Archive for 2022
September 20, 2022
WEIRD, AL FRANKEN WAS JUST TELLING ME I SHOULD SUPPORT THIS GUY: Report: Iowa Dem’s Former Campaign Manager Accuses Him of Sexual Assault.
An Iowa Democratic Senate candidate’s former campaign manager accused her boss of sexual assault, according to police files recently obtained by the Iowa Field Report.
Mike Franken in March apparently grabbed and forcibly kissed Kim Strope-Boggus without her consent, a police incident report in April shows. The assailant’s name is blacked out in the report, but the name of another Franken campaign manager and the candidate’s past electoral history are mentioned. Strope-Boggus said the candidate has had “1950s interactions” with “several other women.”
I guess it’s not that weird that Minnesota Groper Al Franken would endorse him, is it?
DEAL OF THE DAY: Seat Cushion Pillow for Office Chair. #CommissionEarned
CRIMINALIZING OPPOSITION: NY DA launches probe into fraud allegations over Zeldin nomination. “An upstate New York district attorney is reportedly moving forward with a probe into election-fraud allegations connected to the nomination of the Republican candidate for governor, Rep. Lee Zeldin, the same week absentee ballots are being sent out in the high-stakes race against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul.”
TRUE: Joel Kotkin: Environmentalism is a Fundamentalist Religion.
Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world. And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened.
This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers. And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run. . . .
Under the green lobby’s current policies, our “war” against climate change is doomed to make things worse for most people, creating what economist Isabel Schnabel calls “greenflation.” Higher prices for energy and food, worsened further by the war in Ukraine, are already are forcing countries to adopt massive subsidies for food and gas. In the developing world, billions now face immiseration, malnutrition or starvation. And green targets of zero emissions only make this situation worse.
To be fair, environmentalists want the situation to get worse. They want us to suffer for our sin, which is simply that of existing.
HE’S RIGHT, AND THERE NEEDS TO BE A CLEANOUT: Matt Taibbi: The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It’s Out of Control Now: The current Trump investigation is just the latest chapter of a long-brewing civil liberties nightmare.
On Monday, August 8, Justice Department officials spent nine hours raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, carrying out 12 boxes of material. When criticism ensued, FBI spokespeople in wounded tones insisted the press eschew the harsh term “raid,” and use “execution of a search warrant” instead.
“Agents don’t like the word ‘raid,’ they don’t like it,” complained former assistant FBI counterintelligence director turned MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi. He added with unintentional irony: “It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing.”
But it was a raid, as the surprisingly enormous number of people who’ve been on the business end of such actions since 9/11 will report. The state more and more now avails itself of a procedural trick that would have horrified everyone from Jefferson to to Potter Stewart to Thurgood Marshall. Investigating, say, one lawyer, prosecutors raid a whole firm, taking everything — emails, client files, cell phones and personal computers — then have a supposedly separate group of lawyers, called a “taint” or “filter” team, examine it all. In this way they learn the private details of hundreds or even thousands of clients in a shot, all people unrelated to the supposed case at hand.
But, they say, don’t worry, we’re not using any of those secrets, you can trust us. After all, we’re United States Attorneys. (And their paralegals. And legal assistants. And, perhaps, a few IRS or DEA or FBI agents, whose only job is to make cases against the types of people in those files. But still, don’t worry). Just because the whole concept of attorney-client privilege, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments — guaranteeing rights to free speech, against unreasonable searches, and to due process and legal counsel, respectively — were created to bar exactly this kind of behavior, they insist the state would never abuse this authority.
Taint team targets are unpopular. They’re accused drug dealers, terrorists, corporate tax cheats, money launderers, Medicare fraudsters, and, importantly of late, their lawyers. You can add Trump administration officials to the list now. In cases involving such people government prosecutors have begun making an extraordinary claim. As a citizen cries foul when the state peeks at attorney communications, the Justice Department increasingly argues that affording certain people rights harms the secret objectives of the secret state.
It’s time for a major cleanout of the Justice Department and FBI.
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: Biden Is Grasping at Straws as He Seeks a Winning Narrative for November. “Why would Biden say such a thing? Desperation, obviously.”
Robert Spencer: Biden Tries to Get Us Into World War III Again, White House Walks Him Back. “The ChiComs were not amused.”
Yours Truly: Look Ma, No Strings! Denver to Give $12k to 140 Lucky Homeless People. “Does it come with a drug test and a comprehensive mental health screening? Hell, no.”
AGREED: Student debt is not the problem, the Higher Education Cartel Is.
To the extent he thinks about it, President Joe Biden is probably expecting to be canonized by millennials whose student-loan debt he’s paring down.
Depending on how the question is asked, though, the move is not popular. In a Trafalgar Group poll released on Sept. 12, more than half of likely voters – 55.6 percent – and 64.6 percent of self-described independents said that they’d be “less likely” to cast their ballot for someone who backed the Biden debt relief plan. Other polls have shown the opposite sentiment.
In truth, however, the issue of student-loan forgiveness is a distraction from the real problem in higher education. Tuition rates have risen faster than inflation for decades. What no one wants to confront, even as we proceed to forgive as much as $1 trillion in student loan debt, is what has created the whole situation: the stranglehold that the higher-education cartel has on colleges and universities.
Of course, student loans have allowed those tuition rises. “The last person to look at this seriously was William Bennett, back when he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education. A study he commissioned found that tuition rates rose each year by about as much as Congress boosted federal educational assistance to college students.”
September 19, 2022
THE TIKTOK KIDS ARE NOT IMPRESSED:
@therachelmaria Who's he fooling?!🤣🤣 . . . #LikeAMonarch #joebiden #letsgobrandon #sleepyjoe ♬ original sound – Gsk Rookie
Related:
“HAS DELUSIONS THEY ARE:” Ezra Miller reportedly has delusions they are ‘the Messiah,’ wants to ‘lead an Indigenous revolution.’
WHEN DEMOCRATS ARE FLOUNDERING, THEY RESORT TO LAWFARE: Texas sheriff opens probe into migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard. I’m sure this is being conducted with all the nonpartisan dignity of Ronnie Earle’s bogus prosecution of Tom Delay.
Two families made strong accusations Monday against Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar and his office for the handling of shooting deaths of two young girls and their mother in the Anaqua Springs neighborhood in Boerne in 2019.
The Bribiescas and Montez families are calling for the Texas Attorney General to appoint the Texas Rangers to investigate the Jan. 10, 2019 deaths of 10-year-old London Bribiescas, 16-year-old Alexa Montez and their mother 37-year-old Nichol Olson.
The families want BCSO investigators removed from the case.
“[Sheriff Salazar has] inflicted more pain on this family than anyone else other than whoever it was who killed their daughters,” said the Bribiescas family attorney Joseph Hoelscher.
Just for background.
FETTERMAN VOTED TO FREE MURDERER WHO HACKED INNOCENT MAN TO DEATH WITH GARDEN SHEARS:
Goldblum was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1976 killing of George Wilhelm as part of an insurance fraud cover-up. According to prosecutors, Goldblum and an accomplice, Clarence Miller, lured Wilhelm to a parking garage in Pittsburgh, where Goldblum stabbed the man 26 times. While out on bail, Goldblum tried to hire an undercover police officer to murder Miller, who had fingered Goldblum for the crime.
Goldblum, who has maintained his innocence, was poised to die in prison, having unsuccessfully appealed for clemency seven times. But in 2019, Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons, which Fetterman chairs, voted unanimously to release Goldblum from jail, overriding the wishes of Wilhelm’s family. To justify its decision, the board points to the judge and prosecutor on Wilhelm’s case, who have since concluded he was the accomplice rather than the principal assailant.
But in 2007, a federal appeals court rejected Goldblum’s request for an evidentiary hearing, writing, “there is just too much evidence here establishing Goldblum’s guilt.” Both judge and prosecutor have been vague about what information motivated their reversal, and no one has claimed Goldblum is innocent of the hitman charge.
Still, Fetterman cheered when Goldblum was released from jail last year, saying he was “happy that he’s going to be going home to his family” and that Goldblum was “not a threat to public safety.” The commutation was part of Fetterman’s pledge to “transform” Pennsylvania’s pardon process and free more prisoners, a record the Democrat has touted on the campaign trail. Fetterman specifically points to his efforts to end life sentences for those who are involved in murders but did not directly “pull the trigger.”
Beyond Goldblum, however, Fetterman has voted to free “triggermen” convicted of first-degree murder. Last year, he was the only member of the board to vote to release Wayne Covington, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for killing a man for money to buy heroin. That ordeal has already made its way into GOP ads that argue Fetterman is “too far left” and “dangerously liberal on crime,” suggesting Fetterman’s record as chair of the board may not be the winning issue he thinks it is.
Related exit question: Is something about Fetterman’s polling scaring the beejeebus out of his campaign?
UPDATE Fetterman sure loves being radical chic: Pennsylvania Senate Candidate John Fetterman hired unrepentant, lying murderers as his campaign aides.
(Updated and bumped.)
OPEN THREAD: Make it shine.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: France to increase space spending by 25%.
CLOWN SHOW: Illegal migrant commits suicide in NYC shelter; Mayor Adams blames Governor Abbott. “I’ll agree with the mayor, it is a man-made humanitarian crisis. However, the man who made it is Joe Biden, not Greg Abbott. Mayor Adams can’t rewrite history. Joe Biden ran for president and promised to undo everything that the previous administration did to secure the border with Mexico. He promised to freeze deportations of illegal immigrants already in the country. And he pledged to work toward blanket amnesty for illegal aliens. All of this was music to the ears of would-be migrants and they started coming to the border even before Joe Biden was sworn into office. They are still coming. In the first two years of the Biden administration, the U.S. in on track to apprehend about four million illegal migrants. It is, in fact, an humanitarian crisis. It’s also a national security crisis and a crisis of our nation’s sovereignty. Here’s the thing – border states have been handling the Biden border crisis, mostly on their own.”
Remember, it’s only a problem when Democrats are made to look bad, or inconvenienced.
SPACE: Starship will be the biggest rocket ever. Are space scientists ready to take advantage of it? “When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks up Starship, it’s mostly about human exploration: Set up bases on Mars and make humans a multiplanetary species! Save civilization from extinction! But Heldmann and many others believe the heavy lifter could also radically change the way space scientists work. They could fly bigger and heavier instruments more often—and much more cheaply, if SpaceX’s projections of cargo launch costs as low as $10 per kilogram are to be believed. On Mars, they could deploy rovers not as one-offs, but in herds. Space telescopes could grow, and fleets of satellites in low-Earth orbit could become commonplace. Astronomy, planetary science, and Earth observation could all boldly go, better than they ever have before.”
IS CNN TRYING TO INCH BACK TOWARD RESPECTABILITY? CNN’s John Avlon Acknowledges Widespread Media Failure on BYU Racist Heckling Allegations: ‘There Was a Rush to Judgment.’
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR CANADA: Is This Canadian Transgender Shop Teacher Auditioning for an Adult Film Shoot?
Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario, Canada is part of the Halton District School Board. They’ve been promoting gender identity ideology in schools for a few years, so this probably won’t surprise them at all.
A shop teacher who taught last year as a man showed up in class this year looking a little different.
I regret to inform all of the males (and I presume jealous females) reading this that those humongous breasts aren’t real. In fact, we’d be hard-pressed to find anything “real” about “Kayla Lemieux,” who last year was teaching shop as a man named “Stephen Hanna.”
If you guessed that the kids that Lemieux taught are caught between desperately wanting to make fun of the disturbed man and knowing they could be expelled for doing so, you’re right.
“The kids here most definitely don’t think its normal… but realistically we can’t say anything,” one student said on Twitter, “Last year, the teacher was a man. I don’t think the school can fire him.”
Matt Walsh, the creator of the recent What is a Woman? documentary comments in a video, “This is fetishism not dysphoria… There’s no limit to this. Now a teacher could come to school wearing a strap-on dildo in front of the students, and we’d be told that it’s bigoted to object.”
Consider the types of people he would book on his show to inform his viewers. He sought to help rehabilitate the ousted newscaster Dan Rather, the man who did more to discredit the mainstream media with his false 2004 story on George W. Bush than anyone else in this country’s history. He was also a key promoter of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who sued Trump on behalf of the president’s former one-night stand, Stormy Daniels. Stelter literally urged Avenatti on-air to run for president. Avenatti is now serving time in federal prison for attempting to extort money from his clients. And when Stelter included “scholars” and “experts” on his show to bolster criticism of Trump, their tone mirrored Stelter’s own special brand of Trump hyperbole: A former Duke University psychiatry professor claimed in 2019 that “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”
Rather than engage in criticism of his own industry (at least, the nonconservative segment of it), he took to chiding CNN viewers for failing to appreciate the existential importance of his employer. “I don’t want to sound—tell me if this is too grandiose,” he said on a podcast. “The world and the country are better off when CNN is strong, and when brands like CNN are strong.”
Yet one of the reasons viewers were losing trust in outlets like CNN was that during the Trump years, those outlets abandoned any pretense of objectivity and instead embraced partisan bias as mission critical. By the end of his show’s run, with Trump out of the White House, Stelter was reduced to offering on-air recaps and manufactured outrage about the previous week’s offerings on CNN competitor Fox News, with special ire reserved for Tucker Carlson (whose show remains the most-watched on cable).
No wonder Stelter spent his final weeks at CNN indulging in a parade of platitudes and self-regard rather than critical reflection. “It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential,” he told NPR, noting how grateful he was for having the chance to cover “the media, truth, and the stories that shape our world.”
However, Stelter continues to fail upward, Stephen Miller writes: Great news: Brian Stelter got a gig at Harvard. “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”
UNEXPECTEDLY! Corporate Media Enable Biden Family Corruption By Refusing To Ask Tough Questions About Hunter.
It’s no secret that Joe, while he was still vice president, met with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates. Some of those meetings were even held in the West Wing of the White House. Yet, Joe has repeatedly lied about his knowledge of Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
[Scott] Pelley had the perfect opportunity to press Joe on why he lied, what happened in those West Wing meetings, and how involved he’s been brokering deals that the whole Biden family, including Joe’s brother James, reaped the benefits of. Instead, Pelley chose not to press the president.
Pelley’s reluctance to ask tough questions about Hunter is deliberate and straight out of the corporate media handbook.
The corrupt press knew Hunter was sealing deals using his dad’s name and title. They also knew that was compromising for the then-presidential candidate. That’s why when Hunter’s laptop with information indicating Joe was not as clueless about Hunter’s business as he seemed surfaced shortly before the 2020 election, the media claimed it was “Russian disinformation” and refused to cover any of the corruption.
Pelley’s refusal to make Joe answer for the Biden family business in a 2022 “60 Minutes” interview is no different than the media’s deliberate memory holing of Hunter’s depravity and the Bidens’ wheeling and dealings in 2020.
Hey, it is Scott Pelley and CBS after all.
TENSIONS RISE BETWEEN THE LA TIMES AND ITS BILLIONAIRE OWNER:
As Nika Soon-Shiong’s political activism grew, it became harder for the paper to chart out coverage that converged with her interests. Staffers grew alarmed when she clashed with an editor on the Metro desk earlier this year over the Times’ reporting on the LAPD. It was not lost on staff that they did not initially report on the public safety commission’s decision to reduce funding for the LA County Sheriff’s Department — a move she pushed for aggressively and one that was covered widely by other Los Angeles outlets.
There were internal grumbles after the paper endorsed Democratic West Hollywood Council member Lindsey Horvath for the powerful LA County Board of Supervisors. Horvath had a close relationship with Nika Soon-Shiong — she defended her publicly and said attacks on her were “rooted in racism” — and helped appoint her to the public safety commission.
More recently, the Times endorsed Kenneth Mejia, a self-described radical and Nika Soon-Shiong favorite, for the job of city controller. Two days after the endorsement, City Hall reporters David Zahniser and Julia Wick wrote a story detailing how Mejia, as a Green Party member, said he considered both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to be “sexual predators.”
The ownership of a paper retains the right to endorse whichever candidates they want. Often, they exercise that liberty. Merida said that Nika Soon-Shiong has no “say in endorsements.”
But the Mejia editorial sparked immediate backlash over the perception that she had a hand in it. City Council member Paul Koretz, a Democrat and Mejia’s opponent in the race, accused the paper of acting “as if it were run by the Mejia campaign itself.”
“People are just scratching their heads about their editorial board and how they can come to these decisions,” Koretz told POLITICO. “I have never seen an election where the newspaper is the story.”
Really? Keep Rockin’!
As Mickey Kaus notes, Carl Bernstein, then with the Washington Post, used the 1970s equivalent of phone hacking to dig up information about the 1972 Watergate burglary. Kaus quotes from “All the President’s Men,” Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s account of their reporting on the scandal that sank President Nixon:
Bernstein had several sources in the Bell system [the landline telephone monopoly]. He was always reluctant to use them to get information about calls because of the ethical questions involved in breaching the confidentiality of a person’s telephone records. It was a problem he had never resolved in his mind. Why, as a reporter, was he entitled to have access to personal and financial records when such disclosure would outrage him if he were subjected to a similar inquiry by investigators?
Without dwelling on his problem, Bernstein called a telephone company source and asked for a list of [Watergate burglar Bernard] Barker’s calls. That afternoon, his contact called back and confirmed that the calls listed in the [New York] Times had been made. But, he added, he could not get a fuller listing because Barker’s phone records had been subpoenaed by the Miami district attorney.
As far as we know, Bernstein was never investigated, much less prosecuted, for this. To be sure, there’s a strong argument that the ends justified the means in the Post case but not the Globe case. Certainly a political scandal that ended up implicating the president is a matter of much greater public importance than a sensational murder case. But it does not follow that the “mainstream press” is entitled to greater constitutional liberty than tabloids are.
What’s more, supermarket tabloids have been known to break important political stories that the mainstream press shied away from–and in this regard, the Los Angeles Times has an especially embarrassing record. In 2008 Kaus published an email from Tony Pierce, an editor at the L.A. Times, to the paper’s online contributors (quoting verbatim):
Hey bloggers,
There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.
If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask
Keep rockin,
Tony
As Kaus quipped: “That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal.” Two weeks later, Edwards partially confessed, and Times columnist Tim Rutten weighed in:
When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.
Rutten acknowledged that “too many newsrooms, including that of The Times,” were derelict in ignoring the Edwards story. But his column reflected a telling defeatism. By proclaiming the “end to the era” of traditional media, he seemed to be suggesting that those media, including his own paper, were incapable of applying any lessons from the experience of being shown up by the Enquirer–that they were too hidebound to do anything other than keep rockin.
And then there was the moment last year when the L.A. Times smeared the first black candidate for governor of California as “the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” compared him to David Duke and the Klan— and downplayed the physical attack that he received.
Evergreen:
