This appears to be from some sort of Russian tank proving ground. Skip to 1:46 for the really interesting stuff.
Honestly, until I saw this I was unaware it was even possible to roll a T-72 on level ground.
That’s some might fine driving you’ve done there, Ivan…
Update: Comments below and elsewhere seem to indicate this is a Kuwaiti driver managing to roll the tank.
Time for the traditional Friday LinkSwarm!
The news, like Hollywood, became trapped in creating and fawning over celebrities. Getting Anderson Cooper publicized became more important than breaking the big story. When you have celebrity reporters telling you how they feel about being in Iraq instead of reporting on how our troops are doing you begin to lose perspective. With guns, instead of going to gun ranges, gun-owner’s homes, instead of interviewing women who’d stopped an attacker, and instead of really trying to understand the world such women live in and what they’re going through, they just tell us how they feel.
OK, now he’s officially the front-runner…
(Although to my sight, it looks a lot more like an assault rifle like (Maybe an HK MR556A1? The glimpse is pretty brief.) than a machine gun.)
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Time for another Texas vs. California roundup:
“Thanks to our low-tax, low-regulation environment that allows all businesses to thrive, the State of Texas has become the national leader for technology job creation, and we continue to attract tech companies from around the country and around the world,” [Governor Greg] Abbott said. “On behalf of the State of Texas, I am pleased to welcome LiveOps to the Lone Star State as the company seeks to transform cloud-based customer service. With their help, the State of Texas can, and will, continue to lead the nation in job creation within the technology sector.”
This doesn’t sound like good news for Team Inevitable:
Many Democrats have long hoped that Hillary Clinton might expand Barack Obama‘s electoral coalition by drawing in more white women voters.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests she may have a tough time pulling it off. Mrs. Clinton is losing ground with white women and many other important slices of the electorate, the poll shows, amid a spate of reports about her email practices, speaking fees and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation.
In June, 44% of white women had a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, compared to 43% who didn’t. In July, those numbers moved in the wrong direction for Mrs. Clinton: Only 34% of white women saw her in a positive light, compared to 53% who had a negative impression of her, the poll found.
Gee, turns out women voters aren’t wild about an inept politicians with anger and entitlement issues who consistently breaks both ethics guidelines and the law for personal gain. Who knew?
Good thing for Hillary that white women aren’t an important part of her voting coalition…
Though California Democratic state senator Leland Yee has plead guilty to one charge of racketeering, the trial of confederate Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow is still pending. And his lawyers have dropped a bombshell of a charge:
In an explosive court filing, lawyers for a former Chinatown gang leader said Tuesday that federal authorities shielded San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee from prosecution despite evidence from the FBI that he had taken bribes, funneled through two members of the city’s Human Rights Commission.
The two alleged go-betweens, Nazly Mohajer and Zula Jones, both told undercover federal agents that “Ed Lee knew he was taking money illegally,” attorneys for Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow said in federal court papers.
Snip.
“The FBI alleged in discovery that Ed Lee took substantial bribes in exchange for political favors and that Human Rights Commissioners Nazly Mohajer and Zula Jones hustled in these bribes for the mayor,” defense lawyer Curtis Briggs said in a filing seeking dismissal of the charges against Chow. Briggs is a law partner of noted attorney J. Tony Serra, who has been representing Chow in court.
Lee “took over $20,000 from federal agents in his first four months in office,” Briggs said. He said the government “successfully engaged both (state Sen. Leland) Yee and Mayor Ed Lee in bribery scandals, yet only indicted Yee,” who had run unsuccessfully against Lee for mayor in 2011.
Assuming these charges are true, why would the FBI charge one corrupt California Democratic politician taking bribes, but not another?
A good question…
Robert Conquest, one of the leading historians of Soviet genocide, has died at age 98.
It’s hard to remember now, but for most of the Cold War, western liberals vehemently denied that genocide had occurred in the Soviet Union (or other communist nations) at all. Conquest’s The Great Terror helped crack that facade of willful ignorance, as did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s monumental The Gulag Archipelago.
I once reviewed The Harvest of Sorrow, his work on the Holodomor, Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine, and it’s a devastating, amazingly well-researched book. “In the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost, not for every word, but for every letter, in this book.”
He was also a poet, and dabbled in science fiction as a writer and editor, but it was as a historian he made far and away his greatest impact. Communism was the great evil of the 20th century, and Conquest had a key role in exposing it. “Over all, Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the entire Stalin era at no less than 20 million.”
Here’s an obituary from The Telegraph. “Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist.”
Haven’t watched all of this one yet either, but the phrase “Intact fetal cadavers” certainly stands out….
While not unexpected, this certainly isn’t good news for the global economy. “The commonwealth paid a mere $628,000 toward a $58 million debt bill due Monday to creditors of its Public Finance Corporation. This will hurt the island’s residents, not Wall Street. The debt is mostly owned by ordinary Puerto Ricans through credit unions.” That’s like Johnny Boy paying $10 on his $2,000 debt in Mean Streets.
It doesn’t help that Puerto Rico has the U.S. minimum wage and relatively generous welfare benefits. “Less than half of working age males are employed, [and] 35 percent of the island’s residents are on food stamps.”
There are plenty of free market solutions to Puerto Rico’s problems, but those are precisely the ones the Obama Administration won’t let be enacted…
And here’s the third part of that Camille Paglia interview. Here she takes on the 2016 Presidential field. As you might expect from someone who voted for the Green Party in 2012 and who profeses herself a fan of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, her critiques of the Democratic side are a lot more interesting than those of the GOP.
Democrats
There are plenty of women Democratic politicians who are too scared to put themselves forward as candidates because of the Clinton machine. There’s something seriously wrong here with Democratic thinking…Given the problems facing the nation, this passive waiting for your turn is simply unacceptable. The Democrats have plenty of solid, capable women politicians who are just too timid to challenge the party establishment. Well, excuse me, that proves they don’t deserve to be president! You sure won’t be able to deal with ISIS if you can’t deal with Debbie Wasserman Schultz!
More on Hillary:
Hillary has accomplished nothing substantial in her life. She’s been pushed along, coasting on her husband’s coattails, and every job she’s been given fizzled out into time-serving or overt disaster. Hillary constantly strikes attitudes and claims she’s “passionate” about this or that, but there’s never any sustained follow-through. She’s just a classic, corporate exec or bureaucrat type who would prefer to be at her desk behind closed doors, imposing her power schemes on the proletariat. She has no discernible political skills of any kind, which is why she needs a big, shifting army of consultants, advisors, and toadies to whisper in her ear and write her policy statements.
Republicans
She’s not a fan of Ted Cruz: “Ted Cruz–oh, lord! Cruz gives me the willies. The guy is a fanatic! He’s very smart, clever and strategic, and he has a fine education from Princeton, so people have to watch out for him. But I think he is self-absorbed and narcissistic to a maniacal degree.” Paglia also says that “In the primary debates, Cruz will benefit from having a tall and commanding physique.” Commanding presence, yes, but Cruz is around my height (5’10”-ish), which is not generally considered tall for a Presidential contender.
She’s high on Scott Walker:
I think that liberals are dangerously complacent about Scott Walker. They’ve tried to portray him as a madman, an uneducated rube, a tool of the Koch brothers. Right now, Walker seems to be the true GOP frontrunner, but I also feel he lacks gravitas. He’s not ready for his close-up. What is this oddity about so many of the GOP candidates–their excessive boyishness, as if their maturation stalled? But Walker is a very talented and combative politician, with far more substance than liberals are allowing for.
The union issue is huge–because as governor of Wisconsin, Walker went to war with unions and won. Liberals are caught in the past right now in their rosy view of unions, which were heroically established during the progressive era that reformed the abuses of the industrial revolution. But the union battle in Wisconsin had nothing to do with exploited working-class miners or factory workers. In his push to balance the state budget, Walker took action against the middle-class public sector unions, whose negotiations with municipal and state governments outside the arena of private competition have become an enormous drain on local budgets as the economy has worsened. There has been a history of rampant corruption in the public sector unions, coming from their cozy quid pro quo relationships with politicians. Liberals need to wake up about this! All they have to do is read the obituaries of the smaller newspapers in metropolitan New York to see how the early retirement and lavish pensions of the public sector unions have grotesquely drained taxpayer dollars. Obituary after obituary–so-and-so, aged 75, worked for fifteen or twenty years as a policeman or city sanitation worker, retired in his late 40s, and spent the rest of his life on the taxpayer’s dime, pursuing his hobbies of fishing, boating, and golfing. Great work if you can get it!
And then the teachers’ unions! What a colossal tactical error American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (a longtime Clinton friend and donor) made several weeks ago in unilaterally declaring her union’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton right in the middle of the Bernie Sanders surge. Probably for the first time ever, American liberals woke up to the corrupt practices that have become way too common in the political maneuverings of the big unions. The point here is that Scott Walker, in his defeat of the public sector unions, drew the roadmap for struggling municipal and state governments everywhere to balance their budgets, as he did in Wisconsin. Because who ends up suffering the most? It’s the kids. All that money outrageously pouring into inflated pension plans has been gutting public education and community arts programs.
Good to see at least one liberal wake up to the destructive nature of bloated public sector unions. But it’s rather naive of Paglia to express surprise over part of the corrupt wing of the Democratic Party (unions) endorsing the designated candidate of that wing (Hillary) over the candidate of the Party’s insane wing (Bernie Sanders).
“I thought that Mitt Romney was an excellent choice by the GOP four years ago.” Can’t really say we in the GOP are happy with the way that turned out…
