Ken Davenport, The Two Gates

My good friend Ken Davenport was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, and it's now available at Amazon.

Here, Ken Davenport, The Two Gates: A Novel.

I'm a few pages into it, but will be plowing through more this weekend when I have time. It's an intriguing tome so far, and highly recommended.

And congratulations to Ken! That's quite an accomplishment.

Check back for updates on the book.

Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand

At Amazon, Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Carlo D'Este, Bitter Victory

At Amazon, Carlo D'Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943.

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

At Amazon, Ernest Cline, Ready Player One: A Novel.

Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

At Amazon, Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich.

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

At Amazon, Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1).

President Trump Visits Las Vegas (VIDEO)

The full video's at the PBS News Hour, "Watch Live: President Trump speaks after meeting first responders in Las Vegas." (Streamed earlier.)

And at the Las Vegas Sun, "Trump in Las Vegas: America is ‘a nation in mourning’."

Maitland Ward on SnapChat

At Taxi Driver, "Maitland Ward Bare Breasts on SnapChat."

And at Drunken Stepfather, "MAITLAND WARD OF THE DAY."

Katie Pavlich

She's a really smart cookie.

And on Twitter:

See you soon on @OutnumberedFNC pic.twitter.com/a9k3ktyHrD

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) October 4, 2017

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Following-up, "Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse."

I'm still on my fiction jag, so here's another suggestion.

At Amazon, Philip Roth, American Pastoral: American Trilogy (1) (Vintage International).

Michele Tafoya and Secret to Success

Timeless advice from NBC Sports sideline reporter Michele Tafoya. This is great. I'm showing this video to my students after their next exam, as part of my normal pep talk.

I love it!

Kate Upton in Fiji (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

The New Democratic Party

Excellent piece, from Caroline Glick:

Over the past week, two incidents occurred that indicate that the party of Harry Truman and Bill Clinton is becoming increasingly comfortable with blaming the Jews.

First, last Thursday, Obama loyalist and former CIA operative Valerie Plame approvingly shared a fiercely antisemitic article on her Twitter feed.

The article, “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” was written by Philip Giraldi, a fellow former CIA officer and outspoken Jew-hater.

Giraldi’s piece included all the classic antisemitic tropes: Jews control the media and culture; they control US foreign policy; and they compel non-Jewish dupes to fight wars for Israel, to which the treacherous Jews of America are loyal.

Giraldi recommended barring Jews from serving in government positions and participating in public debates related to the Middle East. And, he added, if an American Jewish Israel-backer refuses to recuse himself, the media should duly label him, “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the State of Israel.”

Such a label, he contended, “would be kind of like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.”

Plame, who ultimately issued a contrite, defensive apology for circulating Giraldi’s anti-Jewish screed, initially justified her decision to repost the article and say it was “thoughtful.”

She added, “Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.”

And she should know.

Plame rose to fame in 2003, when she was at the center of a chain of events that led to the delegitimization of Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration through a campaign of antisemitic innuendo and legal persecution.

In 2003, Plame’s husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, published an article in The New York Times in which he falsely denied White House claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium yellow cake from Niger for the purpose advancing his nuclear program.

Apparently in retaliation for his false allegations, then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage leaked to syndicated columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife Valerie was a CIA officer. Plame was a covert operative at the time, making Armitage’s leak a crime.

The Justice Department appointed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to oversee the investigation and prosecute the leak. Fitzgerald knew almost from the outset that Armitage was the source of the leak.

Yet he failed to prosecute him.

Instead, Fitzgerald went on a fishing expedition to root out then-vice president Richard Cheney’s Jewish chief of staff Scooter Libby. After a multiyear investigation, Libby, who did not leak Plame’s identity, was indicted and convicted on a specious count of perjury.

The effect of Libby’s indictment, prosecution and conviction was to place all his fellow Jews in the Bush national security team under constant and deeply antisemitic scrutiny. This defamation of Jewish American security experts in many ways paved the way for Barack Obama’s wholesale use of antisemitic undertones to defend his nuclear deal with Iran.

As Omri Ceren from the Israel Project recalled in a long series of Twitter posts after Plame circulated Giraldi’s article, Obama and his advisers repeatedly argued that “lobbyists” and Israel were seeking to convince lawmakers not to act in the US’s best interest. Instead they tried to manipulate senators into defending Israel and oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, to the detriment of America. These exhortations, made repeatedly by Obama and his surrogates were then expanded upon and made explicit by their political allies in places like the Ploughshares Foundation, which served as focal points of Obama’s media campaign on behalf of the Iran nuclear deal.

Until she resigned on Sunday, Plame served on the Ploughshares board of directors.

Plame’s wing of the Democratic Party is not explicitly antisemitic. Obama never said, “Jews are undermining US national security.” Instead, he attacked Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He attacked “lobbyists” and foreign interests.

Plame’s mistake last week was that, in tweeting a link to Giraldi’s article, she moved beyond Obama’s dog-whistle approach.

In a way, she can be excused for crossing the line, because the rising force in her party has little problem openly trucking in Jew-hatred.

That force, of course is the Bernie Sanders radical leftist wing of the party.

Around the same time that Plame was tweeting her way into ill-repute, Iran was showing off a medium- range ballistic missile capable of hitting Israel and Europe and Sanders was giving a foreign policy speech in Missouri.

Israel was a key focus for Sanders, who is now in charge of the Democratic Party’s outreach efforts.

Sanders said the US is “complicit” with Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and Gaza. He said that he would consider cutting off US military aid to Israel. He argued the US should take a more evenhanded approach to Israel.

No similar statements have ever been made by any major presidential contender or political leader in either party.

And yet, they have raised no outcry among his fellow Democrats.

Sanders’s rise has unleashed forces in the party such as former Nation of Islam spokesman Rep.

Keith Ellison and BDS activist Linda Sarsour. Both have been outspoken in their antisemitism. Both routinely defame and delegitimize American Jews who support Israel. And both are all but unanimously embraced as leaders by their partisan colleagues.

Since Donald Trump’s election, most of the media coverage of US politics has centered on cleavages within the Republican Party. But while it is true that the Republican Party is dysfunctional, the Democratic Party is transforming into something never before seen in mainstream US politics.

In 2016, the party of Bill Clinton ceased to be the party of the working class. Hillary Clinton abandoned her husband’s Rust Belt base, referring to his voters as “deplorables.”

Today, the two predominant branches of the party are the Obama branch – which is comfortable with antisemitic dog whistles – and the Sanders branch, which is comfortable with Corbyn-style Jew-baiting and open discrimination of pro-Israel Jews.

Absent a major restructuring of the party’s makeup, Plame’s forced resignation from Ploughshares may be remembered as the high-water mark in the new Democratic Party’s efforts to root out antisemitism from its ranks.

I Used to Think Gun Control Was the Answer

A great, great piece, from Leah Libresco, at the Washington Post:

This is a must-read. Stop simply shouting Australia! and update your knowledge. https://t.co/dwOINpeMJf

— Milena Rodban (@MilenaRodban) October 3, 2017

Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock Was Gambler, Investor, and Mass Murderer

This was in yesterday's paper, so it's probably a little dated, but interesting nevertheless.

At LAT, "The mystery of Stephen Paddock — gambler, real estate investor, mass killer":

He was 64 years old and, to those who knew him, showed no signs of mental illness, extreme political views or an unhealthy interest in guns. He liked to gamble, and had bounced around over the years, living in Southern California, Texas and Nevada. But he seemed to have plenty of money, and had held steady jobs as a mail carrier, accountant, auditor and apartment manager.

Stephen Paddock’s last stop was here, in Mesquite, Nev., a modest desert oasis 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, where he lived in a retirement community with his female partner and kept a low profile, conversing little and maintaining no Facebook or Twitter accounts.

In an era when social media invites full-throated expression of even the most minor annoyance, Paddock gave away no hint of whatever it was that drove him to commit mass murder on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 59 people in an assault on a country music festival late Sunday night.

“We are completely dumbfounded,” said a younger brother, Eric Paddock, who broke into tears in front of his suburban Orlando, Fla., home. “We can’t understand what happened.”

“He was always normal,” said Donald Judy, a former next-door neighbor who said he was struggling to reconcile the friendly conversations about real estate and family with carnage carried out from a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Almost every week, Paddock and his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, would go to Peggy Sue’s bar and diner in Mesquite, where they would have a few drinks and she would sing karaoke, other patrons and the bartender said.

“She really could sing – great set of pipes,” Bob Hemley said. “Him? He didn’t affect me. Didn’t stand out.”

Everyone seated at the U-shaped bar Monday evening remembered Danley in particular. Bartender Monique Ortega said that when she learned Paddock was the shooter, she called her boss immediately.

“Now [that] I know that it was him, he seemed kind of creepy,” she said.

Paddock, described by the local sheriff as a “lone wolf” attacker, killed himself inside the luxury suite at the Mandalay as SWAT officers closed in. On Monday, authorities searched his light-orange, single-story stucco house in Mesquite and a second home in northern Nevada and questioned relatives and associates but acknowledged that they had uncovered no explanation yet.

Paddock gambled frequently, and two law enforcement sources said he had made chip purchases in Nevada casinos in the last year that were in excess of $10,000 a day, the amount required to be reported to the government.

But relatives and acquaintances said he was a successful real estate investor who showed no sign of financial problems.

Asked if authorities had a working motive at a news conference Monday afternoon, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo replied, “No, we don’t.”

Investigators have all but dismissed a claim by Islamic State that Paddock was a recent convert to Islam acting at the group’s direction. Law enforcement authorities seized computer hard drives from Paddocks’ Mesquite home and are examining dozens of weapons taken from the hotel suite and the home along with explosive material found in his vehicle and residence.

U.S. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.), who received a briefing from the multiagency anti-terrorism center, said no new clues have emerged so far.

“Law enforcement were looking through his computer. They couldn’t find a motive. As of a couple of hours ago, there was no motive. That’s all we know,” he said late Monday afternoon.

Before Monday, Paddock had been a nonentity to local police. "We didn't have prior run-ins with him, we didn't have any traffic stops, we didn't have any arrests of any kind," Mesquite Police Officer Quinn Averett said. “It’s a newer home, a newer subdivision, a nice clean home, nothing out of the ordinary.”

Agents hope they may learn more from Danley, 62. Police were initially searching for her in Nevada as a person of interest in the shooting, but later learned she was out of the country.

Lombardo said she was currently in Tokyo, and investigators are arranging an interview.

Paddock grew up in Arizona, the son of a notorious bank robber. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who went by the aliases “Chromedome” and “Big Daddy,” robbed a bank in Tucson in 1960, when Stephen was 7 years old.

When authorities cornered the elder Paddock in Las Vegas, he attempted to run down an FBI agent with his car, according to press clippings. He escaped from federal prison in Texas, where he was serving a 20-year sentence, on New Year’s Eve 1968. Wanted posters described him as “psychotic,” “armed and very dangerous,” and an avid bridge player and gambler. He was removed from the list in 1977, according to the FBI website.

He was captured the following year in Oregon and died in 1998...

More.

Laura Ingraham: 'It could be something as simple as something inside of him flipped...'

I've been thinking the same thing myself. So far, authorities have absolutely no motive. Not much is known, really, despite the media reporting. The girlfriend's supposed to be landing tonight. I suspect she knows a lot more than folks have let on. So far the tally is 43 guns located, between those at Mandalay Bay and the shooter's home. And a lot of planning --- a whole lot, including the shooter setting up video surveillance cameras outside the hotel room on some kind of food cart, etc. --- went into this massacre. We're still short on answers.

At Fox News:

Ellie Goulding in Red Turtleneck

She's so sweet.

At Taxi Driver, "Ellie Goulding Pokies in Red Turtleneck."

2018 Honda Accord

This is something else, at Instapundit, "2018 Honda Accord First Drive: Feels like home again."

I'm impressed. I'm driving a 2002 Honda Odyssey, which I love, although the van's worn out. I'm looking into a Dodge Challenger V6 at this point, mostly because it's a fast muscle car within my budget. But the wife needs a new car in about a year or so, and perhaps I can convince her to get the new Accord. It's a beauty.

PHOTO: Stephen Paddock Dead of Self-Inflicted Gunshot (GRAPHIC)

This is the allegedly viral photo of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, at Alex Jones' Twitter feed, "Photo of reported Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock."

It looks like the real thing to me, especially after seeing the photos of Paddock's room at Mandalay, at the Daily Star, via Paul Joseph Watson, "Photos emerge of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s body….and there is a NOTE: PHOTOS have leaked online of the dead body of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock – and he appears to have left a note."

And see Jacqui Henrich at Boston 25 News:

EXCLUSIVE: photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows gun, ammo, hammer, bipod, optics @boston25 pic.twitter.com/4B2iRhquq5

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

EXCLUSIVE: second photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows another weapon used in worst mass shooting in modern history pic.twitter.com/gD5IHS7Mk2

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017

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More blogging tonight, people.

Thanks for your support.

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BONUS: Dana Loesch, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America.