'Avalanche of Hate Speech'

Joe Scarborough hammers left-wing hatred and anti-cop vigilantism:

O'Reilly: de Blasio 'Has Disgraced the Office of Mayor of New York City' (Video)

Watch, at Gateway Pundit: "Bill O’Reilly: DeBlasio Should Resign Today – “He Has Disgraced the Office of Mayor of New York City” (Video)."

I'm Watching 'Band of Brothers' Until Monday Night Football Comes On...

And I might still go out to the mall after the game, or earlier if it's a blowout.

I found my box of "Band of Brothers" DVDs while looking for towels for my son the other day. I just popped it in for a viewing.

Haven't watched this series for almost 10 years, when I first got the DVDs for a Christmas gift. Sure seems like a good time to watch it again. Here's the link, at Amazon.

Last-Minute Holiday Shopping

Some deals at Amazon, Shop Amazon Fashion - Up to 70% Off.

Also, some new runners? Shop Amazon Fashion - 20% Off Athletic Shoes.

Cuba's Anti-Castro Opposition Slams Obama's Move to Normalize Relations

Folks aren't pleased down Havana way, and it's not an insignificant faction.

At LAT, "In Cuba, reactions to thaw with U.S. run from cold to warm":

The weekly ritual was underway. Silent and holding fake fuchsia-colored gladioluses, the Ladies in White paraded from church and down 5th Avenue in residential Havana to demand the release of political prisoners and, on this Sunday, to decry the Obama administration's rapprochement with Cuba.

Among the most strident enemies of successive Castro governments, the mood was downcast. Activists said Cuban President Raul Castro gave up very little to gain a great deal.

"By ending the blockade," said Maria Cristina Labrada, using the word with which Cubans refer to the U.S. embargo, President Obama "is only strengthening the repression against us."

Labrada was one of about 70 women participating in the march. A small group of men stood to one side of the avenue, holding up their hands in the shape of an L for libertad, or "freedom."

To the Cuban activists, Castro has emerged a winner in the 55-year-long standoff with the United States, sealing his legacy as the Cuban leader who would oversee official recognition by the giant neighbor to the north. Cuba released Alan Gross, a subcontractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, who had been jailed on the island for five years, and a few other prisoners. But the release of more than 50 people promised as part of the deal has yet to materialize, activists said.

"They can let 53 go, but we are all exposed. Anyone can fall" prisoner, said another of the white-clad women, Lazara Sardiña...

More at that top link.

iOTW REPORT Ripped Off

This is a bummer, "I AM SO SICK OF THIS SHIT," and "It’s Christmas":

For every 1 post I make about credit-stripping there are 10 others that I am alerted to by the good people of iOTWreport and I do nothing about it. It just becomes another paper cut that contributes to your slow death.

Every once in awhile, though, I pop my cork and put up a post expressing my frustration. Seeing the idea I executed in a James Woods tweet, and retweeted over 1000 times, with no mention of iOTWreport, is tough to witness.

I signed off after my post, closed the laptop and watched Mission Impossible on Me TV. Metaphorical? You tell me.

For the record, I did not call out James Woods (he did nothing wrong) or Wayne Dupree (Dupree’s name being associated with this was news to me when I went back online. The post was updated by good people who try and help me because they witness first-hand how much damage is done by my loss of morale and interest in creating graphics when others benefit.)

I did not, and will not publicly name a person as a thief until they tell me straight out that they are the ones that stripped the credit off. Then I name names. And it is never rewarding, in fact, the reverse is true. The situation gets worse. Let me explain...

Keep reading.

Here's the original image, "He Built the Deaths of Many":

Carmen Electra Displays Her Curves at Hollywood Club While Pole Dance Performing New Single

Heh.

I can relate. It was a homosexual Hollywood club too, lol.

At London's Daily Mail:

Carmen Electra treats fans to raunchy pole dance at Hollywood gay club http://t.co/2L1kFkpyNi pic.twitter.com/4PnlCmBTMm

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) December 18, 2014

De Blasio Puts Cops in the Crosshairs

Just watched the NYPD press conference, where Mayor de Blasio stupidly argued that only isolated "bad people" were spouting anti-cop hatred. Seriously. He claimed there was nary a word of violence when some 25 thousand people marched "just a few days ago." What a liar. The dude needs to actually get out there on the street and witness the hateful vigilantism of his own New York City ideological allies.

More on that when the videos are posted.

Meanwhile, at the New York Post:

Op-Ed: Bill de Blasio’s arrogance puts cops in cross hairs http://t.co/v9VsjqMVTP pic.twitter.com/3Os7zX2rtI

— New York Post (@nypost) December 22, 2014

Kate Upton Restored

I don't know why I still use Photobucket. Habit and convenience, I guess.

Their roving censors deleted my lovely photo of Ms. Upton from the other day's post, "Kate Upton: 'Sexiest Woman Alive'." (Photo restored at the link.)

But here she is again:

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation

There's an enduring vitality to the work of David Horowitz. Folks may recall that in fact he's not popular among many on the right. And I take seriously the personal, professional repudiation of Horowitz by those among whom I count friends (including some very close friends from the right blogosphere). But be that as it may, when pondering the perplexing continued influence of the radical left in America, you're not going to fall astray by reading Horowitz's updates. I've read a number of his books, including those written with his long time colleague Peter Collier. The combination of personal bitterness and historical memory makes for very compelling reading. And having met Horowitz and listened to him speak on a number of occasions, I know that his words express unsurpassed first-hand experience. It's why he's so widely reviled by those on the left. He's got their number down to a tee.

Here's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. These are discrete essays. I recommend starting with Chapter 6, "Divided Loyalties: The Fifth-Column Left," which brilliantly chronicles the historical continuities of the left's treason and subterfuge over the decades. (And readers will be amazed at how some of the Democrat Party's top leadership today populate the history of New Left radicalism going back decades.)

And check the authors' essay at FrontPage Magazine, "Destructive Generation":

The Left that the Sixties created tends to lose the battles: whether it is the push to erase the differences between the sexes, or to take away Everyman’s SUV, or to define down the terrorism of those who would bring their war into the heartland of this country. When they have the opportunity, the American people usually reject such ideas. But the Left wages a permanent war, and therefore often seems to be winning in the midst of its losses. Its survivorship comes from the fact that even as radicals were losing the decade-long referendum on their radical plans in the Sixties, they seized cultural citadels that allowed them to continue a stealth fight later on.

One of these citadels was the “elite” media, whose commitment to leftish ideas is so complete that it has become a series of scandals: Dan Rather’s bogus “exposé” about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, for instance, or Newsweek’s fraudulent report that Americans guarding al-Qaeda soldiers at Guantanamo desecrated the Koran—a story whose retraction did not keep sister publications such as the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Los Angeles Times from editorializing, in essence, that Newsweek was right even though it was wrong or from continuing to pursue the Gitmo story like a vendetta.

Another citadel is commanded by the big foundations, notably Ford and Rockefeller, which have invested vast sums in movements carrying more than a whiff of the Sixties—a separatist Hispanic movement with an ethnic agenda rather than an assimilative one; and groups such as Catholics for Free Choice, created out of whole cloth to oppose the Catholic Church on abortion and other issues.

But nowhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education—“deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism; creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination. Some of them now profess to be embarrassed by the “excess” of a Ward Churchill, and no wonder: his sin is to reveal by his blatancy the agenda they try to disguise through stealth and subtle misdirection.

Former SDS president Todd Gitlin, currently a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia whose academic work has centered on mythologizing the Sixties, candidly acknowledged the Left’s academic coup in a recent essay he called “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” Writing about the failure of his—and our—former comrades to produce a revolution in the streets during the Sixties, Gitlin comments:

My generation of the New Left—a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on—relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss … . All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked “political correctness” of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost—we squandered the politics—but won the textbooks.

Gitlin is as wrong in implying that the New Left, even in its earliest moments, ever had a “righteous” plan as he is in suggesting that establishing an atmosphere of political intimidation in the universities is simply a trivial pursuit. The “consolation” offered by the takeover is revolution by other means. And not least among the Left’s objectives now that the university is under its thumb is consolidating its fantasy of the Sixties as the Last Good Time. There are literally hundreds of college courses devoted to the history of the decade, but the growing literature of second thoughts—along with other dissident views—is virtually absent from the course lists.

Our book is no exception. Running for President in 2000, George W. Bush said that Destructive Generation was one of the three books that had formed his worldview on how America veered off course in the postwar era. But university professors have consigned this book to the memory hole, along with other books of second thoughts like Commies: My Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh, and Professing Feminism: Indoctrination and Education in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, former professors of women’s studies.

The erasure of an entire side of a critical argument calls to mind Stalin’s famous trick of airbrushing opponents out of photos so that they simply ceased to be part of history. The consequences can be measured by what is now the conventional treatment of two groups we wrote about in Destructive Generation, the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground. Both were central to the meaning of the Sixties; both are now treated by the academy in a way that reverses novelist Milan Kundera’s famous formulation about the power of memory over forgetting. Forgetting—an induced amnesia—is exactly the point of the current pedagogy...

More.

And pick up your copy at Amazon.

Bye Candy, DLTDHYOTWO!

Candy Crowley, CNN's partisan hack and moral reprobate, gets a final sendoff.

Word is the network's looking to replace the hag with a blond hottie to rival Fox News' deep bench of bodacious broadcast babes.

The Radical Left and Violent Anti-Police Rhetoric

From the editors at the Wall Street Journal, "Progressives and the Police":

‘What do we want? Dead cops!” So chanted marchers at one of the protests organized in the last month against the failure of grand juries to indict white officers in the death of black crime suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner. On Saturday they got their wish, as a black assailant citing revenge for Brown and Garner traveled from Maryland to murder two cops sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn.

“They were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniform,” New York Police Commissioner William Bratton said, and so they were. Garner and Brown were resisting arrest, but the two young officers never had a chance even to pull their guns. They had been marked for death near a high-crime housing project they were trying to protect against criminal predators.

Mayor Bill de Blasio , Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama were all quick to condemn the shooting. And let’s stipulate that no one other than the alleged shooter, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, is responsible for pulling the trigger. Chased into the subway by police, he then shot himself.

But this double assassination is also a moment of clarity about how thin the line in any society is between order and anarchy. America is full of Brinsleys who no longer abide the norms of civilized behavior, if they even know what those norms are. They need but the slightest excuse to take justice into their own hands and go on a rampage.

Especially in urban America, the police walk that line between civilization and mayhem every day. Yet since the Garner and Brown episodes, the progressive leaders in New York and Washington have talked and behaved as if the police are society’s main problem.

They have honored with joint public appearances and private meetings such racial agitators as Al Sharpton who want to stop the “broken windows” policing that has done so much to reduce crime in poor minority neighborhoods. Mr. Holder has sent federal agents to second-guess grand juries and “reform” local police as if he assumes these police chiefs and prosecutors are biased. The New York City Council staged a “die-in” as fallen victims of police.

And progressives have failed to denounce protestors who have disrupted civic life, rampaged through stores, and even assaulted police who tried to arrest law-breakers. All of this has contributed to a public climate of suspicion and hate against police in which a man like Ismaaiyl Brinsley can in his deranged mind think it is justified to stalk and execute two cops on the beat...

Yeah, sing it brothers.

While the direction of blame points only to the killer himself, the radical left has created the tinderbox in which Ismaaiyl Brinsley was waiting to explode. And despicable leftists themselves know it full well, which is why these ghouls have been mounting the most epic walkback marathon in recent years. And frankly, it's not going to help, since Americans are already recoiling at the anti-police protests and the nation's institutional machinery is making epochal course corrections to restore legitimacy and power to law enforcement agencies. Indeed, the priority for the country going forward is to further marginalize the radical left and its racist bombthowers from President Obama on down.

More.

The Left's Racism Narrative Unravels

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "As Police Die, Racism Narrative Unravels" (via Memeorandum):

Any conversation about the murders of two New York City Police officers this weekend must start by acknowledging the ordinary heroism of law enforcement personnel that puts them in harm’s way every day. We should then acknowledge that all those who have criticized police actions in Ferguson, Missouri and New York after the controversial deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not responsible for the slaying of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. We don’t know yet who or what may have influenced the reportedly mentally disturbed shooter, who was apparently bent on “revenge” for Brown and Garner. But we do know this. After four months of non-stop condemnations of the police and the justice system for both racism and deliberately targeting African Americans for violence, it is time for the race hucksters and their political enablers such as President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to stop the campaign of incitement against the police.

Conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair. They know that liberal claims that either the Tea Party or conservatives such as Sarah Palin were somehow responsible for the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was sheer slander. If some angry supporters of the police now try to say Obama, Holder, or de Blasio approved or countenanced the actions of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, they are just as wrong. Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have all rightly condemned the murder of the two officers.

But once we acknowledge that, we cannot ignore the fact that the discussion about race and the police in this country has gotten out of control in recent months and that these same political leaders who should have been seeking to restrain the public from drawing extreme and general conclusions about two very extraordinary cases instead kept the pot boiling for political advantage.

Even worse than that, they have empowered and legitimized racial demagogues like Al Sharpton who have sought to profit from exploiting these tragedies to promote their own agendas. In turn, Sharpton and those like him who are given prominent air time on networks like MSNBC and CNN have encouraged protesters who have not only engaged in violence but often openly called for the killing of police, a stance that has been openly endorsed by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and other radicals.

The act of a single possibly mad gunman does not mean that Americans must never question the actions of police or ponder broader issues about race. It is misleading to claim that those who have raised such questions have given a green light to the murder of police officers. Yet those who have sought to take two very different and quite unusual incidents in Ferguson and New York and weave them into a neat narrative of racism and anti-black violence by police have done very much the same thing. The difference between the two is that the media spent much of the last four months seeking to establish that wrongheaded narrative as a fact while they will, quite rightly, give no credence or air time to those who will blame Obama for cop killers....

If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions, they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.

That's quite fair. But keep reading.

I'd correct Tobin, though, in mentioning that the MSM is indeed giving airtime to those who would blame President Obama for the murders. Further, it's simply not possible to discount the Al Sharpton-inspired protesters who marched through New York's streets inciting violence and exhorting activists to bring about more "dead cops."

That's the burden that the left must bear and it's the complicity that it must accept, and ultimately, overcome. That will require that mainstream leaders repudiate that most strident voices of the far-left apparatus --- which of course will be prohibitively difficult since these same people are those who wield enormous power in government, academe, and the media. Indeed, American politics is going to continue something of an ideological realignment over the next couple of years. The left will most likely continue to revive its default 1960s mode of radicalism and revolutionary dogma. Street activists and college ideological rabble will continue to denounce "this fucking country" with the blessings of those highest in power, such as Eric Holder at the Justice Department, as well as his successor, Loretta Lynch. But in electoral politics, we're already seeing and we'll continue to see ostensibly mainstream candidates aggressively distance themselves from the Obama-inspired radicalism that has infected contemporary "progressivism" with the cancer of ideological evil.

Barry Rubin's Silent Revolution

I'm going to post some book selections throughout the day, for folks still working on last-minute Christmas shopping. Amazon will ship in time for Christmas if you're shopping today.

I can't recommend Barry Rubin's book enough, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance.

So timely, there's no other book that pulls together the disparate ideological strands of our current far-left predicament under the Obama interregnum. I'm reading Chapter 7 right now, "Barack Obama as a Case Study of a Third Left Cadre."

Rubin's "Third Left" is the far-left ideological tendency that arose out of the ashes of the two previous lefts, the Communist Party of the 1920s-1950s and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The "Third Left" today is what the MSM deceptively identifies as "progressive" liberalism. As I've said many times, progressives are communists. According to Rubin, they've adopted a subterranean ideological program of seizing power across America's leading institutions, particularly the universities and the mainstream press. Millions of students have been marinated in the cultural and intellectual theories of Third Left practitioners, and through this strategy, "the far left converted to its views tens of millions of people, most of them unaware of how outlandish these ideas were and how fundamentally they undermined the basis of America's success."

It's a classic. Available at Amazon.

Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio Faces Crisis, Resentment by Police

Well, you think?

At the Washington Post, "In New York, tensions between police and Mayor Bill de Blasio boil over after killings":

Tensions between New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s police — which boiled over in the wake of the assassination-style slayings of two officers Saturday — have been simmering since the mayor’s 2013 campaign and represent a sharp turn from the close alliance between the city’s mayors and law enforcement over the past two decades.

Recriminations against de Blasio began within hours of the news that the officers had been shot at point-blank range as they sat in their patrol car near a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn — and that the gunman had been motivated to kill them as retribution for the black men whose deaths at the hands of police in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., have sparked protests around the country.

A video of the arrival of de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton at the hospital where officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos had been taken showed dozens of police officers silently turning their backs.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Patrick Lynch, president of the largest police union, said late Saturday. “Those that incited violence on the street in the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day. We tried to warn it must not go on, it shouldn’t be tolerated. That blood on the hands starts at the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”

Although New York is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 6 to 1, de Blasio is its first Democratic mayor in 20 years, and his stewardship of the city is being watched nationally as a test of unabashedly liberal leadership. After his landslide victory, he declared: “Make no mistake. The people of this city have chosen a progressive path. And tonight we set forth on it together, as one city.”

The people of New York chose "a progressive path"?

Well, remember, "Progressives Are Communists (If You Didn't Know)." Violence against police --- considered the agents of the capitalist oppressors --- is boilerplate rhetoric for the left's violent protest cadres.

We've been witnessing leftist exhortations to violence and vigilantism for months.

But keep reading.

Also at the New York Times, "A Widening Rift Between de Blasio and the Police Is Savagely Ripped Open."

And at the New York Post, "De Blasio visited Communist USSR in college."

Khadijah Lynch, Undergraduate Representative for Afro-American Studies at Brandies, Resigns After Outrageous Anti-Police Comments on Twitter

Some stupid people think they can just tweet whatever the f-k they want and everyone else will be down with it.

Nope. We're at a turning point, and leftists are coming up all over with blood on their hands.

At Truth Revolt, "Student Leader Resigns After Stating She Has 'No Sympathy' for Murdered Cops."

And here's the report that triggered her resignation, "Student Leader: 'No Sympathy' for Executed NYPD Officers."

.@BeccaJLower @AaronWorthing Khadija has "protected her tweets": https://t.co/pqha58HnS0 http://t.co/TaN93kn5Dp

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2014

There is Blood on Hands of Those Who Demanded 'Dead Cops'

From Bob McManus, at the New York Post:

“What do we want?” drones the blood chant.

“Dead cops!” comes the reply.

Done.

Thus does rhetoric have consequences.

There may have been just a single shooter in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Saturday afternoon. But New York’s failure to denounce without nuance the bloodlust that’s been boiling out of the corners of the Eric Garner-Michael Brown demonstrations for weeks now boils down to this:

There is blood on many hands this morning.

Yes, First Amendment. Yes, redress of grievances. Yes, peaceful protests — even as clogged bridges and mobbed boulevards created, however temporarily, very real peril for tens of thousands of New Yorkers every night for a week.

The free-speech trope is so obviously true that it’s a deflection even to raise it.

Here’s the real issue: It was, and it remains, the responsibility of protest organizers — such as they may be in the face of ubiquitous social media — to directly address murderous incantations, to unequivocally condemn those who call down harm on the city’s protectors.

And they didn’t do that.

Moreover, when two of the six people who “allegedly” attacked two cops on the Brooklyn Bridge a week ago Saturday night turn out to be, respectively, a CUNY professor and an organizer for a union that placed five one-time senior union leaders in top de Blasio ­administration posts, it’s clear that New York isn’t dealing with bearded Bolsheviks living in caves.

Violence against cops has gone mainstream — that is, violent threats to society itself can manifest virtually without a soul among the city’s elected leaders saying so much as boo.

Pitiful.

The cops understand all this, of course. They get the threat. They are steeped in the department’s institutional memories of other cops, executed from ambush in similar circumstances. They know its tradition of reflexive heroism under deadly threat — and they are proud it its record: Not perfect, of course, but better than anyone else’s.

And now this.

Who would have thought that PBA President Pat Lynch’s don’t-come-to-my-funeral petition would have become so relevant, so prescient, so tragically right to the point.

So quickly.

There will be time to count the political consequences of Saturday’s cowardly murders.

They will be substantial.

The city’s cut-the-baby-in-half approach to the Garner-Brown protests — genuflect to the PBA, confer with the most rhetorically irresponsible of the protesting groups, rinse, repeat — lent an air of moral equivalence to the events leading up to Saturday’s savagery.

Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the ­responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head.

But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional...

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "Al Sharpton's New York Protesters: We Want 'Dead Cops!' (VIDEO)."

Ghouls, Racists, and Savages Take to Twitter to Celebrate Execution of NYPD Minority Cops

It's almost shocking, but by this point I'm literally inured to the left's vicious hatred.

From Pamela Geller, at Atlas Shrugs.

Radical Protest Leaders Under Fire, on the Defensive, in Wake of New York Police Assassinations

You know, it's like a silent majority is rising up against the blood-red tide of destructive leftism destroying the country. Radical left protest leaders can't run away fast enough from their own diabolical handiwork.

At the Washington Post, "Protest leaders seek to distance budding movement from New York police killings":

Left-wing Twitter is on an epic walk-back marathon from all the anti-cop vigilantism they've been advocating all year. It's on their hands.

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2014

The ambush killing of two New York police officers Saturday has forced a burgeoning protest movement over police use of lethal force to address accusations that it bears some responsibility for violence carried out in the name of that cause.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were fatally shot Saturday as they sat in their patrol car in a Brooklyn neighborhood. The suspect, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, is thought to have posted threats against police on social media before shooting his ­ex-girlfriend in Baltimore and then traveling to New York to target the officers. He killed himself soon after attacking the officers.

Police officials in New York and elsewhere were quick to lay at least partial blame for the officers’ killings on ongoing protests of several high-profile fatal encounters between police and unarmed black men this year. Brinsley referred to two of those men in his online rants.

“Let’s face it: There’s been, not just in New York but throughout the country, very strong ­anti-police, anti-criminal-justice system, anti-societal initiatives underway,” New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said during a news conference Saturday. “One of the unfortunate aspects sometimes is some people get caught up in these and go in directions they should not.”

The officers’ deaths were condemned by local, state and national officials; the families of the victims of police killings this year; and many of the civil rights leaders and groups that have been the most vocal in the ongoing national Black Lives Matter protests.

“I’m standing here in sorrow about losing those two police officers,” said Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, whose ­video-recorded chokehold death at the hands of a New York officer this year sparked national outrage that turned to protest when the officer was not indicted. “These two police officers lost their lives senselessly.”

But pundits, particularly among political conservatives and law enforcement officials — who for weeks have insisted that the demonstrations are ­“anti-police” — said this weekend that the attack on the two officers was a result of the tense environment created by the protests.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day.” Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York, a union representing the city’s police officers, declared during a news conference Saturday night...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "NYPD Assassinations Spark Massive Backlash Against the Radical Left's Police Protests."

NYPD Assassinations Spark Massive Backlash Against the Radical Left's Police Protests

Well, it's about time.

The radical left has all but declared open season on America's law enforcement. We're basically in an ideological war commensurate with the political violence of the 1960s.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Killings of New York Police Officers Spark Backlash to Protests":

The assassination of two New York City police officers this weekend has emboldened police and their supporters to lash out at weeks of nationwide protest and criticism that they say have left officers more vulnerable.

Police are investigating social-media posts by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the apparent assailant in the point-blank fatal shootings Saturday of the two officers who were sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn. In them, he allegedly talked about killing officers in retaliation for the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this summer during confrontations with police.

Experts on law enforcement said the demonstrations that followed grand jury decisions not to charge the officers in those cases have strained police morale nationwide, as officers have been forced to defend their tactics, then deploy in big numbers to protests against those tactics.

“This senseless murder of two of New York’s finest further exemplifies the dangerous political climate in which all members of law enforcement, nationwide, now find themselves,” Baltimore police union President Gene Ryan said in a posting on the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police website. “Not since the political unrest of the 1960s have police officers been so targeted.”

On Sunday, a somber-faced New York Mayor Bill de Blasio , who has come under withering criticism from the city’s police union, which contends he has undermined officers, attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, flanked in a pew by his wife and Police Commissioner William Bratton .

“We are in solidarity with you,” New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan told the public officials.

Protest leaders have condemned the killing of the two officers. The protest movement faced its first test Sunday evening, when about 100 demonstrators marched almost silently in Central Park and parts of Harlem to the First Corinthian Baptist Church.

“We realize the sensitivity of this time,” said Tamika Mallory, a board member of Justice League NYC, one of the main organizations involved in the New York City demonstrations.

Elsewhere, organizers defended their demonstrations...

Keep reading.

VIDEO: Aftermath at New York 'Pigs in a Blanket' Execution Scene (VIDEO)

Scene of the left's politics of vengeance.

Via Legal Insurrection:

From Ismaaiyl Brinsley to Barack Obama, Leftist Agenda All About Revenge Against Political Enemies

Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani put the cop-killing blame squarely on President Obama, saying that our racist Bombthrower-in-Chief has been exhorting his partisans to "hate the police."

Indeed, the left from Obama and Eric Holder on down has been on a jihad against "racist" law enforcement for years now, and thus the cold-blooded ideological murders of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos are the natural consequence of the left's politics of ideological recrimination and hate-driven vengeance.

According to Politico, President Obama's current viability is based on a revenge-based agenda against ideological foes. See, "Operation Revenge: President Obama is back in his campaign comfort zone: Smiting his political enemies":

Obama’s turnaround in recent weeks – he’s seized the offensive with a series of controversial executive actions and challenges to leaders in his own party on the budget — can be attributed to a fundamental change in his political mindset, according to current and former aides. He’s gone from thinking of himself as a sitting (lame) duck, they tell me, to a president diving headlong into what amounts to a final campaign – this one to preserve his legacy, add policy points to the scoreboard, and – last but definitely not least – to inflict the same kind of punishment on his newly empowered Republican enemies, who delighted in tormenting him when he was on top.

Obama needs someone to "run against," to demonize and destroy. Indeed, that's the fundamental basis of leftist Democrat Party ideology and politics. And now the chickens have come home in Brooklyn, and this won't be the last of it. It's no wonder that Americans blame the White House for the violent deterioration of race relations in America.

Al Sharpton's New York Protesters: We Want 'Dead Cops!' (VIDEO)

Via Katie Pavlich, at Town Hall, "FLASHBACK: Al Sharpton's Marchers in New York City Chant 'What Do We Want? Dead Cops!'"

Cowards like DeBlasio, Sharpton, Holder & Obama stoke bogus racial flames w/ gasoline & then run away & cry politics when real sh*t happens

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) December 21, 2014

As the White House tries to squirm away from this, remember Al Sharpton is Obama's advisor, and Sharpton's march chanted for dead cops

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) December 21, 2014

Leftists denying responsibility for the murders are lying. The blood is dripping from their hands.

Margaret Hoover's Regrets

I'm gobsmacked by the shameless lack of self-awareness of people like the disgusting faux-conservative Margaret Hoover.

.@MargaretHoover's gotta be regretting that "hands-up" idiocy she douched on CNN last week. #CopsLivesMatter

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2014

"Hands up" has fused with a larger mvmt & we all have an interest equal justice. @sallykohn @SunnyHostin @melrobbins http://t.co/jMc94bPdhQ

— MargaretHoover (@MargaretHoover) December 16, 2014

Actually, hands up is a lie @MargaretHoover @sallykohn @SunnyHostin @melrobbins @CNNOpinion

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) December 16, 2014

Rape Truthers

At the Other McCain, "Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’."

I Can Breathe

From Friday night in New York, via Reason:

Deep Discounts in Electronics

At Amazon, Shop Amazon - Deep Discounts in Electronics.

NYPD's 84th Precinct in Mourning (VIDEO)

Via CBS News New York:

NYPD Officers Turn Backs to de Blasio (VIDEO)

At London's Daily Mail, "Police officers turn their backs on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio as he is accused of having 'blood on his hands'."

Vicious Hatemonger @CassandraRules 'Spammed by Idiots' Calling Her Out for Her Violent Anti-Cop Agitation

She deserves to be mercilessly trolled for her vicious anti-police agitation, the scummy bitch.

.@CassandraRules has blood on her hands. She's been agitating vigilante anti-cop violence for months. @CFLancop @MarshallLocke @MsEBL

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) December 21, 2014

Does this mean I can't wear my FTP Santa hat today? #ColdMedsDanceParty pic.twitter.com/ovr4BCZh8i

— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) December 20, 2014

Every time a cop gets killed I get spammed like I did it. Wanting cops to stop killing people isn't the same as wishing anyone dead.

— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) December 21, 2014

Being spammed by idiots, have a cop telling me about when he killed someone, & I'm still loopy from cold meds. Twitter, I can't handle you.

— Cassandra (@CassandraRules) December 21, 2014

'Al Sharpton Got What He Wanted' — On CNN, Retired NYPD Detective Slams Obama's Race Huckster (VIDEO)

Detective Harry Houck pulls no punches, man.



PREVIOUSLY: "Two NYPD Officers Shot Dead — 'Execution Style — in 'Revenge' for Michael Brown and Eric Garner (VIDEO)."

Two NYPD Officers Shot Dead — 'Execution Style — in 'Revenge' for Michael Brown and Eric Garner (VIDEO)

The fruits of weeks of leftist violence, vandalism, and mayhem nationwide. I dare say this is just a beginning.

At the New York Post, "Gunman executes 2 NYPD cops as ‘revenge’ for Garner."

Two uniformed NYPD officers were shot dead Saturday afternoon as they sat in their marked police car on a Brooklyn street corner — in what investigators believe was a crazed gunman’s ­assassination-style mission to avenge Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

“It’s an execution,” one law-enforcement source said of the 3 p.m. shooting.

The tragic heroes were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill in Bedford-Stuyvesant when they were shot point-blank in the head by the lone gunman, identified by sources as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, who had addresses in Georgia and Brooklyn.

Moments after killing the two officers, he too was dead, having turned the gun on himself on a nearby subway platform as cops closed in.

“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today,” a person believed to be the gunman wrote on Instagram in a message posted just three hours before the officers were shot.

“They Take 1 Of Ours…Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” the post continued, signing off with, “This May Be My Final Post...”

Keep reading at Memeorandum.

Darleen Click has a tweet of the Instagram message, at Protein Wisdom, "Uh-oh."

More at Jawa Report, "Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley Murders Two NYC Police Officers."

Plus, at the New York Times, "Two Police Officers Fatally Shot in Brooklyn; Suspect Is Found Dead," and "Live Updates on Fatal Shooting of Two N.Y.P.D. Officers."

And of course, the far-left celebrations of the dead cops, at Twitchy, "‘Can they breathe?’ Execution-style killing of two NYPD officers celebrated; ‘Salute the shooter’," and "#PoliceLivesMatter: Michelle Malkin warned in columns of growing anti-police vigilantism."

My column last week on anti-police vigilantism across the country ==> http://t.co/ZNobzQz3Zk

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) December 20, 2014

Plunging Russian Ruble Puts Pressure on Putin

At WSJ, "Plunging Ruble Unsettles Russians, Poses Test for Putin: Russians Rush to Buy Big-Ticket Items and Foreign Currencies as Ruble Hits Record Low":

MOSCOW—As Russian President Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up the conflict with the West for most of the year, the economic fallout on ordinary Russians has been limited.

Suddenly, though, the plunging ruble is reawakening fears of rising prices and the kind of financial crisis Mr. Putin has sought to put behind his country. As the ruble hit a record low, falling as much as 20% against the dollar Tuesday, Moscow residents rushed to buy electronics and other big-ticket items and drained rubles from ATMs to swap them for dollars and euros—signaling a new feeling of vulnerability among Russians and a fresh challenge to their leader.

From St. Petersburg to Siberia, money changers ran out of foreign currency and were raising exchange rates. Sberbank , Russia’s state savings bank, and Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private lender, said they were experiencing a rush for dollars and euros.

“The demand is enormous. People are bringing piles, huge piles of cash. It is madness,” said Kamila Asmalova, a manager at a Moscow branch of Sberbank. The branch ran out of foreign currency by 2 p.m., she said.

Lanta Bank, a midsize Moscow lender, said its foreign counterparts would be unable to send foreign currency Wednesday as aircraft that typically transport cash are full.

Apple Inc. said it halted online sales in the country because of the ruble’s volatility, and IKEA announced it would raise prices there.

The ruble’s continued fall despite the Russian central bank’s move to raise interest rates to 17% rippled across global markets Tuesday, fueling a selloff in emerging market currencies and stocks. In the U.S., the turbulence was more muted, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 0.7%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, a traditional haven, fell to 2.07%, its lowest closing level since May 2013.

Abroad, Russia’s crumbling currency—driven by sanctions and eroding oil prices—raises the threat of a currency market contagion, particularly for emerging economies facing headwinds, such as Turkey and Indonesia.

At home, economists say the Russian central bank’s rate gambit is certain to push the country’s faltering economy into recession by raising borrowing costs. Even before the rate increase, the central bank estimated the economy could contract as much as 4.7% next year if oil remains around $60 a barrel. On Tuesday, Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said that the government would introduce some “regulatory measures” on the foreign-exchange market, but that it wasn’t discussing any capital-control measures.

The big question is whether Russia’s economic troubles will turn into a real political challenge for Mr. Putin, whose approval ratings remain above 80% and who retains tight control over politics and the economy...

Continue reading.

Democrat Party Thanks Stephen Colbert for Nearly 10-Years of Leftist Partisanship and Propaganda — Stalker-Troll Repsac3 Signs On!

John Hinderaker got some mileage out of this story, apparently, at Power Line, "DEMOCRATS TO COLBERT: THANKS FOR YOUR HELP!"

And what do you know?

AmPow's hate-addled stalking hate-troll Walter James Casper III totes signed the petition to "thank Stephen Colbert for 9 great years!"

I just signed the petition to thank Stephen Colbert for 9 great years! Add your name: http://t.co/GLQiwUW1KV

— Walter James Casper (@repsac3) December 18, 2014

Talk about moral bankruptcy and rank, brainless partisanship and ideological hatred.

But that's our own stalker troll "Hate-sac" for you, boasting about his corrupt media bias and institutional hackery.

FLASHBACK: From Robert Stacy McCain, "Portrait of a Stalker Troll: @Repsac3, Also Known as Walter James Casper III":

Among the significant characteristics of cyberstalkers is the disproportionality of their obsessions. Professor Douglas is not an academic celebrity or influential media personality. He’s a professor of political science at Long Beach City College in California. It is not as if he’s at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or some other big-money “prestige” school, and yet the fact that Professor Douglas is (a) conservative and (b) a blogger is sufficient to justify in Casper’s sick mind the most insane forms of stalking behavior.

Another characteristic of cyberstalkers is their resort to psychological projection: They are not obsessed with you — no! — you are obsessed with them, and don’t you dare accuse them of harassing you — of course not! — you are instead harassing them.

Indeed, the hate-filled, morally bankrupt Repsac is universally reviled across the 'sphere: This kind of “accuse the accusers” tactic serves two purposes for the troll: First, it is a psychological rationalization by which he justifies his behavior and, second, it serves to obfuscate the situation in the eyes of law enforcement or other authorities.
Something else: The conflict between Casper and Professor Douglas is not about politics, nor is it about Professor Douglas.

That is to say, Casper’s espousal of left-wing political ideas is not the reason for his behavior, but simply a pretext, and if he weren’t harassing Professor Douglas, he’d be harassing some other target, selected more or less at random. There is, of course, a specific history to the conflict between them, but it is ultimately irrelevant. There are plenty of people every bit as left-wing as Casper who are not obsessive stalkers, and there are other conservative bloggers who might just as easily become targets for stalking, if ever they attracted the attention of such a grotesquely deformed personality as Casper.

Walter James Casper III has spent years smearing and harassing Professor Douglas, trying to get him fired from his job. This could (and in fact, often does) happen to any blogger who has a day job.

@rsmccain @repsac3 @AmPowerBlog Get a life, 3casper. Even your friends say you're obsessed. The whole world is not wrong and you are right

— The Mad Jewess™ (@MadJewessWoman) January 8, 2014

@repsac3 stirring the pot and spreading the H8…does that make you feel great? Loser. @AmPowerBlog @rsmccain @regularrightguy @instapundit

— Evi L. Bloggerlady (@MsEBL) November 16, 2014

Corruption, stalking, and spreading partisan hatred. Boy, Repsac sure knows how to win friends and influence people, not!

James Holmes' Parents Plead Against Death Penalty

At LAT, "James Holmes' parents plead for their son: 'He is not a monster'":

The parents of shooting suspect James Holmes pleaded for their son’s life in a letter sent Friday, arguing that the man accused in the deadly rampage at a suburban Denver movie theater is mentally ill and should be institutionalized for life instead of facing execution.

Holmes, 27, faces the death penalty if he is convicted of killing 12 people and injuring 70 in the 2012 attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Jury selection is scheduled to start Jan. 20.

The case has reignited arguments over gun control, the death penalty and whether to execute people who are mentally ill. Holmes has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

In a letter sent to the Denver Post and emailed to journalists around the country, Robert and Arlene Holmes wrote: “We are always praying for everyone in Aurora. We wish that July 20, 2012, never happened.”

Of their son, they wrote, “We have read postings on the Internet that have likened him to a monster. He is not a monster. He is a human being gripped by a severe mental illness.”

It was Robert and Arlene Holmes’ first comments except for a brief statement immediately after the attack at the theater.

“Treatment in an institution would be best for our son,” they wrote. “We love our son, we have always loved him and we do not want him to be executed.”

There must be some significant doubt about that insanity plea. If the courts find him competent, the f-ker should fry.

More.

Less Than 25 Percent of Americans Satisfied with Direction of the Country

Following up on the previous post, "The Obama Administration May Represent the 'Peak Left' in American Politics."

Despite all the bullshit MSM hoopla about how Obama's going all 2.0 and such, bedrock Americans --- i.e., real Americans, not the treasonous bastard leftists --- continue to say the country's going to hell.

At Gallup, "Satisfaction With Direction of U.S. Continues to Languish."

Even though Americans are more positive about the economy than they have been in recent years, it still ranks at or near the top of their list of the most important problems facing the country. In addition to the economy, dissatisfaction with the government has also consistently ranked among the most important problems facing the country in the last two years. As a result, Americans' frustration with Washington's ability to address the country's major issues could be holding satisfaction down, as it likely did in 2006 and 2007 when the economy relatively good. With Republicans taking control of the Senate and the House in January, the prospects for greater cooperation in Washington are not bright.

Right.

And the idiot Obama continues to push for policies everything of which are besides the economy. Fucking Democrat morons.

The Obama Administration May Represent the 'Peak Left' in American Politics

Or, to put it another way, the high tide of leftist "progressive" perversion, deceit and moral decay.

From Walter Russell Mead, at the American Interest, "Next Up in America: The Liberal Leftist Retreat":

As the United States staggers toward the seventh year of Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House, a growing disquiet permeates the ranks of the American left. After six years of the most liberal President since Jimmy Carter, the nation doesn’t seem to be asking for a second helping. Even though the multiyear rollout of Obamacare was carefully crafted to put all the popular features up front, delaying less popular changes into the far future, the program remains unpopular. Trust in the fairness and competence of government is pushing toward new lows in the polls, even though the government is now in the hands of forward-looking, progressive Democrats rather than antediluvian Gopers.

For liberals, these are bleak times of hollow victories (Obamacare) and tipping points that don’t tip. For examples of the latter, think of Sandy Hook, the horrific massacre in Connecticut that Democrats and liberals everywhere believed would finally push the American public toward gun control. Two years later, polls show more Americans than ever before think it’s more important to protect gun access than to promote gun control.

Sandy Hook isn’t the only example. There was the latest 2014 IPCC report on climate change that was going to end the debate once and for all. The chances for legislative action on climate change in the new Congress: zero or less. There was Ferguson and the Garner videotape showing the fatal chokehold, both of which set off a wave of protests but seem unlikely to change public attitudes about the police. There was the Senate Intelligence Committee “torture report” that was going to settle the issue of treatment of detainees. Again, the polls are rolling in suggesting that the public remains exactly where it was: supportive of “torture” under certain circumstances. And of course there was the blockbuster Rolling Stone article on campus rape at UVA, the story that, before it abruptly collapsed, was going to cement public support for the Obama administration’s aggressive attempt to federalize the treatment of sexual harassment on campuses around the country.

In all of these cases, liberals got what, from a liberal perspective, appeared to be conclusive evidence that long cherished liberal policy ideas were as correct as liberals have always thought they were. In all of these cases the establishment media conformed to the liberal narrative, inundating the airwaves and flooding the cyberverse with the liberal line. Some of the stories, like the UVA rape story, collapsed. Some, like the Ferguson story, became so complex and nuanced that some of their initial political salience diminished. But even when, as with Ferguson, other follow-up stories seem to reinforce the initial liberal take (the Garner case, for example), the public still doesn’t seem to accept the liberal line or draw the inferences that liberals want it to draw. It’s becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that many Americans will continue to disagree with many liberal policy prescriptions no matter what.

Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No “name and shame” report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.

These are not the only issues in which, from a left Democratic point of view, the country is overrun with zombies and vampires: policy ideas that Democrats thought had been killed but still restlessly roam the earth. The finale of the George W. Bush presidency was, for many Democrats, conclusive evidence that conservative ideas just don’t work. The post 9/11 Bush foreign policy led to two long and unhappy wars. America had lost the trust of its allies without defeating its enemies. At home, the Bush tax cuts led to an exploding deficit, and the orgy of deregulation (admittedly, much of it dating from the Clinton years) led to the greatest financial crash since World War II and the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression...

Still more, and be sure to click through for the links to polling data that show the public's repudiation of idiotic leftist policy positions down the line.

Meanwhile, little Scotty Lemieux, at Leftists, Losers and Perverts, mewls about how Obama's going to be the most "substantial" and "significant" president since LBJ and FDR. Heh, I know. The lulz. They hurt!

Obama Props Up Tyranny in Cuba

At Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Abnormalization."

Sony CEO Michael Lynton Responds to President Obama (VIDEO)

"We have not caved, we have not given in, we have persevered, and we have not backed down..."

See the Wrap, "Sony CEO Michael Lynton to President Obama: ‘We Have Not Caved’ (Video)."

And watch at CNN:



And ICYMI: "Obama Blames Sony After Failing to Defend Free Speech When it Mattered."

Nikki Finke Said to Be in Talks With Politico

Well, she's the master Hollywood gossip reporter (or she was), and she's sure be a nice fit at Politico, with its "win the morning" ethos.

See the New York Times, "Nikki Finke, Hollywood Chronicler, Said to Be in Talks With Politico":

Ms. Finke grew infamous in Los Angeles for aggressive coverage of the entertainment industry, which made her former website, Deadline Hollywood, into a draw for breaking industry news. Penske Media acquired the site in 2009. But in 2012 it purchased Variety, a competing Hollywood trade publication, which sparked a dispute that resulted in Ms. Finke’s leaving the company.

Ms. Finke and Penske recently came to settlement terms, which prohibited her from writing about the entertainment industry for another company. Writing about Washington might circumnavigate that agreement.

Yeah, her parting with Deadline must burn like a thousand suns. I wrote about that here, "Final Deadline for Nikke Finke?"

And best of luck to the lady.

Believing That Friendly U.S.-Cuba Relations Can Remake the Regime in Havana is the Worst Kind of American Exceptionalist Fantasy

From Gordon Adams, at Foreign Policy, "The Liberal Fallacy of the Cuba Deal":

When the New York Times decides to run a banner headline in virtually every one of its domestic and international editions, it usually means something big has just gone down. This week, it was the administration’s announcement that the United States is reversing the policy of the last 50-plus years, re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and advocating an end of the economic embargo of the island nation.

I would like to say that this policy change has emerged because non-recognition and the embargo were both stupid and self-defeating policies. And that may be part of it. But the debate that has begun to emerge around the Cuba policy announcement this week actually seems to be going in another direction. Instead of simply ending a policy that was always unworkable, we are at risk of embarking on another misleading debate about American exceptionalism: that somehow U.S. policy, in some way, will lead to the political and economic order that we (not the Cubans) want to see in Cuba...

More.

More Kate Upton 'Sexiest Woman'

Following up from yesterday, "Kate Upton: 'Sexiest Woman Alive'."

And see now this massive photo slideshow of Ms. Upton at the Los Angeles Times, "Kate Upton named 'Sexiest Woman Alive' by People magazine."

A Reply to Kim's Cyberterrorism

At the Wall Street Journal, "Financial sanctions squeezed the North before and could again":

President Obama vowed in his press conference Friday that the United States “will respond proportionally” to the cyberattack on Sony Pictures, “in a place and time and manner that we choose.” Since the FBI has now concluded the attack was orchestrated by North Korea, a forceful response is essential to deterring future attacks by the world’s rogues. Allow us to offer some suggestions as to what a “proportional” response might be.

As we noted Friday, one good place to start would be for the U.S. government to pay Sony Pictures for the rights to “The Interview” and release the movie for free into the public domain. The comedy, about an assassination attempt on Kim Jong Un, could then be seen by the world and translated into Korean, loaded on USB sticks, and floated into North Korea by balloons.

That would teach Pyongyang a useful lesson in the value the free world attaches to free speech. But the corpulent Korean despot also needs to learn a lesson about the costs of hacking and cyberterrorism, which caused Sony to cancel the movie’s scheduled Christmas release.

The easy place to start would be to once again place North Korea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism—a list from which the Bush Administration unwisely removed it in 2008 in exchange for the late Kim Jong Il ’s fake promises of denuclearization. Putting the North back on the list would be an act of diplomatic hygiene, though it would probably not do much to hurt the Kim regime.

A tougher move would be to reprise the Treasury Department’s 2007 sanctions on Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank that the U.S. accused of being a major money-launderer for Pyongyang. The Kim family is heavily dependent on drug dealing, contraband cigarettes, counterfeit dollars, arms smuggling and other illicit activity for its hard currency earnings, which it then uses as bribes to keep the North’s elite in line. The bank denies the allegations.

The sanctions froze Banco Delta Asia out of conducting dollar-denominated transactions, though their broader effect was to dissuade other banks from doing business with Pyongyang for fear of being similarly sanctioned. It was, by all accounts, the toughest blow the Kim family had ever sustained. “They were not able to pay for gyroscopes for their missile program,” Rep. Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told us Friday. “Their missile line just shut down. The dictator couldn’t pay his generals.”

The Kim regime squealed. In one of their worst diplomatic moves, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush ultimately relented, and it was back to North Korean business as usual. But at least the sanctions demonstrated how vulnerable the Kims were to having their personal finances squeezed. It can be done again...

Lone Wolf Terrorism is the New Nightmare

Once again, a penetrating analysis from Charles Krauthammer, at WaPo, "How to fight the lone wolf":

The lone wolf is the new nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and the evil — and the distinction is important.

The real terrorists are rational. Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, had been functioning as an Army doctor for years. Psychotics cannot carry that off. Hasan even had a business card listing his occupation as SoA (Soldier of Allah). He then went out and, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” shot dead 13 people, 12 of them fellow soldiers. To this day, Hasan speaks coherently and proudly of the massacre. That’s terrorism.

Sydney’s Man Haron Monis, on the other hand, was a marginal, alienated Iranian immigrant with a cauldron of psychopathologies. Described by his own former lawyer as “unhinged,” Monis was increasingly paranoid. He’d been charged as accessory to the murder of his ex-wife and convicted of sending threatening letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers.

His religiosity was both fanatical and confused. A Shiite recently converted to Sunni Islam, his Internet postings showed not just the zeal of the convert but a remarkable ignorance of Islam and Islamism. He even brought the wrong Islamic banner to the attack. He had to ask the authorities to provide him with an Islamic State flag.

Which led to a frantic search to find an Islamic State connection or conspiracy. But for the disturbed like Monis, the terror group does not provide instructions, it provides a script. It offers the disoriented and deranged a context, a purpose, a chance even at heroism.

I suspect this is the case with most of the recent cluster of lone-wolf terrorist incidents, from the beheading of a co-worker in Oklahoma to the Queens ax attack on New York City police. We fear these attackers because the psychopathological raw material is everywhere, in the interstices of every society. Normally in and out of mental hospitals, in and out of homelessness, some are now redirected to find a twisted redemption in terror.

Nonetheless, in the scheme of things, the crazies are limited in what they can carry out. They are too disorganized to do more than localized, small-scale damage. The larger danger is the Maj. Hasan with his mental faculties intact and his purpose unwavering.

The still greater threat is organized terror, as we were reminded just hours after Sydney by the Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar that killed at least 148, mostly children...

Still more.

Pamela Geller on the Rick Amato Show: Jihad in Australia

At Atlas Shrugs, "The Faces of Jihad Terror: #SydneySiege hero victims, Young lawyer and mother-of-three died after ‘shielding pregnant friend’ from gunfire and the café manager, 34, shot dead as he tried to grab terrorist’s gun," and "#SydneySiege Jihadist wore headband bearing the war cry: “We are ready to sacrifice for you, O Muhammad”."

Just Finished 'The Hunger Games'

There was something about the latest film, "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1," that piqued my interest more than usual. (The problem of totalitarianism really came out, especially at the conclusion.)

I took my kid to see it on the opening weekend. Impressed, I came home and picked up my older son's copy of the first volume in the series, "The Hunger Games."

A great gift item for Christmas, at Amazon, "The Hunger Games Box Set: Foil Edition."

America's Craven Capitulation to Terror

I'm posting this one FWIW, considering the significant doubts on the origins of the Sony hack.

From David Keyes, at the Daily Beast, "The Sony Hack and America’s Craven Capitulation to Terror":

Americans are giving in to North Korean blackmail — and it will only get worse.

If the noble experiment of American democracy is to mean anything, it is fidelity to the principle of freedom. It is to champion the idea that all men and women are endowed with certain unalienable rights—free to think our thoughts, speak our minds, associate with whom we want and express our feelings without fear that a tyrant will silence us. Slavery is not only the physical restraining of the body. It is also the imprisonment of the mind—the instinct to quiet one’s thoughts in the face of terror.

This is a degrading and shameful state which no man or woman should be forced to endure.

Yesterday, Americans not only endured it—they enabled it. Anonymous hackers, possibly associated with the North Korean regime, made unspecified threats to conduct a 9/11-style attack on theaters that showed “The Interview,” a feature comedy film which pokes fun at Kim Jong Un. Major theaters announced they would not show the movie and Sony pulled it.

On Christmas weekend, a North Korean tyrant has decided what American teenagers will see on the silver screen. Some sympathize with the theaters. Who can blame them? Why would any business expose their customers to potential terror?

This is wrong, dangerous and shameful.

By giving an artistic veto to a madman, we submit to the mindset of a slave. We are no longer sovereigns of our thoughts, comedy and art. If anything is worth fighting for, it is this...

Heh, a little dramatic (although not necessarily disagreeable).

More, at the New Republic (safe link), "Why Aren't We Retaliating Right Now for the Sony Cyberattack?"

More Questions on Who's Behind the Sony Hack?

The dissenting voices on NoKo's complicity are extremely compelling.

Recall Wired's piece from yesterday, "Who's Behind the Sony Hack Attack?"

Now here's Marc Rogers (via Dana Loesch), "Why the Sony hack is unlikely to be the work of North Korea":

Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself....

Finally, blaming North Korea is the easy way out for a number of folks, including the security vendors and Sony management who are under the microscope for this. Let’s face it – most of today’s so-called “cutting edge” security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don’t offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers. That doesn’t mean that we should let them off and give up every time someone plays the “APT” or “Sophisticated Attacker” card though. This is a significant area of weakness in the security industry – the truth is we are TERRIBLE at protecting against bespoke, unique attacks, let alone true zero days. There is some promising technology out there, but it’s clear that it just isn’t ready yet.

While we are on the subject, and ignoring the inability of traditional AntiVirus to detect bespoke malware, just how did whatever Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution that Sony uses miss terabytes of data flying out of their network? How did their sophisticated on-premise perimeter security appliances miss such huge anomalies in network traffic, machine usage or host relationships? How did they miss Sony’s own edge being hijacked and used as public bittorrent servers aiding the exfiltration of their data? ....

The reality is, as things stand, Sony has little choice but to burn everything down and start again. Every password, every key, every certificate is tainted now and that’s a terrifying place for an organization to find itself. This hack should be used as the definitive lesson in why security matters and just how bad things can get if you don’t take it seriously.

Keep reading.

New 'American Sniper' Movie Trailer

The film's out on Christmas Day.



Plus, an interview with Bradley Cooper, at CBS This Morning, "Bradley Cooper's transformation: New roles on stage and screen." (A really good interview. Cooper reports that Chris Kyle's wife thought she was watching her husband on screen. Amazing.)

FBI Accuses North Korean Government in Cyberattack on Sony Pictures

I guess this is the authoritative determination, despite the extant doubts that Pyongyang is behind the hack.

At NYT, "Obama Vows U.S. Response to North Korea Cyberattack on Sony":

In describing the United States’ evidence against North Korea, the F.B.I. said that there were significant “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks” to previous attacks by the North Koreans. It also said that there were classified elements of the evidence against the North that it could not reveal.

“The F.B.I. also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyberactivity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea,” the bureau said. “For example, the F.B.I. discovered that several Internet protocol addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with I.P. addresses that were hard-coded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.”

The F.B.I. said that some of the methods employed in the Sony attack were similar to ones that were used by the North Koreans against South Korean banks and news media outlets in 2013.

“We are deeply concerned about the destructive nature of this attack on a private sector entity and the ordinary citizens who worked there,” the F.B.I. said.

It added: “Though the F.B.I. has seen a wide variety and increasing number of cyberintrusions, the destructive nature of this attack, coupled with its coercive nature, sets it apart. North Korea’s actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a U.S. business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves. Such acts of intimidation fall outside the bounds of acceptable state behavior.”

The F.B.I.'s announcement was carefully coordinated with the White House and reflected the intensity of the investigation; just a week ago a senior F.B.I. official said he could not say whether North Korea was responsible. But it also puts new pressure on President Obama on how to respond. Administration officials note that the White House has now described the action against Sony as an “attack,” as opposed to mere theft of intellectual property, and that suggests that Mr. Obama is now looking for a government response, rather than a corporate one.

Also, at the FBI's homepage, "Update on Sony Investigation."