Didn’t we sort of already know something of this, or at least suspect it? Is it just that it’s now somewhat more official?:
Fox’s Jesse Watters featured a bombshell story from Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi on his show on Tuesday: that the Obama CIA had foreign allies surveil Trump aides, setting off the Russia collusion hoax.
The official story to this point has been that Australian officials informed U.S. officials that a Trump aide told an Australian diplomat that Russia had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
“Sources” say this began as far back as March of 2016.
But wasn’t there already suspicion that the Obama administration had tipped Australia off?
Donald Trump has said he wants Australia’s role in setting off the FBI inquiry into links between Russia and his election campaign examined by the US attorney general, William Barr.
It is a potentially explosive development for the historically solid US-Australian alliance and the first time Trump has publicly named Australia while discussing what he calls the “Russia hoax” and “witch hunt”. …
Trump said he had declassified “potentially millions of pages” of intelligence documents related to surveillance activities on his campaign and Barr would be in charge of analysing it.
“So what I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan.
“He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine.
“I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”
Trump’s former campaign aide George Papadopoulos has claimed that Australia’s former high commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer, spied on him during a meeting at a London bar in May 2016.
Some of that information about the surveillance and the FBI investigation is in a 10-inch binder, according to this report. Trump ordered that material be declassified prior to leaving office. So, what happened to the binder?
Shellenberger told Watters that they would have a follow-up piece specifically to address questions about the binder and the rumor that the binder may have factored into the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Shellenberger said if the binder contains what they have been told, that’s “extremely serious information.” It’s been speculated by many for a long time that the raid was related to Crossfire Hurricane documents, so if they have something firm on that, that would be hugely significant information to reveal.
Expelling Santos would only benefit Democrats. So why are Republicans about to do it?
Yesterday was a special election in Santos’ district, and the Democrat won:
In a disappointing outcome for Republicans, another House seat has flipped to the Democrats as former Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Tom Suozzi has been declared the winner over Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip in Tuesday’s special election for New York’s Third Congressional District.
Suozzi won the seat back; he held it prior to Santos but had quit in 2022 to run unsuccessfully for governor.
True, it appears that Santos is a liar who cheated campaign donors out of thousands of dollars so he could fund a tacky, degenerate lifestyle buying luxury clothes and subscribing to online pornography. (Yes, Santos paid for something that is free, but I’m not defending him as a genius.) He’s been charged with serious crimes, and he’s probably someone I’d never let near my kids or borrow a ten-spot. But he hasn’t been convicted of anything. And Republicans, with a 14-seat [sic] majority, are in no position to be shedding votes. What’s the rush? Santos is up for reelection in a year anyway. Until then, why not just hold off on any votes related to OnlyFans?
Ah, but then Republicans wouldn’t be able to go on CNN and say they “did the right thing.” And by “the right thing,” elected Republicans invariably mean “the thing that nobody outside the Washington media cares about or benefits from but gets me a pat on the head from The New York Times.”
Republicans lose another seat, which might very well go to a Democrat in a special election — but hey, it’s the decent, noble, principled thing to do.
You, American voter who wanted change in 2022, gaze on as the U.S. dollar disintegrates, billions get shipped to foreign wars, and Democrats criminalize their political opposition. But don’t worry. Mike Johnson and his GOP colleagues will get to say they have dignity because they sacrificed one of their own.
(1) More evidence for what everyone ought to know by now, which is that Hamas doesn’t just want a Palestinian state. It wants Israel destroyed, and it wants the entire world to become Muslim.
(2) Biden blames Trump for not vaccinating the public. There are so many things wrong with this charge that I hardly know where to begin, but in fact the vaccine wasn’t available until after the 2020 election (in December), and the Trump administration drew up a vaccination plan which Biden followed. And of course, vaccination was not the hoped-for magic bullet anyway.
(3) The gang rape of a 13-year-old in Italy by “Egyptian migrants” is feared to be an opportunity for the “far right” to pounce.
(4) The ridiculously destructive “2-state solution” should be completely off the table at this point:
But compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of self-therapy, the two-state solution is, sadly, no solution at all. Rather, it is a big step down the road to another Lebanon. It would doom the Zionist project, not save it, while producing much greater misery and more bloodshed for Israelis and Palestinians alike. By now most of us in Israel understand this dreadful math.
That’s from someone who used to support the 2-state solution.
First of all, that’s been happening for decades. Second of all, there’s a reason it’s happening, and that reason isn’t that corporations are just plain mean.
Male high jumper Maelle Jacques won a GIRLS' high school state title yesterday in New Hampshire. @NHIAA_LOA
His winning jump was almost 10" lower than the boys' winning height. His 10 pt score helped the Kearsage HS girls' track & field team jump to runner-up in the state among… pic.twitter.com/mX2c0lUOHS
There’s a hint there as to why schools let this happen: it helps the team place higher. However, not only is it an obvious travesty which we’re not supposed to notice, but it hurts individual girl athletes:
…[S]ince Maelle has declared that he is femaelle, he finished in fourth in the girls meet. This is significant for two reasons:
1. His girl’s team got 5 points towards their team score.
2. The top 6 girls in each event qualify for the New England Championship, which meant that Brooke Bouchard of Hollis-Brookline Regional would’ve qualified if she ran against a field exclusively of other girls.
Many people think the girls should just refuse to compete. But don’t underestimate how difficult that is. From the comments at LI:
Competitors definitely don’t want to miss a meet. And/But, they definitely don’t want to miss a meet and then get labeled ‘transphobic.’ There’s a reason why (for the most part) the only collegiate athletes who are publicly criticizing this insanity are those who are in their senior year or have graduated. The younger girls in college or those prep school athletes wanting to make a collegiate team themselves, keep their mouths shut because they’re terrified of retaliation. Given what happened to the college coach (I think at Otterbein), that fear is clearly justified.
Plus, unless it’s a group boycott, it has little effect except to ruin the boycotter’s athletic career. I wish more people were strong enough to protest by getting together in a large group to stop participating, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect that many people to be courageous. In my opinion it is the athletic authorities who allow this who are the gutless cowards who should stop it.
All sorts of news today on Biden. First, we have his refusal to take a cognitive test at his physical:
The White House says President Biden will not take a cognitive test — even after a damning report from his own Department of Justice highlighting his “poor memory” and voters expressing major concerns about his mental acuity.
“The president proves every day [in] how he operates and how he thinks — by dealing with world leaders, by making difficult decisions on behalf of the American people — whether it’s domestic or national security,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday, quoting from Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor.
Well, yes, we all see that. We also see him speak about talking with dead leaders, getting fog-brained on a regular basis, and getting disoriented spatially as well.
I actually agree with those who say that Biden isn’t senile; I have long said he’s cognitively challenged. It’s just a question of how bad it has gotten, and he actually can be coherent on many occasions, at least for a while. But not only do we not want a cognitively challenged president, we don’t want one whose judgment is as terrible as Biden’s. However, with Biden, it’s difficult to tell whether his poor judgment is a result of his cognitive challenges or whether it’s merely a demonstration of his lifelong dimness. There’s also his lifelong penchant for lying and his long-term corruption to consider.
It’s quite the combination.
I’ve long said that I think the Democrats will nominate him in 2024 anyway, for want of a better candidate and in particular due to the difficulty of removing him. The needle has shifted somewhat in the direction of removal, I think. But it’s still not quite there; perhaps they themselves aren’t sure what they will do and how they will do it. My guess is that there are several camps fighting over this, probably quite bitterly.
But however competent or incompetent Joe Biden seems to the American public, you can be sure the Democrats are busy “fortifying” the election. And at the moment, most of the Democrat spokespeople certainly seem to be saying “pay no attention to that weird old guy in front of the curtain, the real Joe is sharp as a tack.” Perhaps that indicates they will stand behind him in November, or perhaps they’re just buying time and gaslighting us until they find a good substitute and a face-saving method of removal.
But on the corruption side, there’s plenty of news as well: we have this from Hunter’s business associate Bobulinski:
However, most Democrats I know – probably all Democrats I know – will vote for Biden if he is the nominee, especially if he runs against Trump. That’s because Trump is Hitler, or something like that.
[ADDENDUM: More on Bobulinski’s testimony can be found here.]
Here’s a video with a few of the details; more can be found here:
New Argentinian president Milei, a friend of Israel who recently visited there, got a present because both hostages – Fernando Marman, 61, and Louis Har, 70 – were originally Argentinian nationals.
From the Times of Israel article I linked:
The joint operation by the police’s elite Yamam counterterrorism unit, the Shin Bet security agency, and IDF began at around 1 a.m. in Rafah, an area that Israeli forces had not yet maneuvered into during their ground offensive against the Hamas terror group.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Yamam officers “carried out a very complex action on the premises and the second floor where the hostages were held.” …
He said the forces breached the apartment with explosives at 1:49 a.m., killing the three terrorists guarding the hostages and “hugged and protected Louis and Fernando with their bodies.”
“The troops pulled Louis and Fernando out of the apartment and rescued them under fire, until they reached the safe zone,” Hagari said.
The IDF later released footage from the air showing the rescuers entering a building and strikes hitting the area.
Fighting also broke out in several adjacent buildings, with massive airstrikes carried out against Hamas terrorists in the area of the rescue operation at 1:50 a.m., Hagari said.
The fact that they were on the second floor seems to be a significant reason that Israel was able to carry out this rescue, but as pointed out in the video, this is unusual and most of the hostages are being kept underground. I wish they didn’t release these details, but once they’re released they can’t be unreleased.
AP coverage of the same story is typically slanted against Israel (as are many other MSM stories I found, such as this one, all of which emphasize the numbers of Palestinian dead given out by Hamas, although the articles don’t put it exactly that way). The headline of the AP piece is: “Israeli forces rescue 2 hostages in dramatic Gaza raid that killed at least 67 Palestinians”
So even in the headline we have a tit-for-tat approach in which the Israelis are by implication the bad guys – to rescue two men, they killed at least 67 “Palestinians.” And these are supposedly generic Palestinians, not armed terrorists or terrorists at all. Most people just read the headlines and maybe the first paragraph or two; some just the headlines.
Another AP article by the same three people – who seem to write a lot for AP on this war – also takes Hamas’ word for the number of casualties. The headline for that article also gives no hint that the figures just might be propaganda: “More than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, health officials say.” Who are these “health officials”? The AP does not tell us in that headline (or often in the articles themselves, either), which is no accident.
These headlines are very carefully crafted, as are the articles themselves, to stir up hatred of Israel and sympathy for the Palestinians. The sub-headline of that article edges up to saying the fuller truth but still doesn’t say it directly; this is an art they’ve perfected: “The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says more than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war.” Why not say these figures are uncorroborated and highly suspect and that the Health Ministry and Hamas are one and the same? You know why; then people wouldn’t be as sympathetic and wouldn’t hate Israel so much, and the AP can’t have that.
Continuing:
More than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory said Monday.
Minors made up about 47% of the total number of 28,176 Palestinians killed so far, the ministry said. About 8,400 women were also among those killed.
“Minors” is a legal term. What does it mean? Shouldn’t they define it? Much better for propaganda purposes if they leave it vague, but it usually refers to people under 18 years of age. They don’t want people thinking of 17-year-old and 16-year-old Hamas fighters with guns as being chief among those “minors.” And of course they want the reader to trust this “health ministry” that might be in “Hamas-run” Gaza but certainly isn’t identified as being Hamas itself.
Then the first AP article I linked is repeated, the one on the hostage rescue operation. An excerpt:
Israeli forces rescued two hostages early Monday, storming a heavily guarded apartment in the southern Gaza Strip and extracting the captives under fire in a dramatic raid that was a small but symbolically significant success for Israel. The operation killed at least 67 Palestinians, including women and children, according to Palestinian health officials in the beleaguered territory.
So here we have, “According to Palestinian health officials in the beleaguered territory.” There are those health officials again; no mention of Hamas in that paragraph. And note the adjective “beleaguered,” designed to elicit even more sympathy for the Gazans.
The raid was celebrated in Israel as a victory in the sluggish battle to free the hostages, with more than 100 captives still held by Hamas and other Gaza militants, and briefly lifted the spirits of a nation still reeling from Hamas’ cross-border raid last year. But in Gaza, where civilians have borne a staggering toll since the war erupted on Oct. 7, the operation unleashed another wartime tragedy, with many Palestinians killed or wounded.
Those nasty Israelis, celebrating the rescue of the two while a far larger tragedy occurs in the Gazan neighborhood – another tragedy for the poor innocent Palestinians. No mention that most of these people that Hamas reports having been killed are probably Hamas terrorist themselves. And the grisly October 7, with its terrible attacks on civilians featuring massive sadistic torture and rape is reduced to a “cross-border raid.” That’s quite the eupemism.
Much of the rest of the article is spent in recapping the background of the conflict and describing the hostage rescue. Then, as if we hadn’t already heard this, we hear again:
[The two hostages] were among roughly 250 taken captive during Hamas’ stunning cross-border raid, when an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, according to Israeli authorities. Israeli’s retaliatory air and ground offensive has killed over 28,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, displaced over 80% of the population and set off a massive humanitarian crisis.
You see, what Israel did is so much worse, according to this paragraph. The October 7 massacre is labeled a “stunning cross-border raid” – a fairly neutral word – in which civilians “were killed.” Well, isn’t that what Israel is doing? Killing? No mention that Hamas broke a ceasefire. No mention of the purpose of the “stunning raid” being to kill civilians and to torture and rape them in a manner that was extremely barbaric. Just that a certain number of people were killed by Hamas in a raid, and of course the numbers from these “health officials” are so much greater than any killed in that little October 7 “raid.” Plus, mention of the huge numbers of Palestinians that were displaced, but with a little detail left out: that this was done by Israel to save their lives and leave only terrorists to target, and that Hamas wants the civilians dead and discouraged them from leaving in order that the AP and MSM could write just this sort of story about their deaths.
Then there’s a lengthy description of the wounded in a Gaza hospital. But we already know from many previous experiences that much of this is often staged, so that what is real cannot be ascertained at this point or sometimes at any point (some videos even feature the same actors over and over as victims in different places and with different garb, and at least those can easily be seen to be fake).
NOTE: Another story is that a huge Hamas center for processing data was found under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
A woman who walked into a popular Texas megachurch Sunday afternoon with a long gun and a young child opened fire before she was killed by law enforcement officers on scene. The gunfire left the child in critical condition and another man injured, officials said.
Authorities are now probing the shooting at televangelist and pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church – roughly 6 miles from downtown Houston.
The woman, identified in a search warrant as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, entered the church shortly before 2 p.m. wearing a trench coat and backpack and opened fire, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said in a Sunday afternoon news conference.
Officers “shot and killed her in self-defense” after she pointed her weapon at them, according to the search warrant released Monday by the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office.
Female shooters are unusual, but not unheard of. Some recent ones have actually been trans, and although a few outlets have said that Moreno was trans, there is no official confirmation so we still don’t know for sure. However, a previously unheard of thing – as far as I can tell – is for any such shooter in the US to purposely bring a young child to the scene of the planned murder or murders.
Why would anyone do that? The following – which can be found quite far down in the story, might just be a hint:
The shooter used an AR-15 that had “Free Palestine” written on it, according to a federal law enforcement source. Investigators are trying to determine whether she was politically motivated or a disturbed individual, the source said.
Well, how about “both”? It’s an old Palestinian custom to use children either as human shields to discourage authorities from shooting, or as tools to implicate authorities for cruelty if the child is hit by their return fire.
And you better believe that, if the weapon was reported to have had something like “Donald Trump is the greatest!” on it, that would have been the CNN lede and headline.
The right-leaning NY Postcovers the story quite differently. The transgender possibility is in the headline, and the “Free Palestine” detail is in the lede sentence.
More on the possible transgender angle:
Moreno had a criminal history dating back to 2005 and was previously arrested under the name Jeffery Escalante, according to local station KHOU, raising questions over whether the shooter was transitioning before or at the time of the attack.
A 2022 photo taken when Moreno was booked into jail at Fort Bend County, Texas, listed her sex as female, according to the website Mugshots Zone.
I haven’t seen any article mentioning the obvious, which is that Moreno/Escalante seems to be Hispanic. The shooting occurred right before a Spanish-language service, as well.
At any rate, this sort of incident is why many houses of worship have armed guards these days. It’s a wise move.
UPDATE 6:40 PM:
Now it is reported that the shooter was a biological woman with “a history of mental illness,” and that the child was her 7-year-old son.
Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said it remained too soon to identify a motive for the shooting, but officials said they were looking into a dispute involving the shooter and the family of the shooter’s ex-husband, adding that investigators also found antisemitic writings by the shooter.
Hassig also said the rifle used in the shooting had a “Palestine” sticker on the buttstock.
This sounds as though the incident may have involved a combination of factors: a mentally disturbed person, a family conflict, and recent current events giving the perp’s rage a pro-Palestinian political form and perhaps even the idea of taking her child with her as a combination of shield and sacrifice. The child was shot in the head, whether by the woman or the security guards we don’t know, but the exchange of gunfire occurred in a hallway and lasted several minutes.
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]
His actual birthday, that is.
When I was a child, Lincoln had a birthday all his own. Nowadays he’s lumped in with other presidents. And who knows where he’ll be in the future?
When I was a child, Lincoln also fascinated me more than any other president. One reason was a superficial one: he was just about the strangest-looking president ever (see this). Another was his eloquence, and a third was his sense of humor.
Which brings us to a series of Lincoln quotes. This first one seems especially apropos today:
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
More:
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.
I hope this prediction is correct:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
And of course, one of the most famous:
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Hollywood, circa 1956. Ferrer and Hepburn were married in real life at the time:
Here’s the Russian version made in the 1960s, which I saw in movie theaters long ago. I found it a mixed bag, and extremely long; it’s over seven hours, and I saw it in segments. But the length and scope allowed the filmmakers to take their time with scenes such as this one. I also found the actor who played Andrei to lean too heavily towards the reptilian and repellent. Natasha was excellent, though:
