I blogged briefly about Ms. Dean here, "Chris Cuomo's Conflicts of Interest (VIDEO)."
The lady's a one-woman incinerator of Democrat sleaze and corruption, and she's got ultra-moral authority on the issue.
In any case, here's the video of her appearance on Hannity's last night, so enjoy:
This one's kinda hilarious. It's like Manchin's actually siding with the Republicans (supposed enemies) in the upper chamer, heh.
I wrote about the idiot Tanden way back in November, "Top CAP Executive Neera Tanden is Biden's Pick for Director of Management and Budget."
There's a piece up at "The American Independent," an obvious far-left website I've never heard of, slamming Rep. Boebert for her defense of Second Amendment rights, and her right, as a Member of Congress, to "open carry" her weapons in the halls of that august body.
I'm no expert on this area, but guns in Congress were extremely common in the 19th century, and in recent years the Supreme Court has ruled (twice) that the right to bear arms is an "individual right." So, I'm very interested to see gun control freaks try to "wish away" SCOTUS precedents on this matter.
Here's the piece, via Memeorandum, "2nd Amendment defender Lauren Boebert upset others might want to amend Constitution." (Safe link.)
And you can watch the interaction from some of the actual committee hearing in question, at the video:
The text of the Second Amendment guarantees that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As this Court explained in Heller, “[a]t the time of the founding, as now, to ‘bear’ meant to ‘carry.’” 554 U.S., at 584. “When used with ‘arms,’ . . . the term has a meaning that refers to carrying for a particular purpose— confrontation.” Ibid. Thus, the right to “bear arms” refers to the right to “‘wear, bear, or carry upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.’” Ibid. (quoting Muscarello v. United States, 524 U. S. 125, 143 (1998) (GINSBURG, J., dissenting); alterations and some internal quotation marks omitted). “The most natural reading of this definition encompasses public carry.” Peruta v. California, 582 U. S. ___, ___ (2017) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 5). Confrontations, of course, often occur outside the home. See, e.g., Moore, supra, at 937 (noting that “most murders occur outside the home” in Chicago). Thus, the right to carry arms for self-defense inherently includes the right to carry in public. This conclusion not only flows from the definition of “bear Arms” but also from the natural use of the language in the text. As I have stated before, it is “extremely improbable that the Framers understood the Second Amendment to protect little more than carrying a gun from the bedroom to the kitchen.”
Quite right.
So, again, I only suggest, as a "non-expert," that idiot leftist gun-control freaks back the f*ck off, sheesh.
(And note, SCOTUS denied certiorari in Rogers, because the lower courts had already affirmed previous SCOTUS rulings holding that the Second Amendment indeed confers an individual right the bear ("carry") arms in public. But no matter, I stand with Rep. Boebert, and I hope she continues to hammer her arguments in defense of the Second Amendment.)
L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon by training (a very wealthy surgeon) denies the story.
But here it is, at WSJ, "Los Angeles Times Owner Exploring Sale of Company":
Billionaire biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong is exploring a sale of the Los Angeles Times less than three years after buying it for $500 million, people familiar with the matter said. The move marks an abrupt about-face for Mr. Soon-Shiong, who had vowed to restore stability to the West Coast news institution and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the paper in an effort to turn it around. When Mr. Soon-Shiong acquired the Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and a handful of weeklies from Tribune Publishing Co. TPCO +0.00% , then called Tronc Inc., in 2018, it was met with great fanfare from staff and media watchers after years of turmoil and downsizing at the publications. At the time, he said that the sale represented the beginning of a new era and that he intended to do what it took to make the business viable for the next 100 years. He has since grown dissatisfied with the news organization’s slow expansion of its digital audience and its substantial losses, the people said. He also has increasingly come to believe that the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune—together known as the California Times company—would be better served if they were part of a larger media group, they said. Mr. Soon-Shiong has been heavily focused on efforts by his immunotherapy company to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and has had little time to devote to the Times, people familiar with the matter said. “Covid really brought him back to the lab,” said one of the people. Mr. Soon-Shiong didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment and a spokeswoman for the Times had no immediate comment...
So, no comment from the newspaper's owner of spokeswoman?
I'll bet there really is some "dissatisfaction" over in El Segundo, where Mr. Soon-Shiong moved the paper shortly after his acquisition a few years back.
One thing, though, despite his protestations on the accuracy of WSJ's reporting, I see enough tweets from L.A. Times journalists to know that it's definitely up-and-down at L.A.'s last remaining "broadsheet" newspaper.
And since I'm a subscriber, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled, as I'd hate to have to rely on the New York Times for the occasional local story, like the one a couple of weeks ago, on the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital.
We'll see. We'll see.
Following-up from yesterday, "Ted Cruz Flew to Cancun with His Family Amid Power Crisis in Texas (VIDEO)."
I wanted to highlight this NYT piece on Senator Cruz, which is kinda shocking in its details. What's so interesting is the text messages Cruz's wife sent out before the trip, to some of her neighbors and friends in Houston, which were later leaked to the press, which I guess seems both naturally appropriate and gross and sleazy at the same time.
See, "Ted Cruz's Cancún Trip: Family Texts Detail His Political Blunder":
Like millions of his constituents across Texas, Senator Ted Cruz had a frigid home without electricity this week amid the state’s power crisis. But unlike most, Mr. Cruz got out, fleeing Houston and hopping a Wednesday afternoon flight to Cancún with his family for a respite at a luxury resort. Photos of Mr. Cruz and his wife, Heidi, boarding the flight ricocheted quickly across social media and left both his political allies and rivals aghast at a tropical trip as a disaster unfolded at home. The blowback only intensified after Mr. Cruz, a Republican, released a statement saying he had flown to Mexico “to be a good dad” and accompany his daughters and their friends; he noted he was flying back Thursday afternoon, though he did not disclose how long he had originally intended to stay. Text messages sent from Ms. Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip. Their house was “FREEZING,” as Ms. Cruz put it — and she proposed a getaway until Sunday. Ms. Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, where they had stayed “many times,” noting the room price this week ($309 per night) and its good security. The text messages were provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread, who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the texts. For more than 12 hours after the airport departure photos first emerged, Mr. Cruz’s office declined to comment on his whereabouts. The Houston police confirmed that the senator’s office had sought their assistance for his airport trip on Wednesday, and eventually Mr. Cruz was spotted wheeling his suitcase in Mexico on Thursday as he returned to the state he represents in the Senate...
Now who was it who leaked those texts to the New York Times? I mean, if you can't trust your "friends and neighbors," who can you trust (that is, if you should be trusting these same "friends" and "neighbors" with this kind of bombshell "vacation" planning in the first place)?
That said, for the second day this story's headlining at Memeorandum, so you know hated-addled leftists can't get their fill of their hateful demonic schadenfreude. *Shrugs.*
ADDED: Via Ashley Parker on Twitter, and yes, it is funny. "Cancún-gate," lol. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This segment below, from "CBS This Morning," is really well-done --- and troubling.
I mean, there's so much leftist anger and hatred over "racism" and "white supremacy," which nowadays neither is anywhere near the "devastating" levels idiot leftist-Dems want "the rubes" to believe.
But if you honestly go back to the 1950s and 1960s, you do see patterns or real racial discrimination, and this segment is particularly interesting, as "CBS This Morning" co-host Tony Dokoupil's grandfather settled in the suburb of Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and at the video, Dokoupil conducts a set of generally decent, and not "blame-casting," interviews, discussing the phenomenon of racial "redlining," which back in the day, kept black families from being able to buy homes, and thus build generational wealth.
It's well-done:
At Drunken Stepfather, "SYDNEY SWEENEY BIKINI OF THE DAY."
BONUS: "TANLINE THURSDAY OF THE DAY," and "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."
I met Cornel West when he spoke at my college a few years ago, and while at that time I was no big fan, I gotta admit the guy's a powerful speaker with an uncanny attractiveness: Signing my book (that came with the event program, etc.), he wrote, "Brother Donald! Stay Strong!" (Photo below.)
So, while I don't agree with all his writings (nor his public statements, on Israel, in particular), he's definitely an interesting character, and it looks like he's taking a principled stand against Harvard University, since the powers-that-be there are denying him tenure. (And I guess Harvard, in fact, has not had a good record of late in granting tenure to scholars of color, so that's also interesting to me, because, I mean, c'mon, Harvard?!!)
In any case, RTWT, at the Boston Globe, "Cornel West threatens to leave Harvard again."
His farewell speech in the U.S. Senate is here.
He wasn't the greatest presidential candidate, obviously, but he's a true patriot, serving his country in WWII, where in the Italian campaign he took German machine gun fire in the Apennine mountains near Castel d'Aiano, southwest of Bologna. His personal recovery from his injuries was apparently miraculous, and his physician was a Holocaust survivor who helped him develop an outlook on loss and recovery after such great personal sacrifice.
He's got stage 4 lung cancer, which is what killed Rush Limbaugh yesterday, so it's pretty clear that Dole, who is 97-years-old, has got a tough battle ahead.
Prayers up.
More at MSNBC:
At Fox News, via Memeorandum.
The surprising thing is Senator Cruz is a really smart guy, so this "vacation" to Cancun was a huge "own goal" on his part.
And, while I haven't seen them, apparently some "top" conservatives on Twitter have been defending the Texas senator, for behavior that is political indefensible.
Not me.
I like Ted Cruz, but he's failing his constituents by taking "his children" on vacation, away from the state's weather disaster, while Texas residents are literally freezing to death.
Following-up from yesterday, "Global Warming is Man-Made," the Wall Street Journal comes back with a humdinger of an editorial.
While millions of Texans remain without power for a third day, the wind industry and its advocates are spinning a fable that gas, coal and nuclear plants—not their frozen turbines—are to blame. PolitiFact proclaims “Natural gas, not wind turbines, main driver of Texas power shortage.” Climate-change conformity is hard for the media to resist, but we don’t mind. So here are the facts to cut through the spin. Texas energy regulators were already warning of rolling blackouts late last week as temperatures in western Texas plunged into the 20s, causing wind turbines to freeze. Natural gas and coal-fired plants ramped up to cover the wind power shortfall as demand for electricity increased with falling temperatures. Some readers have questioned our reporting Wednesday ("The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage") that wind’s share of electricity generation in Texas plunged to 8% from 42%. How can that be, they wonder, when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) has reported that it counts on wind to meet only 10% of its winter capacity. Ercot’s disclosure is slippery. Start with the term “capacity,” which means potential maximum output. This is different than actual power generation. Texas has a total winter capacity of about 83,000 megawatts (MW) including all power sources. Total power demand and generation, however, at their peak are usually only around 57,000 MW. Regulators build slack into the system. Texas has about 30,000 MW of wind capacity, but winds aren’t constant or predictable. Winds this past month have generated between about 600 and 22,500 MW. Regulators don’t count on wind to provide much more than 10% or so of the grid’s total capacity since they can’t command turbines to increase power like they can coal and gas plants. Wind turbines at times this month have generated more than half of the Texas power generation, though this is only about a quarter of the system’s power capacity. Last week wind generation plunged as demand surged. Fossil-fuel generation increased and covered the supply gap. Thus between the mornings of Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind as a share of the state’s electricity fell to 8% from 42%, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Gas-fired plants produced 43,800 MW of power Sunday night and coal plants chipped in 10,800 MW—about two to three times what they usually generate at their peak on any given winter day—after wind power had largely vanished. In other words, gas and coal plants held up in the frosty conditions far better than wind turbines did. It wasn’t until temperatures plunged into the single digits early Monday morning that some conventional power plants including nuclear started to have problems, which was the same time that demand surged for heating. Gas plants also ran low on fuel as pipelines froze and more was diverted for heating. “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Electric Reliability Council of Texas senior director Dan Woodfin said Tuesday. The wind industry and its friends are citing this statement as exoneration. But note he used the word “today.” Most wind power had already dropped offline last week. Gas generation fell by about one-third between late Sunday night and Tuesday, but even then was running two to three times higher than usual before the Arctic blast. Gas power nearly made up for the shortfall in wind, though it wasn’t enough to cover surging demand...
Still more.
Very, very dangerous risks, as it turns out.
AUSTIN, Texas—The children played in front of four lighted gas burners in East Austin on Tuesday night as their family tried to warm up during days of subfreezing temperatures, no power, and no relief on the horizon. One-year-old Alex Johnson Jr. toddled, his brother Gabriel Brewster, 3, played with a toy, and their cousin Desiah Fisher, 6, hugged them close, as eight other family members huddled around the light of a single candle. Charlene Brewster, the mother of the boys and a 4-month-old daughter, said she knows how dangerous it is to try to heat an apartment with a gas stove. She had no option but to try it for a little while, she said. “I know carbon monoxide poisoning, but what else can we do?” said Ms. Brewster, a city of Austin crossing guard. “Is anyone going to help us? I have a baby in here.” t was a level of desperation many others in Texas had reached, days into a power grid shutdown during one of the coldest weeks in a generation. Like others across the state, Ms. Brewster’s family lost electricity—and, with it, heat—late Sunday night, before a snowstorm closed most of the city and temperatures plunged to single digits. As of midday Wednesday, officials had no estimate of when power might return. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the power grid in the state, ordered blackouts to prevent damage to the electricity system after frozen power plants and a shortfall of natural gas required to run the plants limited power production. In the public-housing complex where Ms. Brewster lives, help seemed far away. Those who risked driving were likely to meet blocked roadways or iced-over hills that many drivers couldn’t traverse. Those who called the city’s help line for transportation to an emergency warming shelter met only busy phone lines, they said. Many said they had no water or had run out of food. Most businesses had been closed all week. Daylan Cook, 18, said he had built a fire inside a ceramic pot in his apartment living room, aided by hand sanitizer and gasoline. LaShay Thomas, 34, said she had developed a migraine headache from fumes and had begged neighbors to turn gas burners off, despite the vicious cold. City officials urged residents not to resort to dangerous measures for heat. The Austin Fire Department reported responding to fires at several houses that likely began in fireplaces and to several toxic-exposure calls from residents using charcoal in their homes. The local emergency medical services department said it had responded to 63 carbon monoxide exposure calls in 2 1/2 days. In Houston, the local public health authority said the city was seeing record numbers of carbon monoxide poisonings, including at least two deaths. Sharice Owens and Tosha Henderson, who are sisters, said they had tried to build a fire in Ms. Henderson’s home, but it quickly got too smoky for Ms. Owens’s three young children. They huddled instead under blankets in Ms. Owens’s apartment, where the kids, ages 4, 5, and 13, begged for warmth and food that the family had no way to cook. “There’s only so much heat you can generate,” Ms. Henderson said. “It was 10 degrees. There’s only so many covers you can use. We were told there were supposed to be power rotations.”
This seems, how do you say? Criminal?
I mean, Texas is a G.O.P. state, and the leadership there can't keep the lights on (or homes warm).
And this related story is practically killing me, "Texas mayor resigns after telling residents without power ‘only the strong will survive’."
I get it: Buckle up, pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, blah, blah. I think the mayor might need a lesson in conservative principles: Government is supposed to be there when all else fails, as the protector of citizens who, through no fault of their own, are left literally powerless, hungry, and in some cases dead.
Again, if this ain't criminality, I don't know what is. Save the "rugged individualism" for the days when the state government hasn't f*cked over the population so horribly.
The interesting thing about this pre-announcement, which I saw earlier on Twitter, is how exactly the ratings jump for Carlson's show is what I'd been predicting in some of my blog posts here.
Fox News is clearly set to invest much more in programming involving Tucker, and while I do like Ingraham (and to some extent Hannity), Tucker is "must-watch" TV for me every evening at 5:00pm Pacific time.
So, if you're not checking out Tucker, what are you waiting for?!!
Tucker Carlson Tonight is one of the top-rated shows in the history of cable news. According to Nielsen Media Research, the program averaged 3.6 million viewers last month, and 653,000 in the younger Adults 25-54 demo, topping both CNN and MSNBC by double-digits in overall viewers. Recently, the show notched the highest-rated monthly viewership of any cable news program in history, with 5.4 million viewers. It has been number one in the 8 PM/ET time slot for 46 consecutive months with total viewers. Carlson has also eclipsed broadcast network programming since Memorial Day of last year. In 2020, he made history by hosting one of the two FNC shows ever to average more than 4 million viewers a night. Since moving to 8 PM/ET, Tucker Carlson Tonight has significantly improved performance in the time slot, which was previously held by The O’Reilly Factor. Carlson’s audience has grown by nearly 35 percent in total viewers, and more than 40 percent in the key Adults 25-54 demo.One thing I've noted, for example, when I've posted videos of Tucker, is how totally hilarious he is. I can't stop laughing sometimes while watching, and my wife loves him too. So, have a great evening, as I'm about ready to flick on Fox News right now.Check back here later for more excellent blog content, and thanks for checking out my blog.
I watched parts of China Joe's "CNN Town Hall" (love-fest), and I thought his response on the student loan question was a disaster. Now, it's not that he didn't address it; he did. But Biden said he'd only go as high as $10,000, and obviously those idiot young people taking out hundreds of thousands in student loans, and who are clearly expecting a big "pay-off," in the literal sense of the federal government "forgiving" the student loans that no one forced them to take, aren't too pleased about it.
Now, this Briahna Joy Gray lady, a former Bernie spokeswoman, has some thoughts, and they're delivered in that tricky leftist kinda way, in which debt forgiveness is really about "alleviating" poverty. Shoot, we can straight-up alleviate poverty by just sending everybody a check --- and I mean everybody, like my 25-year-old son, who himself is taking out loans for college. So, what to do? Hey, if Biden caves to the progressive's debt-forgiveness crap, is he going to make that forgiveness retroactive? Because I'm still paying down the $70,000 or so I borrowed for my Ph.D. program. And while I'm not "poor," I could sure use the money, just like all those idiots youngsters taking out loans for their worthless "gender studies" degrees.
Watch, at the "Rising," with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti:
At Fox News, via Mediagazer (with all its links to Twitter commentary on the "Great One's" death), "Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer."
Indeed, Nicole Hemmer, the author of Messengers of the Right, has a great thread hereself, here: "Rush Limbaugh radically transformed the Republican Party. He elevated conservative media into a coequal branch of party politics, and pioneered a style of rhetoric, argument, and entertainment that would come to define conservative politics.... The things we now think of as particularly Trumpian features of conservatism — the insults, the conspiracies, the blend of entertainment and politics and anger — Limbaugh had been doing it for a quarter-century before Trump showed up to the party."
And see the obligatory leftist grave-dancing, at Twitchy, "‘I’m glad he’s dead’: ‘Rest in piss’ trends as compassionate, tolerant liberals dance on Rush Limbaugh’s grave."
In light of today's postings, "Totally Predictable: Unlike the Texas Energy Grid, the Insane Left's Response to Power Outrage is Straight Outta the 'Climate Change' Playbook," and "California's Dumb Democrats Introduce Bill to Ban Fracking by 2027," I'm re-upping this graphic from back in the day, which appeared originally at the "People's Cube," from the Obama days of yore, heh.
I guess the folks over at the Bulwark ran out of Lincoln Project sexual predator-enablers to post their "Never Trump" crap at their crappy "Never Trump" website.
So now they're going with Joe Klein? Joe Klein, really? I haven't heard a peep outta that guy, since, I don't know, I saw "Primary Colors" in theaters?
But here he is, at the bullsh*t Bulwark, and whether he's hip to the ignominious origins of that foul outlet is anyone's guess, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
He's blathering on about "unity," as if such a touchy-feely notion's gonna fix one iota of our entrenched mutual partisan hatred and polarization in this country, a hatred that's actually gotten worse since the new "unity" president (China Joe Biden) was elected.
See, "What We Mean When We Talk About 'Unity'":
It’s not about voting on a policy. It’s about fighting the insurgents trying to destroy our democracy.
Sure Joe. Who cares about "voting on policy" when you've got a majority party now in Washington filled with demonic Democrats located far to the left of Castro's Cuba.
Brilliant!
Following-up, "Totally Predictable: Unlike the Texas Energy Grid, the Insane Left's Response to Power Outrage is Straight Outta the 'Climate Change' Playbook."
Officials in Texas obviously screwed up, and no doubt a lot of those official are dolts, and mindbogglingly, some of these ERCOT Einsteins live out of state!
But never fear! Here comes the dumbf*ck Democrats of California to the rescue, blasting out of the gate to claim the prize for the most idiotic response to the "climate emergency," and we're not even freezing here, in this once-"Golden State." *Eyes rolling out of my eye sockets!*
And wouldn't you know it, the biggest stupidity prizewinner is Senator Scott Wiener, "Dolt" from San Francisco. Wiener, if you happen to know, is the author of state legislation a few years back that decriminalized deliberately infecting others with HIV, so if someone was a rampant and promiscuous gay sex addict, hey, buddy, you're off the hook! Infect and kill as many unsuspecting people as you can! We'll look the other way, and say, "It's all good!"
And Wiener has tried for years, and failed miserably, to get the state legislature to pass laws that would actually BAN housing developments outside of the big urban areas, like, you guessed it, San Francisco. Thank goodness brighter minds prevailed, or more powerful lobbying groups, or whatever, because the one thing this state needs to fix our problems --- like the state's exorbitant housing costs and the dearth of high-paying jobs OUTSIDE of the big coastal enclaves --- is MORE residential (and commercial) development in the more sparsely populated parts of California. Duh.
So, no, I'm not letting up on Texas' stupid state leaders, but California's idiocy is truly hard to beat!
See, at the Sacramento Bee, "Citing climate emergency, California Democrats introduce a bill to ban fracking by 2027":
California would ban hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, by 2027, under a bill introduced in the State Senate on Wednesday. The bill, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Sen. Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, also would prohibit the issuance of new permits for fracking, acid well stimulation treatments, cyclic steaming and water and steam flooding beginning in 2022. In addition, the bill would prevent new or modified permits for oil and gas production from operating within 2,500 feet of homes, schools, health care facilities or long-term care institutions by 2022...
California's cult of Democrat warmists won't stop, of course, so even if yesterday's bill fails, one way or another these clueless leftists will indeed get more bans passed to limit the use of fossil fuels in the state.
And sure, look at Texas and their rolling blackouts in the literally "once in a century" arctic freeze. But here in California, we're basically one big desert with some nice, Mediterranean weather on the coasts. (Santa Barbara is literally heavenly, but even back in the 1990s, "no-growth" leftists dominated the county's policy-making, and it wasn't until 1999 that local leaders approved permits for a Costco wholesales store to go ahead and build a warehouse.) *My eyes are still stuck in the back of my head from those eye-rolls back in the day.*
Keep in mind, we very often get rolling blackouts in the SUMMER, because of course people want to pump their air-conditioners. So, just wait: Idiots like Scott Wiener will probably try to ban the "cooling stations" set up every summer, so folks --- especially elderly folks --- can go somewhere and get into the cool shade. *I can't even sometimes, sheesh.*
But what can you do? Move? I would, but I'm stuck here in this la-la land of loony leftists until I retire, which won't be for another 10 years or so. Then what, move to Texas? Oh brother, hopefully folks down in Austin get their act together. In fact, if folks like Ron DeSantis are still running things in the "Sunshine State," maybe I'll move to Tampa Bay, heh.
