U.S.-trained urban warfare units are leading the fight in the maze of narrow alleyways of the Old City, the last district in the hands of the Sunni Islamist insurgents.
Iraqi authorities are hoping to declare victory in the northern Iraqi city in the Muslim Eid holiday, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, during the next few days.
Military analysts say government troops’ advance will gather pace after Islamic State fighters blew up the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque and its famous leaning minaret on Wednesday.
The report says Iraqi forces are attempting to open safe routes for civilians to escape from Islamic State fighters and avoid getting trapped in the final battle.
I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT:
Chief Executive Jeff Immelt will give up control of General Electric Co. later this year. His colleagues were relieved to learn that he will also relinquish command of the office thermostat.
Mr. Immelt, who said this week he will end his 16-year captaincy of the conglomerate, is famous for preferring refrigerator-like temperatures in GE offices and meeting rooms. “He keeps it very cold,” one person who has regularly endured the chill says. “It’s part of the Immelt lore.”
As Scott Johnson of Power Line notes in a post titled “Immelt on Ice,” “Immelt holds the preferred elite view on global warming. I wondered if he might be concerned about the possible contribution of air conditioning. You can’t be too careful to avoid the apocalypse.”
Note that Immelt’s office was freezing while GE controlled NBC until late 2009; fully divesting themselves of the network in 2013. So he was CEO when this infamous edition of Sunday Night Football ran in 2007 as battlefield preparation for the upcoming election year:
As Ann Coulter quipped that same year, when Al Gore refused to take his own pledge to limit his similarly ManBearPig-sized carbon footprint, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”
But keep the above passage regarding Immelt’s icy offices in mind the next time anyone at NBC or its sister networks goes on a global warming lecture. If you couldn’t convince your own boss to dial the temperature back; if you couldn’t convince your network not to acquire the broadcasting rights to NASCAR, don’t hector the rest of us.
“In a letter to Ms. Lynch, the committee asks her to detail the depths of her involvement in the FBI’s investigation, including whether she ever assured Clinton confidantes that the probe wouldn’t “push too deeply into the matter.”
Fired FBI Director James B. Comey has said publicly that Ms. Lynch tried to shape the way he talked about the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails, and he also hinted at other behavior “which I cannot talk about yet” that made him worried about Ms. Lynch’s ability to make impartial decisions.”
The committee, in a statement released Friday by Grassley and Graham, cited an April story by The New York Times reporting that the FBI came into possession of a batch of hacked documents, including one authored by a “Democratic operative who expressed confidence that Ms. Lynch would keep the Clinton investigation from going too far.” After reading that story, Grassley requested a copy of the document from the Justice Department, which he said never responded. A month later, The Washington Post reported that the email had been sent by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., in her former role as the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, to Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundation, an international grantmaking network founded by Democratic mega-donor and businessman George Soros.
Soros, Lynch and Wasserman caught up in the probe? Who didn’t see that coming?
DECONFLICTION: Russia Gave Heads-Up About Cruise Missile Strike. “‘The deconfliction line is open and was used to [de-conflict] airspace in advance of the Russian cruise missile strike,’ a spokesperson for the Operation Inherent Resolve headquarters tells U.S. News in an email.”
Trudy Schuett’s piece on socialism Charles linked to earlier featured a comment which seems relevant here:
The Resistance is political activist porn but there exists in every liberal group a core of [the] deranged who live for violence. The Bill Ayers, the Weatherman Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army. The Left looks to the 60’s as the base for power and idolizes the loudest voices.
We must ask ourselves though, what happens when the party of Antifa rioters with something-studies degrees working as baristas goes head to head with the party of NRA and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans?
It’s depressing that we have to think about these things here in America, but here we are.
IT’S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS: “Gawker Documentary Fails to Make Case for Publishing Sex Tape“. Reason’s Glenn Garvin asks why they didn’t interview me for a take on the ethics of webcasting an illegally-made sex tape. Hell, it seems they never they bothered to contact Dan Abrams, the son of First Amendment legend Floyd Abrams; Erwin Chemerinsky, Professor of First Amendment Law at the UC Irvine School of Law; or CNN legal analyst Paul Callan, all of whom did not see the threat to free speech that Gawker and its well-paid publicist touted:
“That there isn’t (or at least, shouldn’t be) any such thing as a legally enforceable right to privacy may be an arguable position—but then it should be argued, openly and plainly, not cloaked in a silly claim that in being punished for publishing an illicitly obtained picture of Hogan’s junk, Gawker is being thwarted in the pursuit of “real journalism, journalism that exposes things that powerful people don’t want known,” as one of the Gawkerites grandiosely claims in Nobody Speak.”
To his credit, at least Garvin cited my legal analysis on the matter appearing at Talking Biz News, a journalism website run by the Business Journalism Department at UNC Chapel Hill. The video-hagiographers of Gawker couldn’t be bothered. Of course, they had no legal obligation to do so. They also ignored the fact that while blaming billionaire Peter Thiel and his money for their downfall, they — like their cohort cheerleaders in the media mafia — hid the fact that Gawker had their own sugar daddy (a shady Russian, no less) to sponsor their litigation.
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled against a Wisconsin family in a property rights case that makes it easier for government officials to restrict development in environmentally sensitive areas.
The 5-3 ruling involved the family’s effort to sell part of its land along the St. Croix River. They planned to use the proceeds from an empty lot to pay for improvements on a cabin that sits on adjacent land.
County officials had barred the sale because conservation rules treat the two lots as a single property that can’t be divided.
The family claimed those rules essentially stripped the land of its value and asked the government for compensation. The government argued that it’s fair to view the property as a whole and said the family is owed nothing.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, joining the court’s liberal members, called the government’s action “a reasonable land-use regulation” meant to preserve the river and surrounding land. He said the property as a whole remains valuable and the family could not claim they expected to sell or develop the lots separately given regulations that existed before they acquired the lots.
So where is the pony? It comes from data provided by election guru David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, using something called the Partisan Vote Index, basically a way of determining how much any congressional district leans toward one party or the other.
Wasserman looked at the four special congressional elections we have had since Trump became President — the two on Tuesday, along with ones in Kansas and Montana, all four strongly Republican-leaning. Wasserman looked at the generic vote for Democrats in each district, what you would expect without special circumstances. They are 35% in Kansas 4, 39% in Montana, 42% in the Georgia 6th district and 41% in South Carolina 5. The actual results show Democratic candidates in these districts outdistancing the “expected” vote by 12%, 8%, 6% and 7%, respectively — an average outperformance of 8 points.
There are many Republican-held seats without the large cushion that the party had in these four contests — meaning that if those results help up in the next midterm election, Democrats would be in a position to win enough seats to take back a majority in the House. As Wasserman put it, these elections expand the map of possible winnable contests for Democrats in 2018, not contract it.
If $23 million wasn’t enough to beat a milquetoast Republican in a district barely won by Trump, where are the Democrats going to find the money to do better in tougher districts?
Headline via a classic 2003 Iowahawk satiric article on the Times’ first go-around with their audience — and credibility — becoming more “selective,” as legendarily fictitious rock manager Ian Faith would say.
“Think of a courtroom as a “poison pill” which radiates a gun ban.
The courtroom that the county attempted to foist on us is dark and unused. I filed a APRA/FOIA request for more info on the “courtroom”.
Someone got wind of this request and moved to stop me by making false allegations against me to put me in fear. Problem is that I don’t scare and I fight. Whoever did this will not get anyone with this.
Remember, if they attack you, make certain you mark them in way that when they look in the mirror and see your mark, they always remember you.”
Freeman wants answers, so he filed a motion to compel the officers to submit to a deposition in accordance with Trial Rule 27, which allows petitioners to take depositions for discovery purposes prior to filing a potential lawsuit. A hearing on his motion is set for June 26, 2017 at 10:30 A.M. in the Tippecanoe County Circuit Court.
“I am a little stunned why they would do this to me,” he questioned. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner once said, “If they punch me, I will punch back twice as hard.”
Heh, indeed, as the person who sent me this link from his secure, undisclosed temporarily tropical location would say. Read the whole thing.™
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