HOW ABOUT NO? Minneapolis Mayor to Seek Federal Aid after Looters Cause At Least $55 Million in Damage.
Minneapolis’s government, top-to-bottom controlled by Democrats, is the author of Minneapolis’s misfortunes. Minneapolis voters voted for them, and they deserve to get what they voted for good and hard. Why should taxpayers from more civilized parts of the country foot the bill.
SOURCES: NEW YORK TIMES NOT TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TOM COTTON OP-ED.
As the Times tells its reporters, a story needs at least two corroborations to make sure it ‘stands up’. Here’s the second: Tom Cotton’s staff have told Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, that this op-ed, like Cotton’s previous op-eds for the Times, received a ‘rigorous’ and ‘onerous’ fact-checking. Three drafts went back and forth.
So who’s telling the truth? The management, for whom this is only the latest in a series of unprofessional foul-ups — or The Spectator’s source and Tom Cotton’s staff?
The member of Cotton’s staff who worked with Rubenstein on the edits told The Spectator this morning that while he emailed only with Rubenstein, there were sticking points in the process when it was necessary for Rubenstein to consult with unnamed Times colleagues. These points were all resolved. The inference, Cotton’s staffer tells The Spectator, is that Rubenstein was not, as the Times now claims, working alone or unsupervised:
‘What they have attempted to do to a young editor who is doing his job, and also doing it well, is a disgrace.’
All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:
THIS IS THE SORT OF THING OUR POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL LEADERS ARE CHEERING ON:
Detroit father of five loses home he’d been fixing up & work truck after raging blaze: “I’ve done everything right. How am I gonna tell my kids?” MORE: @FOX2News 6PM. DONATE: https://t.co/dtL77dXTOk pic.twitter.com/j0lAN2SYLv
— Erika Erickson (@FOX2Erika) June 4, 2020
He’s got a GoFundMe. I donated. But there are lots of other people in the same situation.
THIS STATE-SANCTIONED GRAFFITI IS THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF ANTI-TRUMP PETTINESS: DC Mayor Paints ‘Black Lives Matter’ by the White House.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, STASI EDITION: Syracuse invented evidence to find fraternity guilty of racial slur after investigation cleared them: lawsuit.
When Syracuse University found Alpha Chi Rho collectively responsible for shouting a racial slur at a black female student, it not only ignored the woman’s family but overruled its own appeals board, according a lawsuit by the fraternity last week. . . .
The allegations would mean the administration had continually defamed AXP going back to last fall, when Chancellor Kent Syverud said four members had been placed on interim suspension for “a verbal assault.”
The suit provides details from the past several months that Syracuse does not appear to have previously acknowledged, including that the members were quickly exonerated back in December, owing to video evidence and “consistent” testimony.
Make ’em pay. Also, why is it only fraternities and sports teams that are subjected to collective punishment?
AT AMAZON, Little Giant Ladder.
WASHINGTON POST: Let’s cancel all the cop shows on TV.
Writing at the Washington Post, author Alyssa Rosenberg has a unique solution for the problems with our policing: Cancel all the cop shows on television. She argues we need to do that because there’s a “reactionary streak” behind the “surface liberalism” in these shows.
● October, 2018: Steve Carell: The Office Would Be Too Offensive Today. If So, What’s Left?
● January, 2018: The post-Pervnado era has made a lot of classic TV cringeworthy.
I’m not expecting sitcoms and cop shows to vanish from TV anytime soon, as those are the genres that have defined American network television since its inception in the late 1940s. Regarding the latter format, as lefty academic Todd Gitlin wrote in his 1983 look at the American TV industry, Inside Prime Time (which served as a textbook at my college, and presumably, loads of others), in the early 1970s, David Gerber, the producer of the NBC series Police Story and Police Woman, “took to cop shows not only because the police were society’s blue line but because they could be the networks’. In the industry jargon, they afforded a franchise — a hero’s right to interfere every week in the lives of others. ‘In television there are a certain amount of franchises,’ Gerber points out. ‘What do you got? You got doctor, lawyer, and chief. Throw in some Indians, for westerns. So doctor, lawyer, and police; the westerns are gone. You try to do something offbeat — White Shadow, Paper Chase, American Dream — and you get shot down. So you stay with the franchise or you take a chance. In June the networks have patience with anything. The flowers are blooming, hooray, hooray. Come September, they lose patience, because they’re in a competitive race.’”
But the left’s desire, whatever the struggle session du jour, whether it’s #metoo or #blacklivesmatter, to airbrush out offending swatches of pop culture is telling, and will slowly take its toll. (See also: Messrs. Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, who were omnipresent in American culture until becoming unpersons.)
As I wrote in May of 2018, the Great Purge of 20th Century Mass Culture will be astonishing to watch, a much more insidious version of the way the arrival of the Beatles to America completely pushed swing music, America’s pop music from the 1920s through the early 1960s, into the dustbin of history
WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING: Eli Lake: The FBI’s Investigation Into Trump and Russia Now Looks Even Worse.
The FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign has taken a beating in the last six months. Late last year, the Justice Department’s inspector general found the bureau’s application to eavesdrop on a former aide to then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign was riddled with factual errors and omissions. The surveillance court that approved that warrant has barred the agents who submitted it from appearing before it. And last month the Justice Department dropped its case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
On Wednesday, things got worse. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said that all of the irregularities and short cuts exposed in recent Justice Department reviews were kept from him when he signed the warrant applications into that campaign aide, Carter Page. Had he known about them at the time, he said, he would have never signed them.
Rosenstein even reluctantly acknowledged that his own August 2017 memo specifying the parameters of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was deeply flawed.
By August 2017, it was clear that there was no support for “the whole concept that the campaign was colluding with the Russians,” said Senator Lindsey Graham at the hearing. “There was no there there.”
“I agree with that general statement,” Rosenstein responded.
In normal times this would be a bombshell. Rosenstein’s memo listed the alleged crimes that Mueller’s team was investigating. Rosenstein said that Mueller’s office helped him draft it. This reflects poorly on Rosenstein. As the most senior Justice Department official overseeing the Mueller investigation, his job was to check its work. He didn’t.
This also reflects poorly on the FBI. The bureau knew, for example, that the opposition research dossier on which it relied to seek the Page warrant was not reliable. By January 2017, the dossier’s primary source had told FBI agents that its most explosive claims were rumor. The former British spy who helped prepare it was fired as an FBI source after the bureau learned he had been speaking to reporters. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that none of the unique information in the dossier was corroborated.
It doesn’t stop there. Rosenstein also acknowledged that the FBI never shared its draft memo from January 2017 to close the counter-intelligence investigation into Flynn. That investigation was kept open after former FBI Director James Comey discovered Flynn’s calls with Russia’s ambassador at the end of 2016. While such communications would be unusual for most private citizens, the calls were routine for an incoming national security adviser.
Rosenstein also said exculpatory information collected from FBI informant approaches to the investigation’s targets were not shared with him. One such example involved Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, who told an informant that a campaign reaching out to Russia to obtain stolen emails would be treason.
It’s as if the whole thing was a political hit job designed to overturn an American election. Which is because it was a political hit job designed to overturn an American election.
ORANGE MAN BAD: Guess What Happens if You Search for ‘Racist’ People on Twitter…
TWITTER IS GARBAGE AND JACK DORSEY SHOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SHOW HIS FACE IN PUBLIC WITHOUT BEING BOOED: Twitter Mistakenly Disables Video Of A GOP Candidate Doing A Pushup Challenge For PTSD Victims, Offers No Explanation. “Mistakenly.”
AMERICA’S MOST ANNOYING GOVERNOR. OKAY, SECOND-MOST. OKAY, PROBABLY REALLY ONLY ABOUT #5, BUT STILL, WHAT A DICK: NC Gov. Cooper vetoes bill to allow outdoor seating at restaurants.
Outdoor protests with thousands of people yelling are fine. Brunch, however, will kill grandma because reasons.
Related: Government Jealous Of Rioters’ Speed, Efficiency In Destroying Local Businesses.
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Planned Parenthood actually said it’s “devastated, grieving, and outraged by violence against black lives.”
Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.
KRISTI NOEM 2024: South Dakota National Guard quickly shuts down violence as governor calls for swift action against looters. Her pandemic handling was also excellent.
DAILY GOUGE EXPLAINS IT ALL: Want to understand the political reality behind the riots? Here’s the fundamental fact, according to The Daily Gouge:
“Here’s the juice: urban police unions who block accountability for bad cops contribute to Dimocratic politicians running cities who haven’t elected Republicans in 50 years … yet somehow the cause of the problem is thrown at the feet of a President who’s only been in office 3-1/2 years?!?”
ACADEME AT ITS FINEST: Elite New York professors celebrate the destruction of their city.
To quote Neal Stephenson, from In The Beginning Was The Command Line, “During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”
And the ones we replaced them with are dumb, self-obsessed, and destructive.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Why isn’t Andrew Sullivan allowed to write his column?
Cockburn understands that Sullivan is not just forbidden from writing for the New York magazine about the riots; his contract means he cannot write on the topic for another publication. He is therefore legally unable to write anything about the protests without losing his job — at the magazine that, in 1970, published Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant and controversial excoriation of progressive piety. It’s the bonfire of the liberals!
* * * * * * * *
Sullivan’s card has been marked, partly because — many years ago — he edited the New Republic and dedicated an issue to a debate about The Bell Curve, the controversial book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray on IQ. At magazines such as the Atlantic, where Sullivan did some of his best work as a journalist and pioneering blogger, this now makes him persona non grata.
Read the whole thing, but…the Atlantic? As Jim Treacher tweeted on Thursday to Sullivan:
Sullivan’s 2008 stint at the Atlantic caused serious damage to the magazine’s reputation, cemented by the hiring and then immediate shameful firing of Kevin Williamson by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in 2018. (The cause of which was a sneak preview of the New York Times’ meltdown earlier this week caused by its crybully young staffers.)
MICHIGAN SUPREME COURT UNANIMOUSLY SIDES WITH 77-YEAR-OLD BARBER OVER GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER.
Related: Whitmer Defies Own Social Distancing Rule at Detroit Protest.
More: Michigan Regulators Prioritized Environmental Quality Over Public Safety In Edenville Dam — Thousands of Michiganders were evacuated after the collapse of the Edenville Dam where state regulators prioritized freshwater mussels over citizen safety.
REPORT: #GoBaldForBLM Dupes Female Moonbats Into Shaving Their Heads. “[T]he hashtag appears to have been a stunt cooked up by 4chan trolls.”
Earlier:
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