WEIRD, MONEY-LAUNDERING FOR IRAN, 2012-2016. Turkish Bank Charged In Manhattan Federal Court For Its Participation In A Multibillion-Dollar Iranian Sanctions Evasion Scheme.
Archive for 2019
October 17, 2019
SO, NANCY, HOW’S THAT IMPEACHMENT THING GOING?
THE END IS COMING, BUT I’LL KEEP CASHING THOSE (RATHER MEAGER) PAYCHECKS: Is USA Today’s print edition headed for the sunset as GateHouse and Gannett merge? Signs point to yes.
FLAILING CAMPAIGN FLAILS: Kamala Harris campaign’s ‘time for an upgrade’ Pelosi meme backfires.
On Thursday, the Kamala Harris campaign altered the image and replaced President Trump with the California senator and 2020 hopeful, this also backfired.
Harris campaign national press secretary Ian Sams tweeted the edited image with the caption “Time for an upgrade,” but many were left scratching their heads.
Some wondered why Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, would be standing up and berating a Democratic president. Others wondered why President Harris would retain Trump cabinet officials such as Stephen Mnuchin. Harris and Mnuchin have a complicated history dating back to 2012, when she was attorney general of California and he was the CEO of OneWest Bank.
Furthermore, others pointed out that the blue “crop line” wasn’t properly removed, and Harris resembled a Force Ghost from the Star Wars franchise. From there, others started making their own “time for an upgrade” memes, swapping out President Trump for just about anyone, whether it be Danny DeVito or Cersei Lannister.
Sams later deleted the tweet, and told SFGate he was targeted by “rightwing trolls.”
“When I tried to make the point that we needed more than one strong woman leading a branch of government, rightwing trolls spammed my account,” he said in an email.
Considering the preseason hype, courtesy of endless beatific articles by her PR flacks at the DNC-MSM (and a piece in the Washington Post in March from Hugh Hewitt headlined, “Sorry, Mr. Vice President, it’s Harris’s race to lose in 2020,”) I’m really surprised at how inept the Kamala campaign has been thus far.
Here’s Sams’ “upgrade” tweet, which he later deleted:
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Outrage was growing among members of [Madison Wisconsin’s] black community Thursday, a day after a black West High School security guard was fired for what he said was explicitly telling a student not to call him the N-word after the student repeatedly called him the slur.”
PORK CRISIS: A terrible pandemic is killing pigs around the world, and US pork producers fear they could be hit next. “There is insufficient American organic soy, so hog farmers wishing to feed their animals organic soy often import it from China. And there are feed ingredients — B vitamins and trace minerals — that are manufactured only in China. The virus can survive for up to a month on these products, so they must be quarantined and heated to kill the virus.” Maybe we shouldn’t let important things be sole-sourced in China.
Maybe it’s time to beef up my strategic bacon reserve.
JOHN HINDERAKER ON THE MINNEAPOLIS ANTI-TRUMP RIOT: How Evil Is the Left? This Evil. Video at the link. “Trump supporters were assaulted, their vehicles were blocked, police officers and police horses were attacked, and so on. This video, filmed by Alpha News, shows how violent and disgusting the ‘protest’ by liberal Democrats was. . . . While not a single Democrat has condemned the lawless violence that liberals perpetrated in the streets of Minneapolis, they have heaped vicious vituperation on the Trump supporters who peacefully and happily participated in the Target Center rally. Which leads one to wonder: is there, anymore, any such thing as a moderate Democrat?”
Hinderaker emails: “Some of the injured people are trying to identify perpetrators they may be able to sue. We have a public interest firm here that is ready to take such cases, and then use discovery to try to identify and sue the organizers of the riot.”
Meanwhile, hours ahead of time, there’s a huge crowd already waiting for the Trump rally in Dallas. Maybe Trump should repeat his Minneapolis rally, and invite some Texans up, too.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Whatever You Do, Don’t Send Your Kids To J-School.
Jay Rosen has had it up to here with CNN moderators asking front-running Democratic Party primary candidates to explain their signature policy positions. “The ‘make Elizabeth Warren say she would raise taxes on the middle class’ question should be a credibility killer. For the journalists who keep asking it,” Rosen tweeted.
Not long ago, any person arguing that reporters should shun politically inconvenient questions of their favored candidates would be struggling to maintain credibility. Rosen, though, is a professor of journalism—it says “I teach journalism” right there on his Twitter bio.
The gist of Rosen’s case—always wrapped in a patina of academic earnestness —is that mainstream political media skews coverage towards the framing Republican desire. And so the professor busies himself browbeating outlets into adopting more ideological constructive coverage and rhetoric—use “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” to be used instead of “climate change;” that sort of Orwellian thing.
For example, on the Warren question, Rosen embraces Margaret Sullivan’s formulation: “Of course, it’s legitimate to dig into the costs [of ‘Medicare for All’], but not in a way that creates a nice GOP campaign ad, and misses the larger lens of overall costs. (Warren, notably, refused to take the bait.)”
Of course, long ago, Rosen had it up here with any ideology other than the left reporting and opining on the news:
While it would be great to still have Andrew here to call them out, old media — and those who teach future Democratic Party Operatives with bylines — have continued to do an excellent job imploding in the years since his passing.
SECURITY: Anyone’s thumbprint can unlock Galaxy S10 phone.
The issue was spotted by a British woman whose husband was able to unlock her phone with his thumbprint when it was stored in a cheap case.
When the S10 was launched, in March, Samsung described the fingerprint authentication system as “revolutionary”.
The scanner sends ultrasounds to detect 3D ridges of fingerprints in order to recognise users.
Samsung said it was “aware of the case of S10’s malfunctioning fingerprint recognition and will soon issue a software patch”.
South Korea’s online-only KaKao Bank told customers to switch off the fingerprint-recognition option to log in to its services until the issue was fixed.
I would hope a software patch will fix the issue.
LEFT-WING TRIANGULATION: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez backing Bernie Sanders could help Elizabeth Warren. “‘At some point everybody’s got to reach out to the independents and the moderate Republicans’ Zogby said — as well as more moderate Democrats. ‘Arguably one way not to do that is to get an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.’ Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist Neil Oxman said, ‘If I were running her campaign, I would have thought, ‘We dodged a bullet.’’”
AT AMAZON, save on Power and Hand Tools.
PROJECT VERITAS: PART 3: FIELD OPS MANAGER AT CNN: ZUCKER’S 9AM CALLS ARE ‘BULLS***;’ “WE’RE TOTALLY LEFT-LEANING…(BUT) WE DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT.”
Since the early days of the network, I don’t think viewers needed Columbo or Hercule Poirot-level detective skills to be able to deduce CNN’s ideology.
FIXING HISTORY: Warrior in iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo was misidentified, Marines Corps acknowledges. “Historians determined that Cpl. Harold ‘Pie’ Keller was one of the six men who raised the flag.”
THAT’S BECAUSE THE BEHAVIOR TRAITS THAT CORRELATE WITH POVERTY — LIKE POOR IMPULSE CONTROL — ALSO CORRELATE WITH POOR HEALTH, INDEPENDENT OF HEALTH CARE: Poor People Are Still Sicker Than The Rich In Germany, Despite Universal Health Care.
JON GABRIEL: The Fog of Impeachment.
“If it’s a mist in the pulpit, it’s a fog in the pew.” An old Baptist preacher said that years ago and it always stuck with me. Translated into secular-speak, if the speaker doesn’t present a simple, direct, crystal-clear message, the audience will never retain it.
Speaker Pelosi apparently never heard this advice.
Read the whole thing.
I SAID THIS AFTER THE FIRST DEBATE: Democrats have reason to worry after the last presidential debate.
WHY JOE AND BERNIE LOOK SO SPRY: The More Active Your Brain, the Shorter Your Lifespan May Be, a New Study Says.