Editor of CUNY's 'Advocate' Newspaper Calls for Anti-Cop Violence to 'Bring About New, More Egalitarian Paradigm...'

Shoot, we should give thanks to this dolt, Gordon Barnes, of the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), for so enthusiastically letting the cat out of the bag of leftist anti-cop vigilantism.

This is truly what the left is all about, but what so few of their cadres will of course honestly admit (since revolutionary leftism is today a stealth movement in which so-called "progressives" disguise the true intent of their bankrupt ideological program).

Here's Barnes' essay, at CUNY GC "Advocate," a far-left publication sporting an "A" for anarchy at its Twitter profile. See, "In Support of Violence." (And you gotta love how this dude Barnes boasts of studying in Havana, at the Instituto de Filosofía de Cuba, a clearinghouse of Marxist-Leninist ideological agitation.)

From the essay:

Calls for calm emanating from the upper strata of society are an attempt to mitigate the popular indignation that has long been bubbling under the surface of the society. The violence against property, that is destruction and theft, is only an unorganized form of something with the potential to be far more revolutionary and inspiring. To say that an all-out class war is on the horizon would be hyperbolic at this point, and maybe even myopic, but the undergirding social structures that position disenfranchised and working class peoples well below the dictatorship of capital are being pressured, the police being only one such institution. With increased organization, the Ferguson protests and riots do have the potential to transform from seemingly random attacks to ones that aim at puncturing the status quo. This is not a quixotic notion, it is within the realm of material possibilities, and activist-scholars should be lending their weight to this and other attendant struggles. The reliability and social productivity of voting for bourgeoisie parties is long dead. The demonstration turned riot, turned revolt, is the most effective means to bring about a new, more egalitarian social paradigm. While the current “unrest” in Ferguson and around the country is unlikely lead to any revolutionary impetus, it is a start. As people’s consciousness is transmuted from subservience to the prevailing ideologies of the elite to something related to their actual position in the society, drastic social change will become increasingly possible.

The death of Michael Brown has spurred this process and has fomented mass discontent with the government. Furthermore, the events in Ferguson have fomented the most visible resistance to the status quo in the United States. What is needed now is to take the next step from indiscriminate attacks to ones directly pointed at state power as well as at the lackeys and apologists who allow it to prosper. The transformative potential emanating from the protestors’ violence in Ferguson and elsewhere will not help recoup some “golden age” in the United States – there never was one – but can hopefully prove to be the kernel of radically altered social relations.

During the protests in New York City in the days after the decision to not indict Wilson, thousands took to the streets empathetically chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” Some, however, went even further, shouting the slogan “Arms Up, Shoot Back!” The former statement represents an appeal to state authorities, namely the police, to cease its murderous rampage upon those living in this country. The latter, represents a challenge – albeit prematurely and an incendiary one, given the balance of forces – to those that currently wield power, and have the legal (fictitious) right to kill whom they see fit. Instead of attempting to demonize the rioters and looters by invoking the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., it would be more advantageous for those “progressives” in our society to understand the Ferguson protests as part of the same genealogy as the Deacons for Defense, Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and the Black Panthers. What is occurring in Ferguson is symptomatic of the social dislocation that has been ever present but has yet to ferment. When the state comes down on its citizenry violently, we must resist, with equitable violence if necessary. The attacks on property in Ferguson only need be redirected for a magnificent transformation of consciousness to come out of Michael Brown’s death. If not, then Brown’s death, the deaths of the aforementioned men, and the millions who suffered and died under the jackboot of state oppression in this country would have partially been lost in vain. Let us not protest the protestors, but express our solidarity, and our commitment to their struggle, which is invariably our own struggle. As we solidarize and join with the embattled communities in and around Ferguson, let us also remember to look beyond the provincial confines of our own state and express solidarity with others who struggle for a more just and equitable society, be they in Palestine, Mexico, or Burkina Faso. In the word of the late Burkinabé revolutionary Thomas Sankara, “It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”

RTWT.

Barnes announces that the "time for peace has passed."

Indeed, the violent revolutionary manifesto caught the attention of the folks at the New York Post, "CUNY newspaper editorial calls for violent protests":

A disturbing editorial in a CUNY grad-student newspaper calls for rioters protesting the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown to arm themselves and wage violent war with cops.

“The time for peace has passed,” says a revolutionary editorial titled “In Support of Violence” that was penned by editor-in-chief Gordon Barnes in the Dec. 3 issue of The Advocate...

More.

Just one more leftist to add to the long train of so-called "progressives" advocating radical anti-cop vigilantism.

The left's chickens came home to roost. And leftists are now on defense after the furious political backlash against their ideological program.

These people are disgusting, genuinely evil, the dregs of society --- pushing for the death of decency and civilization. Expose them. Repudiate them. Crush the bastards.

Radical Left Anti-Christian Hatred - UPDATED!!

I saw this idiot "Male Feminist" on Twitter somehow of late.

The sheer inanity of the handle caught my attention. So-called "male-feminists" are crazy.

Via Instapundit:




And you know, as I was saying, "Leftists can't wish you a Merry Christmas..."

UPDATE: Ms. EBL, in the comments, informs me that "Male Feminist" on Twitter is a parody account, and in that case, it's totally cool. Check this thread at AoSHQ for more.

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West

In Germany, of all places.

At Der Spiegel, "The End of Tolerance? Anti-Muslim Movement Rattles Germany":

Disenchanted German citizens and right-wing extremists are joining forces to form a protest movement to fight what they see as the Islamization of the West. Is this the end of the long-praised German tolerance of recent years?

Felix Menzel is sitting in his study in an elegant villa in Dresden's Striesen neighborhood on a dark afternoon in early December. He's thinking about Europe. A portrait of Ernst Jünger, a favorite author of many German archconservatives is hung on the wall.

Menzel, 29, is a polite, unimposing man wearing corduroys and rimless glasses. He takes pains to come across as an intellectual, and avoids virulent rhetoric like "Foreigners out!" He prefers to talk about "Europe's Western soul," which, as he believes, includes Christianity and the legacy of antiquity, but not Islam. "I see serious threats coming our way from outside Europe. I feel especially pessimistic about the overpopulation of Africa and Asia," says Menzel, looking serious. "And I believe that what is unfolding in Iraq and Syria at the moment is a clear harbinger of the first global civil war."

Menzel, a media scholar, has been running the Blaue Narzisse (Blue Narcissus), a conservative right-wing magazine for high school and university students, for the last 10 years. His small magazine had attracted little interest until now. But that is about to change, at least if Menzel has his way. "The uprising of the masses that we have long yearned for is slowly getting underway," he writes on his magazine's website. "And this movement is moving toward the right."

In Dresden, at least, the sentiments expressed in the Blaue Narzisse have become more palpable in recent weeks. Protests staged each week on Mondays initially attracted only a few dozen to a few hundred people, but more recently the number of citizens taking to the streets has reached 10,000. The group, which calls itself Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (and goes by the German acronym Pegida), demonstrates against economic migrants and a supposed "cultural foreign domination of our country" -- whatever is meant by that.

What is going on in Germany, the world's second most popular destination for immigrants? Has the open-mindedness for which Germans had long been praised now ended? Are we seeing a return of the vague fear of being overwhelmed by immigrants that Germany experienced in the 1990s, when a hostel for asylum seekers was burned down? How large is the new right-wing movement, and will it remain limited to Dresden, or is it spreading nationwide?

So far, protests held under the Pegida label in other cities -- like Kassel and Würzburg -- have attracted only a few hundred people at a time. In fact, some of the protests attracted significantly larger numbers of counter-demonstrators. And while thousands of "patriotic Europeans" aim to take to the streets in Dresden again in the coming days, their counterparts in Germany's western states are taking a Christmas break. Pegida supporters are waiting until after the holidays to return to the streets in cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf and Unna.

Keep reading.

Christmas Eve in the Ardennes

Just now finishing up on "The Band of Brothers," so I guess this is appropriate.

At Legal Insurrection, "Christmas 1944: The Battle of the Bulge."

'The Interview' Now Available on Xbox Video

Damn. You gotta love 'Merica!

At the Hollywood Reporter, "'The Interview' Goes to YouTube, Google Play, XBox."

And video at CBS News Los Angeles, "Sony Agrees to Limited Release of 'The Interview'."

Saw Julia Roberts This Morning

In a beauty ad, for Lancome.

She's one of a kind. Style and perfection. And class.

Kelly Brook Christmas

Merry Christmas folks.

At London's Daily Mail, "She's definitely on Santa's naughty list! Kelly Brook shows off her ample assets as she performs a Christmas striptease."

Man, that woman has ample assets.

Despite Obama, Plunging Oil Prices Spur U.S. Economy to Stongest Growth in Decade

Just think how much stronger our economy would be doing if we had a pro-growth president.

At LAT, "U.S. growth is strongest in a decade":

The U.S. is rolling into the new year with impressive strength as plunging oil prices have ignited consumer spending and helped fuel the best stretch of growth in more than a decade — even as economies around the world are struggling.

A basketful of mostly upbeat economic data Tuesday pushed financial markets to record highs, with the Dow Jones industrial average breaking through the 18,000-point barrier for the first time.

Investors were spurred by a Commerce Department report that the U.S. economy expanded at a remarkable 5% annual rate in the third quarter, the fastest pace since 2003 and a far cry from the tepid growth that has plagued most of the recovery from the Great Recession.

"This is literally shoot-the-lights-out sort of stuff," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Union Bank in New York. "This economy is pretty much roaring."

And the third quarter wasn't a fluke.

Total economic output, also known as gross domestic product, expanded at a 4.6% annual rate in the second quarter. It marks the first time the economy posted back-to-back quarters of more than 4.5% growth since 2003.

Economists don't expect the torrid pace to continue. The fourth quarter will probably keep the positive momentum, but at a more modest 2.5% to 3%.

With gasoline prices plummeting, Americans are feeling the difference in their bank accounts. Consumer spending jumped in November as incomes continued to rise.

And with a leading measure of consumer confidence on Tuesday hitting its highest level since 2007, signs point to strong spending carrying into next year, economists said.

"The U.S. economy prior to the oil price decline was doing reasonably well. It was chugging along," said Brian Bethune, chief economist at Alpha Economic Foresights.

"Then we get an accelerator, which is the drop in oil prices," he said. "It's equivalent to a big tax cut — and the tax cut is getting larger."

Although oil prices rose Tuesday — partly because strong U.S. growth signaled increased demand — they have fallen nearly 50% over the last six months.

That's caused the average price for a gallon of regular to drop to $2.38 a gallon, according to AAA. That's down 15 cents in just a week and 87 cents from a year ago.

The savings at the gas pump have boosted consumer spending, which rose 3.2% in the third quarter. Those figures beat an earlier estimate, and rose from 2.5% in the previous quarter. A big factor was an increase in spending on healthcare.

Heh. I just love it when the economy defies the leftist program of economic stagnation.

More.

EARLIER: "U.S. Fuel Costs Drop to Historic Lows, Thanks to Shale Oil Boom — And No Thanks to Obama!"

Leftists Mount New Anti-Police Protests at Memorial for Two Assassinated Policemen (VIDEO)

From Noah Rothman, at Hot Air, "Hearts and minds: Anti-police protesters crash memorial for slain NYPD officers":

If the protesters haven’t already completely lost the support of the majority of Americans who do not occupy themselves demonstrating in the streets, it will not be long before they do.

No, not long at all.

The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal

From Heather Lynn Mac Donald, at City Journal:

Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers.

The highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated in the mass hysteria. Following a grand jury’s decision not to indict a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer for fatally shooting 18-year-old Michael Brown in August (Brown had attacked the officer and tried to grab his gun), President Barack Obama announced that blacks were right to believe that the criminal-justice system was often stacked against them. Obama has travelled around the country since then buttressing that message. Eric Holder escalated a long running theme of his tenure as U.S. Attorney General—that the police routinely engaged in racial profiling and needed federal intervention to police properly.

University presidents rushed to show their fealty to the lie. Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust announced that “injustice [toward black lives] still thrives so many years after we hoped we could at last overcome the troubled legacy of race in America. . . . Harvard and . . . the nation have embraced [an] imperative to refuse silence, to reject injustice.” Smith College’s president abjectly flagellated herself for saying that “all lives matter,” instead of the current mantra, “black lives matter.” Her ignorant mistake, she confessed, draws attention away from “institutional violence against Black people.”

The New York Times ratcheted up its already stratospheric level of anti-cop polemics. In an editorial justifying the Ferguson riots, the Times claimed that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” Some facts: Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them...

More (via Memeorandum).

Bill de Blasio's Nightmare

Leftists were touting the elections of far-left socialist mayors in 2013, especially Bill de Blasio in New York.

Things aren't looking so great now, though.

At Politico, "De Blasio’s nightmare":

Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics.

In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the last few days.

Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Sunday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken,” one told us.

That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union – and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the NYPD.

You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.

“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations.

De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.

Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new – it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.

According to a former de Blasio aide, during the general election campaign in 2013, de Blasio’s team was even convinced that members of his police detail were eavesdropping on his private conversations in his city-assigned car. Things got so bad that de Blasio, according to the staffer, would step into the street to make sure he was out of earshot of plainclothes officers...

Man, that's harsh --- and it's Politico, a left wing rag!

More.

Saudi Arabia Fears U.S. Shale Oil

At WSJ, "Why Saudis Decided Not to Prop Up Oil: In American Shale Oil, A Perceived Threat to OPEC Market Share":

In early October, Saudi Arabia’s representative to OPEC surprised attendees at a New York seminar by revealing his government was content to let global energy prices slide.

Nasser al-Dossary ’s message broke from decades of Saudi orthodoxy that sought to keep prices high by limiting global oil production, said people familiar with the session. That set the stage for Saudi Arabia’s oil mandarins to send crude prices tumbling late last month after persuading other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to keep production steady.

Hard-hit countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela suspected the move was a coordinated effort between the oil kingdom and its longtime ally, the U.S., to weaken their foes’ economies and geopolitical standing.

But the story of Saudi Arabia’s new oil strategy, pieced together through interviews with senior Middle Eastern, American and European officials, isn’t one of an old alliance. It is a story of a budding rivalry, driven by what Saudi Arabia views as a threat posed by American energy firms, these officials said...

Once again, I just love the news out on global energy markets. It makes the idiot global warming ghouls look more idiotic than they usually do --- and that's saying something.

More at the link.

Heidi Klum's Sharper Image Too Sexy for Vegas!

At London's Daily Mail, "Heidi Klum's provocative Sharper Image ads are BANNED in Las Vegas for being 'too sexy'."

And even at Fox News:

War Is Being Waged on Our Homeland — By the Radical Left!

From Bernard Kerik, at Time:

War is being waged in our homeland. Not a war of the enemies we have become accustomed to—ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, radical extremists who hate everything we stand for and want to annihilate us.

No, this war is of our own making. It is a war on law and order. It is a war on what keeps our communities safe. It is a war on cops who live to protect those they serve.

This war is as dangerous as any global enemy we face. In some ways, it is even more dangerous because it pits Americans against Americans, those who serve against those who are served, communities against their very own.

What is worst of all is that this war is built on a lie…. a lie that has quickly become so embedded in our society that it will take a Herculean effort to bring this lie to the light of day so everyone can see it for what it is: a lie.

Our nation’s police are not at war on blacks or Hispanics or poor neighborhoods. Cops fight lawlessness each and every day, putting their lives on the line in communities all across this country to keep our citizens, children, schools, institutions, and neighborhoods safe.

Yet if you have listened to some in the media, purported civil rights leader Al Sharpton, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and others around the country over the last several weeks, you’re forced to believe that nearly all of America’s local and state police are out to kill minorities.

It’s a lie! It’s a lie that has inflamed the hearts and minds of many and turned them against every cop in the nation. It’s a lie that has the potential to rip America at its seams and cause damage far worse than any attack on our country, including that on 9/11/2001...

Well, the left is the enemy. Kerik's just making the point in a roundabout way.

Keep reading.

Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of 2014

From Charlotte Allen, at the Los Angeles Times.

PREVIOUSLY: "Feminism Died in 1998."

David Priestland, The Red Flag

Okay, here's one more book recommendation for the night.

Check out David Priestland's magisterial chronicle, The Red Flag: A History of Communism.

I read all this stuff, all these books on Marxism and the subterranean program of leftism in America. And I'm especially fascinated with the left's current collapse, Marxist Bill de Blasio in New York, in particular. It's just too much good stuff!

Feminism Died in 1998

A roundup of radical feminist inanities, at Instapundit:

“Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones.”

Now the corpse is just twitching.

'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.