Sheriff Alex Villanueva told KTLA on Monday that video of the brazen shooting shows the male deputy staggering out of the patrol car after being shot, and the female deputy also getting out of the car.
Both were suffering from gunshot wounds to the head, officials said.
Villanueva said the female deputy, a 31-year-old wife and mother, and the 24-year-old male deputy, took lifesaving actions to help each other soon after they were shot multiple times.
“He’s bleeding out profusely from the arm so she actually applies a tourniquet to his arm to stop the bleeding and she tries to call for help on the radio,” Villanueva explained. “It’s pretty heart-wrenching and she’s trying mumble and we finally get her…she says where she is at and the fact that there was a shooting, and that got all the help rolling in her direction.”
Villanueva said after exiting their patrol car, the wounded deputies hid behind a column.
“They didn’t know if the gunman was going to come back or not and they’re obviously both disabled and injured, very gut-wrenching to see the video and the heroic efforts from both of them to get to safety and still manage to take care of each other,” Villanueva said.
BLM and cops: Words aren’t violence, but they can lead to violence
The narrative that “cops hunt down black people to kill them” leads to actual killings. Killings of cops. Killings by rioters rioting against cops. Killings by black people killing other black people in neighborhoods from which the police have withdrawn.
And all of it stirred up by Marxists and other racial demagogues, sports figures and Hollywood stars, pundits and politicians, lawyers like Ben Crump, and garden-variety well-meaning useful idiots, pushing the lie that police are at war with black people and especially black men and are killing them for no reason other than racial animus.
Now we have reached the point where people are rioting in Lancaster, PA over a cop who shot and killed a person engaged in the act of charging at the officer, knife in hand and raised to strike (see also this). How can that self-defense killing by the officer not be considered justified? But by definition, no killing of a black person [NOTE: or “person of color”] by a white officer can be justified anymore. It doesn’t matter what the deceased person was doing. The officer cannot defend him/herself; the officer must die so that the perp might live.
And that’s how we get to Compton, California, and people who support the cold-blooded attempted assassination of two deputies while they sat in their car. It all fits together like the pieces of a puzzle: blue lives don’t matter, cops cannot be allowed to defend themselves, cops need to die.
This is an evil that’s rests – like so many evils – on a lie. Everyone complicit in that lie should be ashamed, but they are very far from shame.
Biden’s teleprompter reveal
It’s not news that Joe Biden almost certainly uses a teleprompter or copious notes for even the most softball of interviews – and for him, the MSM obliges by making practically all of them softball. Despite the fact that he’s rarely challenged by the press, he seems to be reading a significant amount of the time. It is likely that the questions are either given him ahead of the interview, or someone is keyboarding into a device that feeds him the answers in real time.
The other day what looked like a teleprompter was revealed in a reflection in a large framed photo with a glass covering that Biden held up during an interview. This was discussed by pundits on the right. But so far I can’t find any coverage in the MSM – not even a refutation of the charges that it happened. If you can find something please let me know, but it seems that the MSM is simply ignoring it, in a continuation of its “Emperor’s New Clothes” policy of Biden coverage.
If you had been told twenty or thirty years ago that a major party, the Democrats, had nominated a near-78-year-old who showed strong signs of cognitive decline, so much so that he could not speak extemporaneously in a coherent manner, and that not only was that party covering up that fact but virtually the entire press corps was complicit, you might not have believed it could happen. And yet here we are.
Yes, in the past the press covered up for the extent of FDR’s disability during his administration. But that was a physical disability – and an already-known and acknowledged one, just not the full extent of it. Whether FDR could walk did not affect his functioning as president one iota. Similarly, when Wilson was incapacitated and his wife had to take over for quite a while, the press covered that up, too. But at least Wilson was a president already in office at that time, and they didn’t want to alarm the public. There have been other instances of press silence, too – for example, about JFK’s sex life.
But this is different. Joe Biden is a candidate. We are about to have an election. He’s not in office at all. And his mental acuity (or lack of it) is one of the most salient characteristics of his about which the voters need to be informed. If he is going to be a mostly-empty vessel with other unspecified people providing the content, we all need to know. And yet the press is aiding and abetting the deception of the American public on that score.
Of course, we know why. Biden is the hand they’ve been dealt, and they’ll do whatever they believe it takes to defeat the hated, despised, and feared Trump. There’s nothing secret about that.
[NOTE: When I was a child I used to play canasta with my grandmother. At a certain point I realized that I could see her cards in the reflection in her glasses. I cheated for a bit, and then I confessed and suggested that she hold her cards differently in the future.]
[ADDENDUM: By the way, that interview occurred in April. So this isn’t just some recent innovation of Biden’s. He was being interviewed from his home, of course, where he is free to set up nearly any way he wants. Who’s going to check? I wonder whether that’s the plan for the debates – he’ll be in his home and will be using one or many prompts and aids (as well as aides) to answer questions.]
What happened to Newark?
When I was a child, I had elderly relatives who lived in Newark, New Jersey. We’d visit them now and then. They lived in an old apartment building that had a European quality (as did their furnishings), with very high ceilings and fancy moldings. They weren’t rich, but they were solidly middle-class, and the city was safe.
Some time later they moved to the suburbs, nearer their children. The last time I visited Newark was probably in the late 60s, and it already wasn’t a place where you would want to be. Recently I did some genealogical research and found out that a bunch of my relatives going way way back are buried in Newark as well. But then I discovered that you can only visit these cemeteries nowadays with a police escort, and that they’d been quite thoroughly vandalized anyway.
In a way, that’s the story of Newark, about which I became more curious – in particular, in light of the recent rioting across America.
The story of Newark is actually more complicated than one might think. And more familiar. By the 1800s the place was already thriving:
Newark has long been the largest city in New Jersey. Founded in 1666, it greatly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, becoming the commercial and cultural hub of the region. Its population grew with various waves of migration in the mid 20th century, peaking in 1950.
That would be when I knew it – at its peak.
Newark was founded by Puritans (now, that was a surprise to me) and named “New Ark” for “New Ark of the covenant.” The Puritans were in tight control till the mid-1700s, and then in the early 1800s the city grew tremendously because of the rise of the leather business there (patent leather was invented in Newark):
The middle 19th century saw continued growth and diversification of Newark’s industrial base. The first commercially successful plastic — Celluloid — was produced in a factory on Mechanic Street by John Wesley Hyatt. Hyatt’s Celluloid found its way into Newark-made carriages, billiard balls, and dentures. Dr. Edward Weston perfected a process for zinc electroplating, as well as a superior arc lamp in Newark. Newark’s Military Park had the first public electric lamps anywhere in the United States. Before moving to Menlo Park, Thomas Edison himself made Newark home in the early 1870s. He invented the stock ticker in the Brick City.
Innovation and manufacturing. The insurance business was added, and the city continued to boom:
As Newark’s population approached a half million in the 1920s, the city’s potential seemed limitless. It was said in 1927: “Great is Newark’s vitality. It is the red blood in its veins – this basic strength that is going to carry it over whatever hurdles it may encounter, enable it to recover from whatever losses it may suffer and battle its way to still higher achievement industrially and financially, making it eventually perhaps the greatest industrial center in the world”.
Post-WWII, however, the city became depleted because of many financial incentives favoring the suburbs, plus a highway system that did the same. The inner city became the refuge of the poor, and of more and more of the black inhabitants who had flocked to Newark as part of the Great Migration when the city was still coasting on its reputation as a city of opportunity [my emphasis]:
The city made serious mistakes with public housing and urban renewal, although these were not the sole causes of Newark’s tragedy. Across several administrations, the city leaders of Newark considered the federal government’s offer to pay for 100% of the costs of housing projects as a blessing. The decline in industrial jobs meant that more poor people needed housing, whereas in prewar years, public housing was for working-class families. While other cities were skeptical about putting so many poor families together and were cautious in building housing projects, Newark pursued federal funds. Eventually, Newark had a higher percentage of its residents in public housing than any other American city…
From 1950 to 1960, while Newark’s overall population dropped from 438,000 to 408,000, it gained 65,000 non-whites. By 1966, Newark had a black majority, a faster turnover than most other northern cities had experienced. Evaluating the riots of 1967, Newark educator Nathan Wright, Jr. said, “No typical American city has as yet experienced such a precipitous change from a white to a black majority.” The misfortune of the Great Migration and Puerto Rican migration was that Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans were moving to Newark to be industrial workers just as the industrial jobs were decreasing sharply.
The changes accelerated, with what used to be known as “white flight,” and redlining:
During the 1950s alone, Newark’s white population decreased by more than 25 percent from 363,000 to 266,000. From 1960 to 1967, its white population fell further to 46,000. Although in-migration of new ethnic groups combined with white flight markedly affected the demographics of Newark, the racial composition of city workers did not change as rapidly.
At the point, the stage was set for the riots of 1967. A black population frustrated by the fact that they had come to the city just as the city’s jobs were dying, and a police force that remained predominantly white, because the turnover there was understandably not as fast. The riots were sparked by the now-familiar scenario of a police action that was resented:
Despite being one of the first cities in the country to hire black police officers, the department’s demographics remained at odds with the city’s population, leading to poor relations between black people and the police department. Only 145 of the 1,322 police officers in the city were black (11%), mirroring national demographics, while the city grew to be over 50% black…
This unrest and social change came to a head when two white Newark police officers, John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, arrested a black cab driver, John William Smith, on the evening of July 12. After signaling, Smith passed the double parked police car, after which he was pursued and pulled over by the officers. He was arrested, beaten by the officers and taken to the 4th Police Precinct, where he was charged with assaulting the officers and making insulting remarks.
Residents of Hayes Homes, a large public housing project, saw an incapacitated Smith being dragged into the precinct, and a rumor was started that he had been beaten to death while in police custody. The rumor spread quickly, and a large crowd soon formed outside the precinct. At this point, accounts vary, with some saying that the crowd threw rocks through the precinct windows and police then rushed outside wearing hard hats and carrying clubs. Others say that police rushed out of their station first to confront the crowd, and then they began to throw bricks, bottles, and rocks.
There’s a great deal more at the link. Of course, this happened in the days before there were police videocams, and before every single person on the street carried a handy video recording device, so we really don’t know what happened to Smith at the hands of the police and/or vice versa. But, as we’ve learned so many times, rumors fly and then the riots begin. In the case of Newark in 1967, by the time the smoke had cleared:
…riots, looting, violence, and destruction left a total of 16 civilians, 8 suspects, a police officer, and a firefighter dead; 353 civilians, 214 suspects, 67 police officers, 55 firefighters, and 38 military personnel injured; and 689 civilians and 811 suspects arrested and property damage is expected to have exceeded $10 million.
That was over fifty years ago. Newark has never recovered, but as you can see it was in bad straits even before the riots and would almost certainly have had trouble recovering even without them. The riots exacerbated the situation, however.
In recent years, Newark has been struggling to come back. But it’s been slow going (the link is from last November):
…[The plan for a new multi-business development] comes at a pivotal moment for Newark, a city that has long exemplified the struggles of America’s fading manufacturing hubs.
The proposal for the stadium site is just one of several residential and commercial projects with the potential to accelerate the slow but steady transformation Newark has experienced in recent years.
With the city’s star on the rise, local officials find themselves at a crossroads: They must manage the development Newark has long needed while avoiding the kind of gentrification that could push out its poorer and largely African-American residents.
…Elected officials and activists have vowed to prevent Newark from becoming, as the mayor often puts it, “the next Brooklyn” by making sure the city remains affordable.
Interesting. Initially, white people were blamed for “white flight” because they left a city that was obviously fading economically, and now they are not wanted – at least, not in large numbers – when the city is trying to revitalize itself. Newark’s selling point was that it was only a 20-minute train ride from New York City, and now that NY has fallen – or pushed itself – onto very hard times and an uncertain future, I’m not sure that there’s much hope on the horizon for Newark, either (although fortunately it has managed not to rip itself apart, post-Floyd).
“We’re trying to get that development to happen and get people investing in the city, while at the same time creating opportunities for the residents who live here in the city,” the mayor, Ras Baraka, said in an interview. “It’s not easy. There’s no city in America who’s actually figured it out. Everybody has been attempting to do this, including New York, and it’s been very and extremely difficult.”
I wrote about Mayor Ras Baraka (son of Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones) in this post from 2014, when he was first elected. Baraka is a leftist, and in the past he’s spoken very disparagingly of the police, but he’s not as far gone as some of the mayors we’ve heard this summer:
“I think there needs to be significant reforms … [but] to get rid of the police department — who would respond to calls for service for violence and domestic abuse?”
And yet Baraka himself has been spearheading “significant reform” of the police for much of the time since he’s become mayor. Who would want to be a police officer in a city with the problems of Newark? And here, Baraka invokes the all-purpose phrase “structural racism”:
Stripping the department of its funding wouldn’t address underlying problems of structural racism and poverty, said Baraka, adding that “all of America’s institutions have the same problems the police department has.”
“The police just have guns.”
This post is already very long, much longer than I had originally intended or planned (that happens an awful lot here). And I’ve just scratched the surface; someone could write a book about it, and that someone isn’t me. But Newark is not atypical of a lot of cities these days – cities that lost their industrial bases long ago, and have been in grave trouble ever since. The problems take a visibly racial form, and the leftists in charge make the situation worse (IMHO), but the problems are also economic, cultural, real, and entrenched, and they aren’t easy to solve.
I got distracted for a few hours…
…by an event that’s rare these days, and yet extremely pleasant – an impromptu social get-together, the visit of a new baby and his parents visiting the house of a good friend. On the deck, of course, with appropriate social distancing.
That’s why the late posting. To be continued….
Leftist orthodoxy of thought in the art world
Only one type of thought is allowed in the art world, and it’s leftist thought. Here, the participants in the discussion who dare to be different are Coleman Hughes and Ayishat Akanbi. I’ve linked to Hughes many times before (see this), but Ayishat Akanbi is new to me. She’s a Nigerian-British fashion stylist.
I’ve cued up the part where they discuss people clandestinely reaching out to them and expressing secret agreement:
9/11: Nineteen years [BUMPED UP: scroll down for newer posts]
[BUMPED UP: Scroll down for newer posts.]
Nineteen years is a long time. And yet sometimes September 11, 2001 seems like a century ago.
I date that day as the day I woke up politically, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Nor did I realize that previously I’d been asleep. But I think that many of us were shocked that day into something that ultimately led us to a different sensibility. I think a lot of us have ended up facing grim truths that were present back then but somewhat hidden. I hope we don’t have to face too many more, but I fear we may.
On 9/11 we were attacked from without. That may happen again, but at the moment the attacks come mainly from within. I say “mainly,” because some of the funding and some of the impetus for the leftism and anarchism and sheer nihilism we see today is foreign, but much of it has been carefully nurtured for many decades in our own universities and other institutions. To see the Democratic Party and MSM so utterly complicit with it; to see their campaign so focused on hatred of Trump, the right, and even America; and to watch them all pretend that the geriatric, now-somewhat-addled but always corrupt and mediocre career politician Joe Biden is a worthy candidate, is the sort of thing I could not have imagined in 2001.
And yet here we are, nineteen years later.
On this anniversary, let us remember the bravery and sacrifice of that day, and say RIP to them all. And let us try to go forward with the resolve that this country and its people continue to “nobly save…the last best hope on earth.”
Bahrain joins the other Arab Gulf States…
…in normalizing relations with Israel.
You’ll be hearing other countries coming in over a relatively short period of time. And you could have peace in the Middle East.
I think that last sentence is hyperbole, but it’s a hyperbole for which I totally forgive him. These are big developments, even though it’s been clear for a while that, de facto, these states have been getting friendlier to Israel.
Hey, do you think Obama/Biden will take credit, saying that this is really a result of their cozying up to Iran and enabling it, thus forcing the Arab Gulf States to get closer to Israel in response to the threat?
I also believe that much of the Arab world is heartily sick of the Palestinians. Actually, that’s been true of much of the Arab world for a long, long time, and with good reason (see this and this, for example).
The Palestinians are not happy (the article appeared yesterday and is entitled “Palestinians: ‘Our Arab brothers have abandoned us'”):
Palestinians have reacted with outrage and deep disappointment to the Arab League’s refusal to condemn the normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
The refusal of the Arab League foreign ministers to endorse a Palestinian draft resolution against the Israel-UAE agreement will pave the way for other Arab states to establish relations with Israel, Palestinian officials cautioned.
Indeed – although the refusal was probably the result of other Arab states’ decision to establish relations with Israel rather than the cause.
The “Arab brothers have abandoned the Palestinian issue at a time when the entire world is supporting it,” PLO Executive Committee member Ahmed Majdalani said.
Well, not the entire world. But Palestinian propaganda plus anti-Semitism has been so effective in so much of the world that the statement is nearly true. I would say at this point that Europe is more anti-Israel than the Arab Gulf States. And the same is true of the left in the US.
This sums it up, I think:
…Mohannad Aklouk, the Palestinian envoy to the Arab League, wrote, “[The Palestinians] have dignity, martyrs, prisoners and refugee camps of glory, and this is enough for us.”
Some glory. I guess their sorry history of destruction – and it quite prominently includes self-destruction – is what they are clinging to now.
Of course, if Trump is defeated in November, I believe all of this will be reversed and we’ll be back kissing up to Iran.
Flight 93: “It’s up to us now. I think we can do it.”
You all know the story. But this will rip your heart out anyway. It’s half documentary – with interviews with the families of some of the passengers – and half re-enactment.
Remember.
Where have all the swing voters gone?
Here’s an article that attempts to answer that question:
The notion that the 2020 campaign is a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency has been a persistent storyline of this year’s campaign coverage. And properly so. A strong correlation exists between Americans’ approval of Trump’s presidency and whether they plan to vote for him.
But there’s a second-level storyline that’s often missing in the analysis, and it extends back two decades, the time at which wide swings in voter support disappeared during presidential general elections. It’s the story of party polarization, which began in the 1980s and was firmly in place by the early 2000s. It was marked by a widening of the partisan gap but also a strengthening of partisanship and antipathy toward the opposing party.
The hostility that many partisans have for the other party is a larger driver of the vote than might be assumed. Party identification was once the best predictor of how people would vote on election day — Democrats lining up behind their party’s candidate and Republicans backing their party’s nominee. But party identification no longer has that distinction. When Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster examined post-1990s elections, they found that “ratings of the opposing party were by far the strongest predictor” of vote choice. “The greatest concern of party supporters,” they write, “is preventing the opposing party from gaining power.”
Nothing surprising there.
But I get annoyed when people write in generalities such as “party polarization” and “partisanship.” It’s not that such words are incorrect, but I think they are screen words that smooth over what actually has happened.
It’s actually pretty simple, I think. One driver of this “polarization” is the fact that the press has become more transparent and nasty in its bias, which revs up those who tend to be on the left and further infuriates and frustrates those who tend to be on the right. That drives people who might otherwise be “undecided” into one camp or another. The same is true – and perhaps even more true – of the effect of social media, an amplifying echo chamber.
In addition, years ago there really were not all that many differences between the parties, except in certain years – Goldwater vs. LBJ, for example (and recall that Goldwater was considered to offer the stark contrast of “a choice, not an echo” back in the days when candidates mostly were echoes of one another). Now the differences are intense and obvious. It is far more difficult to remain undecided in that sort of situation, when so much appears to be riding on the choice the voter makes.
I think those who are still undecided at this point fall into two categories. The first is composed of people who have mostly tuned out politics – the LIVs – and who ordinarily vote not at all or on a last-minute whim. The second is made of people who might pay a lot of attention but who have an “a pox on both your houses” attitude towards both parties. Ordinarily, that carries over into antipathy to both nominees, as well, but Trump has attracted some of them because Trump is definitely something different in that regard.
I don’t know anyone who’s undecided at this point. Do you?
Trump deserves two Nobel Peace Prizes…
…if the award still meant what it should mean, that is.
He deserves one prize for this:
President Trump’s Israel-United Arab Emirates diplomatic breakthrough continues rippling out across the world.
Saudi Arabia and Bahrain both announced Wednesday they will now allow flights from Israel to use their airspace en route to other destinations, according to the Times of Israel…
In Abu Dhabi, the UAE is following up on the deal by ordering hotels to serve kosher foods, according to Fox News…
The Palestinians have been trying to drum up opposition to the deal since its announcement but have gained no traction. The most it has been able to accomplish so far is to praise other Gulf states that have not followed UAE’s lead in normalizing relations with Israel. But Bahrain is already reportedly in “advanced talks” to normalize its relations with Israel. Oman may follow suit.
And the second prize for this:
On Sept. 4, the Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic signed an agreement committing the two Balkan states to reach a mutually beneficial and permanent economic and trade normalization deal. The Trump administration brokered the agreement and hosted the signing ceremony in Washington.
No, it’s not a peace treaty between Serbia and Kosovo; it’s an agreement to reach a deal. But the positive small step that makes possible larger steps is proving to be a trademark Donald Trump diplomatic and peace-making technique. Trump emphasizes economic progress that diminishes the negative effects of divisive ethnic, religious and cultural differences, and neuters destructive historical grievances as the harmful excuses for hate they are. Trump sees economic development that everyone can see sets the stage for the resolution of seemingly permanent political disputes.
This may seem as though it’s just common sense, like so many of Trump’s policies. But in the world of diplomacy, common sense is so uncommon as to be nearly extinct. And yet it can accomplish wonderful things. I certainly hope so.
And an Norwegian official actually did nominate Trump for the Prize. No, it wasn’t a joke – it was for real:
“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde, a four-term member of Parliament who also serves as chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told Fox News in an exclusive interview…
Also cited in the letter was the president’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”
Tybring-Gjedde, further, praised Trump for withdrawing a large number of troops from the Middle East. “Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict. The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.
The same man nominated Trump in 2018. Trump did not win, and I will go out on a very stout limb and say he will again not win.
So, who is Tybring-Gjedde? He’s described as a populist conservative (or what passes for that in Norway), but he adds:
“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” he said. “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
Indeed, Obama got the Prize for just being Obama and getting elected. That was very early in his presidency. Later, the things he did regarding foreign policy were not “nothing,” however. For the most part, they were awful.
This week’s hit job is the Bob Woodward book
Bob Woodward’s been riding on Watergate for nearly fifty years. He’s the author of the latest effort to make the public turn on Trump – that portion of the public that hasn’t already done so, that is.
I would imagine that unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you are aware of some of the charges. I’m not going to go into them here; others have done so quite adequately, in my opinion (see this, this, and this, for example).
But this quote in particular caught my eye. Does the left think this exchange reflects badly on Trump?:
When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”
As someone in the comments section to that thread at Althouse wrote:
That, right there, is sufficient reason to vote for Trump.
I wonder sometimes how it is that everyone doesn’t see the transparency of these hit pieces coming like clockwork, based on what Trump’s enemies are saying and writing, or on manufactured outrage at what Trump actually may have said (or some twisted version of it). And in many instances, what he’s actually saying is just the common sense sort of things that most people are thinking.
Trump is a blunt man, and many people find that awful but at least as many find it refreshing.