Los Angeles Foothills Fight Mudslides After the Storm (VIDEO)

It rained today for quite a bit. Not hard downpours, but consistent rain this afternoon.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

'Don't Be Cruel'

Here's Cheap Trick.

I was out Tuesday night, heading over to CVS to pick up my son's prescription, and I hear "Don't Be Cruel." I only vaguely remember that Cheap Trick covered the song, and I told myself to check the playlist at the Sound L.A.

And then yesterday during my afternoon drive time I heard it again. I'm just now getting around to checking the playlist. Here's Tuesday night's:

Lay Down Sally
Eric Clapton
11:28 PM

Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith
10:56 PM

Magic Bus
The Who
10:52 PM

In Your Eyes
Peter Gabriel
10:47 PM

Don't Be Cruel
Cheap Trick
10:38 PM

Run to You
Bryan Adams
10:34 PM

Piece of My Heart
Big Brother & The Holding Company
10:26 PM

New World Man
Rush
10:23 PM

Bennie and the Jets
Elton John
10:17 PM

You Give Love a Bad Name
Bon Jovi
10:14 PM

Do It Again
Steely Dan
10:08 PM

Rock the Casbah
The Clash
10:05 PM

Here Comes the Sun
The Beatles
10:02 PM

Pride (In the Name of Love)
U2
9:58 PM

Go Your Own Way
Fleetwood Mac
9:54 PM

Rock of Ages
Def Leppard
9:50 PM

Jeopardy
Greg Kihn Band
9:40 PM

Doctor My Eyes
Jackson Browne
9:37 PM

Dancing With Myself
Billy Idol
9:33 PM

And here's yesterday's:

Shake It Up
The Cars
4:18 PM

Here Comes My Girl
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
4:14 PM

Limelight
Rush
4:09 PM

Go Your Own Way
Fleetwood Mac
4:06 PM

So Lonely
The Police
4:01 PM

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Crosby, Stills & Nash
3:53 PM

Urgent
Foreigner
3:49 PM

The Valley Road
Bruce Hornsby
3:38 PM

Crazy Train
Ozzy Osbourne
3:33 PM

Don't Be Cruel
Cheap Trick
3:25 PM

Don't You (Forget About Me)
Simple Minds
3:21 PM

T.N.T.
AC/DC
3:17 PM

Dancing With Myself
Billy Idol
3:12 PM

Stuck In the Middle With You
Stealers Wheel
3:09 PM

Lonely Is the Night
Billy Squier
3:04 PM

Eleanor Rigby
The Beatles
3:02 PM

Piers Morgan Slams the Sleazy Hookers of the Left-Wing Press

Oh boy, the hits just keep coming.

I think Ben Smith might need to lay low for a while, man.

At London's Daily Mail, via Steve Green, at Instapundit, "The only hookers in this story are the cheap, lazy journalists who ran with fake Trump sleaze to urinate on his presidency."

.@piersmorgan: Shame on you, @BuzzFeed https://t.co/0UiW4GEy0V pic.twitter.com/LT5Ugureni

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) January 11, 2017

PREVIOUSLY: "Piers Morgan Blasts Meryl Streep's Anti-Trump Golden Globes Tirade."

Columbia Journalism Review Defends BuzzFeed's Despicable Publication of Russian #FakeNews Hack Job

I think I've snarked before, but everything's fake now.

If the CJR, which is supposed to be an uber-establishment institution beyond repute, is defending this BuzzFeed fake news Russian dossier hack publication, then there is no standard for journalism left. Everything's fair game.

And another thing I've mentioned previously: If there's fascism today, we're seeing it in real time in the left's machinations to overturn the results of the election.

Check this out, "BuzzFeed Was Right to Publish Trump-Russia Files":

BuzzFeed was right to publish Trump-Russia files https://t.co/BiuIOzAyj0 pic.twitter.com/fWi4jGovd3

— CJR (@CJR) January 11, 2017

EARLY TUESDAY EVENING, spurred by a CNN story, BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier on Donald Trump’s alleged long-term relationship with Russia. The documents contain references to compromising information the Russians purportedly gathered about the president-elect and accusations that Trump’s campaign was in regular contact with Russian officials. Within hours, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among many others, slammed the digital powerhouse for its decision, while pointing out that they, too, had seen the documents but declined to make them public.

BuzzFeed explained that it was publishing the dossier “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” But the Post’s Erik Wemple countered that “Americans can only ‘make up their own minds’ if they build their own intelligence agencies, with a heavy concentration of operatives in Russia and Eastern Europe.” The Guardian, meanwhile, complained that BuzzFeed’s “decision…forced other media outlets to repeat the allegations or ignore a story that lit up the internet.” That writer was quick to note that his paper, too, “had obtained and reviewed the documents in recent weeks but declined to publish because there was no way to independently verify them.”

The media’s full-throated condemnation of BuzzFeed is both self-righteous and self-serving. BuzzFeed noted up front that the documents contained “explosive—but unverified—information,” and Editor in Chief Ben Smith convincingly defended the decision in a staff memo, arguing that the dossier was being read and talked about “at the highest levels of American government and media. It seems to lie behind a set of vague allegations from the Senate Majority Leader to the director of the FBI and a report that intelligence agencies have delivered to the president and president-elect.”

By publishing the documents when it did, accompanied by strong caveats about their reliability, BuzzFeed put itself at the heart of the story and made some of its most prominent journalists go-to people for any tips the dossier might generate. The most typical kind of investigative reporting entails spending months or even years gathering documents and cultivating sources to build an unshakable edifice. BuzzFeed took a different but still well-established approach: Release what you can when you have it and see what new leads it generates. If this strategy pays off, the outlet that has morphed from a cat-video factory to a font of serious journalism could end up with some terrific scoops. You can almost hear the rest of the media muttering, “Damn, why didn’t we think of that first?”

Still more.

It's a highly coordinated attempt to bring down Donald Trump and scuttle his administration.

See, "Coup d'État! Release of BuzzFeed Russia Hack Is Democrat-Leftist Attempt to Overturn the Election!"

Coup d'État! Release of BuzzFeed Russia Hack Is Democrat-Leftist Attempt to Overturn the Election!

It's Mark Levin.

He's got an angry shtick anyway, but he's really pissed off here.

At Conservative Review, "Levin: BuzzFeed’s Russia Hack Job is the Left ‘Staging a Coup’ Against Trump":

“It is time that we stand our ground in defending Donald Trump’s legitimacy,” said Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin during a fiery segment at the beginning of his radio show Wednesday night. “The praetorian guard media, the Democrat party … Academia and Hollywood are seeking a coup of sorts” against the president-elect.

Levin was referring to a widely-panned “news” story at Buzzfeed that reported salacious, unverified, and disputed accounts of Trump’s dealing with Russia.

“What [the Left] seek to do … is drive issues of controversy,” he concluded. “They’re laying the foundation, not only to discredit Trump, but to impeach him down the road.”

He went on to call all “corners of the conservative movement” to rally around the president-elect “not for every issue, not for every nominee, but for the legitimacy of the election … for our country, for our Constitution.”

“The specific major issue of the legitimacy of this election and our Constitution is under attack,” Levin told his audience. “What you saw yesterday was an absolute attempt to overturn the election!”

BuzzFeed's Enormous Favor to Donald Trump

I just got around reading the BuzzFeed report, which you can access in a Google cache page. (BuzzFeed's notorious for its link-bait publishing model, so you won't give them any hits if you read the cached version.)

And see the commentary at the Blaze:

Commentary: BuzzFeed has done Donald Trump an enormous favor https://t.co/2NbRgodbv5 pic.twitter.com/3Rhli219Mp

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) January 12, 2017

Certainly, the impression that President-elect Donald Trump gives in public is that he is upset with prominent online news site BuzzFeed for publishing an alleged dossier full of salacious details that Russian intelligence was allegedly planning to use to compromise him. Furiously upset, even — going so far as to call them a “failing pile of garbage” in a defiant press conference Wednesday morning. And who knows, Trump’s anger might well be genuine; but he really ought to be thanking BuzzFeed for changing the course of this story in a way that has been very positive for him.

Rewind the clock to Tuesday afternoon and recall what Trump was facing. CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who enjoys one of the broadest bipartisan reputations for honesty of any person in the media, was on television, flanked by reporters Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez and Carl Bernstein. Tapper reported that CNN had developed credible information that U.S. intelligence officials had presented evidence to both Trump and outgoing President Barack Obama that Russian intelligence agents claimed to have compromising information about Trump “of both a personal and financial nature.” Further, the agents claimed that surrogates for the Trump campaign had regularly been in contact with Russian officials throughout 2016, directly contradicting Trump’s fierce denials of any such contact.

Tapper made clear that CNN would not be discussing the contents of the allegations. He stated that they had not been able to independently verify them and thus would not repeat what they were. He stated that no one knew if the claims allegedly made by Russian intelligence were true or not. All they knew was that this dossier was out there, and it had been handed to Trump and to Obama, with the message that the Russians were allegedly trying to use its contents to compromise Trump. Responsible reporting if in fact CNN did its due diligence on the report.

Then came BuzzFeed. They, in fact, had no such qualms about publishing the contents of the dossier itself. They emphasized that the material was both “unverified” and likely “unverifiable,” but laid out the claims in all their glory.

As the dust has settled, a general consensus has developed that CNN’s reporting should be distinguished from BuzzFeed’s and that CNN acted responsibly where BuzzFeed was reckless. It should be noted, BuzzFeed has its notable defenders today, including the Columbia Journalism Review, but most members of the media agree: What BuzzFeed did was worse than what CNN did (if you grant that CNN did anything wrong at all).

However, from Trump’s perspective, BuzzFeed’s reporting did him a huge favor. The reason for that is simple: The contents of the dossier were so obviously suspect that they called the veracity of the entire account into question. What reasonable intelligence official would have taken this transparent pulp to the president of the United States without a shred of verification to back it up? None would have, it was virtually obvious from the document’s face.

Imagine if BuzzFeed’s story had never been printed. CNN’s allegation that Russians had unspecified compromising information of both a “personal” and “financial” nature would have been left hanging in the air. And it would have been believable by a large number of people. Polls have shown that, after a brief post-election honeymoon period, Trump is unpopular again and the American public is increasingly uneasy about his public posture toward Russia — a vulnerability that Senate Democrats have mercilessly exploited during the first few days of confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet appointments...

Last of LOVE Advent — Kate Upton (VIDEO)

They saved the best for last?

Perhaps not, but Ms. Kate sure had a good run, heh.

Bill Plaschke: #Chargers Move to Los Angeles is Bad for Everyone

I posted this great Bill Plaschke commentary last January, "San Diego Chargers Should Stay in San Diego."

Turns out the Chargers didn't get the memo.

I tweeted last night, and Plaschke's latest is below.

San Diego #Chargers set to announce move to Los Angeles: https://t.co/SqsQA04mQG @PatriarchTree @lamblock @LindseyThiry

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 12, 2017

Chargers to LA is unwanted and unnecessary https://t.co/QYye8wjcSa

— Bill Plaschke (@BillPlaschke) January 12, 2017

Every relationship is built on honesty, so the San Diego Chargers should hear this as their moving vans are chugging up the 5 Freeway on their noble mission of greed.

We. Don’t. Want. You.

The news broke Wednesday that Chargers owner Dean Spanos has informed NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell he is moving the team to Los Angeles, which is pretty much dreadful news for Los Angeles.

Wow, just what we need, the return of a professional sports team with no buzz, no tradition, few local fans north of south Orange County, limited success, and an owner who just stole them away from a place where they were loved unconditionally for 56 years.

What was the NFL thinking? What are the Chargers thinking? I know what Spanos is thinking, that he is leaving behind those unwashed heathens who didn’t want their tax dollars to pay for a football stadium and sliding into Stan Kroenke’s Inglewood palace to ride piggyback on the Rams.

What a guy. What a joke.

The problem is not that Los Angeles must now be asked to support two NFL teams after 22 years of somehow surviving with none. We knew this would happen. This was the deal when the Rams returned last year. This is what the NFL has always wanted for Inglewood, so there was no avoiding it.

The problem is, the second team should have been the Raiders. The Southland is filled with Raiders fans everywhere. I have still never met a single Chargers fan.

I like the Chargers, and I've rooted for them many times. But I agree with Plaschke: They should've stayed in San Diego.

Nicole Kidman: It's Time to Accept and Support Donald Trump — #MAGA!

Heh.

I can dig it:

Nicole Kidman: It's time to accept and support Trump https://t.co/s9ohYAYbJv pic.twitter.com/TDT5hxvAHi

— The Hill (@thehill) January 12, 2017

ADDED: Here's the video, "Nicole Kidman on Donald Trump."

Demi Novato Bikini Photos

At Drunken Stepfather, "DEMI LOVATO IN A BIKINI OF THE DAY."

Donald Trump at War With All Sides?

Actually, all sides are at war with Donald Trump. Folks were saying that --- I was saying that --- as far back as the summer of '15.

The entire leftist establishment has been, and remains, out to destroy Donald Trump. And the anger and hatred only intensified when the anointed entitled one, Crooked Hiillary Clinton, lost in November.

So, yeah, Trump's at war with all sides, and it's a war of defense. He's the one who's been attacked, and it's unrelenting.

At any rate, FWIW from Cathleen Decker, at the Los Angeles Times, "President-elect Trump in news conference: At war with all sides":

Donald Trump on Wednesday displayed his essential political character: He is a man apart, rebelling against both the political party he defeated and the one he ostensibly leads.

That positioning, and its appeal to disgruntled voters, helped to secure him the presidency. The question now is whether playing by his own rules will work as well in the White House.

In his first full news conference in almost six months, Trump put his independence and refusal to follow Washington convention on vivid display.

He deepened his public war with the intelligence agencies that in nine days will be among his most important national security guides.

He gratuitously insulted a Republican senator who could prove to be a daunting enemy when it comes to Trump’s own goals.

He laid down demands on replacing Obamacare that his party’s House and Senate leaders have indicated they can’t attain and refused to take steps even many Republicans have said are necessary to limit conflicts between the interests of his business and the United States.

All that comes as Trump wraps up a transition that has achieved some goals but has conspicuously not expanded the political support that was only barely enough to allow him to defeat a highly unpopular Democratic nominee.

He stands to begin his presidency with the lowest poll ratings ever for a newly elected president. Far from using the pre-inauguration honeymoon period to consolidate support, Trump has diminished his standing by some measures.

But if his news conference demonstrated anything, it is that Trump at this point sees no need to change his course.

Most striking was his treatment of the intelligence community, which has aroused Trump’s ire with its unanimous declaration that Russia sought to interfere in the November election in order to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton and assist him.

Any other president-to-be would tread carefully before criticizing the nation’s spy agencies en masse. Impugning the intelligence community and weakening its standing can pose dire problems in the event of crisis, and openly warring with those who hold the nation’s secrets is rarely beneficial. (That might have been obvious on Wednesday, the day after publication of articles detailing how the nation’s intelligence leaders had briefed Trump and others on alleged Russian efforts to gather damaging information about the president-elect.)

Yet Trump started the day by blaming the agencies for allowing “this fake news to leak into the public” and equating the alleged actions with those of a heinous regime...

Still more.

PREVIOUSLY: "The Best Press Conference in the History of Press Conferences."

(I love Trump because he fights back against the left. That's been, and it still is, the biggest reason for my support. I just love him for that.)

Populism Isn't a Threat to Democracy, But a Vibrant Manifestation of It

Following-up, "Fascism vs. Right-Wing Populism."

I don't believe so-called "right-wing populism" is a threat to democracy. What it is is a threat to the morally bankrupt, far-left globalist agenda, and radical progressives across the institutional spectrum, from Hollywood-types, the leftist media, far-left academe, and the radical left's NGO network, working hand-in-hand to delegitimize the grassroots popular surge against the political class, seen in Brexit to Trump and beyond.

The latest case in point is Kenneth Roth, and his piece up at Foreign Policy, "Dark Days: The Global Rise of Populism is a Dangerous Threat to Democracy and Human Rights":

Today the greatest long-term threat to rights is the rise of populism in the West. I describe this worrying trend: https://t.co/n9vXGpIItq

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) January 12, 2017

The global rise of populists poses a dangerous threat to human rights — which exist to protect people from governments. Yet today, a new generation of populists is reversing that role. Claiming to speak for “the people,” they treat rights as an impediment to their conception of the majority will, a needless obstacle to defending the nation from perceived threats and evils. Instead of accepting that rights protect everyone, they encourage people to adopt the dangerous belief that they will never need their rights against an overreaching government claiming to act in their name.

The appeal of the populists has grown with mounting public discontent over the status quo. In the West, many people feel left behind by technological change, the global economy, and growing inequality. Terrorism sows apprehension and fear. Some are uneasy with societies that have become more ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse. There is an increasing sense that governments and the elite ignore public concerns.

In this cauldron of discontent, a certain breed of politician is flourishing by portraying rights as protecting only the terrorist suspect or the asylum-seeker at the expense of the safety, economic welfare, and cultural preferences of the presumed majority. They scapegoat refugees, immigrant communities, and minorities. Truth is a frequent casualty. Nativism, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and misogyny are on the rise.

But if these voices of intolerance prevail, the world risks entering a dark era. We should never underestimate the tendency of demagogues who sacrifice the rights of others in our name today to jettison our rights tomorrow when their real priority — retaining power — is in jeopardy.

And you know what's coming: When leftists start going off on nativism, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, misogyny and blah, blah, the dreaded "F" word is just around the corner.

See, more from Roth:

We see a similar scapegoating of asylum-seekers, immigrant communities, and Muslims in Europe. Leading the charge have been Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, but there are echoes of these arguments of intolerance in the Brexit campaign, the rhetoric of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and far-right parties from Germany to Greece. Throughout the European continent, officials and politicians hark back to distant, even fanciful, times of perceived national ethnic purity, despite established immigrant communities whose integration as productive members of society is undermined by this hostility.

We forget at our peril the demagogues of yesteryear — the fascists, communists, and their ilk who claimed privileged insight into the majority’s interest but ended up crushing the individual. When populists treat rights as an obstacle to their vision of the majority will, it is only a matter of time before they turn on those who disagree with their agenda. Such claims of unfettered majoritarianism, and the attacks on the checks and balances that constrain governmental power, are perhaps the greatest danger today to the future of democracy in the West. They threaten to reverse the accomplishments of the modern human rights movement...

Voices like Roth's are the voices you need to ignore.

Democracy's not under threat. There is no wave of "xenophobia" and "racism." And the so-called "nativist" tide is a righteous populist revolt against the out-of-touch elites in both the U.S. and Europe, who've brought on an unprecedented crisis of jihad terror and political correctness. It's these scourges, and the neo-communist economic policies that go with them --- that threaten world order and the survival of democracy.

Spread the word. Keep fighting for freedom. Make America Great Again!

George Soros Bet Against Donald Trump, and Lost Big

This story makes my day!

Soros Lost Nearly $1 Billion In Weeks Following U.S. Election After Betting Big Against Trump… https://t.co/zrlhZPTMNQ

— Weasel Zippers (@weaselzippers) January 12, 2017

Well dang. Serves him right too lol. https://t.co/qEQxehsiwB

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 12, 2017

Billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros has lost nearly $1 billion in the Trump rally https://t.co/3ccEEpCq2A

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 12, 2017

French Leader Marine Le Pen Visits Trump Tower

Heh.

I love it.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Marine Le Pen Visits Trump Tower During Surprise New York Trip."

Marine Le Pen In New York, May Meet President-Elect Donald Trump https://t.co/SkM6TG0Quo

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) January 12, 2017

President Obama Surprises Vice President Joe Biden with Presidential Medal of Freedom (VIDEO)

Biden was generally surprised.

He truly thought it was a farewell ceremony, and that folks were mostly going to say good things about each other, blah, blah. And then the president announced the award.

I'll be glad when this administration is gone, and I frankly don't remember so much glad-handing, back-slapping, and mutual encomiums when the G.W. Bush administration left office. I think O's taken narcissism to a whole new level.

Still, I gotta admit this moment was pretty amazing. That's genuine emotion coming from the vice president (who, I believe, is a decent man, despite his far-left proclivities).

The story's at USA Today.

And at CNN, which I had going live in real time:

Why Leftist Elites Are So Resentful of Middle America

From Salena Zito, at the New York Post:

Why liberal elites are so resentful of middle America https://t.co/Fow4ZVgk6R pic.twitter.com/vADx2PTzAZ

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) January 12, 2017

The Best Press Conference in the History of Press Conferences

From Melissa McKenzie, at the American Spectator, "Trump Just Had the Best Press Conference in the History of Press Conferences":

The Scene: Donald Trump entered the room with his kids Ivanka, Eric, and Donald, Jr. in tow along with his attorney, press secretary Sean Spicer and Vice President-to-be Mike Pence.  The room is fire-marshall-alerting packed with the media taut and ready to pounce like starved hyenas. It’s been eight years to build up this hunger. It’s been eight years of lovingly grooming Obama when they’re not resting on his lap and being petted.

The Action: Sean Spicer starts with a blistering rebuke of the media–especially Buzzfeed. He decried their bias and baseless reporting. Mike Pence follows up and the introduces President-elect Trump. Strangely, people clap. It had seemed liked the room was only filled with reporters, but evidently not. There were also fans there? Difficult to tell via C-Span.

President-elect Trump comes to the podium and reiterates his disgust with the media, but not all of them. He likes some of them more now. He hands over the press conference to his attorney who lays out that Trump’s sons Eric and Don will run his companies, that Donald won’t be involved, that they won’t be selling assets, that they won’t pursue overseas work. Business building in America is still open, though.

Meanwhile, there are two hearings going on Capital Hill–one for Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, one for Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. Notes about those: Rubio is tearing into Tillerson. The media is responding as though he’s not convincing them. I’ve been watching the hearing and don’t get it. Tillerson comes across as measured and intelligent. Over at the Jeff Sessions trial hearing, the usual suspects hate him which Lindsey Graham humorously revealed by reading the list of ACLU ratings for various Senators.

Back in New York, things got tense. It’s too difficult to adequately describe the full meltdown of CNN’s correspondent when trying to ask a question of Mr. Trump, so here’s the video.

“You are fake news!” Mr. Trump yelled at the CNN reporter and called Buzzfeed a “failing pile of garbage.”

All heck broke loose among the reporters, with many screeching and trying to ask questions.

It was glorious.

Mr. Trump said [and I’m paraphrasing] that the media is attacking, but that he has this [he was pointing to his microphone] and can fight back. He alluded to the people who couldn’t fight back when attacked by the left and media. Mr. Trump is genuinely offended for how the press has not only treated him, but those who are helpless against a careless media.

Having watched the media destroy innocent people and move along, and conversely let a corrupt administration slide, Mr. Trump’s indictment of the press is welcome...

More.

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Obama says goodbye to a nation he despises":

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief | Frontpage Mag https://t.co/ChVLU6vMsf

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) January 11, 2017

President Barack Hussein Obama bid farewell last night to the nation he despises in what was, for him, a mercifully brief speech.

“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” he said in all apparent seriousness.

After sending aid and comfort to an Islamic supremacist dictator in Egypt, he falsely claimed to have pulled the rug out from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The Nobel Peace Prize winner left out how his illegal war destabilized Libya and the fact that the U.S. military deeply distrusts him.

He pretended the economy is going gangbusters while leaving out the fact that nine days away from his departure from the Oval Office, his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, is collapsing as insurers run away from the so-called insurance exchanges. He acted as if fighting alleged manmade global warming was more important than just about everything.

It some ways it wasn’t much different than the warm and fuzzy victory speech the Divider-in-Chief gave in Chicago in 2008, except in this speech he got to lie about his record while throwing in cheap shots against his critics and the incoming president. (A transcript of Obama’s final great oratorical atrocity is available here.)

In a forum resplendent with the echo-acoustics our megalomaniacal president prefers, the pathologically dishonest Obama tried last night to cast himself as a unifying figure:

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud title, the most important office in a democracy: Citizen. Citizen.

So you see that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

A life form that just arrived from Alpha Centauri might have been moved as Obama tried to whitewash the unmitigated catastrophe his presidency has been.

Deploying all the usual tired old left-wing smears against conservatives, the lawless 44th president recited a long series of America-boosting sayings most of which he has never believed in. He said nice things about the dead white men much-derided by the Left whom we call the Founding Fathers, along with the government-restraining Constitution he has spent so much of his life spitting on. With a straight face this despotic destroyer of the rule of law called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”

Of course Chicago was an appropriate locale for the goodbye address. It’s a violent one-party city that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. He gave the speech at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago, not too far from storied Hyde Park and the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.

The Windy City is where community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings on tactics deeply influenced Obama, learned his craft from the Al Capone crime gang. Obama got his start in nasty Alinsky-style community organizing with the assistance of groups like the Developing Communities Project, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Chicago is where young Obama cut his organizing teeth running the successful get-out-the-vote drive for ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992 that elected the awful one-term senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. She was a friend of Communist Cuba and African dictators who worked closely with agitator Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA, all of which Obama welcomed into his political coalition.

Chicago is where the half-black Obama whose purported father was from Kenya learned to portray himself as what the Left calls “authentically” black, soaking up vile racist hatred while sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s sinister Nation of Islam-like church.

Chicago is where unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn launched his career in electoral politics by hosting a living room fundraiser for his Illinois State Senate campaign. Although his presidential campaign vehemently denied Obama was close to Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader admitted years later that “we served on a couple of boards together.” Chicago is also where Michelle Obama worked at the same law firm as Dohrn.

Giving the speech in Chicago was also appropriate on a symbolic level. Chicago (like Detroit) epitomizes Obama’s failed, bankrupt left-wing ideology, and lack of leadership...

Still more.

Samantha Hoopes Wet T-Shirt Photoshoot Saint Lucia (VIDEO)

The swimsuit issue's due out in February, and it's looking to be a keeper!

Leftist Identity Politics Will End in Bitter Recriminations

From Damon Linker, at the Week, "Liberals are drunk on a political poison called intersectionality":

Liberals are drunk on a political poison called intersectionality, says @DamonLinker: https://t.co/hqtwIWf6xd pic.twitter.com/LADORqloHT

— The Week (@TheWeek) January 11, 2017

In the fierce post-election debate about how Democrats should respond to the party's astonishing electoral collapse at all levels of government, some have argued that identity politics is the problem, while many others (especially younger activists) have claimed it's the solution.

Those inclined toward the latter position would be well advised to read a recent New York Times story very closely. An account of growing rancor surrounding the planned Women's March on Washington (scheduled for the day after Donald Trump's inauguration), the piece demonstrates with admirable clarity how doubling down on identity politics — and especially the left's embrace of the trendy postmodern ideology of "intersectionality" — is likely to shatter the Democratic Party into squabbling factions even more vulnerable to a resurgent right.

It would be one thing if Democrats had reason to hope or expect that they would be saved by demographics. Ever since the "emerging Democratic majority" thesis was first floated more than a decade ago, leading liberals have been convinced that their side is bound to prevail as the country becomes less white over time and minority groups eventually combine to form a left-leaning electoral majority. In such a situation, a politics based on racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of identity might make sense as a mobilization strategy.

But recent events and analysis have cast doubt on these hopes and expectations, raising the possibility that the electoral power of white Americans may well persist for a long time to come. In that case, the need for "normal" politics, which involves forming coalitions across racial, ethnic, and gender divides in the name of the common good, will continue indefinitely.

That's where the danger of identity politics — especially in the radical form highlighted in the Times — becomes obvious.
From the start, the Women's March was an expression of identity politics — the coming together in protest of those appalled by the president-elect's attitude and proposed policies toward the female half of the electorate. But some organizers and participants have something else — something far narrower — in mind. For them, solidarity on the basis of gender alone isn't possible because black women have sometimes been oppressed by white women. For that reason, white women must begin "listening more and talking less," and above all learn to "check their privilege."

Here we enter into the kaleidoscopically balkanizing world of intersectionality, which highlights multiple identities in an effort to single-out the nexus of ascriptive attributes that produces maximal oppression. The idea is that once these attributes have been identified, the "privilege" of those who undertake the oppression can be subverted. Yet in practice, the hierarchy of privilege isn't so much subverted as reproduced and inverted.

Consider the world as viewed through the lens of intersectionality...

Intersectionality creates the Oppression Olympics, heh.

But keep reading.

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