4TH TIME AROUND: Nobel Prize committee gives up trying to contact Bob Dylan.
Archive for 2016
October 19, 2016
TRUMP’S NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED (Video):
THE WINTER WAR REDUX? Finland sees propaganda attack from former master Russia.
Mantila, showing on his laptop what he said were false news pictures, skewed authority statements and pro-Kremlin online discussions, said his network has verified around 20 cases of clear information operations against Finland from the past few years, and around 30 “very likely” such operations.
“There is a systematic lying campaign going on… It is not a question of bad journalism, I believe it is controlled from the centre,” he said.
Kremlin and Russian foreign ministry officials were not immediately available for a comment.
Foreign Minister Timo Soini has also acknowledged the alleged propaganda, saying the government was countering false information with facts.
“All states engage in propaganda, authoritarian states even more so,” he told Reuters.
Some of the incidents have taken aim at Finland’s independence and at its historical figures.
Putin is the master of Brandolini’s Law.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd and his wife, a Democratic consultant, hosted a dinner party at their Washington D.C.-area home last year for Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director.
Todd began his career working as a Democrat operative on the 1992 presidential campaign of “stolen valor” Congressman Tom Harkin; little has changed in that regard in his current job.
WHOA: LOOKS LIKE JAMES O’KEEFE CLAIMED ‘LEGIT SCALP’ IN WAKE OF EXPLOSIVE EXPOSÉ. “As Twitchy told you, James O’Keefe and Project Veritas recently released a video in which Democratic operatives admit to inciting violence at Trump rallies, with, according to them, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s knowledge. One of the major players is Robert Creamer, co-founder of Democracy Partners.”
Creamer is the husband of Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Creamer, a political consultant who worked with the Democratic National Committee to consult Barack Obama on his two presidential campaigns, pleaded guilty in 2005 to defrauding nine financial institutions out of at least $2.3 million while running his own failing non-profit organization.”
Naturally, don’t look for the DNC-MSM to connect the dots or play up the story.
SURPRISE! Media Donate Overwhelmingly to Clinton Campaign.
As if we needed any further evidence that the liberal media are in the tank for Hillary Clinton, a new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity reveals that political contributions by journalists to the Democratic nominee outstrip those made to Donald Trump by a margin of more than 27 to 1
Of the $396,000 the Center for Public Integrity tracked, $382,000, or 96 percent, went to Clinton.
Among those giving to Clinton were former ABC “World News Tonight” anchor Carole Simpson, at $2,800, longtime television talk show host Larry King, at $2,700, and New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, who said during the Republican National Convention that Donald Trump was running an “ugly and xenophobic campaign,” while conveniently forgetting to disclose that she gave Clinton $250 in April.
Playing the role of Pauline Kael in tonight’s performance of 1972, Chris Cillizza.
Well this is super depressing. NO idea why any journalist would donate $ to politicians https://t.co/xyGheUdkIA
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) October 17, 2016
NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Dem Operative Who Oversaw Trump Rally Agitators Visited White House 342 Times.
THE HITS KEEP COMING: New Bill Clinton Sexual Assault Accuser Goes Public for the First Time. “Leslie Millwee says that on two of the alleged occasions, Clinton groped her while he rubbed himself against her and reached climax. After these alleged sexual assaults, Millwee claims, Clinton showed up at her apartment and knocked on her door for several minutes while trying to talk his way inside.” There’s video at the link.
IS THERE ANYTHING TRUMP CAN’T DO? Once-Critical Canadians Are Now Telling America It’s Great.
We haven’t seen that since Gordon Sinclair.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: The 2016 election’s tabloid simplicity. Except it’s now tabloid complicated.
GREAT MOMENTS IN TROLLING: Obama to Trump: ‘Stop whining’ that the election is ‘rigged’ against you.
Pretty rich coming from a former rookie senator whom the media pulled out all the stops, and permanently damaged their credibility, to help hit 52.9 percent of the vote in ’08.
THE HILLARY CAMPAIGN IN A NUTSHELL: “It doesn’t matter what the legal and ethics people say, we need to win this mother***er.”
REALLY? Marco Rubio Warns Republicans: Don’t Talk About Wikileaks.
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is warning his fellow Republicans not to talk about the Wikileaks dump of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, breaking with the example set by Donald Trump.
“I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of Wikileaks,” said Rubio in a statement to NBC News. “As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process and I will not indulge it.”
Once the information is out there, by whatever means, it seems foolish not to use it.
THERE WILL BE A LOT OF THESE IN THE U.S., TOO, IF HILLARY IS ELECTED PRESIDENT: Thailand sees rise in royal defamation cases.
Thai police are investigating 12 new complaints of royal defamation on social media lodged since the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej last week, a sharp rise amid intensifying scrutiny of anything deemed offensive to the monarchy.
Remember this line. Anything deemed offensive to the Queen.
THE SIX SCARIEST WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House.
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: So Dan Markel’s ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, published a novel called This Is Our Story about a year before she walked out on Dan Markel. It’s not very good, reportedly, but there’s this:
My interpretation of the breakup scene is that author Wendi Adelson was signaling through her fiction that she not only wanted to divorce Markel, but that she also wanted him out of the lives of her kids. The naming question in the novel foreshadows Adelson’s real life behavior, post murder, in changing her children’s surnames from Markel to Adelson and removing the middle name of one son because it referenced Markel’s deceased grandmother.
I think it is also likely that Adelson wrote the novel in order to promote herself as the public face of the morally unimpeachable cause of female antislavery, notwithstanding her lack of literary talent, her relatively meager academic credentials, and her relative inexperience as a practicing lawyer. This is Our Story was chosen as featured reading for the thousands of incoming freshmen at Florida State, and was also enthusiastically profiled in the Florida Bar News. …
In the novel, Lily’s heroic work is obstructed by a clueless and condescending husband whom she has outgrown. Hubby Josh whines and snivels, but ultimately accepts his marching orders. However, discarding Josh’s real-life model seems to have been a messier proposition.
Indeed.
OF COURSE HE DID: John Podesta grouped Clinton VP picks by race and gender.
In March 2016, Hillary Clinton was still struggling in her primary against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Still, we know the contest was basically rigged for Clinton, with Democratic National Committee staffers openly hostile toward Sanders.
With the fix already in (and even if it wasn’t, it’s never too early to start considering possible vice presidential picks), Team Clinton needed to start looking for her running mate. In a March 17, 2016, email sent to Clinton staffers, her campaign chairman John Podesta sent out a list of potential VP picks, which he organized into “rough food groups.”
What, exactly, rough food groups means is anyone’s guess right now, but it’s clear from the lists that potential candidates were separated into groups by race and gender.
“Food groups?” It’s a cookbook!
THE HIGGS BISON: Yes, bison, not boson.
SHOT: Saudi Minister Sees End of Oil-Price Slump.
CHASER: Saudi has little room to slow austerity drive, IMF says.
Have you thanked a fracker today?
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama ‘jokes’ that he ‘still doesn’t know why’ he won the Nobel Peace Prize in interview with Stephen Colbert.
The clothes have no emperor, to coin a phrase. And leftist elites did permanent damage to their reputations by ignoring that fact, which everyone else could see but them. Or as Peggy Noonan wrote last week, “I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way—towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie! It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.”
GEORGE WILL: Trump Is Right: The Elections Are Rigged, And The IRS Scandal Is Part Of It.
It is hard to think of an innocent reason why Democrats spend so much time, energy and money, scarce resources all, resisting attempts to purge the voter rolls, that is to remove people who are dead or otherwise have left the jurisdiction. It’s hard to think of an innocent reason why they fight so tremendously against Voter I.D. laws. They say, well that burdens the exercise of a fundamental right. The Supreme Court has said that travel is a fundamental right and no one thinks that showing an I.D. at the airport burdens that fundamental right.
We know — we don’t surmise — we know that the 2010, ’12 and ’14 elections were rigged by the most intrusive and potentially punitive institution of the federal government, the IRS. You can read all about it in Kim Strassel’s book Intimidation Game. She’s familiar to all Wall Street Journal readers and FOX viewers. This is not a surmise. I have talked to lawyers in a position to know they say it’s still going on. The IRS is still intolerantly delaying the granting of tax exempt to conservative advocacy groups to skew the persuasion of this campaign.
Gangster government, as Michael Barone calls it.
DON’T HARSH MY BUZZ WITH YOUR FACTS: Thomas Sowell on the left and the masses.
BILL ROGGIO: A “Lasting Defeat” of the Islamic State Will Be Elusive.
Keep in mind that many analysts were quick to pronounce the Islamic State’s predecessor, al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq, as defeated after the US surge that began in 2007 rooted out the jihadists from its sanctuaries across Iraq. By 2010, Iraqi and US forces killed the Islamic State of Iraq’s emir, Abu Omar al Baghdadi, and War Minister Abu Ayyub al Masri a.k.a. Abu Hamza al Muhajir, and the group was driven underground. But these setbacks did not deter the Islamic State of Iraq. Its new leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi rallied the Islamic State of Iraq’s remaining forces and reconstituted the organization. In Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq took advantage of the Syrian civil war to rebuild its strength. By 2012, it created the Al Nusrah Front, its branch in Syria, and was launching large scale raids inside Iraq, such as the one in Haditha in March 2012, that presaged the events of 2014, which saw Iraqi forces defeated in Anbar, Salahaddin, Ninewa, and Diyala.
The Islamic State is not alone in its phoenix-like rebirth after losing ground to local forces backed by the US. Al Qaeda branches in Somalia, Yemen, and Mali, have experienced major setbacks and lost ground it held, only to regroup and retake territory. The same is true with Boko Haram in Nigeria and Taliban branches in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Each of these countries have been in a state of perpetual war for well over a decade due to jihadist insurgencies.
Killing jihadis, as my colleague Bill Whittle says, is like mowing the lawn — a dreary job that must be done with some regularity or else it grows out of control.