Great Mitch McConnell 'Medicare Scare' Video

I like Leader Mitch.

Democrats’ Medicare for None plan is another untested, far-left fantasy designed to destroy Medicare and take away private insurance from more than 180 million Americans. pic.twitter.com/1rDCdcfYGe

— Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) May 2, 2019

Long Beach City College Gun Scare Lockdown (VIDEO)

My college's Pacific Coast Campus was on lockdown yesterday, although it turned out the weapon was a fake gun, I guess to be used in some kind of theater production.

Campus security sent out emergency notifications through email and text messaging around 11:00am or so. The college took this very seriously, which is good. I'd like more answers about why some theater production was having fake guns in use and there was no formal notification to the college beforehand?

My school's newspaper, the Viking, has the story. Turns out is was a theater professor himself who "stupidly" walked across campus carrying the fake weapon, without a bag or anything. You think people might freak out?

See, "Film professor carrying prop gun caused campus lockdown."

And at ABC 7 News Los Angeles:

Paul Joseph Watson Also Banned in Facebook Purge (VIDEO)

Following-up from yesterday, "Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos."

Big tech controls the new public square, and conservatives have to be ready to fight back, and yes, that includes President Trump leading the call to regulate leftist social media giants.

Watch:

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition 2019

Sports Illustrated moved the publication of the swimsuit edition to May, so it'll be out any day now. But now that the magazines going with Muslimas in burkinis, maybe the edition's going the way of the dodo. *Shrugs.*

Rhian Sugden in Lace Bodysuit

I don't think she's doing topless photos any longer, but her lingerie is killer, lol.

Lets all take a minute out of our Wednesday to appreciate @Rhianmarie in the Indulge Me Lace Bodysuit 😍 https://t.co/KcSnZjfJgf pic.twitter.com/1bKP0bE6t5

— Scantilly (@dearscantilly) May 1, 2019

Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos

It's no surprise, although it raises the long-standing questions of whether the social media giants should be the speech police of American society. Obviously, the answer is no, but leftists control the industry.

What's the solution? More conservative media outlets, especially new outlets focused on building massive scale of participation and membership to rival the power of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

At the Washington Post, "Facebook bans far-right leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being “dangerous”":

The bans are a sign that Facebook is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups https://t.co/xRY2Ggjyha

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 2, 2019

Facebook said on Thursday it has permanently banned several far-right figures and organizations including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Infowars host Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Laura Loomer, for being “dangerous,” a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups.

Facebook had removed the accounts, fan pages, and groups affiliated with these individuals after it reevaluated the content that they had posted previously, or had reexamined their activities outside of Facebook, the company said. The removal also pertains to at least one of the organizations run by these people, Jones’ Infowars.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today,” Facebook said in a statement.

Jones, for example, recently hosted Gavin McInnes, the leader of the Proud Boys, which Facebook designated as a hate figure in December. Yiannopoulos, another alt-right social media star, publicly praised McInnes this year, and Loomer appeared with him at a rally. Jones has been temporarily banned before by Facebook as well as other social media platforms including Twitter.

But Facebook and its counterparts have largely resisted permanent bans, holding that objectionable speech is permissible, so long as it doesn’t bleed into hate. Facebook has also been wary of offending conservatives, who have become vocal about allegations that the company unfairly censors their speech.

The move is likely to be welcomed by civil rights activists, who have long argued that these individuals espouse violent and hateful views and that Silicon Valley companies should not allow their platforms to become a vehicle for spreading them...

More.

For one thing, Farrakhan isn't "far-right," and frankly, "far-right" is a slur to demonize conservatives anyway, especially highly effective ones.

That said, I brook no tolerance for any racism, so if some of these folks are dallying with genuine Nazis, that's a no go for me.

And finally, McInnes and Yiannopoulos are examples of canaries in the coalmine, and if they're going down, the big social media sites, with their diabolical "civil rights" safety commissars, will go after the next group of successful conservative activists.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (Vintage International).

A Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism

A surprisingly good (and contrite) editorial on the paper's epic anti-Semitic cluster in its international edition last week.

At the New York Times:

From the Editorial Board: "Anti-Semitism can often still be dismissed as a disease gnawing only at the fringes of society. That is a dangerous mistake." https://t.co/ZPup2sFIrX

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 1, 2019

The cartoon can be found here.

Also, at Commentary, "An Editorial Culture of Complacency."

And see Bret Stephens, who's a former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a former contributing editor at the Wall Street Journal. Now at the New York Times, he hammers his own newspaper, "A Despicable Cartoon in The Times."

Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, LIsa Haliday, Asymmetry: A Novel.

Joe Biden Dogged by His Handling of Anita Hill's Allegations When He Was Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee During the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings (VIDEO)

Joe Biden launched his White House bid today, and as I'm just getting online, I can't quite tell how well it's going just yet. That said, it looks like the Anita Hill fiasco of 1991, when Biden chaired the hearings for Clarence Thomas, could doom his candidacy.

At the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Joe Biden Expresses Regret to Anita Hill, but She Says 'I'm Sorry' Is Not Enough."

And at the Los Angeles Times, from last week, "Joe Biden’s handling of Anita Hill’s harassment allegations clouds his presidential prospects":

As he moves toward formally entering the Democratic presidential race, Joe Biden has repeatedly expressed regret for how he handled one of the most consequential challenges of his career in the Senate — the 1991 hearings into Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

But he has not put the decades-old issue to rest.

Biden, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, has rankled rather than reassured many critics by portraying himself as powerless to have conducted the hearing differently.

“To this day I regret I couldn’t come up with a way to get her the kind of hearing she deserved, given the courage she showed by reaching out to us,” Biden said, speaking of Hill at a charity event in New York in late March. “I wish I could’ve done something.”

His critics call that excuse flimsy, saying Biden has downplayed his considerable authority as the committee chairman.

“He could have done more,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor who assisted Hill’s legal team in 1991. “That’s not an apology. An apology starts with a full acknowledgement of the wrong you have committed. If he wants the women’s vote, he’s got to do something more than symbolic stuff.”

A review of the record of the hearings 28 years ago shows how much Biden was a creature of a Senate that was clubby and male-dominated for much of his early career. The Hill-Thomas hearing was so long ago that the committee received one of the most volatile political documents of the decade — Hill’s affidavit outlining her claims — over a fax machine.

Biden’s handling of the hearings go beyond being just a single data point in his 36-year Senate voting record. The incident became a test of leadership in a climactic political event as Hill’s allegations blew up what were already high-stakes confirmation hearings. Thomas, a young black conservative, had been picked by President George H.W. Bush to replace Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer and the court’s first African American justice.

Hill, then a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, alleged that Thomas harassed her by talking in sordid detail about sex and pornography while she she was an employee of his at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas flatly denied the allegations.

The Senate was singularly ill equipped to deal with the subject at the time. It had no black and only two female members. The Judiciary Committee had none of either.

The hearings turned a spotlight on that glaring lack of diversity. The image of a young black woman sitting alone behind a witness table, telling an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee a lurid tale was televised across the country and the world. Never before had sexual harassment been discussed so explicitly on Capitol Hill.

“There was a real and perceived problem the committee faced,” Biden said at the March charity event. “They were a bunch of white guys.”

Biden had never shown much appetite for pressing nominees on issues related to their personal lives. Another committee leader, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, had been involved earlier in the year in a drunken Florida beach scene with a nephew who was accused of rape.

For about two weeks before the nomination came to a vote, Biden and a few staff members knew of the allegations but kept them out of public view because Hill requested anonymity.

Biden did not deem the allegations important enough to postpone the committee’s scheduled vote on Thomas’s nomination. When he announced his opposition to Thomas in a floor speech he said, “My view on this matter has nothing to do with Judge Thomas’ character. For he is a man of character.”

News of the allegations and Hill’s identity leaked only after the committee voted. At that point, Biden came under enormous pressure to investigate. Several House Democratic women — including Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado — marched to the Senate to demand the hearings be reopened.

Schroeder said in an interview that, when she complained to Biden that the process was being rushed, his response was a window to the ways of the Senate. Biden told her, she said, that he had given his word to Sen. John Danforth (R-Mo.), Thomas’s sponsor, while they were in the Senate’s all-male gym that it would be a “quick hearing.”

“Is that where the deals are all cut? Really?” said Schroeder. “That stuck in my craw. It was a boys club and the boys were not really wanting to yield.” Danforth, asked about Schroeder’s account, said he did not remember such a conversation with Biden.

More at that top link.

John Lydon on Venice Beach (VIDEO)

I don't live in Venice, but Robin Abcarian does and she's not going with Johnny Rotten's analysis:

The Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten laments on the condition of Venice Beach due to "tent cities and "heroin spikes." https://t.co/izPjaFD6FB Watch Johnny's full interview with Newsweek here: https://t.co/SDFHzKOcQK pic.twitter.com/6fgl9NK9nn

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) April 21, 2019

He’s completely out of his mind.

— Robin Abcarian (@AbcarianLAT) April 22, 2019

Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg

This looks fascinating!

At Amazon, Margaret Leslie Davis, The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey.

Playboy Model Kate Great

At Egotastic!, "Kate Great Lives Up to Her Name with an Exquisite Nude Body."

And at Playboy Plus, "International models, Kate Great and Zhenya Beyala enjoy the fresh, crisp air in their seductive Playboy Girlfriends feature, "Tender Moments."

How Trump Can Win Reelection

It's Larry Sabato, who got pretty much everything wrong in 2016, at least concerning the presidential race, so caveat emptor.

At the Washington Post, "It’s easy to see how Trump can win reelection":

It's Easy To See How Trump Could Win Reelection -- from @LarrySabato and me in @PostOpinions https://t.co/DCt6aCewAr

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) April 24, 2019

President Trump thrives on chaos, much of it his own creation. But it would be a mistake to assume that the reelection campaign of this most untraditional president will mirror the tumult of his 2016 effort. It’s too early to handicap 2020, but Trump may try to capitalize on some of the same factors that helped three modern Republican presidents, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, win reelection.

The reelections of all three men were not always certain. Around this time in the 1972 election cycle, Nixon held only a modest lead over the early Democratic front-runner, Edmund Muskie, who in 1968 had been the vice-presidential running mate of Hubert Humphrey. In late January 1983, pollster Lou Harris found former vice president Walter Mondale leading Reagan 53 percent to 44 percent. John Kerry’s challenge to Bush was nip-and-tuck throughout 2004. Fast-forward to 2019, and Trump often trails some Democrats in presidential trial heats, but with his large, solid base and a continuing good economy, it isn’t hard to see how Trump could win again.

That is not to suggest that Trump is destined to win, much less that he would rebound to a gigantic victory like Nixon’s and Reagan’s. For one thing, the landslides that one finds at regular intervals throughout much of the 20th century don’t even seem possible in this highly partisan, polarized era. America is in a stretch of eight consecutive presidential elections where neither side has won the popular vote by double digits, the longest such streak of close, competitive elections in U.S. history.

Another caveat: Trump’s approval rating has been upside down for essentially his entire presidency, and he has shown no inclination to broaden his base of support by changing his policies or softening his sharp rhetoric. From that perspective, even matching Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 seems like a major reach. Yet Trump could again win the presidency without winning the popular vote because of the strength of his coalition in the crucial Midwest battlegrounds.

Trump is in the process of jumping one major hurdle: He lacks a major primary challenger. (Bill Weld, the 2016 Libertarian vice-presidential candidate who recently declared a GOP primary challenge, does not count as “major.”) With approval ratings among Republicans usually exceeding 80 percent, and with his allies firmly in control of the party apparatus almost everywhere, Trump has thus far boxed out major intraparty opposition. The last three reelected GOP presidents all waltzed to renomination.

Trump is also going to be in a much better financial position than he was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton vastly outspent him. Trump already has $40 million in the bank for his reelection bid, and he should be able to raise hundreds of millions more now that his party is more completely behind him than in 2016. Money is not everything, as Trump himself showed in 2016, but any campaign would prefer having more, not less.

The Internet will be a campaign wild card again. Trump will probably reprise his 2016 digital advertising strategy to dissuade specific demographic groups, such as African Americans and young women, from voting for the Democratic candidate. His army of domestic online trolls no doubt will also turn out in force, and foreign actors, particularly Russians tied to the Kremlin, will almost certainly try to influence the election. Don’t expect the Trump administration to devote a lot of energy to frustrating those efforts.

The Democratic Party may inadvertently boost Trump if it gets carried away with an impeachment frenzy that prompts a voter backlash. Opposition to Trump will help unify the Democrats and fund the eventual nominee after a standard-bearer emerges from what is a giant and growing field of about 20 candidates. But one or more factions of the Democratic Party may emerge from the primary season disappointed and angry. Trump’s well-funded digital strategy will work to widen these fissures.

Ultimately, Trump may turn out to be at the mercy of conventional factors...

More.

Islamic Jihad is World's Greatest Threat

Spectacular piece, from David Harsanyi, at the Federalist.

Read it all at the click-through:

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World's Greatest Threat To Peace https://t.co/8FCz4pbPDM

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) April 23, 2019

Miley Cyrus as a Lion

At Taxi Driver, "Miley Cyrus Topless as a Lion."

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Women Smoking for National Weed Appreciation Day

At Drunken Stepfather, "GIRLS SMOKING WEED FOR HEMPER CUZ IT’S 420 WEEKEND OF THE DAY."

Rebuilding Notre Dame (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Notre Dame may take decades to fix. The first concerns are water and soot":

Two holes gape where Notre Dame’s vaulted stone ceiling has collapsed. The cathedral’s 19th century timber spire is gone, as is most of its roof. Portions of the interior walls were blackened by the intense heat of Paris’ most consequential fire in centuries.

As the world absorbs the magnitude of devastation wrought by Notre Dame’s inferno, architects and engineers anticipate a decades-long restoration process replete with unprecedented challenges. Designers will need to navigate complicated structural issues and delicate preservation debates to satisfy an array of stakeholders.

They will all be asking the same question: How do you revive an 850-year-old icon?

"The whole world is watching, and everybody has something to say about it,” said Marc Walton, director of Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University. “It has to be built for the next 1,000 years. It’s going to be a different structure as a result, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

The first order of business is to dry the cathedral out, said John Fidler, who served as conservation director of English Heritage, a government agency that maintains England’s national monuments.

“There are millions of gallons of water poured into the structure that will seep down to the crypt, the basement,” Fidler said. Pumping out that water could take months, and years may pass before the entire building is completely dry.

“It’s easy to make the surface dry because there are large pores on the surface, but deeper in the stone, the pores grow narrower and it’s more difficult to suck that water out,” he said. “When the walls remain damp, you get mildew and mold and fungus and salt crystallization, which can rupture the pores in stone and cause it to deteriorate on the surface.”

Soot is also a particular concern because it’s so oily, said Rosa Lowinger, a conservator of buildings and sculpture based in Los Angeles.

“People’s first instinct is they want to wash it, but that’s the last thing you should do,” she said. The building’s limestone is porous, so soap and water would drive the soot into its pores. Instead, soot must be removed while dry. “The earliest decisions here — the protocols taken — will define how successful a project like this is.”

While conservators tackle those problems, other teams will get started on the greatest engineering challenge of the entire project: the assessment of the cathedral’s structural condition.

Most analysis methods are tailored toward modern buildings, not stone structures, so engineers may struggle to determine the stability of the damaged cathedral, said Matthew DeJong, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked on historic buildings in Europe.

But Notre Dame is surely damaged, said Frank Escher, an architect and preservationist with Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles.

“A fire of this nature can weaken a stone structure. It’s too early to say whether it’s safe or not,” said Escher, who is currently restoring the century-old Church of the Epiphany, the oldest Episcopal church in L.A...

More.

Delilah Belle Hamlin Out Walking

At Taxi Driver:

Delilah Belle Hamlin Braless Pokies While Out Walking - https://t.co/E3X058V2W7 - pic.twitter.com/YCZFzyO4Kf

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) April 17, 2019

Plus, "Delilah Belle Hamlin Goes Topless in Purple Vinyl Gloves for Racy Instagram Post."