Frank Bullitt this morning:
Earlier this year, former Goldman Sachs adviser and columnist Ron Hart wrote in the Orange County Register about Democrats’ strategy “to fan the fires of racial division in order to win back the White House in 2020.”
While true, much more than 2020 is at stake. Democrats want an us-and-them country, one in which they alone have the raw political power. It’s a long-term strategy that has most prominently appeared in their gun-control efforts. Their objective isn’t to reduce firearm violence but to separate Americans into two groups: backward hicks bitterly clinging to their guns and urbane sophisticates who have evolved beyond that primitive state and therefore have standing to rule the hicks.
Ignoring, of course that these selfsame Urban sophisticates are the proximate cause of the majority of the gun violence in this country, by a factor of 10.
He goes on:
By segragating America into two parts — vile, retrograde deplorables who can’t be trusted, and educated, forward-looking progressives — Democrats are setting up a society in which they wouldn’t govern under constitutional limits but rule by political mandate. All power must be turned over to them to keep the barbarians outside the gates. Just as the Cloward-Piven strategy was to create a financial/institutional/societal crisis so profound that it required radical government intervention, seeding the specter of racism and white supremacy is designed to yield a permanent Democratic regime.
Which is precisely what has upset the Donkey club so… Trump represents a huge roadblock to that goal, one which in their view must at all costs, be obliterated.
Mind, I still hold that as personal as the attacks on Trump have been, he is not the real issue for them. Instead, the core reason for Democrat mouths foaming as they’ve been, is that there is resistance to the dynasty they have been trying to build. ( I say again, can anyone imagine the Democrats reacting any differently to a president Ted Cruz?)
Recent events have left all of this completely exposed to the Americn voter… And the results are predictable.
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I’ve made no secret here of my disdain for Mitt Romney.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that my read on the man was absolutely correct. Headlines today:
BREAKING: Mitt Romney’s national security advisor from his 2012 campaign sits on the board of the Ukrainian gas company that paid Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden $50,000 a month
Are you beginning to understand?
Slow Joe, Joseph Biden, raids cookie jar. Brags about it on C/SPAN, from Legal Insurrection:
In any case, back in 2018 former Vice President Biden bragged about pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire the prosecutor investigating his son (who was involved in some seriously shady business dealings with Burisma) or risk losing out on a $1 billion loan from the US. Biden’s bribe was successful. And bonus, it’s allllllll on tape!
video:
Yet more ‘rat corruption, from WaPo, via Legal Insurrection:
It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
Reax, from New York Sun:
All the more reason, in our view, for Mr. Trump to have pressed for an investigation. The Democrats will need an electron microscope to find in the Trump-Zelensky phone call particles of either a quid or a pro or a quo that compare to the Uluru of a quid pro quo in the Biden-Poroshenko palaver. How are Speaker Pelosi and her Democratic caucus going to make a federal case out of Mr. Trump without sacrificing Mr. Biden?
I suspect that Speaker Pelosi will willingly torpedo what’s left of Slow Joe, if that is what is takes to get the President. However, will the Speaker also torpedo, Senators Menedez, Durbin and Leahy? What say you Senator Chuck Schumer?
Vice President Biden clearly implied that President Obama was complicit in Biden’s corruption. Will the former President attempt to clear his name?
Addendum: Eric
I’ve been questioning most of the morning, whether or not the elimination of Biden from the presidential race isn’t precisely what a fair number of Democrats intend… And before Iowa.
Matt Margolis reports:
The White House has released the transcript of a call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that occurred on July 25 of this year. While Joe Biden was mentioned, Trump’s claim that there was “No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo” appears to be true.
As Amber Athey, White House Correspondent for the Daily Caller, noted, “Basically, there isn’t anything in the call that Trump, Giuliani etc. hasn’t already admitted to publicly.” The call began with Trump complaining about the lack of support from European countries for Ukraine, just as Trump said was the case.
One can’t help but wonder if Pelosi isn’t regretting her actions of yesterday….
From The Washington Post and with a hat tip to Glenn we find that, as usual, the Democrats are applying double standards:
We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden. But if we are concerned about U.S. officoials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.
It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
…..
And then there is Joe Biden. In 2016, the then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine if the government did not fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. According to the New York Times, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden … who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.” The Post reports that it is “unclear how seriously Shokin — who was under fire by U.S. and European officials for not taking a more aggressive posture toward corruption overall — was scrutinizing Burisma when he was forced out.” But what is clear is that Biden bragged about getting him fired, declaring last year: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b—-. He got fired.”
This weekend, Biden told reporters, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” That is flatly untrue. Hunter admitted in an interview with the New Yorker that his father expressed concern about the Burisma post at least once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Moreover, the New Yorker reports that, “In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma. Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden.” That same month, the New York Times published an article about how Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine undermined the vice president’s anti-corruption message, which quoted a Biden spokesman saying it had no impact.
So, Biden was fully aware of his son’s involvement with Burisma when he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor in 2016. He should have known that his using U.S. aid as leverage to force the prosecutor’s dismissal would create, at a bare minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest. Federal ethics regulations require “all employees to recuse themselves from participating in an official matter if their impartiality would be questioned.” Biden violated these rules. Imagine if Trump pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that employed Donald Trump Jr. as a board member. No one would be giving Trump a pass.
The revelation of Biden’s misdeeds is what finally drove them over the edge.
Anybody with a sense of history will understand quite clearly the irony of Democrats publicly worried about Russian influence in our elections, while ignoring their own history of Ted Kennedy openly asking the Kremlin for it’s help in defeating Ronald Reagan at the ballot box. Clearly, the Democrats figured that at that point they didn’t have anything more to lose.
By that same token, then, tt seems clear that the reason why Nancy Pelosi finally gave up and started making impeachment noises, is the recognition that the Democrats had to create some diversion away from the ethical and criminal misdeeds of their only viable presidential candidate…. The only person who stood a chance of running a successful presidential campaign against Donald Trump… That at this stage they have nothing more to lose.
No matter what else happened, everybody knew it was going to come to this… That a singular event, a simple revelation of Democrat misdeeds, was finally going to push them into wackytown. Well, it’s done, now, and the electoral result is eminently predictable.
Elsewhere:
A Response to Greta Thunberg
This one is long, but it is incredibly important.
It’s a pretty scary situation that we are propping up a child onto a world stage when her argument is absolutely not supported by facts.
Greta Thunberg claims that “At even 1 degree of warming, we are seeing an unacceptable loss of life and livelihoods”.
Except the loss of life and property destruction due to “Climate Catastrophes” has dropped from 480,00 in 1920 to less than 40,000 annually in 2019.
[See the chart below titled ‘Deaths from Climate and non-Climate catastrophes].
The global warming projection models over the last 30 years have been almost 100% incorrect. Prognosticators predicted that many of the glaciers would be melted by 2014. Not only did they not melt, the total glacier mass on the earth today exceeds the total amount that existed when that prediction was made just prior to 2000.
This poor young lady is being taken advantage of and used as a prop and a pawn in a bigger agenda.
You are told that any climate change is entirely the result of people introducing large amounts of “greenhouse gases” (mostly carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, and that natural forces have little or no effect on these changes. You have also been told that these assertions are a product of “settled science,” agreed upon by 97% of all scientists.
While about 30% of the Sun’s radiation is reflected by clouds, most of it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere and strikes the surface. There it is absorbed, and its energy emitted in the near-infrared spectrum. Some of that re-emitted energy is absorbed by greenhouse-gas molecules. As they absorb the radiation, they in turn emit energy in the form of heat.
[See the Greenhouse Gas Effect graphic below].
In the discussion about greenhouse gases, alarmist organizations and their allies in the media focus solely on man-made gases as the main agents of greenhouse warming. They do not mention the most significant greenhouse gas of all—water vapor.
For example, the National Geographic climate-change website reports that greenhouse gases “include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide (N2O), fluorinated gases, and ozone.” EPA’s greenhouse-gas pie chart is something like the chart below. It shows no contribution from water vapor. Based solely on charts like this and descriptions like that given by National Geographic, one might well conclude that CO2 is the main driver of greenhouse warming. This creates highly inaccurate predictions because the main driver of greenhouse warming—water vapor—is completely ignored and not properly allowed for in many of the Climate Change alarmist models.
[See Including and Excluding Water Vapor graphic below].
An easily understandable example of the role that water vapor plays in retaining heat comes from the southwest of the United States, where a summer evening walk in the near zero humidity of New Mexico may require a jacket, while your friends in Houston are sweltering in the high heat and humidity and dare not venture out at all.
Both sides of the issue agree that water vapor is responsible for the lion’s share of the greenhouse effect, though the percentage of warming attributed has been in dispute. There is no agreement, however, on how much warming will occur due to increases in greenhouse gases, or on how much of that warming has been, or will be, man-made.
Warming allows the atmosphere to increase the amount of water vapor it can carry, which can then add to the greenhouse warming effect (i.e. water-vapor feedback), but neither side agrees on the magnitude of this “multiplier” effect on global warming. Overblown estimates of water-vapor feedback will lead inescapably to overestimation of future warming in the climate models. These overestimates have been identified as one of the main reasons that these models have failed.
Before global warming became a political issue, it was generally accepted among physicists that water vapor contributes 60 to 95% of the greenhouse effect. It is no more sensible or workable for governments to attempt to regulate the weather by declaring CO2 to be a pollutant than it would be for them to try to regulate water vapor or declare it to be a pollutant.
The role of water vapor within climate models and predictions based on it is an inexact science, as the amount of water vapor in the air varies markedly from place to place and from day to day. Absolute humidity can range from near zero in deserts and Antarctica—the Earth’s driest continent—to about 4% in the steamy tropics (Driessen 2014).
Paul Driessen, Senior Policy Advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), said in October 2016;
“No Real-World evidence supports a ‘dangerous manmade climate change’ thesis. In fact, a moderately warmer planet with more atmospheric carbon dioxide would hugely benefit crop, forest and other plant growth, wildlife and humans – with no or minimal climate effect. A colder planet with less CO2 would punish them. And a chillier CO2-deprived planet with less reliable, less affordable energy (from massive wind, solar and biofuel projects) would threaten habitats, species, nutrition and the poorest among us.”
Even a very small change in water vapor, however, can so affect the greenhouse effect as would a doubling of the present CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (Robinson 2012).
Arthur (Art) B. Robinson, Ph.D., Chemistry, University of California at San Diego. Robinson was among a group of climate change skeptics who responded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave into this pressure.”
“The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.
“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”
We have heard that 97% of scientists agree on human-driven climate change. You may also have heard that those who don’t buy into the climate-apocalypse mantra are Luddite science-deniers. So, count me in as a Luddite, but a whole lot more than 3% of scientists are skeptical of the party line on climate. A whole lot more.
There are some scientific truths that are quantifiable and easily proven, and with which, I am confident, at least 97% of scientists agree.
Here are two: Carbon dioxide concentration has been increasing in recent years. Temperatures, as measured by thermometers and satellites, have been generally increasing over the last 150 years.
What is impossible to quantify is the actual percentage of warming that is attributable to increased anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2. There is no scientific evidence or method that can determine how much of the warming we’ve had since 1900 was directly caused by us.
The long and hard road to scientific truth cannot be followed by the trivial expedient of a mere headcount among those who make their livings from government funding. Therefore, the mere fact that climate activists find themselves so often appealing to an imagined and (as we shall see) imaginary “consensus” is a red flag. They are far less sure of the supposed scientific truths to which they cling than they would like us to believe. “Consensus,” here, is a crutch for lame science.
What, then, is the origin of the “97% consensus” notion? Is it backed up with research and data? The earliest attempt to document a “consensus” on climate change was a 2004 paper cited by Al Gore in his allegedly non-fiction book, An Inconvenient Truth. (Gore attended natural science class at Harvard but got a D grade for it.) The author of the cited paper, Naomi Oreskes, asserted that 75% of nearly 1,000 papers she had reviewed on the question of climate change agreed with the “consensus” proposition favored by the IPCC: “Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” None, she maintained, dissented from this line of reasoning.
The Oreskes paper came to the attention of Klaus-Martin Schulte, an eminent London surgeon, who had become concerned with the adverse health effects of his patients from their belief in apocalyptic global warming.
Professor Schulte decided to update Oreskes’ work. However, he found that only 45% of several hundred papers endorsed the “consensus” position. He concluded: “There appears to be little basis in the peer-reviewed scientific literature for the degree of alarm on the issue of climate change which is being expressed in the media and by politicians”.
Another project was self-described as “a ‘citizen science’ project by volunteers contributing to the website.” The team consisted of 12 climate activists who did not leave their climate prejudices at home. These volunteers, many of whom had no training in the sciences, said they had “reviewed” abstracts from 11,944 peer-reviewed papers related to climate change or global warming, published over the 21 years 1991 – 2011, to assess the extent to which they supported the “consensus view” on climate change.
The paper concluded, among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. … Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.
The paper asserted—falsely, as it turned out—that 97% of the papers the reviewers examined had explicitly endorsed the opinion that humans are causing the majority of the warming of the last 150 years. When one looks at the data, one finds that 7,930 (66.3%) of the papers took no position at all on the subject and were arbitrarily excluded from the count on this ground. If we simply add back all the papers reviewed, the 97% claimed by Cook and his co-authors falls to 32.6%.
That is hardly a consensus.
Unfortunately, Greta has been spun into an emotional and passionate activist. It’s sad that she is fighting against the truth and is being used by ‘adults’ in their misguided power-hungry pursuit to hold sway over our lives, our world and our livelihoods.
For detailed information pick up a copy of ‘Inconvenient Facts, the science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know’, by Gregory Wrightstone.
This is Joseph Biden circa 1987, then Senator from Delaware and would be presidential candidate, video:
Slow Joe had the same inflated ego, and opinion of himself, but less hair, from Biography:
Biden was at best a mediocre law student. During his first year at Syracuse, he flunked a class for failing to properly cite a reference to a law review article. Although he claimed it was an accidental oversight, the incident would haunt him later in his career.
Fast forward, this is Slow Joe on the campaign trail in Iowa, same ego, same intellect(or lack thereof same), but with more hair, from Media Research Center.
*You can’t truly be peaceful unless you’re capable of great violence. If you’re incapable of violence, you’re not peaceful, you’re just harmless…. And essentially useless in terms of keeping the peace.
* I observe that the happier Americans are, the unhappier Democrats are.
* The most likely reason that government wants to remove firearms from your possession is that they want to do something that you will want to shoot them for.
* There were more American flags on the moon than there were at any of the Democrat Party gatherings.
* The extent to which Democrats will go to eliminate opposing views is not demonstrated by their treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but by their treatment of Antonin Scalia.
Now [Bill] de Blasio has only dreams of what might have been — and memories of those 10-person campaign crowds; his mortifying invisibility in the polls; his irrelevance in the cattle-call debates; his virtual inability to raise a legitimate dime, and the rip-saw ridicule he suffered in the media.
Normal New Yorkers are left with this question: How can the fellow even look into the mirror in the morning?
Gilly tried to become President with a rabid war on men. However Mayor Bill bottomed her out by waging a campaign that could not break past the the digit barrier. Now Bill can concentrate on his real passion, morning workouts at the gym, thereby making easy for Little Andy, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, to politically urinate on him.
* Remember you heard it here first…. Kamala Harris will be the first of the big names to drop off of the nomination race. She was never that popular to begin with, and the number of times she contradicted her own positions has achieved critical mass.
* New Survey: Half Of Britons (And Most Europeans) Are Climate Sceptics. And the thing is, it would seem they’ve been listening to the scientists on this one and not Greta Thunberg.
* And watching the UAW strike on GM, one can easily imagine that there is a political motivation. As a friend remarked…
Workers: “This is great! Our jobs are coming back! We’re going back to work!”
Union: “We’ll fix that.”
Then of course there is the arrest of the UAW president on corruption charges. Explain to me again why we need unions, anymore.
I’m watching the Lewandowski circus. When Tim Cohen D-Ten accused Lewandowski of being told by Trump to do something illegal. Big Lew responded Trump never asked him to do anything illegal and Old Tim says “The public will be the judge of that.”
What an Aha moment that revealed the entire purpose of this is to influence public opinion and not to do anything legally about our President. It makes it so easy to dismiss this whole farce.
Yeah, that was pretty much my response as well.
Filing for Chapter 11 protection was the first step in a plan Purdue says would provide $10 billion to $12 billion in restitution to state and local governments and clean up the damage done by powerful prescription pain medicines and illegal opioid use linked to them.
The Connecticut-based pharmaceutical giant, which is controlled by the Sackler family, has been accused of fueling a nationwide crisis that has left more than 400,000 people dead from opioid abuse over the past two decades.
Lawyers get rich. Governments lines their pockets. Nary a mention of the physicians who prescribed the drugs, the actual victims, or their families. We have a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers.
(CNN)A Georgia homeowner shot and killed three masked teens as they approached his residence with their faces covered, authorities said.
The three victims, one 15-year-old and two 16-year-olds, were all from the area but did not live in the specific neighborhood they were in, the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office said.The teens approached three residents at the front yard of a home early Monday morning and attempted to rob them, authorities say. One of the would-be robbers took out a gun and fired shots at them, before one of the residents returned fire.
[…]
“Then I heard somebody have an assault rifle,” Carlos Watson told WSB. “And it was a slew of shots that came out.”
If Robert Francis O’Rourke had is way, the homeowners would been disarmed and the local residents might well be dead. O’Rourke has promised to send his jack booted thugs door to door to disarm law abiding citizens. An armed robber’s weapon of choice is a handgun. The best self-defense weapon ever is a short barrelled AR-15 with an ample magazine. O’Rourke promises to take the defensive weapons first.
While the former congressman from Texas, hates modern firearms, the old hag from California, Dianne Fenstein, hates magazines. Maybe the Ringo Kid Wayne can stop three men with but one rifle and just three bullets. In the real world, a mortal is not going to stop a three man armed mob with small magazine of varmint caliber bullets.
Soon after the story was published, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, who had an advanced copy of the book, noted the article failed to mention a critical detail that, quite literally, undermined the entire accusation.”The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event,” she tweeted. John McCormack of National Review called the omission of this fact from the article “one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.”
It wasn’t until late Sunday evening that the New York Times, updated the article to include this crucial piece of information. Here is the relevant paragraph, with the update in bold:
A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier; the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.
An Editors’ Note was also added at the bottom:
Editors’ Note: Sept. 15, 2019
An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.
Despite the update, the damage has been done.
Yeah.
To coin a phrase, this is my shocked face.
I mean, look, damage was always the intent, not reporting. Jean McCormick’s statement that
“one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.”
… is of course true, but his sying that takes on monumental connotations when one considers even a small portion of what Sulzberger’s minions have been pushing for the last three years now.
Additionally, we’ve already seen the extent the left will go to to protect their “right” to kill children that aren’t convenient. This is simply more of the same.
The cause of freedom will be best served by pushing that entire propaganda factory into the swamp next to LaGuardia.
Bernardo Sandinista, Bernie Sanders(D – Cuba) boosts to Slow Joe, Joseph Biden, that he wrote his Damn Medicare for All bill. to which Amy Klobuchar responds:
But when it comes to our healthcare and when it comes to our premiums, I go with the doctor’s creed, which is, ‘Do no harm.’ And while Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill. And on page eight — on page eight of the bill, it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it.
Hat Tip: Amanda Green, Victory Girls
Oops.
Did she just say this wonderful bill would take away our freedom to choose our insurance and, in all likelihood, our doctors? Sure sounded like it to me.
The look on Bernie’s face was priceless. You could almost hear him thinking, “Damn it, they weren’t supposed to read it!
The ‘Rats are down to three, two socialists and a demented old man entering his dotage.
