Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Actually, this is so stupid I'd have hoped Kendall Jenner would've avoided it, but then, perhaps she should get props for helping SJW activism look so lame.
The Sovietization of Washington politics is nearly complete. Strong arm rule, political surveillance and the show trial threatens to replace the orderly alternation at power which characterized elective government. Watching the Beltway is now disturbingly like watching an unfolding power struggle at the Kremlin. Richard Arenberg writing in the Hill asks: "is there any hope of pulling out of the "nuclear option" death spiral before the Senate inflicts permanent damage upon itself and the Supreme Court?" There's growing concern the acrimony will permanently poison the atmosphere by locking both parties into a cycle of retaliation...
Everything is polarized. There's no giving in. There's no compromise. Fuck your partisan enemies. And who can blame Trump and the Republicans? Frankly, fighting back is why people voted for Trump.
Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration.
As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar.
The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far seems to be pointing at Obama.
Adam Housley of Fox News reports:
The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.
The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.
The spreading of the unmasked names was carried out for “political purposes that have nothing to do with national security” or foreign intelligence, Housley said. "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team," he said, citing his sources.
What is incidental collection, by the way?
Incidental collection “happens when an individual is in contact with the target of surveillance,” or is communicating “about” the target, according to Robyn Greene. “So if Bob were being targeted for surveillance and Alice called or emailed Bob, Alice’s communications with him would be collected incidentally.”
In this example, “if Bob is targeted for surveillance and Alice contacts him during that surveillance, resulting in the incidental collection of her communications with him, her name should be redacted or ‘masked’ unless leaving it unredacted provides foreign intelligence value.” Masking is done to protect U.S. persons (i.e. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, etc.) who get inadvertently caught up in the electronic dragnet from being falsely accused of crimes or otherwise improper behavior.
If a National Security Agency analyst “believes Alice’s communications may contain evidence of any crime, the NSA can share those communications with law enforcement or other relevant agencies … even if the crimes are completely unrelated to the purpose for surveilling Bob’s communications, or to foreign intelligence or national security investigations.”
According to former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, “if the intelligence community professionals decide that there’s some value, national security, foreign policy or otherwise in unmasking someone, they will grant those requests,”
Assuming these news reports about data that supposedly was incidentally collected are accurate, they raise a multitude of new questions about the ongoing scandal concerning alleged collaboration between the Trump team and Russia.
We still don’t know who asked then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice to unmask those names – or if she acted on her own initiative. But the most likely culprit has to be President Obama himself, along with those in his inner circle such as his Islamist CIA director John Brennan and his slimy national-security aide Ben Rhodes.
But whoever did the deed, it appears someone used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in likely unlawful espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team. It’s the stuff of banana republics, which makes sense, because Obama spent eight long, lawless years trying to turn the United States into precisely that...
Southern California has long been promoted as the playground of the world, the home of resort-style living, backyard swimming pools, and year-round suntans. Tracing the history of Southern California from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century, The Frontier of Leisure reveals how this region did much more than just create lavish resorts like Santa Catalina Island and Palm Springs -- it literally remade American attitudes towards leisure. Lawrence Culver shows how this "culture of leisure" gradually took hold with an increasingly broad group of Americans, and ultimately manifested itself in suburban developments throughout the Sunbelt and across the United States. He further shows that as Southern Californians promoted resort-style living, they also encouraged people to turn inward, away from public spaces and toward their private homes and communities. Impressively researched, a fascinating and lively read, this finely nuanced history connects Southern Californian recreation and leisure to larger historical themes, including regional development, architecture and urban planning, race relations, Indian policy, politics, suburbanization, and changing perceptions of nature.
CNN's running interference for the Democrats, at the video below. But the latest revelation of Obama administration surveillance, and "unmasking" of Trump transition team members, blows the lid off the left's Russian-meddling election scam and further vindicates President Trump's allegations of the Obama regime's wiretapping. .
Well, what do you know. On the matter of who “unmasked” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports, we now have one answer: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser.
A U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share.
Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.
We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don’t know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.
All of this helps to explain the actions in the last week of House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, the one official in Washington who seems interested in pursuing the evidence of politicized surveillance. Mr. Nunes was roundly criticized by Democrats and the media last week for publicly revealing at least one instance of Obama White House unmasking, albeit without disclosing any names.
Now we know he is onto something. And we know that Mr. Nunes had to go to the White House to verify his information because the records containing Ms. Rice’s unmasking request are held at the National Security Council...
I'm nearly 100 pages into this book, and it's good.
My only issue with it -- and it's a serious issue --- is that Kipnis insists that the left's Title IX totalitarianism isn't "ideological." She refers to the left's anti-rape jihad on campus as a function of an allegedly hysterical, polarized political environment, said to be productive of schizophrenic college policies on sexual assault.
Frankly, that's much too loose in terms of political responsibility, but it can't be otherwise for Kipnis, since she's desperate to cling to her bona fides as a self-described "far-left feminist." (She'd do well to read Kim Holmes' recent book, which places the left's current campus turmoil firmly in the trenches of radical ideological trends going back to at least the 1960s.)
That said, the volume's a worthwhile read that deserves a spot on the shelf of anyone seriously concerned about the denial of basic due process at America's colleges and universities.
In terms of power, controlling the executive branch bureaucracy's up there with holding the majority on the Supreme Court.
It's going to take a while to clean out Obama's treasonous deep state, but the extremely politicized "Office for Civil Rights" at the Department of Education (in charge of Title IX regulations) is an excellent place to start.
Report: New Head of Federal Anti-Rape Agency Is a ‘Libertarian Feminist’ and Clinton Critic; Candice Jackson will allegedly become deputy secretary at the Office for Civil Rights. “A conservative legal activist known for defending the women who accused President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment has been tapped to head the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on a temporary basis. OCR is the agency that regulates Title IX compliance, and is responsible for the recent effort to compel schools to police sexual assault internally.”
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."
The National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration...
In all senses, the sun was shining on Jon Ossoff. It was early in the evening on a Sunday in late March, and the suddenly very visible 30-year-old Democratic candidate in the first competitive special congressional election of the Trump era was riding shotgun in a sooty-black Chrysler Sebring, hunched over a paper plate of cheese and crackers, while a member of his staff steered toward the next fund-raiser through the hills of suburban Atlanta. The back of the car was piled high with half a dozen Nike shoe boxes, a stuffed owl, and a reporter. Between bites, Ossoff stared ahead at the road, indulging in long pauses as he considered what to say about his new life as the luckiest young man in American politics. “There’s nothing that I would love more than a freewheeling conversation about political philosophy,” he said. “But I’m cautious because, as you know, the knives are out right now.”
That is not exactly how things appeared to most observers of this breakneck two-month campaign to fill the House seat vacated by Tom Price, the new secretary of Health and Human Services. Outside of the Sebring motorcade, Ossoff looks like the poster boy of the resistance, the grassroots opposition to both President Donald Trump and the wave of nationalism that installed him in office. He is a relative neophyte running 20 points ahead of a divided Republican field in a congressional district that hasn’t been blue since Jimmy Carter, also a Georgian, was president; an anonymous congressional aide turned documentary-film producer made into a national political figure mostly by love from readers of the Daily Kos; a pleasant, generic hipster-technocrat vessel into which an entire nation of angry Democrats has poured its electoral hopes (not to mention its millions of dollars — literally millions, a wild haul for a first-time nobody in a two-month race).
In this brave new post-2016 world, the Ossoff campaign is an experiment of sorts, a Trump-backlash trial balloon that might — on April 18, when the first round of voting is held, or on June 20, when the likely runoff will be completed — tell us just how much the president has reshaped the electoral map. It may also tell us that Democrats will have to do a whole lot more than just ride the wave of Trump hate to have a real chance of puncturing House Republicans’ red wall in 2018. Which is where Tom Perez, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tends to come down. “Our mistakes, I think, were not just in 2016,” he told me, sketching out his vision for how the party might win back control of the federal government. “Our mistakes were a number of years in the making. We ignored too many voters. We got away from a 50-state strategy. And we took too many people for granted.” Now, Perez said, he’s focused on making up for lost time, which includes plans to channel resources into Georgia’s Sixth District. “We’re going to work hard down there,” he said, “because underdogs win.”
By March, anti-Trump enthusiasm and the national spotlight had made the Ossoff campaign look considerably less underdog-y; most recent polls put him at 40 percent, within striking distance of a majority (which would win him the seat outright and allow him to avoid a runoff in which a Republican candidate could consolidate conservative voters). The Atlanta suburbs seemed so upended by the race it almost didn’t feel like the South at all; traveling from Trump’s Washington, D.C., to what Ossoff hopes will soon become his Georgia seat is like walking out of the Gathering of Juggalos and into the Metropolitan Opera. “He’s our hope,” Carol Finkelstein, a 71-year-old from Sandy Springs, told me in her placid living room on a recent Saturday, just before Ossoff took to the carpet to address her neighbors. “He can’t stop a runaway train, but I’m hoping he can at least be a voice of reason.” Nearby, Barbara Brown, a 93-year-old who’s also committed to voting for Ossoff, was less diplomatic. “I’m an Independent,” she told me. “My husband was the Republican, but we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
The Wall Street Journal has pretty much eliminated access through Google search, which is why I don't link them much any more. They've really "built the wall," the subscription paywall, heh.
But Instapundit's block-quoted most of Jonathan Haidt's op-ed, so this is worth posting.
At the very moment where higher education is in trouble, it is dominated by a mindset that sets it in opposition to the mainstream culture. This will end well:
“People are sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always, ‘[Expletive] you!’ ”
He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”
Last week, we were treated to a news photo that will live in infamy: two dozen white male Republican congressmen (and zero women) around a White House conference table talking about dumping maternity and newborn care as part of their replacement for the Obama health care law.
It instantly went viral: “A rare look inside the GOP’s women’s health caucus,” tweeted Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State.
Seven days later, the infamy was compounded when Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate that would allow states to defund Planned Parenthood.
Since the heyday of the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, American women have assumed they were on a rocket to a future of assured gender equality. But even as individual women continued to break records and barriers in recent years, the engine began to stall.
Pay inequity festers. The rolling scandals at Uber remind us that the frat clubs of Silicon Valley are often rife with sexual harassment.
Women in the military are beleaguered by so-called revenge porn and sexual assault.
The United States still ranks with Swaziland, Lesotho and Papua New Guinea as the last countries on earth, “advanced” or not, that don’t mandate paid maternity leave.
In corporations, it’s turned out that the trouble isn’t the glass ceiling; it’s the sticky floor.
Male chief executives of Fortune 500 companies brag at Davos, Switzerland, about their healthy pipeline of women headed for the C-suite. (But the boast is undermined by statistics that show a paltry 4 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women in the top job.)
And a woman who commanded nearly three million more votes than her opponent did not become president...
Oh boy, where to begin?
Well, start with "pay inequity," which is a myth.
And of course the rampant "sexual harassment" we're seeing is found almost exclusively at far-left business concerns such as Uber. Why won't progressives clean up their own messes before foisting off all this bullshit on the rest of the public? And so no one wonders why "a woman who commanded nearly three million votes" failed to win the presidency. People see through the leftist cant.
In any case, more at that top link, if you can stomach it.
The story talks about David Rockefeller's grandson, Michael Quattrone (pictured), who manages the David Rockefeller Fund. The senior Rockeffer is said to have given away at least $2 billion to charity in his lifetime, and philanthropy's become the raison d'être of the entire family. The younger members of the family convinced some of the family's biggest charitable funds (they are numerous, apparently) to divest from fossil fuels, the irony of which just kills me.
Alex Tizon, a journalist and professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting while at The Seattle Times and spent decades exposing untold stories of marginalized communities, has died at age 57.
Mr. Tizon died unexpectedly Thursday, of natural causes, at his home in Eugene, Oregon, according to his family and the University of Oregon, where he was working as an assistant professor of journalism.
Mr. Tizon was one of three Seattle Times reporters to win the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, for stories that exposed widespread corruption and inequalities in the federally sponsored housing program for Native Americans. The series, which documented how billions of dollars in taxpayer funds were helping wealthy people across the country live in mansions while tribes were housed in decrepit shacks, inspired reforms to the program.
Friends, colleagues and family members said Mr. Tizon was known as a deep listener who preferred to dive headfirst into complicated, long-form stories that are becoming rarer in today’s fast-paced media cycle. An introvert who spent hours alone brooding over deep issues like the meaning of his life, he would often take on seemingly simple stories and come back with complicated tales about humanity.
“He was very curious about other people — and learning about other people helped him learn about himself,” said his wife, Melissa Tizon. “That’s what journalism did for him. His whole life quest was about trying to understand who he was, as an immigrant growing up in a largely white community.”
Born in the Philippines, Mr. Tizon immigrated to Seattle with his family when he was 5 years old and bounced around the country before he settled back here.
He spent 17 years at The Seattle Times before becoming the Seattle bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2003 to 2008. He also contributed to publications like Newsweek and programs such as “60 Minutes.”
He then spent two years in Manila, where he helped track efforts by the government to eliminate poverty in poor communities, and taught workshops in far-flung locales like Romania. And he wrote a memoir, “Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self,” about the challenges of being an Asian-American man in the United States.
He turned to teaching in 2011, but his passion for writing still burned.
A year ago, he revived a story he began working on at the Los Angeles Times a decade before, about an Alaskan family whose son had disappeared. People go missing there all the time — about 3,000 a year at one point — but in the remote corner of the world, it garners little attention or news coverage.
The family had learned that authorities had found remains that might provide closure to their grief. Mr. Tizon flew to the tiny town to write a lengthy magazine piece for The Atlantic on the family’s struggles and the broader phenomenon of why so many people vanish in that state.
Those who worked with Mr. Tizon said the story was emblematic of his career — the way he spent so much time deeply reporting the piece, and the fact that he chose a topic that others in the media likely would have ignored.
“He had a real interest in marginal characters and people who had not been in the spotlight,” said his editor on The Atlantic piece, Denise Wills. “He almost became a member of the extended family for these people.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Tizon told the Harvard journalism program: “The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.”
Jacqui Banaszynski, a University of Missouri journalism professor who was Mr. Tizon’s editor for two years at The Seattle Times, echoed others who said his death was a loss to the journalism community. She recalled Mr. Tizon as “an almost philosopher essayist” in his approach, and that the paper would send him on stories that were complex and needed to be told at a deeper level than the standard news story...
I've watched O'Reilly now for years. When I first started watching him regularly, at least ten years ago, I was mindful of the stereotypes, from critics both right and left: You know, how he's a blowhard, and not really conservative, and all that.
That's all true, of course, But he's a patriot who works hard. He loves the country and he models our values, especially individualism and fairness. I suspect he actually has sexually harassed women at some point. He's an old school kind of a guy, and some of the old school brusque "locker room" kind of banter and being is bound to slip out once in a while. He's wealthy, though, so million dollar payouts here and there, without conceding allegations, just make problems go away.
About $13 million has been paid out over the years to address complaints from women about Mr. O’Reilly’s behavior. He denies the claims have merit.
For nearly two decades, Bill O’Reilly has been Fox News’s top asset, building the No. 1 program in cable news for a network that has pulled in billions of dollars in revenues for its parent company, 21st Century Fox.
Behind the scenes, the company has repeatedly stood by Mr. O’Reilly as he faced a series of allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior.
An investigation by The New York Times has found a total of five women who have received payouts from either Mr. O’Reilly or the company in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations against him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.
Two settlements came after the network’s former chairman, Roger Ailes, was dismissed last summer in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, when the company said it did not tolerate behavior that “disrespects women or contributes to an uncomfortable work environment.”
The women who made allegations against Mr. O’Reilly either worked for him or appeared on his show. They have complained about a wide range of behavior, including verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating, according to documents and interviews.
The reporting suggests a pattern: As an influential figure in the newsroom, Mr. O’Reilly would create a bond with some women by offering advice and promising to help them professionally. He then would pursue sexual relationships with them, causing some to fear that if they rebuffed him, their careers would stall.
Of the five settlements, two were previously known — one for about $9 million in 2004 with a producer, and another struck last year with a former on-air personality, which The Times reported on in January. The Times has learned new details related to those cases...
That "on-air personality" is Juliet Huddy, who's no longer with the network.
I gave up on Boot last year, when he published his notorious screed at the L.A. Times, about changing his party registration after Donald Trump won the GOP nomination.
He still blogs at Commentary as well, which is one reason I don't read the magazine as much as I used to. (That, and Noah Rothman, who I like, turned into some kind of angry, middle-aged, and very unpleasant curmudgeon.)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States launched more airstrikes in Yemen this month than during all of last year. In Syria, it has airlifted local forces to front-line positions and has been accused of killing civilians in airstrikes. In Iraq, American troops and aircraft are central in supporting an urban offensive in Mosul, where airstrikes killed scores of people on March 17.
Two months after the inauguration of President Trump, indications are mounting that the United States military is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames.
Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama. On display are some of the first indications of how complicated military operations are continuing under a president who has vowed to make the military “fight to win.”
In an interview on Wednesday, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the commander of United States Central Command, said the new procedures made it easier for commanders in the field to call in airstrikes without waiting for permission from more senior officers.
“We recognized the nature of the fight was going to change and that we had to ensure that authorities were down to the right level and that we empowered the on-scene commander,” General Votel said. He was speaking specifically about discussions that he said began in November about how the fights in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State were reaching critical phases in Mosul and Raqqa.
Concerns about the recent accusations of civilian casualties are bringing some of these details to light. But some of the shifts have also involved small increases in the deployment and use of American forces or, in Yemen, resuming aid to allies that had previously been suspended.
And they coincide with the settling in of a president who has vowed to intensify the fight against extremists abroad, and whose budgetary and rhetorical priorities have indicated a military-first approach even as he has proposed cuts in diplomatic spending...
The massive recent civilian causalities are extremely regrettable, and totally unacceptable. Otherwise, I'm really liking the growing footprint.
And interestingly, articles like this one, as true and tragic as they are, tend to perpetuate Native American stereotypes. Devon Mihesuah's work attempts to dispel such stereotypes, while others have argued that the reservation experience is the template for understanding the structural epistemology of American Indians.
WHITECLAY, Neb. — This town is a rural skid row, with only a dozen residents, a street strewn with debris, four ramshackle liquor stores and little else. It seems to exist only to sell beer to people like Tyrell Ringing Shield, a grandmother with silver streaks in her hair.
On a recent morning, she had hitched a ride from her home in South Dakota, just steps across the state line. There, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, alcohol is forbidden. In Whiteclay, though, it reigns supreme.
“You visit, you talk, you laugh, you drink,” said Ms. Ringing Shield, 57, as she stood on the sidewalk with friends, chain-smoked Montclair cigarettes and recounted her struggles with alcoholism, diabetes and cirrhosis. “It makes you forget.”
Now many residents of Nebraska and South Dakota are pushing for the liquor stores of Whiteclay to be shut, disgusted by the easy access to alcohol the stores provide to a people who have fought addiction for generations. The Nebraska authorities, in turn, have tightened scrutiny of the stores, which sell millions of cans of beer and malt liquor annually. Last year, for the first time, the state liquor commission ordered the stores’ six owners to reapply for their liquor licenses.
The fate of the stores could be decided next month, when the three-member commission holds hearings in Lincoln, the state capital.
The issue has left people in South Dakota and Nebraska deeply divided. Most agree that alcohol abuse on the reservation is an entrenched problem, but they are unsure of the solution — and who is responsible.
The grim scene in Whiteclay has scarcely changed for decades. Particularly in the warmer months, Native Americans can be seen openly drinking beer in town, often passed out on the ground, disheveled and ill. Many who come to Whiteclay from the reservation spend the night sleeping on mattresses in vacant lots or fields.
Even under the chill of winter, people huddle outside the liquor stores, silver beer cans poking from coat pockets. The street, busy with traffic from customers, is littered with empty bottles and scraps of discarded clothing.
“It promotes so much misery, that little town,” said Andrea Two Bulls, 56, a Native American on Pine Ridge, who added that she hoped the state would revoke the licenses. “My brother used to go to Whiteclay all the time, and we’d have to go look for him. People sit and drink until they pass out. They just succumb.”
Over the decades, there have been frequent protests outside the stores. Lawsuits against the retailers and beer distributors have been filed. Boycotts of brewers that sell to the stores have begun with enthusiasm. All those efforts have sputtered, though, and little has changed...
Here's another faux racist incident, featuring another far-left nutjob, Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles.
Apparently O'Reilly's apologized, but he shouldn't have had to. It's not racist to make a funny remark about someone's wig. And it is a "James Brown wig." He's absolutely right.
This is leftist thought control at its finest (or worst, depending on your perspective).
This book even debunks some of the false memes radical Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz spews, for example, that epidemic disease was secondary, if not tertiary (or so on), to genocide in the conquest of American Indians.
The formal two-year process governing Britain's departure from the European Union began in earnest Wednesday as a letter was delivered to the president of the European Council giving official notice that the country wishes to withdraw from the political and economic confederation.
The letter, signed by Prime Minister Theresa May and several pages long, will fundamentally shape the future of Britain and Europe for generations to come.
The letter was handed over by Sir Tim Barrow, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, and European Council President Donald Tusk released a brief statement on Twitter acknowledging receipt.
At a news conference in Brussels, Tusk appeared somber and said: "This is about damage control."
"Our goal is clear," he said. "To minimize the cost for the EU citizens, businesses and member states."
The move comes after the British public voted 52% to 48% last June, following a bruising referendum campaign, to leave the 28-member bloc after more than four decades.
During a statement to lawmakers in the House of Commons minutes after the letter was delivered, May said this was a "historic moment from which there can be no turning back."
She struck a conciliatory tone and pledged to “get the right deal for every single person in this country." She also implored all sections of society, regardless of how they voted, to use this moment to unite.
"We can, together, make a success of this moment and we can, together, build a stronger, fairer, better Britain — a Britain that our children and grandchildren are proud to call home," she said...
Porn stars like Naomi Woods and Kate England are never exactly fit like regular models. There's some element of shying away from the crowded clubs. Also, tremendous self-loathing. You only wished dad wished you were a boy. These ladies are trying their damnedest to fit in. Maybe cut back on the ass in air poses. You're going to ruin romantic vacations for tons of men whose wives started staring at them funny...
Did the song give you déjà vu? It should: It starts out with the classic “Johnny B. Goode” guitar riff, bringing this latest release full circle.
Chuck is Chuck Berry’s first album in 38 years, so it comes highly anticipated, to say the least. It was initially announced last October, so fans only have a few more months to go before hearing some of Berry’s final works—which is sure to be a celebration of the late rocker’s life.
And his family agrees, sharing, “While our hearts are very heavy at this time, we know that Chuck had no greater wish than to see this album released to the world, and we know of no better way to celebrate and remember his 90 years of life than through his music.”
An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle—a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.
The modest life, the life of home and family, living in security and comfort, would be the "mediocre" life for me. I'm almost at that place in my life. And I see it down the tunnel each day, as I get closer. (I've got to get my kids set up, to where they feel happy and comfortable, before my "mediocre" life comes closer into view.)
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Thank you for shopping through my links.