San Francisco's 'Hellscape' of Rats, Drugs, and Feces Tests Residents' Progressive Values

I've got a little tweet-storm on this right here, "They're so progressive they won't call the police if the homeless drug-addled perps are black." Just keep clicking at the quoted posts.

And go to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Poop. Needles. Rats. Homeless camp pushes SF neighborhood to the edge: One awful experience on one unremarkable city block represent the hellscape that has infuriated many San Francisco residents":

San Francisco Homeless Project: One awful experience on one unremarkable city block represents the hellscape that has infuriated many San Francisco residents. via @HKnightSFhttps://t.co/TqePGmJ8KN

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) June 24, 2018

Some of the city’s biggest names — from San Francisco Travel to the Chamber of Commerce to the Hotel Council — have loudly protested the disastrous conditions on San Francisco’s sidewalks in recent months, and regularly get meetings with City Hall politicians, but the voices of everyday residents aren’t always heard.

The ones just trying to raise kids, work and, well, live. The ones with so little power, they can’t get their supervisors to respond to their requests for help. The ones with the misery literally on their front doorsteps.

Those are the people who live on Isis Street, which should be everything that’s good about San Francisco. Funky flats. A group of progressive neighbors, many of whom are artists, writers and other creative types. A walkable neighborhood where you can get to Rainbow Grocery and a host of bars and restaurants in a flash. There are about 30 units of housing on the block, and six kids younger than 5 are growing up there...

RTWT.

Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower

At Amazon, Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Monterey is the most literary city I can ever recall visiting. There were literally five used bookstores within a mile from each other downtown, and a coffee house bookstore over in Pacific Grove (about a mile from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Here's Steinbeck, Cannery Row, at Amazon.

I'm reading the old mass market paperback below.

Maria Menounos Bikini Photos

At Drunken Stepfather, "MARIA MENOUNOS BIKINI OF THE DAY."

She's really flashing there, man.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."

And A.F. Branco:

pic.twitter.com/kvzqGsO3kO

— MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) June 23, 2018

Jennifer Delacruz Overcast Sunday Forecast

It's cool in SoCal, quite a contrast from NorCal, where it was 104 in East Bay yesterday (not to mention in Fresno, where I was last week for a couple of days).

It's been quite pleasant in Irvine, and I can dig it!

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

Amid Fake News Assault, Trump's Supporters Dig In Deeper

Why this should surprise anyone is beyond me, but leftists and Democrats aren't too bright.

At NYT, "As Critics Assail Trump, His Supporters Dig In Deeper":

NY Times finds “overblown” media attacks on Trump driving Republicans closer to him —> As Critics Assail Trump, His Supporters Dig In Deeper, via @nytimes https://t.co/aawSaItsms

— Brit Hume (@brithume) June 24, 2018

LEESBURG, Va. — Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now. President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn’t necessarily agree with how he handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.

But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.

“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.

“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.

In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November...

Keep reading.

John Yoo: Asian Americans Should Bail on the Democrats

I met John Yoo in 2011, at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's West Coast Retreat.

And here he is, at LAT, "Asian Americans need to wise up and end our blind loyalty to the Democratic Party":

For all their smarts, Asian Americans can be pretty dumb.

They support Democrats in droves, and Democrats support race-based affirmative action. Last week, a lawsuit revealed just how discriminatory that kind of decision-making can be. At Harvard, racial balancing — in the guise of a personality score for applicants — appears to be systematically reducing the admission of Asian American students to the university.

The Harvard scandal contains a lot of takeaways, but here’s the one I hope sticks with my fellow Asian Americans: It’s time for us to end our blind loyalty to the Democratic Party and support instead politicians who will promote our interests.

Asian Americans are the most dynamic minority group in the U.S. Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, the Asian population in the U.S. grew by nearly 50%. According to social science surveys and the census, they are the wealthiest and best-educated Americans. They are more likely to run a small business than any other racial group. They are deeply religious, with strong family values and a low divorce rate. Asian families push their children hard to score at the top of standardized tests and to achieve sterling grade-point averages.

In recent presidential elections, Asian Americans have consistently voted Democratic. In 2012, exit polling shows that 73% of Asian voters turned out for Barack Obama, second only, among racial/ethnic groups, to African Americans. In 2016, two-thirds of Asian voters supported Hillary Clinton, again second to black Americans and this time tied with Latinos. Asian Americans last voted for a Republican for president way back in 1996, when they went for Bob Dole (about the only voters who did, it seems).

The Democratic Party has rewarded this unwavering support with an unyielding defense of race-based school admissions and government programs such as the one that’s been working against Asian Americans at Harvard.

Every Supreme Court justice appointed by a Democratic president has upheld race-based school admissions programs in the name of diversity. Democratic administrations have aggressively supported these same programs in court. In California, Democrats have sought repeatedly to overturn Proposition 209, the law that prevents UC Berkeley and UCLA from rescurrecting the use of race as a factor in their admission process. In New York City today, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio proposes to end the standardized single-test admission system used by magnet schools — because too many Asians do too well on the tests.

Harvard, and the Democratic Party, favor “holistic” admissions policies that yield what is considered to be the “right” balance of racial and ethnic groups on campus. Under pressure of a lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admission, the university disclosed that Asians would make up 43% of the student body if academic scores alone dictated admissions. But Harvard ranks applicants on their strengths in five categories. Even though Asians score highest on academics and extracurricular activities, Harvard gave them the lowest possible score on personal traits such as humor, sensitivity, creativity, grit and leadership.

The personal rating kept Asians to 26% of admissions in 2013. Harvard then made “demographic” adjustments that further reduced the class to 19% Asian, which magically appears to be the same percentage of Asians that’s been admitted to Harvard for years.

RTWT.

BONUS: See Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today, "Why is Harvard discriminating against Asian Americans? 'Diversity' is no excuse for racial bias."

Godwin's Law Update

So, even Mike Godwin's going Godwin. What can you do?

 At LAT, "Do we need to update Godwin's Law about the probability of comparison to Nazis?":

Does Godwin’s Law need to be updated? Suspended? Repealed? I get asked this question from time to time because I’m the guy who came up with it more than a quarter century ago.

In its original simple form, Godwin’s Law goes like this: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches one.” It’s deliberately pseudo-scientific — meant to evoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the inevitable decay of physical systems over time. My goal was to hint that those who escalate a debate into Adolf Hitler or Nazi comparisons may be thinking lazily, not adding clarity or wisdom, and contributing to the decay of an argument over time.

Godwin’s Law doesn’t belong to me, and nobody elected me to be in charge of it. Although I’m sometimes thought to be referee for its use, I’m not. That said, I do have thoughts about how it is being invoked nowadays.

Since it was released into the wilds of the internet in 1991, Godwin’s Law (which I nowadays abbreviate to “GL”) has been frequently reduced to a blurrier notion: that whenever someone compares anything current to Nazis or Hitler it means the discussion is over, or that that person lost the argument. It’s also sometimes used (reflexively, lazily) to suggest that anyone who invokes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler has somehow “broken” the Law, and thus demonstrated their failure to grasp what made the Holocaust uniquely horrific.

Most recently GL has been invoked in response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy that resulted in the traumatic separation of would-be immigrants from their children, many of whom are now warehoused in tent cities or the occasional repurposed Walmart. For example, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden — no squishy bleeding heart — posted a couple of tweets on June 16 that likened that policy to the Nazis’ treatment of children in Germany’s concentration camps. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (a Democrat but also a security hawk) has made the comparison as well.

The response has been predictable: Debate for some people has been derailed by the trivial objection that, even if it is terrible to separate children from their parents (and sometimes lose track of them, or make it impossible for their parents contact them, or even deprive them of the comfort of human touch), it’s not as awful as what the Nazis did. Or as bad as the slave trade. Or as bad as what the expansion of the United States westward did to Native Americans.

My name gets cited in a lot of these discussions. And of course my ears are burning. It hasn’t mattered that I’ve explained GL countless times. Some critics on the left have blamed me for (supposedly) having shut down valid comparisons to the Holocaust or previous atrocities. Some on the right have insisted that I’m “PC” for having tweeted (a bit profanely) that it’s just fine to compare the white nationalists who plagued Charlottesville, Va., last year to Nazis. (I think they were mostly aspirational Nazi cos players.)

I don’t take either strain of criticism too seriously. But I do want to stress that the question of evil, understood historically, is bigger than party politics. GL is about remembering history well enough to draw parallels — sometimes with Hitler or with Nazis, sure — that are deeply considered. That matter. Sometimes those comparisons are going to be appropriate, and on those occasions GL should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.

So let me start another conversation here. Take the argument that our treatment of those seeking asylum at our border, including children, is not as monstrous as institutionalized genocide. That may be true, but it’s not what you’d call a compelling defense. Similarly, saying (disingenuously) that the administration is just doing what immigration law demands sounds suspiciously like “we were just following orders.” That argument isn’t a good look on anyone.

The seeds of future horrors are sometimes visible in the first steps a government takes toward institutionalizing cruelty...

More.

Whatever you thing about "GL," this "debate" is completely stupid, mainly because it's only being raised now, when Trump is in office. We could've had this debate in 2014, when Obama was locking up families --- and separating them --- on the border.

GL or no GL, politics is stupid. And yes, if you've got to resort to calling your opponents Nazis, you've lost the debate.

This Is How You Got Trump

This is beyond Trump derangement. Leftists are out and out advocating the slaughter of Trump supporters, and I'm seeing this multiple times a day, and not just on social media.

Sarah Sanders. Pam Bondi. Melania Trump. All of these women have been targeted and threatened by leftist mobs and Hollywood idiots over the last few days.

MSNBC's Donny Deutsch smeared Trump supporters as Nazis, "If you vote for Trump, you're the bad guy."

It feels like we're heading toward open warfare sometimes. That's one of the reasons I went offline during the vacation, and even then I was still on Twitter, so I never really get away from it. It's all leftist hatred all the time, and it's sickening.

Make this idiot famous. pic.twitter.com/SzXLbwv8zx

— R. Wolfe (@WhoWolfe) June 10, 2018

Trump Exposes Democrats' Hypocrisy and Lies, Outsmarts Them Again

From Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH: This today, ladies and gentlemen, may be one of the biggest See, I Told You So opportunity days I have had in years, maybe ever. And that’s really saying something, because I’ve had a lot of these over a stellar broadcast career. So forgive me if I point out your host — your beloved host, I, El Rushbo — predicted every single reaction that we are seeing from the news media and the rest of the Democrat Party. I have been chomping at the bit all night to get here.

It started shortly after the program ended yesterday, and I know all of you were watching the news and keeping track. I know you all noticed it. I know you’re out there saying, “It’s exactly what Rush said was gonna happen,” and it has happened. I don’t know if Donald Trump is a strategic genius, but I can tell you that he is an instinctive one. I don’t know how much Trump sits around and strategizes and tries to play, for example, a long game and say, “Okay. If I do this and do this, I know they’re gonna do this and this. So, after that happens, I’m going to do this.”

I don’t know if he’s that many steps down the board or not. But I know that his instincts are practically infallible here. He has turned these people inside out, upside down. He has forced them, made them, caused them — his enemies — to expose their hypocrisy, to expose their lies, and to expose the fact that they’re dishonest when reporting so-called news. For starters, ladies and gentlemen, I predicted the press would say that Trump caved, that they would begin to take credit for it, that they indeed had put so much pressure on Trump that finally they had made him cave.

Dana Bash at CNN was the first to start shouting with great happiness that they had made Trump cave. It was their first reaction. There were lots of articles with headlines claiming that Trump caved. There were other stories talking about Trump’s base supporters being tragically saddened and disappointed by this, that Trump didn’t have the guts to stick to his policy, that Trump is even less committed to this than Obama was. There was all kinds of stuff. But then — and you remember this — they began to realize, as I also predicted they would. (laughing)

In fact, the first guy to get up was a little bald head guy yesterday afternoon on CNN. (laughing) It was so fun to watch. We had the sound bite from the guy, Zac something or other. He’s the guy that the Fox infobabes love having this guy on. You can just tell that they are as amused as hell. He’s like a pet! You know, he’s like a talking pet. They’re just amused as hell when this guy gets wound up and gets going. He stands up out of his chair, starts gesticulating wildly, and they look at each other with the suppressed smiles. (laughing) They don’t even try to stop him!

Anyway, he was the first to figure it out. (laughing) They realized that this only meant one thing, that Trump was gonna keep families detained, if we’re gonna keep ’em together, they’re gonna stay detained, quote-unquote, “behind bars.” What the left has been looking for here all along is catch-and-release. That’s what they want to return to. They thought Trump caving meant that his executive order was gonna be, “We no longer detain children,” and since we can’t separate families, if we’re gonna detain the children, we can’t deign the adults.

Therefore nobody’s detained, thereby everybody is free to roam America and get lost. (laughing) Well, that’s not what the executive order says. And then I predicted that there would be a court challenge to this before the next day — today — arrived. And I predicted that the court challenge would be on the fact that Trump had usurped his executive authority, that he cannot trump (no pun intended) existing law as written by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the Flores decision, which the media never talked about during any of this.

When they’re clamoring for Trump to end his supposedly policy of separation, the no tolerance. It isn’t his. It never was, which you know. But they’re demanding that he end it. And all during those days where they’re demanding that he end it, they never once said that there was an opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals called the Flores decision that prevents him from ending it. Then when he signs his executive order, then all of a sudden they discover Flores to say that his executive order may not be valid. (laughing)

They fell right into this at every step!

More at that top link.

Lindsey Pelas Greetings

She's so sweet.

HI ✨✨✨✨ pic.twitter.com/gmLCp0Dyyb

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) June 21, 2018

I’d rather be in Mexico today 🔥 how about you? pic.twitter.com/yDeH9NkRkc

— Lindsey Pelas (@LindseyPelas) June 23, 2018

Alexis Ren on the Beach (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

Jamie Leigh Thornton

At Maxim:

"Don't start a DM with 'Dannnnng girl you got a nice rack.'" https://t.co/bUyrPWurZQ

— Maxim (@MaximMag) June 17, 2018

Jennifer Delacruz's Saturday Forecast

It's really overcast in Irvine today. And come to think of it, that's weird, considering that Monterey Bay was clearing up before Noon.

Be that as it may, here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Time Magazine Stands by #FakeCover Story Featuring Crying Migrant Child Who Was Not Separated from Her Mother

I think this is probably the fakest of fake news stories I've ever seen.

I don't have all that much to add to the commentary. I was on Twitter all this last week while on vacation and I tweeted a lot of commentary. My main take: This is a fake crisis, perpetuated by fake journalists exploiting fake migrants, to foist a fake political controversy ahead of the November elections.

The Washington Post has a huge rundown, "The crying Honduran girl on the cover of Time was not separated from her mother."

And at AoSHQ, "#FakeNews: TIME's Open Borders Propaganda Cover Story Is Fake In Every Way An Article Can Be Fake."

Plus, here's Shannon Bream, at Fox News:

Delilah Hamlin Bikini Model

At Drunken Stepfather, "Delilah Hamlin Bikini Model of the Day."

BONUS: "Kaili Thorne [Bella's sister] is Topless of the Day."

Lily-Rose Depp for Vogue Russia

At People Magazine, "Lily-Rose Depp Smiles While Posing Topless on the Beach in Vogue Russia Shoot."

ADDED: "Lily-Rose Depp by Boo George for Vogue Russia July 2018."

And at the French magazine Gala, "PHOTO – Lily-Rose Depp topless, la fille de Vanessa Paradis se lâche."

Far-Left Cynthia Nixon Smears ICE as a 'Terrorist Organization,' Wants It Abolished (VIDEO)

She's really, really far left.

Her daughter is now her transgender son. See People, "Cynthia Nixon Reveals Her Oldest Child Is Transgender as They Mark Trans Day of Action."

And she attacked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a "terrorist organization."

She's exactly the goofy leftist far-left New Yorkers deserve.

Here's her appearance on the View from a few days ago:

Who's Really to Blame at the Border?

From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal:

Who’s really to blame at the border? https://t.co/WV6B0i4XEj pic.twitter.com/LArcwLXgdg

— City Journal (@CityJournal) June 23, 2018

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.

In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.

Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.

On Wednesday, Trump called their bluff. He signed an executive order that would house illegal-alien adults with minors in Department of Homeland Security or other government facilities.  The zero-tolerance policy, however, would continue. Democratic politicians and illegal alien advocates immediately cried foul. “Make no mistake: the President is doubling down on his ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, said in a statement Wednesday. “His new Executive Order criminalizes asylum-seekers . . . . Locking up whole families is no solution at all—the Trump Administration must reverse its policy of prosecuting vulnerable people fleeing three of the most dangerous countries on earth.”

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday night: “The real problem is Sessions’ decision to prosecute [illegal border crossers] 100 percent.” A CNN anchor on Thursday morning asked U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, if his position was: don’t criminally charge each person who illegally crosses the border. Schiff responded: “We don’t have to criminalize everyone that’s coming here seeking asylum.” NPR interviewed the director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, Michelle Brané. “Families will be just as traumatized, children will be just as traumatized” under the executive order, she said on Thursday morning. “Exchanging one form of trauma for another is not the solution”; getting rid of the prosecutorial mandate is. 

And the open-borders lobby possesses a powerful weapon for doing just that. The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option...

Naturally.

But keep reading.