BUT OTHER THAN THAT, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE SHOW, MR. TOTO? Michael Caine’s ‘Dear Dictator’ isn’t just morally repugnant. It’s slow, painfully unfunny, and a stain on the legendary actor’s resume.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
March 21, 2018
DEPLATFORMED: YouTube Suspends Major Gun Manufacturer, Bans Instructional Gun Videos.
“While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories, specifically, items like ammunition, gatling triggers, and drop-in auto sears,” reads a statement from a YouTube spokesperson.
The list of prohibited content now includes links to sites that sell firearms, videos that teach installation of certain accessories, and videos that teach the entirely legal acts of manufacturing guns and reloading ammunition.
It’s time to regulate YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as common carriers.
WE’RE FROM GOOGLE AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: Google Makes $300 Million Commitment to Supporting News.
In New York on Tuesday, the company announced the launch of the Google News Initiative, which it says is designed to help news organizations strengthen quality journalism, develop new business models and upgrade their technology.
As part of the initiative, Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., GOOGL -0.39% detailed several efforts to help publishers drive more subscription revenue, under the umbrella of a program called Subscribe with Google.
Google unveiled a new feature that will appear on its search results pages that will highlight stories from publications to which a user subscribes. The component won’t affect the rankings on the rest of Google’s search results page, according to a company spokeswoman.
The company says it will help simplify the subscription process so consumers can easily subscribe to multiple news outlets. Following through on plans announced in October, readers will be able to use their Google login credentials as a single sign-on for their various news subscriptions, helping to prevent users from constantly hitting paywalls, particularly when switching devices.
It’s another data-harvesting scheme, paid for by an “investment” in the very news business Google has helped put in its current predicament.
CONRAD BLACK: The Anti-Trump Effort Backfires.
As the parallel investigations and diluvian leaking have unfolded, the anti-Trump Resistance has received a series of gradually suppurating mortal wounds. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign; over a hundred FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers expected Hillary Clinton to be charged criminally, and President Trump was correct in saying conversations by his campaign officials had been tapped, a claim that was much ridiculed at the time. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe testified that the Steele dossier was essential to obtaining a FISA warrant on a junior Trump aide (Carter Page), and McCabe and former director James Comey’s rabidly partisan helper Peter Strzok, and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page, texted suggestions for influencing the FISA judge in the case. The judge recused himself, voluntarily or otherwise, after granting the warrant. Mueller set up his “dream team” of entirely partisan Democrats; McCabe failed to identify to the Bureau his wife as a member and beneficiary of the Clinton entourage and political candidate in Virginia; and the fourth person in the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, met with Steele, and Mrs. Ohr helped compose the Steele dossier.
The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, whose report is expected imminently, showed the FBI director, Christopher Wray, findings about Andrew McCabe’s conduct that caused him to retire McCabe prematurely. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), one of the few centers of unquestionably ethical and nonpartisan conduct in Washington, advised the attorney general to fire McCabe.
The wheels are coming off.
LOCKER ROOM TALK: Biden says he would have ‘beat the hell out’ of Trump in high school for disrespecting women.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” Biden said. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” Biden continued. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
He’s running.
WELL, GOOD: South Korea to deploy ‘artillery killer’ to destroy North Korean bunkers.
The South Korean Army plans to deploy surface-to-surface missiles in a newly created counter-artillery brigade by October, with the aim of destroying North Korea’s hardened long-range artillery sites near the Demilitarized Zone, should conflict erupt on the Korean Peninsula.
The plan is part of South Korea‘s defense reform for developing an offensive operations scheme, a defense source said. The tactical missiles are developed locally.
“The Ministry of National Defense has approved a plan to create an artillery brigade under a ground forces operations command to be inaugurated in October. The plan is to be reported to President Moon Jae-in next month as part of the ‘Defense Reform 2.0’ policy,” the source said. “The brigade’s mission is fairly focused on destroying North Korea’s long-range guns more rapidly and effectively, should conflict arise”
The three-year development of the GPS-guided Korea Tactical Surface-to-Surface Missile was completed last year. Hanwha Corporation, a precision-guided missile maker, led the development in partnership with the state-funded Agency for Defense Development, or ADD.
The missile, dubbed “artillery killer,” has a range of more than 120 kilometers and can hit targets with a 2-meter accuracy, according to ADD and Hanwha officials.
One of the reasons North Korea gets away with so much is that its dug-in artillery effectively holds Seoul — home to 25 million South Koreans — hostage for as long as it would take to destroy or silence those big guns.
This will shorten that time.
HMM: Tempe police chief says early probe shows no fault by Uber.
Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode.
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.
They should.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Austin Bomber Dead, Gov’t Shutdown Redux and Much, Much More. “Police caution that they do not know where the suspect has been in the last 24 hours and to be vigilant as there might be more packages out there.”
NOT A ONE-TIME THING: D.C. councilman who said Rothschilds control weather also said they control government, World Bank.
D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr., a Democrat, claimed that the Rothschilds — a European Jewish banking family descended from Mayer Amschel Rothschild — control the World Bank and the federal government during a Feb. 27 gathering of top city officials, The Washington Post reported Tuesday morning.
“There’s this whole concept with the Rothschilds — control the World Bank, as we all know — infusing dollars into major cities,” Mr. White said, according to video footage reviewed by The Post. “They really pretty much control the federal government, and now they have this concept called resilient cities in which they are using their money and influence into local cities.”
No one in the room, including Democratic Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, challenged Mr. White’s remarks.
When will the media pile-on begin?
WINNING: Small-town America has gotten an economic jolt under Trump.
Smaller communities, lifted by higher prices for oil, gas and other commodities and some gains in manufacturing, last year clawed back a significantly larger share of new job creation than in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the analysis found. While this economic revival in Trump country so far has been driven mostly by cyclical changes in global markets, particularly for energy, Trump can plausibly argue that his agenda of promoting domestic manufacturing and oil and gas production can help sustain those gains in the non-metropolitan places that disproportionately house those industries. And that could create another electoral obstacle for Democrats in smaller communities, where the President has also connected far better culturally and stylistically than in urbanized areas.
This might be yet another way to get more Trump.
SNOWFALLS ARE A THING OF THE PAST: “Four’easter” to hit East Coast — live updates, forecast, power outages, school closings.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuelan hospitals are even worse off than we knew, an independent poll shows.
Even providing basic services has become an insurmountable task, according to the poll, with doctors in 79 percent of hospitals saying water is frequently unavailable and in 96 percent saying their kitchens cannot adequately feed patients.
Crumbling hospitals have become frightful snapshots of Venezuela’s deepening economic crisis, with their nonfunctioning bathrooms, unlit halls, lack of instruments needed for all types of surgeries and a crippling scarcity of medicines to treat ailments from kidney disease to HIV. Even usable blood is hard to come by.
Doctors in more than 80 percent of the hospitals polled said their emergency rooms were experiencing intermittent failures. In 15 percent of hospitals, doctors said operating rooms weren’t functioning, and in 80 percent they said rooms were often inoperative.
Seventy-nine percent of hospitals said they lacked basic surgical supplies such as gauze, gloves and compresses, and 84 percent reported having no catheters and tubes.
Ninety-four percent reported a frequent absence of X-ray equipment; 86 percent said they often could not perform ultrasounds; 96 percent said they often couldn’t offer CT scans, and 100 percent said their laboratories were not fully functioning given the scarcity of reagents.
But it’s all free!
SHE HAS. REPEATEDLY. Hillary Should Just Admit She Hates Half of America.
Yes, she basically called half the country racist. Yes, she basically characterized women who voted for Trump as thoughtless vacuums for their husband’s opinions rather than as actual human beings. But I’m still kind of shocked that the comments made the news. Why? Because she has said these things before; we already know that she thinks this way.
During the election, Clinton said that “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters belonged to a “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic . . . basket of deplorables.” In an interview with NPR last year, she talked about women being “under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” Despite the breathless news coverage, these comments weren’t really news so much as they were what we already know.
After the comments received backlash, Clinton insisted that she “meant no disrespect” by her comments — but she’s lying. Disrespect is exactly what she meant.
Even Clinton’s sorry-not-sorry non-apologies drip with contempt.
March 20, 2018
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT! John Oliver Wants Your Help Telling Mike Pence To ‘Go F**k Himself.’
HuffPo filed this one under “Comedy,” but any laughs seem to be unintentional.
FLASHBACK: Dems Announce Governor McAuliffe Secures $1 Billion Facebook Investment in Virginia.
Social media is only problematical when it benefits Republicans.
SUSAN GOLDBERG: The Real Reason Toys R Us Is Closing That No One Wants to Talk About: Birthrates.
Demographics is destiny, the wise man said.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: What if Trump is right and there is no collusion?
In one sense, the question is irrelevant: Paul Manafort is facing serious money-laundering charges that could land him in jail for 305 years; Gen. Mike Flynn’s been found out for his shady dealings with Russia and Turkey; and various other Papadopouli have pleaded guilty to actual—if relatively minor—crimes. So Robert Mueller could eventually issue stacks of indictments whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia or not.
But…
For more than a year now, Democrats in Congress like Adam Schiff and liberal media outlets have promised Americans proof that “Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election using hackers and propaganda,” as one far-Left activist put it. Back in October, Ezra Klein at Vox.com said it’s “almost impossible to believe that there wasn’t collusion between Trump’s operation and Russia.”
Even now, two out of three Democrats still believe Russia actually tampered with the polls to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.
With Trump declared guilty by Democrats and all but convicted in the press, what happens if Mueller confirms the findings of the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee — that there’s plenty of Trump campaign incompetence, but no collusion?
Read the whole thing.