Punxsutawney Phil Says Six More Weeks of Northam

February 3rd, 2019

Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam has had a bad week.

First he comes out for post-natal abortion, then tries to walk it back, and then it turns out that he appeared in either a Klan outfit or blackface back in medical school, an event immortalized in his yearbook photos.

Immediately liberals tried to draw comparison with the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight. (Or, even stupider, the Billy Bush tape, because they still haven’t gotten over how that “bombshell” failed to derail Trump’s campaign.) Except for the tiny detail that Northam’s offense to current norms is real, and those of Kavanaugh were entirely made up. If Kavanaugh had worn blackface, we all know he would have been forced to withdraw his nomination. But the rules are always different for Democrats.

Oh, and in college before med school, his friends called him “coonman.” Because that’s a perfectly normal nickname for a random white person to have.

After all that, Northam set out to prove that there’s no political crisis that you can’t make worse by lying about it.

First he apologized for the photo, then, the next day, claimed that he wasn’t in the photo but did dress in blackface on another occasion, namely a Michael Jackson contest.

The problem with Northam’s new modified limited hangout is the sheer stupidity of actually making things worse and less believable. So it took him three decades before he noticed an offensive photo on a two page yearbook spread that wasn’t him? Think he maybe should have addressed that a wee bit earlier? “Wow, I’ve never been in blackface or a Klan outfit! Should I tell the yearbook staff they goofed? Naaaaahhhhhhhh….”

The cherry on the top: Back in the 2017 gubernatorial election, Northam allies ran on painting opponent Ed Gillespie and Republicans as racists, including an ad where a pickup truck with a Gillespie sticker flying a confederate flag literally tries to run over black children:

Now Northam is steadfastly insisting he won’t resign despite numerous calls for him to from across the political spectrum. That’s probably the ideal outcome…for Republicans.

Do I believe people should resign over something stupid in their yearbook photos from 30 years ago? No. But do I believe that elected Democrats should resign over same? Awww, hell yes! Democrats have been the ones enabling the Social Justice Warrior mob outrage rules lo these many years, so now they can live by them. Only when they’re forced to live by their own rules will the rules change.

Some related Tweets:

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Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

Europe’s Dysfunctional Defense Dilemma

February 2nd, 2019

Warfare is an endemic part of the human condition, but for at least two millennia, Europeans were the defining practitioners of it. From Alexander the Great and the Roman legions up through the Napoleonic Wars and the Blitzkrieg, Europe was at the forefront of finding new, innovative ways of killing people on a massive scale.

Now the continent that defined warfare can’t figure out how to defend itself. Or, more accurately, they know how to do it but are singularly unwilling to spend the necessary money. For decades, Europe has let the United States do the heavy lifting on defense spending, with most nations falling below the 2% of GDP funding level called called for by NATO. (Only the United States, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia met that threshold last year, with Poland and Lithuania just barely missing it.) It seems that stagnant economies and cradle-to-grave welfare states make adequate defense spending democratically unpopular in most of the EU.

Many U.S. administrations have grumbled abut this. Only President Donald Trump grumbled about it loudly enough to make progress on the issue:

NATO states have agreed to increase their defense spending by $100 billion over two years after President Trump went on a fiery tirade last July – calling on “delinquent” countries to boost their contributions by 2% to 4% of GDP. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance heard Trump’s call “loud and clear” and that member nations are “stepping up,” according to the Telegraph.

Right now these are only promises; it remains to be seen if the various European nations will carry-through.

Weirdly, at the same time Trump was pushing for adequate funding for NATO, France and Germany were signing a treaty proclaiming that they were the same country, at least as far as foreign and defense policy were concerned:

Europe’s most powerful personages on Tuesday signed a treaty for the “unification,” of Western Europe’s biggest countries. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel inked the deal at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle. It was there in the chapel that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had knelt at Holy Mass to celebrate the signing of the 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation that sealed their peoples’ vow of friendship and cooperation. In the ensuing half century, it produced just that. France and Germany became the core of the Common Market and then of the European Union.

Today’s treaty, its pretensions notwithstanding, is between regimes that are overwhelmingly occupied trying, with decreasing success, to fend off domestic challenges to their legitimacy. The treaty is a desperate attempt by France and Germany to change the subject from their internal struggles. Nevertheless, the treaty cannot but have major and deleterious effects on intra-European relations as well as on relations between Europe and the United States.

In 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer had hoped for even greater coordination in foreign and defense policy as well but, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, the German Bundestag added a clause to the treaty’s ratification that privileged the Federal Republic’s defense relationship with America. By contrast, the 2019 treaty’s main thrust is to sever that clause. The two countries will act “as a single unit with regard to relations with third countries.”

Lest there be any doubt, the final sentence reads: “The admission of the Federal Republic of Germany as a permanent member of of the United Nations Security Council [where it would share France’s seat] is a priority of Franco-German diplomacy.”

For other European countries, and for the United States, Macron and Merkel’s real domestic worries matter far less than the fact that, henceforth, the European core’s main weight will be wielded in unison.

Rules notwithstanding, the EU never was a club of equals. As the years passed, and especially after the advent of the Euro and the European Central Bank, Germany became primus inter pares, and then more to the point, other states learned that Berlin was the place to ask for EU favors, and Germans the folks to blame for not getting them. Henceforth, with Berlin and Paris jointly at the helm, other countries will wonder whether asking or blaming will be of any use. The EU will do whatever the two will dictate to Brussels from their joint councils of ministers.

Snip.

In sum, the new Franco-German core is sure further to erode the EU, NATO, and the United Nations. But even as the French and German alliance is poised to disrupt so many international institutions, it is soft inside because it arises from both regimes’ alienation from their own peoples.

Neither has France’s Macron found, nor is he likely to find, a way of appeasing the anger that the French people, via the “yellow vest” movement, have demonstrated for the way they have been governed for a half century; nor have Merkel and her allies on the traditional Left and Right been able to stanch the hemorrhaging of their electoral support, for reasons that differ little from those that motivate France’s yellow vests. France’s 1958 Fifth Republic constitution and Germany’s 1949 Grundgesetz largely insulate the respective governments from immediate popular pressure. But these governments’ alienation from their citizens is substantive and cultural. It is not such as can be healed by time—or by treaties.

Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and the people then in leadership positions in their countries were in basic sympathy with their peoples’ civilization. They wanted to keep France French and Germany German. As Catholics, the notion of enforcing the religion of “global warming” would have been repugnant to them, as would any of the current, ever-changing dictates of “political correctness.” They did not imagine themselves regulators of energy usage or of the details of life. As nationalists, they rejected the notion of supranational institutions beyond the peoples’ electoral control.

In all these regards, Merkel and Macron, and their recent predecessors, have abandoned their peoples. The abandonment is mutual. Consequently, their regimes are rotting. On January 22 they took another step that transfers this rot to the international institutions of which their countries are part.

France has long pushed for a “European” military structure apart from NATO, and now it may (theoretically) have the political framework to actually carry it out.

(But wait, you ask: What about that “European Defence Union?” Indeed, that does exist, in the form of the Common Security and Defence Policy under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, bringing with it a host of other organizations and acronyms dwelling between national military command hierarchies and the EU’s luxuriant tangle of bureaucracy. Never doubt, citizen, that many connected Europeans are being paid extremely well to man the bureaucratic barricades of the CSDP…)

The irony, however, is that after more than a century of being on the losing end of Germany military might, France’s new military best buddy now sucks at war:

The biggest problem that Bundeswehr soldiers complained about was the lack of equipment, despite repeated government promises, dating back to a 2014 NATO summit, of a change in direction. That does not count as a surprising development, considering the barrage of poor press the German military has been facing.

Heavy machinery was a particular concern: [Hans-Peter] Bartels found that often less than 50 percent of the Bundeswehr’s tanks, ships and aircraft were available at any one time, either for training or operational purposes.

“Spare parts are still missing; maintenance in industry is dragging; the training programs are suffering,” Social Democrat Bartels said. “An absolute must is the acceleration of procurement.” (…)

Another worry for the Defense Ministry is the stagnation of its post-conscription recruitment drive, which began after Germany scrapped national service in 2011. Though the Bundeswehr is expanding overall (the report found a net gain of 4,000 professional soldiers), most of these were won by extending existing contracts. In other words, the German military is aging.

(Previously.)

The further irony is that, while Merkel and Macron signed the treaty, it may very well be National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany’s leaders like Alice Weidel who inherit it.

In a parallel development, President Trump has informed Moscow that the United States is pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. American deployment of nuclear-capable Pershing missiles in Europe were, along with SDI, key elements in forcing the Soviet Union to the bargaining table in the 1980s, but Russia has been cheating on it, and the treaty outlived its usefulness.

Speaking of outliving its usefulness, America’s political establishment seems desperate to avoid debating whether NATO itself has outlived its usefulness. The old adage “Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down” no longer seems to apply. Russia still has ample nuclear weapons and a formidable conventional force, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Putin shows every sign of being willing to to bite more chunks off Ukraine (and I wouldn’t put trying to reconquer the Baltic countries past him), they can’t afford to deploy their next generation weapons in sufficient numbers, their navy is in a world of hurt, and their adventurism in Syria is looking more and more like costly overreach.

This piece in National Review argues that (among other things):

The irony is that the Trump administration actually has a success story to tell about its policies toward NATO and Russia, particularly in Europe. Under this administration, the U.S. has provided lethal aid to Ukraine to fight off Russian-backed insurgents. It has made no concessions to Moscow regarding that conflict. It has increased sanctions against Russia and boosted America’s military presence in Eastern Europe.

All that is mostly true, except for the tiny, inconvenient facts that the “Russian-backed insurgents” include significant components of the Russian army and that all these efforts have been singularly ineffective at actually expelling Russian forces from Ukraine. This is not exactly a textbook definition of “success.”

I’m willing to be persuaded that NATO is still a vital alliance, but the arguments I’ve seen thus far are not doing it. And letting Turkey remain a member while its Islamist government remains at cross-purposes to NATO’s stated goals is counterproductive.

With a few exceptions, Europe’s transnational elites will continue to skimp on defense in order to continue feeding the maw of their failing welfare states as long as the United States lets them. And despite some moderate successes by the Trump Administration, I don’t see that dysfunctional dynamic changing as long as those same functionaries remain in charge.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for February 1, 2019

February 1st, 2019

I know many of you don’t want to hear it, but here in Texas we’re enjoying a comparatively mild winter…

  • Why President Donald Trump will win the wall fight:

    Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”

    All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.

    In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • What a fully-funded border protection system looks like.
  • Shot: “Trump has opportunity to flip the 9th Circuit, so why isn’t he?”
  • Chaser: “Trump heard the conservative media outcry, nominates three judges for 9th Circuit.” That’s some swift course-correction…
  • Charlie Martin looks at big media’s very bad week.
  • Newseum closing. “Look on my works, ye mighty…”
  • Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
  • Related:

    In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).

    Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.

  • Heh:

  • “A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
  • Newly seated Texas congressman Chip Roy isn’t backing down.
  • Four Houston police officers shot serving a narcotics warrant in southeast Houston.
  • Houston Police union honcho says that hands up, don’t shoot is to blame. Sounds like there may be a lot of blame to go around, including the possibility of excessive force for a narcotics raid.
  • Cop killer executed after thirty years on death row.
  • Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
  • “Public documents obtained by a Portland attorney reveal that Portland Public School staff, planned, executed and paid for what the media and the school district branded as a ‘student’ anti-Second Amendment protest last March 14th.” Sounds like they should be charged with embezzlement. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Worth a chuckle:

  • The negative startup economics of Buzzfeed:

    In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!

    BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.

  • Heh:

  • “The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Rand Paul’s attacker finds out that assaulting people over political differences is a money-losing proposition.
  • Did Israeli scientists develop a cure for cancer? Let’s hope so…
  • Was Michael Jackson a child diddler?
  • “Three Charged for Working With Serial Swatter.”
  • Robert Stacy McCain talks about Tom Wolfe, Junior Johnson, and the decline of journalism:

    Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.

    If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”

    The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.

    He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:

    In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.

  • The coming Google+pocalypse.
  • Feminists aren’t just angry, they ignore facts that disagree with their preexisting anger.
  • This guy should make you feel a lot better about your own obscure collecting hobby.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

    No Deal Brexit?

    January 31st, 2019

    In a turn of events that looked impossible, the UK may be headed for a no deal Brexit:

    In the latest thrilling parliamentary episode of Brexit, the hopes and expectations of, among other Remainers, House of Commons speaker John Bercow were largely disappointed, and the hopes of Brexiteers began to rise again. That was not supposed to happen.

    Before the actual votes on seven amendments to a government motion supporting Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, it was generally expected that some would pass and either delay the date of Brexit, or transfer control of parliamentary business from cabinet ministers to a coalition of Remainers, or allow MPs to choose among several alternative versions of Brexit. All of these were departures from usual parliamentary conventions — which Bercow had approved, contrary to both precedent and his duty of impartiality — and almost all represented a reversal of what a vast majority of MPs had voted for a year ago. Most significantly, however, they would all have had the intended effect of delaying Brexit indefinitely and likely canceling it altogether.

    That was expected because it has become conventional wisdom that a House of Commons with a Remainer majority would inevitably vote only for a Brexit tolerable to the Remainers and thus disappointing to Leavers. It very much didn’t turn out that way. Of the seven amendments, the five most hostile ones were defeated, all by healthy majorities. The two amendments that did pass were (1) the Brady amendment, which the government had accepted as a way of keeping May’s plan alive, and (2) a non-binding amendment calling for the government not to pursue a No Deal Brexit but not providing any means to prevent it.

    The latter is an example of a rule I’ve just discovered: “Votes that matter matter more than votes that don’t matter.” It’s been very easy for Remainer MPs to posture as principled opponents of Brexit when only other MPs were paying attention and Remainer cabinet ministers were quietly cheering them on. Remain seemed to be gaining ground, and its parliamentary advocates were almost blasé about reversing the referendum result. But the high-octane Brexit debate in the media and the campaign by Remainers to erect clever parliamentary obstacles to its realization meant that more and more voters were paying attention. One effect has been that public support for a No Deal Brexit — in which the U.K. would trade with the EU on World Trade Organization terms, rather than through a separate trade deal — has been rising since Christmas. In two successive BBC Question Time programs, the audience cheered when a lonely Leaver on the five-person panel demanded a simple No Deal departure. And both ministers and whips began to fear that a defeat would weaken the government on more than Brexit.

    Under this combined public and party pressure, the rebels shrank in numbers and the government survived.

    The practical effect of the Brady amendment was a modest one: to unite the Tories around a policy of sending May back to Brussels to ask for a time limit on the so-called Northern Ireland backstop (which would keep the U.K. in the EU customs union in order to avoid a hard border in Ireland). She herself is time-limited; she has two weeks to get this concession. Already the grand EU panjandrums have issued statements saying it’s out of the question. Very likely they are determined to hold that line. If so, May will come back either empty-handed or with some agreeable form of words — “ideally we would like the backstop to be temporary” — that she would try to sell to her party.

    Remainers are painting all sorts of unlikely nightmare scenarios, from the specter of a “no-food Brexit” (because farmers and food companies hate selling food to willing customers, customs union or no customs union) or NHS being unable to buy drugs (because drug companies are notably unwilling to sell their product).

    Oh, and Brussels wants the exit money May foolishly agreed to, even if Parliament rejects the deal. People in Hell want icewater, too…

    Some related tweets. On the contempt the UK’s political class shows to voters:

    Nigel Farage:

    A Remainer who would now vote Leave:

    Pat Condell:

    And don’t forget the onions:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy | No Comments »

    Venezuela: “It’s About Food”

    January 30th, 2019

    For those deluded leftists who think the Venezuela crises is about a “right wing coup,” take a look at this on-the-scene report from Trump-hostile CNN:

  • “It’s about food. It’s about the startling mismanagment and corruption of the Nicolas Maduro government, and how that’s left people unable to get the daily things you and I take for granted. Water. Dinner. Breakfast.”
  • Car queue three days for gas.
  • “There’s a queue for everything, everywhere.”
  • “We beg for a piece of chicken skin to take home.”
  • “In a socialist utopia that now leaves nearly every stomach empty.”
  • “What they really need is for the military to switch sides.”
  • “We’re beggers now. It isn’t political. It’s survival.”

    • Watch the whole thing.

    In other Venezuela news, the Trump Administration has handed control of Venezuela’s bank accounts in the United States to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido and slapped sanctions on Venezuela’s state owned oil company, including three U.S. Citgo refineries.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, video | 2 Comments »

    Why Ask Huawei?

    January 29th, 2019

    The long-delayed hammer of justice finally descended on Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei:

    U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges against Huawei, China’s largest smartphone maker, alleging it stole trade secrets from an American rival and committed bank fraud by violating sanctions against doing business with Iran. In a 13-count indictment unsealed in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon, the government alleged Huawei, two affiliated companies and its chief financial officer engaged in fraud and conspiracy in connection with deals in Iran.

    A separate 10-count indictment in Seattle accused the company of stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile USA Inc. and offering bonuses to employees who succeeded in getting technology from rivals.

    Snip.

    The DOJ formally announced it was seeking the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder, who was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 on allegations that she committed fraud to sidestep sanctions against Iran. She has since become a flash-point in trade tensions between the U.S. and China; her release by the US and Canada was expected by some commentators who were confident the US would send a signal of goodwill to the US; instead Trump appears to be escalating the crackdown against Chinese technological theft.

    Meng remains free in Vancouver, staying at her $4.2 million mansion with GPS monitoring, after posting bail of C$10 million ($7.5 million) as she fights extradition to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

    The U.S., which had requested Canadian authorities arrest Meng, had to submit a formal extradition request by Jan. 30, which it did today. Canada’s justice minister now has up to 30 days to assess it. If she issues an “authority to proceed,” that means Canada is officially moving to extradition hearings. If so, they would likely be scheduled months later, even as relations between the US and China implode.

    The Meng arrest really rattled the cages of China’s ruling elite, and is causing all sorts of friction between China and Canada.

    The fact that China’s government aides and abets intellectual property theft, including industrial espionage, is well documented, and the Trump Administration is right to go after it.

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for January 28, 2019

    January 28th, 2019

    This week in the clown car update: South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is In, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is All But In, and Bobby Francis O’Rourke is sounding a lot more Hamlet-like than heretofore. And a very, very familiar name is once again making noises about a run…

    According to this Zogby poll, everything is coming up Milhouse Biden. Biden leads field with 27%, well ahead of Sanders (18%), Warren (9%), Bloomberg (8%), with Harris and O’Rourke at 6%. McAuliffe, Gabbard and Castro all poll at 0%, behind even John Delaney at 1%.

    In an Emerson poll of announced candidates, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren leads the field with 43%, Sen. Kamala Harris is at 19%, and Julian Castro is at 12%, with no other candidate reaching double digits.”

    538 has their weeekly update of candidate and potential candidate doings. I haven’t looked at it much because that would be cheating.

    Oh, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he’s considering an independent run for President. That would spice things up nicely, and Democrats are livid the he might split the anti-Trump vote. His net worth is estimated at just under $3 billion, so he could probably self-fund a serious run.

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Probably Out.
  • Creepy Porn lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: “I’m thinking about it.” Oh thanks, that’s just super-helpful…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Twitter feed. Here’s an Esquire piece that says Biden should run so he can lose badly for his perfidious gestures towards bipartisanship…
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Making noises like he’s getting in. No announcement, but this week he did some Trump bashing, so of course the media covered it. If he runs it will be on climate change and gun control, which may not be enough intersectional tofu for the SJW faction. He does well in a Quinnipiac poll of New Yorkers.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Probably in. This week Vanity Fair critiques Booker’s style. To be fair, there’s a lot there to critique, but I also get the impression that the media want to knock a potential rival for Kamala Harris’ presumed voting block out early.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Probably running. He’s boasting about how he could beat Trump in Ohio and New York. Since Hillary beat Trump in New York, the latter is not much of a boast…
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Official website. Facebook page. Twitter feed. Announced this week. First openly gay Presidential candidate to garner any media attention. Served in the Naval Reserve in Afghanistan. Here’s 538 doing the how he could win thing, but even they sound dubious: “Among adults who identified as Democrats, 73 percent of respondents supported gay marriage, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. Independents were close behind at 70 percent. But the same research found support for gay marriage at 51 percent among black adults, an important part of the Democratic coalition.”
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter feed. He hates the fact that you got a tax cut. Also, NBC does some Hispandering about the “historic” nature of his campaign, without ever mentioning the name “Ted Cruz.”
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Maybe? “Clinton is telling people that she’s not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020,” Zeleny said on Inside Politics. “I’m told by three people that as recently as this week, she was telling people that, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she talked to several people, saying ‘Look, I’m not closing the doors to this.'” Fire up the villager’s torches, boys, Baroness Frankenstein is trying to break out of her crypt! (Hat tip: Red State’s Twitter feed.) Upgrade from “Probably Out.”
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. “De Blasio Dead Last Among NYers’ Picks For President, Poll Shows.” To know him is to loath him…
  • Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. “Democratic 2020 presidential candidate John Delaney on Thursday earned the approval of the Nashua Telegraph’s editorial board in New Hampshire.” That and $5…
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. The left-wing hit pieces against Gabbard are coming fast and furious. “Is Tulsi Gabbard the Jill Stein of 2020? The Democratic candidate’s perplexing, Bannonesque foreign policy and passivity toward Assad may make her radioactive. And then there is the homophobia.” Man, she sure has somebody (probably the Harris campaign) worried…
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Leaning toward a run, and he managed to cave in enough to end the teacher’s strike.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Official website. Official Twitter feed. “Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is a Bizarrely Wretched Public Speaker. Finally a Woman Who Makes Hillary Clinton Look Authentic by Comparison!”
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter feed. Had a kickoff rally in Oakland. She’s stacking her campaign with ex-Hillary Clinton staffers. Because there’s no way that could possibly backfire.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. In Iowa.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. He wants to run on climate change, but he’s having to deal with a measles outbreak in his state.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In. “Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Amy Klobuchar.” “One of her most influential mentors is former vice president Walter Mondale.” And if that doesn’t say “Electoral Juggernaut”…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. “I will make a decision by March 31.”
  • Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: Maybe. “Oregon senator postpones decision on presidential bid.”
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Considering a run. Headed back to New Hampshire February 2nd.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Addition: Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Dropped Out. I wasn’t including this guy because I didn’t think he had any chance, and evidently he came to the same conclusion. Listing him here only because he was included in that Emerson poll.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe? The machine is in place, but where’s the driver? He’s starting to sound a lot more Hamlet-like. “Beto O’Rourke said Friday that it could take him months to decide whether to run for president, adding that he does not want to ‘raise expectations” about a 2020 bid.” Sure doesn’t sound like someone with a fire in the belly to run. Downgrade from Probably In.
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Doubtful. I’m not seeing any signs of a run.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: All but In. Website. Twitter feed. Reports say he is “set to announce he will run for president in 2020.”
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. “Can we win? There is a path. It’s not an easy path. It’s a steep mountain to climb and I’m up for it. Right now, I have to talk with my family.” Also says there’s a “chance” he could quarterback the Rams next year.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. She wants an unconstitutional wealth tax. In a sign that America’s opioid epidemic has gotten out of hand, George Will calls Warren “Democrat’s Thatcher, if they dare.” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Yet here’s a Rolling Stone interview with him, because I run a full service blog. “In a year when the progressive Democratic platform is coalescing around variations of Medicare-for-All, free college and the Green New Deal, presidential candidate Andrew Yang stands apart — with a bold proposal to provide a ‘Freedom Dividend’ of $1,000 a month to every adult in America.” I look forward to the forthcoming Yang Free Pony Proposal…

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    Westboro Baptist Church For Thee, But Not For Me

    January 27th, 2019

    Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue. The national media is always looking for such a group to puff up in importance as a designated hate object to smear Republicans and promote cohesion among the Democratic Paarty’s fractious factions.

    That’s what the national media tried to do with the Covington Catholic kids: Conjure up a hate group of Otherness representing strains of thought (Catholic orthodoxy, Trump supporters) that threaten the goals of the Democratic Party, no matter that they were teenagers. ironically, there was a group at the Lincoln Monument that day whose beliefs and actions recall the Westboro Baptist Church, but it wasn’t the Covington kids.

    Andrew Sullivan, who watched all the videos of the incident so you don’t have to, has the scoop:

    What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

    And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

    Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headline about “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news story entirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk.

    Here’s what I saw on the full tape: a small group of aggressive, hateful men using a bullhorn to broadcast the crudest of racial slurs, backed up by recitations of Bible verses. I saw a young Native American woman make the mistake of engaging them. When she stood her ground, she was suddenly interrupted: “You’re out of order. Where’s your husband? Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.” On the tape, you can hear the commentary from another member of the Black Israelites: “You see this? This is the problem, Israel. It’s always our women coming up with their loud mouth, thinking they can run and bogart things, thinking they can come and distract things with their loud-ass mouth, because they’re not used to dealing with real men. You think we’re supposed to bow down to your damn emotions when you come around here and run your mouth and distract what we’re doing instead of coming here with order … She’s coming around here being wicked.”

    Wait, there’s more. Hollering through a bullhorn at a group of Native Americans, the speaker boomed: “You ain’t no child of God. You are the Indian. You are a blue-eyed demon. That’s the last Mohican.” Then: “You’re still worshipping totem poles. You out of your mind! You have to repent. You worship the buffalo. You worship the eagle. You worship the phoenix. These are the idols you’ve been worshipping. A damn buffalo ain’t gonna save you. You worship the creations and not the creator … That’s why you’re drunkards in the casinos and the damn plantation.” Another: “Dumb-ass niggers. Bunch of demons. You’re a bunch of Uncle Tomahawks.” They snarled the word “savages” at Native Americans. The yelling was deafening, aggressive, vile, and threatening. But an inscrutable smile by a white teen was enough for some elite liberals to urge punching a schoolboy in the face.

    Here is how the Black Israelites verbally assaulted the schoolboys: “Bring your cracker ass up here. Dirty ass crackers, your day coming. We can give a hell about your police. No one’s playing with these dusty-ass crackers.” Another: “Don’t get too close or your ass gonna get punished … You crackers are some slithery ass bastards. You better keep your distance.” And this, surveying the scene: “I see you, a bunch of incest babies … Babies made out of incest. If you’re the great damn nation, get rid of the lice on your back. … You’re a bunch of hyenas. You outnumber us but you keep your distance. You couldn’t touch us if you wanted to. You worship blasphemy.”

    So not only are these “Black Hebrew Israelites” as poisonous as the Westboro Baptist Church, they’re demonstrably more so, adding racism, sexism and anti-American Indian animus ala mode on top of Westboro’s anti-gay pie. Yet where’s the endless coverage of Black Hebrew Israelite nastiness that the Westboro Baptist Church received for their professional irritant demonstrations? Nowhere. And we all know the reason why: As black people, their Democratic coalition and Victimhood Identity Politics standing puts them beyond criticism. They won’t be demonized for their lunatic beliefs because that demonization isn’t helpful in smearing the Republican Party, Catholics or Trump supporters. It’s the same reason Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam don’t get regular coverage of their lunatic beliefs. As Sullivan says in that essay: “This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it….Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism.”

    Though numbers are hard to come by, Black Hebrew Israelites probably outnumber the Westboro Baptist Church, who seemed to have a maximum membership of 40 people, by some 2-4 orders of magnitude. According to Wikiedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, there are multiple locations of multiple churches: Commandment Keepers, African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Church of the Living God, Church of God and Saints of Christ (with supposedly 50 tabernacles), Orthodox Church of God and Saints of Christ, Church of God in Jesus Christ, Nation of Yahweh (which supposedly has “supporters in over 1,300 cities within the U.S. and 16 foreign countries,”) etc., though it’s unclear how accurate these numbers are, or how many adhere to the most poisonous black supremacist biblical interpretation.

    For a taste of their beliefs, you can check out Nation of Yahweh’s website, which looks like it was built by the leader’s cousin after a semester of website design from a community college in the Geocities era, complete with Flash plugins and long PDFs on theology that cite the dictionary. Here’s just a little taste:

    What does it mean to have an indifference to matters that are spiritual? Indifferent coming from the definition of worldly, the adjective form of indifference in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, copyright 2004, on page 727 is tantamount to, “having or showing no interest, concern, or feeling.” Matter in the Synonym Finder by J.I Rodale, copyright 1978, on page 714, is synonymous to subject and topic; while on page 1145, spiritual is the same as godly, righteous, moral, and good.

    I know I want to get my theology from freshman Comp 301 essays filled with obvious padding to make the word count.

    But don’t expect any exposes of crazy Black Hebrew Israelite belief from the MSM anytime soon. That woudn’t be useful. It wouldn’t help advance the narrative…

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    The “Russia Hacked The DNC” Allegation Remains Unproven

    January 26th, 2019

    Someone at Slashdot seems to be pushing the “Russia supplied Wikileaks with the DNC hack info” theory as fact, even though it remains unproven. We’ve been hearing this supposition for over two years from Democrats and their media enablers who still can’t bring themselves to believe the obvious truth that Hillary Clinton was a horribly corrupt and demonstratively incompetent candidate.

    Anyone could have hacked the DNC, just like anyone could have hacked Hillary Clinton’s illegal homebrew email server. It could have been the Russians, who regularly undertake malicious activity. But it could also be China, or a leak from within the DNC, or the Awan spy ring, who had access to DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz’s computers and tablets, as well as those of some 40 other House Democrats.

    But the Russia theory is pushed above all because that’s the one that fuels Democratic activist outrage and the “Russian collusion” fantasy the mainstream media has spent two years pushing. Which is why we get a piece from the hard-left Daily Beast on the front page of Slashdot.

    But to quote another hard-left outlet, The Nation, about the DNC hack:

    This journalistic mission led The Nation to be troubled by the paucity of serious public scrutiny of the January 2017 intelligence-community assessment (ICA) on purported Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election, which reflects the judgment of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. That report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking of the DNC and the dissemination of e-mails from key staffers via WikiLeaks, in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. This official intelligence assessment has since led to what some call “Russiagate,” with charges and investigations of alleged collusion with the Kremlin, and, in turn, to what is now a major American domestic political crisis and an increasingly perilous state of US-Russia relations. To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

    But the Democratic Media Complex will still push the “Russia hacked the DNC!” talking point out out of political necessity. Anything to maintain the mass hysteria bubble.

    /Cue up the cries of “Russian bot” in 5…4…3…

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for January 25, 2019

    January 25th, 2019

    How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

  • True tales from border enforcement. “I also had multiple cases where convicted child molesters were arrested illegally reentering the United States.” (Hat tip: Director Blue. )
  • Over at American Thinker, E.M. Cadwaladr is not a fan of recent immigration policy:

    The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.

    While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.

    Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.

    This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.

    Snip.

    They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.

  • Human smugglers: extortion and death threats. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abboyy’s Twitter feed.)
  • Are Democrats wavering on a border wall?
  • Luke Rosiak’s book on the Awan case, Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats, is out next week. I intend to pick up a copy.
  • How National Review stepped in it in the rush to denounce the Covington kids:

    It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.

    “They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.

    On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

    That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

    Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.

    But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”

    Snip.

    When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.

    Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)

    To be fair, French did address the issue in this piece. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady via The Other McCain.)

  • It turns out that openly wishing for the deaths of children who hold different political views than you do is a career-limiting decision. Who knew?
  • MSM lies about Trump supporters again. Clip and save this sentence for reuse…
  • Let the lawsuits begin! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Press That Sicced Mob On Teenagers Based On 10-Second Video Clip Unsure Why Some People Call Them ‘Fake News.'”
  • Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
  • Ace of Spades had some pungent observations on journalists and Twitter:

    As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.

    You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.

    The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.

    What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.

    Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.

    Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.

    Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!

  • The six axioms of Social Justice Warrioring. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott on Instapundit.)
  • “Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration.” Naturally Nancy Pelosi has given her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks to Intersectionality, Democrats are exploring bold new frontiers in graft! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “What if the FBI Had Probed Obama for Collusion with Iran?”
  • The Supreme Court has agreed to review New York City’s draconian gun laws.
  • David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • In China, it’s not enough for Communist Big Brother to know you’re in debt, he has to let everyone around you know you’re in debt as well.
  • Germany catches an Iranian spy.
  • This just in: Shelia Jackson Lee is still a scumbag. And no longer leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
  • Cahnman is a big fan of Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s committee assignments.
  • Powerline has a nice meme roundup of last week’s news. I’ll swipe a couple:

  • Could Alzheimer’s be caused by…gum disease? (Hat tip: David Shirpley on Twitter.)
  • Facebook is building an orbital death ray. Because they just weren’t evil enough before…
  • The fraudster behind the Fyre Festival.
  • Feel good story: A Puppy Saved From A Fire Becomes A Firefighter. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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