WHEN HAS SHE EVER SHINED? The Hill: Why Elizabeth Warren will fail to shine in her moment on the trail.
Archive for 2019
October 6, 2019
WHEN YOU’VE LOST MATT TAIBBI AND ROLLING STONE: The ‘Whistleblower’ Probably Isn’t: It’s an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist. “Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government either spend the rest of their lives overseas, like Edward Snowden, end up in jail, like Chelsea Manning, get arrested and ruined financially, like former NSA official Thomas Drake, have their homes raided by FBI like disabled NSA vet William Binney, or get charged with espionage like ex-CIA exposer-of-torture John Kiriakou. It’s an insult to all of these people, and the suffering they’ve weathered, to frame the ballcarrier in the Beltway’s latest partisan power contest as a whistleblower.”
AT AMAZON, save in Hair Care.
Plus, Fall Deals in Kitchen and Dining.
ROGER SIMON: The Pre-Impeachment of Donald Trump Never Stopped.
We all know why impeachment is really happening – and when I say all, I include especially the Democrats and their devoted media allies/leaders. They know because they live in fear of what they wrought and desperately want to hide it or bury it (under impeachment) before it is laid out before the public.
I refer, of course, to the imminent exposure–at least we hope it is coming–of the predicates of the Russia Probe, easily the most despicable and seditious attempt to unseat a president in American history. This attempt to impeach or, at that point, to interdict began on or not long after June 16, 2015, the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy.
What is happening now is merely a continuation of a process that started then. Trump was the first president to be “impeached” before he was elected–a neat trick if there ever was one. In a manner of speaking, the group or groups behind the Russia Probe wanted to pre-impeach him. And they never gave up, not even for a minute, even after the Mueller collusion investigation came up empty after two years and multiple millions spent.
Such outrageous behavior makes one wonder how much more outrageous is the behavior it’s meant to cover for.
AT AMAZON, save on Bras for Women.
THAT’LL LEAVE A MARK: Kamala Harris: Is The Nation Ready For Me As Pres? Audience: NO!
BOB MCMANUS: Lessons of the Bowery homeless-slay horror. “America abandoned a custodial approach to mental illness a half-century ago, and the results have been obvious in the nation’s streets and public spaces ever since — and never more so than on the Bowery early Saturday morning. . . . Enter Rodriguez “Randy” Santos, by most accounts a toxic broth of insanities, addictions and violent impulses so profound his own mother is said to be terrified of him. Police allege he savaged five fellow Bowery derelicts with a makeshift iron wrecking bar in the twilight hours, killing four outright and hospitalizing the fifth with critical injuries. Santos is in custody, and thus now begins a complex adjudication process focused almost solely on him: his actions, his incapacities and his legal culpability. His victims, and the safety of the city itself, are very much on the periphery.”
As usual in New York during the Cuomo/DeBlasio era.
Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey issued an apology on Sunday for a tweet sent out regarding the Hong Kong protests. Morey’s job appears to be safe, according to multiple reports, and he will not be disciplined by the league for his words, according to Shams Charania of The Athletic. The now-deleted message read simply “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong,” but has led to significant repercussions for the Rockets in China.
Tencent, the NBA‘s exclusive digital partner in China, has suspended business relations with the Rockets, and is offering fans who purchased a year-long “team pass” to watch Rockets games the chance to switch it to a different team. A number of other Chinese companies have pulled sponsorship deals with the Rockets as well. Morey issued the following statement on Twitter:
Read the whole thing. I suspect Morey’s eyes were blinking S-O-S while he typed his forced apology.
And as Clay Travis tweets in response, “This NBA-Hong Kong-China mess is fascinating. The NBA is super woke when it comes to things like made up US transgender bathroom disputes, but bent the knee to China when Daryl Morey came out in support of democracy & upset communists. Shows you how hypocritical the league is.”
* The headline is from CBS, where supporting freedom and democracy is always a controversial move.
At Disney-ABC-ESPN, Morey’s pro-Hong Kong statement isn’t just controversial — it’s “offensive:”
While, the above screen capture shows 75 retweets, it doesn’t show the amount of comments in response — they’re over 700 as of the time of this post being written, which is quite a ratio.
UPDATE: Enough of a ratio that Shelbourne deleted the above tweet, and tried to explain her wording — but didn’t apologize for the sentiment.
Clay Travis adds, “Think about this for a minute, Adam Silver banned the use of the word ‘owner’ in the NBA because he said it was racially insensitive & then apologized to Chinese communists because one of his executives had the gall to say he supported democracy.”
More round-up at Twitchy: ‘This is a hostage video:’ Houston Rockets GM apologizes to Communist China for his ‘stand with Hong Kong’ tweet.
OPEN THREAD: Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, you tell me what you know.
DEROY MURDOCK: Media Often Ignore Trump’s Outreach to Racial Minorities. (Yes, they do.)
Think of the next year in the Trump wars as sudden-death playoffs. Should the House impeach President Trump on charges of bad conduct or whatever and the Senate convicts him, he’ll be out of office and out of luck. But since the Senate is unlikely to convict him, he’ll advance to the election, where his bid for four more years will be decided.
By simplifying the process, one can avoid the agony of minute-by-minute reporting, news of “bombshells,” and media hype. It will make the election year more pleasant and the chances of missing important matters slim.
And there’s no need to rely on the media’s unreliable scorekeeping as to how the Trump wars are going. The hunches of an average citizen who checks the news from time to time and gabs with neighbors are likely to be closer to the truth.
Read the whole thing.
I’M NOT STUCK IN HERE WITH YOU. YOU’RE STUCK IN HERE WITH ME! Boris Johnson to sabotage EU if forced to delay Brexit.
Boris Johnson would veto the EU’s seven-year budget and send a Eurosceptic commissioner to Brussels to “disrupt” the bloc’s workings if he were forced into a Brexit delay, under plans being discussed by ministers.
Senior Government figures are considering a series of proposals to “sabotage” the EU’s structures if Brussels refuses to agree a new deal or let Mr Johnson deliver Brexit without one.
Two Cabinet ministers told this newspaper that they were among those backing a more “aggressive” approach towards Brussels.
Related: Boris Johnson preparing to ‘squat’ as Prime Minster to ensure Brexit.
Boris Johnson is preparing to “squat” as Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street — even if fellow members of parliament stage a successful vote of no confidence in his government — in order to ensure Brexit is accomplished by Oct. 31, according to the Sunday Times of London.
The gambit essentially challenges the queen to fire him, a move that has not been employed by a British monarch since William IV fired Lord Melbourne in 1834.
Like his predecessor, Theresa May, Johnson has struggled to negotiate Britain’s exit from the European Union in a way that is acceptable to his fellow legislators and to EU leaders in Brussels.
Johnson’s plan to pressure the EU with threats of an exit with no deal were scuttled by rogue members of his own conservative party last month.
“Our opponents have flouted convention and there is nothing in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that says you have to resign. The Queen is not going to fire the prime minister. She would dissolve parliament and let the people decide,” a senior cabinet minister told the British paper, offering an explanation for Johnson’s thinking.
Like I said. This is asymmetric warfare of the first order. Ultimately, even though the defenders of the status quo are happy to jettison norms in support of their own power, they need those norms more than their challengers do.
VAN’S A COMMIE, BUT NOBODY EVER SAID HE WAS STUPID: Van Jones: Impeachment is a lose-lose for Democrats.
PAST POCAHONTAS IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Elizabeth Warren Caught Lying About Being Fired From Teaching Over Pregnancy (Video).
(Bumped.)
[Samantha] Power’s brand of humanitarianism always bore the marks of being confused and cheap. Despite her rigorous inquiry into organized crimes against humanity, and her heartfelt plea for those in positions of “influence” to counter them, Power embodied a striking ambivalence about the stern imperatives of deterrence and the exigencies of power that, if emulated by America’s political leadership, would ensure their repetition. At one point in The Education of an Idealist, Obama muses that Power isn’t “nearly as hawkish” as she is made out to be, though it isn’t clear how he came by that impression. Only an idle or daft reader of Power’s work would have failed to detect that her commitment to the manacles of diplomatic protocol and multilateral cooperation involved her devotion to the humanitarian cause—which is nothing if not a case of emergency and crisis response—in many contradictions.
This bizarre hybrid worldview, in which human rights needed to be the fulcrum of U.S. foreign policy but without the hard power required to defend them against predatory regimes, flinches from the inconvenient truth that, in our unforgiving world, human rights will be upheld by force of arms or they will not be upheld at all. Since this stubborn fact would require an honest humanitarian to advocate either the use of power in making the world a better place or to step down off her pedestal of moral sanctimony and adapt herself to the world as it is, most human-rights activists have simply ignored it.
As the journalist David Rieff showed in At the Point of a Gun, his penetrating 2005 manifesto against the “imperialism of human rights,” Power exemplifies this wishful non-thinking and evasion of responsibility. Rieff condemns Power for promoting a bold campaign on behalf of universal human rights without laying out—for others or possibly even for herself—what that ambitious, if not utopian, project might entail. What on earth did she and others in the human-rights movement, Rieff modestly asked, think that they were doing in calling attention to flagrant violations of human rights in far-off lands? By what mechanism would the villains of their narrative—who sprang from hell to perpetrate rape and torture and murder on a mass scale—be held to account? The unspoken assumption was some combination of the United Nations and Human Rights Watch.
Exit quote: “In the course of a meeting on the mounting humanitarian and strategic crisis in Syria, President Obama, brushing aside Power’s arguments in favor of more assertive action against the Assad regime, grumbled, ‘We’ve all read your book, Samantha.’”
SPRINGTIME FOR ANGELA: Merkel’s Gov’t Says Iran’s Call To ‘wipe Israel Off The Map’ Not Antisemitic.
As Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post tweets, “German Chancellor says calling to kill millions of Jews is not antisemitic. Not a good look.”
UPDATE: Related:
This is true, and it’s why so many people who supported Romney in 2012 are mocking him now. He poses as a figure of integrity, but he cares more about being popular with the “in” crowd than, well, anything.
Related: Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad: “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”
Also: When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”
Plus: Flashback: Tammy Bruce: Romney’s Trump attack rings especially hollow when you look at his treatment of Ric Grenell. “The fact of the matter is he was pushed out after Mr. Romney failed both a character and moral test: to stand up for someone he hired who was being attacked for being gay. . . . The character-filled Romney was asking the gay man to go hide in the closet.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “Part of the Great Revealing is the revealing of many, many people who are far more motivated by class than anything else, certainly moreso than political philosophy.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): She Accused Him Of Rape. She Then Sent Herself Threatening Messages To Frame Him.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Leftists Don’t Value Tolerance (Video).
AS A GREAT MAN ONCE SAID, GET IN THEIR FACE — PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Nancy Gets A Wakeup Call.
Nancy Pelosi was greeted by at least 300 Trump supporters while attending a fundraiser at the Greenville, South Carolina Hyatt Regency on Friday. The Speaker was confronted by a sea of MAGA caps, “Impeach Pelosi” signs, and at least one woman draped in a “Women for Trump” banner and wearing a Pelosi mask. (A degrading task, but somebody had to do it.)
This is unusual for Republicans, who have traditionally maintained a live and let live policy toward the Democrats no matter what the circumstances. This is a large part of the “Republican as wimp” stereotype that has dominated the political scene for generations. The Demunnists were street fighters, toughies from the unions and the slums, whereas the GOP were the “little man on the wedding cake.”
This started to change in 2000 with the attempted Gore coup in Florida. Republicans actually set aside their plaid jackets and contrasting waistcoats to demonstrate in front of the vote-counting offices. This was the first time this had occurred since the civil war, and was a harbinger as to how things were beginning to change.
This is not something that Nancy could possibly welcome. Most of the Dem strategy is based on the assumption that the party of the Bushes, Romney, and Ryan will never strike back. But the ground is shifting, and a new GOP, brought to life by the Orange Cthulhu, is beginning to stir.
So far nobody has chased Nancy or Adam or Little Sandy from a restaurant or confronted them on the street. It would be a shame if anyone did. But these things have a logic of their own and will go the way they go. Fires of this type, once set, will burn until they burn out. The Dems, in their embrace of violence, lies, manipulation, and gutter tactics, have opened a door, and they must deal with whatever emerges.
They always seem to think that they can violate norms, rhetorical, political, and otherwise, that benefit them with impunity.
COLIN POWELL’S DIPLOMATIC “SHAMBLES” CONTINUES: China Pulls Out of Giant Iranian Gas Project: Exit follows broader Chinese pullback from Islamic Republic amid U.S. pressure.
China National Petroleum Corp. has pulled out of a $5 billion natural-gas project in Iran as escalating tensions threaten to sever Beijing’s trade with Tehran, a key lifeline for the Islamic Republic.
The exit by Beijing—which had vowed to resist U.S. restrictions on Iran—is a blow to Tehran’s attempts to fight growing economic isolation and comes after Washington brought new sanctions on Chinese companies still trading with Iran.
Iranian oil minister Bijan Zangeneh said Sunday that domestic company Petropars Co. had fully taken over a development project in the South Pars gas field after CNPC exited it.
Tehran had hoped the Chinese state-run company would replace France’s Total SA, which left the project last year after the U.S. reinstated sanctions on Iran.
Iran needs the development to move forward to supply natural gas for its power stations. But CNPC officials have said the company struggled to find banking channels to transfer funds to Iran due to U.S. pressure. CNPC’s own bank, Bank of Kunlun, which is the main conduit for China’s Iran trades, has told customers it no longer accepts trades with the Islamic Republic, though it has said publicly it intends to keep its business with Tehran.
Other Chinese companies—in sectors ranging from banking to autos to tech—have pulled back from Iran in recent months after the U.S. moved to squeeze the country’s oil exports and designated its paramilitary force a terrorist organization. Customs data show China—which is Iran’s last major oil buyer—imported on average 233,000 barrels a day from Iran in the May-July period, one-third of the 700,000 barrels a day it bought before the U.S. brought back sanctions.
As a result, overall trade between the two nations—in which Iran barters oil for Chinese equipment, infrastructure contracts and consumer goods—fell under $2 billion in July from $3.5 billion in the same month of 2018, according to Chinese customs.
Shambles, I tell you.