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Archive for 2016
July 15, 2016
THIS IS WHY HE’S POLLING WELL IN PENNYLVANIA: Democratic Convention Host Gov. Ed Rendell: Trump Is Right on Trade, China.
LIVE FROM TURKEY: Soldiers Everywhere; Possible Military Coup in Progress.
THERE ARE COUPS AND THEN THERE ARE COUPS: Military coups have long been a feature-not-a-bug of Ataturk’s secular Turkey, but Erdogan’s emasculation of the military leadership was supposed to protect him from a coup as he de-secularized the country.
If this coup has worked, then… “Oops!” for Erdogan.
PS Austin’s book on Ataturk comes with the VodkaPundit Seal of Approval™. Excellent reading.
(Reposted from the comments to Austin’s post.)
THEY TOLD ME IF THE GOP NOMINATED DONALD TRUMP WE’D SEE A RETURN TO RACIAL SEGREGATION — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! UW-Madison Criticized for Racially Segregated Meetings After Dallas.
TURKISH MILITARY CLAIMS SUCCESSFUL COUP Ed just posted on this breaking news. We’re still short of facts. This interests me. My last book was a biography of Kemal Ataturk that focused on his military career.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Turkish Prime Minister Reports Coup Attempt.
“Developing,” as they say.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Florida man fighting to keep pizza-eating pet alligator in garden.
BUT OF COURSE: Promoting gender equality through emoji.
OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: “Somber cartoon tributes pour in across social media following Nice attack” — actual headline at the Website for NBC’s the Today Show.
And a telling Freudian slip elsewhere in the DNC-MSM: “CNN Chyron Fail: Suggests Muslim Male in France Was ‘Trump Rampage Survivor.’”
Related: On Terrorism and Immigration, America Is Not a Serious Nation:
When the avowedly socialist president of France, recently pilloried in the media for spending $11,000 a month on his haircuts, can immediately say after the horror in Nice that his nation is under attack from Islamic terrorism, but the U.S. president cannot blame anything other than “violent extremism” for the brutal terrorist attacks on our own soil, one sees how deeply unserious a country America has become. And this is true not just among politicians, but in our entire public culture, which has ultimately permitted as dangerous, divisive, and shallow a man as President Obama to occupy the highest office in the land.
That “entire public culture” includes an equally shallow palace guard media who placed him there.
Or as Michelle Malkin noted in her video interview with author/columnist Diana West in 2007, her book The Death of the Grown-Up, West connected the dots regarding “how this perpetual adolescence connects with our perpetual identity crimes and makes us incapable or certainly less able to fight the war against jihad that we’re in right now.” And that was before Footie Pajamas Obamacare Boy, the JuiceVox JournoList mafia, BernieBros, and “somber cartoon tributes” pouring in across social media following terrorist attacks.
MOLON LABE: The CDC wants your semen.
WHY DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IGNORE DEAD LATINOS? Amid Protests Over Police Shootings of Black Men, Latinos Note a Disparity.
BETSY NEWMARK: IS NICE THE NEW NORMAL?
How heartbreaking the stories and pictures out of Nice are. I’m so afraid that this is our new normal. I remember in the 1970s when it seemed as if plane hijackings were happening all the time, but eventually airports built security and those became a thing of the past. But if evil people can just find places and times when crowds are gathered for a celebration or a club or a restaurant, how do we stop this? And, if this is indeed an ISIS attack, as they suffer more attacks in the Middle East, they must feel that their best way to maintain their status is to launch attacks elsewhere. As Charles Krauthammer said last night, such attacks serve two purposes,
And the other thing — the conjunction of one other horrible development — which is this terror organization that thrives, glorifies brutality. And what it does for them is the idea that you can terrorize your enemy, and you can recruit the more disturbed and sadistic people in the world who want to follow this into their own distorted promised land.
Add in the possibilities of social media and instantaneous news, they can magnify the power of any attack. I don’t know what the answer is. Krauthammer recommends fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them at home, but as long as they can find people willing to die while killing people in other countries, it may not matter how many of them we kill on their home turf.
It’s obvious to everyone not named Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes or Hillary Clinton that the current strategy of hashtags, tasteful Photoshops, James Taylor and allowing Iran to develop the Bomb has been a disaster. Oceania isn’t besting Eurasia or Eastasia, and the chocolate ration has been rapidly spiraling downward. As a result, if headlines such as this seem increasingly acceptable: “Newt: Deport Muslims in America who fail Shariah test,” the administration and its palace guard media (aka, “The Blob” as Rhodes describes his MSM lackeys, with the appropriate contempt) have only themselves to blame.
Update: “The local paper reports that the terrorist was ‘of Tunisian origin,’ which surprises no one, of course. But since he was killed by police, President Obama may never know his real motive,” NRO’s Mark Krikorian writes from Nice, where he and his family were vacationing. Read the whole thing.
ZERO HEDGE: On Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row”, A Death Knell Just Tolled For Luxury Real Estate.
Having followed the collapse in the New York luxury housing segment, most recently in “Desperate Sellers Resort To Dramatic Price Cuts In Manhattan’s Luxury Real Estate Market“, as a result of the sudden halt in inbound offshore hot money mostly of Middle Eastern, Latin American and Chinese origin due to the crackdown on anonymous LLCs, money laundering and just the general drop in offshore ultra high net worth over the past year, we thought that we were prepared for ongoing news of a sharp slowdown in NYC luxury retail sales.
That said, even we were surprised by the following NYT narrative of just how dramatic the slowdown in the most opulent segment of NYC housing has been.
Read the whole thing.
Downtown Tokyo was once enjoyed a valuation greater than all of California — and this was when California was still worth something. That was nearly a quarter century ago, and Japan has yet to fully recover from the crash.
WAIT, I THOUGHT OBAMACARE WAS SUPPOSED TO FIX THAT: National Health Spending to Surpass $10,000 a Person in 2016.
CLAIM: FRANCE ‘SUPPRESSED REPORTS OF GRUESOME TORTURE’ AT BATACLAN MASSACRE.
I linked to this article at the end of the post an hour ago noting that Nice is France’s seventh terror attack in 18 months, but it’s worth a headline of its own. Read the whole thing.
STACY McCAIN: Make America Hate Again — Liberals surrender to fear as polls show Hillary losing ground:
“Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea,” Charles Pierce, the left-wing political blogger for Esquire declared Thursday, calling the upcoming GOP convention “a four-day celebration of the ritual suicide of American democracy.”
That’s pretty rich coming from Pierce, the same journalist who “won” the quote of the year at the Media Research Center’s annual Dishonors awards for 2003 after writing in the Boston Globe, “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”
More from McCain:
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told an interviewer she is preparing for a possible Trump presidency by “reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor.”
Note what enflames those employed by MSNBC: A middle-aged New York real estate tycoon and media gadfly (a former employee of NBC, their parent company, to boot) is Hitler, but Islamic jihad in Nice is merely a “Deadly Truck Crash.”
Back to Stacy:
No sooner had media outlets reported that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would be Trump’s vice-presidential pick than the socialist magazine Mother Jones rushed out an online report with the headline: “Mike Pence Has Led a Crusade Against Abortion Access and LGBT Rights.”
Eight years after Obama ran on a slogan of “Hope and Change,” Democrats now seem prepared to campaign on a theme of Hate and Fear. With the eager assistance of the liberal media, Team Clinton is trying to convince voters that Republicans are “un-American,” and that Trump is Hitler. The fearmongering attack on Pence was evidently intended to make gullible liberals imagine that the Republican governor has turned Indiana into a Taliban-like regime of fundamentalist repression. However, despite his avowed social-conservative leanings — Pence calls himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” — his governorship has been more defined by Pence’s budget-hawk fiscal conservatism. It’s true that conservative Republicans have tried to defend the state’s wholesome Midwest values against gay-rights radicalism, and it’s also true that Pence is solidly pro-life. So what? The GOP platform has been opposed to abortion for more than 40 years, and recent controversies involving “LGBT Rights” have raised legitimate concerns about religious liberty. Any other Republican who had been picked as Trump’s running mate would have been demonized the same way Pence is being demonized. This is simply what the media do — promote whatever message Democrats want them to promote and call it “objective journalism.”
Thirty years of “Objective” journalism and the largely Democrat-controlled media overculture is what created Trump. It will be fascinating to watch how it continues to feed his “unexpected” rise – possibly even to November and beyond.
BIG SPENDER: Buffett donates nearly $2.9 billion to Gates charity and four others.
Buffett’s 11th annual donation to the five charities comprised 19.61 million Class “B” shares of Berkshire, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.
The Gates Foundation, which focuses on improving education and health and reducing poverty, received about 14.96 million shares.
The donations were made on Wednesday, and brought Buffett’s total contributions to the charities to more than $24.3 billion since 2006.
I wonder how Buffett’s “giving rate” compares to his secretary’s.
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SOUNDS LIKE A HARRY TURTLEDOVE NOVEL, OR MAYBE S.M. STIRLING: World’s Largest Viking Ship Might be Defeated by US Coast Guard.