Otto Warmbier Has Died

This makes me sad and angry.

I generally don't "hate," but I hate North Korea. I wish the boy never went there in the first place.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Otto Warmbier, the American released by North Korea last week, has died":

Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was in a coma when he was released by North Korea, has died in Ohio. He was 22.

His family said in a statement that Warmbier died Monday afternoon.

The family thanked the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for treating him but said, “Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.”

Otto Warmbier was held for 17+ months in North Korea. Doctors said he returned with severe brain damage https://t.co/fcoM9CVM32 pic.twitter.com/8ZycvYHFeX

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 19, 2017

Oh my god. https://t.co/DPevP6UgeV

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) June 19, 2017

God damn it, Obama. This is on you. https://t.co/oTMRfRSWmE

— Kim Priestap (@kimpriestap) June 19, 2017

Statement issued by the family of #ottowarmbier on his passing pic.twitter.com/0loUSdBmrM

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) June 19, 2017

Oakland Athletics Complete Four-Game Sweep of New York Yankees

This is something else.

The Yankees have the best offense in baseball, so a four-game sweep by the last-place Athletics has to be embarrassing for New York (and freakin' awesome for Oakland).

At the S.F. Chronicle, "A’s complete four-game sweep of Yankees with 4-3 win":

Hoping your Father's Day was as sweep as ours. #RootedInOakland pic.twitter.com/xbq3pNhLUn

— Keep Voting Alonso! (@Athletics) June 18, 2017

RECAP: A's complete four-game sweep of Yankees.https://t.co/1LP0kCIYeJ#RootedInOakland pic.twitter.com/7P5G1mHpXd

— Keep Voting Alonso! (@Athletics) June 18, 2017

The A’s clubhouse had a nightclub feel, complete with lights flashing through a spectrum of colors and music blasting at a near-deafening volume.

“The vibe is good right now, and it’s growing,” starting pitcher Jharel Cotton said. “I think we’re confident, and we’re only going to get that much better.

“I just love it.”

That’s what a four-game sweep of the Yankees will do for a team, a feat the A’s accomplished on a scorching hot Sunday afternoon with a 4-3 victory in front of a crowd of more than 34,000 at the Coliseum.

The A’s snapped a string of 26 series without a sweep, a streak that dates to beating Kansas City four straight in September. They hadn’t swept a four-game series in Oakland since victimizing Toronto in July 2014.

“Against a team of that caliber, it’s tough to sweep a three-game series, let alone a four-game series,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said after sending the Yankees away on a six-game skid. “… It was a big series, especially for the younger guys. … To know that you can have a series like this gives you a lot of confidence in yourself and the team.”

More.

Unhinged Leftists Endorse Violence Against Republicans (VIDEO)

Look, this hits too close to home, which is why even Karen Handel has backed away from it (she's hoping not to scare off independent moderates in the district who might feel sympathy for Ossoff, who will whine about how he's being unfairly attacked).

But hey, I can't find fault with this ad (below), out from the folks at Principled PAC.

See Michelle Malkin for the accurate benchmark reference, "Climate of hate: Shooting at House GOP baseball practice."

I’ve warned for more than a decade about the unhinged Left’s rhetoric and the despicable double standards that have given progressives immunity as they falsely blamed Republicans and conservatives for every last random outbreak of violence.

In fact, Unhinged could be re-released today and readers would hardly notice it was written 11 years ago!

Are there any decent Democrats or left-wingers in the public square willing to acknowledge the existence of their own climate of hate — festering with misogyny, liberal racism, and assassination fascination?

Do words and rhetoric only have consequences if they can be used against conservatives and Republicans?

Or will we spend the rest of the day being bombarded with vile gloating like this...

Click for all the tweets linked at Michelle's.

Partisan Polarization in 2016 and Beyond

This is great! From Lee Drutman, at the Voter Study Group, "Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties":

I've got a new analysis of 2016 political divides & the future of the parties. Just out. https://t.co/v4LSfM5mTb #VOTERSG

— Lee Drutman (@leedrutman) June 13, 2017

Key Findings:

* The primary conflict structuring the two parties involves questions of national identity, race, and morality, while the traditional conflict over economics, though still important, is less divisive now than it used to be. This has the potential to reshape the party coalitions.

* By making questions of national identity more salient, Donald Trump succeeded in winning over “populists” (socially conservative, economically liberal voters) who had previously voted for Democrats.

* Among populists who voted for Obama, Clinton did terribly. She held onto only 6 in 10 of these voters (59 percent). Trump picked up 27 percent of these voters, and the remaining 14 percent didn’t vote for either major party candidate.

* To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions.

* By contrast, Republican voters are more clearly split. For the most part, Trump and Cruz supporters look fairly similar, though Cruz supporters are considerably more conservative on moral issues, and notably less concerned about inequality and the social safety net, and more pro- free trade. Kasich supporters are the true moderates, caught in between the two parties on almost every issue, both economic and social.

* In both parties, the donor class is both more conservative on economic issues and more liberal on social issues, as compared to the rest of the party.

* Democrats may be pressured to move further left on identity issues, given that both younger voters and the party’s donor class are quite far to the left on identity issues. If so, American politics would become further polarized along questions of culture and identity...

RTWT.

Suspect Plows Down Muslims Outside London's Finsbury Park Mosque (VIDEO)

Here's the headline at the Telegraph U.K., "FINSBURY PARK ATTACK: Live - 'I want to kill all Muslims': Extra police to protect Muslims during Ramadan after one person dies and 10 injured when terrorist ploughs van into crowd."

I'll bet. Sheesh.

And can you blame the guy, considering? And that's not to justify it, but sheesh. Britain's been taken over. You're likely to have a race war any time now. Leftists can't be surprised.

More, at the Guardian U.K., "London mosque attack: Man, 48, arrested on suspicion of attempted murder - One dead and eight injured after van ploughs into Muslims near Finsbury Park mosque," and "Finsbury Park terror attack: Theresa May heckled at mosque – latest updates - Prime minister praises members of public who detained attacker after van strikes pedestrians, killing one, in Seven Sisters Road."

But see Truth Revolt, "Retaliation? At Least One Killed as Crowd Leaving London Mosque Hit by Van: 'It appears from eyewitness accounts that the perpetrator was motivated by Islamophobia'."

Leftists Grow More Like #ISIS Every Day (VIDEO)

It's Ezra Levant, at the Rebel Media, "How the American Left is 'Normalizing Violence'."

Does Fake News Make a Difference in Politics?

Of course it matters, especially since virtually the entire mainstream media establishment is pitching fake news 24/7.

As noted, I stopped watching any television news last semester, and just have now starting inching back toward any kind of regular viewing. I simply do not trust reporters and traditional outlets to report fairly or accurately. It's just a given now, and of course it influences politics. We're living in two virtual countries with two virtual realities. And it takes a lot of power to shift those realities and make a new narrative strong enough to shift votes. That's why leftists hate President Trump. He beat the fake news industry and still does it everyday by getting his message out on Twitter and through his campaign-style rallies, God bless him.

But see MercatorNet, "Does fake news make a difference in politics? Or is the term just sour grapes from journalists and politicians who misread the electorate?":

As noted in the previous article, most people learn to adjust for fake news in a medium with which they are familiar. Otherwise, tabloids would hardly be shelved at the checkout counter, as they have been for decades. But many are now convinced that fake news put out on social media helped tip the US to Trump. Post-election, Hillary Clinton decried the epidemic of fake news, as did outgoing President Obama.

The air has been thick with statistics on both sides, with conservatives and the far right usually fingered as the culprits. Actually, fake news was purveyed on both sides. Ben Carson did not, for example, say that the ghosts of aborted babies haunt hospitals. Mainstream media sometimes publish fake news too. The Burlington Electric Company’s grid was not hacked by Russia, as the Washington Post recently claimed. Apparently, the Post staffers had not followed the conventional rule of phoning the facility to check before running the story. But did it make much difference anyway?

As it happens, claims for social media’s awesome power aren’t new to the 2016 election. Similarly dramatic claims were made after the 2008 election. Back then the outcome was welcomed by the proponents of the social media power, so we were unlikely to hear much about the perils of fake news.

Indeed, as “astroturf” investigator Sharyl Atkisson observes,  before mid-September 2016, fake news was hardly mentioned. Concern arose among Clinton allies thereafter via progressive site Media Matters and caught on widely from there in traditional media.

Either something happened rather suddenly to social media or there are more conventional explanations for Clinton’s loss. Let’s look at some of the latter:

It wasn’t fake news that made the difference; it was missed news. First, Trump was not the Republican party’s choice of candidate. He was propelled by a base that felt ignored—and ridiculed—by both parties. Sociologist Charles Murray describes that base quite clearly in Coming Apart (2012): They are the working class communities ("Fishtown," in his narrative) quietly disintegrating amid global societal changes. Meanwhile, middle class communities ("Belmont," in his narrative) are thriving, indifferent or even censorious, a few kilometres away.*

The Democrats did not have a Trump. Their candidate was a party establishment figure with massive intelligentsia and media backing. Among those who felt that their concerns would never be heard in those venues, that was her handicap. It’s a good question why Trump was one of the few public figures to grasp the significance of the demographic shift and exploit it. But little will be learned about that from an intense examinations of fake news. Newly recruited Trump voters were motivated by actual bad news in their own communities.

The hole created by the missed news  was widened by the Democrats’ heavy reliance on millennial social media experts to connect with voters. Kay Hymowitz explains at City Journal:

In the past few years, their influence has only grown, as mass-market fashion magazines like Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire have given them column space, effectively crowning them the new elite experts on women’s issues.

They weren’t. They had heads full of academic theory and millennial angst but little life experience with—and virtually no interest in—military wives from South Carolina or Walmart managers from Staten Island, who also happen to fall into the category “women.” Nor did the new luminaries or their bosses seem to notice that the latter group far outnumbered their own rarefied crowd.

The internet changes a great deal but it does not change the fundamental nature of reality. One small Atlanta-based pollster sensed that the military wife or the WalMart manager might not wish to risk humiliation, even in the abstract, by giving an honest opinion. So he asked his respondents who they thought their neighbors would vote for. He called the big contest right while major polling firms got it embarrassingly wrong.

Both sides in the election were out of touch...

Keep reading.

Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur, "New York Times Sent Three Reporters to the Rebel Media’s Live 2017 Celebration."

Democrat Hopes Sky High in Georgia's 6th Congressional District

From Patricia Murphy, at the Daily Beast, "MONSTER CAMPAIGN: Democratic Hopes Are Sky High in Trump-Testing Georgia Special Election Runoff":

500,000 doors, 100+ staff, 12,000 volunteers: The monster Dem campaign to win a single seat. https://t.co/QO3WoClhyh via @thedailybeast

— Patricia Murphy (@1PatriciaMurphy) June 19, 2017

The $50 million fight to fill Tom Price’s congressional set is now the most expensive House race in American history—and Republicans can blame Trump if Jon Ossoff wins on Tuesday.

SANDY SPRINGS, Georgia—Take the New Hampshire presidential primary, move it next to a Waffle House, douse it in cash and the sweltering June heat of Georgia, and you’ll get the special election runoff in the state’s 6th Congressional District.
In a race that was never expected to be close, the once sleepy collection of solidly Republican suburbs has suddenly become ground zero for the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump.

“What’s happening? The president is happening,” said Barbara Carr, a 6th District voter who had volunteered to hold a Jon Ossoff sign, along with a dripping Popsicle, on a busy Atlanta street corner Saturday as the temperature climbed past 90 degrees. Trump “doesn’t represent my values.”

The hopes of local Democrats like Carr and others across the country are piled onto Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional staffer who was practically unknown—even to fellow Georgia Democrats—before 2017. But when civil rights icon (and a former boss of Ossoff’s) Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) endorsed him in January, a fire-hose of small-dollar donations from Democratic activists began to pour into Ossoff’s campaign coffers and never stopped.

The nonstop money bomb allowed Ossoff to raise a truly obscene amount of money, $23 million so far, and build a monster campaign big enough to challenge both the Republican machine in Georgia and the Republican on the ballot against him on Tuesday, former secretary of state Karen Handel. Keenly aware that a loss in Georgia would be spun as a loss for the president and his agenda, National Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, sent super-sized resources of their own to Georgia. The $50 million-plus contest has now become the most expensive House race in American history.

“They’re getting statewide saturation,” said Jeff DiSantis, a longtime Democratic operative in the state who ran Michelle Nunn’s 2014 Senate race. “Everybody knows everything there is to know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, even in a presidential [election].”

It is hard to describe the sheer scope of the campaign Ossoff has been able to build, first to win 48 percent of the vote in the April primary and now to be running even with Handel in a district that is widely considered “R +10,” meaning a GOP candidate starts out with a safe 10-point advantage over any Democrat they’ll face.

While most political candidates, including Handel, have to spend hours a day, and sometimes their entire day, calling wealthy donors for campaign contributions, the small-dollar activist machine fueled by Daily Kos and End Citizens United has largely freed Ossoff from the onus of call time. Instead of dialing for dollars, Ossoff can show up at nearly every meet-and-greet, neighborhood meeting, or canvass party he gets invited to.

He and his campaign can also knock on voters' doors. Lots of them. With two days left before Election Day, the Ossoff campaign has knocked on more than 500,000 voter doors, including 80,000 on Saturday alone. The campaign has six field offices, more than 100 full-time paid staffers, and more than 12,000 active volunteers. The Georgia Democratic Party has focused another 12 full-time staffers solely on minority voter engagement in the district.

An Atlanta-Journal Constitution poll showed that 51 percent of likely voters had been reached directly by the Ossoff campaign, while 32 percent of voters said they’d heard from Handel or her team.

But that same poll also revealed the greatest hurdle Handel faces on Tuesday, and it isn’t Jon Ossoff or his operation. Instead, it is the broad anti-Trump sentiment in the district, including that 35 percent approval rating...

Still more.

Danielle Gersh's Excessive Heat Forecast

Following-up from last night, "Jennifer Delacruz's Heat Advisory Forecast."

Temperatures reached 116 degrees in Palm Springs yesterday, and the forecast is 120 today. These are record-breaking temps. Interestingly, the coastal areas saw barely cooler weather yesterday, which is from the low-pressure moisture that's clinging along the beaches. That's the place to cool off.

So, I'll be sitting pretty in Irvine today, but if you're inland, take a load off your feet, pump the air conditioning, and stay hydrated.

Here's the fantastic Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 from yesterday:

U.S. Shoots Down Syrian Fighter Jet

This is interesting.

At the Washington Post:

The U.S. military shot down a Syrian aircraft today for the first time since the start of the civil war https://t.co/hRY6j7SRvm

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 19, 2017

While a lot of attention is focused elsewhere…https://t.co/SJSERH891J pic.twitter.com/ec7v0nf8e1

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 19, 2017

Ergonomic Adjustable Standing Desk

At Amazon, Mount-It! Electric Stand Up Desk, Frame Only, Dual Motor Height Adjustable Standing Desk, Ergonomic, Memory and Timer Function, White (MI-7930).

BONUS: Michael Wallis, David Crockett: The Lion of the West.

Jennifer Delacruz's Heat Advisory Forecast

More heat tomorrow, and as posted earlier, it's going to stay hot through Wednesday.

Frankly, it hasn't been too bad in Irvine. We've had worse, for sure. It'll be interesting to see if we get into the 90s in the area by Wednesday.

I guess I should be thankful. It was a blessed Father's Day. I hope you had a good one as well!

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Joy Ann Reid Attacks Steve Scalise

The guy's literally recovering on his (near) death bed, and MSNBC hack Joy Reid's attacking him, claiming he had it coming.

Debra Burlingame tweeted Pajamas Media:

MSNBC Host Labels Rep. Scalise an 'Extremist' While He Lies in Hospital Bed https://t.co/OzRXeRxSRI #Trending via @pjmedia_com

— Debra Burlingame (@DebraBurlingame) June 19, 2017

Scorching Heat to Last Through Wednesday

At the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and the Weather Channel below:

Heat wave to last through Wednesday, Weather Service says https://t.co/6Ms6TCLonQ pic.twitter.com/UrRfRGF7N3

— The Press-Enterprise (@PEcom_news) June 18, 2017

Las Vegas and Phoenix may threaten all-time record-high temperatures early this week: https://t.co/Y2PrgNxG8S pic.twitter.com/hPbBo64hn0

— The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) June 19, 2017

Demi Rose Shows Off Curves in Velvet Bikini in Ibiza

She's amazing.

At London's Daily Mail, "PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Bikini-clad Demi Rose Mawby shows off her curves in velvet swimwear as she soaks up the sun at the beach in Ibiza."

BONUS: At the Sun U.K., "Demi Rose puts her stunning curves on display in a plunging bikini as she soaks up the sun in Ibiz," and "Demi Rose goes TOPLESS in Ibiza as she takes a dip in the sea."

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



Also at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Enough is Enough."

Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class

At Amazon, Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

Sunny Air Magnetic Rower Machine

Shop Today's Deals, at Amazon.

And see especially, Sunny Health & Fitness SF-RW5623 Air Magnetic Rowing Machine Rower w/ LCD Monitor.

BONUS: Andrew Breitbart, Righteous Indignation [Right Nation]: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

Happy Father's Day!

I don't know where this photo was taken, or when exactly. But my dad would have been in his 40s, it looks like (or maybe early-50s).

Have a wonderful Father's Day everybody!

#HappyFathersDay. Miss you, Dad. pic.twitter.com/3ySnXwitQf

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2017

Here's Jennifer Delacruz from Last Night

Her videos haven't been available before I hit the sack.

Danielle Gersh is hot though, so I'm not letting my readers down when it comes to the tasty weather reports, heh.

In any case, the big news continues to be this massive heat wave we're having in the Southwest. It's supposed to be hotter today than yesterday, and hotter still on Monday and Tuesday.

Here's the fabulous Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego: