Those who proclaim themselves “socialists” are usually depressing, have no sense of humor & attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2018
“I honestly feel like there is going to be a lot more gun issues, too, the crazies won finally. This is the tea party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years. We have to fight this again. Also Pence is stupid.”
Signor Conte heads what would once have been regarded as a pantomime-horse coalition of two rear ends: the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) and the right-wing Northern League (Lega). The so-called GroKo - the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat "Große Koalition" that governed Germany for most of the last thirteen years - was regarded as an alliance of all the prudent, sensible, mainstream persons, the kind who think nothing of admitting one-and-a-half million poorly educated, largely unemployable, demographically transformative young Muslim men into a country and then wondering why the gang-rape statistics are through the roof. By contrast, the Italian government is a coalition of the non-prudent non-sensible non-mainstream - the "alt-left" and the "far-right". So how can that possibly work?
Well, we're about to find out. In the two weeks he's been in office, the new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega) has talked non-stop about migrants and his plans to deport over half-a-million of them: "The good times for illegals are over," he declares confidently. "Get ready to pack your bags." On election day, his party won 17 per cent of the vote; after a fortnight of deportation talk, he's up to 27 per cent. Having talked the talk, he's now walking the walk: For the first time since the "humanitarian crisis" began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.
What could be more heartwarming than an NGO rescue ship named after a song from Hair? Since February 2016 it's been cruising the waters of the southern Med off the coast of Libya waiting for some ramshackle "refugee" craft to sink in front of it, and then scooping up the migrants and delivering them to Italy.
FBI’s Insulting ResponseFBI Director Christopher Wray gave a press conference in front of a compliant press corps where he said, “nothing in this report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution.” In fact, the report paints a picture of an FBI with a problematic culture.It’s not just Comey’s usurpation of authority and failure to comply with practices. Multiple people were involved in his condemned decisions. Others were cited for bad judgement in recusal decisions or failure to adhere to recusals. Political bias was rampant in the team of people who handled both the Clinton and Trump email probes. So were leaks, accepting gifts from reporters, incompetence, and other problems.Instead, Wray issued a strawman defense of employees, bragged about the high number of applicants to the agency, and talked about the low percentage of recruits who were accepted.
American women live under a suffocating patriarchy. Rape culture flourishes in the US. Toxic masculinity stunts the emotional and professional growth of American females. Sexual harassment and predation are ubiquitous in American workplaces....In coming to the US, if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the US.Not only is rape culture pervasive in the US, but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-Nehesi Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.
The press says Mr. Trump is pushing the battle of the national anthem because it plays to his base. I suppose it does. But here’s what galls even non-Trumpians about this kneeling kerfuffle: We live in a world soaking in partisan politics. Then one day you wake up ready to relax with NFL Sunday, and you discover that “The Star-Spangled Banner” has become totally politicized. Any normal person, including liberals who won’t admit it, would have a three-word reaction to this spectacle, and the first two words begin with “w” and “t.”So what else is new? Today, if someone has a grievance or beef, first thing they do is look for something to attach it to—the anthem, the Pledge of Allegiance, 19th-century American fiction, Mom’s apple pie—anything that will draw the world’s attention, meaning the attention of the viral plague called social media.I got an email this week from San Francisco flogging “Artists Get Political Ahead of Midterms.” How? By embedding political messages in everyday objects, such as bus kiosks, hand towels, bedspreads and toilets.Then, even now, the people who voted for Hillary still claim to be shocked and stunned that an electorate beaten down by the politicization of everything in life voted for the guy who makes a mockery of all that....The sophisticates in the media thought they could beat Donald Trump at this game by burying him under waves of negative publicity. But he feeds off of it, just as he turned the Philadelphia Eagles’ White House no-show into a display of patriotic music, with the maestro at the center.
Midway through the last century, bedrock legal principles about property rights and freedom of association were abrogated to deal with a specific, intractable problem: We could not get Democrats to stop discriminating against blacks.So Republicans, with very little Democratic help, passed a slew of laws saying: No, even though you own that restaurant, you cannot discriminate against black customers. And no, even though we are a free people, you cannot refuse to associate with black people in your clubs, universities or sports teams.This should have been a one-time exception to the law for one specific group of people based on an emergency.But Democrats, never wild about freedom in the first place, saw "civil rights" as a great gig. Instead of civil rights being used to remedy historic injuries done to a specific group of people, they'd use "civil rights" as a false flag for all their pet projects.
... being a woman, being a Muslim, wanting an abortion, having been born in Mexico, being a smelly homeless person stinking up the public library and -- according to Ruth Bader Ginsburg this week -- being a gay couple who wants to force a Christian to bake a cake for your wedding.
Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer compares black people to apes, citing the black liberation movement as a model for the liberation of apes. We must "extend to other species," Singer says, "the basic principle of equality" that we extend "to all members of our own species."
Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s....
We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community....
We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e., cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably be impeached.
The roots of today's new tensions have roots deep in Obama's and even George W. Bush's term. Yet so great was the establishment's commitment the post Cold War order it seemed irresponsible or unlucky to admit things were breaking down even when they manifestly were. Time and again when challenged by China's naval island building, Russia's expansion into the Ukraine, Beijing's theft of the classified OPM database, the shootdown of MH17 and the disintegration of Syria, Obama with remarkable sang froid maintained the air of business as usual.Ben Rhodes in his account of how Obama drew a Red Line in Syria then erased it, described how avoiding the perception of crisis was so important to his boss. "We in the Obama administration stepped up to the brink of military action against Assad. And then, suddenly, we stepped back." Rhodes wrote:I wanted to do something about the catastrophe in Syria, just as I had advocated intervention in Libya. ... It was as if Obama was finally forcing me to let go of a part of who I was—the person who looked at Syria and felt that we had to do something, who had spent two years searching for hope amid the chaos engulfing the Arab world and the political dysfunction at home. ...I saw what he had been doing—testing Congress, testing public opinion, to see what the real maneuvering room was for his office when it came to intervention in Syria. ... On the flight home, Obama mentioned that he’d had a private conversation with Putin on the margins of the summit. ... This time, Obama again suggested working together to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons.He reposed his trust in Putin because ... what else could he do? Obama's observation that “maybe we never would have done Rwanda” caught the essential sense of helplessness of the 44th president. While he may have sensed that the post WW2 order was grinding to an end and the fruits of Ronald Reagan's victory over the Soviet Union were sliding from his grasp, though the era was dying Obama could not bring himself to bury it.
The Obama administration — despite repeatedly assuring Congress that Iran would remain barred from the U.S. financial system — secretly mobilized to give Tehran access to American banks to convert the windfall of cash it received from sanctions relief under the 2015 nuclear deal into dollars, an investigative report by the Senate has revealed.
A copy of the report, obtained by The Washington Times, outlines how Obama-era State and Treasury Department officials discreetly issued a special license for the conversion to a major Omani bank and unsuccessfully pressured two U.S. banks to partake in the transaction, all while misleading lawmakers about the activities....
The Senate Homeland Security Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations probe contends that the Obama administration went out of its way to keep U.S. lawmakers in the dark about calculated and secretive efforts to give Tehran a back channel to the international financial system and to U.S. banks, facilitating a massive U.S. currency conversion worth billions of dollars.
“Senior U.S. government officials repeatedly testified to Congress that Iranian access to the U.S. financial system was not on the table or part of any deal,” according to a draft copy of the document obtained by The Times. “Despite these claims, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, at the direction of the U.S. State Department, granted a specific license that authorized a conversion of Iranian assets worth billions of U.S. dollars using the U.S. financial system.
“Even after the specific license was issued, U.S. government officials maintained in congressional testimony that Iran would not be granted access to the U.S. financial system,” the report said.
Investigations conducted by Congressional and Senate committees are entering the second year and what has been pieced together by investigators – battling for documents every step of the way – challenges the information the FBI and former senior Obama administration have revealed about the investigation.Their evidence is at odds with the DOJ/FBI timeline leaked to various news outlets indicating the investigation began in late summer of 2016. These discrepancies make it all the more important that the DOJ and FBI turn over documents to the Congressional oversight committees who are investigating what looks like an abuse and weaponization of the tools used by U.S. federal law enforcement and the intelligence community.
Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction....Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. ...What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.And on it goes. On Sunday there was a protest in London in support of him. The legal blogger “The Secret Barrister” might have spoken for a whole nose-holding class when he dismissed this protest as “a Nazi-themed march.” Look at the video he links to and you will see a lot of people with their arms in the air chanting “Oh Tommy Robinson.” If our eminent legal correspondent thinks this is Nazi-themed, he can never have been to a football match or, come to that, a Jeremy Corbyn rally.So it will continue. Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that troublemaker has gone away.” Yet their real problem has not gone away. There is no chance of their real problem going away. Because they have no plan for making it go away.
The liberal protection racket for sexual predators was always intimately intertwined with the Clintons. The template used to defend Bill Clinton became a model for all left-wing sexual predators. They all hired the same lawyers and detectives and counted on the same cultural elites to mete out punishment to anyone who stood in the way of their Caligula lifestyles. It was Total War against the original #MeToo movement.Even Teddy Kennedy never plotted revenge on reporters or smeared his sexual conquests as bimbos, trailer park trash and stalkers. That was the Clinton model.
