I did not comment on the passing of the Queen of Soul, the late Aretha Franklin, because I did not view it as political. It seems that Franklin and I are one opinion and her family of another. The funeral:
Left to right: Louis Farrakhan, , Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and President B.J. Clinton
Aretha Franklin’s family reaction.
NEW YORK (AP) — The late Aretha Franklin’s family said Monday that it found an Atlanta pastor’s eulogy delivered at the Queen of Soul’s funeral last week to be offensive and distasteful.
The eulogist, the Rev. Jasper Williams Jr., was criticized for a political address that described children being in a home without a father as “abortion after birth” and said black lives do not matter unless blacks stop killing each other. Franklin’s funeral was on Friday.
“He spoke for 50 minutes and at no time did he properly eulogize her,” said Vaughn Franklin, the late singer’s nephew, who said he was delivering a statement for the family.
Franklin said that his aunt never asked Williams to eulogize her, since she didn’t talk about plans for her own funeral. The family selected Williams because he has spoken at other family memorials in the past, most prominently at the funeral for Franklin’s father, minister and civil rights activist C.L. Franklin, 34 years ago.
The attendees at Franklin’s funeral were overtly political. Farrakhan is anti-Semite; Sharpton a racial provocateur; Jackson a bastard breeder and Bill Clinton, an unrepentant rapist. Given the political line-up I don’t buy the family criticizing Reverend Williams for being political. Given that Williams spoke at Franklin’s father funeral, the choice may will have been a good one. Williams’ offense may well have been offending the quest of honor. Good job Reverend.
In my mind, a funeral service should reflect the spirit of the departed. In other words think of them as still there and act as such. I believe the Franklin Family failed in this regard. Aretha deserved better.
A good read, this, from the American Spectator, that futhers the point I made the other day about the difference in treatment by the press, and the left as a whole, of John McCain by pointing to Senator Jeremiah Denton.
I’m willing to bet most of you don’t remember the man. I do.
Big Media mocked his first signature effort at legislation, the Adolescent Family Life Act. His proposal was an adaptation of existing legislation enacted under sponsorship of Democratic icon Ted Kennedy. Denton’s bill modified the Kennedy program to increase emphasis on reaching teenagers before they had sexual experience with the message that abstinence is not to be devalued as a means of preventing pregnancy and disease.
Denton shrewdly enlisted support from Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Shriver. Kennedy cooperated with Denton in passage of the bill. Ignoring the overwhelming support Denton negotiated, the cultural left had a raucous good time lampooning his efforts. No clearer sign of the times was that Garry Trudeau devoted an entire Sunday “Doonesbury” ridiculing Denton’s “chastity bill.”
In this and other instances, Denton worked carefully and discreetly to bring about success for conservative policies through sincere bipartisan negotiation.
This contrasts with McCain’s vaunted reputation for what his apologists wrongly called bipartisanship. What McCain actually did, again and again, was to sabotage consensus within his own party out of an impulse for gaining attention and increasing his negotiating position in regard to other interests.
With no discernible principle or regard for the public interest on his side, McCain single-handedly sabotaged the repeal of Obamacare. No one can say honestly that his motivation was anything other than spite for President Trump.
The article goes on to continue the comparison with this rather key paragraph:
Another difference was in character. Senators normally have very big egos, and Denton was normal in this sense. McCain was an outlier — an extraordinary egomaniac — even within a universe of enormous egos.
All of this is pretty much what I’ve been saying. The stark difference in treatment between Denton and McCain by the press and by the left is breathtaking.
I said in the comments of the other post…
I notice with interest that the Democrats gave no honor whatsoever to Chris Kyle.
…
Yet, they practically wet themselves over John McCain. Why?
The only conclusion that one can draw from that is that This is not about whether or not John McCain served honorably. in my view that still a matter of question, but in the process of that I’ll suggest to you that Chris Kyle did as well. The reason for that difference in their response is because McCain reflected their politics more correctly.
…and that reaction from the Preston from the Democrats is precisely the reason for the former post. What we are witness to was the results of political expediency not any kind of Honor really.
But in the process of that discussion there’s a lot of information that’s coming up about McCain which makes me wonder if a lot of the people that are heaping Praise on him these days really understood what the man was about.
As an example of that resurfacing information, there is the issue of POWs Left Behind after Denton and McCain were released in 1973, which was covered in The Nation , back on August 6th of 2008, and reprinted earlier today in expanded form in World News Daily.
Wriiten by Sydney H. Schanberg, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for international reporting “at great risk” from Vietnam and Cambodia. After the war he served as city editor of the New York Times. The Academy Award-winning film “The Killing Fields” was based on his book “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” Schanberg was a journalist for 50 years.
It has some things to add to this puzzle… Notably, McCain’s rather puzzling, and troubling efforts to keep that POW information buried, so to speak.
An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,” suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge – only records that revealed no POW secrets – it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, when the Pentagon cited McCain’s bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all – even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.
As I said, pieces of the puzzle. The picture that is emerging is less than complimentary. At the very least it gives pause do any notion that the man was a hero by any definition.
The Press has been telling us for some time that they feel threatened when people like Donald Trump say that the Press is the enemy of the people.
But let’s Ponder this for a moment. There have been numerous credible threats against Fox News, and none against NBC ABC CBS CNN MSNBC the New York Times The Washington Post and so on.
We’re told that freedom of speech is being threatened. But who is actually had their freedom of speech removed by those lights? Oh yeah, Alex Jones and innumerable conservatives on Facebook on Twitter and so on.
So what’s really happening here? Is this Alinsky writ large? Is this simply a matter of accusing your opponent with what you’re doing to them?
It still amazes me that anyone with a brain still lives in California. The Los Angeles Times
The California bullet train project has cost state taxpayers an average $3.1 million a day over the last year — a construction spending rate higher than that for the Bay Bridge, Boston’s Big Dig or any U.S. transportation project in recent history
Gary Aminoff looks at this and says in part:
This was never about providing a service to California residents. This was, from the start, a payoff to the unions and contractors who donate heavily to Democrats. Nothing works better than using State taxpayer funds for payoffs so that the unions and big contractors continue to fund Democrat Party candidates so they can continue to get payoffs. It is a mafia-type game played at the expense of taxpayers. They don’t care if the train is successful. They will have succeeded in making sure that the funders of the Democrats get $100 Billion so they will continue to fund Democrats in California.
..
Also, the taxpayers of California will be subsidizing the train for generations. It is estimated that the actual cost of a trip from LA to SF on the high-speed rail will be in the range of $700-$800 per person, if you amortize the cost of the train. The tickets will be about $40. The California taxpayers will pay the difference.
The sad part is, no they won’t. The rest of us in the remainder of the states will be paying that price. California, you see, will be considered to be too big to fail.
And of course keeping Democrats in power isn’t the only thing that’s driving this. The Democrat politicians out there are lining their pockets.
For example, Dianne Feinstein
To the surprise of absolutely no one familiar with the ways of Corruptifornia, the one-party state completely in the hands of the Democrats, a consortium whose lead firm is controlled by Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was awarded a nearly billion-dollar contract for the construction of the first phase of the so-called high-speed rail line to link San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Oh, and here’s the kicker:
Crazifornia.com writes:
The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.
And that doesn’t include the cost of rolling stock (that’s engines and cars to the normal among us). Nor does it include the cost of electrifying the route. Does it at least include the cost of land acquisition? No, it does not.
As this fiasco progress, remember that this $35 million per mile represents the best California can do on the section of track the High on Crack Speed Rail Authority selected to go first because it will be the cheapest.
According to reports I’m seeing most California voters don’t want this boondoggle. but since when have actual voters mattered to Democrats looking to line their pockets and retain their power?
In reality that’s what all this comes down to.
And just remember kids, the Democrats on a national scale want the rest of us to be just like California
You know, I’ve really got to hand it to the organizers of the gathering around Aretha Franklin the other day. I finally got around to watching some of the video of it, and let me tell you, it made the Paul Wellstone rally look like funeral, by comparison.
One guy stood up and actually told the truth…
…and was roundly ignored for his pains. I can’t help but think that if Dr. King hself had stood up to speak he would have been rejected as well.
Just downright shameful.
Little Bobby Reich, a/k/a Robert Reich, fancies himself an economist. Yet when named to the Clinton Administration, he was shoved into the Department of Labor, go figure. Not content to spout talk of impeachment, Little Bobby was pulled a card out his backside and is rants about Annulment of the entire administration of President Donald Tromp, from American Spectator:
Impeachment would remedy Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But impeachment would not remedy Trump’s unconstitutional presidency because it would leave in place his vice president, White House staff and Cabinet, as well as all the executive orders he issued and all the legislation he signed, and the official record of his presidency.… Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency. Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions and records were made without constitutional authority.
[…]
The Constitution does not specifically provide for annulment of an unconstitutional presidency. But read as a whole, the Constitution leads to the logical conclusion that annulment is the appropriate remedy for one.… After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.… It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected
Now granted Little Bobby Reich’s incoherent babbling does not meet the Constitution definition of Treason. However one, Little Bobby is willing dismiss the entire Constitution, and two, revert back to an earlier system of governance, to wit the Roman. No problem.
I propose a less drastic solution. We roll back to the British system existing prior to 1776. Little Bobby’s proposal is no less treasonous under then existing British Law than was signing the Declaration of Independence. So President Trump simply suspends the Constitution for a day. Declares himself King Donald the First, then declares by royal edict that Robert Reich is a traitor and orders him hung. We then revert back to Constitutional government.
I think we may have identified the central part of the problem; the FBI and its leadership:
The FBI on Wednesday said it had found no evidence about President Trump‘s claim that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s pthey are the authorityrivate email server was compromised by hackers working for the Chinese government.
In a brief statement, the bureau said: “The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.”
Well of course they did. If they said otherwise they would bear responsibility for that problem… As would of course Hillary Clinton herself, whom they are desperately trying to protect.
Jerry Saperstein looks at this and shakes his head:
Oh, really?
This is the same FBI that repeatedly lied to the FISA court, found HIllary Clinton committed no crimes, found nothing incriminating on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, granted immunity to Hillary’s aides and accomplices and more.
And now we’re supposed to believe the FBI when they say China didn’t hack Hillary’s illegal email server?
Obviously they think we’re all dumber than rocks.
I’m sympathetic here, but I think the answer is a bit more complex than that. They’re operating from the idea that they are the authority and therefore should be trusted at all turns.
What they don’t understand is that ship has already sailed, their credibility is continuing to go down hill with the American people, and they are clueless as to how to rectify that problem. The only thing they can do is stand up stamp their feet and say..”but I am the authority”.
And you see the real problem here is that makes the assumption that they’re telling the truth. We know they’re not. These reports are coming in from all over the place and always from sources not approved of by the FBI.
It’s almost impossible (unless you’re a Democrat) not to draw the conclusion that the FBI here is the locus of the problem… that they are protecting Hillary Clinton from well-deserved jail time. the American people have seen what’s been happening, and have identified the FBI as the problem.
Here it is, gang:
There will be no trust for the FBI going forward, and very little trust for the criminal justice system as a whole, unless the American people are witness to Hillary Clinton, and a goodly number surrounding her being frog marched out of the building.
I would most certainly call this Petty, childish, and deserving of intense scorn. Over the last few years I’ve made no secret of my disdain for John McCain, and it seems everything he did justified it. This one leaves no doubt at all in my mind.
Limbaugh, yesterday:
.We went back to the news archives, we found a Washington Post story in 2008 detailing how Rick Davis brokered a meeting between Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Putin, and McCain, just like a meeting was attempted to be brokered between Deripaska and Trump. Rick Davis of Davis Manafort, a lobbying firm, which still is up and running in the Washington area. Rick Davis sets up a meeting between the Russian oligarch close to Putin and John McCain.
Sometime after that, the FBI or somebody came along and warned Senator McCain to be very careful of Oleg Deripaska because he’s a Soviet agent, could be a really bad guy, ties to Putin. So they warned McCain, and McCain continued the relationship with the guy, and nobody thought a thing of it. Now, the guy surfaces in relationship to the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr., and all of a sudden — and Trump never met with Oleg Deripaska, and yet today we’re trying to nail Trump and impeach him and put him in jail and destroy him and ruin him because he colluded with the guy when he never did! But McCain did after having been introduced to him by Manafort’s partner!
.
I don’t even think I have to add anything to this one
I’ve been saying for several months now, is that the real issue isn’t Russia, it’s China. As an example;
If the Russians were involved in the most recent election, you can bet your baseball bat, your cowboy hat, and your house cat that the Chinese were, as well. The attempts of China to influence our politics through the Democrats is hardly new. There’s no question in my mind that the Chinese had the Clintons in their pocket for at least 30 years. (History)
I added:
Do any of you doubt that the Chinese had their fingers into the DNC servers as well as Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, neither one of which had security that a high school student couldn’t break into?
So now we begin to see that I read this one correctly. according to the Daily Caller and several other sources within the last 24 hours, China, by way of Hillary Clinton’s private email server had access to her emails in real time. Among the points made in the Daily Caller article…
A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing.
You know, somehow when people began telling us about the benefits of openness in government, I doubt this is what they had in mind.
I also raised the following concept:
Personally, I can’t help but wonder if the Chinese aren’t a couple of layers underneath all of this business with Russia.
…
I can’t help but think that the weapons of mass distraction being brought to bear on this is just the thing to cover the Chinese’s backsides in their operations.
Anyone taking bets?
CNN, or the Clinton News Network, was awarded the dubious Dan Rather Award for taking stenography from the Clinton Criminal Clan and reporting it as if it were news, from Breitbart:
Lanny Davis, attorney for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, told Buzzfeed on Monday that he was a source for CNN’s article last month claiming that Cohen would tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that President Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian purportedly offering information on Hillary Clinton.
[…]
The original CNN report, by Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen, claimed that Cohen had personally witnessed Donald Trump, Jr. informing Trump about the meeting, which would contradict the president’s statements that he did not know about it.
[…]
CNN — which cited “sources with knowledge” in its original report, has refused to back down. The report also said Davis had “declined to comment.”
When contacted by Buzzfeed, CNN said, “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it.”
So question for Mr. Bernstein, do you even know the difference between sources with actual knowledge and a paid flunkies?
Meanwhile back at Camp Clinton, from Daily Caller:
A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chi-Com were reading the woman formerly known as the Smartest Woman in the World email in real time. Likely before Mrs. Clinton even sobered up.
I said a few months ago…..
Let me take you back in time just a little bit.
Following Judicial Watch’s 2015 report on the 2013 meeting, Senator McCain issued a statement decrying “false reports claiming that his office was somehow involved in IRS targeting of conservative groups.”
So, now comes this:“Judicial Watch today released newly obtained internal IRS documents, including material revealing that Sen. John McCain’s former staff director and chief counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner, urged top IRS officials, including then-director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner, to ‘audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous.’ Kerner was appointed by President Trump as Special Counsel for the United States Office of Special Counsel.”
~~~~~
So. As Billy Beck noted elsewhere, Lerner was running on McCain’s leash.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again. The one thing that the establishment GOP (and in this I include John McCain) fear more than anything else on the planet… More than losing elections to Democrats, more than Donald Trump, more than anything is actually being conservative. They will fight conservatives tooth and nail. Just like the Democrats. Until such time as you reckon with that fact, none of the rest of this is going to make any sense at all.
And they wonder how somebody like Trump got elected.
…
and that’s just one example, people. One of many.
So, you will understand that I am not going to mourn John McCaims passing.
The ugly fact is, he left us a long time ago
/
From Breitbart
John Sidney McCain III, departed this life today.
Some days ago I made mention of Mark Felt AKA DeepThroat.
Max Holland explores the message that has sprung up around Mark Felt, and essentially demolishes it.
Hollywood, and a good deal of Washington approves of the myth because in the end Felt was instrumental in ending the presidency of an erstwhile Republican called Richard Nixon.
Trouble is, that’s a false narrative like so many that the Democrats latch themselves onto.
Columnists, talking heads and op-ed writers are holding open auditions for a role that presumably needs to be filled if we are ever going to get to the bottom of what seems fated to be dubbed, for better or worse, Russiagate: a new Deep Throat.
I get it. In the years since Watergate, the Washington Post’s famous golden source—later revealed to be former FBI No. 2 executive W. Mark Felt—has become practically synonymous with the ideal of the noble leaker. The original Deep Throat “was instrumental in thwarting the conspiracy and bringing [President Richard] Nixon down,” Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, approvingly wrote in the Los Angeles Times in May. “Was it wrong for Deep Throat, as FBI official Mark Felt was then known, to guide the investigation?” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan asked in June, in the midst of a column praising leaks and anonymous sources, and inviting more. New York magazine columnist Frank Rich has gone a step further and already announced his casting choice: James Comey is today’s Deep Throat.
The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.
But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.
Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life.
What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat.
But, why would the Democrats latch on to the false narrative so quickly and so easily?
It’s not hard to determine, really. Forever Believers in big government, there is an incessant need on their part to believe in the idea that the only source of corruption in government is amongst those who don’t believe that government is the end-all and be-all. And of course the subset of that would be that anything that brings down a Republican has got to be worth the price of admission. In other words they’ll support anything that advances the cause. All this explains their loinizing Peter Strzok, as well.
Holland himself raises the question that I will echo here… Is James Comey today’s Mark Felt? It would take a True Believer in big government to dismiss this idea out of hand.
I will say this plainly; Mark Felt was a power-hungry backstabbing opportunist. No wonder the Democrats hold him up today as a hero, being, (as they have demonstrated so often) power hungry backstabbing opportunists themselves.
(I discussed this situation in these spaces back in 2008 when Mark felt died. Here’s a complete listing of our comments on Felt over the years.)
As I suggested in 2005, the FBI has a long history of acting politically…
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see that what this is all about is ‘positioning’.
Set up a bad cop, as a hero, because he took down a sitting second term, moderate Republican president.
Why? So you can get someone to come forward and bring down… facts or no… a sitting second term moderate Republican president. So that there’s PRECIDENT for a corrupt political activist, being treated like a hero, for taking down a second term moderate Republican president. It’s called self-justificaion.
The implications of all of this for the events of today as history repeats itself, are nothing short of staggering.
