied entry to the UK by Home Secretary Amber Rudd on the grounds that she represents "a threat to the fundamental interests of society and to the public policy of the United Kingdom".

Those are not legal concepts in a free society: they're all-purpose control mechanisms. A government that's entirely incompetent when it comes to keeping out people who want to bomb and stab and decapitate you is suddenly "the most competent Border Force in the world" when it comes to keeping out people who talk and interview and argue - people whose only weapons are words. This will not end well for English liberties.

HOW THE NEW ARISTOCRACY MASKS ITS PRIVILEGE

The ruling class denies that they really are a self-perpetuating elite that has not only inherited certain advantages but also seeks to pass them on. To mask this fact, they describe themselves as the vanguard of equality, in effect denying the very fact of their elevated status and the deleterious consequences of their perpetuation of a class divide that has left their less fortunate countrymen in a dire and perilous condition. Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that their insistent defense of equality is a way of freeing themselves from any real duties to the lower classes that are increasingly out of geographical sight and mind. Because they repudiate inequality, they need not consciously consider themselves to be a ruling class. Denying that they are deeply self-interested in maintaining their elite position, they easily assume that they believe in common kinship—so long as their position is unthreatened. The part of the “noble lie” that once would have horrified the elites—the claim of common kinship—is irrelevant; instead, they resist the inegalitarian part of the myth that would then, as now, have seemed self-evident to the elites as well as the underclass. Today’s underclass is as likely to recognize its unequal position as Plato’s. It is elites that seem most prone to the condition of “false consciousness.”

Welcome to the New Class Warfare

Steven Allen in American Greatness:

The Democratic Party was once considered the home of working people. That changed as mainstream liberals of the 1960s such as Hubert Humphrey, John and Bobby Kennedy, and AFL-CIO leader George Meany were replaced by radicals and their ideological offspring.

A key moment in that transition came during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Before a group of wealthy supporters in California, Obama spoke condescendingly of people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In 2011, Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times:

(P)reparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment—professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists—and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

After the 2014 election, in which 64 percent of “white” voters without college degrees favored Republicans, political analyst Ronald Brownstein said of such voters: “You’re talking about people who are deeply alienated from American life, both culturally and economically.”

Soon, those “alienated” people had a candidate. In August 2015, the British newsmagazine The Economist called Donald Trump’s base “relatively uneducated supporters who don’t have much disposable income, are relatively unlikely to volunteer on his behalf, and who may not even show up at the polls on primary day.”

Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and a regular contributor to American Greatness) wrote in National Review:

Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see.

Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, noted that “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.”

Indeed, rabidly anti-Trump Republicans shared Democrats’ disdain for Trump supporters. Kevin Williamson of National Review wrote, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”

From there, it was a short walk to Hillary’s Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”

What you’re seeing now, played out every night on the news, is class warfare.

America’s privileged elites refuse to accept Trump as president and support any effort, no matter how absurd, to bring him down. (Impeach him! He’s a Russian spy!)

Trump may be a New York billionaire, but to the elites, he’s a man of Queens—the Queens of working-class history and Archie Bunker stereotype—rather than a sophisticated Manhattanite, who would be fit for the presidency.

Worse, he is a stand-in for his supporters. Too many of them are the kind of folks who work on farms or in factories or on construction projects. Too many are the sort who take showers after they get home from work rather than before they leave for work.

It’s a pattern repeated throughout history: Members of one group—say, the British aristocracy, or the Bourbon planter class in the South—come to dominate members of another group—the peasantry, or poor African-Americans and white farmers. In the minds of the elites, the advantages they experience must be the result of their innate superiority; they are more moral, more sophisticated, more intelligent than the lower classes. They’re just better.

We Now Have Proof Susan Rice Gave the ‘Stand Down’ Order

You may recall Susan Rice’s pivotal role in lying about the Benghazi affair where Americans on the ground said they were given a stand down order, delaying them from rescuing the Americans who were under fire at the mission.

But now there’s new information that Rice figured prominently in another ‘stand down’ order of some weight.

Many have questioned why the Obama administration didn’t respond to the supposed Russian involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC and the leaking of John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 campaign.

As it turns out, it was Rice who prevented actions from being taken, according to a new book by Michael Isikoff and David Korn, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”

From Biz Pac Review:

The former National Security Adviser, who chaired a number of high-ranking intelligence principals, told an official to “stand down” on developing cyber-espionage countermeasures because they had not been approved by President Obama.

Trump pardons Kristian Saucier, former sailor jailed for submarine pictures

President Trump issued the second pardon of his presidency Friday to former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier, who learned the news while driving a garbage truck, the only job he could find with a felony conviction.

Saucier was sentenced to a year in prison during the 2016 campaign for taking pictures inside a nuclear submarine. Trump invoked his case repeatedly on the campaign trail, saying he was “ruined” for doing “nothing” compared to Hillary Clinton.

Saucier, now 31, was 22 years old when he took the cellphone photos in 2009. He pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information and his attorneys unsuccessfully requested the "Clinton deal," meaning little if any punishment.

RNC Chair Calls On DNC Chair To Address Party’s Ties To ‘America’s Leading Anti-Semite’ Louis Farrakhan

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called on her Democratic National Committee counterpart, Tom Perez, Friday to address the ties DNC vice chair Keith Ellison and other members of the party have to Louis Farrakhan.

The Democrats can't disavow one of their leading spokesmen: Louis Farrakhan.

It's all about Black Racism.

Twitter refuses to comment on Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic tweets

Twitter has refused to comment on anti-Semitic tweets from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, including one where he writes "the Jews have control over those agencies [FBI] of government."

Twitter management is anti-semitic.

Ignoring Democrats’ Farrakhan Ties Is The Epitome Of Media Bias

A congressman reaffirmed his ties to an avowed anti-Semite this week, but you wouldn’t know about it if you get your news from the establishment media.

The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Peter Hasson broke the story of Democratic Rep. Danny Davis doubling down on claiming Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is an “outstanding human being.”...

In January, a photo emerged of then-Senator Barack Obama shaking hands with Farrakhan at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in 2005. Little attention was paid to the photograph outside of conservative media.

In February, Hasson broke the news that Democratic National Committee deputy chairman Keith Ellison had met with Farrakhan multiple times since he supposedly disavowed the NOI leader in 2006. Ellison has faced very little scrutiny for these continuing ties to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group.

When 21 members of the Congressional Black Caucus were asked by Hasson to disavow Farrakhan, all declined. But that shouldn’t be too surprising when Ellison himself says his fellow Democrats aren’t bothered by his Farrakhan connection. 

Multiple leaders of Women’s March — one of the biggest left-wing organizations at the moment — have strong ties to Farrakhan and aren’t ashamed about it. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well. He is definitely the GOAT [Greatest Of All Time],” Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory once said of Farrakhan. She has refused to disavow the NOI leader and praised the group’s work as recently as Wednesday. (It would seem like all of these prominent Democrats and progressives having ties to a hate figure would be a huge news story. But the only establishment media figure to cover it is CNN’s Jake Tapper, who devoted a brief segment of his show to the story on Monday.

Who Believes in Russiagate?

Knowledgeable reporters on the left and right are frightened by the spread of an elite conspiracy theory among American media

The specter of an intelligence bureaucracy working in tandem with the press to preserve the prerogatives of a ruling clique is the kind of thing that someone who knows Russia from the inside and actually fears the specter of authoritarian government would naturally find worrying. And not surprisingly, concerns over the role of the intelligence community and its increasingly intrusive methods motivate other Russiagate critics on the left, like Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, historian Jackson Lears writing at the London Review of Books, and Stephen Cohen at The Nation.

“One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate,” writes Lears, “is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling—a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves liberals.”

Cohen, a distinguished if often overly sympathetic historian of the Soviet Union, was even more alarmed. “Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community?” asks Cohen, referring to former CIA director John Brennan as well as ex-FBI chief James Comey. “If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history and the most detrimental to American democracy.”

This is what it is.

What unites Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and McCarthy obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to delegitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite.

Adam Entous: threat to Democracy.

If you think Russiagate is real, then you will probably conclude that Sessions, Prince, and Page are all part of a single, monstrous criminal conspiracy—and that Adam Entous is one of the most important journalists in American history, an indefatigable shoe-leather reporter who helped whistleblowers inside the federal government put the truth before the American public, like Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Neil Sheehan combined. If you think the collusion story is nonsense, then Entous is just a political operative with a convenient byline. And if you think Russiagate is a campaign of political warfare waged in the shadows by bureaucrats who violated the privacy of American citizens in order to undo election results they disagreed with, then Entous is something worse—an asset whom sectors of the intelligence community have come to rely on in order to manipulate the public.

THE REAL REASON WE NEED ‘FAHRENHEIT 451’ NOW MORE THAN EVER

Because it's the Left who are the book burners.

Need proof? Consider the following examples. See how each ties too neatly into the freedom-snuffing themes Bradbury conjured 65 years ago.

• Progressive activist Chelsea Handler wants comedians who tell racially-charged jokes arrested.

• Actors Alyssa Milano, Evan Handler, Misha Collins and Tara Strong are trying to shut down NRA TV by demanding Amazon.com stop streaming the pro-Second Amendment news service.

• Liberals like Julianne Moore support pulling down Confederate statues and renaming schools connected to the pre-Civil War south.

• Colleges across America are censoring conservatives. Firebrands (Milo Yiannopoulos), right-leaning feminists (Christina Hoff Sommers), Jewish intellectuals (Ben Shapiro), conservative researchers (Charles Murray), pundits (Heather MacDonald) and Canadian iconoclasts (Jordan Peterson) all have faced liberal mobs eager to shut them down. Or worse.

• Musicians attempted to stop a concert conducted by radio talker Dennis Prager due to his traditional, conservative philosophies.

• Liberal outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic screamed that HBO should pull the plug on “Confederate,” a “what if” series imagining an America where slavery never went away … sight unseen. Judd Apatow was one of the few progressives to be shocked by the effort.

• “Girls” creator Lena Dunham wanted media outlets to avoid using certain words while covering then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

• A Gallup survey of college students found 24 percent of white students and 41 percent of black students felt certain political ideologies should be banned if they offend some groups.

• Massive media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are routinely, and credibly, accused of diminishing conservative voices.

• Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel faced an uproar after news broke he gave more than $1 million to the GOP. Leftists tried to remove him from Facebook’s board but Mark Zuckerberg defended Thiel.

• Two scribes responsible for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” recently argued that the “Death Wish” remake should be pulled from theaters.

• The studio behind “The Death of Stalin” airbrushed actor Jeffrey Tambor out of its poster following allegations the “Transparent” star sexually harassed co-workers.

• This is just a sample of what’s happening in America these days with nary a whisper of protest from liberals, academia, Hollywood or other bastions of progressive thought.

It’s precisely why a story like “Fahrenheit 451” will resonate with audiences come May, even if the usual voices will distract us from that cold, hard truth.

Liberals truly believe that all races commit crimes at exactly the same level, frequency and intensity; AND they are willing to have people die for their political agenda.

Ann Coulter on RACIAL QUOTAS KILL KIDS.

The "school-to-prison pipeline" argument for racial quotas in discipline was hatched in education schools and black studies departments. What I want to know is: How did they test the idea?

To validate the theory that recording students' criminal behavior produces students with criminal records, we divided students into two groups. Group A we continued to suspend when they acted up; Group B we would not suspend no matter what -- even when they engaged in their little mischief, like cracking heads with crowbars, dropping teachers off buildings, using a switchblade to cut other students' eyes out.

RESULT: At the end of the year, Group B had better records.

Were the researchers really in suspense about how the experiment was going to turn out? I could have told them at the beginning that their odds of success were tremendous -- unless they forgot halfway through and began accidentally suspending students in Group B.

But the Obama administration said: Wow! That's amazing. Do you think other schools could replicate those results?

One of the administration's models was Broward County, Florida. Which is kind of important, now that we know that it was Broward's official policy to make it impossible to arrest students like Nikolas Cruz, thus allowing him to amass a cache of firearms, walk into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murder 17 people.

The "school-to-prison pipeline" nonsense may not be the explanation for every school shooting, but it is absolutely the explanation for THIS school shooting. No matter what Cruz did, no matter how many times his crimes were reported to the sheriff or school officials, there was no way a lad with a name like "Nikolas Cruz" was ever going to leave school with a record.

The once admirable Racial Equality movement in America has regrettably transformed itself within a mere 50 years into a Racial Inequity in Perpetuity Movement

Too true, unfortunately

I once thought, when I was drowned deep in the somnambulant 60s dreams of racial equality, that we could — as people of good will working together — achieve the dream of Dr. King. Now I know it is nothing but a chimera. The truth is that good seldom overcomes greed and there is simply too much money to be made and to many jobs to be handed out by the Racial Grievance Industry of America.

The once admirable Racial Equality movement in America has regrettably transformed itself within a mere 50 years into a Racial Inequity in Perpetuity Movement, and is probably more entrenched than a government bureaucracy — especially since many government bureaus and employees have a role in it. As a result, there is no sense in yearning any longer for a raceless or classless America.

The control of words and images by the Race Hustlers of America ensures that that day will never come about no matter how much the people yearn for it. As long as the cheap mouthpieces of a faux ghetto identity strut and fret their weary wares upon the stage of our corrupted culture, as long as there is one grill left to be set on one pair of greedy teeth, as long as the Holy Grail of a Big Reparations Check is dangled in front of all those that hold within their genes a single sequence of African DNA, the Race Hustling Religion of America will never fold up its tents and steal away. It is just too much of a Gold Cash Calf to walk away from.

WHY WE HATE THE MEDIA, CHAPTER 12, 879

A lot of liberal media types are deploring the deplorable people who deplore the media because of the result of this chart drawn from Gallup survey data showing that Democratic trust in the (Trump-hating) media is soaring, while discriminating people (that is, Republicans) continue to have less and less regard for the media:

 

Surprise, surprise! I wonder what could be causing this “polarization”? Maybe things like this, from the newspaper owned by the richest man in the world, the Washington Post:

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try

News flash, Ms. Bruenig: Socialism has been tried. Lots of times. With the same result. If you send me your address, I’ll send you a hammer and you can try that experiment. Or Option 2, I’ll send you a one-way ticket to Venezuela. I’m sure you can help straighten them out. Won’t take but more than a dozen more columns like this. Or did I miss something and this column is actually an application for an academic appointment?

Free Markets and Evolution

Worth a read.

Of course it isn’t just free markets or free speech they have problems with. They actually have problems with lots of science and even with the “evolution” that they claim to believe in. Progressive ideology claims that we are all alike in terms of potential and that the difference in outcomes is purely due to racism/sexism/patriarchal privilege etc. This is, so course, completely nuts as any unbiased observer of humanity must notice. While it is true that, say, some women are physically stronger/faster than nearly all men there is no point where more women are stronger/faster than men.

Russians used social media to disrupt U.S. energy industry, report says

In the media reporting on Russian meddling in American political issues, this subject is lost: the Russians have been meddling in lots of ways to stop the development of American energy resources.

The same Russian-backed propaganda groups accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election used social media to try to disrupt U.S. energy policy, including inciting protests against pipeline projects, according to a new congressional report.

The House Science Committee report says it found evidence that Russian-sponsored agents used Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and Instagram to suppress research and development of fossil fuels and impede efforts to expand the use of natural gas and fracking in the U.S.

The groups targeted Energy Transfer Partners' (NYSE:ETP) Dakota Access pipeline and TransCanada's (NYSE:TRP) Keystone XL pipeline, as well as projects by Enbridge (NYSE:ENB) and other companies, according to the report.

"The Kremlin has a motive to disrupt U.S. energy markets and influence domestic energy policy, since American energy represents a direct threat to Russian energy interests," the report says.

The reason this does not get any press play? The press opposes energy development because it supports the Global Warming hoax.  That's why you won't see the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS and the other alphabet networks give time or space to this.

The German cities and the migrants

The expected backlash has arrived.

Guns, and why the ideological screaming never stops

Where to place blame is a factor. It’s instructive that after Parkland liberal fire is aimed principally at the National Rifle Association (NRA) and not the FBI. This is though the FBI admits it didn't follow its own protocols, including not reacting to a tip that the reportedly-confessed killer wanted to be a “professional school shooter.”

Some ask what the FBI could have done even if it had acted. A person can’t be arrested for what they might do. However, that’s irrelevant. Whatever difference the FBI could have made was lost in the bureaucracy.

Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?

Because the story's too good the way it's being told.

The response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room....

On Twitter, I lost track of the number of bluechecks rhapsodizing over how effective the kids’ organizational instincts were. But organizing isn’t instinctive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes really a lot of people. You don’t just get a few magical kids who’re amazing and naturally good at it.

The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.

Read the whole thing.  The Left is organized for this sort of thing.  The Right doesn't have a clue.

ANN COULTER: THE SCHOOL-TO-MASS-MURDER PIPELINE

Note: the policy that allowed Cruz to murder 17 of his classmates was a product of the Obama Administration. 

Nikolas Cruz's psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff's Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to.

School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the "school-to-prison pipeline." This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.

If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other "red flags."

Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz's terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, "security specialist," and Peter Mahmood, head of JROTC.

At least three students showed school administrators Cruz's near-constant messages threatening to kill them -- e.g., "I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass," "Im going to watch ypu bleed," "iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.

Threatening to kill someone is a felony. In addition to locking Cruz away for a while, having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun.

All the school had to do was risk Cruz not going to college, and depriving Yale University of a Latino class member, by reporting a few of his felonies -- and there would have been no mass shooting.