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

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

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

No, not long at all.

The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal

From Heather Lynn Mac Donald, at City Journal:

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

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

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

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

More (via Memeorandum).

Bill de Blasio's Nightmare

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

Things aren't looking so great now, though.

At Politico, "De Blasio’s nightmare":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More.

Saudi Arabia Fears U.S. Shale Oil

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

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

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

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

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

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

More at the link.

Heidi Klum's Sharper Image Too Sexy for Vegas!

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

And even at Fox News:

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

From Bernard Kerik, at Time:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading.

Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of 2014

From Charlotte Allen, at the Los Angeles Times.

PREVIOUSLY: "Feminism Died in 1998."

David Priestland, The Red Flag

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

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

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

Feminism Died in 1998

A roundup of radical feminist inanities, at Instapundit:

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

Now the corpse is just twitching.

'Avalanche of Hate Speech'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last-Minute Holiday Shopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More at that top link.

iOTW REPORT Ripped Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading.

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

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

Heh.

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

At London's Daily Mail:

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

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

De Blasio Puts Cops in the Crosshairs

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

More on that when the videos are posted.

Meanwhile, at the New York Post:

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

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

Kate Upton Restored

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

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

But here she is again:

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More.

And pick up your copy at Amazon.

Bye Candy, DLTDHYOTWO!

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

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