ERIC ZORN IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Here’s why Kyle Rittenhouse is likely to get off. Well, when even the NYT’s tick-tock video analysis indicates self-defense . . . .
Archive for 2020
September 4, 2020
LONGTERM, THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO STOP ELECTING THUGS: Cuomo’s and de Blasio’s COVID Discrimination Cost New York Restaurants $2B, Lawsuit Claims.
EMBRACE THE POWER OF “AND:” Handgun, Shotgun, or Rifle: Which is Best for Home Defense? An RPG is overkill for most people.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: We’re Begging You Not to Nurse the Nurse Sharks.
UPDATE: From the comments:
The military story is battlefield prep for the Democrats to steal the military votes.
Voter fraud all the way.Stay tuned for the MSM stories about how Trump’s support from vets is plummeting and Joe’s support from vets is skyrocketing.
Sounds plausible.
YUGE: Trump Administration Brokers Serb-Kosovo Deal — With Normalized Israel Relations.
I’m so old I still remember when Trump was a foreign policy bumbler who was going to get us into a bunch of new foreign wars.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS EVERYWHERE SHOULD REJOICE. I SAID “SHOULD.” US gives first-ever OK for small commercial nuclear reactor.
FASTER, PLEASE: Japan on Track to Introduce Flying Taxi Services in 2023. I really want something more like The Jetsons, though.
HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE: Clay Travis writes:
As soon as the Washington Post told me they wanted to do a story on Outkick I knew what was coming.
The usual far left wing smear job to try and make me — and Outkick — look awful.
Been there, done that.
In fact, all of you knew what was coming as well. As a prelude to the story I polled you guys on Twitter and asked if I’d be painted in a positive light.
[Tweet omitted from quote – Ed.]
30k of you voted in my Twitter poll and a whopping 94% of you said the story wouldn’t paint me — or Outkick — in a positive light. The public is not dumb, they know the sports media has picked a side and I’m not on the “right” side so I don’t get positive media coverage.
I know this too.
But the reason I agreed to participate in the story was because I thought you guys would enjoy a behind the scenes perspective to illuminate just how biased hit pieces like this are. So I decided to record every minute of my conversation with the Washington Post reporter and post the portions of our conversation he decided to use as quotes to demonstrate how fundamentally artificial and devoid of context those quotes truly were.
As the Insta-Professor has said, always record your interview.
Update (From Charlie): I’ve disabled the link for now — it’s apparently been hijacked.
The home page for outkick.com works, but the story link has the same problem. I’m trying to notify them.
DON’T GET COCKY: Biden-Harris Have a Big Problem in Pennsylvania.
Two months ago, Donald Trump’s numbers in Pennsylvania didn’t look good. Now, given this sudden grassroots groundswell, I’m convinced Biden is the one in trouble. That’s no B.S. And it’s Biden’s leftward lurch that has hurt him, especially with the highly ill-advised pick of Kamala Harris, who folk in this area see as a West Coast leftist whose “progressive” bona fides include an unwavering opposition to fracking.
Yes, fracking. Do not underestimate the significance of that issue to this region, and to the kind of guys posting the signs I’m describing. These guys are not white-collar businessmen. No, these are the blue collar, big labor, union hardhats that the Democratic Party once owned. They are totally for Trump.
Trump’s blue-collar appeal is, if anything, even greater than Reagan’s was.
HELEN AND I TOOK THE BLEED-CONTROL CLASS ALONG WITH OUR ADVANCED CPR: Most Americans don’t think they could save a life after mass violence. I still felt underprepared when I came on that awful highway accident last year, and was super-relieved that an actual EMT was already there.
TIME TO DECLARE YOUR WEEKEND PARTY A BLM PROTEST: Coronavirus enforcement teams ready to strike illegal Labor Day parties, Massachusetts governor says.
OH: Joe Biden Accused of Groping Breast of Secret Service Agent’s Girlfriend During 2009 Photo-Op. “According to the report, an unidentified Secret Service agent was suspended for a week after the incident for shoving the vice president ‘after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him’.”
Much more at the link.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Flashback: Democrat Makes #MeToo Claim Against Joe Biden: He Smelled Me and Kissed My Head. “Flores said that pictures of Biden touching other women inappropriately made it more difficult to keep silent, referring to Biden nuzzling the neck of Secretary of Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s wife, kissing Sen. Chuck Grassley’s wife on the lips, whispering in women’s ears, and snuggling women on the campaign trail.”
Flashback: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.
Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
HOW MANY LIVES COULD GOVERNMENTS HAVE SAVED JUST BY ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO TAKE 2000 UNITS OF VITAMIN D AND 50 MG OF ZINC A DAY? Vitamin D deficiency raises COVID-19 infection risk by 77%, study finds.
But what’s in it for them to recommend this?
WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Military Moves Forward with Plan to Make Air Force One Supersonic.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: New Tapes Show Salon Owner Luring In Unsuspecting Pelosi With Her Favorite Ice Cream.
PEACE: The UAE-Israel Deal Spells Big Trouble For Iran. “The UAE deal is the first in a generation, ending a 26-year long dry spell. It’s also the first with one of the six Gulf Arab states that sit directly on Iran’s doorstep. The Emirates, whose population (minus expatriates) might, with some creative accounting, approach one fortieth the size of Iran’s, acted in brazen defiance of the Tehran-led resistance camp on an issue—peace with the Zionist entity—absolutely central to the Islamic Republic’s ideological creed. Talk about a lack of fear or respect for Iranian power. You couldn’t do better than the videos of beaming Emirati children celebrating the Israeli delegation’s arrival by waving the Jewish state’s flag alongside balloons decked out in blue and white, its national colors.”
Read the whole thing.
Trump will never get the credit due to him for undoing all the damage Barack Obama did to the Middle East by enriching and emboldening Iran, precisely because the damage was caused by Barack Obama.
MEGAN MCARDLE: When it comes to denouncing violence, the issue isn’t lives vs. property.
Now of course Black lives matter, and more than any building. But it’s not as if there is some obvious trade-off between Black lives and buildings that leaves us no choice but to accept looting. The truth is closer to the opposite: Rioting is a political, moral and economic disaster for everyone, and especially for communities of color. While some politicians, including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Joe Biden, have made this point, much of the commentariat maintained a decorous silence about what was going on, or retreated to euphemisms about mostly peaceful protests. And the longer both the disorder and the denial have gone on in places such as Portland, Ore., the greater the danger that the riots would, in fact, become the point — for some participants and for an electoral majority.
As this has become clear to commentators, this has opened up political space on the left to say what everyone should have boldly proclaimed all along: Riots damage lives as well as buildings.
For when businesses burn, what is destroyed is not merely a collection of cinder blocks and linoleum. Someone’s patient daily labor ensured that shelves were stocked and toilets cleaned, floors scrubbed and invoices paid, that fretful bank managers were reassured and peevish customers sent away happy. All those years of peoples’ lives, embodied in a physical location, should never be dismissed as mere inanimate “property.” Especially if those doing the dismissing have never staked their own life on some similarly unglamorous enterprise tied to a humdrum physical location — and, most particularly, if what was lost can’t really be replaced.
“Oh, but insurance will pay for the damage!” Well, owners of low-margin businesses don’t always carry generous commercial policies. Some let their coverage lapse when the pandemic closed their shops, and some discovered that insurance wouldn’t pay even the cost of demolishing the burned-out hulk of their store. And if insurance does pay enough to rebuild, there is still no guarantee their business will recover, because commercial zones are a whole much greater than the sum of their parts.
When looting and arson leave some owners unable to rebuild, and others reluctant to try, even those who want to rebuild will often worry about attracting customers to locations surrounded by burned-out hulks. This ultimately carries us beyond the suffering of petit-bourgeois store owners and into the ocean of trouble that afflicts communities when the businesses they depend upon disappear.
Five years after the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, there were still boarded-up stores in Ferguson, Mo. Yet Ferguson had comparatively good conditions for recovery: The damage was isolated to one city, the broader national economy was strong and getting stronger, and there was plenty of state, federal and private money to assist with rebuilding.
When external conditions aren’t good, recovery can take much longer. The riots that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. occurred in cities that were already hollowed out by suburban exodus. Many well-insured businesses used their insurance payments to move to suburban shopping malls; underinsured businesses closed. As late as 2007, when I first moved to D.C., there were still major retail districts that were just recovering from the 1968 riots.
The people who suffer when retail strips shut down aren’t the affluent, the class of people who can assume that insurance solves all problems. Those people move. It’s the ones who depend on the social capital of a neighborhood, rather than the financial capital of a market, who ultimately are hurt the worst. A disproportionate number of those people are Black and brown. Research suggests the 1960s riots decreased Black employment rates well into the 1970s, with the effect growing larger over time. And so, instead of expressing righteous rage at collective injustice, rioting ultimately becomes an instrument of suffering and systemic inequality.
The fearful-yet-hateful intelligentsia and commentariat get a lot of catharsis out of other people’s violence, affecting other people’s lives. And rioting — like most leftist politics in general — is more about making the intelligentsia and commentariat feel better about themselves than about making anyone else’s lives better.
A friend on Facebook adds that riots drive people into, and back into, poverty — and poverty itself kills. So the riots are in fact a threat to life as well as property, it’s just lives we don’t see.
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: What media/Dem coordination? Biden campaign has already held a press call about ‘appalling allegations’ in The Atlantic’s crumbling hit piece about Trump.
Related: “Morning Joe now airing a ‘VoteVets’ ad feat. parents of fallen servicemen saying ‘my son was not a loser.’ Amazing how quickly they were able to produce a commercial corresponding w/ an article that just came out yesterday.”
More: Atlantic boss explains why he used unnamed sources in report about Trump insulting dead soldiers:
During a Friday morning interview on CNN, Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the story, defended using four anonymous sources with “firsthand knowledge” who claimed that Trump called dead soldiers “losers” and dead Marines “suckers.” The report has been denied by several current and former members of the administration who were on the trip during which the president allegedly made the remarks.
“They don’t want to be inundated with angry tweets and all the rest. And we push hard, and that’s why you have to sort of do this reporting with even more belt-and-suspenders approach. You know, dotted i’s and crossed t’s and find multiple sources for it,” he explained on New Day.
Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Bad Twitter ratios. One of these things is not like the other, and as usual, an awfully chickenshit excuse from Goldberg.
SEEN, IRONICALLY ENOUGH, ON FACEBOOK:
