Archive for 2016
September 2, 2016
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WHAT TRUMP DID FOR PENA: My latest Observer column. (bumped)
COLIN KAEPERNICK TAKES KNEE FOR NATIONAL ANTHEM AT ‘SALUTE TO THE MILITARY’ GAME: “And this time Kaepernick enjoyed solidarity from a teammate. Fourth-year safety Eric Reid, dressed in street clothes, opted to take a knee during the song as well.”
At a different preseason game yesterday, Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane joined Kaepernick by sitting during national anthem, Business Insider reports.
Witness the awesome douche power of this fully politicized National Football League.
CNN’S HEADLINE NEWS CHANNEL CENSORS HERO’S PRO-TRUMP T-SHIRT:
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon’s David Rutz spotlighted HLN’s censorship of a hero’s pro-Trump T-shirt during a rebroadcast of an interview on his rescue of a baby from a hot car. Rutz (who won the MRC’s Media Blogger of the Year Award on Wednesday) outlined that former police officer Steve Eckle “donned a blue T-shirt saying, ‘2016 Trump for President.’ However, in a rerun of the interview…his shirt was blurred out.” HLN’s sister network, CNN, had no such qualms nearly a month earlier, as it ran Fareed Zakaria’s “bulls**t artist” label of Trump uncensored.
Click over to see the before and after video of Eckle’s T-shirt; it’s akin to CNN in 2008 creating “the Wright-Free Zone” for Obama one week after declaring Wright’s virulently racist speech to the NAACP “a home-run.” And Ari Fleischer’s juxtaposition is much more recent. As he tweets, “Kaepernick sits during Anthem. Gets coverage. Man wears pro-Trump shirt on TV. Coverage blurred. Disgusting.”
Matthew Balan of NewsBusters adds, “Several hours after Rutz’s post, the Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams Tweeted an update about the controversy: ‘HLN spokeswoman in a statement to me just now: ‘We blurred the logo and shouldn’t have; it was done in error.’”
Well, that’s one way to describe what happened.
Scottish Leader Calls for ‘New Conversation’ on Independence.
Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon says support for Scottish independence is growing and that the time is right for a “new conversation” on independence because of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
The Scottish First Minister said Friday her party would set up a website to gather public input on a possible independence referendum. A “listening exercise” with the goal of speaking to 2 million voters was also announced.
She spoke nearly two years after Scottish voters rejected independence in a referendum.
It seems that the SNP would like to continue the EU tradition of holding as many votes as it takes to achieve the desired result.
BYE BYE REPRESENTATIVE CORRINE BROWN (D-FLORIDA): Crooked Corrine faced 24 counts of fraud. She lost in the Florida primary election held earlier this week.
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE, ANGIE? Angela Merkel admits Germany, EU bungled refugee crisis.
Who could have foreseen that the completely disorderly admission of hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into Germany from countries with terrorism problems would turn out to be an issue? Apparently not German Chancellor Angela Merkel, until now.
On Tuesday, Merkel told the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that part of the reason the problem got so out of control was because Europe had ignored it for so long.
“There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment — and in Germany we ignored both the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution,” Merkel said, according to a translation from Reuters.
She said the European Union had “rejected a proportional distribution of the refugees” when the problem first became apparent. Germany has taken in more than 1 million refugees, but the EU had let each country come up with their own plan at first.
But then Merkel acknowledged that the continent failed to properly handle the migration. “We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way,” she said. “That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area.”
The “Schengen area” refers to the 26 European countries that stopped requiring passports for travel between them.
Maybe if Merkel and her ilk had recognized the dangers of letting so many people in without having space for them – or knowing who they were – they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in now.
Virtue-signalling is no basis for policy, but it’s the only moral compass the EU’s leaders have. Besides, the costs always fall on the little people, not the leaders.
HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: UCLA Student Body President Leaves Law School For NYU Due To Anti-Israel Harassment.
WITH 90 HOMICIDES, AUGUST WAS CHICAGO’S BLOODIEST MONTH IN 20 YEARS: “Overall this year, there have been 467 homicides in Chicago, more than New York City and Los Angeles combined,” CBS’s Chicago affiliate adds.
Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office the year before Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. troops in Iraq increasingly active as Mosul battle nears.
FLASHBACK:
DIRT BIKERS TERRORIZE, SHUT DOWN TIMES SQUARE.
If Mike Bloomberg’s New York seemed too much like a Woody Allen movie, Bill de Blasio’s Manhattan is pretty much a real life version of Escape From New York or The Warriors these days.
AUSTIN BAY ON “TRUMP’S MEXICAN TRADE SHOW”: More Presidential Than Hillary’s Ever Been.
That might seem like a low bar, but even those dreaded “Republican insiders” admit that Trump’s trip was a hit.
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Roll Call’s Jonathan Allen calls Trump “Subhuman.”
COMBATING THE ZIKA VIRUS WITH A LIMITED MOSQUITO CONTROL ARSENAL: Reuters reports parts of Miami have been sprayed with “naled, a tightly controlled pesticide often used as a last resort.” Naled kills mosquitoes but it has environmental risks. “Few companies make pesticides for use in public health outbreaks, a niche market that is expensive to get into, has a limited upside and varies season to season.” EPA restrictions and regulations are one reason developing new pesticides is slow. “Even if the EPA speeds up its evaluation, required safety data can take years to collect.” What does safety testing a new pesticide cost? “…up to $250 million and (it can) take 10 years…”
UNEXPECTEDLY! Enrollment drop from Mizzou protests worse than feared.
Inconceivable, as legendary SJW Mr. Vizzini would say.
Hermine makes landfall in Florida as hurricane, starts to lose some steam.
Hermine hit Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane at around 1:30 a.m., but nearly four hours later it was downgraded to a tropical storm.
The storm is expected to move move through the mostly rural and lightly populated corner where the Florida peninsula meets the Panhandle and then drop back down to a tropical storm and push into Georgia, the Carolinas and up the East Coast with the potential for drenching rain and deadly flooding.
Hermine is nothing to laugh at, but as the story notes, it is also “the first hurricane to directly hit the Sunshine State in more than a decade.”
I’m old enough to remember when Al Gore’s panicked warning about increased hurricane activity was recent enough that people still bothered to debunk it.
QUESTION ASKED: What are Netanyahu and Putin plotting?
In an appearance before the UN Security Council on Aug. 29, Nikolay Mladenov, a Russian and the UN envoy for peace in the Middle East, sharply criticized Israel’s policies in the territories. His criticism included harsh statements regarding the onset of recently announced construction work on units in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem and the new “carrot and stick” policies of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman toward West Bank Palestinians. Mladenov emphasized that Israel’s settlement policy thwarts chances for peace, and he used extremely sharp language in criticizing the Israeli government. Jerusalem released an angry response instead of turning the other cheek.
There are a number of behind-the-scenes observers who believe this is all being staged, an act designed to mollify the Palestinians. Before the summit, Abbas will lay down conditions that Israel will have great difficulty in meeting, that is, a settlement construction freeze and the release of “pre-Oslo” Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Mladenov’s harsh statements were designed to show the Palestinians that Russia is pro-Palestinian, and therefore they should transfer their negotiating eggs from the American basket to the Russians’ basket.
Sources involved in negotiations told Al-Monitor that the entire sequence of events has been meticulously planned by Putin and Netanyahu, but with different objectives.
Read the whole thing.
SPOILER ALERT: It ends with President Obama looking feckless once again.
MY LATEST NEW YORK OBSERVER COLUMN: Trump’s Mexican Trade Show, live from Mexico City.
OF COURSE HE DID. Jonathan Tobin in Commentary says Iran cheated on the nuclear deal and Obama let Tehran get away with it. “…we now know that the assurances about compliance were rooted in fiction. The exemptions granted to Iran mean that almost everything President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said about the Iran deal since January was a lie.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A LONGER WEEK: This Week in Clinton Corruption for September 1, 2016.
ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA: As despair spreads in Venezuela, Maduro doubles down.
The country’s GDP has had 10 consecutive quarters of negative growth. (The annualized rate is now minus 12 per cent.) Investment is down 26 per cent from 2015. Consumption, which had fallen precipitously, is down another 16 per cent this year.
The government, whose expenditure has dropped 50 per cent, cannot mitigate the disaster with oil money because, besides committing much of the reduced revenue to creditors or allies, it has decapitalized the industry. In 2015, oil revenue amounted to 915-billion bolivars ($119-billion); in the first five months of this year, the figure was a paltry 159-billion bolivars. Despite having eight times the reserves of the United States, Venezuela has had to import oil, which is cheaper than refining its own heavy crude.
Letting Venezuelans starve, unleashing a ferocious campaign of intimidation against critics and desperately seeking U.S. dollars are the only responses Mr. Maduro can come up with.
“Bad luck.”
IT’S COME TO THIS: Alabama ACLU sues government, claiming pro-Muslim discrimination.