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Saturday, March 30, 2019

Reparations and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Pyrrhic Victory


Excerpts (long)

Secondly, the case for reparations relies on the intellectually lazy assumption that the problems facing low-income blacks today are a part of the legacy of slavery. For most problems, however, the timelines don’t match up. Black teen unemployment, for instance, was virtually identical to white teen unemployment (in many years it was lower) until the mid-1950s, when, as Thomas Sowell observed in Discrimination and Disparities, successive minimum wage hikes and other macroeconomic forces artificially increased the price of unskilled labor to employers—a burden that fell hardest on black teens. Not only did problems like high youth unemployment and fatherless homes not appear in earnest until a century after the abolition of slavery, but similar patterns of social breakdown have since been observed in other groups that have no recent history of oppression to blame it on, such as the rise of single-parent homes in the white working class.

Cartoons

This moron was head of the CIA during Obama's Presidency. How does that make you feel?


The Russians have been working to divide this country.
Based on what John Brennan had done is it reasonable to suspect that he is a Russian agent?

What about the man who appointed him to head the CIA, Barack Hussein Obama?

Mary Katharine Ham: Shouldn’t we be treating it as good news for America that Trump didn’t collude with Russia?

I’ve heard her point made often this week, that Russiagate true believers obviously hoped for the worst from all this even though it would have been ruinous for their country. True enough. If Mueller could prove that Trump had conspired with Putin to influence the 2016 campaign POTUS’s legitimacy would be shattered, America would be humiliated, the right would be in chaos, and the bottom would fall out of public faith in the integrity of presidential elections (to the extent it hasn’t already). It’d be a catastrophe. And yet it wasn’t joy that had Rachel Maddow’s voice cracking on Monday night after Bill Barr assured the country that the worst fortunately hadn’t come to pass. How come?

When you recognize that conspiracy theories are mini-religions, you see it’s a normal reaction. Look at the people who join doomsday cults that believe the world will end on a predetermined date, then somehow have to cope after that date comes and goes. The world isn’t ending! The greatest news of all, right? But they don’t treat it as great. There’s no rejoicing. They cry, and then they get to work on retconning their beliefs such that they were right all along except for the particular date on which they thought doomsday would arrive. Russiagate truthers will do this too, instinctively. It’s a hard thing to ask someone to embrace a religion, build a worldview around it, and then force them to reckon with it being exposed as false in an instant. How would you feel if your chosen faith were somehow debunked today? People hate to be wrong, especially about the things in which they’re most emotionally invested.

The High-Stakes Game of Turnabout Playing Out in the Aftermath of the Mueller Investigation


It will not be long before we begin hearing the question: "what did Obama know and when did he know it?"

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, one can make the equivalent argument that a probe against Obama officials would be just as much "a good faith attempt to investigate a credible charge" as the Mueller investigation. But one should not deceive oneself into not realizing that the ultimate targets of such a course would be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Such a turnabout would not end the crisis which began in the waning days of the Obama administration, it would only change its direction. And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which "is to prevent a clash between kings" would still be in ruins. Perhaps this is why Karl Rove is urging Trump, having won the round, to move on; for by considering the affair closed, Trump could restore the tradition of comity, which has been damaged.

Or could he? In the current political culture, magnanimity is unlikely to be met with gratitude, unless the words are spat out with irony. Passions are high and neither side appears willing to give an inch. It may take time before an extended hand is not met by a punch. The fever must still run its course. One can only hope the fever breaks before the patient does.

When politics becomes a blood sport you know you've gone too far.  But the point of no-return was passed when the coup against Trump started. 

"When you strike at a king you must kill him."  The Democrats missed and now some are beginning to realize their peril. 

Brazil’s Top Election Court Catches Google Manipulating Search Results to Point to Negative Entries on Bolsonaro …Just Like They Do with Conservatives in America


If you thought that Google was manipulating search results for political purposes and they told you that you were crazy, they were gaslighting you.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSA), Brazil’s top election court, fined Fernando Haddad (President Jair Bolsonaro’s leftist opponent) for having a contract with Google to manipulate search results during the election.

Luiz Edson Fachin, of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), ruled that the PT candidate for the presidency, Fernando Haddad, paid Google to highlight negative content and manipulated searches to point to a website with negative coverage of Bolsonaro.

Google wasn’t fined because they claimed that as soon as they were notified by the court of the irregularities they dishonored the contract.

This is a common practice by Google in the United States.

Google manipulates search results for conservatives and conservative publishers to point to negative articles and hit pieces.

So does Google allow people or companies to pay them in order to manipulate search results or only if they are far left/socialist/communist websites?

Google claims their search results are driven by some sacred algorithm. Then how is it possible that they offered such a service to Socialists?

In the U.S. Google does it for free.

Friday, March 29, 2019

Greenland Glacier Reverses Course, Growing Again After Shrinking for Years


Global warming ... Climate Change strikes again. 

The reports related to this finding indicate the shrinkage is “temporary.” Climate change believers are hanging onto this word as vigorously as anti-Trumpers are hanging on to the phase “not exonerated” in the Mueller Report.

Conrad Black: Still Dreaming of Watergate II

Of all the asinine and, at times, almost psychotic misstatements about the bone-crushing victory the president has won, the prize goes, with admirable historical symmetry, to John Dean.

It was Dean who led the destruction of lawyer-client privilege in the Watergate debacle, and with it of much of America’s claim to be a society of laws. Having been the corrupt source of many of the most fatuous illegalities in the amateur obstruction put forward by members of President Richard Nixon’s entourage, John Dean was the first rat down the hawser, denouncing his client, employer, and benefactor with contemptuous disregard for the truth and in the supreme demonstration of the evil of the American plea bargain system.

This perversion of the justice system, more than anything else, has ensured that prosecutors in the United States, win a percentage of their cases about equal to those of North Korea and Cuba. They extort inculpatory evidence against the main target by threatening witnesses and give the denunciators immunity from perjury and a sweetheart sentence.

Dean’s performance exceeds in venality even the antics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, American history’s most successful fiction-writers. (At least Gore Vidal acknowledged he was writing historical novels.) Odious though Woodward and Bernstein are, irritatingly imperishable though they are, as far as I know they didn’t break any laws and didn’t dishonor a learned profession. (Having employed thousands of journalists for decades, I can attest that they aren’t part of a profession and few of them are learned.)

And this ...

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Scientists horrified that Trump wants to require universities to honor free speech

This is not a Babylon Bee story. An article today in the science journal Nature actually expressed outrage and concern about President Trump’s executive order last week tying the grants a university gets to its willingness to protect the free speech of all its students and teachers.

What evil thing did Trump’s order require of these universities? To quote the Nature article itself,

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on 21 March that requires universities to certify that they protect free speech, or risk losing federal research funds.

Public institutions will have to certify that they are following free-speech protections laid out in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and private institutions must promise to follow their stated policies on free speech, a White House official told reporters on 21 March.

The order applies to 12 research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and NASA. It affects only money for research, not financial aid for students.

O the horror! The universities will have to show that they support free speech! What a travesty!

The Nature article then proceeded to find quotes from a number of scientists and organizations who oppose Trump’s action. One even claimed that Trump was not trying to protect free speech, “but the enhancement of conservative voices.”

In other words, to these scientists, there is plenty of free speech in academia. Liberals and leftists are all free to say whatever they want. However, any attempt to allow conservatives right to speak is clearly a biased threat to freedom and must be stopped at all costs. And to threaten their funding because of this? The nerve of that bad orange man!

The intellectual dishonesty exhibited here is mind-boggling. And for it to come from scientists, whose entire field is built on the need for brutal intellectual honesty at all times, is quite appalling.

The Southern Poverty Law Center Is Both a Terrible Place to Work and a Place That Does Terrible Work

Peddling this false narrative has long been the SPLC's business model, and the Trump years have been especially profitable, since the group was almost perfectly positioned to capitalize on growing liberals fears about hate crimes, resurgent white nationalism, and the alt-right. Over the course of the Trump campaign and presidency, the SPLC has added dozens of staffers, saw its social media following rise dramatically, ramped up its fundraising, and built a $200 million endowment. Its role has been to provide intellectual support for a central narrative of the #Resistance: Hate, broadly defined, is surging across America, and Trump is to blame.

But the SPLC's hate tally is incredibly suspect, as left-of-center writer Nathan Robinson explained in a terrific article for Current Affairs. According to the SPLC's hate map, there were more than 1,000 hate groups in the U.S. in 2018—nearly twice as many as existed in 2000. The number has increased every year since 2014.

The map is littered with dots that provide more information on each specific group, and this is where the SPLC gives away the game. Consider a random state—Oklahoma, for example, is home to nine distinct hate groups, by the SPLC's count. Five of them, though, are black nationalist groups: the Nation of Islam, Israel United in Christ, etc. The SPLC counts each chapter of these groups separately, so the Nation of Islam counts as two separate hate groups within Oklahoma (its various chapters in other states are also tallied separately). The map makes no attempt to contextualize all of this—no information is given on the relative size or influence of each group.

In his piece, Robinson describes the map as an "outright fraud," and it's hard to argue with him:

In fact, when you actually look at the hate map, you find something interesting: Many of these "groups" barely seem to exist at all. A "Holocaust denial" group in Kerrville, Texas called "carolynyeager.net" appears to just be a woman called Carolyn Yeager. A "male supremacy" group called Return of Kings is apparently just a blog published by pick-up artist Roosh V and a couple of his friends, and the most recent post is an announcement from six months ago that the project was on indefinite hiatus. Tony Alamo, the abusive cult leader of "Tony Alamo Christian Ministries," died in prison in 2017. (Though his ministry's website still promotes "Tony Alamo's Unreleased Beatles Album.") A "black nationalist" group in Atlanta called "Luxor Couture" appears to be an African fashion boutique. "Sharkhunters International" is one guy who really likes U-boats and takes small groups of sad Nazis on tours to see ruins and relics. And good luck finding out much about the "Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology," which—if it is currently operative at all—is a tiny anti-Catholic cult based in Shawano, Wisconsin.

Sloppily tallying hate in service of a greater narrative is par for the course at the SPLC. The group's report on Trump-inspired schoolyard bullying is similarly flawed: Its survey was unscientific, and based on anecdotes reported by members of the SPLC's mailing list.

When it comes to misleading hate crime data, the SPLC is far from the only offender. Many in the media have exaggerated a finding by the Anti-Defamation League that anti-Semitic hate has increased 57 percent under Trump. (Bomb threats made by an Israeli teenager were largely responsible for the perceived increase: anti-Semitic assaults actually decreased substantially.) The FBI's hate crime data has also been widely mischaracterized.

Still, the SPLC stands out. It previously characterized Maajid Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist—but Nawaz is a progressive whose work is aimed at de-radicalizing Muslim extremists. To this day, the SPLC lists Charles Murray's ideology as "white nationalist."

Duke University to pay over $100 million in settlement for fake research

There are many serious ramifications in pursuing science that fits a narrative instead of collecting data, then deriving proper theories from real data.

One of the consequences, especially in this seemingly new era of real justice that we are now enjoying, is that cheating scientists can get caught and punished.
For example, Duke University will now pay the U.S. government $112.5 million in a settlement related to the submission of faked to win federal research grants. A whistle-blower is also going to enjoy a big reward, instead of fired or otherwise punished.

Former Duke researcher Erin Potts-Kant conducted the alleged fraud from 2006 to 2013. She was fired for embezzling money from the university, which happened during the same period, according to Duke. After her firing, her research was scrutinized, which led to the retractions of 17 scientific papers, according to RetractionWatch.

Lung function in mice exposed to pollutants would be of interest to the green justice advocated in the Environmental Protection Agency, hoping to create even more controls and more rules to support an ever-expanding bureaucracy. By funding Potts-Kant’s work, what other worthy projects have been neglected, including those that may have really benefited the American people.

Legal Insurrection has covered a wide array of fraudulent theories passed off as real science: Food rules, polar bear populations, tampered-with temperature data, plastic pollution in the ocean, just to name a new.

How many billions are squandered by businesses in senseless environmental compliance? How many people have gotten obese or developed diabetes because of unhealthy good guidelines? How much more funding could have been devoted to effective, local pollution-solutions instead of uselessly endeavoring to “fix” the global climate?

When politics contaminates science, it hurts everyone. In fact, I would argue it is the most dangerous pollutant in today’s world.

Democrats are the home of hate

Schiff Eating Grin

Who REALLY colluded with Putin to destabilize America?

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Make No Mistake: The Mueller Investigation Was All About Flynn

What, then, was it all about? I think I know. It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.

Representative Full Stop

I call her Donkey Chompers.

I have decided that henceforth and for the foreseeable future, the woman who calls herself Ocasio-Cortez and who is more descriptively titled Occasional Cortex shall be known as Representative Full Stop.

The name has its origin here: "My last name is Ocasio-Cortez. Full stop. That’s my name."

I'll first confess why this nonsense irritated me: When she says things like "No, you can’t say 'Cortez.' I’ve never used that in my life. 'Cortez' is referring to someone else. Even if they‘re trying to be rude + wrong, my dad’s last name was Ocasio anyway. (His name was hyphenated too, though.)" She's assuming that we give a good g*dd*mn what her dad's name was.

Most of us are aware that Spaniards have their mother's surname last. It's a cute habit that has bitten me in the butt because the Portuguese don't do that. And yet, proto-politically-correct people in Ohio in 1981 assumed so and assume they were gratifying me by handing me a diploma that has Silva as my surname. Look, Representative Full Stop, we don't care. You're an American, born in America. You have the arrant presumption of thinking you can serve as a representative for Americans, but you wish to hold onto to this nonsense that your surname is not your surname because it wasn't your dad's name? Pick a surname, your mother's or your fathers, and make it your surname. We don't care which. Resolve it between the two still-functioning brain cells in your otherwise empty head.
Read the whole thing.

Babylon Bee: Republicans Accused Of Colluding With Reality To Defeat Green New Deal

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After voting down the Green New Deal in the Senate today, Republican lawmakers were accused of colluding with reality to ensure the bill did not pass.

Democrats pointed out that Republicans' levelheaded criticisms of the sweeping legislation had all the hallmarks of influence from reality, from using logic and reason to simply pointing out that the proposal was insane. Democrats quickly called for an official investigation into the matter.

"It is now obvious that our Republican colleagues are working in cahoots with the facts of life," said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "They're agents of reality. No question. We need to get, like, the FBI on this, like right away. The FBI are the ones with that warning that plays before movies, right? Yeah, those guys. Let's get them on it."

Senator Ed Markey joined Ocasio-Cortez in calling for a full-blown investigation into the extent of reality's influence on the vote. "The Republicans are obviously puppets of reality," he said. "We cannot afford to have reality influencing our policies."

Amherst College Language Guide


This is neither a joke ... nor a parody.

Random examples:

BUTCHAn identity term often used to by queer women, particularly by lesbians, who express themselves in masculine ways. Some consider butch to be its own gender identity. While an identity term to some, it can be used as a pejorative.  

CISGENDERAn identity term for individuals whose gender identity matches their birth-assigned sex. Cisgender people receive benefits that trans and nonbinary people don’t have. 

CISHETERO-A pervasive system of belief that centers, and naturalizes,  

NORMATIVITY heterosexuality and a binary system of assigned sex and gender where there are two rigid, distinct ways of being: assigned-male-at-birth masculine man and assigned-female-at-birth feminine woman.  

CISSEXISMThe system of oppression that values and privileges cisgender people, upholds the gender binary and marginalizes, oppresses and makes invisible the lives and experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. 

MALE PRIVILEGE A group of unearned cultural, legal, social and institutional rights extended to cisgender men based on their assigned-sex and gender. Cisgender men have access to institutional power, make the rules, control the resources and are assumed capable. Masculinity, as enacted by cisgender men, is universalized and viewed as the normative gender. Cisgender men are often unaware of their differential treatment (see Fragile Masculinity). While trans men, masculine-of-center women and nonbinary folks have access to benefits based on their proximity to hegemonic masculinity (see above definition), male privilege is reserved for cisgender men. This is particularly true for white cisgender men.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

How much did Mueller break the Media? Look at who is ‘pouncing’ now in the wake of the report


The Mueller-Industrial Complex Collapses

Newsmakers, pundits, and hustlers banked their future on the investigation taking down the president. The jig is up.
With the report in and seemingly impotent, the Mueller-industrial complex is quickly collapsing. Abramson has been posting feverishly on Twitter since Friday, in long numbered threads in between national media appearances, attempting to recuperate his miscalculation. On Sunday, Tribe pinned a last-ditch tweet to his Twitter timeline reminding readers that “the ‘no obstruction’ conclusion was Barr’s, not Mueller’s.” Saturday Night Live didn’t even get to weigh in this week; the show is on spring break. And it’s hard to imagine anyone lighting a Mueller votive candle at bedtime or donning their It’s Mueller Time T-shirt while drinking down some cold ones on the deck. The special counsel’s cottage industry quietly burned down when its namesake completed his job without fanfare.
 

Justice Department sides with court ruling Obamacare invalid


Not tired of winning.

John Brennan Tries to Explain: It's Not My Fault I Called Trump a Russian Traitor, I Got Bad Information

John Brennan is a national embarrassment. 

Keep in mind the Barack Obama named him the director of the CIA. 

Are you worried yet?

Brennan on MSNBC: Well, I don't know if I received bad information but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was. I am relieved that it's been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.

Five days before this he tweeted:
Hmmm...your bizarre tweets and recent temper tantrums reveal your panic over the likelihood the Special Counsel will soon further complicate your life, putting your political & financial future in jeopardy. Fortunately, Lady Justice does not do NDAs.

Apple-backed Southern Poverty Law Center wracked in turmoil, called a ‘con’ for ‘bilking gullible liberals’

In August 2017, following the Charlottesville riots, Apple made a contribution of $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Apple also matched two-for-one employees’ donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center through September 30th of that year and had Apple’s iTunes Store offer visitors a way to donate to the SPLC.

In a letter to employees in August 2017, explaining Apple Inc.’s contribution, CEO Tim Cook wrote:

Apple will be making contributions of $1 million each to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. We will also match two-for-one our employees’ donations to these and several other human rights groups, between now and September 30. In the coming days, iTunes will offer users an easy way to join us in directly supporting the work of the SPLC. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” So, we will continue to speak up. These have been dark days, but I remain as optimistic as ever that the future is bright. Apple can and will play an important role in bringing about positive change. – Apple CEO Tim Cook in a letter to employees, August 2017


Uh, yeah. Aging well, Cook’s missive hasn’t:

“In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane,” Bob Moser reports for The New Yorker. “Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble — ‘Until justice rolls down like waters’ — and intone, in our deepest voices, ‘Until justice rolls down like dollars.'”

SPLC is a hate group designed to enrich it's founders.

DRUDGE 3/26/2019


TRUMP'S BEST DAY...
SHAME OF THE NATION: 533,074 articles about Russia probe...
Networks Gave Whopping 2,284 Minutes...
50 Hollywood Stars Who Accused President of Treason, Collusion...
LIST: FALSE BOMBSHELLS...
Most embarrassing predictions...
Greenwald Rails Against Misinformation and Fear...
TAIBBI: Russiagate is this generation's WMD... GOOGLE obscures news...
Former Spy Chiefs Exposed...
BRENNAN: 'I don't know if I received bad information'...
DEMS: PLAN B...
TAX RETURNS!
PAPER: Apologies...
FLASHBACK: Lindsey Graham urged McCain to pass dossier to FBI...




MEDIA HUMILIATION
DEMS DEMAND FULL RELEASE
REPUBLICANS BLOCK
THOUSANDS OF PAGES LONG?

Who got is the most wrong?


Peggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump’s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented.



As Victor Davis Hanson shows, she's dead wrong.

With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump.

Do we recall the recent deranged talk of 2004-8 from the Democratic Party, the popular culture, and the media—or the relative passivity of the wounded Bush administration in response to such venom?

Why, after all, did Alfred A. Knopf publish the novel Checkpoint, a boring and tired rant about fantasizing the assassination of then-President Bush? Who created the particular landscape that encouraged filmmaker Gabriel Range to offer up “Death of a President”that trafficked in the same fantasies of a Bush assassination?

Why would the Guardian publish an op-ed by “satirist” Charles Brooker’s dreaming of the need for another John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald to repeat their needed work—a theme in part that actor Johnny Depp has recently channeled against Trump.

Were premonitions of Trump in 2004 befouling our political discourse?

What were the “origin and rationale” of the Jonathan Chait’s 2003 New Republic screed, “Why I Hate George W. Bush” in which he began: “I hate President George W. Bush There, I said it . . . I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him.”

Had Chait become unhinged by reading The Art of the Deal?

Peggy has been coasting for most of her life on her role as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. In her old age, she has become a sad spectacle.

Monday, March 25, 2019

Nobody told Beto O'Rourke

Time to ban the collusion conspiracy theorists

Just when you thought the media’s credibility was hanging by a thread, along comes special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report — finding no Russia collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign, shredding all the conspiracy theories and false accusations to smithereens.

After all, it was the left-wing media and countless Democrats, including chief conspiracy theorist Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), among others, who relentlessly trafficked Russian collusion propaganda the past few years to derail the Trump administration in an attempt to remove a duly elected president from office. But now, after multiple congressional investigations and the latest 22-month Mueller probe, all of which found no evidence of collusion, the verdict is in — #RussiaGate was a hoax.

A five-alarm disinformation campaign waged by complicit Hate-Trump media, corrupt deep state officials and hysterical Democrats that misled the American people by telling us day in and day out the president, his family and former campaign associates were in cahoots with Putin to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

None of which turned out to be true, evidenced by Mueller’s report submitted on Friday to the attorney general that, after an exhaustive investigation led by an adversarial and aggressive prosecutor, didn’t recommend charging a single person in Trump’s orbit with collusion. Why? Because there was none — blowing an irreparable hole in the media’s credibility.

On Sunday a vindicated president tweeted “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

So now what?

For starters, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies should remove all Russian collusion conspiracy theorists from their platforms.

After all, social media networks didn’t hesitate to ban Alex Jones of Infowars and others for spreading misinformation and/or conspiracy theories, so why not ban House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Schiff, Eric Swalwell, John Brennan, Beto O’ Rourke and scores of media hacks who’ve all done the same?

And what about Google? Will it continue to allow search results that yield now-debunked conspiracy theories surrounding Russian collusion and the Trump campaign? Or will they do the right thing and scrub misinformation and lies to stop the hoax from perpetuating?

Mueller report: Collusion by the news media, not Donald Trump, but don't expect apologies

The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse. After two years of hype, special counsel Robert Mueller has reported to Attorney General William Barr that there was no “collusion,” as Donald Trump would put it, between Trump or the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians regarding the 2016 election.

There will be no new indictments from Mueller beyond the few already issued, none of which charges a U.S. person with anything related to collusion. This is a big disappointment to the people in politics and the press who were openly hoping to see Trump, and his family, kicked out of the White House and thrown into jail.

And there were a lot of those people, as Grabien editor Tom Elliott noted last week:

►In December 2017, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said the Trump team might be going to jail "for the rest of their lives."

►Last December, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Delaware Sen. Chris Coons — as he often does — whether he thought Trump might be facing jail time. Coons said yes, "the issues outlined against both Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, I think, continue to sharpen the ways in which it is clear that the Mueller investigation has produced a whole series of actions not previously exposed to the public."
Special counsel Robert Mueller attends church across from the White House on March 24, 2019.

►Also in December, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Trump could be the first president "to face the real prospect of jail time."

►In April 2017, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said the evidence he had already seen suggested "people will probably go to jail."

Actually, it was always a crock, dreamed up immediately after Hillary Clinton’s election-night defeat by her staff to explain away failure. As reported in the campaign book "Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Clinton refused to take responsibility for her defeat, and the day after her concession, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

Though this was a matter of record — the book was hardly obscure — the news media chose to run with the Russia story, which quickly morphed from “hacking” to the more nebulous “collusion,” quite credulously. They did so because they wanted it to be true, because they hoped it would hurt Trump, whom the press almost universally despises, and because it was good for ratings and clicks.

The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing the work of President Vladimir Putin, sowing division and confusion through the American polity.

As former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tweeted, we wasted two years, at least $30 million and a lot of institutional credibility at the FBI and Department of Justice over “a false story of Russia collusion based on oppo research that was always unsubstantiated and preposterous.”

Liberal journalist Matt Taibbi was even harsher, calling the Russia-collusion story WMD times a million. Taibbi noted that the news media's credibility is a major victim:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As (New York Times' Peter) Baker notes, a full 50.3 percent of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Well, that’s because it was. Leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald administered a Twitter beat-down to some of his colleagues in the news media, saying: “If you constantly went on TV or wrote things to mislead millions into believing Mueller was coming to arrest Trump, Jr., Jared and a whole slew of others for conspiring with the Russians, just admit it. Save yourselves the embarrassment of all this whitewashing & pretending.”

We might someday need a press we can trust. But I hope not, because we certainly don’t have one.

So what’s next? Well, there may not have been Russian collusion, but there certainly was collusion between FBI agents and journalists, with agents leaking information and journalists paying them off with “tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events," according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice.

And the connections between the Justice Department and the political opposition-research firm Fusion GPS (where the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr was paid to dig up dirt on Trump) were particularly egregious.

Roger Simon of of PJ Media writes that there is a lot of corruption yet to be investigated and prosecuted, on the part of Trump’s accusers: “It was a conspiracy and, worse yet, a conspiracy ignited and carried out from within the FBI and the Department of Justice. Nothing could be more dangerous to a democratic society than that. How high this conspiracy went is still somewhat unclear. I say ‘somewhat’ because the likelihood of it having reached into the White House of the previous administration is great. It's hard to imagine how it could have happened otherwise.”

Will we see any accountability for the many ethical — and probably legal — breaches involving Trump’s bureaucratic opposition? Stay tuned. But the “Russian collusion” narrative has now imploded.

DRUDGE on the Mueller Report


TRUMP WINS!
NO COLLUSION
NO OBSTRUCTION*
NO PROOF OF CRIMES
BARR TEXT
NADLER: IT'S NOT OVER
MAXINE MELTDOWN
MEDIA ROCKED
*FULL FINDINGS STILL SECRET
DC ON EDGE

Glenn Greenwald on Twitter and the Russia Hoax.

Good morning. The NYT didn't even try to caveat the truth to make the medicine go down a bit more smoothly for their readers.

 


In sum: if you have a cable show and refuse to put people on who do anything but nod their head madly at everything you say until they risk a sprained neck - all while excluding skepticism & dissent from your primary narrative - you're likely to end up spreading deceit & scams:

 

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD


It's long but worth it. Read the whole thing.

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it.

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

Sunday, March 24, 2019

JUST IN: Attorney General Barr says in letter to Congress that Special Counsel Mueller did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official knowingly conspired with Russia

 Democrats and the Press (but I repeat myself) scream to the sky.

Woke’s on you

Those who doubt the operation of a beneficent, or at least an amusing, providence should consider the case of the British writer Titania McGrath. Margaret Ann Bulkley may have decided to move to South Africa and live her life as a man. But Titania McGrath, a Twitter sensation and the author of the forthcoming Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, is “a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. A regular on the live-slam poetry scene, Titania regularly performs at arts festivals, deconsecrated churches, and genderqueer spiritual retreats.” Nice! Ms. McGrath was guyed by Private Eye forthe way she commended her book to the public: “I have written the most important book of 2019. Do not buy it for my sake, but for the sake of humanity.”

Shameless? Or in-your-face intersectional wokeness?

We incline to the latter view. Ms. McGrath burrows deep into the contradictions of late capitalism, patriarchal privilege, toxic masculinity, white supremacism, and heteronormative binary exclusivity. She is so woke she makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez look like Sleeping Beauty. Consider: “If you don’t think exactly the same way as me,” she points out, “then you’ve clearly got a lot to learn about diversity.” Could any triggered academic put it better? “I despise whiteness. Literally nothing about me is white except for my skin colour.”

Remember Jussie Smollett? Titania McGrath gets it: “It is absolutely essential that we believe Jussie Smollett. If we don’t, other people who haven’t been attacked might not have the courage to come forward.”

“Whenever anyone says that women aren’t funny, I take it as a compliment. Humour is a patriarchal construct.” Ditto body hair: “Chest hair is a social construct.” You knew that, right?


Read the whole thing.

Remember all the Democrats that predicted that Trump would go to jail?


Flashback: Dems, Media Predict Mueller Probe Results in Impeachment, Prison

9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up


Everything is going as planned.

It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam.

Charlie Kirk: President Trump Recognizes the Importance of the Culture War

Yes!
Turning Point USA founder and Executive Director Charlie Kirk told Breitbart News that President Donald Trump “recognizes the importance of the culture war” and that when the president sees his supporters — as well as constitutional liberties — under attack, he “has an obligation to have their backs.”

How to end our national nightmare — probe Hillary Clinton again



Now that special counsel Robert Mueller has completed his investigation, it is tempting to breathe a sigh of relief and assume that our long national nightmare is over. Resist the temptation, the assumption is false.

We are not close to the end. Not by a long shot....


But even as we learn the details of what Mueller found, there remains a giant black hole about the very origins of the FBI investigation that led to his appointment in the first place.


It is astonishing, for example, that at this late date, we still do not know what evidence the disgraced James Comey and his FBI had to open the original probe in the summer of 2016, and whether there was anything other than the fatally tainted Russian dossier.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

San Antonio Violates the First Amendment to Punish Chick-fil-A



San Antonio is in Texas.  Think hard about that.

This clip serves as a reminder of how terrible the MSM is...

The American Media Destroyed Themselves over the Mueller Investigation


Combining incompetence with bigotry will do that to you.


With only a few exceptions — Fox News, the editorial pages (not the front pages) of the Wall Street Journal, and a handful of websites — the better part of the American media has spent the last two years fulminating about Trump-Russia collusion we now know never existed.

Actually, we always knew that, but finally, it's official. It was always a bunch of — excuse the expression — trumped up baloney that made no sense except to those who wished so deeply to believe it was true.

Which makes the people who were doing that fulminating — media, politicians and (usually retired) intelligence figures, who were, as is becoming increasingly clear, betraying the American Constitutional system with impunity — sick and evil.

That may sound extreme, but it's the all-too-obvious truth. What they did is unforgivable, particularly since few, if any of them, will have the honesty or basic morals to apologize. Some, however, may go to jail.

Glenn Reynolds on the new class struggle


It sounds like a Marxist explanation of the situation, but it's just a little different.
This sentence sounds like something that could be written by a doctrinaire Marxist. But it is nonetheless true. Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”)

Djilas’ work was explosive — he was jailed — because it made clear that the workers and peasants had simply replaced one class of exploiters with another. It set the stage for the Soviet Union’s implosion, and for the discrediting of communism among everyone with any sense.

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

The postwar era saw the creation of international institutions ranging from NATO to the United Nations to the World Bank, along with a proliferation of think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to accompany them. It saw the vast expansion of higher education in the United States, and the transformation of academic degrees into something close to must-haves for the upper-middle class. It saw a great expansion of power on the part of media organizations, and on the part of government bureaucrats and lobbyists, both of whose numbers increased enormously.

But after the turn of the millennium, other Americans, much like the workers and peasants in the old Soviet Union, started to notice that while the New Class was doing quite well (America’s richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.), things weren’t going so well for them. And what made it more upsetting was that — while the Soviet Union’s apparatchiks at least pretended to like the workers and peasants — members of America’s ruling class seemed to view ordinary Americans with something like contempt, using terms such as “bitter clingers,” “deplorables” and flyover people.

The Yellow Jackets Revolt and The Future of America

The media has been so quiet on the Yellow Jackets in France that you could be excused for thinking my title refers to some kind of invasion by weird wasps.

Well, for the record, it doesn’t. It refers to the ongoing revolt in France by various groups but mostly, honestly, middle aged, middle class people who have just had middle-class enough and are now setting fires to things and making life hell in the ritzy districts of Paris (and elsewhere.)

You probably thought that was all over and done with, and you’d be excused for thinking it, because our media has worked so hard not to report it.

“Trump is my fourth Hitler,”



When you hear nutcases explainig that Trump is Hitler, or crazy keep this article oin mind by Kathy Shaidle

When I say “Trump is my fourth Hitler,” it’s only because I’m too young to remember Goldwater


Now David Cole tackles “the Goldwater Rule” (and name-checks a blast from my past, Dr. Helen Caldicott):

Lifton’s conclusion is that Trump is essentially a Nazi, and it’s up to America’s heroic psychiatrists to bring him down. And that’s pretty much the tone of the rest of the book (in what’s supposed to be a serious psychoanalytical tome, the name “Hitler” is invoked forty times). RealClearPolitics’ Carl Cannon suggests a more accurate title for the book: 27 Angry Democrats With Advanced Degrees Who Voted Against Trump and Say He’s Crazy Although They’ve Never Met Him. Ah, and there’s the thing! You see, technically, American psychiatrists are forbidden from doing what Lee did. (…)

Section 7 is often referred to as the Goldwater Rule, because it was implemented in response to the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, during which a bunch of leftist psychiatrists decided to torpedo Goldwater by declaring him mentally unfit to be president (unlike LBJ, who was the very model of sanity). (…)

2018 is the year I turn 50, and I have a long memory. I remember with great clarity Dr. Helen Caldicott. Dr. Caldicott was an Aussie fruitloop who believed that President Reagan was going to blow up the world. In the ’80s, Caldicott ran an outfit called Physicians for Social Responsibility. Like Dr. Lee, she too had a messiah complex. She saw the world as a two-character play: her vs. Reagan. Sensible physician vs. psychopathic madman.

In 1983, she managed to wrangle a 75-minute meeting with Reagan. Note that that’s 75 minutes more than Lee has ever spent with Trump. Following the meeting, Caldicott announced to the world that she had “diagnosed” Reagan as having a “paranoid delusional” disorder. In a series of talks she gave throughout 1983 and ’84, she declared, over and over again, that if Reagan were to be reelected in 1984, nuclear war would become not only “inevitable,” but a “mathematical certainty.” Yes, she used that term. “Mathematical certainty.” Because, she swore, her 75-minute “diagnosis” was faultless. Trust her; she’s a doctor.

Make no mistake: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Make no mistake: anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The two terms have become conflated. If you agree that Israel is evil, apartheid, fascist, and repugnant, then the only possible resolution is its total destruction, its Jews exiled or exterminated.

Slowly, surely, irrevocably, methodically, step by step, the constraints are removed from the unacceptable — adjusting the population to the various forms of anti-Semitism, from rhetoric to parade floats to refusing to seriously address the issue, defending the perpetrators such as Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, who called Jews "termites" to leftist media silence. Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream. Jews are fleeing the ever increasing attacks in France, once home to the world's third largest Jewish population. Prime Minister Theresa May laments that Jews may have no future in Great Britain as the Labor Party's overtly anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn seeks increased power. American Jews seem oblivious to the tsunami of anti-Semitism engulfing Europe and poised to take America with the same intensity.

Supreme Court Doesn't Care About the Law or the Constitution. It's a policy making body.

The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare.

The discussion focused on the individual insurance mandate and Congress' power to regulate commerce. Roberts went first, as was the custom, laying out his views. He emphasized that he believed the Constitution's commerce clause never was intended to cover inactivity, such as the refusal to buy insurance.

After the chief, conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas offered their views. Like Roberts, they thought Congress' commerce authority did not cover an individual's decision to forgo -- rather than obtain -- health insurance.

So far so good; what does the Constitution say?
The votes of the liberals were known, too. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fifth in seniority, was the first to cast a vote to uphold the individual mandate. She believed Supreme Court precedent demanded the law be found constitutional. She was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer, who agreed with her.

What court precedent? Let's not kid each other, they like the policy and the constitution was not goint to get in the way..

Roberts did not want the entire law to fall. A pro-business conservative, he understood the importance of the insurance industry to US businesses, and he was genuinely concerned about invalidating an entire law that had been approved through the democratic process to solve the intractable health care problem.

There goes the constitution; the focus became the policy.

Breyer and Kagan had voted in the private March conference to uphold the new Medicaid requirement, and their votes had been unequivocal. But they were pragmatists. If there was a chance that Roberts would cast the critical vote to uphold the central plank of Obamacare -- and negotiations in May were such that they still considered that a shaky proposition -- they were willing to meet him partway. ..

Perhaps Roberts' move was born of a concern for the business of health care. Perhaps he had worries about his own legitimacy and legacy, intertwined with concerns about the legitimacy and legacy of the court. Perhaps his change of heart really arose from a sudden new understanding of congressional taxing power. However the chief would explain it -- and he has not explained it beyond his written opinion -- the case added a new dimension to a man who insisted that he always decided cases based on the law.

Viewed only through a judicial lens, his moves were not consistent, and his legal arguments were not entirely coherent. But he brought people and their different interests together. His moves may have been good for the country at a time of division and a real crisis in health care, even as they engendered, in the years since, anger, confusion and distrust.

‘Highly Profitable Scam’: Southern Poverty Law Center ‘Ripping Off Donors,’ - Corruption inside and out.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a “highly profitable scam” that “never lived up to the values it espoused,” according to former SPLC staffer Bob Moser.

The New Yorker on Thursday published a scathing essay from Moser, now a Rolling Stone reporter, accusing the left-wing non-profit of “ripping off donors” while turning a blind eye to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within its own ranks.

The SPLC fired co-founder Morris Dees on March 13 over unspecified conduct issues.

The SPLC announced Dees’ firing after roughly two dozen SPLC employees previously signed a letter to the organization’s leadership expressing their alarm at “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

The SPLC, which is known to label pedestrian conservative organizations as “hate groups,” is a key resource for Amazon, Google and other tech companies in policing “hate speech.”

It's the leading purveyor of fake reports of hate groups. This organization is ugly inside and out.

The FBI’s deranged actions in the 2016 race


Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gives the denizens of the press too much credit:

Our media continues to obsess over a document any 9-year-old with Google and an inkjet printer could have created. It has no interest in a secret government report that details how a piece of dubious Russian intelligence was used by the FBI to meddle ineptly in a U.S. presidential election.

At this late hour reporters even now cling to the hope that Mr. Mueller will validate the improbable Steele allegations. Our language casually refers to the “news media,” but many in the media wouldn’t know news if it bit them in the rear end. That’s not their job. To them, the “story” is whatever the social animals in their milieu say it is, even if it rests on something as fundamentally flimsy and anonymous as the Steele dossier (notice even its putative author has no interest in making the rounds to defend his work).

I am not alleging partisan bias here, partly because portraying Mr. Trump’s victory as a fluke occasioned by the actions of Mr. Comey fits neither side’s preferred narrative. I am alleging a media groupthink that has many reporters falling-down drunk with credulity for the Steele allegations even as the real story passes them by. Let’s hope once the Mueller red herring has been reeled in, the press will start doing its job again and get to the bottom of the FBI’s deranged actions in the 2016 race.

Friday, March 22, 2019

God, I love my job. ‘OMG are those TEARS’?! Rep. Eric Swalwell just basically had a total MELTDOWN over the Mueller report on CNN (watch)

Southern Poverty Law Center chief Richard Cohen announces resignation amid internal upheaval

Another bigot bites the dust.

I suspect that there will be a BIG payout.

What does Britain's government have against Christianity and Christians?

The government agency charged with overseeing immigration and passports in the United Kingdom has denied asylum to an Iranian Christian convert from Islam, explaining its verdict is based on its assessment that Christianity is not a “peaceful” religion.

Post-Christain Britain.

As Russia collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges

This requires a Special Council.

After nearly three years and millions of tax dollars, the Trump-Russia collusion probe is about to be resolved. Emerging in its place is newly unearthed evidence suggesting another foreign effort to influence the 2016 election — this time, in favor of the Democrats.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.


The leak of the so-called black ledger files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years.

Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian's release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton's campaign.

The parliamentarian also secured a court ruling that the leak amounted to “an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko said the tape recording is a serious enough allegation to warrant opening a probe, and one of his concerns is that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency involved had frequent contact with the Obama administration’s U.S. Embassy in Kiev at the time.

The Chilling Censorship of the Christchurch Shooting

Serious concerns have arisen over how New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has handled the recent Christchurch mosques massacre. And they don’t just involve her calls for stricter gun control and decision to ban all semi-automatic rifles.

In the wake of the attacks, the prime minister promised to keep the murderer “nameless,” and the internet promptly obliged by flushing the perpetrator’s identity down the memory hole. New Zealanders’ access to online material about him was blocked. In what has become standing operating procedure after mass attacks, social media accounts connected to the perpetrator disappeared. Internet service providers in New Zealand blocked access to sites like 4chan, 8chan, LiveLeak, and the file-sharing site Mega if the sites did not take down material related to the shooting.

Ardern then announced that the government would consider further policing social media, saying, “We will look at the role that social media played and what steps we can take, including on the international stage and in unison with our partners.”

Her actions raise the question: can we prevent evil by simply deleting its mention online? Imagine if the same decision had been made in the wake of other horrific historic crimes. Should we delete all footage of 9/11 from YouTube? How about never uttering the name Osama bin Laden or the acronym ISIS? What about banning all mentions of Adolf Hitler, burning all copies of Mein Kampf, and deleting all references to the Holocaust from our history books, lest we inspire neo-Nazis? Would these actions honor the memory of the dead, or simply erase their suffering? Such logic would replace “never forget” with “never remember.”

Should we erase information about "The Final Solution" to discourage future Hitlers? What do you think?

It’s Omar’s Party Now

When freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar came out with smears whose anti-Semitic nature couldn’t be denied, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer responded rapidly, with unequivocal denunciation. But when Pelosi tried to steer a resolution condemning anti-Semitism through the House, her party’s young radicals, who rightly view themselves as representative of the Democrats’ base, rebelled. Omar and her fellow “progressives” won the day, and Pelosi replaced her anti-Semitism resolution with one so anodyne that Omar happily voted for it.

Yesterday, the arch-leftist group MoveOn denounced the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has until now enjoyed broad bipartisan support, and urged Democratic presidential candidates to boycott AIPAC’s upcoming conference.

Democratic presidential candidates see which way their party is going. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Julián Castro have all announced that they are boycotting AIPAC. So far, no prominent Democratic contender has said he intends to attend. The AIPAC boycott is obviously related to Ilhan Omar’s claim that American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” followed by “AIPAC!” It’s Omar’s party now.

Just a few years ago, the idea of the Democrats turning anti-Israel en masse would have been unthinkable. It would have been especially unthinkable if the phenomenon bore the taint of anti-Semitism that it has been lent by Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and others. Meanwhile, President Trump tweeted today that the U.S. should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights...

Will this change the overwhelming support that American Jews give the Democrats?  No, I don't think so.  They are Democrats first.

Political Institution Specifically Designed To Guard Against Angry Mobs Draws Ire Of Angry Mobs

Babylon Bee (satire)

The Electoral College, a political institution designed specifically to guard against rule by an angry mob, has drawn the ire of angry mobs this week, shocking dozens.

"Why on earth did the founders think it was a good idea to put in this political safeguard against the enraged majority!?" screamed one woman as she lobbed a hand grenade in the general direction of Washington, D.C., in a symbolic gesture (luckily, what she thought was a hand grenade was actually a potato.) "We don't need any protection against an emotionally driven majority who want to inflict their will on the minority! IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE! AHHHHH!!!!"

Liberals continued to argue for the dismantling of the system that was created to ensure anyone with at least 51% of the vote couldn't oppress the rest of their nation, disregarding vast swathes of the populace so they could inflict their terrible ideas on everyone else. They made really good, coherent points as they marched toward Washington with pitchforks, torches, and pointy sticks.

Kirsten Gillibrand Says Illegal Aliens Should Have Social Security Benefits



Presidential 2020 hopeful New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said that illegal aliens should receive social security benefits, in another move by Democrats pushing to expand the rights of illegal immigrants in the United States.

The dash to the left for Dem presidential candidates continues. NY Sen. Gillibrand wants to expand Social Security to cover all illegal immigrants. Why stop there? Why not cover all of Mexico, Central and South America?

And she's not even the most insane Democrat Presidential hopeful.

Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on 'Collusion'

Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.
...

Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on 'Collusion'

TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros…

Five days a week, TDIP emails a newsletter to influential Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading “TDIP Research” – which summarizes the latest “collusion” news, and offers “points of interest” to inspire fresh stories regarding President Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow…

In 2017, Reiner started the Committee to Investigate Russia with James Clapper and several other former Obama officials… Tom Steyer has donated $2.1 million to TDIP…

Longtime observers of the Washington political scene are curious how Jones has for years been able to escape serious scrutiny while running a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators. With access to a multimillion-dollar war chest, they say he could continue to push the anti-Trump Russia collusion narrative long past the Mueller report or even the 2020 presidential election.

Caputo, the former Trump aide, wants an investigation of Jones: “I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI to the Southern District of New York to the [Special Counsel’s Office] to the Department of Justice, to Congress.”


Read the whole thing.

Ted Koppel: "Establishment Press" Decided That Trump Is Bad For The United States, "Out To Get Him"



Former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel said President Trump is "not mistaken" that the media is "out to get him" in a discussion with Marvin Kalb at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Koppel said 'The New York Times' is "committed" to making sure Trump is not elected and that the president the "liberal media" have become part of "the resistance."

On Sunday, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Trump has the "most powerful platform for propaganda" in human history with Twitter.

"We are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were," Koppel lamented in the interview.

"We have things appearing on the front page of the New York Times right now that never would have appeared 50 years ago. Analysis, commentary on the front page," Koppel said. "I remember sitting at the breakfast table with my wife during the campaign after the Access Hollywood tape came out and the New York Times, and I will not offend any of you here by using the language but you know exactly what words were used and they were spelled out on the front page of the New York Times."

"I turned to my wife and I said the Times is absolutely committed to making sure that this guy does not get elected," he said. "So his perception that the establishment press is out to get him doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done. It is. But the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he’s not mistaken in that perception and he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, described themselves as belonging to the Resistance."

"We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States," Kopell said.

About that media lie that Trump called the Nazis at Charlottesville "fine people"

By Steve Cortes March 21, 2019
Trump Didn't Call Neo-Nazis 'Fine People.' Here's Proof.


News anchors and pundits have repeated lies about Donald Trump and race so often that some of these narratives seem true, even to Americans who embrace the fruits of the president’s policies. The most pernicious and pervasive of these lies is the “Charlottesville Hoax,” the fake-news fabrication that he described the neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 as “fine people.”

Just last week I exposed this falsehood, yet again, when CNN contributor Keith Boykin falsely stated, “When violent people were marching with tiki torches in Charlottesville, the president said they were ‘very fine people.’” When I objected and detailed that Trump’s “fine people on both sides” observation clearly related to those on both sides of the Confederate monument debate, and specifically excluded the violent supremacists, anchor Erin Burnett interjected, “He [Trump] didn’t say it was on the monument debate at all. No, they didn’t even try to use that defense. It’s a good one, but no one’s even tried to use it, so you just used it now.”

My colleagues seem prepared to dispute our own network’s correct contemporaneous reporting and the very clear transcripts of the now-infamous Trump Tower presser on the tragic events of Charlottesville. Here are the unambiguous actual words of President Trump:

“Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

After another question at that press conference, Trump became even more explicit:

“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”


As a man charged with publicly explaining Donald Trump’s often meandering and colloquial vernacular in highly adversarial TV settings, I appreciate more than most the sometimes-murky nature of his off-script commentaries. But these Charlottesville statements leave little room for interpretation. For any honest person, therefore, to conclude that the president somehow praised the very people he actually derided, reveals a blatant and blinding level of bias.

Nonetheless, countless so-called journalists have furthered this damnable lie. For example, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace responded that Trump had “given safe harbor to Nazis, to white supremacists.” Her NBC colleague Chuck Todd claimed Trump “gave me the wrong kind of chills. Honestly, I’m a bit shaken from what I just heard.” Not to be outdone, print also got in on the act, with the New York Times spewing the blatantly propagandist headline: “Trump Gives White Supremacists Unequivocal Boost.” How could the Times possibly reconcile that Trump, who admonished that the supremacists should be “condemned totally” somehow also delivered an “unequivocal boost” to those very same miscreants?

But like many fake news narratives, repetition has helped cement this one into a reasonably plausible storyline for all but the most skeptical consumers of news. In fact, over the weekend, Fox News host Chris Wallace pressed White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on why Trump has not given a speech “condemning … white supremacist bigotry.” Well, Chris, he has, and more than once. The most powerful version was from the White House following Charlottesville and the heartbreaking death of Heather Heyer. President Trump’s succinct and direct words:

“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

Despite the clear evidence of Trump’s statements regarding Charlottesville, major media figures insist on spreading the calumny that Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people.” The only explanation for such a repeated falsehood is abject laziness or willful deception. Either way, the duplicity on this topic perhaps encapsulates the depressingly low trust most Americans place in major media, with 77 percent stating in a Monmouth University 2018 poll that traditional TV and newspapers report fake news. In addition, such lies as the Charlottesville Hoax needlessly further divide our already-polarized society.