“IN WHICH WE MARVEL AT THE MENTAL CONTORTIONS OF OUR SELF-IMAGINED BETTERS:” David Thompson on The Year Reheated.
Archive for 2019
December 29, 2019
MONSEY: SUSPECT THOMAS GRAFTON, 37, BEING CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER.
Thomas Grafton, 37, was arrested Sunday for an alleged antisemitic stabbing attack in Monsey, New York that left five people wounded, two critically.
CBS News reported that Grafton, of African American descent, was arrested while driving a gray Nissan Sentra at the intersection of West 144th Street and Adam Clayton Boulevard in Harlem. He was taken to the city’s 32nd precinct for questioning.
He is being charged with five counts of attempted murder for entering a synagogue known as Rabbi Rottenburg’s Shul, located in the Forshay neighborhood in Monsey, on Saturday at around 10:30 p.m. and pulling out a machete, which he used to stab people.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called the event “an act of domestic terrorism” on Sunday morning.
Note that some Websites, such as this Heavy.com “5 Fast Facts” page are reporting that the suspect’s name is Grafton Thomas. “Some media outlets reported the suspect’s name as Thomas Grafton or Thomas E. Grafton, but public records reveal it to be Grafton E. Thomas.”
Related: Karol Markowicz on “How liberals are allowing anti-Semitism to flourish.”
REVISITING ROSENSTEIN’S COVER-UP OF CROSSFIRE HURRICANE:
To date, no person has been held accountable for the many false statements made to the FISA court under Rosenstein’s signature. In the absence of consequences, there’s nothing to deter continued lying to courts to spy on Americans and interfere in elections. Rosenstein’s unmolested freedom proves his promises of accountability were as false as the FISA application he signed.
If Democrats think they can control an FBI that has slipped free of its constitutional safeguards, they’re fooling themselves. If nobody makes good on Rosenstein’s promises of accountability, elections will become a quaint ceremonial exercise as the real power of government remains in the hands of the FBI.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How An Unlimited Supply Of Borrowed Cash Is Destroying Higher Education.
20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Disrupting Schools For Racial Justice. Next school year, California schools forbidden by law from suspending students, because Racism.
Related: When Disruptive Students Are Coddled, the Whole Class Suffers.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Has The Master’s Degree Bubble Burst?
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Looking Back at Afghanistan, The ‘War of Necessity.’. “The campaign in Afghanistan began in 2002 with a specific purpose. But by the time Barack Obama was running for President its chief attraction was the fact that it was an alternative to the campaign in Iraq. A 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal covering his speech before the VWF captured his thinking: Afghanistan was a ‘war of necessity,’ unlike Iraq, which was a ‘war of choice.’ Of all the ‘false choices’ the President was fond of rhetorically raising, this was perhaps the falsest choice of all. By asserting that Afghanistan, not oil or the Middle East or radical Islam was the center of gravity of the enemy, President Obama completely misframed the strategic choices.”
Plus: “If the War on Terror seems largely won today, or at least less desperate than September, 2001 it is because radical Islam has discredited itself, the strongmen of the Middle East have self-immolated themselves through their own dysfunction and entrepreneurs have eased American dependence on foreign oil through fracking and other innovations.”
WELL, THAT’S A NICE TOUCH: 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman promoted to Brigadier General.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: How Did Detroit Schools Spend $286,596 On LA Conference? The answer: With glee. “Other travel expense reports from the Detroit school district mention $250,000 in spending for staffers to attend a May 2019 conference in Italy and $240,000 for a six-day conference in Los Angeles in December 2018.”
ALWAYS A GOOD SLOGAN, SINCE IT’S NEVER WRONG: Taiwan president channels HK protests in appeal for votes: ‘Don’t believe the Communists.’
BALTIMORE BREAKS CITY RECORD FOR KILLINGS PER CAPITA IN 2019.
Earlier: Drunk Driving, Pulling A Gun On Someone For Spilling Tea: Baltimore Cops Have Ugly Year.
Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office over 50 years ago. Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits of violence?
IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: GOP demands apology after liberal PAC features ‘regretful’ Trump voter who didn’t vote in 2016.
An allegedly regretful Trump voter in Pennsylvania, highlighted in videos by a Democratic political action committee and by The New York Times, never actually voted in 2016.
News organization JET 24, an ABC affiliate, found after checking county voting records that Mark Graham of Erie County, Pennsylvania, did not vote in the presidential election three years ago.
Mr. Graham is featured in videos funded by America Bridge, a Democratic PAC, as part of a $5 million advertising campaign in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
In an ad, Mr. Graham states, “I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because I thought he would make a change.” But he laments the change was “not for the good,” and complains that the president “plays favorites for people like himself … he doesn’t understand life around here.”
He was also featured in two New York Times articles about dissatisfied Trump voters and swing voters. The Times has since issued corrections and verified that Mr. Graham did not vote in 2016.
Fake news. But to be fair, I think it would be awfully hard to find people who voted for Trump in 2016 who are disappointed.
DEBLASIO’S NEW YORK: NYPD Investigating 9th Anti-Semitic Attack Reported This Week.
Related: ‘Open Season on Jews’: Outrage Over Spike in NYC Hate Attacks.
UPDATE: Jews Stabbed in Monsey Shul in Bloody Attack. “A black male wielding a machete stabbed 5 people at Rabbi Rottenburg’s Shul in Monsey on Motzoei Shabbos Chanukah.”
ANOTHER UPDATE:
WHEN YOU’RE A SOCIALIST*, THEY LET YOU DO IT: ‘Color me shocked’: WaPo editorial has columnist saying ‘we were wrong’ for calling on Ralph Northam to resign (ratio alert!).
* I started to type “Democrat,” but that wouldn’t inclusive to Canada’s leftwing blackface enthusiasts.
Evergreen:
THE DEBUNKING GOES ON: Historian Gordon Wood responds to the New York Times’ defense of the 1619 Project. “I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view that ‘one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.’ I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
The 1619 Project is not about truth, and it is not about justice. It is about undermining any history or tradition that might limit the power of the left. In other words, it’s business as usual.
AND AN OBAMA-APPOINTED JUDGE, TO BOOT: Judge blocks California’s ban of alligator and crocodile products after Louisiana sues.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN CALIFORNIA: Single Homeless Moms Get Reprieve On Eviction From Oakland Home.
A pair of homeless Oakland mothers occupying a vacant home as a housing protest on Thursday was given another four days to make their case.
At a hearing packed by dozens of people who support mothers Dominique Walker, 34, and Sameerah Karim, 41, in their effort to remain living at the house at 2928 Magnolia St., Alameda County Superior Court Judge Patrick McKinney said, “I understand the confusion” and said there seems to have been a lack of notice.
The two single, homeless women who have established the activist group Moms 4 Housing has been living in the home on Magnolia Street since they illegally entered it on November 18th.
The court case, which is just one part of the standoff over an illegally occupied Oakland home, has been continued to next week. Thursday also reinforced every indication that, whatever the outcome in court, the occupation will go on much longer.
“There is no right way to do a wrong thing,” said Sam Singer, a spokesman for real estate firm Wedgewood. “What these people are doing is the wrong thing.They are bullies, and they are thieves.”
Exit quote from NBC’s Bay Area affiliate, back in November: “I have the right to be housed in my city,’ Karim said.”
I don’t recall that in the Constitution, but I do recall Thomas Sowell mentioning that particularly in the Bay Area, “The housing price of liberalism” doesn’t come cheap.
Earlier: How California became a one-state homelessness machine.
