BREAKING: TURKEY EXPLODES IN POLITICAL VIOLENCE AS OBAMA ALLY ERDOGAN UNLEASHES SHOCK TROOPS: “Political violence exploded in Turkey today as supporters of Islamist President Recep Erdogan’s AKP Party attacked newspapers and offices of opposition political parties.”
A would-be strongman leader who publicly loathes democracy using his operatives to attack journalists and opposition political parties — good thing that can’t happen in America.
TRUMP: JEB’S A“VERY LOW-ENERGY KIND OF GUY:” As Neo-Neocon writes, “No way you can disagree with this:”
Bush comes across as the most boring teacher you ever had, a fairly decent sort but a big snooze. As he talks, you can almost feel the juices ooze right out of you.
Trump, of course, has a ton of energy. Whether you think he’s worth your vote or not (and for me it’s “not”; I much prefer several other candidates), he has an energizing, fun, lively quality.
And as Dan McLaughlin tweets, “Part of Trump’s shtick that’s most like Obama — & no prior POTUS — is the scoreboard-pointing, football-spiking ‘Smackdown.’” Which brings us to:
“Troll Level: Master,” John Schindler tweets. “Our politics won’t go back from this …enjoy the ride.”
GATEKEEPERS PREDICTABLY NOT WELCOMING THE self-publishing revolution.
THERE’S GOT TO BE A MORNING AFTER: Roger Kimball looks into his crystal ball and sees visions of the day after the election:
Hillary’s divorce was a shock, but it was nothing compared to what happened next.
I don’t think anyone could have predicted that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would actually join forces and convince the American people to elect them as co-presidents. Looking back, of course, it all makes sense.
Join me, Donald, and together we can rule the galaxy…It..is..your…destiny.
CHANGE: Gun Sales See Best Summer Ever.
REID: DEAL ‘DOES NOTHING BUT STOP IRAN FROM GETTING A NUCLEAR WEAPON:’ “Reid assured the public there is ‘no better deal’ and ‘no plausible alternative’ to the current agreement. He also urged Congress and President Obama to continue supporting Israel:”
“I believe this agreement makes Israel safer and in no small part that’s why I support it. Over my decades in the Senate, my support for the safety and security of the Israeli people has been at the core of my views on the Middle East and the national security of the United States,” he said.
“I plan to work with the White House and work with both Democrats and Republicans to guarantee the United States is doing everything possible to protect the safety and security of Israel.”
Well, I feel reassured — how about you?
THE BOY ON THE BEACH: OBAMA’S FOREIGN POLICY FAILURES GO VIRAL: At The Wilderness, Stephen Miller writes:
It wasn’t “the United States” that let Obama get away with declaring “I didn’t set that red line, the world did” only to have him to walk out the door like a dejected child needing an afternoon snack and media-induced nap. No, that was our media: rather than hold him accountable for his own declarations of removing Assad and setting a “red line,” they simply shrugged, muttered a word or two about how war Totally Sucks Anyway, and went back to writing think pieces on the cultural impact of the President’s NCAA tournament bracket.
Because of DC media’s nerd-prom infatuation at the thought of being a part, any part, of this socially cool West Wing Presidency, we have to turn to other sources in calling out this ridiculous clipboard hashtag foreign policy. Earlier this year in a brief appearance during Jon Stewart’s Night of Too Many Stars, and much to the horror of the crowd, stand up comedian Bill Burr tore into Michelle Obama over the White House’s penchant for doing nothing to stop these events except guilt-shaming us with puppydog eyes:
“She’s sitting there holding up those hashtags, Bring Back Our Girls. Remember that hashtag #BringBackOurGirls? That blew my mind, like, why are you showing me that? I’m a stand up comedian. Like what am I going to do to get back the girls? Why don’t you look across the dinner table — you see that guy? That is the Leader Of The Free World. Tell him to pick up a phone, call some Navy SEALs and solve it….what am I going to do? Show up with a sharpened mic stand? HEY EVERYONE MICHELLE TOLD ME TO BRING THEM BACK”
The whole routine is worth watching, if for no other reason than to see an overly-sensitive politically correct crowd, saturated with social media activism for the past seven years, pucker helplessly in their seats. And yet that’s where we’re at. Using Twitter to hold up signs — it’s exasperating precisely because the one “Red Line” that actually seems to still exist is the one forbidding the media from holding the one guy who can do anything about these foreign policy meltdowns and humanitarian crises responsible.
Our media collectively demands accountability for these conflicts from every single person…except the one person who has any real power to stop or mitigate it. This has always been the anecdote in Obama’s foreign policy: 1) show up 2) demand the world follow him 3) world leaders balk at his demands 4) he shrugs his shoulders and goes and plays with his selfie stick somewhere.
Miller juxtaposes two viral photos in his article: one of the Syrian “boy on the beach” being carried by Turkish rescue worker as AP photographers click away, and our man-child president posing with a selfie-stick in Alaska. (As actor James Woods deadpanned on Twitter, “Because what else is there to photograph in Alaska?”) Obama’s selfie photo is even more damning knowing it was taken while the president was narcissistically goofing in front of a phalanx of White House photographers documenting his every gesture for the history books. In the mid-‘90s, Rush Limbaugh frequently chided Bill Clinton for turning on the mock tears when he spotted a network minicam pointed his way at Ron Brown’s 1996 funeral, but whatever Clinton’s boundless narcissism, he at least he made more of an effort at attempting to give an aura of a penumbra of looking presidential than Obama can be bothered with in the YOLO twilight phase of his presidency.
And he really doesn’t give a damn how badly he looks juxtaposed against world events — I created this Photoshop back in February for a Victor Davis Hanson article that ran shortly after Buzzfeed talked Obama into posing with a selfie-stick even as ISIS were concurrently burning men alive in cages and uploading their snuff-films to the Web:
Exit quote: “Sarah Palin to Obama: Carry a ‘Big Stick Instead of a Selfie Stick.’” Why would he start manning-up now?
UPDATE: Squaring the circle: “Do people leaving a bombed out village in SYRIA usually take their selfie sticks with them?”
IRAN SIDE AGREEMENTS VOID CORKER-CARDIN LAW: David Rivkin and Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) have a spot-on piece in the Washington Post, explaining how the “side deals” between Iran and the IAEA mean that under the terms of the Corker-Cardin law, President Obama has never submitted any “agreement” for Congress to review:
The act defines “agreement,” with exceptional precision, to include not only the agreement between Iran and six Western powers but also “any additional materials related thereto, including . . . side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.” But the president has not given Congress a key side agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This document describes how key questions about the past military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program will be resolved, as well as the precise operational parameters of the verification regime to which Tehran will be subject.
This omission has important legal consequences. At the heart of the act is a provision, negotiated between Congress and the White House, freezing the president’s ability to “waive, suspend, reduce, provide relief from, or otherwise limit the application of statutory sanctions with respect to Iran” while Congress is reviewing the agreement.
That review period was supposed to take 60 days and is triggered the day the president submits the agreement to Congress. However, because the president failed to submit the agreement in full, as the law requires, the 60-day clock has not started, and the president remains unable lawfully to waive or lift statutory Iran-related sanctions. Indeed, since the act also provides for the transmittal of the agreement to Congress between July 10 and Sept. 7, the president’s ability to waive statutory sanctions will remain frozen in perpetuity if Congress does not receive the full agreement Monday.
Since the time period specified in Corker-Cardin for transmittal of the agreement (and all side deals) has now expired, Congress is no longer bound by the law, and President Obama has accordingly not been authorized to suspend, waive, reduce, or otherwise limit existing statutory sanctions against Iran.
If the President ignores this legal reality and waives Iranian sanctions anyway (he is rather fond of ignoring laws and taking unilateral executive action), Congress or the States should sue to stop him.
RELATED: Trump storms D.C. to oppose Iran deal. A rally is slated for tomorrow (Wednesday) at the Capitol with Senator Ted Cruz, former Gov. Sarah Palin, and talk show hosts Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
UPDATE: Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) has introduced a resolution that says that President Obama has not submitted the “agreement” (which was defined to explicitly include side deals) as required by law. He will seek to present the resolution as a “privileged” matter, which would allow an immediate floor vote, bypassing committee consideration. Speaker Boehner would need to recognize the resolution as privileged, however, and there are indicators that he is not willing to do this (surprise, surprise).
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OBAMA VISITS WITH TOP NEWSPAPER EXECUTIVES RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT MEDIA FAIRNESS:
In recent weeks, the president has gotten cozy with top executives at major U.S. newspapers, headlining a Democratic Party fundraiser at the home of Las Vegas Sun owner Brian Greenspun and dining at the Anchorage home of Alaska Dispatch News publisher Alice Rogoff during a three-day trek across the state last week.
On the surface the events didn’t seem to influence either paper’s coverage of the president during his stays in Las Vegas and Alaska, but journalism specialists say they may have raised questions in the eyes of average Americans about the fairness of the news media.
At the same time, however, a distinction must be drawn between the business leaders at an individual media outlet and the reporters who work beneath them, says John Watson, director of the journalism division at American University.
“Here’s a news flash for you: The people who own newspapers and the people who publish newspapers aren’t journalists. They’re business people,” Mr. Watson said. “Owners and publishers aren’t journalists, even though they own and employ journalists. It’s different.
Nahh, it really isn’t; as the passage I highlighted above regarding a Democrat fundraiser in the home of the Sun’s publisher, he and his journalists are all, as Glenn likes to call them, Democratic operatives — and the vast majority of news consumers on both sides of the aisle know this already and can adjust their expectations accordingly. Nobody is still claiming with a straight face that the media is objective — or even should be – at this late date.
And second, it’s worth noting that even when Obama has been aboveboard with journalists, their role as party operatives supersedes their ability to report news. Recall Obama’s infamous quotes, which rocketed through the Blogosphere immediately before the November 2008 election that he would bankrupt the coal industry and that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
These promises, spoken in a chilling monotone by Obama sat, out in the open, as part of an hour-long video uploaded without comment in January of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle. They were recorded during his meeting with the paper’s editors to discuss his policies in general. No matter what your beliefs on environmentalism are, if you’re a journalist, a major presidential candidate promising to raise consumers’ energy prices and bankrupt an entire industry should be 48-point all-caps front page news. Instead, Obama’s remarks went uncommented on by the Chronicle, meaning either they’re lousy journalists who don’t know when a major story has been handed to them, or they’re Democratic operatives with bylines.
Or both. Any questions about media “fairness” were answered quite a long time ago.
EVERYTHING IS ECONOMICS, AND ALL OF ECONOMICS IS ABOUT SUPPLY AND DEMAND: Why College-Educated Women Can’t Find Love. Though in this case, female hypergamy plays a major role in shaping demand.
THE RISE OF THE CULTURE OF VICTIMHOOD EXPLAINED: At Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Ronald Bailey posits that American society is “Replacing honor and dignity with victimhood:”
Over at the Righteous Mind blog, New York University moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt is signposting a fascinating article, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” by two sociologists in the journal Comparative Sociology. The argument in the article is that U.S. society is in the midst of a large-scale moral change in which we are experiencing the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past. If true, this bodes really bad for future social and political peace.
In honor cultures, people (men) maintained their honor by responding to insults, slights, violations of rights by self-help violence. Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak. In honor cultures, people protected themselves, their families, and property through having a reputation for swift violence. During the 19th century, most Western societies began the moral transition toward dignity cultures in which all citizens were legally endowed with equal rights. In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf. Dignity cultures practice tolerance and are much more peaceful than honor cultures.
Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning are arguing that the U.S. is now transitioning to a victimhood culture that combines both the honor culture’s quickness to take offense with the dignity culture’s use of third parties to police and punish transgressions. The result is people are encouraged to think of themselves as weak, marginalized, and oppressed. This is nothing less than demoralizing and polarizing as everybody seeks to become a “victim.”
If only we had seen this coming 15 years ago…
QUICK — WE NEED “AFFIRMATIVE CONSENT” TRAINING, STAT! Premature Babies Study Raises Debate Over Disclosure of Risks.
GOOGLE LIKES TO CENSOR THINGS: ‘Dear Fat People’: Comedian’s Video Lambasting Obese Americans Quickly Goes Viral — Then YouTube Shuts Down Her Entire Page.
Google sure has a lot of power. You know, if Republicans were as smart as Democrats, they’d be targeting Google for antitrust enforcement.
ANDREA MITCHELL: I WAS AFRAID CLINTON WOULD CUT OFF OUR INTERVIEW IF I ASKED TOO MANY EMAIL QUESTIONS.
Ahh, decisions, decisions: Hillary unclipping her lavaliere and storming off the set while yelling curses and incantations against Mitchell would make for awesome television, but would redeem Mitchell’s underwater reputation with “the wrong people,” and more importantly, would likely destroy or severely damage Hillary’s election chances.
Hillary doesn’t have an (R) after her name, so best to take one for the team and pull your punches, right Andrea?
THEY NEVER STOP TRYING. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine’s Gun Control Bill Is A Backdoor Ban On All Private Gun Sales.
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A cordless chainsaw.
GENERATOR SALES ARE RISING: “Generators are where central air-conditioning was in the 1960s.”
With various regulatory changes making power outages seem more likely, I expect the appeal to continue. In the Third World, everybody who can afford one has a generator. And, well, . . .
TRUMP: ‘I ALWAYS FELT THAT I WAS IN THE MILITARY:’
Donald Trump did not serve in the military, but according to a report, the Republican presidential candidate and multibillionaire business tycoon said in a forthcoming book that he still “always felt that I was in the military” because he attended a military boarding school and “dealt with those people.”
According to an upcoming biography and interview excerpts shared with The New York Times, Trump said that his five years at the New York Military Academy provided him with “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
“Detention hall is hell,” Iowahawk tweets in response.
Hey, I went to St. Mary’s Hall in Burlington, NJ from K through 12 and had to wear a blue blazer every year but kindergarten as part of the school uniform. That counts as serving in the US Navy, right?
UPDATE: Allahpundit adds, “Reminds me of what Leon Wolf wrote a few weeks back about how Trump’s public remarks are like fighter jets expelling ‘chaff’ to try to confuse the enemy’s heat-seeking missiles. There’s so much bright shiny nonsense already out there in the sky to hone in on, including previous belittlement of others’ military service, that you can’t spend too much time on any one part of it.”
A couple of years ago, Glenn was referring to Obama and his minions employing the equivalent of the “dense pack” nuclear missile strategy when it came to overwhelming the public with his administration’s sheer number of scandals and disasters. Such a technique inculcated Obama — and so far appears to be doing the same for his 2016 doppleganger as well:
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: You can print your own guns at home. Next it will be nuclear weapons. Really.
Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End is set in 2025. Here’s the description of the problem:
Every year, the civilized world grew and the reach of lawlessness and poverty shrank. Many people thought that the world was becoming a safer place . . . Nowadays Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and criminal gangs could acquire it. . . . In all innocence, the marvelous creativity of humankind continued to generate unintended consequences. There were a dozen research trends that could ultimately put world-killer weapons in the hands of anyone having a bad hair day.
2025 doesn’t seem all that far away anymore. Though the part about the civilized world growing and lawlessness and poverty shrinking doesn’t seem to be coming true. . . .
ARTHUR CHRENKOFF IN THE NEW YORK OBSERVER: Europe’s Phony Compassion for Refugees: Intake should not be a real-life ‘Amazing Race.’ “The majority of the 350,000-400,000 immigrants who have arrived in Europe so far this year (these are the known numbers; no one knows how many enter undetected) are not Syrians. In fact, less than a third are, with the rest originating in a miscellany of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries. The majority seem to be single, healthy-looking young men, which traditionally suggests economic motives for migration, rather than the fear of death or persecution.”
Plus:
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are currently some 60 million forcibly displaced people in the world, of which the UNHCR considers 19.5 million to be refugees. While many of them pine for the day they can safely return to their homes, many, no doubt, would rather have a chance to start their new life somewhere safer and more prosperous.
When one includes those whose motivations are primarily economic, the numbers overwhelm. Some 1.2 billion people around the world survive on less than $1 a day, and 2.8 billion survive on less than $2. Even those not in dire poverty are attracted by the prospect of a better life in a developed country, whether through work or welfare. The prominent role played by people smugglers in facilitating the current wave of migration into Europe suggests that in fact many of the arrivals are far from “the tired, the poor and the hungry” of popular imagination. As the commentator John Schindler tweeted earlier this week, “If the answer to ‘my country is awful/war torn/poor’ is ‘just move right in’ the West better get ready for a couple billion new arrivals.”
It is now clear that all those currently entering Europe, be they economic migrants or political refugees, are shopping for their end destination.
It’s rational for them to do so. It’s not necessarily rational for destination-countries to cooperate.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Former Texas high school teacher accused of having sex with a second student. “Ramirez was arrested in July, 2014 after cell phone video surfaced allegedly showing her being intimate with a student at her home. The former teacher turned herself in after prosecutors say they identified her in the video through a tattoo on her back, which is about 8 inches long.”
JAMES DELINGPOLE: Five Awkward Questions About That Drowned Syrian Boy.
Related: Kerry Picket: Story Begins To Unravel About Drowned Syrian Boy.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first such hoax.
THE ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE RACKET: Reason.TV investigates how the federal government funds quacks.
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