A Few Words On Covington

 

I think it's worth spending a few words on Covington, since the real root of the matter seems to be overlooked by a lot of people who I think ought to know better.

Originally, this was labeled by the Left, their trained seals in the media and yes, a lot of faux 'conservative' cucks as a hideous example of Trump inspired racism, with MAGA hats being the symbol of the new Nazi brown shirts.

Basically,what happened was this. Teenage students at the Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky decided to peacefully demonstrate in solidarity with the March For Life near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. They were approached by one Nathan Phillips, described by the media later as an 'Indian tribe elder' and a 'Vietnam War veteran.'

The media's story, led by the habitually fake news Buzzfeed, was that the kids went up to him, mocked him and insulted him racially. And Buzzfeed, the NRO and the rest of the media jackals were quick to pick up on a heavily doctored and edited video that supposedly showed this.

Of course, the real story was revealed later.  Longer versions of the same video showed that it was the activist, and a nearby group of black supremacist activists, who harassed the students while they were waiting for their bus. The black group even hurled racial abuse at the students. You'll notice, of course that  the racist vile black supremacist group was left out of this story. The student's response was to sing school songs to try to drown out the obscenities and remain calm.

The student shown smiling at a professional 'activist' who got in his face and started beating a drum while chanting some Indian gibberish was admirable  in its restraint as far as I'm concerned

Even the so called creds of this Nathan Phillips turned out to be sheer BS.  It turns out that this guy is simply a professional agitator who makes seems to have quite a history of confronting white students and then claiming he was assaulted by these racists. He's pulled this several times, and no real evidence to back up his stories has ever been found. In fact, he's something of a Catholic basher. Phillips led a rally that attempted to disrupt Mass at DC’s National Shrine on January 19th, just a few days before this happened.

He's no 'Vietnam War Veteran' either. After one reporter at the WAPO shrieked in print ad nauseum about how these MAGA Nazi teenagers disrespected a war veteran, the WAPO had to fix it by admitting it was a blatant lie:

 "Correction: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips served in the U.S. Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was never deployed to Vietnam."

He also isn't a tribal Elder as far as I can find out.


But of course, all this was too good to let a little thing like this get in the way. The media creeps piled on, to the point that the kids lives were actually threatened. The Twitter people, who have lied over and over again about their political bias and still mock us by claiming that they are taking great steps to eliminate violence, threats and things like harassment, and what they call 'misinformation.'

Get a load of what ran on Twitter and is still up:

LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT BITCH TO THE GROUND.

— Uncle Shoes (@HouseShoes) January 19, 2019

But you gotta punch that shit off one of those bitches faces first.

Uncle Shoes ✔ @HouseShoes

Free @STREETCORNERSCM catalog for a red hat.

23

8:12 PM - Jan 20, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

127 people are talking about this

Giving a shit-eating grin to a Native American's face isn't legally violence. But he is smiling *about* the violence. He is saying, "my people hurt you, and you can't touch me even while I gloat about it." It is fascism. And you should punch fascists.

— Jeffrey Grubb (@JeffGrubb) January 19, 2019

 

@AaronSmarter

Punch the little mfs in the face
Pain is an excellent teacher

  Reza Aslan

Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?

I know he’s like a teen or whatever but I still wanna hit him. Like super hard. Right in that bish ass lookin face. Ya know? https://t.co/sOMjeYVQPy

— TATIANNA (@TATIANNANOW) January 20, 2019

Kathy Griffin ✔ @kathygriffin

Ps. The reply from the school was pathetic and impotent. Name these kids. I want NAMES. Shame them. If you think these fuckers wouldn’t dox you in a heartbeat, think again.

Paul Stothard @paul_stothard

 · Jan 19, 2019

Replying to @4154Life @williamlegate

Is today the day that Twitter hunts down and vilifies school kids? If so, I’m out.

William LeGate ✔ @williamlegate

It is that day. Sorry, you will have to go & defend these kids now. I did shit way less dumb than these kids when I was 16 & got obliterated for it. They deserve everything they’re getting & more

372

10:53 PM - Jan 19, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Breitbart Jacked It To Eva Braun Scat Porn Li'l ✔ @karengeier

 · Jan 20, 2019

“Let Nazi teens have their privacy” is just the most white supremacist, ahistorical horseshit. Like, there was literally an organization called the Hitler Youth and it served a very deliberate purpose. Fuck off and read a book

Breitbart Jacked It To Eva Braun Scat Porn Li'l ✔ @karengeier

Maybe doxing racist teens is a powerful deterrent against being a racist teen. We all know how much fash love discipline and consequences

67 people are talking about this

 

If I were in a room with the MAGA Kid, Hitler, and Toby and had three bullets, I’d shoot the MAGA Kid three times

— Chad Chamberlain (@ChadChum15) January 20, 2019

I hope all these MAGA kids in the news get cancer and the horrible parents that raised them this way get to suffer alongside them- 🏴 Jez 🌻 Watson🌹 (@jezawatson) January 20, 2019

******************************************************

There's lots more, but the above is stomach turning enough.

So here are a few things to take away from all this.

1) Commentators on the right have been vilified, lost jobs and been pushed off the net for far milder things than this and will continue to be. So this is a war with no rules. Women,families and children are not off limits. There are no standards anymore. The Left hates us, and wants us dead or in the gulags.

2) To the Left, any racist hatred against whites, Jews, Christians,  women, children, Hispanics, Asians or blacks who fail to bow to the new order is legitimate, and any violence and retaliation directed at them  is going to be excused. 

3) A puppy will keep peeing on the floor  if he is sees that there are no consequences for doing so. What we have here is exactly that...puppies  who have learned they can pee on the floor with impunity and even bite people because there's no downside for them, no cost to them whatsoever. If the Left's behavior is going to change, they are going to need real punishment for this sort of thing until they realize that their violence, defamation and and attacks are going to merit similar treatment.

And yes, it has come to that, I'm afraid.

4) These children have been unjustly scarred for life. Their identities have become known, and they will never know if they weren't refused college admission, scholarships, promotions, or a job simply because someone Googled their name and rejected them simply because the people making the decisions were on the Left or afraid to antagonize the Left.

And that was part of the reason this hideous assault on the Covington kids was planned and publicized as it was. It was to give them and everyone else a message. Oppose the Left in any way and you and your loved ones will be ruined for life. Brett Kavanaugh still needs to have private security on his home and his two daughters still need bodyguards in school, simply because some Hillary loving left Wing activist was wiling to lie under oath about a 'sexual assault' that never happened.

This, by the way, is what the Klan used to do to blacks who had the temerity  to register to vote. They'd make life hell for them or even lynch them, which is exactly what the Left did here, using the media instead of a rope. With Democrats, some things never change, I suppose.

Because of our antiquated libel and slander laws, Kavanaugh was unable to sue the pants off this foul woman because he is a public person. But the Covington kids were neither public people or attempting to be public people. Their reaction to this should be to sue every company that collaborated in this attack on them and made them a target. For that matter, so should the Covington Catholic High School, which has been forced to remain closed for safety reasons.

Among other things, this was a violationof their First Amendment rights.  Twitter, Buzzfeed and the National Review should be the first on the list to have their bank accounts drained, followed by the talking heads and celebrities who threatened these kids with violence. I can think of other things that could be done, but I'll leave that to my reader's imagination. Let the Left and their cuck allies see the price for this kind of attack on kids who neither merited it or deserved it.

5)Finally, the worst enemies we have now are not the Left, but the faux so-called 'conservatives.' Cucks like Bill Kristol,  Hugh Hewitt (boy do I hate writing his name here, but so be it), Jen Ruben, Max Boot, the cucks at places like the NRO and the whole disgusting pile of never Trumpers. They all jumped on this likes flies on a fresh dog turd. You think they would at least have said 'let's wait a bit and see, this seems a bit manufactured. It's Buzzfeed, you know, and after all...'

In reality, they very much wanted this to be true. That's why they were so anxious to start virtue signaling and showing their friends on the Left  that they hate what the Left hates....It's their way of saying, ' I want you to really like me. Please keep hiring me to do spots on your networks, write for your newspapers, publish my books and keep inviting me to your parties, OK?'

And of course they lied blatantly (again) once the con was discovered to be just that. Like they didn't know Buzzfeed is not to be trusted? Like didn't know the Left pulls this stuff all the time? Please, spare me. 

They're rather like the Left wing Jews willing to swallow the Jew hatred and anti-Israel rants of their fellow Democrats just to wallow in the illusion that these people actually like them. And they are willing to ignore all the hard evidence they see that they're really not liked at all except for the checks these Jews write and the verbal support and votes they are suicidally willing to cast.

The left, frankly, is quite open about its hatred of us. That's a given, and they prove it every day. The danger of the people I'm talking about here is that even though they betrays us at every turn, they pretend to be our friend and allies. Who needs a bunch of quislings cucks and traitors as allies?

What happened to the Covington kids needs to be a wake up call to all of us. And it deserves a substantial response. The rules of the game the way the Left and their allies play it changed a long time ago. It's time we realized it and responded in kind.

President Trump Is 100% Right - The Media's Feeding Hate And Division

 

President Trump, whatever else he accomplishes during his term deserves major credit for unmasking our dishonest, partisan media. He's totally correct when he says, as he does here in Phoenix, that the biased media is feeding hate and division here in America. And it's hard not to believe, as President Trump says that they really don't want America to be great again, and lack love of country. And that's been evident long before Donald Trump became president.



What really happened here, as most of us know is that the biased media really thought Hillary Clinton was a shoe in. Their biased polls showed it. The Left controls most of academia, Hollywood, the publishing industry, most of the legacy media, most of pop culture, and most of the tech/Social media industry and its billions.

Much of the media actually worked for either the Clintons, Obama or both before they eased into their present sinecures.

Mrs. Clinton had the big money behind her.She had an army of the best consultants money could buy to plan strategy and carpet bomb the American people with vicious attack ads. She had the corrupt DNC in her pocket to grease the primaries so she would win easily. She had the media working fo her to provide partisan hosts and slant the debates. She even had a large contingent of #neverTrump conservatives on her side.

And against her was Donald Trump, running his first campaign ever, with a small campaign team, his plane, and not much else except well, himself.

The Left, especially the media were so convinced that they could destroy him easily, so confident of their own power that they went all out...and got careless. A lot of had already known how biased they were for sometime, but the waythey conducted themselves in 2016 pulled the Wizard of Oz's curtain away for America at large.

The media bet everything on one throw of the dice, and got snake eyes. Because against all expectations Donald Trump won the election in the biggest upset in American political history.

And the Left had a collective nervous breakdown. What happened on camera was hilarious enough, but I've heard that what happened when the cameras were off was even funnier.

Mrs. Clinton was so angry and distraught she threw a major tantrum backstage and wasn't even able to speak to her followers who were waiting to hear from her. Her campaign manager, John Podesta had to speak to them and tell them to go home. And once Mrs. Clinton calmed down, they came up with the fairy tale of 'Russian collusion' to alibi why they lost so badly.

Oddly enough it was Donald Trump who caught the heat before the election for saying that he would respect the results 'if it was an honest election.'

Remember this?



Did you ever see or hear former President Obama addressing the nation to decry the Left's disrespect for the 2016 election results? Did you see any of the legacy media excoriating Mrs. Clinton,the Obama Administration and the 'resistance' for disrespecting our democracy? Of course not, because the media was intimately involved in that disrespect and they still are complicit in it. And if that's not de facto hatred of our country, what is?

The bogus 'Russia story has been off the front pages for almost two weeks now. Instead, it's 'trump the racist,' 'Trump's insane,' and 'Trumps unfit for office' repeated over and over and over again in the classic cadence of the Big Lie.

The huge crowd of over 8,000 (put a few thousand outside who couldn't get in and braved the heat to listen on monitors) in Phoenix cheering the president on and the tiny contingent of 500 or so 'protestors' that showed up after all the hype shows us two things. That Trump hasn't lost his base and that the only place the Left's brown shirts can act out is in the solid blue enclaves sympahthetic politicans control...like Charlottesville, Chicago, Berkeley or Los Angeles. Anywhere else, the police are going to be allowed to do their jobs.

Which is of course what happened in Phoenix, which has a Democrat Mayor but one who wasn't going to let the Left run amuck in his city. Unlike Mayor Signer in Charlottesville, he ordered the police to keep the two groups separated. That angered the Left's thugs so much that as soon as Trump's crowd departed, they attacked the police...and got exactly what they deserved.

Phoenix ain't Chicago,Baltimore or Charlottesville. Not by a long shot.

Charlottesville - The Left Finally Gets What It's Been Salivating For

Charlotttesville, Virginia is a small college city. It is the home of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819.

Over the weekend, it became the home of a violent melee that resulted in scores of injured and one death.

The story of the run up to these events reveals a great deal. Charlottesville, like many college towns is fairly blue. And the town council decided to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee that had stood in Emancipation Park (formerly known as Lee Park) for decades.

Led by a local blogger, Jason Kessler, a number of people decided to hold a rally protesting the removal of the statue. They were given a permit to do so. Kessler called the rally 'Unite The Right' and made the stupid mistake of allowing white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer to be part of the rally, which of course allowed the entire rally to be characterized as 'Nazis' and 'White Nationalists.'

This led to the recruitment of a large mob of Antifa, #Blacklivesmatter, and Black Blok 'counter protestors' to organize what amounted to an attack on the rally.

The city first tried to appease them by reneging on the permit, after which Kessler took the matter to court and won.

Over the weekend, the city was flooded with both Kessler's protestors and the 'counter protestors', with most of both groups being from outside the area. Contrary to what some of the media would have you believe, there were few college students involved. Most classes at the University don't start for a few weeks.

Instead, what you had was an attempt to 'punch some nazis.' The #blacklivesmatter, AntiFa, and the so-called Black Blok groups came there in force and armed with baseball bats, pepper spray, sticks, metal flagpoles, iron riser bars, urine bombs, knives and spray can bombs, which basically spurt fire at people at a nice distance with the aid of a handy Bic lighter.




In other words, the 'counter protestors' came to start something. It's inevitable that violence was going to occur. These 'counter protesters' as the media religiously refers to them are the very same thugs that have been burning, shutting down free speech and bashing heads for several years.

Let me be very clear.  There were obviously neo Nazis and active KKK members among the protestors, and I have nothing but contempt for such people.  If I had been a Democrat member of the Senate at a certain time and place, you would never have seen me voting for former Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as my majority leader. But even Nazis are entitled to freedom of assembly and free speech within certain clearly defined limits.

And with the exception of one cretin who  drove his car into a crowd, the protestors weren't the aggressors. If they had been the aggressors, there would have been a lot more casualties.

Here's a factoid that bears this out. A lot of the protestors the media labeled under the catchall of 'white nationalists' came strapped. Yet despite being attacked by these leftist thugs, guess what? No one was shot. NO ONE. That's a huge clue as to who came to peacefully protest and who came looking to perpetrate exactly what happened.

And what actually happened? Well, let's see.

A number of observers on both sides have commented on the lack of police presence. As the New York Times, of all places, reported:

“There was no police presence,” Ms.Brittany Caine-Conley (a minister in training at Sojourners United Church of Christ) said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”

Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, was watching the events from a command post on the sixth floor of a Wells Fargo bank on the downtown mall. There were sporadic fights. “I compare it to hockey,” he said. “Often in hockey there are sporadic fights, and then they separate.”

Suddenly, people were throwing water bottles, some filled with urine. Some used pepper spray; from his perch on the sixth floor, Mr. Moran saw smoke bombs being thrown. People started clubbing one another. The clergy retreated to a “safe house” — a restaurant nearby.

But according to many witnesses, the police waited to intervene. Ms. Caine-Conley called it “fascinating and appalling.”

Mr. Kessler, too, complained.

In a statement, he said the authorities had “exacerbated the violence” by failing to separate his followers from counter protesters. He said his group had “networked with law enforcement officials” months ago on a plan for maintaining safety, which he said was not followed, and he called the police “under equipped for the situation.”

What the New York Times and most of the media didn't report was what the police did that exacerbated the violence.




Even a primary school teacher knows that when you have two kids fighting, the first thing you do is separate them. There are various ways police are trained to do exactly that. Instead, here's what happened and I have this from people who were actually at the scene in Charlottesville.

Under orders from Charlottesville's uber progressive Democrat mayor Mike Signer, the protestor's permit was illegally revoked in defiance of the court order. This happened at 11 AM, after the confrontations had already been going on for some time. At that point, the demonstrators, who were vastly outnumbered by the 'counter protestors' were in the park with crowds of 'counter protestors' on three sides.

Then the mayor ordered Charlotteville's police chief, Al Thomas to have the police form a shield wall on the  one side of the park that was still open and  tell the demonstrators  (who still had a legal permit to be there reaffirmed by a federal judge)  that they were an unlawful assembly. And that if they didn't disperse immediately they'd be arrested.



Since the police let few if any of the demonstrators through their line, the only ways out were through the counter protestors. It seems like the mayor decided the protestors were all  'nazis' who needed a lesson from the Left's own brownshirts. And let's not forget,  the police are not to blame. Just as in Chicago, Baltimore, Berkeley and many other cities, they were ordered to stand down and let the Leftist thugs act out.

 What's astonishing that so few people were injured, with the majority of serious injuries coming from the incident where one of the protestors drove his car into the crowd. The casualties could have been far worse.

Even faced with this carnage, the police pretty much let things go. As one observer mentioned, 'Yeah, it (the car incident) was intentional.About 40 miles an hour, hit about 15-20 people, crashed into the two cars in front of it, and then backed up and sped away while cops were standing on the side of the road and didn't do anything.'

The driver, James Alex Fields of Maumee, Ohio fled the scene is his car, a Dodge Charger, but was arrested several blocks away, jailed without bail and charged with suspicion of malicious wounding, failure to stop for an accident involving a death, second degree homicide and hit and run. I'd guess he's going to be in jail quite awhile and deservedly so. I'm sure many on the Left who ordinarily cringe at the thought of the death penalty for the most inhumane, vicious murderers would happily lynch Mr. Fields and burn his bare feet with lit cigarettes as he swings.

Actually, the Left owes Alex Fields big time. He gave them something they have been desperately  trying to get, a bloody flag to wave and a martyr for the cause in the form of Heather Heyer, the counter protestor he killed. She was certainly no Nazi, but she will now become the Left's Horst Wessel and put to exactly the same use Horst Wessel was.





The comparison is spot on. The 'resistance' have been using the same tactics Hitler's brownshirts did for some time.

 #Blacklives matter were directly responsible for the violence in Ferguson over the faux Micheal Brown Hands up don't shoot nonsense, and for helping to burn down and loot a large chunk of Baltimore after the city's dysfunctional mayor said they could because of some career drug dealer who was trying to injure himself so he could sue the city..

The AntiFa and Black Blok thugs have been responsible for all sorts of violence, especially in Seattle and in Berkeley where they first attacked people standing in line to buy tickets to hear Milo Yianopoulos speak, injured a number of them severely, and then proceeded to do thousands of dollars worth of damage before the police were allowed by the mayor to rein them in.That's exactly what happened here.

Ask yourself this. Has any politicians on the Left seriously condemned these groups and their vicious behavior? Heck no.Did the media wring their collective hands and condemn this sort of thing? Nope. In fact the media took joy in fanning the flames and absolving these miscreants of any blame.  So we all know the answer to that one.

And just in case you still haven't gotten the message,  a planned news conference by Jason Kessler, the organizer of what was in fact a perfectly legal rally, came to an abrupt end when a man wearing a plaid shirt punched him and a group of lefty protestors literally chased him off the podium.



You see, what happened in Charlottesville and the way the media is presenting it  gives the Left the opportunity to shut up anyone who doesn't agree with them by any means necessary. 

The Left applauds violence when it's some of their own doing it, especially if they're members of certain protected groups. Fascism is just fine and dandy then. Thanks to the ever helpful media, they've gotten away with this for quite some time.  All one needs to do is see the Left's reaction to President Trump's call for both sides to take a good look at where this sort of thing is headed:




The president's attempt to to rein things is was unfortunately a failure, because that's not what the Left really wants. What happened in Charlottesville was merely the opening skirmish of a whole series of planned riots in places like Richmond, Va, Nashville, Atlanta, and Baltimore. And rest assured, there will be more.

And there's something a lot of these places have in common, with Charlottesville. They all have uber progressive Democrat mayors who can be relied on to reign in the police  and allow the Left's brownshirts to act out, attack people and riot.

Charlottesville is the Left's excuse for open season on labeling anyone who doesn't follow the Left's totalitarian diktats as a 'Nazi', a white supremacist, a 'hater' or a white nationalist. And shutting them up either by denying them a platform or physically attacking them. And of course, to do their best to slime a sitting president as one of the 'Nazis.'

They're correct when they call for getting rid of domestic terrorism. What they don't realize is that it will likely not be defined by their terms if this nonsense keeps up.

You could probably put all of Richard Spencer and David Duke's followers in a 200 seat hall and have lots of seats left over. That isn't true of AntiFa, #blacklivesmatter, BlackBlokand other assorted Leftist groups engaged in this sort of activity. Nor do the neo Nazis have th epower, organization and financing the Leftist groups do.

Who the real threat to our liberties are and who the real  Nazis are is becoming more and more obvious, isn't it? The irony is hilarious.

 

Seattle Wealth Tax Approved On Incomes Over $250K

 

The Seattle City Council voted to approve a wealth tax on total income. The vote was unanimous, 9-0. The new Seattle wealth tax is 2.25% over $250,000 per year for a single person and $500,000 per year for a married couple filing jointly.

The city estimates that the new Seattle wealth tax would raise $140 million per year, and would cost between $10-13 million to set up and $5-6 million per year to assess, manage and enforce. Those figures will almost certainly prove top be optimistic, as I'll explain.

For those familiar with Seattle and what it costs to live there, the dollar guidelines for the new wealth tax target quite a few people who hardly qualify as 'rich' especially small business owners since it targets total income. Also, given the nature of Seattle's city government, this tax is likely to be raised more and more as time goes on.

One of the attractions of living in Washington State is that it has no state income tax. So there will likely be a legal challenge to the new law once Mayor Ed Murry signs it into law, since it violates the state constitution. But Washington being a Blue State, there's no guaranty it will be successful. Mayor Murry's argument is that Washington's tax system is "antiquated and regressive, causing people with less money to pay more of what they have."

The Mayor thinks it's time Seattle and the whole State "adopted a progressive income tax."

This is a curious argument, although the Left has been repeating it ad nauseum.This is not a 'progressive income tax' no matter what Seattle's mayor and his socialist buddies claim. A progressive tax affects everyone in varying degrees according to their income and situation. This one does not, only affecting people above a certain total income.

And if people are already not paying state income tax at all, how are they paying 'more of what they have?' The sales tax in Seattle has now been raised to 10.1%, one of the highest in the nation. There's been absolutely no talk about using this new windfall from the rich to lower that tax and I can guarantee you there won't be. Ditto with Seattle's relatively high property taxes, which are levied by King County anyway, not the City of Seattle. So that won't be changing either, at least not as a result of this new Seattle wealth tax.

If it becomes law and survives the legal challenge, here's what will change...Seattle's tax base. If you're a person with a gross income of $250,000, the new Seattle wealth tax will set you back a hefty $5,650, almost $500 a month.And remember, you might only come home with part of that $250,000 after federal taxes and expenses. If you're a professional or highly skilled, there's a good chance you'll move to some place like Kirkland, Renton or Kent or even a little further out and commute in. That's especially true if you live in Seattle but work for say, Microsoft in Redmond or Boeing's factory in Everett. And if you own a home or condo in Seattle, you'll either sell it or rent it if you don't need the sale to finance a new house. If you own a business, you'll either raise the prices you charge for good and services or close your doors and relocate. Especially as this levy on the 'rich' goes up, and rest assured it will.

 

This is very much yet another instance of the failed Blue State model, similar to Detroit, Chicago, etc. The only place this kind of nonsense can be imposed is when people have no choices available, ala' Venezuela. That isn't the case here, and what you end up with as people exercise those choices is a deteriorating tax base, less revenue and a declining city.

There likely are people willing to pay through the nose to live in the Emerald City. But I think that the numbers are unlikely to net anywhere near $140 million per year. And the city of Seattle is going to have to pay something like $15-$20 million to find that out. But hey, it's fun to got to Vegas with other people's money! If you gamble and lose, who cares?

Of course, what Mayor Murray and his socialist friends on the Seattle City Council are doing has nothing to do with actual economics. It's political red meat for their portion of the Seattle electorate.



Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com and other publications.

Follow him on Twitter here and on Facebook here.

Demonize Police, And Here's What Happens

 

Pravda-on-the-Hudson has an interesting article up that inadvertently showcases one of the effects of  efforts to demonize police by the #blacklivesmatter movement and its media and political supporters.

Here's the headline: "Heroin Use? Juvenile Record? For Recruits, Police forgive Past Sins."

The article breathlessly goes on...and note what I emphasized:

But now, faced with thousands of vacancies, a shortage of applicants and a mandate to become as diverse as the communities they serve, police departments are rethinking requirements once considered untouchable.

New Orleans no longer automatically disqualifies those who have injected heroin or smoked crack. Aurora, Colo., has stopped using military-style running tests, but now checks how quickly candidates can get out of a squad car.

Pittsburgh, accused of discriminating against black applicants, recently updated its hiring criteria to include integrity, dependability and “cultural competence,” or the ability to incorporate diverse perspectives.

In other words, the current climate created by #blacklivesmatter, the media and Democrat politicians who cater to #blacklivesmatter for political reasons means that a lot of ordinarily desirable recruits who met the old standards involving background checks required to be hired as a police officer are no longer applying. Instead, because police departments are desperate for recruits, they're opening the doors to hiring former gangbangers. With special diversity points if they're black or Hispanic. Because of course, white police are automatically racist and can't be expected to have the 'cultural competence' to treat non-whites with fairness and competence.

 

In St. Paul, the department has experimented with a number of ways to find the best officers, including taking some “situational judgment” questions — meant to test common sense, adherence to police hierarchy and police priorities — off the written exam.

Chief Todd Axtell said the tests might have been unintentionally biased against minorities, proving particularly difficult for those who are not native English speakers.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity in St. Paul, and we’ve struggled with recruiting in the past, so we need to be more thoughtful about these communities,” he said. {...}

For 'minorities' read 'Somalis.'

The department’s new written tests now focus more on personal histories and community engagement, and interviews have been refocused to allow applicants to personally explain incidents that may have previously disqualified them.

“Some people have been caught doing bad things and other people haven’t been caught,” Chief Axtell said. “The question we have is, ‘Was ownership taken?’”

Ownership???? As in 'yeah, I did it. I've gotten over it, you should too.'

As police departments grapple with complaints of excessive use of force and retrain officers to “de-escalate,” or defuse, tense encounters, Chief Axtell said he had used the interviews to identify one personality flaw that in the past might have gone overlooked.

“People who I believe have a short fuse,” he said, “will not get the opportunity in this department.”

Not that we want trigger happy police, but we've already seen policemen being murdered attempting to 'de-escalate.'

Now this isn't the first time this sort of change  has happened after the media whips up an incident to  a frenzy. After the Rodney King riots, old school police chief Daryl Gates was forced out and Willie Williams, Los Angeles's first black police chief was hurriedly hired. Williams proved comically inept and had personal corruption issues to the point where the City of Los Angeles eventually bought his contract out for a hefty sum to get rid of him. But he hung around long enough to implement new hiring practiced in the LAPD that pretty much mirrored what the New York Times is talking about here, where standards for police were dramatically lowered.

The result was the Rampart Division scandal, which involved  major police corruption including falsifying evidence, perjury, the targeting of specific gangs for the benefit of other sets and the theft of drugs by policemen from police property areas among other things. In the end, Ramparts negated over 100 convictions, put criminals who were actually guilty of violent crimes back on the streets  because of police errors and cost the City of Los Angeles  $125 million in financial settlements.

 It's a guaranteed recipe. Demonize police in big cities with fake prosecutions like Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and add a healthy dose of racialist politics. Then watch as people with impeccable backgrounds no longer find the job desirable and don't apply, or the ones already there get fed up and leave as the job becomes unbearable. 

Then, when you lower the standards simply to get more bodies on the street with diversity uber alles as a guideline, that leads to a whole different set of problems.

No police force is perfect, but demonizing police for political purposes is always a bad idea.  And keep in mind that the people sponsoring this kind of attitude usually don't have to live with the consequences, because they have 24-7 private security...many times paid for by the taxes on the same people  who will have to live with those consequences.

Memorial Day: Heroes And Hypocrites

Today is Memorial Day, a day when we honor men and women fallen in the service of their country.

Back when America was more of a piece, such a day was universal it what it meant. Oddly enough, the holiday itself started from division after the Civil War, a conflict over 600,000 Americans never returned from.

Southern women, putting flowers on the graves of their fallen also decided to decorate the graves of the fallen Union soldiers as well, and the custom spread across the Mason-Dixon line. From such a great,painful division came unity.

In America today, we are now in the midst of another great division. And increasingly, we lack the common bonds of our ancestors.

Let's examine something.

At the present time, we have a volunteer military. What that means is that some young men in our society made a choice to restrict their own freedom and risk their lives to defend the rest of us.Increasingly, there is a socioeconomic and geographical divide between those whom chose to serve and those who don't. In the past, most Americans knew someone who was serving or had served in our military...vets like Dad, your uncle or grandpa, somebody's niece or nephew, the neighbors kid or perhaps your own. That's no longer true.

The fact is, most self-styled progressives despise the sort of people who serve in our military. Oh, they'll pay lip service to 'supporting the troops' because, you know, it sounds patriotic and provides them a fig leaf, but the attitude is fairly obvious. A few Memeorial Days ago, MSNBC host and Nation editor Chris Hayes had this to say



CHRIS HAYES: Thinking today and observing Memorial Day, that'll be happening tomorrow. Just talked with Lt. Col. Steve Burke, who was a casualty officer with the Marines and had to tell people [inaudible]. Um, I, I, ah, [Steve] Beck, sorry, um, I think it's interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words "heroes." Um, and, ah, ah, why do I feel so comfortable [sic] about the word "hero"? I feel comfortable, ah, uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

To people like Chris Hayes, the people that go into the military are suckers and dupes, and more than one of his comrades on the left have shown that this is exactly how they see it...especially when they think no one's listening too closely.



Chris Hayes isn't alone. And people like him don't understand this. Not only don't most of them not know anyone who has ever served, but to them, it seems like anyone who would volunteer for the military is someone beneath them socially and intellectually,someone who had no other option. Especially for patriotic motives, which they also think of as borderline neanderthal. I mean, why would someone risk his life at minimal pay for such a deeply flawed country like America if they were, you know, smart?



Today, I saw photos of Bill and Hillary Clinton marching in a Memorial Day parade in their home town Chautauqua, New York. Since Mrs. Clinton and her friends are now preparing the ground for a 2020 run, I suppose they though it made good optics, you know. A nice photo op.

Just yesterday, an Obama-appointed judge threw a lawsuit out of court against Mrs. Clinton for willful negligence in the death of their sons by the Benghazi families. Judge Amy Berman Jackson set aside their claims that her use of an illegal private server to send confidential intel out unprotected helped cause the death of their sons. Not to mention ignoring repeated pleas for more security from Ambassador Stevens.

The judges verdict? That Mrs. Clinton's activities, even the clearly illegal ones were, and I quote "that Secretary Clinton was acting in the scope of her employment when she transmitted the emails that are alleged to give rise to her liability,”

And here you have these people marching and smiling in a Memorial Day Parade.

Our last president actually attempted to charge our wounded warriors for the medical care they were receiving for free via the VA. He also used there were the Obama Department of Justice to disenfranchise military votes overseas during the 2010 midterms.

And he further showed his feelings about the kind of people whom serve in our military by using dead military bodies being flown back to American soil as a political photo-op in defiance of Department of Defense regulations,the wishes of the families and simple common decency.

Yet in spite of all that, we still breed men here in America who answer the call of freedom. They understand something far more important than the contempt of the elites, and the smug platitudes uttered on this day. It is these men and women who define patriotism.

They knew that our beloved republic is worth fighting, and sometimes dying for. They put their lives on the line for our homeland. And they know how much many of us honor their bravery and sacrifice, even if it's s simple gesture like flowers on a grave. They showed up and gave their all. That's what we really honor on Memorial Day. And recent events may signify that we have indeed turned the corner as a nation, back towards the values we once held in common.

Those heroes, dead and alive will live forever in our hearts and always have our deepest gratitude and respect. The Chris Hayses, and their ilk never will.

The UK Left: 'Europe Needs To Just Get Used to Attacks Like Manchester"

Apparently children are just meant to be sacrificed for the greater goal of multiculti according to Britain's Left. Can't do anything about it you know, just like the weather.

Katty Kay is a well known BBC anchorwoman, and she pretty much said exactly that in an interview with far Left MSNBC personality Mike Brzezinsky.

Here's a partial transcript:


MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MORNING JOE: Katty Kay, your reaction and also tell us about this part of the country.

KATTY KAY, BBC: Manchester is about three hours northeast of Britain. It's Britain's second biggest city. It has, of course, as do most British cities, a large immigrant, and large Muslim population. It is the kind of place where Ariana Grande would go and play up in the north of the country.

And now the investigation will try to be on whether this person acted alone or whether there is some kind of cell behind it. It's particularly awful, this one, because it was girls. My daughter is 11. Her greatest wish in life is to go to an Ariana Grande concert. Ariana Grande is coming to play in Washington, D.C. in September and she really wants tickets for it. And those are the kinds of kids that were at this concert. It was families. And the heartbreaking news that we're getting from the Manchester police this morning, the statements they're putting out of mothers they found who are still looking for their daughters and daughters they found still looking for their mothers and they can't find the rest of their families.

And I think that's what's making -- Europe is getting used to attacks like this, Mika. We have to because we are never going to be able to totally wipe this out. As ISIS gets squeezed in Syria and Iraq, we're going to see more of these kinds of attacks takes place in Europe. And Europe is starting to get used to that. None of us are used to having children targeted in this way, young girls targeted in this way.

Here's the full interview:



This, by the way, is pretty much what French President Macron said, that attacks like Bataclan and Nice were simply the price to pay for 'a truly multicultural society.'

This woman has already surrendered. She's prepared to become a dhimmi, a 'protected person' with no real rights except what her overlords decree. Perhaps someone ought to clue her in as to how many girls like her daughter fare in a number of Muslim dominated countries like Egypt and Pakistan. Non-Muslim girls there are routinely kidnapped, 'converted' to Islam and 'married' to their kidnappers, after which they are not even allowed contact with their families except on the whim of their new owner.

Her nonsense about the cause being pressure on ISIS in places like Iraq and Syria is ridiculous. Perhaps if the UK and other European countries weren't letting these people in, things like this just might not happen. You think? Even a child who touches a hot stove and gets burned has the brains to figure out that it's a bad idea to repeat the behavior.

And that goes for native born jihadis too. There's no reason not to have them face a deportation tribunal.And no reason not to subject jihadist Mosques and Imams to surveillance.

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who was actually set off the nail bomb at the Manchester auditorium, wasn't from Iraq or Syria. He was British born, and actually a so-called 'known wolf' who was already on the radar of British police with known ties to Islamist terrorism. Yet there the was, free as a bird.

Did I mention the weather earlier? Well there's little control over that. But what happened at Manchester could have been controlled and avoided, provided Britain's government wants it so.

The British Left in general is pretty much taking the same position Katty Kay is. Because there's a national election coming up in a week or two in which Labour is already trailing badly. So the spin is necessary.

And Katty Kay isn't alone here. The far Left Guardian is equally spinning the narrative, but in a more subtle, evil way. Prominent columnist George Monbiot's shtick is that we have to submerge our outrage and remember what he calls our common humanity:

The terrorists want to drive us apart, to sow suspicion and fear, to oblige us to replace liberty with security and answer them with bombs and bullets of our own. For a terrorist organisation any of this, if implemented, would mean mission accomplished. So we should do the opposite. We defy them by proving that this is not what we are. And the proof is everywhere. [...]

This is why terrorism happens: those who perpetrate it know that an attack on one is an attack on all. People are killed or injured in order to maximise the distress suffered by a far greater number – and to induce us, blinded by outrage, to forget our humanity and to lash out. This then cultivates a political environment in which terrorists prosper: a nation dominated by fear, a cycle of revenge, and the escalation of conflict.

Altruism and empathy are what binds us together, and what defines us. We should let no one distract us from this central fact of our nature: neither terrorists nor those who, in response to them, demand that we slam our doors in the faces of an entire community or an entire religion.

What a fine, humanitarian human being! Ummm, except when it comes to Jews and especially Israel. He's a prominent supporter of BDS and a pal to Labour's anti-semitic leader Jeremy Cobyn. He also was a founder of George Galloway's Hamas and Hezbollah friendly Respect Party.

Obviously, nail bombs in pizza parlors that kill and maim Jewish children aren't something to condemn at all for Mr. Monbiot. After all, it's the Jew's fault isn't it? Always is.

If the European Left has its way, Europe's people will simply be limited to the options Mohammed told his followers to give them in Qur'an 9:5, also known as 'The verse of the Sword'; to become corpses, Muslims,or tribute paying slaves.

The Brits, the French, all of the free people of Europe are going to have to decide whether what they believe in is worth fighting for.

Ann Coulter Forced To Cancel Speech At Berkeley - And How We Fight back

Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at UC Berkeley after the city of Berkeley's Police Department told her they could not (read, would not) guarantee her safety. That should be no surprise, since they essentially followed orders from the mayor and police chief to stand down and allowed radical antifa and black prog-facist terrorists to freely assault and seroiusly injure people whose only crime was to be in line to hear Milo Yiannopoulos speak. Not to mention the over $100,000 in damages to private property they were allowed to act out and commit before the police finally got the OK to quash the carnage.

The university made a show in the beginning of permitting Ann Coulter to speak, but there were so many additional fees and numerous conditions they insisted on designed to limit access and reduce turnout for the event that it was obvious they were attempt in to quash it. Needless to say,no radical Leftist (and Berkeley has had a number of those creeps speakers there) has ever been subject toanything like these special fees and conditions. When that didn't work, they simply banned her because of course, they weren't going to have the campus police protect her.

So in the end University officials sent the Berkeley College Republicans, who were hosting the event  a letter Tuesday, saying that in their wisdom, they had determined it was just too much of a security risk to allow here to speak.

“We have been unable to find a safe and suitable venue,” said the letter from Vice Chancellor Scott Biddy (what a perfectly surnamed official) and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Stephen Sutton. Especially when you'd much rather avoid having someone speak whom might challenge what's being poured into the lil' snowflake's heads (horrors, they might learn something!!) and anger the mob.

La Coulter toyed with the idea of speaking in public at Sproul Plaza, where Mario Savio started the original free speech movement and which is open to the public. After which the powers that be in Berkeley who are responsible for law enforcement let her know that they weren't going to do much to protect her either.

You can't really blame the Berkeley Police. Like most cops, I'm sure they are admirable people who take their jobs seriously, a job most of us wouldn't do for any money. But they are also human beings with pensions to protect, bills to pay and families to support. When the word comes from upstairs to knuckle under and not get in the way of some of the Lefty brown shirts beating up on people who came to hear the latest subject of the Two Minute Hate commit thought crimes,  they going to obey.

So, the Young America's Foundation decided it was too risky to participate,Berkeley College Republicans are suing the university and Ann Coulter is staying home.

And the powers that be in Berkeley? The college administrators are undoubtedly getting a few fist bumps and atta boys in the faculty room. And Jesse Arreguin, the mayor, who has deep ties with the Antifa group By Any Means Necessary and publicly supports them is enjoying another win. After all, why do you think he was elected mayor of a place like Berkeley in the first place if not to suppress thought crimes in Lenin's Little Acre?



He's not facing re-election until 2020, and anyone who participated in Black Lives Matter protests and the Occupy Movement. and called - officially - for the impeachment of President Trump is not worried about his job or reputation when it comes to anyone he thinks counts.

So if you're expecting any remorse or even mild embarrassment over this blatant display, forget about it.

With increasingly rare exceptions, the Left feels the same way about free speech as they do about democracy in general. They only approve of it when it applies to them and works for The Cause. They are totalitarian to the core, and Berkeley is a yet another superb example of what happens when they actually have power and hold all the cards.

Milo was making some noise earlier today about invading Berkeley with what he called 'a free speech army' in the future. As far as I'm concerned, that is a uniquely futile gesture. What it would do, unless it happens earlier is to simply become the occasion when someone who merely wants to exercise freedom of speech gets murdered by the Left's brownshirts. And when that happens, you're going to see people defend themselves. Which is exactly how brownshirt street thug Horst Wessel became a 'martyr' and got famous. He simply tried to beat up on the wrong person and a virtual civil war erupted. And those of you saying 'bring it on' might perhaps have noticed that Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the rest of the Left's violent cadres only really operate in areas where they know they're going to be protected by the local authorities; university campuses like Berkeley and Blue fifedoms like coastal California. So don't expect justice when it comes to defending yourselves.Or count on the police to protect you.

A better way to fight this? Sure there is. What tactics work?

• Lawfare: There's no question that the City of Berkeley and UCSB are guilty of violating the civil rights of the people who were beaten up while police stood by. Or that Ann Coulter's civil and Constitutional rights were violated  as well as those whom wished to hear her speak...just read the First Amendment. There is also a clear claim based on unequal treatment, since she and the College Republicans were subjected to fees and regulations Lefty speakers weren't. Second wave feminists cut a path on that one.The Berkeley PD can also probably be sued for negligence by those whom were injured. Sue the bastards and make them pay through the nose. And remember, Judge shopping works two ways.

• Boycotting: Berkeley is a public university and receives public funds. But it also receives money from alumni and from the proceeds of its sports event as well as merchandising. Don't go to Berkeley sporting events. Don't attend concerts or exhibits at the university's facilities.If any TV or radio shows carry their games, don't watch or listen and write the companies that sponsor the games  that you don't patronize companies that aid and abet such fascism. Don't buy their tee shirts, mugs or other garbage.  Picket and disrupt any speakers from Berkeley who do events in Red States. Make it expensive security wise for universities to invite them. And one way of disrupting them is to ask them how they can continue to represent such a fascist institution.

• Ridicule, shame and target Berkeley's prog-fascist view point as socially unacceptable at every opportunity: Remember back in the old days of the fledgling  civil rights or women's lib movement? Remember how you and perhaps other people responded to remarks and 'jokes' that were racist or misogynist, with a nasty look and a remark to the effect that you didn't find that funny but offensive? Make Berkeley's prog-fascist attitudes just as socially unacceptable when you run across them. In public. Make 'Berserkeley' a figure of ridicule.

• And yes,  be aware at anytime that you might just have to physically defend yourself and conduct yourself accordingly: Bullies like the antifa crowd are usually physical cowards who hide their faces and only attack in mobs where they can get away with it. Faced with opposition, especially in areas the Left doesn't control,they can be beaten badly at their own game.

How The Leftist Media Obsession With Attacking Trump Is Hurting America

 

Victor Davis Hanson, not exactly a Trump cheerleader, has an interesting piece on the subject of fake news. Not only does he call out what he calls ‘the contemporary mainstream media’ as purveyors of fake news, but he accuses them of dereliction of duty when it comes to the role of journalists in a free society, to act as disinterested, neutral reporters who act as a brake on power by informing the American people.

Donald Trump conducted a press conference recently as if he were a loud circus ringmaster whipping the media circus animals into shape. The establishment thought the performance was a window into an unhinged mind; half the country thought it was a long overdue media comeuppance.

The media suffer the lowest approval numbers in nearly a half-century. In a recent Emerson College poll, 49 percent of American voters termed the Trump administration “truthful”; yet only 39 percent believed the same about the news media.

Every president needs media audit. The role of journalists in a free society is to act as disinterested censors of government power—neither going on witch-hunts against political opponents nor deifying ideological fellow-travelers.

Sadly, the contemporary mainstream media—the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN), the traditional blue-chip newspapers (Washington Post, New York Times), and the public affiliates (NPR, PBS)—have lost credibility. They are no more reliable critics of President Trump’s excesses than they were believable cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s policies.

Trump may have a habit of exaggeration and gratuitous feuding that could cause problems with his presidency. But we would never quite know that from the media. In just his first month in office, reporters have already peddled dozens of fake news stories designed to discredit the President—to such a degree that little they now write or say can be taken at face value.

No, Trump did not have any plans to invade Mexico, as Buzzfeed and the Associated Press alleged.

No, Trump’s father did not run for Mayor of New York by peddling racist television ads, as reported by Sidney Blumenthal.

No, there were not mass resignations at the State Department in protest of its new leaders, as was reported by the Washington Post.

No, Trump’s attorney did not cut a deal with the Russians in Prague. Nor did Trump indulge in sexual escapades in Moscow. Buzzfeed again peddled those fake news stories.

No, a supposedly racist Trump did not remove the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the White House, as a Time Magazine reporter claimed.

No, election results in three states were not altered by hackers or computer criminals to give Trump the election, as implied by New York Magazine.

No, Michael Flynn did not tweet that he was a scapegoat. That was a media fantasy endorsed by Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, Daniel Payne of the Federalist has compiled a lengthy list of sensational stories about Trump’s supposed buffooneries, mistakes, and crudities that all proved either outright lies or were gross exaggerations and distortions.

We would like to believe writers for the New York Times or Washington Post when they warn us about the new president’s overreach. But how can we do so when they have lost all credibility—either by colluding with the Obama presidency and the Hillary Clinton campaign, or by creating false narratives to ensure that Trump fails?

Ezra Klein at Vox just wrote a warning about the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump. Should we believe him? Perhaps not. Klein was the originator of Journolist, a “left-leaning” private online chat room of journalists that was designed to coordinate media narratives that would enhance Democratic politicians and in particular Barack Obama. Such past collusion begs the question of whether Klein is really disinterested now in the fashion that he certainly was not during the Obama administration.

Recently, New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush coauthored a report
about initial chaos among the Trump White House staff, replete with unidentified sources. Should we believe Thrush’s largely negative story?

Perhaps. But then again, Thrush not so long ago turned up in the Wikileaks troves as sending a story to Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta for prepublication audit. Thrush was his own honest critic, admitting to Podesta: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has become a fierce critic of President Trump. Are his writs accurate? Milbank also appeared in Wikileaks, asking the Democratic National Committee to provide him with free opposition research for a negative column he was writing about candidate Trump. Are Milbank’s latest attacks his own—or once again coordinated with Democratic researchers?

The Washington Post censor Glenn Kessler posted the yarn about Trump’s father’s racist campaign for New York mayor—until he finally fact-checked his own fake news and deleted his tweet.

Sometimes the line between journalism and politicians is no line at all. Recently, former Obama deputy National Security advisor Ben Rhodes (brother of CBS news president David Rhodes) took to Twitter to blast the Trump administration’s opposition to the Iran Deal, brokered in large part by Rhodes himself. “Everything Trump says here,” Rhodes stormed, “is false.”

Should we believe Rhodes’s charges that Trump is now lying about the details of the Iran Deal?
Who knows, given that Rhodes himself not long ago bragged to the New York Times of his role in massaging reporters to reverberate an administration narrative: “We created an echo chamber They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.” Rhodes also had no respect for the very journalists that he had manipulated: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Is Rhodes now being disinterested or once again creating an “echo chamber”?

His boss, former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, Susan Rice (married to Ian Cameron, a former producer at ABC news), likewise went on Twitter to blast the Trump administration’s decision to include presidential advisor Steven Bannon in meetings of the National Security Council: “This is stone cold crazy,” Rice asserted, “After a week of crazy.”
Is Rice (who has no military experience) correct that the former naval officer Bannon has no business participating in such high strategy meetings?

In September 2012, Rice went on television on five separate occasions to insist falsely to the nation that the attacks on the Benghazi consulate were the work of spontaneous rioters and not a preplanned hit by an al Qaeda franchise. Her own quite crazy stories proved a convenient administration reelection narrative of Al Qaeda on the run, but there were already sufficient sources available to Rice to contradict her false news talking points.

There are various explanations for the loss of media credibility.

(read the rest here)

BREAKING! Project Veritas Undercover Op Outs Plans To Terrorize Inaugural

James O'Keefe and his team have gone public with the results of their undercover investigation of a group known as 'the DC Anti-fascist Coalition,' an alliance of radical Leftist groups who have come together and have made concrete plans to disrupt the Trump inauguration and terrorize the attendees. These are not people simple planning a protest or some street theater. These are violent, serious people, And listening to them, it's obvious they have the expertise to carry their plans for violence off.This video is part one:

California Seceding? Don't Make Me Laugh!

The latest manifestation of butt hurt, crybaby lefties are threats from Democrat owned California to secede from the United States.



Here's a sample of what the#neverTrumpers at Bloomberg have to say:

Immediately after the election, state Senate President Kevin de León and his Assembly counterpart, Anthony Rendon, both Latinos from Southern California, sent out a scathing statement in English and Spanish assuring all 39 million Californians that they were ready for political war. “Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California,” they wrote. “We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.”

With the largest economy in the U.S. and the sixth-largest in the world, the state enjoys greater independence from Washington than most. It was the first state to adopt its own vehicle emissions standards, in 2002. In 2012, California created the only state-level cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse gas emissions after Republicans in Congress rejected a national model. California, which has more undocumented immigrants than any other state, offers them driver’s licenses as well as financial aid for college. It has imposed some of the country’s strictest background checks on firearms purchases. It’s one of three states to provide paid family and medical leave and one of five that require employers to offer paid sick leave. “This is unlike anything we’ve seen in modern political history,” says de León. “We’re going to do everything in our power to protect our people and our values as Californians.”

State Democrats say there’s plenty they can do short of leaving the U.S. California has long been a net contributor to Washington’s coffers, receiving an estimated 78¢ in federal spending in return for every dollar it sends, according to a study by the Washington-based Tax Foundation, a nonprofit think tank that provides analysis of federal and state tax policies. That gives state leaders potential leverage when it comes to complying with policies it doesn’t like, starting with the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

From January 2014 to September 2015, California released immigrants considered deportable under federal law in more than 11,000 instances, rather than keeping them in custody for federal agents, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by the Texas Tribune. The next state on the list, New York, released people in fewer than 2,000 cases.

The article's certainly correct about that last part. One of these 'immigrants' they refused to hold for ICE (let's be more honest than Bloomberg and call them illegal migrants instead) was a career criminal murdered Kate Steinle in San Francisco. And that's after he was deported five times.

 

 Let's examine this bolshoi in detail, shall we?

The reason for the uproar among California Democrats has nothing to do with values. It has to do with maintaining their political power. California is a solid blue state today simply because the electorate was deliberately changed by the state's Democrats using a combination of open borders,extremely generous social welfare benefits and high taxation to pay for it that caused a lot of the sort of people who used to vote Republican to leave the state.

California, which has the largest population of illegal migrants in America is arguably the easiest state in the union to commit voter fraud in. Democrat President Clinton's 'voter-motor' legislation automatically registers to vote anyone getting a driver's license or registering a vehicle who checks a box asking to be registered to vote. California changed that slightly by automatically registering them to vote unless they checked a box asking not to be registered to vote.

The state gives driver's licenses to illegal migrants and not only does it not check immigration status, but it allows illegal migrants to obtain California driver's licenses with a matricula consular card issued by one of the numerous Mexican consulates in the state as their only identification. Needless to say, the consulates don't check anyone's data too closely, and if there's a problem, $50 0r $100 cash to the right clerk will get you a matricula consular ID with any name or details you want.

The state has no voter ID laws at all, and a recent Univision poll that the station quickly suppressed and took off the internet showed that a third of the respondents who admitted to being in California illegally also admitted they had voted. And why wouldn't they? There's nothing stopping them, they're duly registered and the president of the United States encouraged them to vote in the last election!

So now you know exactly why many California Democrats are up in arms over actually enforcing our immigration laws. And a big part of what's behind the recent secession fervor.

Right now, as I write this there's an organized group submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office for a 2018 vote.

It's unlikely to go anywhere for a number of reasons. The national Democrat party will fight it tooth and nail because without California, they lose two senate seats and 39 House seats, and they're doomed to minority status forever. A large part of the state would likely refuse to leave the United States. And November 2018 would take place almost two years after President Trump takes office. A fair amount of those illegal migrant votes the proponents are counting on to shove this through will likely not be available by then. Finally, as we'll see, the cost would likely bankrupt the state.

But just for giggles, let's assume it gets on the ballot, is put to a vote, and passes. How exactly would that work out for California?

As secession proponents are fond of repeating, the state is the world's sixth largest economy and contributes $1 to the federal treasury for every 78 cents it receives in federal funding. What they aren't looking at is the nature of what California contributes and where it comes from, or the nature of that federal spending.

California's large economy primarily derives from the fact that it can ship things like high tech and agricultural products to the rest of the United States tariff free and receive imports from the rest of America duty free. If the new nation/state of California expects to receive the same deal after a hostile secession, they're kidding themselves.

Just imagine how quickly most of Silicon Valley would relocate faced with a 25% tariff on what it exports to the rest of America! Not only that, but things California now gets for free would be things the state would now have to finance, like defense, the Coast Guard, airport security, Medicare, MedicAid (that's $15 billion for the exchange  alone) a merchant marine to ship its good overseas, various regulatory agencies...it's a long and costly list. 

Another thing secessionists aren't calculating astounds me, given that it's California we're talking about...that divorces always cost money.

California has millions in Federal infrastructure. There are office buildings, highways, post offices, military bases, armories, dams, national parks, prisons, VA hospitals, communications networks and terminals, fire watching stations,and railroads among other things that the Federal government will rightly demand to be reimbursed for since they were paid for with federal funds.

Also, much of what California contributes to the federal treasury is in the form of taxes. This includes excise taxes on gasoline, communications, the internet, and all sorts of other things. A lot of this stuff would have to be imported to the new nation, and the cheapest and nearest source is Red America unless the new California government wants to enrage its powerful environmental lobby by drilling offshore near those pretty beaches. Setting up an oil or natural gas infrastructure is costly too. And so is importing it. Goodness, they'd actually have to build an oil refinery! And put desalinization plants on the coast to be able  to stop buying Colorado River water from Red America. Imagine how high the taxes would have to go to support all that!

Californians thinking about whether to secede will be shocked at how much freedom from America is going to cost.That ratio of dollars paid out versus federal funds received would change really quickly.

The socialist coastal elites have been running - almost wrote ruining, Freudian slip- California for some time now. You won't get any argument out of me that they're insane. Whether they're crazy enough for this, especially since a lot of their tax base - the folks that aren't working for state and local governments would move away to avoid the inevitable sky high taxes that would result  is anyone's guess. Mine would be no, but like I said we're not dealing with rational people here.