They Can't All Be 'Extremists'

I've got my Twitter page set to private, because folks at my college often scour my social media posts for objectionable posts, or "wrongthink," in Orwellian terms. 

The LAT article at the photo below is here, "Recall Newsom effort has ties to far-right movements, including QAnon and virus skeptics."

And here's the comments and photo I posted to Twitter a little while ago:

The recall signature petition has garnered well over 1 million signatures across the state thus far. These citizens can’t, by definition, all be “extremists,” but LAT goes with this above-the-fold headline anyway. MSM-Leftist-Dem collusion much? Pfft.

 

Arizona Republican Party Censures Doug Ducey, Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain; Narrowly Reelects Kelli Ward as State Party Chairwoman (VIDEO)

The video report at ABC News 15 Phoenix is from yesterday.

And see the Arizona Republic this morning, via Memeorandum, "Ariz. GOP censures Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake, Doug Ducey; narrowly reelects Kelli Ward":

Kelli Ward, the fractious leader of the Arizona Republican Party, narrowly beat back significant competition on Saturday to win another two-year term as the organization's chairwoman despite the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

The closely watched result offers an early, state-level indication that Trump retains sway over the activist base of the GOP, though it is more tenuous. The election also suggests the longstanding divisions in the state party in the Trump era have not abated.

Ward’s reelection was considered a foregone conclusion weeks ago, but many in the GOP had misgivings about the party’s past electoral performance on her watch and an uncertain future heading into the 2022 midterm elections.

The party members later passed three resolutions censuring high-profile Republicans: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain. It was another sign of the party's move to the right...

 

Baseball Legend Hank Aaron Has Died

I was just a kid, and Willie Mays was my favorite at the time (after leaving the S.F. Giants, he had just one more year or so with the N.Y. Mets before retiring), so I can't say I'm a "Henry Aaron" fanatic. I also wasn't watching that day, at Dodger Stadium, when he hit #715.

But Aaron's story is absolutely phenomenal and historic. Just reading his obit, I've been literally shaking my head at what the man dealt with in his life and career.

In any case, here's his NYT obituary (I know, I know, but FWIW), "Hank Aaron, Home Run King Who Defied Racism, Dies at 86":

Hank Aaron, who faced down racism as he eclipsed Babe Ruth as baseball’s home run king, hitting 755 homers and holding the most celebrated record in sports for more than 30 years, has died. He was 86.

The Atlanta Braves, his team for many years, confirmed the death on Friday in a message from its chairman, Terry McGuirk. No other details were provided.

Playing for 23 seasons, all but his final two years with the Braves in Milwaukee and then Atlanta, Aaron was among the greatest all-around players in baseball history and one of the last major league stars to have played in the Negro leagues.

But his pursuit of Ruth’s record of 714 home runs proved a deeply troubling affair beyond the pressures of the ball field. When he hit his 715th home run, on the evening of April 8, 1974, against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, he prevailed in the face of hate mail and even death threats spewing outrage that a Black man could supplant a white baseball icon.

Aaron was routinely brilliant, performing with seemingly effortless grace, but he had little flash, notwithstanding his nickname in the sports pages, Hammerin’ Hank. He long felt that he had not been accorded the recognition he deserved.

He played for teams far beyond the news media centers of New York and the West Coast, and his Braves won only two pennants and a single World Series championship, those coming long before he approached Ruth’s record.

Aaron did not enjoy the idolatry accorded the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle or match the exuberance and electric presence of the Giants’ Willie Mays, his outfield contemporaries and rivals for acclamation as the greatest ballplayer in major league history.

But when he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, his first year of eligibility, Aaron received 97.8 percent of the vote from baseball writers, second at the time only to Ty Cobb, who was inducted in 1936.

Aaron grew up in Alabama amid rigid segregation and its humiliations, and he faced abuse from the stands while playing in the South as a minor leaguer. Years later, he felt that Braves fans were largely indifferent or hostile to him as he chased Ruth’s record. And the baseball commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn, was not present when he hit his historic 715th home run.

All that, and especially the hate mail that besieged him, seared Aaron for years to come.

As the 20th anniversary of his home run feat approached in the early 1990s, he told the sports columnist William C. Rhoden of The New York Times, “April 8, 1974, really led up to turning me off on baseball.”

“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about,” he said. “My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.”

Aaron’s achievements went well beyond his home run prowess. In fact, he never hit as many as 50 homers in a single season.

He was a two-time National League batting champion and had a career batting average of .305. He was the league’s most valuable player in 1957, when the Milwaukee Braves won their only World Series championship. He was voted an All-Star in all but his first and last seasons, and he won three Gold Glove awards for his play in right field.

Aaron combined with the Hall of Fame third baseman Eddie Mathews for 863 home runs during their 13 years together on the Braves, the most ever for two teammates.

Aaron remains No. 1 in the major leagues in total bases (6,856) and runs batted in (2,297); No. 2 in at-bats (12,364), behind Pete Rose; and No. 3 in hits (3,771), behind Rose and Cobb. He won the National League’s single-season home run title four times, though his highest total was only 47, in 1971. Matching his jersey number, he hit exactly 44 home runs in four different seasons.

At six feet tall and 180 pounds, Aaron was hardly the picture of a slugger, but he had thick, powerful wrists, enabling him to whip the bat out of his right-handed stance with uncommon speed.

“He had great forearms and wrists,” Lew Burdette, the outstanding Braves pitcher, recalled in Danny Peary’s oral history “We Played the Game” (1994). “He could be fooled completely and be way out on his front foot, and the bat would still be back, and he’d just roll his wrists and hit the ball out of the ballpark.”

Aaron was quick on the bases and in the outfield...

More at the link.

A Last Look at a Remarkable Presidency

At Issues & Insights, "Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs":

President Donald Trump became an ex-president on Wednesday, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. We wish him nothing but the best. But before we let Trump go, we thought we’d review some of his biggest accomplishments while in office. We call them “triumphs,” because they were all big achievements executed against great odds.

More than any other president of recent memory, Trump fought hard for average working Americans. And contrary to the epithets thrown at him by his far-left detractors in the Democratic Party, his policies helped low-income and minority Americans most of all.

We believe – we hope – that Trump’s post-presidential career and reputation will resemble President Ronald Reagan’s. For those old enough to remember, Reagan also was called every vile name in the book, from “senile” to “fascist” and everything between. Yet, today, in retrospect, his presidency shines as a beacon in our nation’s history.

Given the at-times unhinged nature of the criticism directed at Trump’s presidency by the left and Republican “never-Trumpers,” Trump’s performance in just four years was nothing short of remarkable. He promulgated dozens, if not hundreds, of successful policies that other presidents talked about, but never secured.

He reached so many we can’t highlight all of them. But here are 10 that we believe stand out — and that future presidents (are you listening, Joe Biden?) would be foolish to reverse or overturn:

1. Slashed taxes on individuals and businesses. As an earlier administration said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” As much as anything, Trump’s growth-boosting $1.9 trillion in tax cuts and doubling of the child tax credit led to the bottom-up growth of our economy, as unemployment rates plunged for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and women, and poverty rates plummeted to an all-time low in 2019, before COVID-19 struck. The bottom 20% of incomes posted a 16%-plus rise, the largest ever for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.Yes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley moguls made out well as stocks boomed. But so did average Americans, especially the middle class. More than half of all Americans now own stock, a fact that’s lost on those who curse the stock market and “tax cuts for the rich.” By the way, the top income earners were the only group to pay more to Uncle Sam under the Trump tax cuts. And income inequality under Trump fell, after rising during Obama’s eight years in office.

2. Forged peace in the Mideast. The big media have tried to pretend that Trump’s unorthodox but astoundingly successful peace deals don’t exist. But it’s no accident that Trump has already been nominated — twice — for the Nobel Peace Prize. He deserves it. This year, thanks almost entirely to Trump’s efforts under the “Abraham Accords,” Israel has normalized diplomatic ties with four Arab League members: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco. Jordan and Egypt already have ties. Terrorist sponsor Iran, meanwhile, has never been more isolated and on the defensive than it is now, thanks to Trump’s pulling out of President Barack Obama’s phony “nuclear deal” with Tehran’s mullahs. And while the terrorist group ISIS still exists, it has effectively been neutered, a shell of its former self, pushed out of nearly all its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

3. Created Operation Warp Speed. The Chinese virus hit the U.S. hard. It’s now clear that China’s communist regime downplayed the deadly virus outbreak early, leading to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus that official data show has killed 400,000 Americans. Trump was ridiculed and berated for daring to think he could push the creation of a new, effective vaccine within the remaining months of his term. Yet, as Bloomberg noted on Wednesday, “Vaccinations in the U.S. began Dec. 14 with health care workers, and so far 16.3 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally … In the last week, an average of 806,716 doses per day were administered.” The vaccine critics were dead wrong, and Trump’s push may well end up saving hundreds of thousands of lives in coming years.

4. Deregulated the nation’s economy. It’s not sexy. But Trump promised to cut two regulations for every new one proposed. He beat even that estimate, cutting eight regulations for every one added. If you think that doesn’t matter, consider this: Regulations currently cost the economy nearly $2 trillion a year, or about $14,000 a year for every U.S. household. Trump’s rule-cutting saved the average American household an average of $3,100 a year.

5. Got rid of Obamacare’s “individual mandate”. By far the most odious element of Obama’s first step toward socialized medicine was its requirement that all Americans must buy health insurance. For the first time ever, the U.S. government forced its citizens to purchase something, whether they wanted it or not. This part of the 2010 bill was clearly unconstitutional, as a federal appeals court ruled late last year. Americans are, for now, safe from being forced to buy insurance policies they don’t want. At least, that is, until the new Democratic administration begins its push for Medicare for All, or some other nationalized health care scheme.

6. Restored Supreme Court balance. By naming three new justices, Trump assured Americans that the court’s days of rulings based on politics and ideology, not the Constitution, are over. At least for the foreseeable future. Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, are all strong constitutionalists who have sterling reputations for fairness and non-political legal decision making. “A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers,” Barrett said during her nomination hearings in the Senate, a fitting description for all Trump’s choices. That includes the more than 230 judges he appointed to the federal bench.

7. Forced NATO to reform. Trump pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense, part of a 2014 deal that came after years of NATO countries shirking their duty to pull their own weight in the military alliance. In Trump’s first year in office, just four of the 30 NATO members met the 2% floor. Today, 10 do, and more will increase spending by $400 billion by 2024. By demanding NATO to keep its promises, Trump likely saved the West’s main military alliance.

8. Encouraged U.S. energy independence. By encouraging fracking and approving the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump set off an energy boom. And he did something that no one thought possible just four years ago: He made the U.S. energy independent for the first time in 70 years, meaning we would no longer be held hostage to unstable petro-powers and the vagaries of foreign energy supplies. Fracking enabled the U.S. to boost its output of natural gas, with many major utilities now using the cheap, clean source of energy instead of coal and other major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. The result: the U.S. is one of the only major countries whose CO2 emissions are plunging, with output now at the lowest levels since 1985.

9. Reformed immigration and built the border wall. Despite being called a “racist” and “fascist” and “anti-immigrant,” Trump has now built more than 450 miles of wall to restore control of our nation’s borders against illegal entrants into the U.S., including gang members, smugglers and drug dealers. As journalist Deroy Murdock recently noted, “federal apprehensions and encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border have plunged from 977,509 in fiscal year 2019 to 458,088 in fiscal year 2020 — down 53.1%.” A blow to Mexico? Not according to a recent Reuters headline: “Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says Trump helped Mexico.“

10. Withdrew from the Paris Climate Deal. The U.S. is the only major country actually living up to the Paris Climate Accords’ steep cuts in CO2 emissions. But the deal is still a bad one, since it commits the U.S. and other major industrial nations to shrink their economies over the long run to meet arbitrary CO2 limits in the future. Meanwhile, fast-growing countries such as China and India have few binding requirements on their emissions. The result: Those two countries, with more than a third of the world’s population, continue to spew CO2. This year China’s coal use surged above 2015 levels, “undercutting climate pledges,” according to a news report out this week. Biden’s plan to rejoin the Paris deal will only bolster China and hamstring the U.S. going forward. It’s a climate-based “America last” policy...

Still more.

 

Tucker Carlson: Democrats Are Demonizing Half the Country (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Biden's Inauguration Brings Back 'American Carnage'!"

Here's Tucker's opening from last night --- the man is on fire!

Salma Hayek Flaunting

 At Celeb Jihad, "Salma Hayek Flaunts Her Gigantic Stuff."

Biden's Inauguration Brings Back 'American Carnage'!

It's Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "Hail to the Thief":

Democrats celebrate a “victory for democracy” with barbed wire, soldiers, and political terror.

On a cold, windy day with a small group of spectators watching from behind barbed wire, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. swore another in a long series of false oaths before his motorcade passed between a long row of soldiers with their backs to him looking outward for threats.

No inauguration has been this empty in a century of American history. And at no inauguration have the spectators been outnumbered by a raw display of armed force. American presidents have been inaugurated in wartime and during actual national emergencies with a better turnout.

Through world wars and wars on terror, Washington D.C. has remained a national capital where the hundreds of millions of taxpayers who labor to pay for its grand edifices, free museums, and lavish lifestyles could briefly come to enjoy a little of the life lived by the ruling class in the Imperial City. Now the ruling class has made it clear that it doesn’t want peasants entering D.C.

Even as Biden’s team prepped the executive orders that would end the national emergency at the border and shut down construction of the wall, new walls topped by razor wire were rising across the imperial city. The new Fortress of Government sealed off two miles of the National Mall and parts of downtown D.C. and filled it with more soldiers than are deployed in Iraq.

The Secret Service designated green and red zones. Some 25,000 National Guard members were dispatched from Vermont, Maine, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Colorado to prepare for a fake invasion that never came. But the armored vehicles and heavy weaponry did come. President Trump had wanted a military parade that would show America’s strength to the world. Biden held his own military parade to intimidate his fellow Americans.

Democrats had deployed more soldiers in D.C. than they had in Iraq and Afghanistan while authorizing them to use lethal force and investigating their politics before the deployment. The radical leftists who had resisted using the military to fight terrorism or secure the border from invasion were eager to deploy the military against the people of the United States of America.

The handfuls of ordinary people who arrived, as Americans always do, to attend the inauguration of a new president were confronted with heavy weapons and barbed wire.

D.C. had become a Baghdad and Berlin of checkpoints, choking off access to much of the city, closing roads, bridges, and metro stations. Soldiers could be seen on every corner, and the 25,000 troops were bolstered by 4,000 Marshalls, and a motley crew of local forces, including 200 members of the NYPD, 40 members of the Chicago police, New Jersey and Maryland state troopers, Miami-Dade cops, and other law enforcement officers who were needed back home.

24 people were shot in Chicago this weekend and murders are already up 125% this year in New York City. Those officers could have done more good at home, but Democrats don’t care about murder victims in urban areas, instead redeploying officers to D.C. in a show of force.

Biden took office in a city under military occupation whose businesses were closed and boarded up. The D.C. government had tried to force hotels to shut down. The hotels didn’t close, but there were hardly any people. Instead the hotels were filled with soldiers tramping through their lobbies. Any tourists that did come found nothing to see except barricades and barbed wire.

Sometimes what you don’t see is more important than what you do see.

Filling D.C. with soldiers meant that no one was going to measure Biden’s crowds. The only crowds were heavily armed and had been ordered to come. The complete lack of enthusiasm for the new one-party state that was getting its Mussolini on was the dog that didn’t bark.

Questioning Biden’s election has been deemed to be incitement. It’s enough to get you censored, deplatformed, and fired by the companies standing behind him. The election challenges have been used as the pretext for a military occupation of Washington D.C. But the cloud of a disputed election, like the winter clouds overhead, still hung over the inauguration.

There were no crowds, just soldiers. After the military and police contingent, the second largest group there for the inauguration weren’t Biden’s civilian supporters, but his propagandists. With few people, the media had to work twice as hard to manufacture the illusion that this was a popular leader taking office instead of a usurper imposed by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the rest of the political, cultural, and economic oligarchy which owns the media on America.

CNN, a subsidiary of AT&T, had already gushed about, "Joe Biden's arms embracing America". MSNBC, a subsidiary of Comcast, compared Biden to God. "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." The only wounds being bound up were those of the ruling class which had temporarily lost electoral power to an army of flyover country workers and peasants, only to reclaim it with sedition, wiretapping, abuse of power, billions of dollars, and soldiers in the street.

Popular leaders, elected or unelected, might have troops in their cities, but they also have adoring crowds to cheer them on. Biden’s only cheers were coming from employees of huge corporations whose jobs depend on praising him as the greatest thing since SuperPACs.

Biden couldn’t manage the cheering crowds that greeted even the most mediocre presidents on their arrival. The band might as well have struck up a rousing chorus of, “Hail to the Thief.”

Jokes like that are all but illegal these days even though they were ubiquitous during the Bush and Trump administrations. But jokes only need to be banned when they’re too close to the truth. The hysterical fascist theater with troops in the streets and fawning praise on the lips of the press are all efforts to overcompensate for the hollow man taking a false oath on a bible.

This isn’t the pageantry of Stalin or Hitler. It’s the weary theater of Brezhnev, a senescent leader of a decaying regime being propped up by desperate threats of force by the nomenklatura. Even though the media has told us more about Biden’s dogs than it has about any of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists enabled by the open borders that Biden just reinstated, no one cares.

Biden isn’t a charismatic leader. He isn’t moving the cause forward. He’s a placeholder for a ruling class that wants homes in Dupont Circle that it buys by selling out America to China, by ruining our economy with environmental consulting gigs and racial contract quotas, and for all the manifold ways which the swamp is coming back as Biden’s wetlands restoration project.

“Hail to the Thief” is as much their anthem as it is Biden’s. They fought to keep hold of D.C., the center of their power base not because they care about its history or that of this country, but because it’s where they network, collaborate, and do their dirty little deals at our expense.

The troops in the street are their warning to the rest of the country about who is really in charge.

And it isn’t Joe Jr, who, along with his criminal family, will be allowed to dip their beaks in cash and cocaine until they’re sopping wet, along with every aide, staffer, and associate. Biden will be fawned over, his idiot wife will be dubbed a doctor, and the investigations involving his son and brother will be swiftly dropped. And when the time is right, Kamala Harris will step into his place.

When the Soviet Union was entering its last days, one leader quickly made way for another. The parade of old Communist hacks in their dotage became a procession of political funerals. Generations after the revolution and the purges, the only thing anyone in Moscow believed in was the power and decadence of the ruling class. That and the threat America posed to them.

These are still the only three things that Washington D.C.’s ruling class believes in anymore.

Democrats and their media claim that this charade is a “victory for democracy”.

"We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated," Amanda Gorman, the Harvard youth poetess, sonorously recited her tin-eared Maoist verses at the inauguration.

But where is this democracy? Where are the adoring crowds, the joyous mobs celebrating and the people cheering the tremendous victory of the democracy of Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast and their D.C. lobbyists and associates over the Rust Belt and the flyovers

Biden and the Democrats celebrated their democratic victory with barbed wire, troops in the streets, political terror, and the threat of even more political repression to come.

"There is a broader societal issue that is going to take years to detox the disinformation," Ben Rhodes, the Obama adviser who had boasted of creating a media echo chamber, ranted on Comcast's MSNBC. On that same state TV news network, John Brennan warned that "because of this growth of polarization in the United States" members of the Biden team would be "moving in laser-like fashion" to "root out an insidious threat to our democracy".

Democracy is in a state of permanent emergency that requires locking down D.C., filling it with soldiers, walls, and barbed wire, and investigating political crimes. And D.C. will do everything it can to end the threat that Americans pose to democracy even if its ruling class has to live in its green zone surrounded by troops and barbed wire until democracy is saved from Americans...

Still more.

 

Biden Invokes Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels to Condemn Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley as 'Part of the Big Lie' of the 'Far-Right's' Election Fraud Conspiracies (VIDEO)

Following-up from previously, "Goebbels and the New American Terror."

At Mediate:

President-elect Joe Biden specifically called out pro-Trump Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Josh Hawley (MO) for being “part of the big lie” that is Donald Trump’s disinformation campaign to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election, invoking the propaganda tactics of Nazi Joseph Goebbels in his answer.

During a press conference on Friday afternoon, Biden was asked about Cruz and Hawley, who were on the forefront of pushing alleged concerns about widespread election fraud, of which there is no evidence to support. Both senators also joined in the effort to object to the Electoral College results certifying Biden’s victory. That political stunt was interrupted when violent, pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, resulting in five deaths, including one Capitol Police officer...

Still more. 

And at the video, scroll ahead to about 3:10 minutes for the Goebbels smear. And this is the "unity" the President-Elect is going with, pfft. They're all liars, the whole lot of America's internal enemies, the Leftist-Democrat-Big Tech Party:

Gavin Newsom's Botched Coronavirus Updates, Going from Bad to Worse

You know, the Newsom opponents' recall campaign now has well over 1 million signatures, and Democrats are freakin' scared, resorting to allegations that the recall drive is a white nationalist "coup" to "overturn" democracy in California. 

Seriously? 

The initiative, referendum, and recall mechanisms are all right there in the California state constitution. Er, Sacramento, we have a problem.

At LAT, "Newsom’s COVID-19 briefings often leave more questions than answers, some officials say":

SACRAMENTO — In his last news briefing of 2020, one of more than 100 held since the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in March, Gov. Gavin Newsom looked seriously into the camera and assured Californians that public schools could reopen as soon as February.

The pressure to return to in-classroom learning had been intensifying for months, and Newsom’s “California Safe School for All” plan was an attempt to temper growing discontent.

It didn’t work. Superintendents in seven of California’s largest school districts said Newsom failed to address the needs of big-city schoolchildren and called his policy “confused.” The state’s largest teachers’ union said it left “many unanswered questions.” The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office, which evaluates proposals for state lawmakers, said the governor’s proposal was “likely unfeasible.”

Once a reassuring elixir to millions of Californians facing the harrowing unknowns of a contagious, deadly virus, Newsom’s briefings — streamed on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and covered extensively by California news outlets — appear to have lost the impact they commanded in the spring.

Part of that can be blamed on natural fatigue after being imprisoned by a pandemic for 10 months, making people more likely to tune out.

“The public has gotten tired of hearing about the coronavirus, and so I think messaging has gotten increasingly difficult because people have stopped listening. Instead of talking more, you have to really sharpen your message to one or two things that people need to understand,” said Jennifer Kent, who was appointed director of the state Department of Health Care Services during the administration of former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 before resigning last year.

Newsom himself may share much of the blame. The governor, who had already come to embody the left in this polarized nation, used the briefings to cement himself as the sole voice of the state’s response — inflaming the politicization of the pandemic, while at the same time boosting his name recognition in California and beyond its borders...

 More at that top link, FWIW. 

Rashida Jones Leaked

NSFW.

At Celeb Jihad, "Rashida Jones Uncovered."

BONUS: "Rashida Jones Leaked!" 

Eugene Robinson and Nikole Hannah-Jones on MSNBC: We Must 'Deprogram' 74 Million Trump-Supporting 'White Nationalists' (VIDEO)

Watch at the Washington Examiner, "Washington Post columnist says that white Trump supporters need to be 'deprogrammed'." 

It's not just Robinson. Nikole Hannah-Jones, of "1619 Project" infamy, is also quoted at the piece:

“I know we can look to history,” Hannah-Jones said. “What ultimately breaks that power structure in the South is enforcement, right? There has to be consequences. And then once you get those consequences … people have to take a second look at their actions.”

Hannah-Jones said that people become too focused on reconciling their differences after bitter events, which only “emboldens” the type of people who participate in violence.

“What has long been the case in this country is that we have wanted to quickly move on to reconciliation,” Hannah-Jones said. “We’ve always been afraid that if you actually punish those kind of white nationalists element in our society will only make things worse. But, in fact, what history shows is not reacting, not forcing accountability, only emboldens those people and those movements.”

“What has long been the case in this country is that we have wanted to quickly move on to reconciliation,” Hannah-Jones said. “We’ve always been afraid that if you actually punish those kind of white nationalists element in our society will only make things worse. But, in fact, what history shows is not reacting, not forcing accountability, only emboldens those people and those movements.”

BONUS: Here's a Sky News Australia video, which starts off with the insane Katie Couric whining about "How are we going to deprogram all these people for the cult of Trump."

I'm just loving all the "racial unity" leftist-Dems have promised since November. *Eye-roll.*

Police Command Structure Crumbled Fast During Capitol Riot

 You don't say?!!

At the Associated Press, via Memeorandum:

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, many of the police officers had to decide on their own how to fight them off. There was no direction. No plan. And no top leadership.

One cop ran from one side of the building to another, fighting hand-to-hand against rioters. Another decided to respond to any calls of officers in distress and spent three hours helping cops who had been immobilized by bear spray or other chemicals.

Three officers were able to handcuff one rioter. But a crowd swarmed the group and took the arrested man away with the handcuffs still on.

Interviews with four members of the U.S. Capitol Police who were overrun by rioters on Jan. 6 show just how quickly the command structure collapsed as throngs of people, egged on by President Donald Trump, set upon the Capitol. The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because the department has threatened to suspend anyone who speaks to the media.

“We were on our own,” one of the officers told The Associated Press. “Totally on our own.”

The officers who spoke to the AP said they were given next to no warning by leadership on the morning of Jan. 6 about what would become a growing force of thousands of rioters, many better armed than the officers themselves were. And once the riot began, they were given no instructions by the department’s leaders on how to stop the mob or rescue lawmakers who had barricaded themselves inside. There were only enough officers for a routine day.

Three officers told the AP they did not hear Chief Steven Sund on the radio the entire afternoon. It turned out he was sheltering with Vice President Mike Pence in a secure location for some of the siege. Sund resigned the next day.

His assistant chief, Yogananda Pittman, who is now interim chief, was heard over the radio telling the force to “lock the building down,” with no further instructions, two officers said.

One specific order came from Lt. Tarik Johnson, who told officers not to use deadly force outside the building as the rioters descended, the officers recounted. The order almost certainly prevented deaths and more chaos, but it meant officers didn’t pull their weapons and were fighting back with fists and batons.

Johnson has been suspended after being captured on video wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat while moving through crowds of rioters. Johnson told colleagues he wore the hat as a tactic to gain the crowd’s confidence as he tried to reach other officers who were pinned down by rioters, one of the officers said. A video of the incident obtained by the Wall Street Journal shows Johnson asking rioters for help in getting his colleagues.

Johnson, who could not be reached for comment, was heard by an officer on the radio repeatedly asking, “Does anybody have a plan?”

More at that top link.

 

Joe Biden's Call for Unity

Right!

At CNBC, "Biden calls for unity and healing after Electoral College certifies his victory."

Look at All the Democrats Who Boycotted Trump's Inauguration

Wow! 

If Democrats didn't have double-standards, they'd have no standards at all!

At Pajamas, "Political Amnesia: Look at All the Democrats Who Boycotted Trump's Inauguration."

Izabel Goulart on the Beach

 At Drunken Stepfather, "Izabel Goulart is Topless on the Beach of the Day..."

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross

At Amazon, David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

MLK Day 2021

A surprising headline at the Los Angeles Times, "Martin Luther King’s Promised Land may be closer than we think."

Plus, seen on Facebook earlier:

Regnery Picks Up Senator Josh Hawley's Book After Simon & Schuster 'Cancelled' It

Heh.

Free speech is like water running downhill. If a tree falls to block the flow, the stream just rolls up and over and keeps on going down.

At Yahoo News, "Hawley Book Picked Up by Regnery Publishing after Being Dropped by Simon and Schuster."

Crimony! End the Lockdowns So This Woman Can Go Out and Get Some Fun-In-The-Sun!

She's could use a tan, sheesh.

At Country Girls:

Hmm, 'Far-Right' Protesters Stayed Home on Sunday?

 That's not what we were told. 

The story's at NYT (FWIW), "After Capitols Become Fortresses, Far-Right Protesters Are Mostly a No-Show."

Also a screenshot of my post on Facebook yesterday: 

Molly Hemingway, Justice on Trial

Molly Hemingway, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.

James Wesley Rawles, Patriots

At Amazon, James Wesley Rawles, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse.

Kim Strassel, Resistance (At All Costs)

At Amazon, Kim Strassel, Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.

Michigan Congressman Peter Meijer Buys 'Body Armor', Claims 'Someone May Try to kill Us' Ahead of Joe Biden's Inauguration (VIDEO)

The guy's prolly a "Never-Trumper" nutjob, sheesh.

At the Detroit Free Press, "Rep. Meijer says legislators buying body armor as precaution: 'Someone may try to kill us'."

Watch on Twitter (since YouTube shoved this clip down the memory hole), "Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), who voted to impeach Trump, says he and other lawmakers believe their lives are in danger following yesterday’s impeachment."

Ravens Fan Amber Athey is Not Pleased

On Twitter, "I'm upset. No one talk to me."

(On the other hand, pro golfer Paige Spiranac is "1-0 as a Bills fan," and the Bills themselves aren't holding back on the celebratory trolling lol.)

Lincoln Project's John Weaver Comes Out as Gay! Who Knew, LOL?!!

Heh. 

Following-up, "Lincoln Project Co-Founder John Weaver Accused of 'Grooming' Young Men, Offering Jobs for Sex."

At the Other McCain, "John Weaver: ‘The Truth Is I’m Gay’":

Sunday, I blogged about the accusation that John Weaver, the former top campaign aide to John McCain and co-founder of the anti-Trump “Lincoln Project,” had been sexually harassing young men. Now he has been forced out of the Lincoln Project:

Lincoln Project cofounder John Weaver is no longer affiliated with the Democratic Super PAC after admitting — in the classic tradition of the Friday evening news dump — to having “inappropriate” sexual conversations with young men.

“The truth is that I’m gay,” Weaver told former Washington Free Beacon journalist Lachlan Markay in a prewritten statement. “And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place.”

Weaver reportedly took a medical leave of absence from the Lincoln Project over the summer, and will not be returning to the controversial Super PAC.

Over the past few days, dozens of young men have come forward with accusations that Weaver engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct, including text messages and phone conversations, as well as “grooming” them by promising lucrative career opportunities in exchange for sex. The allegations were broght to light through the reporting of journalists Ryan Girdusky and Scott Stedman.

Weaver admitted to making the young men “uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations,” which included at least one instance in which Weaver allegedly emailed an unsolicited photo of his penis. However, he appeared to suggest the men accusing him of grooming them, or offering favors in exchange for sex, are lying, perhaps for nefarious reasons.

“While I am taking full responsibility for the inappropriate messages and conversations,” Weaver wrote in the statement, “I want to state clearly that the other smears being leveled at me … are categorically false and outrageous.” The emergence of the allegations, Weaver suggested, was facilitated by political critics of the Lincoln Project.

Wait — “dozens of young men”? This implies a number in the 25-30 range, at least. Your homosexuality is not really secret, if you’re engaged in such large-scale solicitation...

Maybe they're all homos at the Lincoln Project,  NTTAWWT!

Still more at the Other McCain.

Eat it! Eat It! No One Can Be Defeated, LOL!

At Instapundit, "ONE YEAR AGO":

Folks Can't Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough

Yeah, and it's bad all over this once-Golden State.

At NYT, "They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough":

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area struck a hard bargain with its tech workers.

Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn’t like you. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook. Or if your office was in the city, maybe it was in a neighborhood with too much street crime, open drug use and $5 coffees.

But it was worth it. Living in the epicenter of a boom that was changing the world was what mattered. The city gave its workers a choice of interesting jobs and a chance at the brass ring.

That is, until the pandemic. Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easier. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events. But maybe they needed elbow room and a yard for the new puppy. A place to put the Peloton. A top public school.

They fled. They fled to tropical beach towns. They fled to more affordable places like Georgia. They fled to states without income taxes like Texas and Florida.

That’s where the story of the Bay Area’s latest tech era is ending for a growing crowd of tech workers and their companies. They have suddenly movable jobs and money in the bank — money that will go plenty further somewhere else.

But where? The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving. Some cities have even set up recruiting programs to lure them to new homes. Miami’s mayor has even been inviting tech people to move there in his Twitter posts.

I talked to more than two dozen tech executives and workers who have left San Francisco for other parts of the country over the last year, like a young entrepreneur who moved home to Georgia and another who has created a community in Puerto Rico. Here are some of their stories...

RTWT.

 

Kristen Clarke’s Disastrous Nomination to Head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division (VIDEO)

 From Joseph Klein, at FrontPage Magazine, "Biden’s Disastrous Pick to Head DOJ Civil Rights Division":

Senate must reject Kristen Clarke’s nomination.

Kristen Clarke, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, is a disastrous choice. Clarke has a long record of making racially charged-comments, going back to her time in college and continuing to this day. She also has spoken out in favor of anti-Semites. Back in college, Clarke led a student group that provided an anti-Semitic professor a platform to spew his vile remarks. Much more recently, Clarke supported an advocate of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. If Clarke’s name is not withdrawn from consideration, the Senate must reject her nomination.

Back in the day when Clarke served as the president of the Black Students Association (BSA) at Harvard, she co-authored a letter to the Harvard Crimson asserting that blacks are born with “superior physical and mental abilities.” It’s all due to the chemical melanin, Clarke claimed, which “endows [b]lacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities -- something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards." The Harvard Crimson editors at the time called for Clarke to resign her position at the BSA unless she was “prepared to retract her statements, and apologize publicly for making them.” The furthest that Clarke was willing to go at that time was stating that "The information [contained in the letter] is not necessarily something we believe.” [Emphasis added] There was no public retraction back then.

Clarke also invited the late Wellesley Professor of Africana Studies Anthony Martin to speak at a 1994 Black Students Association-sponsored event. Clarke’s guest used his time to slander Jews with the accusation that Jews had a “tradition” of persecuting blacks. "There was a Jewish monopoly over Blacks being cursed," Martin said during his address.

Clarke defended the choice of Martin to speak after receiving criticism from the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel. "Professor Martin is an intelligent, well-versed Black intellectual who bases his information on indisputable fact," Clarke said. The real indisputable fact is that Jews have put their lives on the line in the cause of the black civil rights movement. For example, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman served in 1964 as voting-registration volunteers in Meridian, Mississippi and were murdered by Klansmen.

Now that Clarke is craving for the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights position in the Biden administration, she wants a do-over. In a recent interview, Clarke said that she realizes it was a mistake to invite Martin to speak at Harvard. “Giving someone like him a platform, it’s not something I would do again,” Clarke said, adding that “I unequivocally denounce antisemitism.”

Clarke’s recantation comes way too late. If Democrats had an ounce of intellectual honesty, which they do not, Clarke’s invitation to an anti-Semitic professor to speak at Harvard when she was a student would be reason enough for them to “cancel” Clarke now. After all, Democrats in the Senate were willing to throw Trump nominees’ alleged behavior in college and high school back at them when their nominations were being considered. The worst case involved the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But there were others as well who were targeted by the cancel culture crowd.

In any case, we don’t even have to look back at Clarke’s college days to find proof of her support for radicals who espouse anti-Semitic views. In 2018, for example, Israel denied Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, entry to the country because of his organization’s support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Clarke tweeted, “Incredibly disturbed to hear that @VinceWarren was detained and denied entry into Israel on a trip that was carefully and thoughtfully planned out over the course of several months. #CivilRights Lawyers should not be penalized for their work to promote justice.”

As for the letter to the Harvard Crimson Clarke co-authored, claiming that blacks have “superior physical and mental abilities,” Clarke is now saying that it was all a misunderstanding. She claims that the letter was intended as a satirical response to the book The Bell Curve, which posited genetic differences between whites and blacks. Clarke wants us to believe that her letter’s references to melanin as the cause of black superiority “was meant to express an equally absurd point of view — fighting one ridiculous absurd racist theory with another ridiculous absurd theory.” That’s disinformation. At the time when the letter was written, Clarke said that she was uncertain whether the melanin theory of black superiority was true or not. There wasn’t a hint of sarcasm in the letter.

Putting aside her comments about melanin back in college, Clarke certainly shows no uncertainty today in embracing critical race theory, which posits that America is inherently racist. In her capacity as president and executive director of Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Clarke condemned the Trump administration’s decision to remove critical race theory from federal government training programs. "Our nation stands at an inflection point as communities are grappling with the ongoing threat of racism, white supremacy and police violence," Clarke said in a statement. "President Trump's latest federal directive is an attempt to discredit, condemn and silence important conversations happening in communities and workplaces about anti-racism and about our nation's history of white supremacy. By banning government support for these discussions, he sends a dangerous message to the country that racism is a fallacy."

Last year, Clarke denounced what she claims is “systemic racism that pervades every aspect of our lives, especially when it comes to policing and the operation of the criminal justice system of our country.” She supports defunding of the police. “I advocate for defunding policing operations that have made African Americans more vulnerable to police violence and contributed to mass incarceration, while investing more in programs and policies that address critical community needs,” she wrote last June for Newsweek. She called the concerns regarding the violence that broke out last year in the wake of the George Floyd killing a “distraction.”

Clearly, if Clarke were to become Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and have her way, she would push to put the police on trial all over the country. She would also force-feed critical race theory to all federal employees and beyond. She would support the BDS movement as a civil right.

 

The Senate's Coming Impeachment Fiasco

A great piece, from Byron York, "Byron York's Daily Memo":

Remember that the primary purpose of an impeachment trial is to remove the convicted official from office. Here is the description of impeachment from Article II of the Constitution: "The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." The Constitution gives the Senate "the sole power to try all impeachments" and says that "no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present." If the official is convicted, the punishment "shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States."

But the removal part will be off the table. The Senate trial will not begin until January 20 at the earliest, after President Trump leaves office. So Democrats propose to use impeachment to disqualify Trump from ever holding federal office again, which they say requires only a majority vote in the Senate. But the Constitution clearly requires a conviction before punishment, so two thirds of the Senate would have to convict former President Trump before he could be disqualified.

*****

There are two new polls on the impeachment question. An NBC survey shows the public narrowly divided on the issue, with 50 percent for and 48 percent against. An ABC-Washington Post poll shows a wider spread, with 56 for and 42 percent against. But both polls asked respondents whether they supported removing Trump from office without mentioning that in real life Trump will already be out of office when the impeachment verdict is rendered. This is just a guess, but it seems opinion might change when the public realizes that Democrats are using impeachment against a president who has already left office...

Still more.

And read those polls, especially the one from ABC News. Americans of all partisan persuasions repudiate the violence of the Capitol Hill riot, including 76 percent of Trump supporters.  

And as usual, don't forget all the caveats about media polling, perhaps the biggest one is that their samples are always biased toward the Democrats, and often questions are rigged (push-polling) to get the desired results of making Trump, Republicans, and conservatives look bad. 

]

Yellow Bikini Local

From Old Row Rad Chicks, "CSULB."

Evelyn Taft's Weather Scorching Forecast

 It's hot out here today. Just the other night we needed extra blankets when going to sleep.

Weird. 

Here's the fantastic Ms. Evelyn, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Goebbels and the New American Terror

Following-up from yesterday, "America's 'Reichstag Fire'."

See Caroline Glick:

What purpose did it serve for President-elect Joe Biden to liken Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Adolf Hitler’s top propagandist Joseph Goebbels?

In response to a question about the two Republican lawmakers following remarks on January 8, Biden said, “I was being reminded by a friend of mine…when we’re told [about] Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”

Although Biden’s comparison was imperfectly stated, it was clear enough to follow. He was saying that the lawmakers’ efforts to challenge the Electoral College votes from disputed states was a Nazi-like effort.

By speaking this way, Biden did many things at once. First, he whitewashed Goebbels’ barbaric crimes. Goebbels was the chief architect of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and one of the lead architects of the Holocaust.

In his literary warning about the fragility of freedom and the allure of totalitarianism, 1984, George Orwell demonstrated that total control over a society is achieved through total control over the information its members can see.

Goebbels implemented this in Nazi Germany. As Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels exerted total control over information. He ensured that Germans would view Hitler as their infallible savior. He conditioned them to view Jews as subhuman vermin, to be exterminated like cockroaches. And he made them believe that all Germans who didn’t accept what they were told were enemies of the people.

Goebbels achieved all of these things by blocking public access to accurate information while inundating the Germans with images and words that repeated and amplified his monstrous lies. Goebbels’ success in controlling information was the necessary precondition for all he and his comrades unleashed on Jews, and on humanity as a whole.

The second thing Biden did by comparing Hawley and Cruz to Goebbels was to whitewash the unspeakable crimes of Nazi Germany. After all, if merely questioning certain election returns is the moral equivalent of Goebbels’ “Big Lie,” then the Big Lie was actually no big deal.

The third thing Biden did by comparing Hawley and Cruz to Goebbels was set them up for what Orwell referred to as “un-personing”—or in today’s culture, “canceling.”

Obviously, if Cruz and Hawley are Goebbels, then all right-thinking people must work to silence them and remove them from positions of influence in the Senate and larger society.

As if on cue, shortly after Biden said what he did, Senate Democrats began debating whether to censure the lawmakers. Senate Republicans, for their part, began discussing the possibility of denying the two members cherished committee assignments. According to Senate officials, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is leaning toward denying the two their subcommittee chairmanships—thereby removing them from the line of seniority.

Outside the Senate chamber, major corporate donors also announced they will cease all political contributions to the two men, and to all 149 federal lawmakers who supported the efforts to challenge election returns from various states. Simon & Schuster canceled its contract to publish Hawley’s forthcoming book about the tyranny of Big Tech.

And this brings us to the fourth thing that Biden did by comparing the two senators to Hitler’s satanic propagandist. Whether one supports or opposes their decision to formally raise questions about the Electoral College vote count, the indisputable fact is that their actions were both legal and widely supported by their constituents. A Rasmussen poll released on January 6 found that 52 percent of politically unaffiliated Americans were less than fully confident about the integrity of the election results. The senators, and their colleagues in both houses who worked with them, noted that they had been flooded by requests from their constituents to question the returns from the states in question—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.

Cruz and Hawley incited no riots. To the contrary, they tried to channel the concerns of voters the American way—through constitutional, peaceful deliberations in Congress. Cruz, for his part, denounced the January 6 riot in real time, referring to it as “a despicable act of terrorism.”

By conflating the constitutional, democratic behavior of the senators and their colleagues with Goebbels’ crimes, Biden accomplished a fifth goal. He demonized as Nazis these officials’ voters who had urged them to act—and by extension, threw under the bus the shockingly high percentage of Americans who questioned the election returns.

Of course, Biden’s statement wasn’t made in isolation. He spoke after Twitter, Facebook and Instagram had banned Trump from their platforms and begun a purge of the accounts of his supporters—and as other major private sector actors openly called for the “un-personing” of Trump’s advisers and supporters.

Forbes Editor Randall Lane, for instance, announced he would destroy any business that hires Trump’s spokespeople. In his words, “Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists…and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. …Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away!”

The Lincoln Project, an influence outfit run by former Republicans now serving Democrats by demonizing Republicans, announced it was working to have all Trump administration officials blacklisted.

“We are constructing a database of Trump officials and staff that will detail their roles in the Trump administration and track where they are now. …They will be held accountable and not allowed to pretend they were not involved,” the group tweeted.

Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank announced they were closing Trump’s accounts. Payment processors such as PayPal, Shopify and Stripe cut off the Trump campaign and Trump merchandising stores.

These actions are of a piece with earlier actions by financial giants like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and others that announced last month they will require their clients to hire women and LGBT persons to their corporate boards, adopt approved green policies, and reveal their political contributions, lobbying contacts and trade association memberships as conditions for continuing to receive financial services.

All of these repressive statements and actions provided both the impetus for, and the legitimization of, the coordinated action taken last weekend by tech oligarchs Google, Apple and Amazon to destroy Parler, the free speech social media platform launched two years ago.

As law professor William Jacobson documented on his Legal Insurrection website, there is no evidence to support the tech giants’ implicit claim that Parler was in any way responsible for the Capitol Hill riot. Indeed, as Jacobson showed, it was Facebook, not Parler, that the organizers of the violent events had relied upon to mobilize their supporters.

The reason Google, Apple and Amazon destroyed Parler was not because it had done anything wrong. They destroyed Parler because it did everything right. For years, Big Tech oligarchs brushed off criticism that they operated as monopolies by insisting that everyone remains free to create platforms and compete with them. And as their viewpoint censorship of conservatives became more aggressive in recent years and reached new heights during the 2020 election, demand for alternatives continued to grow.

Parler wasn’t a Trump affiliate. It wasn’t a political instrument. It was simply a free speech platform. It was an alternative. And so it was destroyed. The social media users who wish to leave Twitter and Facebook now have no comparable alternative venue. So they are compelled to remain and live within the platforms’ increasingly repressive rules.

A sense of foreboding and fear now grips millions of Americans—and, indeed, conservatives worldwide. Unless something is done quickly by those who wield power to restore freedom, it is impossible to see a happy end to this story.

Charges Leveled at Men Accused of Assaulting Police With Flag, Fire Extinguisher in Capitol Riot

No surprise. The "authorities" are cracking down. Never forget the Reichstag fire.

At WSJ, "Man carrying Confederate flag in Capitol was also charged":

Federal prosecutors escalated their efforts Thursday to target some of the more brazen violent conduct from last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, charging a retired firefighter who they say threw a fire extinguisher at three police officers and another man who allegedly beat a police officer repeatedly with an American flag.

Robert Sanford of Chester, Pa., faces charges including assaulting a police officer after he was allegedly identified as the person who lobbed a fire extinguisher on the west side of the Capitol, at around 2:30 p.m., as the mob crashed past a thin line of Capitol police officers and stormed toward the building on Jan. 6.

Around the same time, a radio dispatch captured by OpenMHZ, a platform that records radio chatter from law enforcement and other agencies, relayed: “There is a 10-33 at the Capitol building. It has been breached,” using a code that signifies an emergency in which an officer needs assistance.

The prosecution’s statement of facts in the case described the fire extinguisher hitting three officers in the head, including one who wasn’t wearing a helmet. Officials said the extinguisher Mr. Sanford allegedly threw isn’t the one that killed Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was also struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest and died from his wounds, officials said.

William Young, one of the officers who was hit in the incident allegedly involving Mr. Sanford, was evaluated at a hospital and cleared to return to duty, the charging document said. A friend of Mr. Sanford tipped off the FBI to his involvement, the document said, adding that he was around 55 years old and had recently retired from the Chester Fire Department.

Mr. Sanford’ charges include using a deadly weapon in a restricted area, which carries a potential 10-year prison term, disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and obstructing law enforcement.

The charges against Mr. Sanford, who couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, come as prosecutors have filed dozens of cases against the most visible participants in the riot, many of whose efforts were widely broadcast on social media, including one video showing a man beating a police officer with an American flag at the Capitol riot.

An Arkansas man identified in court documents as Peter Stager was charged Thursday with obstructing a law-enforcement officer in connection with that incident. The officer from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department was guarding an entrance of the U.S. Capitol after 4 p.m., when members of the mob grabbed him, dragged him down a set of stairs, forced him into a prone position and proceeded to forcibly and repeatedly strike him, according to an affidavit from FBI agent Jason Coe.

The document identified the Washington police officer only as B.M., saying it was anonymizing victims and witnesses. The Metropolitan Police Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A confidential informant recognized Mr. Stager from videos posted online in social media and notified the FBI on Tuesday, the documents said. One video, cited in the documents, showed Mr. Stager saying: “Everybody in there is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”

Mr. Stager had told his associate he planned to turn himself in to law enforcement for his actions, the document, signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, said. A man reached by telephone at a number associated with Mr. Stager had no immediate comment...

Still more. 

America's 'Reichstag Fire'

At Theo's , "Let's be very CLEAR. The Capitol event was America's "Reichstag Fire" and was staged by the Left (Antifa-BLM) to 'seal the steal'."

Frankly, that's the best analogy I can come up with myself. In fact, last night I was reading William Shirer's, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has a long section on the both the fire and the political machinations. 

The Nazis were lucky, as apparently there was one actual communist who had entered the building that day to set fires, shortly before Goebbels and Goering's "Brown Shirts" stormed the building with containers of gasoline. Once the fuse was lit, with flames reaching higher than surrounding rooftops, and having their scapegoat, Goebbels and Goering seized the moment, to "never let a crisis go to waste," and initiated the massive crackdown on dissent that culminated in the passage of Hitler's "Enabling Act of 1933." This law literally gave all legislative power to the chancellor's office. The national parliamentary elections held shortly thereafter were completely rigged, with members of opposition parties banned from the building, attacked by Brown Shirt mobs, and in many case, murdered in summary executions after the fact. 

As we're seeing more news that the Capitol riot was planned days in advance, the leftist narrative that Trump "incited" the riot is completely falling apart. 

Know your history, people. The truth is starting to trickle out, and it's going to redound to the everlasting regret of our leftist domestic enemies and literal terrorists (see Portland, Oregon). 

Wedgie Wednesday

At Drunken Stepfather, "WEDGIE WEDNESDAY OF THE DAY."

John Eastman Resigns From Chapman University Law School

 At Instapundit, "Well, if you’re a lefty you can be an unrepentant terror-bomber and get a cushy slot at a top university. But if you peacefully speak at a rally for the right, well, you get this: 'Law Prof John Eastman Retires From Chapman ‘Effective Immediately’ Amidst Uproar Over Speaking At Trump Rally Last Wednesday'."

Here's the letter, originally published at the American Mind:

It is with mixed feeling that I announce my retirement from Chapman University today. Apart from prominent visitorships at the University of San Diego and the University of Colorado Boulder, my entire academic career has been as a professor and Dean at the Chapman University Fowler School of Law.

During my tenure as Dean, the law school achieved the highest national ranking it has achieved to date, moving from 163rd to 93rd in that short three-year period between 2007 and 2010. I wish Dean Parlow much success in regaining and surpassing that high water mark.

I have also enjoyed a strong working relationship with the University’s current President, Daniele Struppa, dating to my Deanship when he was serving as the University’s Provost and Chancellor. And I applaud his defense of me in particular and academic freedom more generally in this recent controversy.

But I cannot extend such praise to some of my “colleagues” on the campus or to the few members of the Board of Trustees who have published false, defamatory statements about me without even the courtesy of contacting me beforehand to discuss. The political science faculty, for example, made numerous false statements of fact and law in their diatribe against me. They asserted, for example, that I have made “false claims” about the 2020 presidential election which “have no basis in fact or law and seek to harm the democratic foundations of our constitutional republic.”

Had they bothered to discuss the matter with me, they could have learned that every statement I have made is backed up with documentary and/or expert evidence, and solidly grounded in law. For example, it is a fact that partisan election officials and even partisan-elected judicial officials in numerous states altered or ignored existing state laws in the conduct of the election, the instances of which are well documented in the petition for writ of certiorari I filed in the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of the President. And it is clearly established law that Article II of the Constitution assigns to the legislatures of the state, not anyone else, the sole, plenary power to determine the “manner” for choosing presidential electors. And it is a fact that numerous legislators wrote to Vice President Pence indicating that their electoral votes were problematic at best because of these illegalities and urging him to delay the electoral count proceedings long enough to allow the legislatures in the contested states time to review whether their electoral slate was legally certified.

By way of example, 21 members of the Pennsylvania Senate, including the powerful President Pro Tem of the Senate, outlined in a January 4 letter the numerous instances of violations of state law by state election officials and even the partisan-elected judiciary in the conduct of Pennsylvania’s election, thereby usurping the sole power that the Legislature has pursuant to Article II of the federal constitution to determine the manner for choosing presidential electors. Because of those illegal actions, the Senators noted “that PA election results should not have been certified,” and asked that the Congress “delay certification of the Electoral College to allow due process as we pursue election integrity in our Commonwealth.” Similar letters were sent from Pennsylvania house members, and from legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Arizona’s included this: “Based upon the clear and convincing nature of the evidence [of illegality and fraud], we respectfully ask that you recognize our desire to reclaim Arizona’s Electoral College Electors and block the use of any Electors from Arizona until such time as the controversy is properly resolved through the pending litigation or a comprehensive forensic audit.”

It is also a fact that a forensic analysis of the one voting machine courts have permitted to be inspected demonstrated not only that the machines are capable of switching votes, but they actually did switch votes in Antrim County, Michigan.

In other words, it is patently untrue that my statements have “no basis in fact or law.”

As for the claim that by raising these issues, I have sought to “harm the democratic foundations of our constitutional republic,” nothing could be further from the truth. As noted above, the Constitution sets out the authority for choosing electors, and that authority was usurped by non-legislative partisans in several states. Legislators in the contested states have quite reasonably asserted that the illegal conduct effected the outcome of the election. If true—and a full forensic audit would confirm whether or not it is true—then the democratic foundations of our constitutional republic were not just harmed but completely subverted by those partisan actors who violated election laws in order to permit the counting of illegal votes. Shining a light on what occurred is the highest defense of the constitutional republic, and such an investigation ought to be welcomed by citizens of all political stripes rather than blocked by those who are acting as though they have something to hide.

The letter signed by 169 members of the Chapman faculty and Board of Trustees is even more scurrilous. It claims, falsely, that I “participated in a riot that incited” last week’s violence at the nation’s Capital. I participated in a peaceful rally of nearly ½ million people, two miles away from the violence that occurred at the capital and which began even before the speeches were finished. And unless simply identifying illegal actions by election officials qualifies as “incitement”—under the law and well- established Supreme Court precedent, it clearly does not—then this charge is really an attempt to shut down the exercise of First Amendment rights. Nor did I “spout lies” about secret folders in the machines—the forensic audit discussed above has identified the suspension files in the software. Neither is there anything “conspiratorial” about simply identifying the available evidence.

I am grateful that not a single one of my colleagues at the Law School signed such a defamatory letter. To my knowledge, not one of the faculty signers has a law degree, and the three members of the Board of Trustees who are lawyers (and hyper-partisan Democrats) are clearly not well-versed in the constitutional questions at issue—either the Article II role of legislatures, or the definition of the “incitement” exception to the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. Nevertheless, these 169 have created such a hostile environment for me that I no longer wish to be a member of the Chapman faculty, and am therefore retiring from my position, effective immediately. I am currently on leave from Chapman while serving as the Visiting Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder, so my mid-year retirement will not have any impact on my Chapman students. Once that visitorship is concluded, I plan to devote my full-time efforts to the Claremont Institute and its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which I direct.

Still more, "Statement from the Office of the President."

The Real Reason Most Republicans Opposed Impeachment

It's Ben Shapiro, at Politico's Playbook, via Memeorandum:

Howdy from Nashville, y’all! I’m BEN SHAPIRO, and I host the conservative podcast and radio show “The Ben Shapiro Show”; I’m also editor emeritus of the Daily Wire, husband to a medical doctor, and father to three children who run me more ragged than the news cycle.

Or at least they used to, before all time was condensed into a political gravitational singularity, where one day is several years long.

So, let’s get to it.

The big news of the day, of course, is the House’s impeachment of President DONALD J. TRUMP for the second time in just over a year. It was a foregone conclusion that the Democratic House would do so — the only question was how many Republicans would vote along with Democrats to impeach Trump over his behavior leading up to and surrounding the Capitol riot.

In the end, 10 did — ranging from Rep. LIZ CHENEY (R-Wyo.), the third-ranking Republican in the House, who called openly and clearly for impeachment; to Rep. FRED UPTON (R-Mich.), who said he’d prefer censure but that he’d settle for impeachment.

The spotlight immediately moved to Senate Majority Leader MITCH MCCONNELL, who now says that he hasn’t made up his mind on impeachment. It seems he’ll leave Republicans to their own devices on the Senate vote when it takes place.

Many in the media seem bewildered that House Republicans didn’t unanimously join Democrats in supporting impeachment (looking at you, Playbook readers in the media) — after all, Republicans were in the building when rioters broke through, seeking to do them grievous physical harm. My Republican sources tell me that opposition to impeachment doesn’t spring from generalized sanguinity over Trump’s behavior: I’ve been receiving calls and texts for more than a week from elected Republicans heartsick over what they saw in the Capitol.

Opposition to impeachment comes from a deep and abiding conservative belief that members of the opposing political tribe want their destruction, not simply to punish Trump for his behavior. Republicans believe that Democrats and the overwhelmingly liberal media see impeachment as an attempt to cudgel them collectively by lumping them in with the Capitol rioters thanks to their support for Trump.

The evidence for that position isn’t difficult to find.

Sen. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.) suggested this week at NBCNews.com that the only way to prevent a repeat of the Capitol riot was endorsement of a full slate of Democratic agenda items. Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) suggested that “Southern states are not red states, they are suppressed states, which means the only way that our country is going to heal is through the actual liberation of Southern states …” And PAUL KRUGMAN of The New York Times placed blame for the Capitol riots on the entire Republican Party infrastructure: “This Putsch Was Decades In The Making.”

Unity looks a lot like “sign onto our agenda, or be lumped in with the Capitol rioters.”

More.

And at the Daily Beast (safe link), "‘Mischief Making’: Politico Boss Defends Handing Playbook Over to Right-Wing Bombthrower Ben Shapiro."