Posts Tagged ‘Catholics’

LinkSwarm for August 31, 2018

Friday, August 31st, 2018

Just when I think the Catholic Church can’t make itself look any worse in the wake of the burgeoning child rape scandal, they prove me wrong:

  • Papal spokesman on the Catholic Church’s spiraling child rape scandal:

    In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.

    “The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.

  • Evidently Pope Francis and company were doing their darnedest to imitate the Babylon Bee.
  • Related: “Pope Starting To Suspect He Might Be Antichrist.”
  • How ObamaCare was designed to force independent doctors out of business. (Hat tip: Ian Murray at Instapundit.)
  • ICE arrests over 100 illegal alien workers at Load Trail LLC in Sumner, north Texas.
  • The U.S. share of mass shootings is actually lower than the global average.
  • President Trump’s Iran sanctions are working.
  • “There’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Remember Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank? They were going to build 2,300 of them. Now? 132. And that number is split between the T-14 and the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, which shares the same chassis. Which means Russia will have to continue to rely on older T-72 and T-90 tanks as the mainstays of their armored forces for the foreseeable future. By comparison the United States has over 1,500 M1A2s and over 4,000 M1A1s, both of which proved capable of taking out T-72s in the Gulf War. As Stalin once put it, “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” And the essential brokeness of Russia is why I’m not worried about their costly adventurism in Syria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • John McCain was admired by liberals; that is, when they weren’t calling him a senile plutocrat warmonger.
  • How Chicago 68 destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • The Missouri Democratic Party does not need any of you stinking moderates. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Biased liberal news sites hate being called biased liberal news sites. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Philadelphia is bankrupt. So naturally the liberal mayor is trying to ignore the obvious. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Cahnman looks at gang rape in the Baylor football program. Add to this the news that Baylor planted moles in sexual assault survivor groups to report back on cases involving student athletes, and you start to wonder whether the NCAA out not to revive the “Death Penalty” for Baylor’s football program…or maybe their entire athletic department.
  • CNN lied, they know they lied, and they can’t stop lying.
  • Washington Post: “Russia hacked the election!” Also Washington Post: “We’re going to court to fight election transparency advertising law!” (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
  • Speaking of liberal mouthpiece newspapers, both the editor and the publisher for the Austin American Statesman are retiring.
  • This just in: Greece is still boned.
  • “If he’s cute, it’s flirting. If he’s ugly, it’s sexual harassment.”
  • “Abbas to close banks in Gaza, cut off all salaries.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lancaster Independent School District violates state law with illegal electioneering.
  • Dick’s Sporting Goods move away from guns hurt their bottom line. “The anti-gun crowd must not buy a lot of sporting goods.​”
  • ESPN finally seems to understand that they should get out of politics and stick to sports. Took them long enough…
  • Chicanery at the Llano police department. Bad cop! No ribs!
  • Eat Steak and Live Longer.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Snowflake Kansas professor cancels office hours because concealed carry is no legal. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • There can be only one…going to prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • How ballpoint pens killed cursive.
  • LinkSwarm for August 24, 2018

    Friday, August 24th, 2018

    I suspect people in the upper Midwest want summer to last as long as possible, but here in Texas, I admit to getting mighty tired of walking my dog at night when it’s still 90° and windless…

  • Thanks to a booming economy, millions fewer are on food stamps.
  • As those arguing for immigration restrictions from Muslim-majority countries have long argued, the majority of convicted rapist in Sweden are foreign born:

    About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.

    Public broadcaster SVT said it had counted all court convictions to present a complete picture in Sweden.

    But Sweden had thousands more reported rapes, and there is no ethnic breakdown for those.

    Immigration and crime are major issues in Sweden’s general election campaign. The vote is on 9 September.

    The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats hope to make significant ground, although they have slipped to third place in the latest opinion poll.

    The Mission Investigation programme, due to be broadcast on Wednesday by SVT, said the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan.

  • A thorough examination of the Pennsylvania DA’s investigation into the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal:
  • The report clearly shows a pattern of cover-up by the Church, even detailing the precise methods the archdioceses used to avoid prosecution. Of this, there can be no doubt that the scope of the abuse was known by the Church, and that it sometimes took extraordinary measures to bury evidence and deny facts.
  • Over 1,000 individual victims are identified, but the report acknowledges that many of them came forward only as news spread that the report was being compiled. The writers of the report are aware that public release of this report may result in thousands more victims coming forward. An interesting facet of mass-child-abuse cases is that many victims keep silent for decades assuming no one will believe them; however, when seeing that “Rev. Joe Smith” has been identified doing X, the victims often realize “Hey, he did that to me, too” and then realize they were not alone, and are now credible.
  • More interestingly, the report acknowledges the cooperation of the Church in its compilation. Even though the report lambasts current Church leaders, the report acknowledges the various archdioceses of Pennsylvania (with the exception of Philadelphia, which is still preparing information) were readily assisting with producing evidence: letters, memoranda, reports, and more were promptly turned over, and Church officials almost seem to be eager to get this information public. The report even stipulates that, for the first time, there is reason to be optimistic the Catholic Church is cleaning house at last.
  • (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Most people don’t know the self defense laws of their own state. Sadly, “most people” frequently includes prosecutors. Says friend-of-the-blog firearms training expert Karl Rehn: “I think his comments are correct in that article.”
  • President Donald Trump’s bad court day in context:

    None of this would be happening, of course, but for Bob Mueller’s effort to drive President Trump from office on behalf of his de facto client, the Democratic Party. In a nauseating bit of hypocrisy, Deputy U.S. attorney Robert Khuzami said today that “The essence of what this case is about is justice, and that is an equal playing field for all persons in the eyes of the law….” Equal justice has nothing to do with this prosecution. Michael Cohen was targeted solely because he was Trump’s personal lawyer, and enforcement of campaign finance law is anything but equal. Just ask Dinesh D’Souza.

    As we and others have said many times, what is going on in the courts is mostly theater–unless, of course, you are Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen. President Trump can’t be indicted, so legal niceties are not very material. The Mueller Switch Project has three objectives: 1) furnish House Democrats (assuming they take the majority in November) with ammunition to impeach the President; 2) help the Democrats to win the midterm elections; and 3) make President Trump’s re-election less likely in 2020.

    Today’s legal developments unquestionably represent a step forward for the Democrats on all three fronts. But in principle, there is no reason why they should change the landscape. Manafort’s conviction has nothing to do with Trump. And no matter how Mueller may try to dress it up with talk about campaign finance–which voters don’t care about, anyway–the Cohen plea simply confirms what we already knew–that Trump tried to keep Stephanie Clifford quiet. That may be a big deal to Melania, I can’t speak for her. But I doubt that it is a big deal to a significant number of voters, and I doubt that tomorrow’s headlines will move the needle on the midterm election.

  • Purdue’s new engineering school dean is a social justice warrior. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Texas successful in getting District Court to overturn ObamaCare fee. Texas Attorney general Ken Paxton: “Obamacare is unconstitutional, plain and simple. We all know that the feds cannot tax the states, and we’re proud to return this illegally collected money to the people of Texas.”
  • This piece claims that had (for example) Ted Cruz won the nomination and beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016, the liberal overclass would be acting just as deranged toward him as it is toward Donald Trump.

    Bill [Kristol] and his fellow travelers such as Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Max Boot, and George Will, among other NeverTrumps and their allies, are telling each other, and anyone who will listen, that Trump is not only far worse than the Democrats in Congress, but solely responsible for the combative state of American politics.

    Trump’s unexpected and overwhelming success as an amateur politician is a clear and present danger to the Professional Conservative Class, as he does not and will not listen to them. This cabal is used to being feted by the mainstream media as setting the tone for the conservative movement, which more often than not includes being obsequious toward the dominant movers and shakers in Washington: the Democrats and the media.

    Therefore, the radicalization and absolutism of the Democratic Party that have been evolving over the past two decades are subsumed by the greater threat of Donald Trump. To listen to the NeverTrump crowd, had he not won the presidency, the country would be far better off, civility would reign supreme, and Democrats and housebroken Republicans would hold hands as they cheerfully do the bidding of them who must be obeyed: the American Ruling Class.

    Snip.

    Ted Cruz represents an existential threat to the Democratic Party. He is Cuban-American and thus would be the first Hispanic nominated to run for president by either major party. The Democrats and the left view the 57 million Hispanic Americans and 38 million black Americans as the unquestioned property of Democratic Party, thus they are not allowed to wander off the plantation. Any threat to that hegemony must be met, and has been met, with unrestrained ferocity.

    Therefore, the foundational strategy the Democrats and Hillary Clinton decided to deploy against Cruz, if he won the nomination, was to portray him as an out-of-control and dangerous extremist – so vile and fanatical that his own party could not stomach him – thus an out-of-touch and faux Hispanic.

    To augment this strategy, Cruz would have been vilified as a virulent Islamophobe, an anti-immigration bigot, a Bible-toting intolerant Christian Evangelical, someone in favor of draconian spending cuts, and a toady of the far-right…and he was born in Canada.

    Further, as this same cabal went to great lengths and expense to produce and use a phony dossier regarding Donald Trump, it would be safe to assume that they would have done the same with Ted Cruz, particularly in light of a fictitious story about a number of alleged extramarital affairs planted in the National Enquirer in March of 2016. There would have been incessant leaks to the media that would have mirrored what they did to Trump.

    There is a certain amount of truth in this, but there is something about Trump, just like there was something about Sarah Palin, that needles our self-anointed overclass at a subconscious, visceral level. The idea that this obvious social inferior gnaws at them and makes them irrational in a way that I suspect a Ted Cruz presidency would not.

  • Nothing qualifies you to attend a DNC meeting, or run for president, like being the mouthpiece for a porn star. And really, is that actually the whole DNC meeting? It looks like a PTA meeting.
  • Facebook removes conservative posts as spam. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Singer claims he was anally raped by opera’s gay power couple.
  • Game studio allows social justice warrior customization…for a World War II game. Check out the comments. “Ever since I was a kid watching the likes of The Longest Day and Where Eagles Dare I’ve fantasized about raiding occupied Norway as an Asian transgender pirate.” (Ht tip: Borepatch.)
  • LinkSwarm for August 17, 2018

    Friday, August 17th, 2018

    Themes for today’s LinkSwarm: Jihad, rape and China. Not necessarily in that order…

  • So let me see if I have this story straight: New Mexico jihadis, one related to a New York City imam who might have been involved in 9/11, murdered three children, abused and starved 11 other children while teaching them to be school shooters, and the judge let them out on bail?

    A New Mexico state judge ruled Monday that five alleged Muslim extremists accused of training children to conduct school shootings do not have to remain in jail while they await trial for child abuse.

    Judge Sarah Backus released the five defendants, Siraj Wahhaj, Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhannah Wahhaj, Jany Leveille, and Lucas Morten, on a $20,000 “signature bond,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. That means that the defendants will not have to pay money unless they violate the conditions of their release

    It’s a good thing there’s not a huge foreign nation immediately to the south with a porous border they can flee to…

    And authorities just bulldozed the compound?

  • The great illusion of China’s economic growth.

    If China really had a savings rate of 46%, the economy would look quite different. There would be very little debt in the system; the banks would have a very low loans to deposits ratio and low leverage, like banks in nineteenth century Britain. Consumer debt would be almost non-existent, while the Chinese market would have an enormous variety of saving and investment schemes, to take care of all the accumulated wealth. New company formation would be very high, but “venture capital” would be very scarce, because new companies would be capitalized from the savings of the founders’ relatives and friends. Overall, China might well have a rapid growth rate, but it would be a very contented, stable economy.

    A recent Financial Times examination of China’s economy illustrates the problem; it shows consumer debt almost doubling as a share of GDP, from roughly 20% to 40% in the last five years and tells pathetic stories of young, highly educated Chinese who max out their credit cards, desperately hoping to boost their earnings sufficiently to pay that debt back. But Chinese elite youths brought up in a society with a 46% savings rate would have neither the desire nor the need for heavy credit card usage. First, they would have been brought up in families with a fanatical devotion to deferring consumption, so would regard the over-indebted Western Millennial lifestyle with undiluted horror. Second, because of their families’ savings habits, such elite youths would be beneficiaries of very substantial trust funds from their relatives, and so would have no need of credit cards.

    If the savings rate is fiction, then so are all China’s economic statistics. GDP is at least one third lower than claimed, to account for the missing savings, and growth rates over the last decades correspondingly lower, On the other hand, China’s foreign debt is all too real, and most of the domestic debt also appears to be solid, so China’ s gross debt, already alarmingly high at 299% of GDP according to the Institute for International Finance, is in reality about 450% of true GDP, substantially higher than that of any other country. With such a level of debt, China is not about to overtake the West, it is in imminent danger of collapse. Indeed, it is at first sight something of a mystery why it has not collapsed already under the weight of its excesses.

    (Hat tip: Iain Murray at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of China, they got all pissy about the latest defense bill.
  • Also: “China Buckles, Sends Trade Delegation to Washington to Seek End of Trade War.” Maybe, just maybe, President Donald Trump knows a thing or two about negotiating strategy…
  • Today’s @realDonaldTrump approval ratings among black voters: 36%.” That’s up from 29% two weeks ago.
  • “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” That quote comes from an American bicycling across several foreign countries, including one where Islamic State followers killed him, his wife, and two fellow-travelers thanks to their “different perspectives.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Google has released a report on the paid ads they’ve run on political campaigns. It’s not completely useless, but then you drill down to congressional district, it only shows you total spending, not how much was spent by each campaign, much less links to the relevant ads.
  • Borepatch brings up an old and (to our media) deeply uncomfortable truth about the Catholic child rape scandal:

    A theme that keeps recurring in histories of the worst abusers is that they were trained in seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not been an important enabler of priestly abuse.

    Along those lines, the book Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church made this argument shortly after the original Catholic Church pedophilia scandal broke, and was promptly ignored by the media for not fitting the narrative.

  • Speaking of child rape, 30 Muslim men and one woman have been charged with multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking of women as young as 12 in West Yorkshire, UK. (“Luxury! We used to be raped 25 hours a day…”)
  • Ace of Spades is surprised to find Disney holding firm on it’s firing of James “I Make Pedophile Jokes” Gunn. Also, in the course of slamming (perhaps a littler too strenuously) Trump-skeptical establishment conservatives on their hypocrisy on the issue (RE: Roseanne), he does nicely articulate the logic of taking’s the Guardians of the Galaxy director’s scalp, even if Gunn was only joking:

    I will not be subject to one of your rules and yet permit you to be free of your own rule. If it’s your rule, you shall suffer under it just the same as me.

    We do not (yet) have a formal caste system in America, despite the obvious longing from the left and the NeverTrump rump to establish over-castes and under-castes.

    And it’s MUH #SacredPrinciple that we shall not have a tiered system of citizenship that the leftwing establishment as well as the “right”-leaning establishment so clearly crave.

    And I’ll sacrifice anyone to make sure that they do not put me in their designated under-caste.​

  • “Poll: Majority of Millennial Women Do Not Identify as Feminist.” Take a bow, Shoe0nHead! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Newspaper editorial says that the MSM is falling into Prsident Trump’s trap:

    Trump may be both more relentless and obnoxious than his predecessors, but cries of “Fake News!” from the Oval Office are old hat. Presidents always blame the messenger. Even Barack Obama, the object of so much media fawning, groused about distorted coverage.

    This time, though, we are taking it personally. Striking at the bait Trump dangles. Joining the war he’s declared. Allowing him to goad us into abandoning the fundamental principles of our profession.

    Donald Trump is not responsible for the eroding trust in the media. He lacks the credibility to pull that off. The damage to our standing is self-inflicted.

    The independent press was built on a foundation of objectivity. Through a tradition of conscientious commitment to telling all sides of a story we convinced our readers, listeners, viewers that we were the source of fair and balanced coverage. We were equal opportunity scourges of scoundrels on both sides of the political aisle.

    Now, too many of us are following the websites, cable networks and blogosphere into point-of-view journalism that presents the news with equal parts fact and opinion. We’ve infused our reports with commentary and call it context.

    Journalists once kept their personal views personal, lest anyone challenge the motives behind their reporting. Now reporters post their opinions on Facebook and Twitter. They sob in newsrooms over the results of an election. News meetings and editorial boards are often indistinguishable.

    Respected journalists openly question whether remaining objective in the Donald Trump era is a sell-out rather than a virtue. Some have joined the resistance movement, blending journalism with activism.

    No one in our profession can say with a straight face that we cover Donald Trump the same way we have past presidents. We are not only giving him more scrutiny — rightly so — but we are making more mistakes in our haste to discredit him. Our accuracy ratings have fallen as we turn to poorly vetted anonymous sources and repeat every rumor that fits the narrative that Trump is a disaster.

    Yes, Trump is an extraordinary case. Chaos is the hallmark of his governing style. His personal conduct falls well short of presidential. But his administration has had successes, and the press is not as eager to cover those as it is his failures.

    Journalism seems to have turned a corner in search of some higher purpose beyond simply digging out the truth, presenting it to our readers and letting them decide what to do with it.

    Nothing about Donald Trump justifies tossing aside the standards that have allowed journalists to remain the trusted eyes and ears of the people.

  • “Patreon and Mastercard ban Robert Spencer without explanation.” That’s Robert Spencer of JihadWatch, not Richard Spencer the LARP Nazi.
  • By the way, Robert Spencer has a new book out: The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS.
  • MoviePass is getting ready to bite the moose. I can imagine a way you could make this thing work out: Make deals with large theater chains, exclude the first week of all movies, and the first few weeks for blockbusters, and make a deal to buy tickets at a steep discount to put butts in seats so theater owners can make more money off concessions. All things that MoviePass evidently never attempted…
  • The great plastic gun panic…of 1986. I think we can all remember how the widespread availability of the Glock resulted in the downfall of America…
  • The remote Australian town where people live underground and hunt opals.
  • Unlikely teamups:

  • Are you ready to take your cosplay to Flavortown? (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Trump Supreme Court Pick Roundup

    Monday, July 9th, 2018

    In advance of President Donald Trump announcing his nominee to the Supreme Court to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy tonight, here are a few links of interest on the subject:

  • The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan Adler looks at President Trump’s reported finalists:

    According to press reports, rollout packages have been prepared for four potential nominees, all of whom sit as judges on U.S. Courts of Appeals: Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Circuit), Raymond Kethledge (6th Circuit), Amy Coney Barrett (7th Circuit), and Thomas Hardiman (3rd Circuit). All four potential nominees are on Trump’s list of 25 potential SCOTUS nominees, and all four are highly qualified jurists of the sort the President said he would appoint.

  • Jim Geraghty is hoping for Amy Comey Barrett, just to watch the left-wing anti-Catholic freakout:

    The way Senate Democrats treated Barrett last autumn — in particular, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s argument that Barrett was simply too religious and too devoutly Catholic to serve on the bench, declaring, “the dogma lives loudly within you,” revealed an argument this country needs to have: whether the country accepts deeply religious people in positions of legal authority.

    (It’s kind of amazing that a country that has freedom of religion, that was founded in part by Pilgrims, was a beacon for those seeking religious freedom for generations, and that has had George Washington, John Adams, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush as presidents would even need to have this debate. But it is illustrative of how different the modern Left is from previous generations.)

    Yes, there are plenty of progressive and Democratic Catholics in this country. But I don’t think you have to look too hard to find progressives who believe, more or less, that devout Catholics — perhaps devout Christians of any stripe — simply can’t be trusted to rule on the law and should be prevented from serving in the judiciary whenever possible. A Catholic judge can insist, loudly and often, that they believe their role as a judge is to rule on the law and the Constitution alone, and that while their faith no doubt shapes their values and their worldview — as much as any religion, philosophy, or atheism shapes the values and worldview of any other judge — and some progressives will insist it’s all a ruse. Some are determined to see any religiously active Christians as theocrats in black robes. (As this 2007 cartoon demonstrates, the arguments are sometimes not that subtle at all; merely an affiliation with a Catholic faith makes you an agent of the Pope.)

    You know that if Barrett is the nominee, someone on the Left will make an openly sexist criticism. You know her seven children will be discussed in depth. You know that someone will inevitably make an argument that amounts to, “Look, if we’re going to allow Catholics to be judges, they at least have to be lapsed Catholics.”

    Why do some progressives see Catholics and/or Christians as aspiring dictators from the bench, eager to toss away any established rights, established traditions, and impose an oppressive doctrine on the entire country and stifle dissent and differing points of view?

    Because that’s how some progressives see the role of the judiciary.

  • Contrasting Amy Comey Barrett with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois thinks other Democratic senators should be just fine and dandy with losing their own senate seats in order to defeat President trump’s Supreme Court pick, whoever it is. I wonder what that would accomplish, given that President Trump could just resubmit them to a more Republican senate for approval come January…
  • Via Adler comes news that there’s a FantasySCOTUS page where people can vote for their preferred pick. Barrett is leading there.
  • “Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) said Thursday the upcoming fight over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee was about whether the country would ‘criminalize women.'” OK, you caught us! At our Secret Patriarchal Oppressor Tribunals (SPOT), we often opine “Hey, what if we just threw everyone with two X chromosomes into prison! That would solve all our problems!” Good times, good times…
  • This Week in Clinton Corruption for October 13, 2016

    Thursday, October 13th, 2016

    There’s a gusher of Clinton corruption information coming out of the leak of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails:

  • Hillary’s State Department gave special treatment to Friends of Bill.
  • “I know [Hillary] has begun to hate everyday Americans.”
  • She also called blacks and Muslims “professional never-do-wells.”
  • Her campaign also mocked Catholics, Southerners and “needy Latinos.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • 14 things we learned from the latest email revelations. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Chelsea Clinton almost drove the Clinton Foundation COO to suicide.
  • Hillary’s email team failed to turn over key subpoenaed documents. (Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)
  • And here they are discussing which emails to delete. So they’re actually on record discussing felony destruction of evidence.
  • “Unless The Saudi Sheikh Gave Us $6 Million, This Sounds Crazy To Do.”
  • Wikileaks also brought back to light a bit of information that was mostly swept under the rug at the time: Eric McFadden, Hillary’s 2008 Catholic community liaison, was arrested in 2009 for running an underage prostitution ring. Just another member of the Clinton Campaign Moral Freakshow…
  • The list of MSM reporters who take their marching orders from Hillary. On the list: ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (Duh) and Diane Sawyer, New York Times‘s Gail Collins, etc. The only surprise is no one from the Washington Post on that list. Maybe they just assumed they already had marching orders to support Hillary. (Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)
  • The Wikileaks emails expose the inner workings of the American Nomenklatura:

    Most evident from their downloads is the unremitting, almost incestual, alliance between elites (read: Democratic Party leadership) and the press, those who are informing us of what we are supposed to think. The myriad emails between New York Times reporter and CNBC anchor John Harwood and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta would approach the risible were they not so disturbing by implication. Presidential debate moderator Harwood, putatively a journalist, actually acts as an advisor to Podesta in them, warning the campaign manager of the dangers of a potential Ben Carson candidacy and even bragging to him about having tripped up Donald Trump at a debate.

    But the presidential debate moderator is far from alone in his fealty to the ways and means of the nomenklatura. The New York Times and the Boston Globe—the emails show, as if we hadn’t guessed already—colluded with the Clinton campaign.

    But the level of collusion goes much deeper than press and politicians. The Department of Justice itself—the emails also reveal—was in private communication with the Clinton people during the investigation of the Hillary Clinton homebrew server, warning her campaign in advance of a State Department release of emails. Everybody was colluding!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Excerpts from Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speech. In which Hillary declares she has nothing in common with those peons in the middle class, admits that jihadists are coming over among Syrian refugees, and proclaims her love of open borders.
  • More on the subject: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Sounds like the EU written large.
  • Still more from her speeches on having different public and private positions.
  • So who is she lying to: her supporters or her donors?
  • On Hillary’s dream of open borders. “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • And 2000 more Podesta emails.
  • FBI: “The vast majority felt she should be prosecuted.” (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt.)
  • The White House coordinated with the Clinton campaign back in 2015 to do damage control over the email scandal.
  • Hard to believe it’s been a mere five days since Trump held a press conference with women Bill Clinton sexually assaulted. So much news has come down the pike since…
  • The long list of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Eileen Wellstone, Carolyn Moffet, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Becky Brown, Helen Dowdy, Cristy Zercher… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “It’s always ‘believe the women’ until they threaten the career of a Clinton.”
  • Bill Clinton gets Bone-d. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Scott Adams: “If the new battleground is spousal fidelity, you have to like Trump’s chances.”
  • New Trump ad hits Hillary on Pay-to-Play corruption:

  • Nigel Farage on Brexit and Trump: “I believe we are witnessing a popular uprising against failed politics on a global scale. People want to vote for candidates with personality, faults and all. It is the same in the UK, America and much of the rest of Europe. The little people have had enough. They want change.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Even Green Party candidate Jill Stein says that “it is actually Hillary’s policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump.”
  • New York City election commissioner admits on camera that “voters get bused around to vote multiple times.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • That NBC poll showing Hillary up 11 points is pure hogwash with biased samples from a company that’s on the Hillary campaign’s payroll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Stephen Green is right: I need a bigger week…

    The War on the Little Sisters of the Poor

    Thursday, April 14th, 2016

    The Little Sisters of the Poor case, which will decide whether the Obama Administration can force Catholic nuns to pay for abortions by fiat, is before the Supreme Court.

    Some interesting developments:

    The government’s position in Zubik v. Burwell, the contraceptive mandate case, just got weirder. It is increasingly difficult to understand why the government has been litigating so long and so hard to force the Little Sisters and other religious organizations to perform acts they regard as contrary to their faith, when it now admits (however grudgingly) that it all was unnecessary.

    Of course, this ignores the possibility that the entire point of ObamaCare (and the administration’s specific interpretation of same) was to force Catholics and evangelicals to pay for abortion against their will. As Yuval Levin notes: “It is a culture war of choice on the part of the Obama White House.” That’s the reason this administration is willing to violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in order to punish the The Little Sisters of the Poor. As Instapundit noted: “They hate those groups and wanted to punish them.”

    Every knee must bend.

    LinkSwarm for April 1, 2016

    Friday, April 1st, 2016

    Happy April Fools day! No tricks here, just the usual Friday LinkSwarm:

  • ObamaCare didn’t do jack to lower costs. (Hat tip Instapundit.)
  • Indeed, Obamacare is the fail that keeps failing: “As a result of the ACA, between 4 million and 9 million fewer people are projected to have employment-based coverage each year from 2017 through 2026 than would have had such coverage if the ACA had never been enacted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Great news! The Nigerian Army has rescued rescued 800 Boko Haram hostages. That’s compared to the number of those hostages rescued by the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which is (stops, counts, carries the one) Zero.
  • Bad news: They just kidnapped 300 more. (Hat tip: Weasel Zippers.)
  • Following the Brussels attack, the standard ruling class rituals of aversion are in full bloom.
  • Donald Trump suggested targeting the families of terrorists. Putin’s Russia does exactly that.
  • The Obama Administration treats Little Sisters of the Poor worse than Exxon, Visa and Pepsi, all of whom have health plans lacking the abortion mandate. Then again, as Instapundit noted: “To be fair, that was basically because they hate those groups and wanted to punish them.”
  • Xi Jinping has accumulated more power than any leader since Mao. “He has been fighting dissent with even more ruthlessness than he has been waging war on graft. Not since the dark days after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 has there been such a sweeping crackdown on critics of the party.”
  • Belgium’s current crises sounds an awful lot like where California is headed: Expensive government that’s congenitally incapable of solving problems.
  • Canadian bank depositors are now officially at risk of bail-ins.
  • David Brin says the Amendment that most protects the right of citizens to film interactions with the police is the Sixth.
  • Rob Ford was more than just a loud-mouth drunk. “Ford was a political pragmatist who simply didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about him other than his constituents. It was that gumption that endeared him to hundreds of thousands of Torontonians.”
  • Supergenius New Yorker writer thinks Arizona is next to Texas.

    Screen shot 2016-03-23 at 10.56.52 PM

    (Screen shot has been included because the article has been edited and no notice made of the deleted error.)

  • Illegal alien rapes 12-year old. (Hat tip: Director Blue.
  • Lake Travis hits full again.
  • Hulk Hogan may have just destroyed Gawker.” Well, we can only hope…
  • Lunatic hoplophobe associate professor of English calls 911 to report ROTC maneuvers on campus at the University of North Dakota. (Hat tip: Tam.)
  • Old and Busted: The Suicide Prevention Hotline. The New Hotness: The Suicide Encouragement Hotline. Not an April Fools joke, alas…
  • Why grackles love supermarket parking lots.
  • Weekend Roundup for April 28, 2014

    Monday, April 28th, 2014

    Not so much a #LinkSwarm per se, as a roundup of news you might have missed over the weekend:

  • NBA owner Donald Sterling, under the spotlight for a bizarre racist rant captured on tape, is a Democrat.
  • Catholic Church canonizes Popes John Paul II and John XXIII as Saints.
  • 3,000 Florida voters are registered at a single UPS store.
  • “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
  • John Kerry still pursuing the mirage of Middle East peace.
  • Obama Administration watchdog actually a lapdog.
  • Man up, Nancy Boy.
  • CNN analyst welches on Zimmerman bet.
  • William Friedkin’s brilliant movie Sorcerer is finally out on Blu Ray.
  • LinkSwarm for October 11, 2013

    Friday, October 11th, 2013

    A LinkSwarm heavy on shutdown-related news:

  • For epitomizing what Democrats have done to Detroit, Kwame Kirkpatrick gets 28 years.
  • Hey Venezuela, how’s that Socialism working out for you? Inflation hits 49.4%. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
  • Victor Davis Hanson thinks Republicans are winning.
  • ObamaCare, or food?
  • Steyn on the shutdown. “The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft facility.”
  • Catholic priests prohibited from giving Mass.
  • The revolving door between the Democratic Party and the IRS.
  • How the GOP establishment tried to seize control of Freedomworks.
  • The Magic of Obama: White House gift shop goes bankrupt.
  • Department of Fish & Wildlife lift ban minutes before North Dakota files lawsuit.
  • Le Pen poised to win European Parliament elections? That’s Marine Le Pen, or Le Pen: The Next Generation.
  • Five years after the meltdown, families still hoarding cash.
  • Kent Hance to retire as Texas Tech Chancellor. Hance’s political career is in many ways emblematic of the evolution of Texas politics, starting out as a conservative Democrat, elected to the state Senate in 1974, defeating George W. Bush for a U.S. congressional seat in 1978, played key roll in backing the Kemp-Roth tax cuts in 1981, narrowly losing the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Lloyd Doggett (who would then get stomped by Phil Gramm in the general election) in 1984, followed Gramm by switching to the Republican Party in 1985, losing the GOP Gubernatorial nomination to an un-retired Bill Clements in 1986, getting appointed to the Railroad Commission in 1987, winning re-election to it in 1988, and losing to Clayton Williams in the 1990 Republican Gubernatorial primary. He had a long, long career as a bridesmaid…
  • Raising the debt limit means bankrupting your children.
  • “This 20 year old has discovered Sex Is Awesome!!! and just wants us all to know that. Yeah Sugar-Tits we sort of know. We’ve been enjoying it for years, but without quite as much Noob Squeeing about it.”
  • Democrats Take 2: Oh, THAT Catholic Cardinal!

    Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

    Via Moe Lane comes word that Democrats have reconsidered their decision to reject Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s offer to lead a prayer at the Democratic National Convention.

    Two days ago: Die in a fire, you dress-wearing, anti-choice freak!
    Yesterday: Oh, that Cardinal! We love that guy! Can’t enough of him! Yeah, he can offer the closing prayer.

    So Democratic delegates will have to spend at least a few minutes that day pretending they don’t hate Catholics.