WELL PLAYED, HUSTLER, WELL PLAYED: “Model Wearing American Flag as Hijab on Magazine Cover Shows Underboob.”
Archive for 2017
June 25, 2017
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IT’S REALLY NOT THAT UNCOMMON: The New York Post is reporting that a Washington research firm of former journalists were behind the salacious Russian/Trump dossier:
Fusion GPS describes itself as a “research and strategic intelligence firm” founded by “three former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters.” But congressional sources says it’s actually an opposition-research group for Democrats, and the founders, who are more political activists than journalists, have a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump agenda. “These weren’t mercenaries or hired guns,” a congressional source familiar with the dossier probe said. “These guys had a vested personal and ideological interest in smearing Trump and boosting Hillary’s chances of winning the White House.”
The fact is that that firms creating opposition research are often staffed with former journalists, who use their connections in the editorial world to redistribute this sort of thing. (Naturally, there are “right-leaning” as well as “left-leaning” firms of this sort.) Work in a newsroom long enough and you’ll begin to recognize “oppo” when you see it. Sadly, a number of journalists who were laid off by big news outfits and can’t find work elsewhere have resorted to doing this kind of work. As news organizations cut back on reporting, it’s easier than ever to get “oppo” published as news without sufficient fact-checking. What’s the opposite of a virtuous circle?
**Update: Austin Bay answers the question.
SABER STRIKE: Polish and U.S. Marine tanks maneuver during a live fire exercise in Latvia. The photo was taken June 9.
RELATED: The TUSK. Tank Urban Survival Kit. This kit was developed for city fights like the one going on in Mosul, Iraq.
RELATED: A U.S. Army M1A2 Abrams that is truly optimized for desert combat. Just like the logistics specialist walking through the photo.
TRUMP COUNTER PUNCHES: Trump continues to accuse Obama of failing to respond to Russian hacking and election meddling.
Trump on Obama’s lack of action:
“If he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it? He should have done something about it. But you don’t read that. It’s quite sad.”
Trump has his critics in a bind. If the election meddling was so terrible, then Obama was incompetent and negligent. If it wasn’t so significant, then why the sustained hand wringing and pearl clutching?
Answer: Dems want it both ways so they can excuse their election loss and protect Obama’s legacy.
Remember, Obama told Medvedev to tell Putin he’d have more “flexibility” after he was re-elected. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” Medvedev replied.
It’s time the Senate and FBI investigated that conversation. It sure sounds like collusion with the Kremlin.
SARAH HOYT: A Cultural Revolution in Slow Motion.
Read the whole thing, but you knew that already, right?
June 24, 2017
THE GEOLOGICALLY ODD AND INTERESTING GULF OF MEXICO: The strangeness began when Africa started separating from the Americas some 200 million years ago.
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NEO-NEOCON: Leftist guilt about “privilege” as motivation dates back to the Soviet revolution.
Related: Jonathan Kay Of Canada’s National Post On the Tyranny Of Twitter: How Mob Censure is Changing the Intellectual Landscape. “Without intending to, Twitter’s culture warriors have created a sort of crowdsourced ideological autocracy ― and paradoxically, it’s left-wingers who are often targets:”
In a 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell described a rumour among leftists that the real reason American troops had been brought to Europe was to suppress English communism*, not fight the Nazis.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” Orwell famously noted. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Even by Orwell’s high standards, those words have aged extremely well. Tell an ordinary Canadian schlub that white people aren’t allowed to quote Beyoncé, and he will be smart enough to laugh in your face. Dress down a superbly intelligent Peace and Conflict Studies PhD candidate for the same act, and she will fall over herself with apologies.
I refer here, of course, to federal NDP leadership candidate Niki Ashton, who back in March tweeted “Like Beyoncé says, to the left. Time for an unapologetic left turn for the #NDP, for social, racial, enviro and economic justice.” The Vancouver chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted a demand that Ashton retract her appropriation of Beyoncé. And she complied, meekly replying: “Not our intention to appropriate. We’re committed to a platform of racial justice + would appreciate ur feedback.”
Shades of America in the 1960s, which, aside from Goldwater’s abortive candidacy in 1964, was largely blue-on-blue warfare, with milquetoast older New Deal Democrats, particularly in academia, meekly knuckling under to the demands of the radical New Left.
* To be fair, given that the British left brought nationalism and socialism to England concurrently with National Socialism was being vanquished in Germany, I can somewhat understand the basis of their fears.
(Kay’s article found via Kathy Shaidle, whose thoughts on it are also well worth your time.)
PUERTO RICO GOING BANKRUPT: It’s been on the verge for a year. Investors Business Daily says Puerto Rico “essentially declared bankruptcy” earlier this month.
Puerto Rico is currently $73 billion in debt, which is close to 100% of the island’s annual output. It owes a sizeable portion of this to the island’s current and future pensioners: Puerto Rico’s pension fund is woefully underfunded. It also owes billions to general obligation bondholders — whose investments are guaranteed by the island’s constitution — and to COFINA (also known as Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp.) bondholders, who hold debt explicitly backed by sales-tax revenues.
Has Puerto Rico gone “Full Illinois” before Illinois goes Full Illinois? Not according to the article.
Illinois also has taken a page out of the Puerto Rico playbook by beginning to demonize its bondholders as greedy investment bankers profiting off the misery of others.
While such rhetoric plays well with the voters — and that is to whom Puerto Rico’s new governor, Ricardo Rossello, is clearly playing — it makes escaping the island’s financial predicaments more problematic. Once the Puerto Rican government and its oversight committee reach some sort of arrangement for moving the island forward, it will need to re-engage with capital markets to borrow money — whether it be for capital improvements, short-term credit arrangements, or something else.
If Puerto Rico spends the next year denigrating its lenders and trying to break contracts, few investors will want to take a chance lending money to the island again. Put simply, the market cannot credibly believe future repayment promises no matter what steps Puerto Rico takes — at least not until it returns to economic expansion and solvency.
What’s more, if Puerto Rico successfully breaks these covenants, municipal bondholders in Illinois — and elsewhere — are going to perceive that their investments now contain much more risk than they had previously perceived, and will demand a higher interest rate to take it.
In short, Puerto Rico’s shenanigans may hasten Illinois’ insolvency.
Oh. So we may have Full Illinois before Puerto Rico goes under, at least officially goes under.
Until history resolves the issue, here’s the interim bumper sticker: “Never go Full Illinois.”
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WAIT, THERE WAS A TRUCE? “Dems say goodbye to truce, use inflammatory rhetoric against GOP healthcare,” including these gems from the past 24 hours:
● “On CNN, Montel Williams: GOP Plan Would Send 140 Million to ‘Death.’”
—Headline, NewsBusters today.
● “Republicans are trying to pass a bill that could kill up to 27,000 in 2026 so they can give tax cuts to the wealthy.”
—Deleted tweet by Bernie Sanders yesterday.
● “Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law.
—Not-deleted tweet by Bernie Sanders, yesterday.
● “Forget death panels. If Republicans pass this bill, they’re the death party.”
—Not-deleted tweet by Hillary Clinton, yesterday.
But presumably, many of the left should find all of the above to be good news:
● “Remember the Population Bomb? It’s Still Ticking.”
—Op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times.
That last link is safe; it goes to a Reason article headlined, “Overpopulation Scaremongering Never Gets Old.” Which is certainly true — but the left appear to be nothing but scaremongering these days (until the scaremongering foments into actual violence.)
Or as Seth Barron noted in City Journal last week in response to GOP Rep. Steve Scalise being shot by a deranged Sanders supporter, “Every policy difference, no matter how trivial, has been cast as a matter of life and death. Proposed changes in federal Medicaid reimbursement practices will consign ‘tens of thousands of people’ to early death, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, while rolling back federal guidelines on transgender bathroom signage will cause more teenagers to kill themselves, according to ThinkProgress…Trump’s opponents in the media, academia, and politics can pretend that their calls for radical action were meant metaphorically or in a nonviolent sense. But they are the ones who opened this box of fear, panic, and rage. Let them take responsibility for the climate that now exists.”
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: Dems give politically connected judge six-figure gig she’s too obese to do.
OH, THAT FAKE NEWS. CNN Deletes, Then Retracts Fake News Story about Trump and Russia:
Editor’s Note
Updated 10:44 PM ET, Fri June 23, 2017On June 22, 2017, CNN.com published a story connecting Anthony Scaramucci with investigations into the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted. Links to the story have been disabled. CNN apologizes to Mr. Scaramucci.
This is CNN; more from Insta-co-blogger Charles Glasser here.
ROGER KIMBALL ON POTEMKIN PROGRESSIVISM:
I believe that Trump would be well advised to leave the Democrats in their bawl room, their boudoir (French for “room for pouting in”) while he gets on with the business of running, and improving, the country, which, by the way, he is doing very well.
Still, it is worth noting that the deceiving nature of appearances cuts many ways and is often difficult to parse accurately. For the most part, the actions of the Potemkin progressives are just exhibitions of temperament, whining, childish static that cannot be reasoned with, only pampered and put to bed for a nice long nap.
The tantrum-like behavior is not quite irrational, however. The Democrats really are on an historic losing streak. In 2008, they came to town on a tsunami of hope-’n-change euphoria. But the wrecking ball that was Barack Obama soon brought that illusion crashing down. Now they are like some threatened animal that, largely defenseless, has developed the ability to appear threatening by puffing itself up, changing color, emitting startling sounds, bristling quills, and the like. Zoologists call this activity “deimatic behavior,” after a Greek verb meaning “to frighten.”
Deimatic behavior is all show and no spear: that is, the animal might look or sound or smell threatening, but it is all bluff. Really, it is just a tasty moth, frog, California Democrat, or whatever.
I rarely disagree with Roger K., but it’s difficult to consider the Democrats’ seething anger is all bluff when simultaneously, a Republican congressman is recovering from being shot in an assassination attempt, and a Trump supporter in California is recovering from stab wounds delivered by a racist California leftist.
OBAMA, THE DEEP STATE, AND RUSSIA: An epidemic of lawlessness.
BERNIE AND JANE SANDERS, UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION FOR BANK FRAUD, HIRE LAWYERS, CBS reports.
David Kahane, call your office!
CALIFORNIA’S SOFT SECESSION: “The fantastical push for ‘CalExit’ might be on hold for now, but America’s Left Coast giant is nonetheless beginning to symbolically sever ties with the rest of the United States—a significant provocation that could have wide-reaching consequences down the line. The Sacramento Bee reports that California is banning publicly funded travel to a growing list of red states.”
As Randy Barnett tweets in response, “It’s not unprecedented for Democrats to favor secession when their control of the Union is broken by Electoral College loss to a Republican.” But somehow, I don’t think those red states aren’t losing too much sleep over Sacramento’s symbolic “travel ban” blocking state workers from visiting — on their taxpayers’ dime — Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee. And as Jazz Shaw notes at Hot Air, it’s fun watching “California’s state government – which viciously opposes President Trump’s travel ban – [expanding] their own travel ban.”
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RAHM EMANUEL: ‘I’d Rather be a Democrat Today Going Into 2018 Than a Republican’
The odds of getting shot at certainly seem lower.