DEFINE “DANGEROUS GAMBIT”: Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is a dangerous gambit.
So says long-term American diplomat Aaron David Miller, who helped facilitate the Oslo Accords. But it’s not like Trump is inviting unrepentant anti-American PLO terrorists to form a government a few kilometers from Israel’s heartland, inevitably leading to thousands of casualties on both sides, right?
THEY ALL KNEW: 12 Notorious Matt Lauer Stories.
Any other industry run like the infotainment industry would have been regulated out of existence by now.
MAYBE IT WOULD BE SHORTER TO MAKE A LIST OF MUELLER FOLKS WHO AREN’T HOPELESSLY COMPROMISED: Another One! Mueller Deputy Was Personal Attorney of Ben Rhodes, Represented Clinton Foundation. “Jeannie Rhee, who was hired by Mueller last summer to work on the probe, was the personal attorney of Ben Rhodes and also represented the Clinton Foundation. . . . Rhee is the third member of the Mueller team this week who has been shown to be brazenly partisan. Two other members of the team have been revealed as highly questionable hires in recent days as well — Peter Strzok, an anti-Trumper who helped exonerate Hillary Clinton, and Andrew Weissmann, an unscrupulous prosecutor who told outgoing acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email that he was ‘proud’ of her for defying President Trump’s travel ban. As bad as Strzok and Weissman are, Jeannie Rhee takes the cake.”
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Chinese Newspaper Near North Korea Offers Advice on Surviving Nukes.
THIS, FROM RANDY BARNETT, IS VERY TRUE:
JEFF DUNETZ: Six Facts The MSM Isn’t Reporting About The Jerusalem Issue.
Here are probably the two most important:
Jerusalem has been part of Israel since 1948. The Arab Nations aren’t objecting to Israel’s presence in the part of Jerusalem controlled since June 1967, they are objecting to any Israeli presence in Jerusalem, even the section agreed to as part of the 1949 Israeli/Jordan armistice. Because of the rejectionism by Israel’s neighbors, the United States has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Under Arab rule holy sites were not protected. Only since 1967 when Israel took control of all of Jerusalem have the holy sites in the eastern part of the city been protected and open to all faiths. Between 1949 and 1967 the Jordanians breached their commitment (in the Armistice Agreement) to allow free access of Jews to the holy sites, mainly to the Western Wall and to the cemetery on the Mount of Olives. They also desecrated the Jewish holy sites.
Read the whole thing.
I’d just add that the Jewish State has been a boon to the local ecology, recreating a fertile land out of a Promised Land which had been badly stewarded for nearly two millennia.
POLLS IN ALABAMA: Gravis says Jones by four, WBRC says Moore by seven. Which is correct? Your guess is as good as mine. I doubt any polling is reliable in a race this crazy.
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CONRAD BLACK: Retreat of the Democrats: Grows Hard To Disguise After Indictment of Flynn. “To anyone with any legal insight, such as Alan Dershowitz, Trey Gowdy, and Andy McCarthy (one of them should be the attorney general), it was the barefaced admission by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that, after nine months in charge of an investigation that had already been under way for eight months, he has absolutely nothing to justify continuing this charade within its original mandate to explore a Trump-Russian connection.”
To be fair: His investigation has certainly produced a lot of amusing texts.
BRIDGET JOHNSON: King Abdullah Tells Trump Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem ‘Will Provoke Muslims and Christians Alike.’
Meanwhile, Bridget’s unexplained banishment from Twitter continues without explanation.
AND ANOTHER ONE DOWN: Top gossip editor Dylan Howard accused of sexual misconduct.
The behavior by Dylan Howard, currently the chief content officer of American Media Inc., occurred while he was running the company’s Los Angeles office, according to men and women who worked there. Howard’s self-proclaimed nickname was “Dildo,” a phallus-shaped sex toy, the former employees said. His conduct led to an internal inquiry in 2012 by an outside consultant, and former employees said he stopped working out of the L.A. office after the inquiry.
Howard quit soon after the report was completed, but the company rehired him one year later with a promotion that landed him in the company’s main office in New York. It was not clear whether Howard faced any discipline over the accusations. AP is not aware of any sexual harassment allegations involving Howard since he was rehired.
The AP spoke with 12 former employees who knew about the investigation into Howard’s behavior, though not all were aware of every detail. The outside investigator hired to examine complaints about Howard’s behavior also confirmed to AP that he completed a report.
From the story he doesn’t seem to have assaulted or molested anyone, but his behavior would be completely out-of-place in your typical midwestern office building.
American Media’s gossip rags include The National Enquirer, Us, and Star.
MILLENNIAL WISDOM: Student Protesters: Defending the First Amendment Is ‘Violent.’
A group of students at Western Washington University used their own right to free speech to disrupt a pro–free-speech lecture — calling the idea of complete free speech “violent” — and apparently, they don’t understand the irony.
According to an article in the school’s official student newspaper, the Western Front, Professor Jonathan Zimmerman was about to begin his “Censorship and Free Speech in the Age of Trump” lecture when he was disrupted by a group of students carrying signs reading “Advocating for the right to racist, sexist and transphobic speech is violent” and “Your safe space is violent.”
I wonder what it’s going to take to knock some sense into these kids, but I don’t wonder that it will have to be something awful. And due to the depths of their ignorance and inability to reason, something inevitable.
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF OUR BETTERS: Nevada Dem says he won’t resign despite calls from party leaders.
Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.) said Tuesday he will not resign from his post amid allegations of sexual harassment from a former staffer.
Kihuen asserted in an ABC News interview that party leaders knew last year about the woman’s allegations of sexual misconduct, but did not take action against his campaign.
Well, yeah, but it’s one thing when they know. It’s another thing entirely once we know.
DAVID FRENCH: The Incredible Tale of a Reckless, Partisan FBI Agent and Our Partisan Bureaucracy. “Peter Strzok’s story will hurt public trust in the federal government at the worst possible time. If the story hadn’t been verified by virtually every mainstream-media outlet in the country, you’d think it came straight from conspiratorial fever dreams of the alt-right.”
French, of course, was a NeverTrumper, but that only adds force to this piece. And maybe they were never “fever dreams.”
MARTHA STEWART JOKED, “I HEAR NBC EXECUTIVES CALL MATT THE ‘COCK OF THE ROCK:’” ‘They all knew’: Media elites roared in laughter at obscene 2008 ‘roast’ sending up Matt Lauer’s office sexcapades.
The 2008 Friars Club roast took place at the New York Hilton and was attended by everyone from future President Donald Trump to TV legend Norman Lear to a constellation of New York’s media elite including Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Nancy O’Dell and Howard Stern. Also on hand were numerous top executives from across the business and almost everyone who was anyone at NBC News. Fox News has confirmed many details of the roast with a media executive who attended, and has also drawn on the one contemporaneous account of the roast, which appeared in The Village Voice.
Speaker Martha Stewart joked, “I hear NBC executives call Matt the ‘Cock of the Rock,’” according to The Voice.
Another of the roast’s speakers was current CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker — then the chairman of NBC Universal — who last week adamantly denied that he had any idea about Lauer’s in-office sexcapades.
“It’s just good to see Matt up here and not under my desk,” Zucker said from the podium. “I don’t want to say Matt is a germophobe, but he’s the only guy I know who uses Purell both before and after he masturbates.”
Perhaps the big catch there is Zucker, who has been in full Sgt. Schultz mode during the past week regarding his former employee, including last Thursday when he said, “I’ve known Matt for 25 years and I didn’t know this Matt.” But we’ve been seeing numerous variations of the above article in recent weeks. As Daniel Greenfield writes today at Front Page, “The massive media machine built to smear and steamroll Republicans never bothered to report what everybody on the inside already knew. The wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins in every paper, news bureau and explainer site weren’t investigating the scandals they already knew about. Those weren’t the scandals they were looking for. That’s why no one trusts them. Hollywood, the media and the Democrats have been preaching to us about sexism and feminism for generations. Meanwhile behind the cameras and the chambers, an assault spree was in progress. And everybody knew.”
QED, these articles, all recent Insta-links:
● Cokie Roberts: Oh, We All Knew to Avoid Getting in an Elevator with Rep. Conyers.
● “Or, to put it another way: More than 20 people in one magazine office alone all had the story about Harvey Weinstein’s ‘mistreatment’ of women. So why didn’t anyone write it? Not to take anything away from Jodi Kantor’s excellent New York Times piece, but the reality is that everyone had the story. The reason no one wrote it is not because the press wanted to get Weinstein, but couldn’t prove the story. No, it’s because the press was protecting Weinstein.”
● Charlie Rose, sexual harassment and the female newsroom managers who looked away.
● Kevin Spacey is another ‘everyone knew’ — who else does Hollywood know about?
Amazing how many in the political-media-industrial complex “everybody knew,” and couldn’t be bothered telling the public.
SAY WHAT YOU WILL, THE TRUMP ERA HAS BEEN ALL ABOUT REVEALED PREFERENCES: Liberal States That Like High Taxes Now Consider Lawsuit for Actually Having to Pay Them.
20 YEARS OF NORTH KOREA CAN-KICKING LED TO THIS: ‘The threat is very real’: Millions in Tokyo to take part in North Korean nuclear attack exercise.
THAT WOULD BE MOST OF THE TIME, THESE DAYS: When Racism is Disguised as “Anti-Racism.”
WELL, THAT’S WEIRD: John Travolta’s Gotti Biopic Dropped By Lionsgate Studio At Last Minute. “The studio did not give any explanation for selling ‘Gotti’ back to the production company in the 11th hour.”
