EVEN BETTER. LET’S SEND THEM TO CHINA: Greg Abbott: Let’s Bus Illegal Migrants to DC.
Hey, they’ll find lots and lots of work….
Let’s send the Junta with them.
Archive for 2022
April 8, 2022
BARRY LIVES FOR THIS KIND OF THING: Barack Obama’s humiliation of feeble ol’ Joe Biden.
Just imagine what a Mean Girl would do and you can predict what Barack Obama will do.
BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE: Biden Family Racket Traded On Joe’s Influence.
It certainly wasn’t on Hunter’s art talent!
RIDICULOUS BUT NOT UNEXPECTED: Ketanji Brown-Jackson confirmed by a 53-47 vote.
We do after all live in the age of the ridiculous.
No one who can’t in good conscience swear to follow and defend the US constitution should hold a post requiring a constitutional oath. That should be the very minimum bar.
April 7, 2022
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: A left-right coalition could take down Macron — and do the same to Democrats here.
A FRIEND COMMENTS ON TODAY’S SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATION: “It seems odd to say but for the first time a Black woman is a member of the Supremes.” I laughed.
COAL MINE, MEET CANARY: Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns.
Sri Lanka is facing the imminent threat of starvation for its population of 22 million as the economic crisis in the country continues to worsen and food becomes increasingly scarce, a senior politician has warned.
Speaking in a debate in parliament, held against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis to hit the country since independence – and with anti-government protests spreading across the country – the speaker of the parliament, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana, warned that this was “just the beginning”.
“The food, gas and electricity shortages will get worse. There will be very acute food shortages and starvation,” Abeywardana told the legislature.
The economic meltdown in Sri Lanka spiralled on Wednesday as the Sri Lankan rupee plunged to become the world’s worst-performing currency. Sovereign dollar bonds dropped to trade at deeply distressed levels, while the stock market fell a further 2%.
Over the past few months, Sri Lanka has been facing a dire financial crisis on multiple fronts, triggered partially by the impact of Covid-19, which battered the economy, as well as mounting foreign debts, rising inflation and economic mismanagement by the government, led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
The country barely has any foreign currency reserves left, leading to dangerous shortages of food, gas and medicines as it is unable to import foreign goods, while people are enduring power blackouts of up to eight hours a day. The situation has pushed thousands out onto the streets in protest in recent days, calling for the resignation of the president.
Flashback: In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
Get woke, go broke.
Related: Looming food shortages the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world .
OPEN THREAD: I always do the best for the common folk.
OUT ON A LIMB: Weirdos Who Want To Sexualize Your Children Should Absolutely Be Stigmatized As Groomers.
Joel Barry, the managing editor of The Babylon Bee (which has been censored for truthful statements about sex and gender), put it correctly when he said, “Most teachers aren’t themselves pedophiles, but they are working in a pedophilic system designed to make kids more exploitable—both politically and sexually.” He continued:
They aren’t grooming kids for a specific pedophile, necessarily. They’re grooming them for a system of pedophilia — which in the long run will result in horrors we can’t comprehend. Find your courage and stop it.
“System of pedophilia” isn’t conspiratorial; it’s an apt way to describe a depraved culture that preys upon its children — in the womb, in entertainment, in the classroom, online, during global pandemics, and anywhere else self-serving adults can exploit children to accomplish their political, social, and sexual ends.
The ridiculous “groomer” tut-tutting is just the latest friendly fire from the dwindling faction of used-to-be-conservatives who care more about getting published in The Atlantic than in defending the rights of parents and their vulnerable children. According to many of them, you’re too sensitive about censorship, not concerned enough about decorum, secretly racist, not a faithful enough Christian, and now too sensitive to child exploitation.
But we know what grooming looks like, and if we’re too afraid to call it what it is, what the hell are we conserving?
The aforementioned opportunity to write for the Atlantic, and the desire to enjoy the catering in the CNN green room!
Related: Media In Sync Trots out ‘QAnon,’ ‘Red Scare’ Cards to Attack Parents Rights Movement.
Like gay conversion therapy … but with scalpels. https://t.co/5mmWcRe9VH
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) April 7, 2022
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: John Nolte: Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel ‘Jokes’ About Will Smith Slapping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Kimmel, a far-left propagandist who hosts Disney’s basement-rated late-night show on ABC, “joked” about how much he’d like to see Will Smith slap Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
“This woman, Klan mom, is especially upset with the three Republican senators who said they’ll vote yes on Ketanji Brown Jackson, who’s nominated for the Supreme Court,” Kimmel said, adding, “She tweeted, ‘Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile. They just voted for KBJ.’ Wow, where is Will Smith when you really need him?”
You see, when chauvinist leftists like Kimmel “joke” about committing violence against women who dare to defy them with their political opinions, that is perfectly acceptable to the Walt Disney Co., the pro-grooming multinational that owns the ABC network that pays Kimmel millions to attract an audience of dozens.
And these calls for violence are nothing new…
Just last week, Stephen Colbert, Kimmel’s far-left counterpart at CBS, used Will Smith’s assault on comedian Chris Rock to call for a journalist to be slapped. But because Colbert was referring to a Fox News journalist, Peter Doocy, a journalist who asks tough and relevant questions of a regime Colbert is paid millions to protect, suddenly it’s okay to call for violence against journalists.
For her part, Rep. Greene has done the correct thing and reported Kimmel’s “joke” to the Capitol Police.
I’m no defender of Greene and her conspiracy theories, but Kimmel works for a network who in the midst of a moral panic, tried to blame the January 2011 massacre in Tuscon on Sarah Palin’s clip art. Afterwards, every major person in the liberal overculture talked about “we can be better” and the dangers of violent rhetoric. Later that month, “CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term ‘crosshairs’ during a segment: ‘We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language,’” as NewsBusters noted during that brief period of magical thinking when the DNC-MSM convinced themselves of the awesome talismanic powers of Palin’s clip-art and the media’s own violence and gun-related metaphors.
Curiously, violent rhetoric is much in favor these days, by the same players:
Flashbacks:
● Sen. Rand Paul had part of his lung removed this weekend because of damage from 2017 attack.
● Actor Jeff Daniels to CBS’s Stephen Colbert: ‘We Need Someone That Can Punch Trump in the Face.’
● Ilhan Omar Retweet Suggests Rand Paul Deserved to Be Assaulted.
● Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to 2020 Dems: Don’t Run Away from Trump — ‘Punch Him in the Face.’
● Joe Biden: I Want to ‘Beat the Hell Out of’ President Trump.
● Patti LuPone defends violent attack on Rand Paul.
● CNN Host Palled Around with, Promoted ICE Firebomber’s Antifa Group.
● Leftist Thug Caught on Video Assaulting Conservative Berkeley Student While Fellow Students Laugh.
● Journalist Andy Ngo Beaten Up at Portland Antifa Rally.
● John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Consequences for nefarious activity in space.
DICK DURBIN LEADS THE CHARGE TO PROTECT CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS.
Last week, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the Protect Act of 2022. You can read the text of the bill here, but the Reader’s Digest version is that it would create minimum mandatory sentencing for offenses for child pornography and keep judges from imposing lighter sentences.
The bill faced stiff opposition from Democrats in the Senate, including Dick Durbin, who denied Hawley unanimous consent. Durbin asked: “Why now? I know why. He said as much. This senator has suggested over the course of the last two weeks and hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee that somehow this judge… aspiring to the Supreme Court is out of the mainstream when it comes to sentencing in child pornography cases.”
Well, Dick, why not now? Please explain to me why this is a bad bill. I know your side has dumped millions into getting your nominee confirmed. I know you dream of using the Supreme Court as a juggernaut to ensure that every one of your fevered dreams is enshrined as law no matter the vox populi. After all, you were in favor of a similar bill back in 2003. Remember that?
To his credit, Hawley did not back down, stating: “The Senator from Illinois says Congress hasn’t acted in 2 decades. That’s true. I haven’t been here for 2 decades. He has, the Senator doesn’t want tougher sentences, he doesn’t want to talk about this issue, he wants to sweep it under the rug. I’m here to say I won’t let that happen.”
Related: Dick Durbin Is a Bad Joke on Supreme Court Nominees.
WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON PUTIN: ‘This is a crazy, unjust attack:’ Pink Floyd re-form to support Ukraine.
TATER TAUNTED: College Freshman Torches Stelter/CNN at ‘Disinformation’ Conference.
As the final question for the “How Media Platforms Shape Consumer Realities” panel, self-identified “first-year” student Christopher Phillips chided the panel (moderated by the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg, The Dispatch’s Stephen Hayes, Lauren Williams of Capital B, and Stelter) for attacking Fox News while they themselves had a laundry list of disinformation sins:
You’ve all spoken extensively about Fox News being a purveyor of disinformation. But CNN is right up there with them. They pushed the Russian collusion hoax, they pushed the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smeared Justice Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist, and yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation.
That airing of the laundry was followed up with two hard-hitting questions. “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative,” he asked in his first.
And in his second question, Phillips made the astute observation that “[a]ll of the mistakes of the mainstream media, and CNN in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction.” And that brought him to wonder: “Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence or is there something else behind it?”
Stelter was clearly uncomfortable and quipped that it’s “too bad” he couldn’t answer the questions because “it’s time for lunch.” And he didn’t want to get into a discussion about CNN’s lies on camera, telling Phillips, “I’ll come over and talk in more detail after this.”
Of course, in his bloviating that followed, Stelter didn’t actually answer any of Phillips’ questions. He initially scoffed, suggesting the student was “describing a different channel than the one that I watch.” And he dismissed the facts of CNN’s flamboyant bias as just “a popular right-wing narrative about CNN.”
More at our sister site, Townhall: “Stelter added that behind the scenes, outlets help each other out. He used Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall’s injury while reporting in Ukraine as an example. Oh, and the last time Brian spoke with a Biden official, he was yelled at by them or something. Yeah, not so sure how that absolves him or his network of the pervasive incompetence we’ve seen for years, but whatever. There’s no accountability here. We all know this. Everyone who peddled the Russian collusion hoax as fact at CNN and elsewhere deserves to be fired. Someone must be tossed into the meat grinder over this fiasco since it’s one of the biggest journalistic failures in recent memory.”
As Sohrab Ahmari tweets, “How delicious: Thanks to brave and smart student questioners, the Atlantic’s ‘anti-disinfo’ fest is turning into a sustained critique of elite-media disinformation. And the likes of Applebaum and Stelter appear so arrogant and dismissive. Kudos, lads! We’re cheering from home.”
Earlier: Atlantic Staff Writer Anne Applebaum Says The Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Not ‘Interesting’ … At ‘Disinformation’ Conference.
GOP PROBE OF HUNTER BIDEN’S BUSINESS DEALINGS TURNS TO PRESIDENT’S BROTHER JAMES: “‘We have people with the Biden name, dealing with Chinese business people that have a relationship to the Communist Party,’ Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, told CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge. ‘I think James Biden was very much a part of this.’ Bank records released by Republican senators this week indicate James Biden’s company, the Lion Hall Group, received payments from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, before his brother Joe announced he was running for president. Grassley says that same year James Biden and the president’s son, Hunter, received monthly retainers totaling $165,000 — $100,000 to Hunter and $65,000 to James.”
BLITZKRIEG: Nomadic Invaders Raced Across Asia in Record Time, Study Reveals. “They covered more than 5,000 kilometers [3,100 miles] in a few years from Mongolia to the Caucasus, and after 10 more years settled in what is now Hungary. This is the fastest long-distance migration in human history that we can reconstruct up to this point.”
THIS IS FASCINATING: Miranda warnings in 1748?
Professor Oliver and his co-authors argue that Miranda v. Arizona was more a return to Framing-era interrogation practices than something entirely novel. Around the time of the Framing, he claims, the common law voluntariness test for the admission of confessions was much more restrictive than it became in the 20th century. In the Framing era, magistrates routinely gave legal warnings to a person about to be interrogated that he had a right to remain silent and that their evidence would be used against them. The warnings were thought necessary, Oliver argues, as a way to meet the very strict voluntariness rule then in place. Only when a person was told of his rights, the thinking went, could a subsequent statement be deemed truly voluntary.
This thinking will ring a bell to modern criminal procedure ears: It’s the basic theory of Miranda. What happened, Oliver argues, is that courts loosened the voluntariness test in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Warnings were then dropped, as they were no longer needed to make sure statements were voluntary. (Almost everything was voluntary under the new voluntariness test; who needs warnings?) But the new looser voluntariness test then led to brutal interrogation practices in the 20th century. And then the Warren Court, entirely unaware of this history, responded to those brutal interrogation practices by devising what it thought was a new idea for how to ensure the voluntariness of confessions: Introduce the requirements of legal warnings.
As Oliver tells it, Miranda inadvertently returned the law to something akin to what it was in the Framing era without actually realizing it.
Everything old is new again.
GOOD NEWS OR A NOTHINGBURGER?: Yesterday, Rep. Raskin (D. – MD 08) announced that “the House Judiciary Committee voted to pass H.R. 4330, the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, legislation introduced by Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08), Congressman John Yarmuth (KY-03) and Congressman Ted Lieu (CA-33) that would safeguard a free and independent press by establishing a federal statutory privilege to protect journalists from being compelled to reveal confidential sources and prevent federal law enforcement from abusing subpoena power.”
It sounds like a good idea. The bill has a very wide definition of journalist that ought to cover bloggers as much as anyone else. “Covered” journalists are defined as those who are involved in (whether for profit or not):
“[G]athering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.”
But wait! There’s more! The bill also requires that any agency seeking to spy on a journalist must provide a Federal court with a reason for the interception that shows by a “preponderance of the evidence” that the information is sought to prevent violence and that the journalist must be given notice and an opportunity to respond (usually filing a motion to quash). Ok, we like that. Secret warrants are bad.
But it’s always the goddam exemptions. The bill contains workarounds so wide you could drive a truck through it. First, it does not apply if the agency says the journalist is “suspected of being an agent of a foreign power.” Am I the only one who remembers Adam Schiff (D- Liarsville) calling Tucker Carlson a “Russian agent” on live TV?
Moreover, the protection from spying does not apply to anyone suspected of involvement with terrorism. That’s all well and good, but it was a scant few weeks ago that parents concerned about the curricula to which their children might be exposed were branded as “domestic terrorists” by the National School Board Association, who prompted the DOJ to “direct the FBI to investigate threats of violence at school board meetings.
Finally, the exemption does not apply if the journalist is “suspected of committing a crime.” The is the hole you can get two trucks through. Sure, David Gregory can wave an illegal-to-possess high capacity magazine around on TV without fear of being spied upon, but if James O’Keefe uses a hidden camera, well, that could be a crime.
I’ve learned a long time ago that it doesn’t matter what you call a piece of legislation. That’s for spin purposes: You could easily pass “The Happy Puppy and Blooming Flowers Act”, even if buried in the exemptions is explicit permission to drown left-handed babies. The key thing is given the extraordinary abuse of phrases like “terrorism” or “national security” and the like, this bill doesn’t really do anything.
It’s always about the definitions. And the problem is the people applying those definitions just can’t be trusted.
Personally, I always found the Disney cartoons inferior to the wisecracking Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes stuff. Okay, Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge was genius, but that’s about it. Mickey is far inferior to Bugs.
WHY WOULD PEOPLE HOARD COINS? Got change? Businesses say coins are still in short supply. “It’s not a coin shortage America faces, but a lack of circulation.”
HMM: Rangemaster Shotgun Training With The Benelli M4. “Yes, shotguns loaded with anything but slugs have a very limited effective range, but they certainly hold sway at home-defense distances when using the proper loads.”