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Archive for 2020
September 13, 2020
THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: All the amazing rocket launches that happened this summer.
ROGER KIMBALL: Leading vs Lying:
Last week, the wretched anti-Trump foot solider Jeffrey Goldberg made up things that Trump was supposed to have said about American soldiers and, armed with his four anonymous sources, published it in the Atlantic. The charges were instantly contradicted by a wide range of people who had actually been with President Trump on the occasion (including the Trump critic John Bolton). But no matter. The accusations made the rounds of the news shows and have been faithfully parroted by Dem operatives, including Joe Biden, ever since.
On Wednesday, the next little stink bomb dropped. Bob ‘Watergate’ Woodward leaked a snippet of a telephone interview he conducted with the President in February. Why Donald Trump decided to speak with the notoriously sketchy Woodward is a question for the ages. But he did. And when they got around to the Chinese virus, at that time still an amorphous threat, Trump frankly admitted that he endeavored to soft pedal the threat. ‘I wanted to always play it down,’ he said. ‘I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.’
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At the Thursday news briefing, ABC’s Jonathan Karl got to ask the first question. ‘Why did you lie to the American people,’ he began.
Right. The President rightly objected to the tone of the question but then went on to point out that he was leading, not lying. Leading vs lying: it’s a pertinent distinction that went over the heads of Karl and his piranha-like colleagues (actually, they probably understood it but are constitutionally incapable of giving Trump credit for anything).
The whole sorry performance was as pathetic as it was mendacious. As Victoria Taft and others have noted, the idea that Trump should be faulted for downplaying the threat of the coronavirus is risible since, although he said calming things, he took effective action at the time and was roundly denounced by the Democrats for doing so.
A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK COMMENTS: “Looks like tomorrow xenobiology becomes a real field of scientific endeavor. What a year.” Stay tuned.
SORENESS IS JUST A SIDE EFFECT OF EXERCISE: Feel Like You Can’t Move After Your Last Tough Workout? Blame DOMS.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: ‘California Is The Progressive Utopia Of The Future!’ Says Gavin Newsom Who Is Currently On Fire.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Oopsies! NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell COVID-shames Nevada Trump rally and trips spectacularly over her own BLM riot coverage.
Earlier: Amid a ban on religious gatherings, Church of the Woke gets a dispensation.
A CIVL RIGHTS VICTORY: FAA Reportedly Rules For Chick-Fil-A Over San Antonio Airport Concession. “This is a rare move by the FAA and it will be interesting to see if San Antonio litigates this further. However, the problem is that the record is a poor one for the city given the statements of Nirenberg and others. The move was popular as retaliation against Cathy for his statements. That record will now be combined with the possible use of Chevron deference from an agency decision. San Antonio would be best served to give the lease and allow the market to address any consumer objections to the owners or management of the company.”
So in a version of The Eyes of Orson Welles that blessedly doesn’t exist, we’d be forced to hear Cousins ask Welles, “And what did you think, Orson, of the shooting of Jacob Blake in the city in which you were born?”
This is certain because one portion of the film spotlights Welles’ now-forgotten efforts to help a black man assaulted by police achieve justice.
In 1946, Welles focused five episodes of his 15-minute radio program Commentaries on what happened to Isaac Woodard:
Having been discharged from active duty in the Pacific that year, this U.S. Army Sergeant was on a Greyhound bus, heading home to South Carolina. Woodard asked the bus to stop for bathroom break. The driver refused. Words were exchanged and, at the next stop, he was removed from the bus by police, including local Chief Lynwood Shull. Still in uniform, Woodard was beaten so severely that he was blinded for life.
Woody Guthrie wrote an even more appalling than usual “ballad” about Isaac Woodard — the lyrics make William McGonagall sound like Philip Larkin — but fortunately he doesn’t get to take credit for what happened next: the NAACP said it was Welles’ series of broadcasts that catalyzed a Justice Department investigation into the atrocity.
Not surprisingly, an all-white jury acquitted Chief Shull, but it is widely thought that President Truman was so troubled by the case that it helped inspire his decision to desegregate the U.S. military two years later.
Read the whole thing.
“SOCIAL JUSTICE:” Compton ‘ambush’ leaves 2 LA County sheriff’s deputies ‘fighting for their lives.’
A handful of anti-police protesters showed up at the hospital where the deputies were being treated but soon dispersed after some tense moments with authorities who were guarding the entrance, KABC reported.
A local faith leader who came to the hospital to pray for the deputies, told a KABC reporter that some of the protesters had been shouting slogans like “Death to police!”
Protesters were blocking the entrance to the hospital emergency room and yelling, “We hope they die,” referring to the two deputies, the sheriff’s office said.
The press will ignore this, of course. It’s not like it was a white high school boy allegedly smirking.
Related: Despicable Video from Los Angeles: BLM Blocks Entrances To Hospitals While Celebrating Shooting of Two LA Deputy Sheriffs. Note, by the way, that the community/police tension is racial, but it’s not black/white it’s black/hispanic:
The City of Compton disbanded its own police department in 2000. It was riddled with corruption, and it was economically unfeasible for the City to continue funding it. Compton now contracts with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for police services.
But the Sheriff’s Department has had a long history of trouble in the City of Compton. It is alleged by community activists that within the Sheriff’s Department — which has a large Latino component — there is an “assassination” squad who get special tattoos after killing a reputed gang member, justified or not.
One interesting bit of fallout to watch from the BLM protests/riots is how the Latino vote reacts.
TOM COTTON LEADS LAWMAKERS CALLING ON DOJ TO INVESTIGATE NETFLIX FOR ‘PEDDLING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY.’
Related: Netflix CEO was not asked single question about Cuties controversy during 10-minute CNN interview.
More: What Cuties Really Is:
These children had to memorize this dialogue and perform it on camera. They also had to learn how to stroke their crotches, twerk, put their fingers in their mouths suggestively, and move like strippers mimicking vigorous intercourse.
The actors are children. Simply to play their roles, they had to have their innocence taken from them by the filmmaker — no doubt with the consent of their parent or parents. It is hard to imagine fathers and mothers allowing their little girls to be exploited in this way, but people will do anything for fame.
My point is that the intention of the director, even if noble, does not obviate the fact that for these children to play these roles, they had to say filthy things (and to imagine visually the things the script had them saying), and do filthy things with their bodies for the camera.
Flashback: Zhou Enlai Gets His Answer on France’s 1968 Revolution.
DEMOCRATS TALKING ABOUT SOULS IS LIKE CAR SALESMEN TALKING ABOUT MORALS: Is America’s “soul” up for election? What if it loses?
MEET THE DARK MONEY KING AND QUEEN: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have long vociferously and regularly condemned Republican dark money in politics. That’s what they say but look what the Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Schoftstall found out about what Schumer and Pelosi do with dark money.
MLK EXPLAINS WHY VIOLENT PROTESTS BACKFIRE: New video from Reason TV.
A SPY ALL ALONG: Morton Sobell went on trial for espionage with the Rosenbergs. His devotion to communism fascinated me.
On 11 March 2008, Morton Sobell, who was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, finally admitted to the New York Times, after five decades of denial, that he had spied for the Soviet Union. He implicated Julius Rosenberg in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets “classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb”. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison and served almost 19. The reporter, Sam Roberts, asked Sobell if, in fact, he was a spy. Sobell replied nonchalantly, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
This was the same insouciant Morty I remembered from the mid-1980s when I first met him. It was the same Morty who, speaking about his disillusionment with communism to me in 2011, casually said, “I bet on the wrong horse.” When I mentioned the murder of millions in the Gulag, he said, “Well, that goes with the territory.” Citing communists’ early participation in the civil rights struggle, he noted, “Well, that was political.”
Sobell’s 2008 confession was no surprise; he almost confessed to me more than 20 years before. Why did he finally confess, an act that threw his devoted defenders under the bus and exposed as a pitiful fraud decades of his own life? It may have been a desperate attempt to reclaim relevance in the eyes of a left that had moved on and had little nostalgia for the old days.
Read the whole thing.
DEMONSTRATION TEAM IN THE LEAD: Three demonstration team aircraft fly in formation with a WW2-era P-51 Mustang. The formation includes an A-10 Thunderbolt II, a F-35A Lightning II and an F-16 Viper. The formation was participating in the Tri-City Water Follies Drive-In Airshow at Kennewick, Washington. Photo taken Sept. 4, 2020. UPDATE: Typo fixed.
MICHAEL BARONE: The campaign is at knife’s edge.
MOURN THAT SUCH A BOY DIED — BUT REJOICE THAT SUCH A BOY LIVED: 13-Year-Old Oregon Boy Dies Trying To Save Grandmother In Wildfire, Says Family.
