Posts on Saturday, December 28, 2019
Suspects arrested in last week’s spree of eight anti-Semitic attacks are being quickly released right back into the neighborhoods they terrorized thanks to “bail reform” legislation—which doesn’t even take effect until Jan. 1. The most recent case of revolving-door justice came Saturday morning, with the release, with no bail, of a woman charged with punching and cursing at three Orthodox women, ages 22, 26 and 31, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at dawn the day before. The accused assailant, Tiffany Harris, was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on 21 menacing, harassment and attempted assault charges.(Snip) “Yes, I slapped them.
An assailant stabbed multiple victims in a synagogue in the small upstate New York town of Monsey late on Saturday night, according to several social media reports.
Video circulating on Twitter shows emergency vehicles and ambulances hurriedly evacuating victims from a home on Forshay Road in Monsey.
That home is believed to be used as a house of worship.
One local report is claiming that an African American man armed with a machete stabbed at least 15 people after entering the synagogue.
Two of the victims are said to be in critical condition.(Snip) 'It's the house of a Hasidic Rabbi. 5 patients with stab
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the state of Georgia acted within the law by purging 98,000 voters from registration rolls who hadn't voted in 8 years or responded to a mailed notification letter.
All told, Georgia purged nearly 300,000 people who were either inactive or did not respond to the mailer. Liberal groups fought the purge claiming it was unconstitutional.
But the judge didn't see it that way.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Jones wrote in a 32-page order that the plaintiffs, led by the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, failed to show that the cancellations violated the U.S. Constitution.
American journalist H.L. Mencken once observed, “Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” Despite an unending respect for Mencken, this is an occasion in which I found him mistaken, after I violated the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not testify for Republicans.”Worse yet, I am a recidivist sinner, after testifying as a constitutional expert in both the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings. Like all mortal sins, the violation of the Eleventh Commandment comes with not just eternal but immediate damnation.
Want to know what leadership is? Here's some real leadership, according to a report in American Military News:
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been meeting with enlisted troops to get a better understanding of how they feel the war in Afghanistan has been progressing.
Trump did not want to meet with higher ranking officers, instead choosing to meet with enlisted troops to get a more candid assessment of the America’s longest-running war, Business Insider reported.
“I want to sit down with some enlisted guys that have been there,” Trump reportedly told advisers, according to Peter Bergen,
A concealed carrier at a Houston, Texas, gas station shot and killed an armed robbery suspect during a gunfight around 4:00 p.m. Friday. Fox 26 reports the suspect allegedly approached while the concealed carrier was sitting in his jeep, and a gunfight ensued. Multiple rounds were fired from both men but a witness said, “The man with the Jeep was a better shot.” Click2Houston reports that the concealed carrier was struck multiple times by gunfire as well and was transported to a hospital but is expected to survive.
Ghislaine Maxwell — the British socialite who’s long been accused of serving as Jeffrey Epstein’s madam — is under investigation by the FBI, sources confirmed to The Post on Friday. Maxwell, who has largely kept out of the public eye since 2016, allegedly procured young women and groomed them to have sex with Epstein and his wealthy pals. Several other “people who facilitated” the dead pedophile’s alleged sexual abuse are also being probed but Maxwell is the main focus, two sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters.
Nancy Pelosi’s fecklessness has ensured that Americans understand impeachment to be a purely political matter, and as a purely political matter impeachment is as dead as your leftover Christmas turkey.
Only a few days after the impeachment vote, President Donald Trump hit his best job-approval rating ever in the Quinnipiac poll. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is ready to slap the process around like a housecat tormenting a sparrow. The magic bullet missed, and now Democrats have to make a more ordinary case against Trump.
The problem is: They don’t know how.
The case against Trump in 2016 was that he is unfit for the office.
Billboards are popping up around Virginia suggesting gun confiscation pushed by Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and backed by Michael Bloomberg is about to take place. The billboards are warning of the leftist turn of Virginia’s legislature. which Democrat’s take over in January 2020. The Daily Wire posted a photo of one of the billboards.
Given the intense and sustained media attacks on Donald Trump, it’s sometimes easy to forget just how much journalists loved Barack Obama. Instead of comparing the President to Hitler or Nazis, The Washington Post embarrassed itself by drooling over the Democrat’s “chiseled pecs.” Eleven years ago this week, on December 25, 2008, The Washington Post’s Eli Saslow gushed over Barack Obama as a “paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness.” The creepy Post headline enthused, “As Duties Weigh Obama Down, His Faith in Fitness Only Increases.” Saslow’s prose oozed the worst kind of celeb-obsessed tabloid praise:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was confronted by a constituent who bluntly told her what he thought of her handling of her California district. A video posted on Twitter showed the Democrat leader purportedly at a San Francisco 49ers football game when she is approached by a man who had something to say. (Tweet/Video) “Can I get a photo with you,” he asked, shaking her hand as she sat in the stands, noting that they are both fans of the team.After Pelosi stood up, putting on a strained smile for the camera, which was actually recording video at the time, the unidentified man very politely spoke his mind.
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday sought to “clarify” his prior remarks that he will not comply with a potential subpoena to testify in the Senate impeachment trial against President Trump. The 2020 presidential hopeful on Friday had told the Des Moines Register that any testimony would draw attention away from Trump’s alleged wrongdoing and let him off the hoo"What are you going to cover?” Biden said in response to a question about the possibility of his participation in the trial. “You guys are going to cover for three weeks anything that I said. And (Trump’s) going to get away."
Over the coming weeks, one question will be paramount in the wake of the Democrats’ disastrous impeachment fail. Should President Trump wage a pitched and protracted battle in the upcoming Senate trial? Or will cooler heads--like Senator Lindsey Graham’s--prevail upon him to accept a perfunctory hearing or outright dismissal?
Fox News host Laura Ingraham posited a paraphrase of that question to Ken Starr before Christmas. She asked the former Clinton scandal independent prosecutor whether Trump should simply “declare victory” in light of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s passive-aggressive call to sit on the House articles like a distraught hen sits on an egg sucked dry by a barnyard viper.
A new California law that takes effect in 2020 will make it illegal to suspend a student in grades 1-5 for disobeying teachers or administrators. Starting next year, the rule will be applied to students in grades 6-8 and will include charter schools.
There's a very good reason for this change, according to supporters. It's because of racism, you see. More little black kids are punished for disobeying teachers than little white kids. Naturally, there's only one possible explanation, to the exclusion of all others.
Whitey has it in for black children.
KCRA:
Yes, a study by San Diego State and UCLA called “ Get Out! Black Male Suspensions in California Public Schools,”
After weeks of behind-the-scenes debate, Senate Republicans have hit on their strategy for handling President Trump’s impeachment: a brief trial — with no witness testimony — and a fast acquittal.
“I’m ready to vote now,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) told The Hill. “I think the articles are a joke.”
But they don’t want to dismiss the House Democrats’ charges out of hand, as some Trump allies have proposed.
“It’s time for him to have his day in court,” Hawley said. “The president deserves to have due process.”
Trump, who was calling for a full-blown trial with multiple witnesses (Snip) now supports the Senate leadership’s plan.
“The facts belie
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Around the globe, cancer incidence has been steadily increasing over the past half-century.
The question I have asked myself and many others most often over the past decade is, with all this technology, the artificial intelligence, the autonomous cars, the drones, how have we not cracked cancer?
Well, there are of course many answers, the first of which is that there is no such thing as “cracking cancer.” We call it cancer, but every cancer is of course different and needs a different type of cure.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Lizzie Fletcher’s first bill — a measure meant to cut away federal red tape and speed up disaster recovery funding — passed the House nearly unanimously, with just seven votes against it and some of the chamber’s most conservative members joining the freshman Democrat in pushing the legislation forward.
The next day, Fletcher voted to impeach President Donald Trump — a move Republicans are dead-set on making sure overshadows all else Fletcher has done in her rather effective first year in Congress.
For weeks now Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale has posted numbers on Trump rally attendees. Here’s Parscale’s tweet following President Trump’s Mississippi rally where 27% of attendees were former Democrats. (Tweet) It’s at the point that even CNN can’t ignore it. In a recent appearance on CNN Washington Post White House reporter Seung Min Kim reported on the startling number of Democrats who are attending the Trump rallies.When even the Washington Post and CNN take notice
Sue Lyon, who at 14 was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita,” a film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s eyebrow-raising novel about a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with a 12-year-old girl, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 73.
Phil Syracopoulos, a longtime friend, announced her death. He said she had been in declining health for some time.
Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel, which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself.
Something not-so-funny happened on the way to the Russian Collusion accusations that dominate the politics of our day.
And it happened between 2010 and 2016. In June of 2010, federal prosecutors within the F.B.I. accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, during a major sting operation. After years of surveillance, the 11 were caught “living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy making circles.” (New York Times, June 28, 2010). “An F.B.I. investigation that began at least seven years ago culminated with the arrest on
This is the time of year that a lot of publications explore the bests of the last decade—one hundred greatest albums, ten greatest movies, and so on. This is not one of those lists. Is this list in ascending or descending order? People of good faith can disagree.
It was an eventful time in the politics of our great state, replete with many lows and lower lows. Join me in remembering it with me, will you? At least, don’t leave me alone here.
“There’s a lot of talk about FISA applications,” then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said during a May 1, 2018 “Law Day” event at the Newseum, a Washington D.C. museum of the news. “And many people I see talking about it seem not to recognize what a FISA application is,” (Snip)
“Just like a search warrant, in order to get a FISA search warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career federal law enforcement officer who swears [Rosenstein raised his right hand for effect] that the information in the affidavit is true and correct to the best of his knowledge and belief. And if it’s wrong . . . that person
In April, I published my list of The Top Ten Evilest People of All Time. It was, I admit, a joy to be Dante for a day and pronounce sentence on some of history’s greatest villains.
That article got quite a reaction, as people added their own nominees to the list or, as in the case of the leftists who crashed the comments section, to subtract — can you believe it? — the likes of Margaret Sanger and Muhammad from mine. That is, I suppose, the fun of top-10 lists, be it best quarterbacks (no, Brady is not the G.O.A.T.) or worst movies. They are fodder for endless debate
(Tweet/Video) During an interview with the Des Moines Register on Friday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden stated that if he was subpoenaed to testify at the Senate’s impeachment trial, he would not comply, and that if he testified it would create a “diversion” that would allow President Trump to “get away.” Biden explained that he wouldn’t testify “because it’s all designed to deal with Trump doing what he’s done his whole life, trying to take the focus off him. The issue is not what I did. Not a single person, not one single person, even that thug Giuliani and his [unintelligible] compatriots have said
It turns out that 2020 Democrat presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden has no intention of testifying during a Senate impeachment trial against Donald Trump.
During a discussion with the Des Moines Register editorial board Friday, Biden said that even if he were subpoenaed for testimony, he wouldn't attend.
"The reason I wouldn't is because it's all designed to deal with Trump doing what he's done his whole life, trying to take the focus off him. The issue is not what I did, not a single person, not one, not a single person, even that thug Guiliani and his (inaudible) compatriots,
Abolish the Police?
replies
The latest call to action from some criminal-justice activists: “Abolish the police.” From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists are building a case not just to reform policing—viewed as an oppressive, violent, and racist institution—but to do away with it altogether. When I first heard this slogan, I assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist literature,
Theodore McCarrick, the first Catholic cardinal to be defrocked over sexual abuse allegations, sent over $600,000 to powerful clergy in the Church over almost two decades, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The payments started in 2001 and went to high-level clergy around the world, including Vatican bureaucrats, papal advisers and two popes, according to the documents and former Church officials. In total, the former cardinal gave money to over 100 officials, several of whom were closely involved in assessing misconduct claims against McCarrick, the Post reports.
This was devastating! President Trump hit the Bidens and Pelosi families tonight in one tweet! President Trump shined light on Paul Pelosi’s shady dealings with Ukraine! (Tweet/Video) Trump linked to an OAN video of Paul Pelosi’s shady deal with Ukrainian energy companies. (Tweets/Video) As The Gateway Pundit reported back in November Quid-Pro-Joe and his son Hunter are not the only Democrat family members cashing in on their prominent positions. Like many Democrats Paul Pelosi Jr. has made a career off of his mother’s political stature. Shortly after his mother became the first woman speaker, Paul Pelosi Jr.,
Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University. He has written books of varying critical reception on Russia and Eastern Europe. Lately, he has taken to warning Americans of what he sees as the danger the United States will fall into totalitarianism under President Trump. In the past few days, Snyder has turned his attention , not in a scholarly work but in a series of tweets, to a Trump impeachment trial in the Senate. His tweets were notable mostly because Snyder managed to pack a large number of misconceptions about impeachment into a very small space.
The tweets, ten in all, were directed toward Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell.
Making Journalism Great Again
replies
A new year is upon us, and I am keenly aware of the Fourth Estate’s four New Year’s Resolutions for 2020: (1) get Trump; (2) get Trump’s friends and family; (3) ridicule anyone who has voted or would consider voting for Trump; and (4) protect the Democratic Party from scandal. If the “free” press can do this while impersonating the virtuous hero withstanding onslaught from the impenitent pretender in the White House, then all the better. There is nothing they like more than playing Saint George to Trump’s dragon. They’ll need to dig deeper if they expect any of us to take them seriously ever again.
Jason Alderman was hungry. It was the beginning of his regular Sunday night commute from San Francisco to Boston, but unlike most weeks, he hadn't grabbed food before boarding his plane. So that June 2018 evening, the public relations executive did something he'd sworn he'd never do again: He ate the in-flight meal.
Sitting in business class, he ordered the duck ravioli after he says the flight attendant assured him it was "very good." But a few hours later, Alderman knew something was wrong.
"About three-quarters of the way through the flight, I start feeling really bad. Really, really bad," he recalled.
Today the character of Jeff Flake, the former resident Hamlet of the Senate, is being played by GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who originally inherited her Senate seat from her daddy, Frank Murkowski. Murkowski the daughter says she is “disturbed” by Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statements that he will be working closely with and taking his cues from President Trump in any impeachment trial in the Senate.
When Michael Bloomberg flooded Virginia state legislative contests with his anti-gun groups' cash he got a quid pro quo from victorious Democrats: a near ban of AR-15s and a promise of more anti-gun laws. Now, to make room for all the felons who are predicted to be arrested by cops and the Virginia National Guard, whom the governor has been urged to deploy, Democrats are demanding more money for prison space and law enforcement.
Taking guns and making you pay for it is the ultimate gut punch. Law Enforcement Today reports that a $250,000 increase in taxes would enforce these areas:
Allow the removal of firearms
Rachel Maddow’s Reckoning
replies
You may recall that back in March 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow shocked the world by declaring “we’ve got Trump’s tax returns!” Then she later clarified she had obtained Donald Trump’s 1040 form from … 2005. Those who tuned in to her program that evening had to watch a meandering 19-minute soliloquy and a commercial break before Maddow showed anything from the tax return, which wasn’t much. Her guest, David Cay Johnson, speculated that Trump may have also leaked nude photos of Melania.
That night was a massive letdown for those who believed Maddow’s initial announcement, but it previewed what we could expect from Maddow for the next three years,
Roger Ailes might have gotten a kick out of this report from the Washington Post. Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly are locked in a proxy war over, in effect, which of the two women merits top billing in “Bombshell,” the movie about Ailes’s downfall at Fox News. (I say “proxy war” because the battle is being waged by their friends).
The Post’s Paul Fahri reports:
There’s an argument brewing over who deserves credit for triggering Ailes’s demise, one of the major events preceding the start of the #MeToo movement.
The movie. . .has provoked crossfire between Carlson’s and Kelly’s camps about how the Ailes saga
The prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the origins of the Russia investigation is focusing much of his attention on the CIA, placing the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, at the center of a politically toxic tug-of-war between the Justice Department and the intelligence community.
The prosecutor, John Durham, has reportedly asked the CIA for former director John Brennan’s communications as he examines the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened in the election specifically to help Donald Trump.
The “striking” difference between the Bill Clinton and Donald Trump impeachments, argue MSNBC hosts and others in the media, was not only the willingness of Clinton to “show contrition,” but the willingness of his supporters to acknowledge that the president had done something wrong.
Let’s not let liberals rewrite history.
In the real world, Clinton, with help from the entire Democratic Party, kept earnestly lying to anyone who would listen until physical evidence compelled him to admit what he had done. His subsequent “contrition” was a matter of political survival. The notion that Trump engaged in “bribery” is debatable. The notion that Clinton perjured himself is not.
Guy Lewis says impeachment
stalemate is a strategy to gain more
time to build their impeachment case replies
stalemate is a strategy to gain more
time to build their impeachment case replies
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to withhold articles of impeachment against President Trump is merely a strategy to gain more time to build a stronger case, former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis argued Friday.
“I think that the Democrats are looking for additional evidence,” Lewis told “America’s Newsroom,” highlighting that they are aware that the impeachment charges are “dead on arrival” in the Republican-majority Senate. “So, what do you do as a federal prosecutor? You continue to gather evidence. You wait for the president’s tax returns. You look for [former White House Counsel Don] McGahn’s testimony, if and when it becomes available. You try to build your case,” Lewis said.
The Philippines has barred two U.S. senators from visiting the country and has threatened new visa requirements for American travelers.
Effective Friday, Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dick Durbin of Illinois are no longer allowed to travel to the island nation because of a provision they introduced in the 2020 budget that bars entry into the United States for any Filipinos involved in the jailing of Filipina Sen. Leila de Lima.
The announcement was made Friday by President Rodrigo Duterte’s spokesman Salvador Panelo, according to CNN Philippines.
“The Philippines is immediately ordering the Bureau of Immigration to deny US Senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy —
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing to President Donald Trump what no one else has in the nearly three years since he took office: She's making him squirm. In the wake of an impeachment inquiry and with a looming trial in the Senate, the president has become increasingly frustrated by Pelosi's unprecedented decision to withhold the two articles of impeachment against him from the upper chamber until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell guarantees a fair and impartial trial. Pelosi's refusal to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate has robbed the president of what he wants most: "total and complete exoneration" following a trial.
The United States of America no longer has a free press as of December 2019.
Press freedom was already in danger, as Mark Levin noted, as journalists became political activists in the Obama era, and feuded with the president in the Trump era. But press freedom could have thrived in a more openly partisan marketplace of ideas. In the end, press freedom was killed by the press itself, in the decision not to report the name of the so-called “whistleblower” in the impeachment crisis.