Posts Tagged ‘Politico’

LinkSwarm for August 20, 2021

Friday, August 20th, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I sort of want to put all the horrible news out of Afghanistan in one blog post, but it will probably have to wait until next week.

  • Democrat voting fraud straight outa Compton. ”[Compton city councilman] Isaac Galvan, 34, was one of six people charged Friday with conspiracy to commit election fraud, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.”
  • One in ten Democrats regret voting for Biden over Trump.
  • Related:

  • Just as in Austin, the homeless drug addicts Democratic politicians love in Seattle are killing innocent, law-abiding Americans:

  • Mathias Dopfner, CEO of German Axel Springer, flies Israeli flag for a week after antisemitic attacks. Leftwing employees: “Triggered!” Dopfner: “Then quit.” Bonus: He might buy Politico. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Kennedy bashes Cuomo (not the one he was married to):

  • Instapundit: “Mask bullies don’t want to persuade you — but to humiliate and rule you….This sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule.”
  • “Honolulu Immediately Folds in Face of Gun-Rights Lawsuit…Federal District Judge J. Michael Seabright, a Bush appointee, ruled the state’s requirement that pistol purchasers present their guns to police for inspection and its 10-day expiration for purchase permits were unconstitutional.”
  • Thanks to Travis County DA Jose Garza, two accused child murderers are out on bail.

    APD says that officers responded to a urgent check welfare call on March 7 just after 8 p.m. at the First Choice Emergency Room Center on E. Riverside Drive. The caller had reported to 911 that someone had brought an unresponsive child to the ER and that they were getting mixed information as to why the child was unresponsive. CPR was in progress.

    ATCEMS then transported the child, identified as six-year-old Stavian Driver, to the emergency room at Dell Children’s Medical Center. Stavian succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead just before 9 p.m.

    APD says that over the next several days, homicide detectives interviewed Stavian’s mother, 27-year-old Staleigh Coleman and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Blake Jones, who were both at their home on Cromwell Circle when the incident occurred. A search warrant was also executed at the home.

    Pictured are the mugshots of Staleigh B. Coleman (left) and Blake Howard Jones (right). (Austin Police Department)

    Due to serious inconsistencies as to how Stavian received scalding burns over 40% of his upper body, arrest warrants were issued for both Coleman and Jones for injury to a child by omission, says APD. Their bonds were set at $100,000 dollars.

    Coleman and Jones were arrested on March 10 and were transported and booked into the Travis County Jail. APD says both are currently out of jail on bond.

  • “Ted Cruz saved America at 3:30 AM on Wednesday morning.” By objecting to passage of the $3.5 trillion Democratic Party wish list budget.
  • Air Force cadets forced to watch #BlackLivesMatter videos.
  • Critical Race Theory has even spread to Oklahoma: “‘Only white people can be racist’: Union officials call for purge of teacher workforce.”
  • Also forced to take Critical Race Theory classes: Bank of America. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Madison Ave is 39% empty; Manhattan landlords, can you lower the prices now?” Also this: “$1,000 a square foot is not sustainable!” And more on the problems engendered by mortgage-backed securities.
  • A rerun: “California Legislature Unveils Plan To Raise Taxes On Wildfires Until They Move Out Of State.”
  • “Dominion Voting Machine Really Starting To Regret Its 50,000 Votes For Biden.”
  • My books wanted list. If you have a lot of rare science fiction first editions just lying around, I could be persuaded to take those off your hands…
  • A feelgood dog link to brighten up your day.

    • A number of deadlines conspired to converge on this week. I’m hoping next week will be less insanely busy…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 1 Comment »

    Chinese Lies Update For May 6, 2020

    Wednesday, May 6th, 2020

    Time for another roundup of Chinese lies and perfidy!

  • Remember all that blather about how there was “no way” the Wuhan coronavirus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Yeah, not so much:

    A US government analysis leaked to the Washington Times concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Chinese CDC is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 200,000 people worldwide in roughly four months.

    The document, compiled from open sources and not a finished product, says there is no smoking gun to blame the virus on either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, both located in the city where the first outbreaks were reported. -Washington Times

    And while we may not have a smoking gun proving that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab, “there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such may be the case,” according to the report.

    Also, it’s perhaps the world’s easiest game of connect-the-dots;

    • In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected horseshoe bats at a cave 1,000 miles away infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. (Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19. -WSJ)
    • Peng Zhou, WIV’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without getting sick.”
    • Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses – co-authoring a controversial 2015 paper which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
    • In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US government suspended funding to the lab due to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
    • Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin.
  • China knew the Wuhan coronavirus was contagious but waited five days to tell anyone else:

    Chinese health officials were drawing up plans to combat the CCP virus, which they knew to be infectious, days before they informed the public about its potential to spread, according to internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times.

    The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The virus has since spread to more than 200 countries and territories, causing more than 61,000 deaths in the United States alone.

    China officially confirmed that the virus could be transmitted between humans on Jan. 20, when top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan made the announcement.

    Now, internal documents provided to The Epoch Times show that Beijing covered up what it knew, as central authorities were secretly providing directives to regional governments on how to cope with the outbreak.

    On Jan. 15, the regional health commission in northern China’s Inner Mongolia issued a “super urgent” emergency notice to its municipal counterparts, explaining how medical facilities should respond to a new form of pneumonia. The notice said that China’s National Health Commission had implemented treatment and prevention measures for local health agencies to deal with the new disease (now known as COVID-19).

  • “US intel believes China hid severity of coronavirus epidemic while stockpiling supplies.” Nothing says “neighborly” quite like selling you infected blankets while buying up all the small pox vaccines…
  • China arrests users for posting coronavirus memories to GitHub.
  • “Why Was the U.S. So Late to Recognize the China Threat?”

    During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy was largely based on assumptions that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread communism worldwide; they possessed strategic patience and were adaptive in pursuing their goal. The USSR would never be America’s partner but a long-term rival, and therefore it must be contained. Moreover, U.S. decision-makers assumed that American society would fully support this approach.

    However, after the end of that confrontation, strategists like former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger falsely assumed that Communist China could be changed into a benign actor, even a “responsible stakeholder,” or strategic partner of the U.S. were the U.S. to engage with China, believing that China’s rise was a positive thing.

    We argue that China is not just a rival but a formidable enemy. Its goal is not just to weaken America but supplant it and the liberal international order it created with a Communist ideology-based model of global governance. The PRC is more dangerous than the Soviet Union because it is unpredictable and more formidable. It is an amalgamation of a rapidly rising power and an ideological regime with an aggressive leader in Chairman Xi Jinping. Xi is both extremely ambitious and paranoid about his regime’s security as well as his own. These factors make this enemy far less certain than the Soviets.

    Additionally, China is far more formidable than the Soviet Union because it has learned key lessons from the USSR’s mistakes regarding competition with the United States. It is an extremely adaptive adversary. So adaptive that it has been seen as a partner rather than an enemy for a generation. Moreover, it was so highly valued as a partner that it was brought into the Western economic ecosystem to be allowed and encouraged to prosper. China’s rapid growth was made possible by the U.S. government, business, financial markets, and universities, as well as its own efforts. Close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, even in the wake of the coronavirus.

    Fundamentally, there remain sectors in U.S. government, business, and intellectual communities who still see China as a partner and want to return the Sino-American relationship to “normalcy.” Even in the wake of the coronavirus, close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, and there is an assumption that things will return to normal once Trump leaves office.

  • How did we get here?

    Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.

    Like the United States, another hard-hit region—Northern Italy, so progressive and tony—had swung its toll gates open. Italy outsourced whole production lines to China.

    Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The toll gates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement.

    Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington State—local Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland.

    And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.

    Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. More than 100,000 Chinese citizens moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought up Italian firms.

    See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipedia’s telling, is home to far and away “the highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.”

    Courtesy of an Italian strain of COVID-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April, it was said that “coronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.”

    In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.

    The West’s political and corporate leaders, not China’s, had opened their borders to the world’s flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people.

    The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “As China’s Economy Implodes, Trump Ratchets Up the Pressure“:

    As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread, stay at home orders have shut down commerce in many parts of the world. Some have predicted a 40% contraction in the U.S. economy in the 2nd quarter of 2020. This means that China’s economy, heavily dependent upon exports, will see no economic rebound for quite some time. In the mean time, the Trump administration has “turbocharged” its effort to relocate global supply chains from China to markets less hostile to the West.

    Details on manufacturing and commerce imploding in Q1 snipped.

    This gives the Trump administration more ammunition in its attempts to move global supply chains away from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reuters reported on Sunday:

    Now, economic destruction and the massive U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.

    “We’ve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.

    The report describes a “whole-of-government” effort in which free trade advocates seem to be losing their struggle with China hawks inside the administration. Citing national security concerns, many departments have joined in the process to figure out how to incentivize U.S. firms to move their operations out of the Chinese mainland. Options reportedly include ‘reshoring’ subsidies, tax incentives, developing closer ties to Taiwan, and ever higher tariffs on goods produced in China.

  • China tells its government to get ready for possible war with the United States over the Wuhan coronavirus. As opposed to China’s illegal actions in Hong Kong or the South China Sea…
  • UC Davis shuts down commie-funded Confucius Institute. Only about 80 more to go.
  • Some universities are not so brave: “Harvard Canceled Human Rights Event as Its President Met With Xi Jinping.”

    Teng Biao, a former fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s human rights center, attempted to host a panel discussion on Chinese human rights issues in 2015. A vice dean at Harvard Law School, however, ordered him in February of that year to cancel the event because it would have been “embarrassing” for the university, according to Teng.

    “He called me into his office and he told me that the Harvard president was meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping,” Teng told the Washington Free Beacon. “It seems that for Harvard leaders, it was very embarrassing if we had a talk at Harvard about human rights issues in China when the Harvard president just came back from China after meeting with the Chinese president.”

    Teng is a human rights lawyer who fled China after authorities kidnapped and tortured him for his participation in the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Professor William P. Alford, a vice dean at the Harvard Law School, played a role in bringing Teng to Harvard. He also ordered Teng to cancel the event, according to the Harvard Crimson. Alford confirmed with the Free Beacon that he told Teng to postpone the event, a decision he made on his own accord, rather than at the administration’s urging. He said that he allowed Teng to host other events during his time at Harvard. While Teng did participate in other events, he said the panel discussion was never rescheduled.

    Evidently having a $40 billion endowment just isn’t enough to keep you from having to suck up to communist China…

  • Europe: “Hey China, want to help us create a vaccine for this coronavirus of yours?” China: “Go flu yourself!”
  • If you want to see exactly how China lies about the Wuhan Coronavirus, here’s an example:

    Compare those statements to this timeline to see everything they left out. (Hat tip: Neontaster.)

  • Speaking of propaganda:

  • Speaking of willing dupes: “POLITICO Peddles Red China Propaganda Attempting To Own Trump–Gets SLAMMED On Twitter.” “POLITICO promoted a piece praising the Chinese Communist Party’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak and blasting the Trump administration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Sadly, foreign news outlets seem more immune to China’s influence than our own MSM:

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military | 1 Comment »

    Obama Let Hezbollah Sell Cocaine in U.S.

    Monday, December 18th, 2017

    This should take still more of the shine off Obama’s plastic halo:

    In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

    The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

    Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

    They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

    But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

    The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

    How high did drug trafficking evidence go?

    As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.

    The network was extensive:

    For decades, Hezbollah — in close cooperation with Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard — had worked with supporters in Lebanese communities around the world to create a web of businesses that were long suspected of being fronts for black-market trading. Along the same routes that carried frozen chicken and consumer electronics, these businesses moved weapons, laundered money and even procured parts for Iran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

    As they pursued their investigations, the DEA agents found that Hezbollah was redoubling all of these efforts, working urgently to raise cash, and lots of it, to rebuild its south Lebanon stronghold after a 2006 war with Israel had reduced it to rubble.

    Dating back to its inception in the early 1980s, Hezbollah, which translates to “Party of God,” had also engaged in “narcoterrorism,” collecting a tariff from drug dealers and other black-market suppliers who operated in territory it controlled in Lebanon and elsewhere. Now, based on the DEA’s extensive network of informants, undercover operatives and wiretaps, it looked like Hezbollah had shifted tactics, and gotten directly involved in the global cocaine trade, according to interviews and documents, including a confidential DEA assessment.

    “It was like they flipped a switch,” Kelly told POLITICO. “All of a sudden, they reversed the flow of all of the black-market activity they had been taxing for years, and took control of the operation.”

    Operating like an organized crime family, Hezbollah operatives would identify businesses that might be profitable and useful as covers for cocaine trafficking and buy financial stakes in them, Kelly and others said. “And if the business was successful and suited their current needs,” Kelly said, “they went from partial owners to majority owners to full partnership or takeover.”

    Hezbollah even created a special financial unit that, translated into English, means “Business Affairs Component,” to oversee the sprawling criminal operation, and it was run by the world’s most wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden, a notoriously vicious Hezbollah military commander named Imad Mughniyeh
    Imad MughniyehA Hezbollah mastermind who oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization.
    , according to DEA interviews and documents.

    Mughniyeh had for decades been the public face of terrorism for Americans, orchestrating the infamous attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983 in their barracks in Lebanon, and dozens more Americans in attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that year and an annex the year after. When President Ronald Reagan responded to the attacks by withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed a major victory and vaulted to the forefront of the Islamist resistance movement against the West.

    Over the next 25 years, Iran’s financial and military support for Hezbollah enabled it to amass an army with tens of thousands of foot soldiers, more heavy armaments than most nation-states and approximately 120,000 rockets and ballistic missiles that could strike Israel and U.S. interests in the region with devastating precision.

    Socialist “hero” Hugo Chavez was also involved in the operation up to his ears:

    In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez was personally working with then-Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hezbollah on drug trafficking and other activities aimed at undermining U.S. influence in the region, according to interviews and documents.

    Within a few years, Venezuelan cocaine exports skyrocketed from 50 tons a year to 250, much of it bound for American cities, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime statistics show.

    And beginning in 2007, DEA agents watched as a commercial jetliner from Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash. They nicknamed it “Aeroterror,” they said, because the return flight often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake identities and travel documents on their arrival.

    From there, the operatives spread throughout the subcontinent and set up shop in the many recently opened Iranian consulates, businesses and mosques, former Project Cassandra agents said.

    So what was the result of all this painstaking case-building?

    Senior Obama administration officials appeared to be alarmed by how far Project Cassandra’s investigations had reached into the leadership of Hezbollah and Iran, and wary of the possible political repercussions.

    As a result, task force members claim, Project Cassandra was increasingly viewed as a threat to the administration’s efforts to secure a nuclear deal, and the top-secret prisoner swap that was about to be negotiated.

    Snip.

    In addition, the briefings for top White House and Justice Department officials that had been requested by Holder never materialized, task force agents said. (Holder did not respond to requests for comment.) Also, a top intelligence official blocked the inclusion of Project Cassandra’s memo on the Hezbollah drug threat from being included in Obama’s daily threat briefing, they said. And Kelly, Asher and other agents said they stopped getting invitations to interagency meetings, including those of a top Obama transnational crime working group.

    That may have been because Obama officials dropped Hezbollah from the formal list of groups targeted by a special White House initiative into transnational organized crime, which in turn effectively eliminated DEA’s broad authority to investigate it overseas, task force members said.

    Snip.

    “When it looked like the [nuclear] agreement might actually happen, it became clear that there was no interest in dealing with anything about Iran or Hezbollah on the ground that it may be negative, that it might scare off the Iranians.”

    Hey, what are the lives of some black kids hooked on crack compared to the glory of Obama’s Iran deal?

    Remember the fantasy floated by liberals in the 1980s that the CIA was secretly behind the Central American cocaine trade? Obama actually did that, letting Hezbollah off the hook despite an iron-clad case of narcoterrorism, in order to do the Iran deal.

    This is a long, detailed piece in a mainstream media outlet. Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Jihad | 2 Comments »

    More Ways For Trump to Troll the Press

    Saturday, February 25th, 2017

    The mainstream media’s latest freakout de jour came when the Trump Administration excluded several traditional outlets from White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Q&A session on Friday afternoon:

    Among the outlets not permitted to cover the gaggle were various news organizations that Trump has singled out in the past including CNN, The NYT, The Hill, Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.

    Several non mainstream outlets were allowed into Spicer’s office, including Breitbart, the Washington Times and One America News Network. Several other major news organizations were also let in to cover the gaggle. That group included ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Reuters and Bloomberg, however AP and Time have boycotted the event.

    Let’s examine these blameless victims of Trump’s heartless war on our hallowed free press:

  • BuzzFeed is garbage. “People are losing their minds over this Buzzfeed trolling headline!”
  • There are plenty of reasons CNN was dubbed the Clinton News Network last year.
  • Politico and The Hill do some good reporting, but they’ve been heavily slanted against both Trump and Republicans for quite a while.
  • The Daily Mail might, at first glance, be a surprise, since they are perceived as quite right-leaning in the UK for their willingness to cover some stories (like sex crimes committed by Muslim immigrants) other outlets won’t touch. But then there’s the tiny matter of them calling the First Lady a prostitute…
  • BBC news leans pretty far left these days (though not as far left as The Guardian). UK PM Theresa May should push to privatize the Beeb, or at least spin off the news division, allowing the BBC to focus on core competencies like Doctor Who.
  • I so seldom read or link to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News that I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion.

    • And that leaves the New York Times, the once proud paper that so grossly abandoned even a pretense of objectivity to demonize Trump throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign. This, I think, is the one that will bring most howls of outrage on the left, given how heavily they’re invested in the idea that the “Old Gray Lady” is still a great paper in its prime rather than a declining hard-left regional daily partially owned by a shady Mexican billionaire. Indeed, many liberals seem to celebrate the “specialness” of the New York Times for the second-hand ego gratification “specialness” of being Times readers.

    My suspicion is that the Trump Administration has engineered this outrage to bury some sort of document or policy dump (you know, just like Obama used to do). But it also has the salutatory effect of inducing still more status anxiety in the traditional dinosaurs of the press perturbed at being supplanted by such ostracized mammals as Breitbart and the Washington Times.

    If mainstream media outlets don’t want to be excluded from White House briefings due to bias, maybe they should stop putting out fake and biased news. Sure, investigate Trump when he deserves it. But where was all this “extreme vetting” when Obama was President for eight years?

    I actually have a few ideas on how President Trump might troll the media still further:

  • Trump should tell the New York Times that he’ll let them back into media briefings if they fire Glenn Thrush. Remember Thrush? He was the one that actually sought copy approval from Team Hillary during the campaign while working for Politico. In the bygone days of yore, that sort of naked political sycophancy got reporters fired, but the New York Times decided that slavish subservience to Democratic Party power-brokers was exactly what they wanted in their newsroom, so they hired him after the election. Asking for Thrush’s head would force the media to talk about just how badly so many outlets were in the tank for Hillary in 2016, and the incestuous relationships between the mainstream media and the Democratic Party.
  • Trump should tell CNN that he’ll let them back into media briefings if they fire everyone who attended “a private, off-the-record gathering at the New York home of Joel Benenson, the chief campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, two days before she announced her candidacy in 2015.” That would include Brianna Keilar, David Chalian, Gloria Borger, Jeff Zeleny, John Berman, Kate Bolduan, Mark Preston and Sam Feist (assuming one or more haven’t already left in the interim).
  • Trump should offer to let Bernie Sanders pick one reporter to attend White House briefings, and promise to let them ask at least one question. After all, Sanders was on the pointy end of Team Clinton’s 2016 screwjob. Letting him pick a reporter would not only force the media to revisit the screwjob, it would add fuel to the inter-party fight to control the DNC. Plus, while Sanders would probably be pressured to pick the New York Times, he could pick anybody: The Nation, the Addison County Independent, the Socialist Worker or the People’s World. Hell, he could pick David Icke to ask Trump if he’s a shape-changing reptoid. (Would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?)

    • These are just a few off the top of my head.

    Reporting used to be a blue collar profession anyone could join if they worked hard and could write. These days they seem more like a credentialed priestly class open only to those with the right (i.e. left) backgrounds and political beliefs. Suspending slanted outlets from briefing events is far less of a blow to a free press than their willing subservience to the Democratic Party. Let them start acting like reporters again rather than (to quote Glenn Reynolds) “Democratic operatives with bylines.”

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    More on How Clinton Lost

    Thursday, December 15th, 2016

    Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential race by rewriting the rule book. Conversely, Hillary Clinton seems to have lost the race by simply ignoring the same rule book.

    This Politico piece on how Hillary Clinton’s arrogant campaign lost Michigan is well worth it’s own link for the rich aroma of schadenfreude wafting off it:

    Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course.

    Then again, according to senior people in Brooklyn, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook never heard any of those complaints directly from anyone on his state teams before Election Day.

    In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

    Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

    The anecdotes are different but the narrative is the same across battlegrounds, where Democratic operatives lament a one-size-fits-all approach drawn entirely from pre-selected data — operatives spit out “the model, the model,” as they complain about it — guiding Mook’s decisions on field, television, everything else. That’s the same data operation, of course, that predicted Clinton would win the Iowa caucuses by 6 percentage points (she scraped by with two-tenths of a point), and that predicted she’d beat Bernie Sanders in Michigan (he won by 1.5 points).

    “I’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

    Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs.

    Rollins doesn’t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.

    “When you don’t reach out to community folk and reach out to precinct campaigns and district organizations that know where the votes are, then you’re going to have problems,” she said.

    From the day Clinton released her launch video, the campaign knew she’d struggle with enthusiasm. Yet they didn’t do many of the things voters are used to seeing to give a sense of momentum, insisting that votes didn’t come from campaign literature, door knocking, commitment to vote cards or the standard program of sending absentee ballot applications to likely voters rather than just appealing to the people once they’d already ordered the ballots.

    “It was very surgical and corporate. They had their model, this is how they’re going to do it. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is,’” said one person involved in the Michigan campaign. “But in terms of activists, it seems different, it’s maybe they don’t care about us.”

    Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.

    “There’s this illusion that the Clinton campaign had a ground game. The deal is that the Clinton campaign could have had a ground game,” said a former Obama operative in Michigan. “They had people in the states who were willing to do stuff. But they didn’t provide people anything to do until GOTV.”

    The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Operatives watched packets of real-time voter information piled up in bins at the coordinated campaign headquarters. The sheets were updated only when they got ripped, or soaked with coffee. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

    According to Hillary’s final FEC report, the Clinton campaign spent $576,402,561 on the race. Don’t think that printing campaign literature, sending volunteers door-to-door or mailing absentee ballots is cost-effective? Fine. But if you have half a billion dollars to spend you do it anyway. What else are you going to do with the money?

    Well, if you’re Clinton, you spend money running up the popular vote count in places where it doesn’t help get you electoral college votes:

    But there also were millions approved for transfer from Clinton’s campaign for use by the DNC — which, under a plan devised by Brazile to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote, got dumped into Chicago and New Orleans, far from anywhere that would have made a difference in the election.

    And when regional offices tried to go to the DNC for help, they were refused because the Clinton campaign didn’t want them talking to the DNC:

    With Clinton’s team ignoring or rejecting requests, Democratic operatives in Michigan and other battleground states might have turned to the DNC. But they couldn’t; they weren’t allowed to ask for help.

    State officials were banned from speaking directly to anyone at the DNC in Washington. (“Welcome to DNC HQ,” read a blue and white sign behind the reception desk in Brooklyn that appeared after the ouster of Debbie Wasserman Schultz just before the July convention).

    A presidential campaign taking over the party committee post-convention is standard, but what happened in 2016 was more intense than veterans remember. People at the DNC and in battleground states speak of angry, bitter calls that came in from Brooklyn whenever they caught wind of contact between them, adamant that only the campaign’s top brass could approve spending or tactical decisions.

    “Don’t touch them. Stay away,” one person on the other end of the call remembered Clinton campaign states director Marlon Marshall saying after hearing about a rogue conversation between a battleground operative and an official at the DNC. “You can’t be calling those people and making them think something is coming when nothing is.

    Mook himself made a number of those calls.

    To Brooklyn, this was the only way to shut down what they perceived early as an effort to undermine the campaign’s planning, DNC officials playing good cop as they made promises they couldn’t keep to friends in the states, took credit for moves Clinton’s staff already were making, or looked to dig up trouble to use against them later.

    So not only did the Clinton campaign have a thermocline of truth to keep unpleasant messages from reaching the top ranks, they created their own and then strengthened it out of turf defense, arrogance, paranoia, and ego.

    As in most of these Clinton 2016 autopsies, all the insider fingers seem to be pointing at campaign manager Robby Mook as the designated scapegoat for their collective failure. And I’m sure he had a hand. But the fact the Clinton campaign was an arrogant, out-of-touch operation reflected the presence of an arrogant, out-of-touch candidate at the very top of it.

    Read the whole thing.

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    Clinton Bilked Taxpayers To Pay for Illegal Email Server

    Thursday, September 1st, 2016

    This story broke today just after my weekly Clinton Corruption roundup went up, and I don’t want to wait an entire work for it to appear in the next one. (Besides, I’m sure there will be no shortage of Clinton scandals between now and then to cover.)

    Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program, originally created to keep former presidents out of the poorhouse, to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server, a POLITICO investigation has found.

    Taxpayer cash was used to buy IT equipment — including servers — housed at the Clinton Foundation, and also to supplement the pay and benefits of several aides now at the center of the email and cash-for-access scandals dogging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

    Snip.

    Even as the Clintons got rich and grew their foundation into a $2 billion organization credited with major victories in the fights against childhood obesity and AIDS — while paying six-figure salaries to top aides — Bill Clinton continued drawing more cash from the Former President’s Act than any other ex-president, according to a POLITICO analysis. The analysis also found that Clinton’s representatives, between 2001, when the Clintons left the White House, and the end of this year, had requested allocations under the Act totaling $16 million. That’s more than any of the other living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush — requested during that span.

    Well, the Clintons needed more money than all the other ex-Presidents combined because they’re more corrupt than all the ex-Presidents combined.

    using the GSA records, POLITICO pieced together a list of Clinton loyalists who at various times have had their earnings supplemented by federal payments of about $10,000-a-year using funds from the Former Presidents Act.

    The list reads like a field guide to Clinton World.

    It includes longtime Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper, who despite not having a security clearance, any apparent training in cybersecurity or a job at the State Department, in early 2009 helped set up the private email account that Hillary Clinton would use to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. Her use of that system has been dubbed “extremely careless” by the FBI director. Cooper continued working to maintain Clinton’s private email system — including advising her top aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, on attempted hacks — through at least 2012, according to emails released by the State Department.

    During some of that period, Cooper was on the GSA payroll, drawing a federal government stipend from February 2011 through 2013, according to the records obtained by POLITICO.

    At the same time, though, Cooper was working with Doug Band, a trusted Bill Clinton lieutenant, and Declan Kelly, a top Hillary Clinton fundraiser-turned-State Department official, to launch a global consulting firm called Teneo. It did lucrative work for foundation donors and entities with business before Clinton’s State Department. And it signed a contract reportedly worth $3.5 million with Bill Clinton to serve as a “honorary chairman” (though the former president ultimately kept only $100,000 of that, according to his tax returns and a source familiar with the arrangement). Teneo also paid Abedin as a “senior advisor.”

    All the while, Band and Abedin were working together to broker meetings between Secretary of State Clinton and donors to the foundation, where Band served as an official until 2012, drawing an annual salary that in some years exceeded $111,000.

    Yet, despite the profitable consulting business and his foundation compensation, Band continued drawing a taxpayer-funded stipend from the GSA until 2013.

    Also receiving a salary from both the GSA and the Clinton Foundation was Laura Graham, who remained in extremely close contact with Clinton’s top aide at the State Department, swapping emails about sensitive foreign policy issues. During most of her time on the GSA payroll, Graham was earning a six-figure salary from the Clinton Foundation, which topped out at $190,000 per year in 2014.

    Cooper, Band and Graham are no longer on the GSA payroll, nor are they working for the foundation. They all either declined to comment or did not respond to questions about the overlap between their taxpayer-funded work, the foundation and the State Department.

    Clinton corruption! You’re soaking in it! And paying for it…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ and Jim Gegherty’s Morning Jolt.)

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