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Archive for 2016
June 27, 2016
THIS IS A HOLLOW THREAT, SINCE PAJAMA BOY WON’T GET OFF THE DAMN COUCH ANYWAY: Democrats call for ‘family sit-ins’ on guns.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Some Late Thoughts on the American Civil War and Southern Identity.
The Democrats on the House Benghazi committee released their final conclusions from the inquiry into attacks on Americans in that Libyan city in 2012, and in the report they say, once again, that the investigation is a politically motivated sham aimed at damaging the reputation of Hillary Clinton.
But the report, which the Democrats published as a preemptive strike before the Republican majority releases findings likely to charge ineptitude and deception by the former secretary of State, also revealed, apparently unintentionally, details about the eye-popping amount of money a close Clinton friend and advisor made in a contract with a pro-Clinton nonprofit.
But they’re as bad at this modern technology stuff as Grandma Hillary:
But the redaction marks are easily erased by anyone able to use a computer’s cut-and-paste function.
Ouch.
IT (DOESN’T) COME IN PINTS? Why you can’t get a pint in a beer bar anymore.
Three years ago, Pizzeria Paradiso got rid of its common pint glasses, choosing 12-ounce tumblers and tulips as the default glassware and nine-ounce snifters for the smallest servings. “Pint glasses aren’t an ideal vessel to enjoy craft beer,” says Josh Fernands, beer director for the restaurant’s three locations. “They’re not the best glasses for aroma or head retention.”
He’s right on all counts, but many other 16-ounce glasses out there avoid those problems: German glassmaker Spiegelau has worked with Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada to create 16-ounce glasses that noticeably enhance aromas and flavors. ChurchKey, which has also rejected the traditional pints, has more than a dozen different glasses, including English-style nonic pint glasses, which have a characteristic bulge in the neck.
The truth is, bars like smaller glasses because they create the illusion of lower-priced beer.
I like pints.
FASTER, PLEASE: New Paper Claims EM Drive Works, Produces Light As Exhaust.
A FLASHBACK TO THE DIFFERENT AMERICA OF . . . 2009: Geoffrey Stone: Remembering the Nazis in Skokie.
JOURNALISM: “Vogue doesn’t want us to remember that it was shilling for Assad, now that hundreds of thousands have died.” Plus: “In July of last year, Vogue did a similar puff piece on Marilyn Mosby, the States Attorney in Baltimore who charged six officers in the death of Freddie Gray. . . . The officers were mostly black, too. Mosby is black. The judge who eventually heard the cases is black. Nevertheless, on the Left, the Freddie Gray story was all about race.”
How fitting that the inaugural winner of the Walter Duranty Prize should engage in airbrushing and support show trials.
GOOD: Police: Legally armed bystanders break up Walmart shooting.
Augusta Police say two bystanders, legally armed with handguns, stepped in during a shooting incident at a Walmart in Augusta.
Police say four suspects were taken into custody by police Sunday after allegedly firing gunshots in the parking lot of a Walmart.
The suspects involved were sitting in vehicles parked next to each other when the altercation arose. The occupants of one vehicle fired at the occupants of the other, which resulted in return gunfire.
When the shooting stopped, police said one suspect exited their vehicle to confront the occupants of the other. This is when two bystanders, who were legally carrying, interfered and stopped the incident, police said.
Augusta police say one of the men involved was injured. A bullet grazed the stomach of Kwiesha “Reggie” McBride of Harlem, New York.
Glad nobody else was hurt.
JAMES TARANTO: Donald And The Duck: A weak week for President Obama.
With his presidency nearly 93% over, Barack Obama isn’t technically a lame duck. (That cutoff is approximately 97.5%.) But although he may not quack like a duck, he looked awfully lame last week.
It started, as we noted Monday and Tuesday, with the attempt to transform the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11 into a domestic kulturkampf. First the Justice Department scrubbed the attacker’s declarations of allegiance to the Islamic State from a publicly released 911 transcript—a decision consistent with the president’s policy of denying Islamic terror is Islamic, but one executed so ham-handedly that the department was forced to back down within hours.
Then came another futile set of Senate votes on measures to constrain the rights of Americans under the Second and Fifth amendments. Whereupon House Democrats made their Senate counterparts look almost dignified by comparison.
“Using sit-in demonstrations inspired by civil rights protests,” as a Wall Street Journal news story put it, a group of Democrats hijacked the House chamber. Actually, they might have been inspired by House Republicans, who attempted the same thing in 2008. . . .
This time, however, majority Republicans left the lights on, and one of the sitting-in Democrats used his phone to stream video to a social-media site, which C-Span eventually picked up. Thus everyone was able to watch the ridiculous spectacle.
To be sure, it seemed very serious to people who sympathized with the sitters’ authoritarian aims—including most of the reporters covering it. Almost every news organization took to describing the spectacle as “historic,” as if in response to a memo from the Ministry of Truth. And that may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. NewsBusters.org notes that Pelosi, now the minority leader, “openly thanked people in the news media for creating an ‘echo chamber’.”
It’s the Media Party, to steal a term from Ezra Levant. Plus:
All of Obama’s difficulties last week can be seen as examples of his being eclipsed by Donald Trump, who despite trailing in the polls has become the most dominant figure in American politics.
Trump had put the president (and Hillary Clinton) on the defensive for downplaying radical Islam after Orlando, and he has changed the immigration debate by putting more-restrictive policies at the center of his campaign. The credit for bottling up Garland’s nomination goes to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans, but Trump was quick to endorse that effort: “I think it’s up to Mitch McConnell, and everybody else to stop it,” the future presumptive nominee said at a debate Feb. 13, hours after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. “It’s called delay, delay, delay.”
Say what you will about Trump, he’s been going after Hillary, Obama, and Elizabeth Warren like Mitt Romney and John McCain never did.
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE UNIONS DEMAND HUUUUGE PAY HIKE: They already make on average 78 percent more than private sector works – counting salary and the value of benefits – but a coalition of federal employee unions claim they deserve a 5.3 percent pay raise, reports Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.
“At a time when we need to recruit the best and brightest to civil service, federal pay is falling further behind the private sector and living standards for federal employees and their families continue to decline,” the coalition claims in a letter to Congress. “A catch-up raise to reflect market rates in 2017 is imperative.”
Yes, that’s really what they said.
AS IN WEIMAR, ILLIBERALISM RISES WHEN LIBERALISM LOOKS WEAK AND CORRUPT: Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis.
WHEN THE NAZIS ARE THE PEACEFUL PROTESTERS: Neo-Nazis didn’t start the violence at state Capitol, police say. Still no arrests, though.
UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “I’m wondering how this would have been reported if the left/right orientation were flipped. One group, with a permit, was engaging in expression and the other group, in scary matching garb and masks and wielding clubs, suddenly ran at them and unleashed violence on them. And in the news report, it’s ‘people’ all more or less doing the same thing.”
Yeah, I’m not wondering at all.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION, FUGITIVE-FROM-JUSTICE EDITION: Civil rights leader Walter Fauntroy arrested at Dulles International Airport. “Fauntroy was booked at 12:30 p.m. on Monday and posted no bond. He’d just gotten off a long-haul, nonstop flight on Emirates airlines from Dubai to Dulles, said his attorney, Johnny Barnes. In January 2012, Fauntroy left the United States after a bench warrant was issued for him to appear in Prince George’s County, Md., on a charge that he wrote a bad check for $55,000 to help pay for a 2009 ball he organized for President Obama’s first inauguration.”
Like a lot of people who took high moral stances in the 1960s, his moral stance has become considerably lower of late.
THE TRUTH ABOUT GUNS: California law enforcement lost 944 of them in last six years.
IT IS DECIDEDLY SO: Is “Ghostbusters” a flop already?
A BIT PRICEY FOR A SIMPLE LAW PROFESSOR SUCH AS MYSELF: Meet the 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT R.
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FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Colorado man in a grand ol’ fight over order to remove American flag.
Samuel Adams, of Greeley, Colo., received a notice last week from the management of his building complex asking that he remove the American flag from his apartment’s balcony railing.
Adams, who had hung the flag as decoration for the Independence Day holiday, took to social media to express his outrage — recording and posting video to YouTube and Facebook of himself reading the letter.
“Please do not clutter with personal belongings. Balconies and patios must be maintained in a neat, clean and attractive condition,” the notice read, in part.
I wonder what the response would have been if Adams had hung an EU flag to show solidarity with Remain, or flown a rainbow flag after Orlando.
AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER* ONION:
Shot: Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years.
—Headline, the Onion, April 25, 2001.
Chaser: Gay Pride Parade In NYC Remembering Orlando, Carries Banner: “Republican Hate Kills.”
—Headline, Weasel Zippers, yesterday.
An odd slogan considering that Orlando was caused by an ISIS-supporting terrorist who, like his Congressional lobbyist father, was a registered Democrat. But never let a crisis go to waste, to coin a phrase.
* Before they went in the tank for Hillary, that is.
TIM BLAIR: MAN IDENTIFIES AS GROCERIES.
This isn’t the 21st century I was promised.
VIDEO: THE INSANE SACRAMENTO NEO-NAZI/ANTI-FASCIST MELEE.
As Lance, co-blogger at Small Dead Animals quips, “When the Communists show up to protest the Nazis, You’re supposed to pray for an asteroid — not pick a favourite!”
Where is SMOD when you need him, anyhow?
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Second Iceberg. “If the Brexit in response to dysfunctional nature of the EU was the first iceberg, the effort to nullify the referendum will be the second.”