It’s a “got nothing” day, so enjoy this short video of Rep. Steve Scalise (Republican-Louisiana) returning to the House floor three months after being shot by a crazed Democrat.
He gets a long standing ovation from the entire House. For once, no one took a knee…
AUSTIN — President Trump on Thursday will nominate two conservatives from Texas with compelling personal stories to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to a senior administrative official. Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett was cited by Trump as a potential U.S. Supreme court pick during his presidential campaign. Dallas appellate lawyer James Ho is a former Texas solicitor general who has argued cases before state and federal courts.
Senator Ted Cruz approves of both nominations:
For over a decade on the Texas Supreme Court, Don Willett has proven himself to be a jurist of the highest order. His service on the court was simply one more step in a career of public service, from the Texas Governor Office, to the White House, to the Department of Justice, to the Texas Attorney General’s office. Every step along the way, Justice Willett has stood out as man of intellect and principle, and I am excited to see what he will accomplish on the Fifth Circuit.
Jim Ho has proven throughout his accomplished career that he is a passionate defender of the Constitution and the rule of law. Jim has served with distinction in all three branches of government, including as a law clerk to the great Justice Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court, an official at the Department of Justice, and a chief counsel here in the United States Senate. Jim also succeeded me as Solicitor General of Texas, where he argued some of this country’s toughest cases before its highest courts. I am confident that he will be a stellar jurist and an intellectual force on the court.
In addition to recognizing Willett as a fine judge, maybe Trump recognized a fellow tweet master…
Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner has died at age 91.
Conservatives will decry Hefner for debasing the culture while libertarians will celebrate his role in unleashing the sexual revolution, but neither view is particularly accurate. Pornography predated Playboy by decades, and various cultural and technological forces (not least of which was the widespread adoption of the automobile, ensuring people could decamp to less restrictive environs at will) were always going to bring about the sexual revolution. Hefner was a canny businessman who understood that he could marry nude pictures of women to an upscale lifestyle magazine. The business model worked, and for many years Playboy paid writers some of the top rates in the field.
Those same cultural and technological forces were also going to render Playboy obsolete, as the profit centers in the skin trade quickly moved first to video and then to the Internet.
Today, most attacks on pornography seem to come from the anti-sex feminist left than the religious right.
Hefner lived long enough to see himself transformed into a media icon, and for his flagship magazine to become culturally irrelevant.
Setup:
“The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., announced Tuesday that he will leave the Senate when his term expires next year, and will not seek re-election.”
Shot:
Hey @instapundit: now’s your chance!
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) September 26, 2017
Chaser:
“Sure, fine, but what if I won? Do you hate me so much?”
Someone has to take a bullet for the team. Besides, think of all the blogging opportunities! You’d finally be able to report on the graft from the inside!
“Alabama Republicans on Tuesday voted decisively to nominate Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court judge, for a U.S. Senate seat, delivering a rebuke to President Donald Trump and the GOP establishment that supported his rival. ”
I wasn’t following this race closely, so enjoy some brief Takes of Elevated Temperature:
Edited to add: Gracious (verily, even Presidential) tweet from President Trump following Moore’s win:
Congratulations to Roy Moore on his Republican Primary win in Alabama. Luther Strange started way back & ran a good race. Roy, WIN in Dec!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2017
ZeroHedge suggests that this actually strengthens Trump’s hand against congressional Republicans.
That’s the New York Post headline, and who are we to improve on the experts?
The disgraced ex-congressman broke down crying as he was sentenced to 21 months in prison Monday for convincing a high school student to undress and touch herself via Skype in 2016.
“This was a serious crime. It’s a serious crime that deserves serious punishment,” Manhattan federal Judge Denise Cote said as the convicted sext fiend dropped his head into his hand and wept.
After the courtroom cleared, Weiner sat crying in his chair with his lawyers patting him on the back. His mom also sat crying on the bench behind him, sitting next to Weiner’s brother Jason and Weiner’s dad.
Far be it for me to kick a man while he’s down—
Ha! Just kidding! It’s Anthony Weiner we’re talking about here! He deserves to be kicked.
Repeatedly.
What sort of sex fiend brings his mother to sit next to him at his sentencing hearing? And crying, when he went in knowing he had already been convicted, when he’s getting only a fraction of the sentence he could have gotten, just bespeaks what a pathetic little weasel he is.
It would be best for the nation for Weiner to do his time and then disappear from sight. It would be best for the Republican Party for Weiner to immediately announce he’s running for office again upon his release (or even before). But I suspect Democrats will simply have to find a way to lose elections without having Weiner in the public spotlight.
I’m pretty sure they’re up to the task.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
(Previously: a long, hard look at Anthony Weiner’s sentence.)
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union once again won the majority of votes in German federal elections. However, it got the smallest share of any of Merkel’s victories, and the “far right” Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered the Bundestag with 12.7% of the vote, making it the third largest party. The “far right” and “populist” tags don’t take into account that the party was originally formed by economists skeptical of deeper European economic integration. They catch the most heat for a position that’s extremely popular: that Merkel’s inviting millions of Islamic “refugees” to Germany was a big mistake that should be reversed and that border controls should be implemented. They also believe that multiculturalism does not work.
This, of course, is deeply unacceptable to the European ruling class, which is why they describe AfD in ways that make it sound like they’re about to break out singing the Horst Wessel song.
The actual AfD manifesto can be read in English here, assuming you’re up for 96 pages of European party positions. It includes a mix of populist, Euroskeptic, conservative and libertarian positions. (Germany’s fourth largest party, the Free Democratic Party, bills itself as a fusions of liberalism and “classical liberalism,” is generally considered center-right, but is markedly more internationalist than AfD, and have frequently played the parliamentary swing-party role the Liberal Democrats have in the UK.)
As in America, the German ruling class have decided that some issues (in Germany’s case, Greek bailouts and Muslim refugees) are too sensitive to let mere voters have their say in them, with the result that more and more, voters are looking to alternatives, “respectable” or otherwise.
Lockheed Martin has developed a battlefield laser weapon to shoot down drones. Here’s video of it in action.
Keep in mind all the caveats of corporate-produced weapon test videos (if a test run was a failure, you wouldn’t be seeing that video), and don’t expect these to be deployed in the battlefield anytime soon. But it’s still promising.
That’s what this headline implies. The truth is a little less dramatic: Raqqa is on the edge of full liberation and the Islamic State is in retreat everywhere else.
Static lines of control that held for months in northern Raqqa have collapsed, as seen in this Syria Livemap screen cap:
Compare that to this map from September 5:
Islamic State fighters are running out of territory in Raqqa to defend.
Here’s a video from the battle of Raqqa:
Southeast of Raqqa, Syrian government forces and the SDF are both pushing toward Deir ez-Zor.
SDF also say they have captured Syria’s largest oilfield from the Islamic State near Deir ez-Zor.
Elsewhere in the theater, “Iraqi Security Forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces have cleared ISIS out of about 50,000 square miles and liberated more than 6 million people who were living under Islamic State occupation.”
Here’s a map of Iraqi forces collapsing the pocket of Islamic State forces to the southwest of Kirkuk that have been cut off from the rest of the Islamic State at least since the investment of Mosul.
Everywhere within it’s supposed caliphate, the Islamic State is in retreat, and nowhere is it counterattacking successfully. But it still holds a lot of territory, and there’s a lot more fighting left before declaring it dead.
Bonus video: Royal Air Force drone stops Islamic State public execution: