Posts on Saturday, August 3, 2019
Yum, “woke” flavored ice cream. The more you eat, the more you support Medicare for all! Ice cream creators Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are known for their line of bizarrely named creamy confections, as well as their left-wing political advocacy. Hailing from Vermont, their love for Bernie Sanders and his particular flavor of socialism is no secret. In 2016, Cohen formulated “Bernie’s Yearning,” a name that will forever be uncomfortable to say. While the flavor remained “unofficial” and was not created for mass production, it shares a lot of similarities with the one announced this week.
Don’t get duped by moderate Democrats — their message is a loser. That was the warning Bill de Blasio made to union workers Saturday in Las Vegas, where he urged his party to go hard to the left if it hopes to defeat Donald Trump.“Do we need to nominate a moderate to win in 2020? You hear it everywhere,” said hizzoner at a forum hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.“No, it is a trap, because when you listen to the moderates — I don’t disrespect them, I want to work with them — but I don’t find them inspiring,
You can add the confirmation of thirteen of President Trump’s judicial picks to the list of good news coming out of the Senate’s work this week. Wrapping agenda items up as the senators headed out the door for August recess, Mitch McConnell made sure that the process flowed throughout the week. He scheduled four confirmation votes Tuesday and nine on Wednesday. Three of the votes Wednesday were voice votes.
Trump Says He Stands With America
In Condemning El Paso Shooting. Here’s
How Twitter Users Responded replies
In Condemning El Paso Shooting. Here’s
How Twitter Users Responded replies
President Donald Trump said he stands with “everyone in this country to condemn” Saturday’s “hateful act” on Twitter Saturday night after 20 people were killed in an El Paso, Texas, shooting. The shooting, which took place at an El Paso shopping center, left 20 people dead and another 26 injured, state and city officials said. Two law enforcement officials identified the shooter as a 21-year-old man from Allen, Texas, The Associated Press reported. “Today’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, was not only tragic, it was an act of cowardice.
LAS VEGAS — California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris gave details about her gun control proposals in the wake of the deadly El Paso, Texas shooting after she addressed union members at the AFSCME forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Saturday.When asked by the Washington Examiner if her plan would include legal gun owner databases or gun confiscation via law enforcement visits to residents who own banned firearms, she replied, “I'm actually prepared to take executive action to put in place rules that improve this situation.”She continued, “I also have as part of my background and experience working on this issue, when I was attorney general
The progressive elements around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortz are framing the removal of the Justice Democrat leader, Saikat Chakrabarti, as a move to continue the movement beyond the landscape of AOC. However, in reality it looks like Nancy Pelosi is cracking the whip. [Snip] Apparently Pelosi said: enough is enough. [Snip] Obviously it doesn’t take a political expert to see how that was causing the 2020 candidate field to look like a bunch of raving mad idiots. [Just ask Bill Maher]
Thus, if Pelosi is going to retain her gavel; and you better believe it will only be removed by prying her fingers from it; the Speaker cannot let this nonsense continue.
Former Vice President Joe Biden (D) vowed to take on the National Rifle Association (NRA) following the deadly shooting in El Paso Saturday, telling a crowd of supporters that he has beaten it before and intends to do so again.Police responded to reports of a gunman opening fire at an El Paso Walmart Saturday morning. While numbers have been fluctuating, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen told reporters that there are at least 20 casualties and 26 injuries. The suspect is in police custody, and a motive is not yet known.As Breitbart News reported: Chief Allen referenced a manifesto that is allegedly written by the shooter.
Democrat Tulsi Gabbard said during this week's debates, "This current president is continuing to betray us. We were supposed to be going after al Qaeda. But over years now, not only have we not gone after al Qaeda, our president is supporting al Qaeda." [Snip] Well, Real Clear Politics has her at >1% in the polls, which puts her more than 31 points behind Creepy Uncle Joe. She had to break out in the debate or run for Congress again. She and her campaign staff came up with a reasonable plan. She would attack Kamala Harris and the president. She scored on Harris.
American is on a liberal racism rollercoaster. “I’m getting torn up by my fellow black people.” Cory Booker cackled it up while being interviewed on CNN. (CNN Panelists Weigh In On Cory Booker’s ‘Kool-Aid’ Debate Moment, Laughs Ensue | HuffPost) “I can explain it to white women in the suburbs,” was a comment by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand during the “debates.” (Kirsten Gillibrand: I can explain white privilege to ‘white women’) Where is the hue and cry about racist remarks? “Fellow black people”; “White women”? You can get whiplash trying to determine when racism is racist.
Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter killed himself,
coroner says, contradicting police
version of events replies
coroner says, contradicting police
version of events replies
The Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman killed himself, the county medical examiner concluded Friday, contradicting an earlier police account that three officers had shot him dead within a minute.
Santino William Legan, 19, opened fire at the popular food festival Sunday evening, killing three people and wounding 13 more. Police had previously said his rampage was cut short when three Gilroy policemen — outgunned by a rifle-wielding Legan — engaged him with handguns and killed him in less than a minute.
The Santa Clara County medical examiner, however, determined that Legan died of a self-inflicted, “intra-oral” gunshot wound, according to a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.
Robert Mueller’s two-year, $25.2 million investigation was supposed to provide the definitive account of Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election. Yet even after he issued a 448-page report and testified for five hours before Congress, critical aspects remain unexplained, calling into question the basis for the probe and the decisions of those who conducted it.
Time and again in his report and his testimony, Mueller refused to address a wide range of fundamental issues, claiming they were beyond his purview. Some of the issues Mueller and his team did not clarify include whether the FBI had a sound predicate for opening a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign;
A Chinese billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member is suing WarnerMedia over a CNN segment that he claims falsely implies he committed espionage and was on the verge of being deported. Guo Wengui, who's known as Miles Kwok in the U.S., on Friday filed a $50 million lawsuit against WarnerMedia and CNN anchor Erin Burnett for defamation. According to the complaint, Guo is an "outspoken and vitriolic critic" of the Chinese Communist Party who's seeking asylum in the U.S. because his public statements about the Chinese government led to the arrest of his family members and the freezing of his assets.
Photos and the name of the alleged Walmart – Cielo Vista Mall shooter in El Paso, Texas are being posted by reporters to twitter. (Photo) Washington Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli posted the name and a photos of the alleged shooter, sourced to law enforcement, “A law enforcement official in El Paso told me the Walmart shooter is in custody. Patrick Crusius of Dallas. Just turned 21 years old this week.” (Tweet)
Fox Nation personality Tomi Lahren apologized Thursday morning after several colleagues condemned her tweet suggesting Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris slept her “way to the top.” “Kamala did you fight for ideals or did you sleep your way to the top,” Ms. Lahren wrote in a tweet Wednesday night that has yet to be deleted. “Ask Willie Brown how Kamala became AG of CA…,” she added in another still-active tweet. Fox News personalities Kat Timpf, Janice Dean and Britt McHenry called out Ms. Lahren for the comments, saying they’re demeaning to all women.(Snip) Ms. Lahren initially defended herself by posting a January article
The Florida woman accused of “milkshaking” Rep. Matt Gaetz after he left a town hall in June pleaded guilty and could face a year in prison.
Amanda L. Kondrat’yev pleaded guilty Thursday to assaulting a government official after changing her initial plea of not guilty back in June following her arrest for tossing a drink at the Florida Republican as he was leaving the Brew Ha Ha Restaurant & Bar in Pensacola, according to the Pensacola News Journal. [video]
The protester, who actually ran as a Democrat against Gaetz in 2016, was one of several who had gathered outside the restaurant where the lawmaker was holding a town hall.
Embattled celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti is revisiting a potential 2020 presidential bid and told CNBC he is “one of the few effective fighters” in the Democratic Party.
“Never say never,” he told CNBC Friday when asked if he might still run in 2020. “The Dems need a non-traditional fighter. They have a lot of talent but not a lot of fighters.”
Avenatti said he puts the odds of running at 50-50, and he will make a final decision in the next few months, CNBC reported Saturday.
“I don’t think I need to make a final decision for a number of months.
A rodeo is no place for vegan protesters, and a group of more than 40 of them have learned that the hard way.
A video going viral through LiveLeak and other sites shows a group of vegan protesters attempting to disrupt a dressage contest — a competition where horses and their owners perform a series of movements from memory — only to face an anti-protest from the cowboys in attendance.
LiveLeak reported about the video, “This Saturday at La Exposición de Gandadería, – commonly known as Expo Rural – more than 40 vegan activists staged a peaceful protest interrupting a dressage contest. The activists walked onto the central track,
US Border Patrol shows toddler DNA revealed
was used by migrant crosser pretending to be
his father replies
was used by migrant crosser pretending to be
his father replies
Though congressional Democrats remain reluctant to admit it, the “recycling” of illegal alien children remains a growing problem along the southern U.S. border.
First revealed by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen back in March, these “recycling” operations involve cartel-affiliated smugglers using illegal alien children to help random, unrelated adults legally apply for asylum within the United States.
Children like the toddler pictured below: [Instagram]
Around mid-July, agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection found the boy seen above traveling with a man who claimed to be his father and used this claim to demand asylum.
But when CBP officials looked the man up,
A sizeable portion of Nevada’s incarcerated population is in the United States illegally, including about 150 who have been convicted of murder, a local investigation finds.
(Snip) federal, state, and local records to reveal that about 1-in-14 inmates across Nevada’s prison population are illegal aliens — totaling to about 1,000 illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes in the state.
Of those 1,000 illegal aliens in Nevada prisons, almost 200 had previously been convicted of crimes in the U.S., indicating that these illegal aliens had never been deported or had committed crimes after reentering the country
A year and a half ago, my wife Mary and I moved closer to our parents. We relocated from Florida to what I nicknamed "Trump Country USA," a tiny town in West Virginia. I've seen MAGA cap–wearers and a few lawns with old Trump signs.
Our tiny town emits Christian traditional American values. We enjoy the annual Christmas and July 4th parades. Only a handful of blacks, which includes me, live here.
A few days after we moved into our home, our neighbor Meg welcomed us with a homemade apple pie. Meg recently called and asked us to help with the "Friends of the Library" picnic
According to Politico, after the Robert Mueller’s testimony in 2 televised hearings 37% of Americans still wanted impeachment proceedings to begin, while 46% still wanted the inquiry to stop and their legislators to refocus on the critical issues of the day: immigration, crime, health care, drug addiction, cyberterrorism and global trade. Still, Committee Chairmen Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff were undeterred. They insisted that Mueller’s halting testimony was a triumph of substance over style but assured us that they’ll have something even better -- a real game-changer -- if we can just hold on until after their six-week vacation is over.
El Paso, Texas — UPDATE: 1:06 p.m. – An officers on the scene tell KTSM that 18 people are dead at the scene. An updated number of injured has not been given by EPPD. We are waiting to confirm from an El Paso Police spokesperson. UPDATE: 12:53 p.m. El Paso Police say anyone looking to reunite with loved ones who may have been inside the Walmart or Cielo Vista Mall are asked to gather at MacArthur Intermediate School located 8101 Whitus Dr. A KTSM photographer confirms that Bassett Place Mall was also being evacuated as a precaution.
UPDATE: 12:46 p.m. El Paso Mayor Dee Margo
Richard Petty's once lost NASCAR
Plymouth Superbird is heading to
auction and the sky's the limit replies
Plymouth Superbird is heading to
auction and the sky's the limit replies
The Plymouth Superbird may have been a one-year wonder, but it remains a classic today. The aerodynamically-optimized muscle car was built for NASCAR’s superspeedways, where Richard Petty and others competed in it during the 1970 season before it was effectively banned from competition the following year. Petty won 18 races that season driving Superbirds and Plymouth Road Runners, but finished fourth in the standings behind season champion Bobby Isaac, who used the similar big wing Dodge Daytona on the fast tracks.
Trump and the End of 'Normal'
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Anne Applebaum tells her readers in the Washington Post: "Non-Americans, be warned — there will be no return to normal after Trump." (Snip) Applebaum is probably wrong in predicting a reversion to the past. Countries are not returning to isolation, rather they are re-inventing globalization into one that resembles the way modern computers operate with protected memory spaces that nevertheless communicate over defined interfaces. "Essential to any multitasking system is to safely and effectively share access to system resources. Access to memory must be strictly managed to ensure that no process can inadvertently or deliberately read or write to memory locations
A year ahead of the US presidential election, exaggeration about global warming is greater than ever. While some politicians continue (incorrectly) to insist it’s made up, far more insist (also incorrectly) that we face an imminent climate crisis threatening civilization.
During this week’s Democratic debates, Pete Buttigieg called 2030 a “point of no return,” Beto O’Rourke warned we don’t have “more than 10 years to get this right” and Andrew Yang claimed climate change has already moved beyond a tipping point: “We are 10 years too late,” he said.
Is former president Barack Obama beginning to lose his luster?
Lately, especially during the current Democratic presidential debates, we keep on hearing about Barack Obama. You know, the Great One, the Rock-Star President, the messianic leader, much beloved overseas, though not so much in America, and even about his wife, Michelle, as a presidential “hope” for the Democrats sometime in the future.
That is odd, considering that Obama legacy-to-be, his projected mammoth presidential center in Chicago, would have an “adverse effect” on the surrounding area, according to a new study completed by the city municipal planners.
What ails the US Press?
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The question of “What ails the US press?” is too big for one column or one case study. Holman Jenkins takes it up in his Wall Street Journal Business World column this morning in the matter of the Steele Dossier.
Whence the allegations of the dossier? We still don’t know. The subhead to the column puts it this way: “The media’s lack of interest in the Steele dossier amounts to collusion in a coverup.”
The lack of journalistic interest calls for an explanation. Laziness, stupidity, herd mentality, and partisanship all seem to have something to do with the utter lack of interest in what it’s all about,
Little Stalins
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Assessing the Democratic stable of candidates based largely on debate performances is fodder for all manner of analogy and descriptors.
Comparing the debates to a reality game show is popular. Few if any of the candidates display any retail political savvy or charm. That they are a circular firing squad, a pack of hyenas devouring each other, and/or coffee klatch of resentful scare-mongers are all apt observations in one way or another.
Let me propose yet another: that they are mostly a bunch of little wannabe Stalins.
That applies especially to the two avowed socialists of the group, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
President Trump responded to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's claim in the second Democratic presidential debate that he is helping al Qaeda.
"Nobody knows what she meant by that," Trump told reporters Thursday. "She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. If you remember a short while ago, I defeated ISIS. We have 100% of the caliphate. ... We have captured 100% of the caliphate. And we've done a big job on al Qaeda and everybody else. So for her to make that statement is ridiculous, frankly. For her to make that statement is so ridiculous."
"The president said he was considering three candidates for the role, whom he didn’t identify, and said he would discuss the matter over the weekend.
Among the candidates the president is considering, according to a person familiar with the matter, is Pete Hoekstra, whom Mr. Trump appointed as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands in July 2017. The U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment."
HUDSON RIVER -Dozens of Navy SEALs swam across the Hudson River to support military veterans and their families on Saturda. More than 30 swimmers started at Liberty State Park and swam all the way to Battery Park in Manhattan in over two and a half hours.Former Navy SEALs like MMA fighter Mitch Aguir and actor Remi Adeleke from "Transformers: The Last Knight" took part in the event. They are swimming to benefit the GI Go Fund, a nonprofit that helps veterans.
An online exchange on Friday between Donald Trump Jr. and the guy best known for his long-ago, failed marriage to Roseanne Barr clearly exposed a malevolent ill will on the part of Tom Arnold, even while Don Jr. revealed that his family has to deal with “daily death threats.”The third-rate actor is one of the Hollyweird personalities who regularly takes aim at the President and his family, but his latest follow-on tweet was a clear death threat in its own right and will most assuredly get him a personal interview with the Secret Service. Arnold got the ball rolling with a tweet in response to President Trump’s comments
If there's one amazingly bad take on the Democrats in 2019, it's the idea that they're somehow not secular, and appeal to a strong base of secularists. On Friday night's PBS NewsHour, the Week in Review segment ran typically with lots of Trump denunciations -- David Brooks compared him to George Wallace and Father Coughlin -- but then David Brooks touted kooky Marianne Williamson pushing an "uprising of decency" for the Democrats, as he did in his Friday New York Times column. Brooks insisted "you can't beat a values revolution with a policy proposal.
Republicans only need to net win back 20 seats from Democrats to retake their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy broke down the GOP plan to do just that in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News that aired Saturday morning.
The one-hour-long in-studio exclusive interview which aired on Breitbart News Saturday and will air again on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, is the first and most comprehensive the House’s leading Republican has given detailing such plans by the GOP.
Rep. Ilhan Omar was just an opening act. Now, another ungrateful migrant has come out of the woodwork to tell us how awful we are and how ingratitude for being allowed to come here is the rightful state for migrants.
Calcutta-born Suketu Mehta, a bitter revanchist who would have been ripped to shreds as a fourth-rate, fourth world 'intellectual' by V.S. Naipaul (too bad he's not alive) puts forth the argument in the Washington Post that immigration is a reparation. His piece is titled 'I am an uppity immigrant. Don't expect me to be grateful."
A popular surfing beach was closed Saturday after a cliff collapsed, sending tons of sandstone onto beachgoers and killing three people. A 30-foot-long slab of the cliff plunged onto the sand near Grandview Beach north of San Diego. A KNSD-TV helicopter captured footage of beach chairs, towels, surf boards and beach toys strewn about the sand. Other beachgoers and lifeguards at a nearby tower scrambled to the towering pile of debris, which was estimated to weigh tens of thousands of pounds, to help dig out victims.
An elementary school in Georgia has come under fire after it created and displayed a poster dictating ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ hairstyles for black students. One parent of a student of the Narvie Harris Elementary School noticed the controversial diagram as she passed through the halls and took a picture. Outraged, the woman shared it with her friend Danay Helena, who in-turn shared it on Facebook where it has since been shared thousands of times.(Snip) In a later interview with CNN, the hairstylist said the poster particularly concerned her because it only seemed to be singling-out the hairstyles of black students.
President Trump’s withdrawal of the nomination of U.S. Representative John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) to be director of national intelligence on Friday is the latest of his acts of deference to an Intelligence Community that hindered his election and plays a key role in the ruling class’s subversion of his presidency.(Snip)For all the wizards who have hidden behind the CIA’s and FBI’s curtains, this is old news. Nothing could be further from the truth than the assumption (prevalent even at Fox News) that 99 percent of their officers are competent patriots who keep us safe. No. In reality, they are standard-issue bureaucrats
U.S. officials are working with Panama’s government to shut down the growing flow of migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, says Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
“We are seeing [migration] flows from throughout the Eastern Hemisphere from Africa, from the Middle East, from South Asia, that are arriving in South America and making a long land trek to the U.S. border, paying, in some cases, $30,000 to $50,000 per person to a variety of alien-smuggling organizations,” (Snip)
“That’s something that we want to work with Panama to cut off.”
Shedding Obama
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Democrats are tossing the 44th president aside like an old newspaper.
Deservedly. He shed people like they were tissues.
He also has a disdain for his fellow countrymen that befits a Prince Charles or evidently Prince Harry, who is rapidly becoming just as insufferable.
Obama failed the country because instead of healing the nation, he opened old wounds. His election was a milestone for race relations that he turned into a millstone because he branded any and all critics as racists.
Conservatives can take comfort in knowing Democrats are more upset because he failed to fundamentally transform America into a socialist state.
Republicans have long idealized Texas as a deep-red frontier state, home to rural conservatives who love President Donald Trump. But political turbulence in the sprawling suburbs and fast-growing cities are turning the Lone Star State into a possible 2020 battleground.
"The president's reelection campaign needs to take Texas seriously," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in an interview. He added that while he remains optimistic about the GOP's chances, it is "by no means a given" that Trump will carry Texas - and win its 38 electoral votes - next year or that Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, will be reelected.
For a state that once elevated the Bush family and was forged into
Hold off on the party: The sudden departure of radical New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti, should be the cause for caution and not celebration. “Saikat Chakrabarti has decided to leave the office of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to work with [nonprofit group] New Consensus to further develop plans for a Green New Deal,” Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez director of communications, told The Intercept Friday. (Fox News, Aug. 3, 2019) Like all current “Resistance” leaders, including former President Barack Obama, Chakrabarti, supposedly leaving his post after controversies, is going nowhere but
What’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going to use for brains now that her brain trust is leaving her congressional office? Saikat Chakrabarti, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur who recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress and who became her chief of staff and Svengali, is leaving her office, it was revealed Friday. Also departing her congressional payroll is her Communications Director, Corbin Trent. (snip) Ocasio-Cortez didn’t require Chakrabarti nor Trent to disclose their personal finances. Members can designate any member of their staff a “principal assistant” forcing them to file forms annual financial disclosure forms.
Race-baiting celebrities should shut up for at least a week, black conservative commentator and Blexit leader Candace Owens said on Friday.
Replying to a tweet by President Donald Trump annoucing that rapper ASAP Rocky has been released from a Swedish prison and is on his way home to the U.S., Owens lashed out at liberal celebrities who call Trump a racist:
“To every single one of you good-for-nothing, “he’s a racist”, Democrat-plantation celebrities...shut up.
“I want silence from every single one of you for at least a week.”
China and other countries are receiving oil shipments from a larger number of Iranian tankers than had been previously known, defying sanctions imposed by the United States to choke off Tehran’s main source of income, an investigation by The New York Times has found. At least 12 Iranian tankers have loaded and delivered oil across Asia and the Mediterranean since May 2. Countries that take the oil risk economic penalties from the United States.
Metro Councilman At-Large John Cooper won 35 percent of the votes in Thursday’s Nashville mayoral election, significantly shy of the 50 percent he needed to win the election outright, but setting him up for a September 12 runoff election with incumbent Mayor David Briley, who finished in second place with 25 percent of the vote.
Former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, a conservative, finished in third place with 22 percent of the vote, missing the runoff by finishing three points behind Briley.
Cooper’s brother, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), has represented Nashville in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2003.
Chick-fil-A has topped an annual nationwide poll as America’s favorite fast food restaurant, surpassing In-N-Out Burger.
Market Force, a customer satisfaction company, released its annual look at “America’s favorite” fast food chains this week, polling more than 7,600 consumers about their favorite fast foods.
Chick-fil-A received the highest overall score across all categories of restaurants, with a 79 percent “loyalty rating,” placing it above In-N-Out, which was No. 1 last year.
In-N-Out still holds the top spot as America’s favorite burger chain, with a 73 percent customer satisfaction rating.
Chipotle was No. 1 among Mexican chains, while Jersey Mike’s topped the list of sandwich shops.
This year, Chick-fil-A became the
When the Left Snatches our Kids
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I am skeptical that our efforts as conservative parents to produce conservative offspring will materialize. Even with the best of intentions, the odds are not in our favor to successfully counter the Democrat-Media Complex, the educational system, and pop culture. That doesn’t mean there aren’t success stories (some in my own family), but I hear more about the failure and the disaffection it engenders in conservative families. (snip) The conservative path is littered with the bodies of well-intentioned parents who are devastated when their formerly straight kids come out of imaginary closets, transition to the opposite sex, or demand to be called “they”
As the political chattering class has been focused on parsing and analyzing every syllable of this week's Democratic debates, I'd like to briefly revisit an illustrative episode that helps underscore one of the President Trump's most powerful advantages heading into 2020. Because the Resistance-minded media and Democratic Party are on constant hair-trigger alert to signal their strident and total opposition to Trump, this impulse often leads them to make dumb, indefensible, strategically-damaging, reactionary decisions. This is true on the policy level, of course, but it also bleeds over into associations and alliances. As Katie pointed out on Tuesday, several top-tier presidential candidates went out of their way
What ever happened to Barack Obama?
For a while there, no modern figure was supposed to be as consequential. It’s difficult to describe the hype in the early days of the Obama era. Time, Newsweek, and countless deep thinkers cast him as a 21st-century Lincoln or FDR. Some literally saw a messianic figure — “The One,” in Oprah Winfrey’s words. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra said Obama represented a “quantum leap in American consciousness.”
George Lucas speculated that he might even be a Jedi.
It was a global phenomenon. In a move that embarrassed Obama himself, the Nobel Committee gave him a Peace Prize on spec
In The Case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, brings his expert knowledge from years of academia to bear on his analysis of the political and sociological events that led to a Trump election. The Hoover Institute scholar doesn’t ignore Trump’s flaws or gloss over his failures, but he also doesn’t exaggerate them.
Hanson does not paint a black and white portrait of Trump, but uses a Machiavellian shade of gray to demonstrate that, despite his flaws, Trump is the one to get the job done. He likens Trump to Augustus, a renowned builder; to Julius Caesar bravely crossing the Rubicon;
So, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (HJC), fresh off his committee’s disastrous session with Robert Mueller, has announced his intent to obtain access to the secret grand jury testimony taken during the Mueller investigation. It matters not that Mueller concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against President Trump; he and his entire two-year investigation are now being disowned by ardent Democrats dead set on impeaching the president. Nadler’s hope is to uncover some testimony, however remote, that he can claim as the basis for an impeachment initiative.
It is settled law, at least within the District of Columbia circuit,
Biden's Corruption Problem
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Joe Biden is being portrayed as the Democrats’ safest potential presidential nominee, despite his obvious flaws as a candidate. But one wonders how Biden’s history of swamp corruption will play if he actually faces the scrutiny of a national run. Biden’s family has gotten wealthy, like those of so many low-paid “public servants”–Tom Daschle and Harry Reid are obvious examples. How does that happen?
Politico headlines: “Biden Inc. Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career.” It begins:
The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one.
Rest assured, folks, Mick Jagger will still never stop.
When the Rolling Stones performed their 1981 hit “Start Me Up” toward the end of their show at MetLife Stadium on Thursday night, Jagger sang, “If you start me up, I’ll never stop, never stop, never stop, never stop” as he had done countless times before. But the lyrics took on new, greater meaning in this concert on the Stones’ No Filter tour, which was postponed after Jagger had to undergo heart valve replacement surgery in April.
From the moment Jagger hit the stage for the first of two MetLife shows — the Stones return to the stadium on Monday —
With homelessness up double digits in San Francisco and surrounding areas it’s definitely too early to claim victory over the scourge of human waste on the streets, but today the Associated Press reports there are some initial signs that the city’s efforts to combat the problem are working. Last August the city announced the creation of a “poop patrol” which would target problem neighborhoods for steam cleaning. The city also expanded the use of “pit stop” toilets which are basically a pair of toilets in a trailer which the city can part wherever needed. At least one local businessman says things have improved:
Naked, Angry, and Alone
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Early last month, 29-year-old Christopher Morisette rampaged through the streets of Seattle, stabbing three pedestrians with a steel folding knife, then stripped off his clothes and ran naked across a freeway interchange, where he was arrested. In the past six months, three similar “random stabbings” occurred in Seattle’s downtown commercial district.
Despite the police department’s repeated efforts—including a block-by-block strategy targeting open-air drug-dealing and violence—crime and anti-social behavior stubbornly persist. In 2018, just in the downtown precinct, Seattle police received 44,246 calls for service, including 7,215 reports of violence, 3,861 reports of narcotics and public intoxication, and 1,069 reports of mental health crises and suicidal behavior.
Two more deaths were reported early Saturday after a bluff overlooking a popular beach collapsed Friday afternoon in Southern California, authorities said.
One woman had been pronounced dead at the scene at Grandview Beach in Encinitas, north of San Diego, but then city officials disclosed in a Twitter message shortly after midnight that two of the three injured people transported to local hospitals had also died.
Authorities did not identify the victims except to say that they were all adults, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
Attorneys for the Covington Catholic high school teens accused of harassing a Native-American protester on Capitol Hill back in January have filed a new defamation lawsuit against several of their most well-known Twitter detractors.Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and CNN correspondent Ana Navarro were among 12 defendants named in the new suit, which seeks a maximum payout of $600,000 ($50,000 per defendant).Activist Shaun King, U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland (D-Ariz.), comedian Kathy Griffin and historian Kevin M. Kruse
Conservative reporter and activist Laura Loomer announced her run for Congress in Florida’s 21st congressional district.The district went for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016, 59% to 39%.Laura released this statement on Friday.(Copy of Statement)
Laura will take on Democrat Lois Frankel in the district. (Tweet)
Leftwing Hollywood actor Tom Arnold on Friday expressed disappointment that the apartments of President Donald Trump’s eldest sons haven’t been broken into after the president tweets about the burglary of Rep. Elijah Cummings’ (D-MD) Baltimore home.“Don Jr’s NYC apartment has not been robbed yet! Eric Trump’s either! Really bad news!!” Tom Arnold, one of Hollywood’s most vocal anti-Trump critics, wrote on Twitter. His comment came in response to the president’s tweet earlier Friday about Cummings.
Joe Biden’s younger brother James received a series of “unusually generous” bank loans during the 1970s, while the former vice president served on the Senate Banking Committee.Politico reported on Friday that James Biden, who has a history of murky financial dealings, was able to parlay his role as the chief fundraiser for his brother’s 1972 Senate run into the startup capital required to open a nightclub.The loans were considered “unusually generous” given that the younger Biden was a salesman without any business experience and purportedly had a net worth of less than $10,000 at the outset of the venture in 1973.
An email disclosing Rep. John Ratcliffe’s (R-TX) alleged involvement in a controversial whistleblowing case reached the White House prior to the announcement Friday that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for Director of National Intelligence, according to two sources with knowledge of the correspondence.
The email, originally sent to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, laid out how Ratcliffe promoted a company accused of being instrumental in the reprisal against a whistleblower and their cybersecurity efforts, according to one of those sources.
A reporter says the White House suspended
his credentials in an ‘attempt to stifle
the free press’ replies
his credentials in an ‘attempt to stifle
the free press’ replies
Brian Karem, the chief White House correspondent for Playboy magazine, said Friday that his press pass is being suspended for 30 days in what he called an “anti-First Amendment move.”
The suspension will begin Monday, Karem said. In an interview late Friday, he said the White House told him the suspension was related to his actions in the Rose Garden nearly a month ago, where he infamously sparred with former White House aide Sebastian Gorka.
The White House wrote that Karem “failed to abide by basic norms of decorum and order” on July 11, Karem said. The letter further suggested that Karem had been rude to Gorka —
President Trump said Thursday of Hong Kong, "they’ve had riots for a long period of time," where locals are protesting efforts by communist China to crack down and violate Hongkongers' human rights. "Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that," Trump added. "But that’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China."
This phrasing, a bizarre regurgitation of mainland Chinese propaganda about recent events in Hong Kong, is very disappointing to hear out of Trump's mouth. We hope this is Trump speaking off the cuff and not him selling out Hong Kong.
The U.S. Air Force announced Friday it will soon deploy two ground-based laser weapons to an undisclosed location to test how they can be used against small drones, the service's first "operational field test" of an experimental "directed energy" weapon.
On Friday afternoon the Air Force announced a $23 million sole-source contract for two of Raytheon's High Energy Laser Weapons Systems, through which the systems are to be tested for 12 months in an undisclosed "contested environment" outside the continental United States. "What we really want to do is figure out how we can deploy these systems in an environment where our warfighters work and train every day,"
The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,
The days of picking up a plastic bottle of water to stay hydrated during a long flight will soon be over for people flying out of San Francisco’s International Airport (SFO). The airport, which restricted the distribution of single-use plastic straws when the city law went into effect in July, is now banning convenience shops, restaurants and vending machines from selling plastic water bottles. Starting 20 August, only water in glass, recycled aluminum, or certified compostable materials can be sold. The change is a part of SFO’s five-year strategic plan.(Snip) SFO’s new policy comes amid an international reckoning