FOX, HENHOUSE, ETC: Last month, holier-than thou Oxfam was embroiled in a scandal with staff accused of using charitable funds to buy prostitutes. Now the head of another British charity admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16 and was sentenced to six years and eight months.
Beware the pious.
TOM MAGUIRE LOOKS INTO THAT NAZI WHO “WON” A PRIMARY IN ILLINOIS:
The Times coverage is decent but overlooks a lot. The short version is this: the incumbent, Dan Lipinski, is a pro-life anti-ObamaCare Blue Dog Democrat who was locked in a near-death struggle with a progressive challenger. The Nazi, Jones, had been kept off the ballot in cycles past by the invocation of technicalities. So the plan was to DQ Jones and let Republican crossover voters in the primary keep Lipinski alive. Since Lipinski won, barely, that part of the plan succeeded.
In 2016, for example, the Republican Party also failed to run a conventional candidate. Jones was the only one to submit signatures but the party managed to disqualify him to keep him off the primary ballot. They had the same plan for 2018 but Jones outmaneuvered them with a last-minute filing. . . .
The peril and promise of these ballot access rules is that ordinary registered voters are empowered – the party bosses cannot unilaterally dismiss reform minded, “rage against the machine” candidates like in the good old days. On the other hand, sometimes shit happens. . . .
Apparently Republicans will muster a write-in sacrificial lamb for the November vote. And Krugman, Oliver and the other progressive entertainers will have their fun.
Personally, I hate Illinois Nazis.
WE’RE FROM GOOGLE AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: Google Makes $300 Million Commitment to Supporting News.
In New York on Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the Google News Initiative, which it says is designed to help news organizations strengthen quality journalism, develop new business models and upgrade their technology.
As part of the initiative, Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOGL -0.39% detailed several efforts to help publishers drive more subscription revenue, under the umbrella of a program called Subscribe with Google.
Google unveiled a new feature that will appear on its search results pages that will highlight stories from publications to which a user subscribes. The component won’t affect the rankings on the rest of Google’s search results page, according to a company spokeswoman.
The company says it will help simplify the subscription process so consumers can easily subscribe to multiple news outlets. Following through on plans announced in October, readers will be able to use their Google login credentials as a single sign-on for their various news subscriptions, helping to prevent users from constantly hitting paywalls, particularly when switching devices.
It’s another data-harvesting scheme, paid for by an “investment” in the very news business Google has helped put in its current predicament.
CONRAD BLACK: The Anti-Trump Effort Backfires.
As the parallel investigations and diluvian leaking have unfolded, the anti-Trump Resistance has received a series of gradually suppurating mortal wounds. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign; over a hundred FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers expected Hillary Clinton to be charged criminally, and President Trump was correct in saying conversations by his campaign officials had been tapped, a claim that was much ridiculed at the time. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe testified that the Steele dossier was essential to obtaining a FISA warrant on a junior Trump aide (Carter Page), and McCabe and former director James Comey’s rabidly partisan helper Peter Strzok, and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page, texted suggestions for influencing the FISA judge in the case. The judge recused himself, voluntarily or otherwise, after granting the warrant. Mueller set up his “dream team” of entirely partisan Democrats; McCabe failed to identify to the Bureau his wife as a member and beneficiary of the Clinton entourage and political candidate in Virginia; and the fourth person in the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, met with Steele, and Mrs. Ohr helped compose the Steele dossier.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, whose report is expected imminently, showed the FBI director, Christopher Wray, findings about Andrew McCabe’s conduct that caused him to retire McCabe prematurely. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), one of the few centers of unquestionably ethical and nonpartisan conduct in Washington, advised the attorney general to fire McCabe.
The wheels are coming off.
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LOCKER ROOM TALK: Biden says he would have ‘beat the hell out’ of Trump in high school for disrespecting women.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” Biden said. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” Biden continued. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
He’s running.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
K.C. JOHNSON: “Last week, a New Haven jury acquitted Yale student Saifullah Khan of rape. Coverage of the case provided only the latest reminder of the one-sided, often effectively misleading manner in which the mainstream media covers the issue of campus sexual assault.”
WELL, GOOD: South Korea to deploy ‘artillery killer’ to destroy North Korean bunkers.
The South Korean Army plans to deploy surface-to-surface missiles in a newly created counter-artillery brigade by October, with the aim of destroying North Korea’s hardened long-range artillery sites near the Demilitarized Zone, should conflict erupt on the Korean Peninsula.
The plan is part of South Korea‘s defense reform for developing an offensive operations scheme, a defense source said. The tactical missiles are developed locally.
“The Ministry of National Defense has approved a plan to create an artillery brigade under a ground forces operations command to be inaugurated in October. The plan is to be reported to President Moon Jae-in next month as part of the ‘Defense Reform 2.0’ policy,” the source said. “The brigade’s mission is fairly focused on destroying North Korea’s long-range guns more rapidly and effectively, should conflict arise”
The three-year development of the GPS-guided Korea Tactical Surface-to-Surface Missile was completed last year. Hanwha Corporation, a precision-guided missile maker, led the development in partnership with the state-funded Agency for Defense Development, or ADD.
The missile, dubbed “artillery killer,” has a range of more than 120 kilometers and can hit targets with a 2-meter accuracy, according to ADD and Hanwha officials.
One of the reasons North Korea gets away with so much is that its dug-in artillery effectively holds Seoul — home to 25 million South Koreans — hostage for as long as it would take to destroy or silence those big guns.
This will shorten that time.
HMM: Tempe police chief says early probe shows no fault by Uber.
Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.
They should.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Indiana University of Pennsylvania has reinstated a conservative student who was temporarily banned from his religious studies class recently for disputing his instructor’s claims regarding the “reality of white male privilege.” “Lake Ingle was initially told that he could not finish the course, which he needs in order to graduate, unless he delivered an apology in front of the entire class and then sat silently while his peers and his professor judged him. . . . The incident appeared in national headlines, stoking public outcry, and Ingle reported in a Facebook status that a ruling on his case would be released on March 19. President Eugene Delgaudio of Public Advocate, an organization that describes itself as ‘a dedicated group of young conservatives in Washington, D.C.,’ filed a Letter of Complaint the morning of March 19 addressed to various federal authorities in response to IUP’s handling of the case.”
They always go full Red Guards, but as a famous American said, punch back twice as hard. And with the change in Administrations, the threat of complaints to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice carries more weight. Elections matter.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Austin Bomber Dead, Gov’t Shutdown Redux and Much, Much More. “Police caution that they do not know where the suspect has been in the last 24 hours and to be vigilant as there might be more packages out there.”
MY STATE-SECESSION PIECE is now #1 on SSRN. Thanks to everyone who was interested enough to download!
HERE’S WHY TOM HOMAN IS STILL ONLY THE ACTING ICE CHIEF: Thomas Homan has been the acting director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the federal official at the point of President Trump’s war against illegal immigration. He’s been a visible, articulate defender of strict enforcement of immigration law and Trump nominated him as the permanent director months ago. But the Republican Senate hasn’t even held a hearing on his nomination.
LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby makes clear there is much more to this story than Homan’s explanation that there’s a lot of paperwork involved. And in the process, Kirby provides insight into why asking these Republicans to drain the swamp may be akin to speaking Olde English to an Eskimo.
NOT A ONE-TIME THING: D.C. councilman who said Rothschilds control weather also said they control government, World Bank.
D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr., a Democrat, claimed that the Rothschilds — a European Jewish banking family descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild — control the World Bank and the federal government during a Feb. 27 gathering of top city officials, The Washington Post reported Tuesday morning.
“There’s this whole concept with the Rothschilds — control the World Bank, as we all know — infusing dollars into major cities,” Mr. White said, according to video footage reviewed by The Post. “They really pretty much control the federal government, and now they have this concept called resilient cities in which they are using their money and influence into local cities.”
No one in the room, including Democratic Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, challenged Mr. White’s remarks.
When will the media pile-on begin?
BACK TO THE FUTURE: A friend sent me this message: “Glenn, with all the privacy crap about Facebook rearing it’s ugly head again, I’m thinking about moving back to a regular blog for my social interaction. Any recommendations for a hosting company? Maybe do a post on Insty about it? Others may feel the same way.”
I can’t recommend Hosting Matters enough. I used them for years before moving to PJ’s servers, and I still host my backup GlennReynolds.com site there. Their prices are good and their service is great. And they offer special deals for InstaPundit readers.
I hope a lot of people will move back to blogs and away from big corporate platforms. As I wrote a while back: “I think that the old blogosphere was superior to ‘social media’ like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.”
Maybe I should start featuring people who move back to blogs. (Bumped).
TRUMP WINS DEMOCRATIC CONVERT ON RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: Congressman suggests Second Amendment as means of opposing Trump.
WINNING: Small-town America has gotten an economic jolt under Trump.
Smaller communities, lifted by higher prices for oil, gas and other commodities and some gains in manufacturing, last year clawed back a significantly larger share of new job creation than in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the analysis found. While this economic revival in Trump country so far has been driven mostly by cyclical changes in global markets, particularly for energy, Trump can plausibly argue that his agenda of promoting domestic manufacturing and oil and gas production can help sustain those gains in the non-metropolitan places that disproportionately house those industries. And that could create another electoral obstacle for Democrats in smaller communities, where the President has also connected far better culturally and stylistically than in urbanized areas.
This might be yet another way to get more Trump.
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