NIGER’S JUNTA RULERS ASK FOR HELP FROM RUSSIAN GROUP WAGNER AS IT FACES MILITARY INTERVENTION THREAT. “Niger has been seen as the West’s last reliable counterterrorism partner in a region where coups have been common in recent years. Juntas have rejected former colonizer France and turning toward Russia. Wagner operates in a handful of African countries, including Mali, where human rights groups have accused its forces of deadly abuses.”
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 5, 2023
JUST NBC THE BIAS!
NBC News doing straight-up Biden fan service pic.twitter.com/MspyxkIpQp
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 5, 2023
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Meet Anita Pallenberg, the Teutonic goddess who ‘created’ the Rolling Stones.
The twenty-three-year-old Pallenberg first met the Stones backstage in Berlin in 1965. Winder invites us to picture the “Teutonic goddess” leaning against the spotty lads’ dressing room door, “her smile cocky, revealing flashes of fanglike teeth.” She dug into her pocket for a vial of amyl nitrate, then asked: “Vant to smoke a joint?” The Stones had never taken drugs before. Nor had they met a woman as intimidatingly experienced as Pallenberg. Winder notes they were used to “Carnaby Street’s trendy dolly birds with their knee socks and baby-doll dresses.” But Pallenberg had grown up “skipping school with the street kids and artists in Rome, grave-digging, beach drinking, boyfriends with Vespas, Caffè Rosati with Federico Fellini and living in Warhol’s Manhattan as a Factory girl.”
Faithfull has always credited Pallenberg with creating the Stones. She brought them swashbuckling, gender-bending flair and the cosmopolitan confidence to flout the rules. She zipped them into skirts, slipped them drugs and took them to galleries. Winder calls her a “pythoness” — a satanic majesty who humiliated, seduced, empowered, educated, bonded and divided the band as the whim took her. She goaded them into the swagger they carried into their music and they remixed tracks on her instructions.
But they all struggled with her freewheeling power. Brian Jones eventually responded by blacking her eyes and ripping up the film scripts she was offered. Keith Richards initially loved her from afar, while the competitive Jagger was irked that she out-cooled his own girlfriend, the Buckinghamshire farm-raised model Chrissie Shrimpton (whom he controlled with strict curfews and gifts of children’s toys). Jagger withdrew his offer of marriage to Shrimpton and upgraded to the more intellectual Faithfull.
There’s no doubt that Pallenberg was the Stones’ muse in the late ’60s and early 1970s, when they did some of their best work. But she didn’t “create” the group. The band existed before her, and after she and Keith broke up.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: White House Says Bidenomics So Successful The Average American Has Twice As Many Jobs As They Had Two Years Ago.
BILL AND HILLARY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: If you live in Arkansas, the White House thinks you’re dumb.
NYT COLUMNIST ASKS, ‘WHAT IF WE’RE THE BAD GUYS HERE?’
Mitchell and Webb could not be reached for comment:
ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND: Oregon bravely allows people to pump their own gas.
All eyes now turn to New Jersey: NJ now only state where you can’t pump your own gas.
August 4, 2023
DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: ‘Full-on riot’ breaks out during Twitch influencer Kai Cenat’s PS5 giveaway in NYC’s Union Square.
THE OBAMA FACTOR: David Samuels Interviews MLK Biographer David Garrow on Barack Obama.
In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.
But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.
The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.
That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE:
FLASHBACK
Barack Obama in November 2020: "If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman [to be POTUS], and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines… pic.twitter.com/Tp6iUCXshF
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 3, 2023
UPDATE: As of now, it’s the article of the year. But to ask why it wasn’t written in 2008 is to answer the question:
(Updated and bumped.)
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM? Cardi B Tries to Compliment Her Jewish Lawyers But Messes It Up Badly.
Earlier today, American rapper Cardi B tweeted the following to her 31.4 million followers:
She has since deleted it.
What did she mean by the tweet? The clue is in her Instagram stories (where she has a whopping 168 million followers)[.]
It seems her Tweet was referring to the fact her lawyers – who are Jewish – helped get her cleared of wrongdoing for throwing a microphone at a fan. The words “Lawyer is a Jew he gon’ chew up all the charges” are part of her 2018 hit Bickenhead.
In other words, it seems the tweet was meant as a compliment, even though it plays into a particular stereotype of Jews as merciless lawyers.
However, at a time of rising hate crimes against Jews, especially religious Jews in the USA, the tweet could easily be misinterpreted. When I first saw it, I thought she was referring to the fact Jews have perpetrated [insert supposed crime].
An enterprising journalist could have a lot of fun with Karine Jean-Pierre asking her about Biden’s reaction to this.
Flashback: Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon). Biden gave Cardi B (whose real name is Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar) an interview (of sorts) that was published by Elle magazine on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August of 2020.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Two US Navy sailors charged with providing sensitive military information to China.
Two U.S. Navy sailors were charged Thursday with providing sensitive military information to China — including details on wartime exercises, naval operations and critical technical material.
The two sailors, both based in California, were charged with similar moves to provide sensitive intelligence to the Chinese. But they were separate cases, and it wasn’t clear if the two were courted or paid by the same Chinese intelligence officer as part of a larger scheme. Federal officials at a news conference in San Diego declined to specify whether the sailors were aware of each other’s actions.
Both men pleaded not guilty in federal courts in San Diego and Los Angeles. They were ordered to be held until their detention hearings, which will take place Aug. 8 in those same cities.
U.S. officials have for years expressed concern about the espionage threat they say the Chinese government poses, bringing criminal cases in recent years against Beijing intelligence operatives who have stolen sensitive government and commercial information, including through illegal hacking.
Flashback: Treason? Resignation Calls Follow Report of General Milley’s Secret Calls to China.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: How Accurate is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? A nuclear engineer reviews the blockbuster film.
DISPATCHES FROM THE DC BANANA REPUBLIC: Here’s What Happened at Trump’s J6 Hearing Today.
THIS IS THE WAY: Florida bans AP psych, pointing to lessons on gender, sexuality.
OUT ON A LIMB: Florida versus California is the election we should be having.
National elections should be about contrast and choice — and those choices should offer the clearest opportunity for parity in the candidates and the parties. If the polls are to be believed, the 2024 election as it stands now, before any debates or primaries, does not offer that. Instead the country currently faces the prospect of two senior citizens clashing, both with low approval ratings, personal and legal baggage and questions of mental acuity.
There is a side debate forming, however, between Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a declared candidate for president in 2024 and the only polling alternative to Donald Trump at the moment, and California governor Gavin Newsom, an all-but-declared candidate running a standby campaign, should Joe Biden decide to step aside and Kamala Harris be found unviable (as her own polls would suggest).
This week, while appearing on Hannity, DeSantis accepted a debate offer from Newsom, with Hannity moderating, possibly to happen in the fall. It’s an unorthodox move by a presidential candidate to appear in a debate with a non-candidate, and it carries risk for DeSantis. It also carries a huge reward as he continues to poke Newsom into declaring against Biden, where he would certainly be viewed as a serious alternative to a president whose own party is concerned about both his age and stamina for another five years in office.
Related: “Stock up on popcorn. It’s almost political debate season. Later this month will be the first Republican primary debate. The second Republican debate will be in September. Then, November will bring the battle of the governors. DeSantis will get some good experience during the GOP debates because the others will be gunning for him, especially if Trump doesn’t show up for them. “
SO, THAT’S WHAT JOE BIDEN GAVE TO DEVON ARCHER:
Hunter’s emails to Archer, which were recently released, show the First Kid worried about Foreign Agents Registration Act violations. That’s the least of it, but Joe chiming in over the phone the 20-plus times could rope him into a FARA legal pickle. Archer claimed that the father-son duo would discuss things like the weather. Try again. All these calls happened to have occurred when a business deal was being hashed out. Archer told Carlson that Joe on the phone was proof to prospective clients that they would have platinum-level access in DC. What about the money?
Well, mountains of cash were funneled into shell companies, which dinged the Biden clan with over 170 suspicious activity reports from six banks. Archer admits the influence-peddling operation the Bidens had established was an “abuse of soft power.” And to make matters worse for Joe Biden, there’s this letter he sent to Archer in 2011, where the then-VP said he was “happy” that Archer and Hunter were “together” (via NY Post)[.]
Exit quote: “Archer tells Tucker Carlson that by putting Joe Biden on the phone with his business associates, Hunter was giving them ‘the pinnacle of power in D.C.'”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Governor Of State People Are Fleeing From Agrees To Debate Governor Of State They Are Fleeing To.
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY, PART DEUX: BBC apologizes after presenter Sally Nugent calls Dambusters Raid ‘infamous.’