Nine-Hundred U.S. Troops Still Deployed to Syria. Oh. Why? And Who Lied About It?

At LAT, surprisingly, "Inside U.S. troops’ stronghold in Syria, a question of how long Biden will keep them there":

KHSHAM, Syria — At a makeshift military outpost abutting a natural gas field in eastern Syria, the signs of the country’s violent upheaval are everywhere. Bombed-out concrete buildings lie in ruins. The pipes that once carried liquefied natural gas are shredded and twisted. A tattered U.S. flag strung between 40-foot-tall gas processing towers flies high over the base, a visible symbol that American troops are here — and not planning on leaving soon.

“We’ve got the flagpole planted,” said Army Lt. Alan Favalora, a Louisiana National Guard soldier at Conoco, the name the base acquired from the long- departed U.S. oil and gas firm that once operated the wells. “We want them to know we are committed to this region.”

How committed President Biden will be to keeping troops in Syria is uncertain, however.

The Biden administration does not appear to be in any rush to pull out the 900 U.S. troops who remain in the country, a relatively small force that some White House officials see as key to preventing a resurgence of Islamic State and a rush to reclaim the area’s oil fields by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies.

But White House officials have said they are reviewing the troop presence in Syria — an announcement that has raised concerns that Biden could reconsider the deployment as part of a larger scaling back of U.S. troops in the Middle East and a planned shift of Pentagon focus to Asia.

What Biden is going to do “is the one question I got from everybody,” Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in an interview after visiting eastern Syria on Friday. “I think the new administration is going to look at this, and then we’re going to get guidance.”

Robert Ford, who was an ambassador to Syria during the Obama administration, called the U.S. strategy “deeply flawed” and said Biden should withdraw the remaining troops who have helped the Syrian Democratic Forces — a Kurdish-led militia — carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast.

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” Ford said about the American deployment in an interview. Islamic State “is largely contained and not in a position to threaten the U.S. homeland or even to send fighters to Europe.”

The Arab population in northeastern Syria initially supported Kurdish militias’ efforts to oust Islamic State. But many Arabs now resent being under the Kurds’ governance, creating a new source of recruits as Islamic State tries to recover, Ford added...

Well, of course Biden's policy is "deeply flawed," because his foreign policy advice has been "deeply flawed" all around, particularly during the Obama administration, when the "red line" fiasco basically put Russia in the driver's seat, giving that neo-imperialist power strategic advantage, of which it hasn't wasted, to the disadvantage of U.S. interests. Now Biden's just trying to salvage his own reckless legacy and save whatever loss of face he can for all the f*cked up Democrat foreign policy fiascos. These people are liars and hacks. 

Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse (VIDEO)

 A great piece, from the fearless Gleen Greenwald, at his Substack page:

The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office...

Still more.

And at Hot Air, "Glenn Greenwald’s Insightful Take on the Taylor Lorenz Situation."

The Sovietization of the American Press

A great piece, from the surprisingly amazing Matt Taibbi, at his Substack page:

I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

— Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

— Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

— Biden's historic victory for America

The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:

Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”:

It doesn’t take much looking to find comedians like James Adomian and Anthony Atamaniuk ab-libbing riffs on Biden with ease. He checks almost every box as a comic subject, saying inappropriate things, engaging in wacky Inspector Clouseau-style physical stunts (like biting his wife’s finger), and switching back and forth between outbursts of splenetic certainty and total cluelessness. The parody doesn’t even have to be mean — you could make it endearing cluelessness. But to say nothing’s there to work with is bananas.

The first 50 days of Biden’s administration have been a surprise on multiple fronts. The breadth of his stimulus suggests a real change from the Obama years, while hints that this administration wants to pick a unionization fight with Amazon go against every tendency of Clintonian politics. But it’s hard to know what much of it means, because coverage of Biden increasingly resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions.

When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the “cost” of “breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies” was too high, the New York Times headline read: “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach.” When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties because “the world is a very dangerous place” and “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.

“In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.”

This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.

The old con of the Manufacturing Consent era of media was a phony show of bipartisanship. Legitimate opinion was depicted as a spectrum stretching all the way from “moderate” Democrats (often depicted as more correct on social issues) to “moderate” Republicans (whose views on the economy or war were often depicted as more realistic). That propaganda trick involved constantly narrowing the debate to a little slice of the Venn diagram between two established parties. Did we need to invade Iraq right away to stay safe, as Republicans contended, or should we wait until inspectors finished their work and then invade, as Democrats insisted?

The new, cleaved media landscape advances the same tiny intersection of elite opinion, except in the post-Trump era, that strip fits inside one party. Instead of appearing as props in a phony rendering of objectivity, Republicans in basically all non-Fox media have been moved off the legitimacy spectrum, and appear as foils only. Allowable opinion is now depicted stretching all the way from one brand of “moderate” Democrat to another...

Keep reading.

 

Alex Marlow, Breaking the News

At Amazon, Alex Marlow, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. 

The Los Angeles Times Hails Biden as the New 'F.D.R.'; Meanwhile, 'China Joe' Lies About His Administration's Vaccine Rollout (VIDEO)

Again, you have to go to Duck Duck Go to find any decent conservative videos, especially for Tucker Carlson (and I don't know why Fox doesn't upload more of them, except to say, maybe they're afraid they'll lose even more audience share, despite Tucker's continuing killer ratings metrics). 

And if you missed it, you gotta watch Tucker's interview with Alex Berenson from Wednesday night, which was just amazing, "Tucker Carlson Tonight 2-10-21 Alex Berenson."

But don't miss it! The Los Angeles Times has found its new "New Dealer" in the 78-year-old mumbo-jumbo "China Joe."

See, "Biden’s early win on COVID-19 relief could be hard to repeat. Or he could be FDR":

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s first big legislative victory, the $1.9-trillion package he calls the American Rescue Plan, squeaked through an evenly divided Senate by the narrowest of margins, along party lines, foreshadowing the challenges ahead for his other priorities — on infrastructure, voting rights, immigration and climate change.

But the accomplishment — and the potential economic and public health impact of the wide-ranging relief program — could also mark a big step toward Biden fulfilling his Rooseveltian ambitions.

“This is going to be the biggest legislation affecting social and economic justice in decades, and it’s been achieved in the early days of an administration,” said Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic operative.

Building on this early success won’t be easy, given Democrats’ razor-thin Senate and House majorities and the nation’s deep partisan divisions. Few of the president’s other policy initiatives are likely to be as broadly popular as combating a painful year-old pandemic. But his first 50 days have given Democrats reason to believe that the experienced, grandfatherly Biden is well-suited to capitalize on the opportunities opened up by the confluence of twin health and economic crises and a divided, distracted opposition party.

“He’s been underestimated all along ... and then he pulled off the biggest popular vote defeat of an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover lost in 1932,” said Shrum. “Nobody would have predicted this, but Biden’s not on a path to being a transitional figure. He’s on a path to being a transformational figure.”

With Republicans failing to mount a blitz against him, Biden kept his focus on his pandemic response. He amped up vaccination efforts, mourned the more than 529,000 Americans killed by COVID-19, and built public support for his relief bill, much of which — direct payments, extended unemployment benefits, a child tax credit — is targeted toward the country’s neediest families.

The fact that not a single Republican voted for the package belied its broad popularity, which Biden said was critical for passage. In a poll released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 70% of Americans surveyed said they supported the proposal, including 41% of Republicans. And Biden, set to deliver a prime-time address Thursday to mark one year since the country first locked down to limit the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID, continues to earn high marks for his response.

“He just seems like the right person at the right time, and this is a totally unprecedented time,” said Mack McLarty, President Clinton’s first chief of staff. “He’s very self-aware, and after being vice president and serving in the Senate, he’s at a different place in his life and career. He’s very secure in himself; he’s experienced loss and that’s shaped him.

“He’s been decisive and bold, but in a very statesmanlike manner,” McLarty continued. “So far, it’s been effective.”

Republican strategist Mike DuHaime said Biden benefits from the low bar Donald Trump set by his outlandish conduct as president.

“It’s a very basic level of competency and a lack of controversy,” DuHaime said of Biden. “Just by being boring, he is clearing the bar.”

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher said Biden also benefits from “being an old white guy.”

Belcher, who is Black, added: “It’s hard for Republicans to scare middle-of-the-road Republicans about Joe Biden.... But he’s also someone minorities have rallied around. And that makes for a combination we don’t see very often in our politics.”

Biden and Democrats have been guided by hindsight and an oft-avowed determination not to repeat perceived mistakes from President Obama’s first year by going too small on a recovery package, waiting too long for Republican support, or failing to tout its benefits.

The example of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has also been influential for Biden and his team. Chief of Staff Ron Klain and other senior aides made a point of studying FDR’s Depression-era presidency during the transition period, and Biden hung his portrait in the Oval Office.

But past experience is only so helpful.

“It’s good to learn from the past. It’s more important to recognize changed circumstances when you’re in the moment,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who was a communications director for Obama. “The Biden team, as much as they’re relying on their experience, they’re seeing and appreciating that they’re in uncharted territory.”

Many senior aides, Palmieri noted, are on their third tour of duty at the White House after serving Presidents Clinton and Obama.

“You learn to trust your instincts,” she said. “And you come to know that to some degree, you’re damned [politically] if you do and if you don’t. So it becomes: Position yourself to actually solve the problems.”

When Biden and his aides began sketching out a relief bill before the inauguration, they didn’t start with a price tag. “We spent weeks assessing and analyzing what more the federal government could do to meet this challenge more effectively, more aggressively and more forcefully,” said Biden counselor Steve Ricchetti. “The total number and nature of the package reflected that analysis. The president had assessed that this was what was needed to address the crisis.”

Biden never budged from the $1.9-trillion bottom line, arguing that Obama’s 2009 stimulus package suggested the greater risk was spending too little. Emboldened by two Senate victories on Jan. 5 in Georgia, where the Democratic candidates won after campaigning for larger relief payments, Biden also refused to reduce the $1,400 provided for most Americans in the bill.

Once the Georgia elections suddenly put Democrats in control of the Senate, they could use a procedural option for budget bills, known as reconciliation, to pass the measure with just 50 votes — without Republican support.

Biden, who spent 36 years in the Senate, leveraged his relationships with lawmakers in both parties. He was unsuccessful in cajoling moderate Republicans, but helped negotiate a last-minute compromise on unemployment benefits to secure the decisive 50th vote from centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.

The victory unified a Democratic caucus that had been divided over parts of the bill, in particular over a minimum wage increase that was ultimately removed on procedural grounds...

I should say, I hope the authors of this piece, Eli Stokols and Chris Megerian, had an extra set of clothes handy, after obviously drooling all over themselves while writing-up this hasty hagiography. (*Eye-roll.*)

The Nuking of the American Nuclear Family

I should also be blogging Michelle Malkin more often, but, as noted, my blogging's been light of late, due to big family and work responsibilities. 

That said, I should have more "hotties" posted over the weekend.

Anyway, at the Unz Review:

“Gay poly throuple makes history, lists 3 dads on a birth certificate.”

That’s an actual headline from The New York Post, which last week featured an unsettling trio of men who recruited two female friends to help them conceive and deliver a baby girl named Piper.

Piper is now 3 years old and has a 1-year-old brother named Parker. According to the “gay poly throuple,” Piper told her preschool classmates how proud she was of her plentiful progenitors by bragging: “You have two parents. I have three parents.”

Actually, the “throuple” is really a quintet. If you count Piper’s egg donor and birth surrogate, we’ve now traveled from “Heather Has Two Mommies” (the infamous children’s book normalizing same-sex adoptions published in 1989) to “Piper Has Five Parents.” And in 2021, if you have any discomfort or reservations at all about the nuking of the nuclear family by throuples or quadrouples or dozenouples, then woke society tells us there’s something wrong with us, not them.

Dr. Ian Jenkins, one of Piper’s polyamorous pops, wrote in a newly released book about their “adventures in modern parenting” that the arrangement is “just not a big deal.” Nothing to see here, move along. Two, three, whatever. “Some people seem to think it’s about a ton of sex or something,” Jenkins complained, “or we’re unstable and must do crazy things. (But) it’s really remarkably ordinary and domestic in our house and definitely not ‘Tiger King’ (the creepy Netflix hit series about convicted murder-for-hire zookeeper Joe Exotic, who headed up a three-way “marriage to two men).

Weirdly, one of Piper’s other dads, Jeremy, is also a zookeeper like Joe Exotic whom the other two met through an online dating service. All very “remarkably ordinary and domestic.” Ho-hum.

Neighborhoods, cities and nations are safer, healthier and more prosperous where nuclear families are the norm. But for the sake of social justice and modern progressivism, we are all just supposed to shake our heads politely and keep our alarm about the sexual slippery slope to ourselves. As University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox summarized in a 2020 article reviewing the benefits of two-parent married households for The Atlantic magazine, “sadly, adults who are unrelated to children are much more likely to abuse or neglect them than their own parents are.”

Never mind all the scientific studies showing an elevated risk of child sexual abuse in households where children live with unrelated adults. Never mind the CDC data showing that introducing men unrelated to the children in a family elevates the risk of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of those children by about nine times higher than the rate experienced by children raised in normal, stable nuclear family of married biological parents and their children...

Still more.

 

Friday Afternoon Women

Well, this young little tasty-tart looks a bit like Olivia Jade Giannulli, although one hopes she's nowhere near as much a narcissistic numbskull.

Via Rad Chicks, and more totties here and here.

Rachel Maddow Breaks Silence on Despicable New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Following-up, "Governor Andrew Cuomo Says He Won't Bow to 'Cancel Culture'."

Well, while New York Dems nearly across the board have abandoned to serial sexual harasser (and groper) Andrew Cuomo, no fear! MSNBC hasn't uploaded Rachel Maddow's rant against Cuomo from last night, and!, both Google and Twitter have buried any search results even pointing you anywhere near Maddow's segments; so no doubt, Creepy Cuomo's still got a little mojo with Big Tech's totalitarians.

I did find this, the first result, at Duck Duck Go, which is actually pretty amazing.

At Fox News "Rachel Maddow breaks silence on Cuomo, warns MSNBC viewers his scandals are 'developing by the second'":

The liberal star referred to the governor's growing political woes as 'quite dramatic'.

MSNBC star Rachel Maddow addressed the growing scandals plaguing Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the first time since his political woes began six weeks ago.

While her primetime colleagues Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell similarly waited weeks before finally acknowledging the controversies surrounding the embattled governor, Maddow shocked her viewers Thursday night with an "impeachment inquiry" graphic that loomed over an image of Cuomo.

After taking an audibly deep breath, Maddow began detailing the "dramatic turn" that took place amid the "rising scandals," laying out the sexual misconduct allegations that have surfaced in recent weeks and how an impeachment investigation is being launched by Democratic lawmakers that is set to look into the alleged coverup of nursing home deaths by the governor's administration.

"Now, impeachment at the state level works basically the same way that it does at the federal level," Maddow explained to viewers. "If the Assembly were ultimately to vote to impeach Governor Cuomo, the next step is he would then be tried in the state Senate. Well, as of tonight, roughly two-thirds of the senators in the New York state Senate have already called on Governor Cuomo to step down, including the Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins."

Unlike her CNN rivals, Maddow did mention Cuomo's sixth accuser, a former aide who according to the Albany Times-Union newspaper said the governor groped her late last year at the Executive Mansion. Cuomo denies her claims but called them "gut-wrenching."

MSNBC's most-watched host concluded the segment by offering a warning to her viewers that Cuomo's troubles were far from over.

"This story is developing by the second. Some of these latest developments, quite dramatic. Watch this space," Maddow said.

Prior to "The Rachel Maddow Show," MSNBC offered minimal coverage of the groping allegation on Thursday, giving it only brief coverage in the network's 5 a.m. and 4 p.m. timeslots...

Naturally (*Sigh.*)

 

Governor Andrew Cuomo Says He Won't Bow to 'Cancel Culture'

What a f*cking arrogant, pissant, goober creep. Gawd, this man is indeed the worst governor I can remember in my lifetime, and that's saying a lot, given California's stream of dumb leftist governors over decades, including "Arnold."

"Cancel culture" for you, but not for me, the asshole. 

At NYT, "Cuomo Says He Won’t Bow to ‘Cancel Culture’ and Rejects Calls to Resign":

Nearly all of the Democrats in New York’s congressional delegation, including Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, say that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has lost the ability to govern.

A raft of powerful Democratic members of New York’s congressional delegation, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jerrold Nadler, called on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to resign on Friday, saying Mr. Cuomo had lost the capacity to govern amid a series of multiplying scandals.

“Governor Cuomo has lost the confidence of the people of New York,” said Mr. Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the highest-ranking members of Congress. “Governor Cuomo must resign.”

Mr. Cuomo immediately rejected the calls for him to step down, telling reporters at a quickly convened news conference that he would not resign or bow to “cancel culture.” He also denied ever abusing and harassing anyone.

“I did not do what has been alleged, period,” Mr. Cuomo said.

The calls for his resignation, which came in rapid succession and appeared to be a coordinated message, were the sharpest rebuke yet of Mr. Cuomo from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party.

A least 13 House Democrats from New York said Friday that Mr. Cuomo should leave office following a string of sexual harassment allegations and controversy over his administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic. Another House Democrat, Kathleen Rice of Long Island, had previously called on Mr. Cuomo to resign.

In remarks to reporters, Mr. Cuomo reiterated that he respected the right of women to speak out, but suggested that some of the accusations may have been ill-motivated and had to be thoroughly investigated.

He said that politicians who had called for his resignation without knowing the facts were “reckless and dangerous.”

“The people of New York should not have confidence in a politician who takes a position without knowing any facts and substance,” he said, adding that “politicians take positions for all sorts of reasons, including political expediency.” He added that “part of this is that I’m not part of the political club.”

“And you know what?” he said. “I’m proud of it.”

President Biden and Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York have not called on Mr. Cuomo to step down, instead reiterating their support of an independent investigation into the sexual harassment claims overseen by the state attorney general, Letitia James. That investigation, conducted by two outside lawyers deputized by Ms. James, began this week...

More at that top link.

 

Piers Morgan Should Be an Inspiration for Us All (VIDEO)

I wish I had the entire show from last night's Tucker Carlson. Half the time I can't stop laughing, especially during his takedown of NYT's fake-journalist and online teen stalker, Taylor Lorenz, to say nothing of the footage of CNN's Brian Stelter broadcasting a segment in his underwear. Just great stuff. 

In any case, Piers Morgan walked off the set at his morning show, "Good Morning Britain," and he demonstrated genuine courage and principles for standing up for his opinions, and refusing to be bullied.

Very good segment:

The Miseducation of America's Elites

Dear readers, my apologies for the light blogging. I'm hitting "crunch time" this week in my "online remote" classes, and I just started a "late-start" class this week (which is a 12-week class, rather than the normal 16-week class, which is a "regular" course in a "normal" semester).

Also, family duties take up a lot of time, especially with my 19-year-old son, who is "on the spectrum," that is, he has "autism spectrum disorder," and while he's "high-functioning," he takes a lot of time to manage, and even as this post goes live, I've still got to help him "settle down" and get to sleep, or he'll be one cranky mofo in the morning, who is hella hard to wake up, lol.

Anyway, just read this fabulous piece by the wonderful Bari Weiss, at City Journal, "Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret."

If you're like me, you'll actually get a good giggle out of it, although it's "comic relief," for the actual fear that many folks have, parents and students, of speaking out against "woke" culture, is in fact depressing. That said, Ms. Weiss is now a leader in the counterrevolution that's been taking place, pushing back, and hard, against leftist ideological totalitarians.

So, again, sorry for missing yesterday's blogging, and again, thank you for reading the blog, and also thanks very much if you've purchased books and things through my Amazon links.

Check back tomorrow, and I promise to try to get a bit more "hot" content posted.

Liz Posner 'Was a Well-Meaning WHITE Teacher,' Except She Wasn't a 'Teacher' at All

I should be reading and posting Ann Althouse more often, because she's still one of the very best writers still "blogging" today. 

"Exhibit A" is her post from the other day, "'Black children suffer disproportionately from 'zero tolerance' disciplinary policies under which they are suspended and expelled....'"

You gotta read the whole thing, but it turns out this white "teacher" who authored an op-ed at the Washington Post, entitled, "I was a well-meaning White teacher. But my harsh discipline harmed Black kids," in fact wasn't a teacher at all. As Althouse writes:

The most up-voted comment says: "She was not a teacher. A 'Teach for America'-er. Didn't train to be a teacher. Didn't plan to be a teacher. Planned always to be a writer. Decided to swoop in and save the poor underprivileged children. For two whole years. And, uh, write about it. Not using them at all...."

Posner's own webpage supports that factual assertion: "Liz is a lifelong writer, editor and advocate for social justice. She writes frequently about feminism, education, and justice issues for various publications. While working as a high school Spanish instructor with Teach for America in Memphis, Tennessee, she wrote a novel about low-income students and teachers. As a a writer and editor, she is dedicated to amplifying the voices of marginalized people everywhere.... Liz has known she was destined for a writing career since the 5th grade...."

More at that top link. 

This movement towards "antiracist" ideology (and this bogus idea of "white fragility," which holds that white's feel "discomfort" in discussing race because they're "fragile," and they're actually really racist if race isn't the most important topic of their day) is killing this country. 

I can only shake my darned head, because I have to deal with this idiotic ideological baloney at my college. And while I do try to be fair and "equitable" in my teaching (which in fact translates into lowering standards and ignoring massive disciplinary problems in face-to-face, in-class instruction), as much as I might disagree, sometimes you just have to go with the flow --- especially, if you need to keep you job. 

David Shambaugh, Where Great Powers Meet

David Shambaugh, Where Great Powers Meet: America and China in Southeast Asia.

MacKenzie Scott (Bezos) Marries Seattle Private School Teacher

Talk about "lifestyles of the rich and famous."

I mentioned this piece earlier to my wife and I erroneously suggested that the ex-Mrs. Bezos got "$4 billion" out of her marriage settlement, but I must have been confused the the amount of money she's already given away, which is indeed $4 billion --- and she's only got $53 billion to go!

Must be nice. I mean, I think my wife and I would be fine with a cool billion, lol.

In any case, she's a likable lady, from what little I've seen of her on TV, and she's still relatively young. Now, marrying a "private school teacher" is kinda funny to me, especially since the guy sounds like a kooky "Seattle socialist," ready to "spread" his new wife's wealth. I doubt, in any case, they'll be living in poverty-level accommodations, so, yeah, a life of "privilege" has its perks. *Eye-roll.*

At WSJ, "Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, Ex-Wife of Jeff Bezos, Marries Seattle School Teacher":

MacKenzie Scott, the philanthropist formerly married to Jeff Bezos, has married again following her 2019 divorce from the Amazon.com Inc. founder, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ms. Scott, one of the world’s wealthiest women, has married Dan Jewett, a science teacher at a Seattle private school, according to the person.

Ms. Scott has devoted much of her time recently to philanthropic efforts benefiting women-led charities, food banks and Black colleges, among other institutions. Since her divorce, Ms. Scott has given away more than $4 billion of her fortune, according to a post she wrote on Medium in December.

In a post dated Saturday on Ms. Scott’s page on the Giving Pledge website, for billionaires who have promised to donate most of their fortune to philanthropic efforts, Mr. Jewett signed on to her commitment.

“It is strange to be writing a letter indicating I plan to give away the majority of my wealth during my lifetime, as I have never sought to gather the kind of wealth required to feel like saying such a thing would have particular meaning,” Mr. Jewett’s post says.

“Dan is such a great guy, and I am happy and excited for the both of them,” said Mr. Bezos in a statement provided by an Amazon spokesman.

Ms. Scott and Mr. Jewett couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Sunday...

Still more.

 

U.S. Government Scientists Skeptical of One-Shot Regimen for Pfizer, Moderna Covid Vaccines

I'm skeptical, not just of a "one-shot regimen," but any regimen with these freakin' brand new vaccines.

As far as my work goes, the college can't require employees to be vaccinated, but airlines can, and while I'm not planning on flying anytime soon, who knows? Sometimes things come up. My older sister's in Boise, and she just lost her son in January, and perhaps I'd want to fly up there to see her. I don't know? Maybe I'll just want to visit Florida sometime soon, which sounds like a fantastic sojourn to get me out of this hellhole of a state where I currently reside, even if just for a few days.

In any case, at WSJ, "Some members of Congress have urged to allow for just one dose to speed up vaccinations":

WASHINGTON—U.S. government scientists are pushing back against calls for one-dose regimens for two Covid-19 vaccines designed to be administered with two shots, saying there isn’t enough evidence that a single dose provides long-term protection.

“It is essential that these vaccines be used as authorized by FDA in order to prevent Covid-19 and related hospitalizations and death,” Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s center that oversees vaccines, told The Wall Street Journal.

The FDA late last year approved a two-dose regimen for vaccines from Moderna Inc. and from a partnership of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. More recently it approved use of a one-dose regimen for a vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.

Some scientists and lawmakers have called for shifting to a one-dose regimen for all the vaccines, citing preliminary studies showing one shot can be effective. They contend shifting to one shot will allow the U.S. to accelerate the pace of vaccinations.

In a March 2 letter to acting Health and Human Services Secretary Norris Cochran, seven physician members of Congress urged the department “to consider issuing a revised emergency use authorization as soon as possible” that might lead to single-dose use of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

“Last week, the U.S. passed a sobering milestone of over 500,000 deaths related to COVID-19,” said the letter, signed by lawmakers including Rep. Andy Harris (R, Md.) and Rep. Gregory F. Murphy, (R., N.C.). “These are staggering statistics, and anything we can do to help prevent further tragedy—to further protect the public health and safety of the American people—should be fully employed.”

In interviews, senior government scientists at the FDA and the National Institutes of Health said such a shift isn’t warranted, saying the evidence used to approve the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was based on two doses.

These scientists said one dose may offer short-term protection, but the longer-term protection is a question mark.

“You would be flying blind to just use one dose,” said one senior scientist and adviser to President Biden. “If you’re going to do something else other than follow the studies shown to the FDA, show me that this one-shot effect is durable.”

Another senior U.S. government doctor said the durability of the vaccination is especially important when more-resistant strains of Covid-19, including those from the U.K. and South Africa, are appearing in the U.S.

“We think it’s best to get people to as high a level of immunity as possible,” the doctor said.

The doctor added that the pace of vaccinations is accelerating with the recent decision by Merck & Co. to help produce the J&J vaccine.

“We’re going to have a good supply of vaccines very soon,” the doctor said...

Still more.

 

Skateboard Legend Jeff Grosso (VIDEO)

I didn't know him well. 

He was sorta crass, actually. But he was a great skater, and extremely well-loved in the skate community.

The LA. Times has a big write up, "Jeff Grosso: The life and death of skateboarding’s soul":

Jeff Grosso’s first skateboard wasn’t much.

It was a hand-me-down miniature-sized banana board he got from his mom’s boss when he was 8 years old. Even for 1977, it was antiquated, with rickety old clay wheels and worn-out bearings. Grosso barely knew how to stand on the thing, struggling to keep his balance without toppling to the ground.

But for a curious boy whose childhood home was next to a steep hill, there was an instant connection. He would sit on his back or lie flat on his stomach and let gravity take over. Every time he bombed down the street, he fell more in love with the feeling.

“Initially, it was the rush of going down a hill, and the wind in your hair,” Grosso once said. “Poetic nonsense.”

The skateboarding world looks much different now than it did then. Its ever-increasing popularity is pulling the fundamentally subversive sport into the mainstream. Formerly relegated to back alleys and sparse concrete parks, it is now set to debut on the Olympic stage during this summer’s Tokyo Games.

But somewhere at its core, the lust for that poetic nonsense remains.

No one understood it quite like Grosso.

“He was the gatekeeper to why skateboarding was cool,” said skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.

Grosso looked an unlikely figure for such a role. He didn’t have a long pro career, flaming out at the end of the 1980s, hardly spanning the decade. He battled drug addiction and suicidal depression. By his late 20s, it seemed like his life had bottomed out.

But then he rebounded, embodying the resiliency that has defined the entire history of his sport.

Grosso became an ambassador, speaking for skateboarding’s soul through his beloved “Loveletters to Skateboarding” YouTube show. He was a guardian and a helping hand to skateboarding’s newest generation.

In many ways, he was like a north star, his effervescent personality and endearing pertinacity emitting a guiding light through the sport’s most transitional times.

And when he died unexpectedly last March of an accidental drug overdose, it left a void the skateboarding world is still trying to fill.

To best understand skateboarding — its counter-culture roots, its rise to the Olympics, its helter-skelter tale of competing styles, clashing customs and self-sabotaging plot twists — it’s best to understand someone like Jeff Grosso.

Complicated. Flawed. But an authentic source of joy to the end.  

“It’s a total rush. It’s the feeling that when you go out there with your board, it’s a no-hero type of thing. And you either accomplish something or you don’t.” — Jeff Grosso, to the St. Louis Dispatch in 1986.

The rarest sight in skateboarding might be a frown.

Even after a failed trick or nasty wipeout, most skaters are wired to smile, laugh, shake off the dust, and climb back on their boards.

That carefree disposition is what initially captured Grosso’s interest. A stubborn and expressive freckle-faced kid born in Glendale in 1968, he felt like an outcast from a young age. He liked to draw, read “Lord of the Rings” and listen to punk rock. He picked contrarian arguments during conversations simply to spark a debate. And he moved around a lot as a kid: from the hillside house in Eagle Rock, to Las Vegas for a year with his mom, and then to Arcadia for the start of fifth grade.

Though he was naturally athletic, he found the structured pressure of team sports arbitrary and suffocating.

Only when he was on a skateboard did Grosso truly feel free.

“You have this culture of kids that need that,” said his mother, Rae Williams. “They need to go and do this and be creative and come up with new tricks and try different things.”

The newly opened parks soon faltered under liability issues and financial distress, and the young demographic of riders once fueling the boom grew up and moved on. By the time Grosso discovered the sport at the end of the ‘70s, only a small community of self-willed skaters remained.

“Skateboarders were very rare at that time,” said Grosso’s childhood friend Eric Nash, the only other kid at their Camino Grove Elementary School who matched Grosso’s passion for the sport. “Jeff enjoyed that rebel spirit. I think that’s who he was.”

Grosso and Nash spent almost every weekend at one of the few Southland skate parks that were left. Grosso was a perfectionist — at home he was constantly rearranging the furniture in his bedroom — and practiced for hours to perfect a trick. Skate City in Whittier became their home base, though sometimes they snuck away to more secluded spots — a cement ditch behind a church in Glendale, an empty washway nicknamed the “V bowl” in Irwindale.

One of their friends, future pro skater Lance Mountain, had a ramp in the backyard of his Alhambra home where the group would spend hours together honing their technique and embracing a recalcitrant culture few others could comprehend. “We were a bunch of nerds, we were weirdos, we were social outcasts,” Grosso said in a 2015 episode of his “Loveletters” series. “We were the people that nobody wanted to be, doing things that nobody wanted to, and that nobody understood. … We were the freaks. That’s how you rolled. That’s how it was. That’s what drew us to skateboarding.”

“The little wooden toy is a kiss and a curse. It’s everything. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to me, all rolled up into one.” — Jeff Grosso, to Juice Magazine in 2006.

Like any good parent, Williams tried to get her son to think about his future as he went through grade school. Skateboarding, she told him, “is fun and can be a pastime, but you can’t make a career out of it.”

Reliving the memory during an interview, Williams stopped herself and laughed.

“Boy, were we wrong.”

Instead, as Grosso went through his teenage years in the mid-1980s, the sport became cool again...

There's still losts more at the link.

The thing about the "counterculture" aspects of the old skating scene is certainly the punk rock and drugs --- lots of drugs. 

Three of my best friends from back in the day are dead, one from a heroin O.D. years ago, and two of my other best buddies died of drug-related illnesses more recently, especially liver disease. 

That Grosso overdosed himself is extremely sad, but not surprising at all. His death is loss for the sport, but he leaves a great legacy of commitment to the genre.

I'll leave off here with a photo of myself (below), from around 1980, at the Upland Pipeline skatepark, back when the old "pay to play" parks were the big thing. But because I had won so many amateur contests (like the one at the photo, where that "layback" finale scored well with the judges), I had an "all parks" pass to skate for free, at any SoCal skatepark; and in 1984 I turned pro for just one contest, where I was killing it in the banked slalom, but on my first run I lost control going around the third cone, and tumbled badly, breaking my wrist. I didn't quit the contest, though. I got up and completed my second run, and you only get two runs through the course, so that salvaged my self-esteem, and a few folks came up after to praise me for my hard-charging style. 

Nowadays, I still skate once in a while, most recently at the Redlands skatepark a few weeks back, although I mostly putter around the "freestyle" area, like the old man I am. 

  

So Former Governor Gina Raimondo Botched Rhode Island's Coronavirus Response, and the New York Times Shills for Her, Now That She's Joined the Biden Administration

And here I though California and New York were bad. Well, they are, but Ms. Raimondo's a genuine clown, now failing upward to a cabinet post in the Biden administration. Hopefully she'll be better than the far-left hatemonger, Neera Tanden, whose nomination for White House budget chief went down in flames, thank goodness.

Here's the Old Gray Lady, with the brazen polish-job on Ms. Raimondo's deadly record in the Ocean State. 

See, "How Rhode Island Fell to the Coronavirus":

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The numbers began ticking up in September. After a quiet summer, doctors at Rhode Island Hospital began seeing one or two patients with Covid-19 on each shift — and soon three. Then four.

Cases climbed steadily until early December, when Rhode Island earned the dubious distinction of having more cases and deaths per 100,000 people than any other state in the country. The case rate still puts it among the top five states.

Where did this tightly knit state go wrong? Former Gov. Gina Raimondo’s “pauses” on economic activity were short-lived and partial, leaving open indoor dining, shopping malls and bowling alleys. But the shutdowns were no patchier than those in many other states.

Until late summer, she was lauded for reining in the virus. Even now, few residents blame her for the bleak numbers. (Ms. Raimondo was sworn in as the secretary of commerce on Wednesday night.)

Experts point instead to myriad other factors, all of which have played out elsewhere in the country but converged into a bigger crisis here.

The fall chill sent people indoors, where risk from the virus is highest, and the holidays brought people together. Rhode Island is tiny — you can traverse it in 45 minutes. But crammed into that smallish area are a million people, for a population density second only to that of New Jersey. If everyone in the world is connected by six degrees of separation, Rhode Islanders seem to be connected by maybe two.

Central Falls, the epicenter of Rhode Island’s epidemic, has a density of 16,000 people per square mile, almost twice that of Providence. “Just imagine, 16,000 people per square mile — I mean, that’s amazing,” said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, a member of the government committee that guides Covid vaccine distribution in Rhode Island. “It doesn’t take much for the spark to create an outbreak.”

Apart from its density, Rhode Island has a high percentage of elderly residents in nursing homes, accounting for the bulk of deaths. Packed into the state are multiple urban areas — Central Falls, Pawtucket, Providence — where language barriers, mistrust and jobs have left immigrant families in multigenerational homes particularly vulnerable. The state is also home to multiple colleges that set off chains of infection in the early fall.

For months, the hospitals in Rhode Island were understaffed and overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses were trying to cope with rising caseloads, often without the protective equipment they needed, with constantly shifting guidelines and with their own resilience stretched to the limit.

Dr. Megan Ranney, a researcher and public health advocate, is also an emergency room physician at Rhode Island Hospital who has witnessed the full scope of the state’s crisis firsthand. What she saw unfold over a single shift offers a window into what happened.

Plowing Through It One day in late December, as the crisis reached new heights, Dr. Ranney girded for a long eight-hour shift. The sores behind her ears, where her glasses and the straps of the N95 and surgical masks dug in, still had not healed. But how could she complain, Dr. Ranney said, when her medical residents “eat, sleep, breathe Covid” five days a week?

The patients had it worse, she knew. Anxious and isolated, they became even more discomfited by the masked and unrecognizable doctors and nurses rushing around them. During Dr. Ranney’s shift the prior week, she had seen a broad spectrum: elderly people on a downward spiral, otherwise healthy young Latino men, Cape Verdean immigrants with limited English comprehension.

These demographics are partly what made Rhode Island particularly susceptible, said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University in Providence: “Certainly in New England, it is the poorest state — so a lot of poverty, and a lot of multigenerational poverty.”

As in most of the country, the Latino community has borne the brunt of the epidemic. In Rhode Island, Latinos have 6.7 times the risk for hospitalization and 2.5 times the risk of death, compared with white people.

In the days before her shift, Dr. Ranney had been working in a part of the hospital intended to deal with non-Covid cases. But even people with other ailments, like ankle fractures, turned out to be positive for the virus, she found.

“I never know from day to day how bad the surge will be,” she said. “I’ve just got to plow through it.”

It turned out to be an extraordinarily busy day. “The E.R. is full, the hospital is full, the intensive care unit is full,” Dr. Ranney said. “All of our units are moving as quickly as they can, but the patients keep coming in.”

Every time she took off masks during a shift, she ran the risk of contaminating herself. She had had four cups of coffee before this shift, and nothing since.

The average age of the patients that night was about 70. One elderly woman who had trouble breathing could not isolate because she lived with her children and grandchildren. At any rate, she arrived at the hospital 10 days into her illness, too late for isolation to matter.

Rhode Island’s epidemic has been disastrous for immigrant families in multigenerational households. “How do you isolate from someone when you have one bathroom?” Dr. Ranney said...

Well, I like Dr. Ranney, who appears on CNN once in a while, and who doesn't seem to have any particular partisan agenda other than promoting the best medicine to combat the pandemic.

I can't say that for former Governor Raimondo, who obviously bailed out on her "high-density" graveyard of a state. Democrats. They're despicable people.

 

'I do not like you, Mr. Joe'

Me neither.

From Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Twitter.

Saturday Women

What a lovely double-barrel set she's got there, heh.

More here and here.

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BONUS: Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal.