TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Why Wait? Here’s Liz Cheney’s Concession Speech in Advance.
Archive for 2022
August 11, 2022
MATT TAIBBI: Welcome to the Third World. The FBI really better have something “pulverizing” on Trump, because otherwise we’ve just witnessed one of the dumbest moves in the history of politics.
We’ve reached the stage of American history where everything we see on the news must first be understood as political theater. In other words, the messaging layer of news now almost always dominates the factual narrative, with the latter often reported so unreliably as to be meaningless anyway. [Monday’s] sensational tale of the FBI raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of former president Donald Trump is no different.
As of now, it’s impossible to say if Trump’s alleged offense was great, small, or in between. But this for sure is a huge story, and its hugeness extends in multiple directions, including the extraordinary political risk inherent in the decision to execute the raid. If it backfires, if underlying this action there isn’t a very substantial there there, the Biden administration just took the world’s most reputable police force and turned it into the American version of the Tonton Macoute on national television. We may be looking at simultaneously the dumbest and most inadvertently destructive political gambit in the recent history of this country.
Read the whole thing.
REVIEWING THE FBI’S RECENT BAD APPLES: Ken Braun of the Capital Research Center (CRC) lays out the disturbing details.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 2022 New Optics Guide: Thermal and Night-Vision.
LIVE AT 4PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest Cam Edwards.
READER FAVORITE: Amerex 322, 5lb Carbon Dioxide Class B C Fire Extinguisher. #CommissionEarned
I’M PRETTY SURE THIS IS HOW PLANET OF THE APES BEGAN: WHO warns people not to attack monkeys amid monkeypox outbreak.
FAKE NUMBERS: Did Twitterbots Hide a Myspace Like Collapse? “Twitter likely has 25% bots and not 5%. There might even be as many as 50% bots. Twitter had reported nearly flat daily active user counts from 2014 to 2022. If there were growing Twitterbots, then fake users and fake activity hid a drop in real users and real activity.”
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Twitter Announces New Fact Checking Policy Ahead of Midterms Including ‘Prebunks’ to Preemptively Tackle Misinformation.
VDH: FBI, R.I.P.?
The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump — an historical first.
A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady.
Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act.
The Democratic Party is anticipated to suffer historical losses. Trump was on the verge of announcing his 2024 presidential candidacy. In many polls, he remains the Republican front-runner for the nomination — and well ahead of incumbent President Joe Biden in a putative 2024 rematch.
In 2016 then FBI Director James Comey announced that candidate Hillary Clinton was guilty of destroying subpoenaed emails — a likely felony pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. Yet he all but pledged that she would not be prosecuted given her status as a presidential candidate.
As far as targeting presidential candidates, Trump was impeached in 2020 ostensibly for delaying military aid to Ukraine by asking Ukrainian officials to investigate more fully the clearly corrupt Biden family — given Joe Biden at the time was a likely possible presidential opponent in 2020.
The FBI has devolved into a personal retrieval service for the incorrigible Biden family. It suppressed, for political purposes, information surrounding Hunter Biden’s missing laptop on the eve of the 2020 election.
Previously, the FBI never pursued Hunter’s fraudulently registered firearm, his mysterious foreign income, his felonious crack cocaine use, or his regular employment of foreign prostitutes.
Yet in a pre-dawn raid just before the 2020 election, the FBI targeted the home of journalist James O’Keefe on grounds that someone had passed to him the lost and lurid diary of Ashley Biden, Biden’s wayward daughter.
At the dawn of the Obama era, the Washington Post, via their then-sister magazine Newsweek, announced that “We Are All Socialists Now.” Apparently the model they had in mind was the East German Stasi.
HERE’S WHY DEMS ARE OBSESSED WITH DOUBLING THE IRS: Conservative think tanks, activist groups, social media sites, and blogs, as well as evangelical ministries and groups, are in for an all-out assault led by the soon-to-be-doubled-in-size-IRS. My latest PJ Media column is indeed a WARNING!
OCEANIA’S CHOCOLATE RATION JUST KEEPS GOING UP! Leftist Establishment Praises Biden For Gas Going Below $4, Forgets It Was $2.39 When He Took Office.
NEWS JOE BIDEN CAN USE: Study: Visit friends, take a walk or, better yet, read to lower dementia risk.
WHAT IS A WOMAN? Elite Nashville Girls School, Founded in 1865, Announces Transgender Girls Are Welcome.
Any student who identifies as a girl may apply to our school…. Harpeth Hall acknowledges the developmental journey of each student and recognizes that adolescence includes natural searching and questioning about many topics. For some students, this may include the question of gender identity and the desire to identify as nonbinary or use they/them pronouns.
Harpeth Hall approaches gender identity with understanding and open communication, rather than with shame or othering, and will provide a safe environment to partner with each student and family to consider the needs and requests of the student on an individual basis.
This will end well.
FRACK THAT: Spain cracks down on air conditioning and heating in bid to save energy. “Under the changes, air conditioning must not exceed 27C (80.1F) and heating will not be allowed higher than 19C (66.2F).”
OUT ON A LIMB: Don’t blame Texas for New York’s immigration ‘crisis.’
To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie.
Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point? That’s about as many as come with the average church tourist group from Nebraska; it’s not exactly Exodus or the Mariel Boatlift. To put it in perspective, the maximum capacity of a single New York subway car is 198.
But listen to this ridiculous hyperbole from Adams: “This is horrific when you think about what the governor is doing.” He added, “We need help, and we’re reaching out to the federal government to tell them that we need help. We’re going to get through this.” Get through this? Get through what, exactly? More illegal immigrants pass through our airports every day. What help do we need from the federal government? Do we need them to rent us a church basement and buy some cots? What’s going on here?
This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.
FURIOUS FURRY: Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke at rally: Stop laughing at me, “motherf****r.” “So Beto’s history is entirely laughable, but so are his political instincts here. He’s clearly talking to a small group of supporters in this incident. What politician calls his own supporters ‘motherf*****s’? Rather than ask what the criticism might be, O’Rourke’s first instinct is to attack and posture himself as supremely virtuous rather than defend his argument. That’s a bad look for any politician, but especially risible for a gun-control radical stumping for office in Texas, of all places.”
I HAVE A FEW CHOICE WORDS AND PHRASES ASIDE FROM ‘GROOMER’: Don’t Say ‘Groomer’ Because the MSM Will Call You a Bigot.
ANNALS OF (INADVERTENT) LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Claire McCaskill accidentally invalidates all those BLM protests with her take on how ‘accused criminal’ defendants operate.
WILLIE SUTTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Middle-class Americans to bear brunt of IRS audits under Dem inflation bill, analysis shows. “Americans making less than $75,000 will be subject to 710,863 additional audits, according to the analysis”