Many of you may have noticed that suddenly there’s a plus added in the comments between any username that has two parts, such as a first and last name. I’ve been told it can be remedied if you just take the plus out of the name field once, and it won’t show up again.
Hope that works.
…is that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t just qualified to be a SCOTUS justice, she’s highly qualified and extraordinarily impressive even when under extreme pressure from the opposition.
Oh, and also that the Democrats questioning her are an embarrassment to their offices.
I don’t think the Democrats had this in mind when they decided to hold very contentious hearings – although of course their own constituents probably think they did just great. But I think that in general, to more objective viewers (the two or three who might exist), Barrett came out the clear winner.
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013
It’s not just journalism, of course. In the interconnected web that is our media and social media, Twitter and Facebook have also become dedicated to the cause of squashing stories they don’t like, as well as the online voices of the people who might be trying to tell them.
At Ace’s you can find a huge list of tweets about the fact that the link to the NY Post story on Hunter Biden’s emails (which I wrote about earlier today) cannot be tweeted anymore.
And now, the NY Post’s entire Twitter account has been locked by Twitter. This is, of course, in contrast to the treatment of all the sketchily-sourced anti-Trump stories in the MSM that turned out to be lies. This one may turn out to be less than it appears, too, but let it air in the light of day rather than hide it, and don’t have an obvious double standard. If this story had hurt Trump instead of Biden, there would be no hesitation on the part of Twitter or any of the other social media platforms (or newspapers) to spread it far and wide.
The NY Post is not some fly-by-night rumor-mongering scandal sheet, either.
The Trump campaign has responded to a statement of denial put out by the Biden camp with this reply:
The Biden campaign does not dispute the authenticity of the emails published by the New York Post, which serves to confirm that they are real. And if Joe Biden never met with Vadym Pozharskyi, the Biden campaign would say so. They do not say that. Their answer basically is that the entry ‘Meeting with Ukrainian businessman buying access to the Vice President’ does not appear on Joe Biden’s official schedule. Their response is so carefully worded that it reveals the truth in what they don’t deny. They also don’t address the overarching question of why Joe Biden lied to the American people about never discussing with Hunter Biden his corrupt business dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Americans deserve a full accounting of the conversations Joe Biden had with Hunter, and what Joe Biden discussed with Vadym Pozharskyi.
Don’t count on our precious MSM to press for that “full accounting.”
[NOTE: I wrote this earlier today and somehow forgot to hit “publish.” I was about to post a sequel, and then I realized that this was still in draft form. So here it is as a first installment.]
We’ve known for quite some time that Hunter Biden is a trainwreck who got rich off his father’s position, and we’ve known that – surprise, surprise! – the MSM is uninterested in this juicy story. Today, however, a bunch of emails have surfaced that give more details, including one in particular that suggests that Joe Biden had met, at his son’s behest, with a Ukrainian who was a top guy in an energy firm in that country, and therefore that Joe was lying when he claimed to know nothing whatsoever of Hunter’s business dealings.
The story has appeared in the right-leaning NY Post. More information can be found here, including this Joe Biden quote from September of 2019:
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said, before pivoting to President Trump. “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be looking at Trump.”
That, of course, is around the time when the Democrats were trying to drum up enough outrage to justify their impeachment of Trump over an ordinary presidential act, and to deflect from the Biden controversy. With the help of the MSM, of course.
The Hunter emails also contain evidence of a conference call indicating:
…White House involvement with the call with the p.r. company for Burisma about Joe Biden’s upcoming trip. Pretty hard to say that Biden didn’t know anything and/or it had nothing to do with his position in the administration.
More here on the rather convoluted story of how the emails got revealed.
Not unexpectedly, Facebook is “reducing” links to the story (see this). But Facebook and Google have been putting their thumbs on the leftist/Democratic side of the scale for a long, long time.
And Team Trump is criticizing Facebook:
?? INBOX from @TeamTrump —>
Former Democrat operative turned Facebook official censoring journalism harmful to Biden pic.twitter.com/mTT4yMKzD0
— Abigail Marone ?? (@abigailmarone) October 14, 2020
I assume we haven’t heard the last of this.
…calls forth the woke mob, who oblige by destroying a black-owned Portland restaurant that actually has the gall to support Blue Lives.
One of the big big differences between riots now and riots back in the 60s is that now big businesses are encouraging and sympathizing with the rioters.
Meanwhile – Nancy Pelosi is so startled by Wolf Blitzer’s suddenly putting on his “unbiased reporter” cap, and asking her a series of sustained and relatively hard-hitting questions, that she becomes rattled and aggressive, accusing him and CNN of “always” apologizing for the right.
That would be amusing if it weren’t so Orwellian. And watch her smile through clenched teeth as she does it, barely restraining her rage at Blitzer for his unaccustomed and unexpected betrayal (it’s worth it to watch the entire thing to see how he hangs in there]:
I really don’t see how anyone can watch that and admire the woman, even Democrats. What extraordinary entitlement and arrogance. By not challenging Democrats, or doing so only on extremely rare occasions, the MSM has been instrumental in fostering this sort of self-righteous and utterly hypocritical haughtiness and disdain. How dare they question her – she represents the people, after all!
Nancy Pelosi is PEOPLE!
But there are shrines to George Floyd:
The memorial itself is a 15-foot black fist erected in the middle of the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, festooned roundabout with flowers and signs and graffiti and flags. Every conceivable surface, from the streets and sidewalks and light poles to the buildings and bus shelters and the abandoned Speedway gas station on the corner, is covered in graffiti and posters and overlapping murals…
The businesses at this intersection have been all but destroyed. Cup Foods, the convenience store where a teenage clerk called 911 after Floyd tried to pass a fake $20 bill, and where he later died, didn’t reopen until Aug. 3. The store’s owners tried to open in June a few weeks after Floyd’s death but quickly closed amid backlash from activists and a self-appointed “security force” from the neighborhood.
One of the store’s co-owners, Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, is behind the counter on the phone when I walk in. After getting death threats, he now wears a gun and employs an armed security guard at the store, which has been a neighborhood staple for the past 30 years. Abumayyaleh and his brother, Samir, own the entire building, which also includes a barbershop, a laundromat, and a mosque.
But some activists and agitators want the immigrant-owned family store to shutter for good.
Please read the whole thing.
I don’t see how the store can survive. But I also don’t see how the city can survive, except as a ghost of its former self, a set from a dystopic film that’s all too real.
The city’s so-called “leaders” – mayor and city councilors, as well as the state’s governor – abdicated their first responsibility, to keep civil order. It was sacrificed to BLM and Antifa as well as to random looters and arsonists and all-around sociopaths, in the name of righting racial wrongs. And of course, in the irony that is commonplace in such situations, the entire city suffers – most especially its minorities.
The article quotes one speaker who identifies as “center-left” as saying he is going to vote for Trump, and so are some of his friends. That would be heartening, except for two things. The first is that I doubt many leftists in Minneapolis have had the same reaction. And the second is that Minnesota is one of the states in which I think voting fraud on the part of the Democrats will be rampant (see this for a description of some of the ways this can be done).
About a motion filed by Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell asking for Sullivan’s recusal:
Is anyone surprised that this is going on? I’m certainly not, and I bet you’re not either.
The dead are receiving ballots – sometimes, the long-dead. Many people are getting duplicate ballots. Some ballots are being thrown out. And there’s probably plenty more, including of course the possibilities for fraud inherent in ballot harvesting.
It’s not just California that’s suspect, but California has one of the most easily corruptible voting situations, and I believe that is by design.
And to those who say “it should have been fixed before this,” my question is “how?”. After all, California is totally run by Democrats, and the Republicans have no power. In addition, if the game is rigged against them and voter fraud on the part of Democrats is a significant factor in local politics, the right would have to win in an overwhelming landslide in order to change things.
Is that the future of the US?
NOTE: I’ve been trying to determine whether SCOTUS has ever ruled on ballot harvesting. Apparently not, at least I couldn’t find anything in a quick search except this pending case that will be heard after the election. And the case involves Arizona, not California. What’s more, the case involves a challenge to some restrictions on Arizona ballot harvesting – that only a relative or caregiver can return such a ballot – and an effort to loosen the rules rather than tighten them.
This is actually one of the most disturbing of what are euphemistically known as Biden’s “gaffes” (please watch the video):
“56% of Americans said that they are better off today than they were 4 years ago under the Obama-Biden administration. Why should they vote for you?”
Biden: Well if they think that, they probably shouldn’t pic.twitter.com/upKO1TMMZy
— Jewish Deplorable ?? (@TrumpJew) October 13, 2020
The reporter is to be commended for asking the question, which is a bit difficult to answer but features a poll that has been widely talked about lately. Biden should have had a prepared answer for it.
An acceptable answer might have gone something like this: “Well, that was just one poll, and other polls say the American people prefer me quite strongly. So I must be doing something right.”
Instead, Biden bizarrely says that the 56% of people who think they’re better off today than they were four years ago shouldn’t vote for him. I wonder whether that means he simply doesn’t care what 56% of the people think, because he knows voter fraud will carry him over the finish line. Or maybe he just gets angry when anything or anyone challenges him, and saying this group shouldn’t vote for him is a statement he feels comes off as lovably feisty.
And what he actually says is even more troubling that that: he adds that, if fifty-four percent of the people say they are better off now than four years ago, “Well, their memory’s not very good.” So, immediately prior to challenging the accuracy of memory of a vast swath of the American public – the ones who aren’t smart enough to vote for Joe – Biden makes an error about the figure the reporter has just given him, because that figure was 56% rather than 54%. And he not only says they don’t have to vote for him, he says they don’t correctly perceive or remember the facts of their own lives. He, Joe Biden, knows better and remembers better.
It’s one thing to forget a specific number after some passage of time. But to forget it nearly immediately is evidence of a higher degree of cognitive disruption. I doubt he misheard the number, either, because “six” sounds nothing like “four.”
Then Biden pivots to what he knows best, a trashing of Trump, which is pretty much the tactic of his entire campaign. It’s his happy place. And one of the things Biden says – that Trump is not very honest with people – is especially ironic coming from one of the biggest and most long-term liars in American politics.
Of course they do – because they believe (correctly IMHO) that they can get away with it. They do it in unison, even though it’s a preposterous notion to use the phrase in this novel way – to mean appointing someone to the Court to make a conservative majority, and yet to keep the number of justices at nine.
Meanwhile, they themselves strongly contemplate a future in which they will actively court-pack in the sense that the phrase has always been used:
One of the reasons why trying to discuss things with Democrats is a frustrating waste of time is their penchant for redefining key words and concepts on the fly to fit whatever item on their agenda they’re pushing that day. So, in this case, ‘court packing’ is a bad thing, therefore a Republican president using his constitution-granted authority to appoint judges with the advice and consent of the Senate is ‘court packing’. In fact, pretty much anything the GOP does to put originalist judges on the bench is ‘court packing.’ And so the phrase, completely torn away from its historical context, is now just another flaccid pejorative used by crybaby Democrats who are unhappy about getting their asses handed to them over and over again. For example here’s sob sister Dick Durbin:
“…the American people have watched the Republicans packing the court over the last three and a half years. And they brag about it. They?ve taken every vacancy and filled it.”
Imagine that! The gall of these Republicans, filling vacancies. In other words, packing the Court is now nominating judges to fill vacancies, if the judges aren’t of the leftist persuasion. Apparently, leftism is the natural and correct state of SCOTUS, and anything different is a violation.
A rhetorical approach like this can succeed only if two things are present: a dumbed-down electorate too ignorant to understand the principles involved, and a unitary MSM that doesn’t include a sizeable enough and vocal enough segment of journalists who are not onboard and who will challenge the prevailing agree-on message. The right can rant all it wants in our hermetically sealed echo chamber, but will anyone who isn’t already on the right hear it?
The Humpty Dumpty Democrats and reporters say [emphasis mine]:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”