An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream -- and finding enormous new audiences thirsty to discuss subjects that have become taboo. Meet the Intellectual Dark Web: https://t.co/iveK9LoXPd
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 8, 2018
Are the Tsars out tonight? High in the sky the Tsars climb. For policy makers in Washington it is useful to compare two individuals who have risen in the Russian sky. On May 7, 2018 the 65 year old Vladimir V. Putin was sworn in as President of Russia for another six year term, his fourth term of office, having been elected with 77% of the vote. He was not crowned Tsar in a relatively low key ceremomy that was attended by about 6,000 including sundry personalities, Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor and critic of sanctions against Russia, Steven Seagal, Hollywood black belt in aikido and citizen of Russia since November 2016, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill who gave Putin an 18th century icon. After the inauguration ceremony the secular Putin attended a prayer service at the Cathedral of the Annunciation.More.
Vladimir Putin has been in power, as president or as prime minister since the last day of 1999. According to polls conducted by the independent Moscow Levanda Center in 2017, his popularity remains high, partly because there is no obvious alternative, no candidate from political parties, or social organizations, or trade unions, who can be regarded as a possible alternative.
Yet, Putin is not the most renowned or revered Russian. A poll in June 2017 on which Russian was the national symbol and biggest hero revealed that Joseph Stalin was the "most outstanding person in history." Stalin got 38% approval, while Putin tied with writer Alexander Pushkin at 34%. Stalin, probably seen as the hero of World War II rather than a cruel ruler, was even much more favorably regarded than Lenin, Bolshevik founder of the Soviet Union.
For the U.S. and indeed the rest of the democratic world a vital question is raised. Can Putin be seen as the heir of Stalin and the continuator of his policies? First, how to define Stalinism? Was it a perversion of the Bolshevism launched by Lenin, or was it the Revolution betrayed, or was it the embodiment of historic Russian nationalism using palatable language?
The showing recently of the black comedy film The Death of Stalin is a reminder of the crimes, the power struggles, counter plots, cult of personality, rewriting of history, the shifting truths in the Soviet Union. Central to most of that regime is the story of Stalin's reign of terror, a "total river of blood" in Leon Trotsky's words, during which more than 1.6 million party officials, military officers, intelligence agents, were murdered on fake charges of treason. In one year 1937-38, more than 700,000 were executed and millions of others were exiled or imprisoned.
It is arguable whether Stalin's brutality towards Ukraine 1932-3 can be called Holodomor, the deliberate attempt at genocide, the death of millions, some estimates go as high as seven million, of Ukrainians on ethnic grounds, and the elimination of the Ukraininan independence movement, or whether the catastophe was an act of nature, a genuine result of crop failure. Either way, it was a state engineered mass murder of the peasantry. It was part of Stalin's emphasis on the collectivization of agriculture. Every action of Stalin, other than the maintenance of his own power, was subordinated to "socialism in one country" and thus to a near permanent state of emergency. For Stalin, the Soviet Union was encircled by external enemies, and therefore a massive security organization was vital.
But Stalin's paranoia embodied internal enemies for which the main instruments were the political police and the Gulag system of forced labor camps...
Nine-year-old Addysson "Addy" Soltau became a YouTube sensation after learning to shoot three years ago. Now she's the darling of the NRA https://t.co/C46BKEDEm5 pic.twitter.com/sW3pFPTgch— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 6, 2018
The gap-toothed 9-year-old girl walked the floor of her first National Rifle Assn. convention, her blond ponytail bobbing above earrings fashioned from bullet casings.Keep reading.
When Addysson "Addy" Soltau arrived at the Smith & Wesson booth, she gravitated to a sleek silver .22 semiautomatic Victory pistol, a James Bond-style gun with a silencer attached. It was just out of reach. So her godfather lifted it from the wall and handed it to the girl, who gripped and sighted along the gun like a pro. She already shoots an M&P 15-22 rifle hanging nearby.
"That's actually your next gun," her godfather, Johnny Campos, said of the pistol. Addy gaped, overjoyed.
"Alpha Addy" became a YouTube sensation and NRA darling after she started shooting three years ago, one of many competitive girl shooters who buck not only gun culture stereotypes, but the youth-driven gun control movement that sprung up after the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., this year.
The NRA doesn't track the number of young female shooters, a spokesman said, but as the number of women with guns has grown, they are inspiring their daughters. The National Shooting Sports Foundation says there's been a 77% increase in female gun ownership since 2005, with 5.4 million women participating in target shooting.
All of the youth celebrities at this weekend's annual NRA convention in Dallas, which was expected to draw more than 80,000 people, were female. Keystone Sporting Arms, which sold the Crickett and Chipmunk starter rifles at the convention under the banner "Never too young to understand freedom," sells as many pink and turquoise guns as the traditional colors, staff said. On Sunday, families with children flocked to the Dallas convention center for NRA Youth Day.
Many who stopped at the JM4 Tactical booth where Addy was greeting fans Sunday were parents and girl shooters who recognized her from her videos. A video of her rapidly reloading at home has more than 30 million views; she has 14,000 Facebook followers, 5,600 on Instagram and nearly 300 subscribers on YouTube, where the lead video shows her target shooting to the tune of Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball."
Addy was inspired by 17-year-old Katelyn Francis, a female competitive shooter she saw featured on NRATV while her godfather was babysitting her in San Antonio. Then she found the YouTube channel of Faith and Jenna Collier, sisters in nearby Austin who were about her age, and asked if she could shoot too.
Campos, 28, a retired Marine, agreed to coach her.
"She had never been around firearms. I didn't own any. Her parents didn't. This all started because she showed an interest," he said.
Addy's parents, who work at an education company, had their doubts.
Emily Seller is some random girl showing her bush on the internet. We looked for her social media, and found nothing, but we didn’t look too hard, and I find it very hard to believe that someone going out there and putting her bush on the internet doesn’t have social media…unless she’s just so fucking hipster, she’s moved to Detroit hipster, to be an artist hipster and deleted her social media as some hipster statement, and has got herself a flip phone with no data plan….because that’s the way hipsters do it if they can’t find a long enough string to use the old can and string form of communication you know at least one unicycle riding weirdo with a waxed moustache out there uses as the only way to contact him…BONUS: "IGGY AZALEA HARD NIPPLES OF THE DAY."
“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2018
CA School mural artist says they were forced to change mural depicting an Aztec spearing Trump’s severed head because “white supremacists” complained https://t.co/wRojMKRp1A
— Amanda House (@AmandaLeeHouse) May 7, 2018
No jokes, please. We are fainting-couch feminists. https://t.co/nb0mlP5bjV
— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) May 7, 2018
Transgender Supremacy: Understanding the Ideology of a Totalitarian Menace https://t.co/5WmkzJK9DM pic.twitter.com/9wDPgcUXQ2— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) May 5, 2018
Spicy margarita time 🇲🇽♥️ @mondayswimwear pic.twitter.com/5KqthfL7kY— Natasha Oakley (@Tashoakley) May 4, 2018
Today's #BOTD is @MONDAYSWIMWEAR's most popular new print: https://t.co/0v0M71Q8vm pic.twitter.com/fZMo5aZZBY
— A Bikini A Day (@ABikiniADay) May 2, 2018
BIKINI OF THE DAY! Tash in @MONDAYSWIMWEAR https://t.co/VPXdipTL0o pic.twitter.com/elHMP7xRUT
— A Bikini A Day (@ABikiniADay) May 1, 2018
Last year, Ronan Farrow, who broke some of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault allegations in the New Yorker, approached Sevigny and asked if she’d be interviewed by him about her experiences of Hollywood. She turned him down. “I didn’t really have anything to say to him,” she says. “I’ve had experiences that are kind of common, verbal experiences, or innuendos. But I didn’t feel they offended me to such a degree that I wanted to name the names. I think they’re commonly known as assholes anyway. Do you know what I mean? I felt it would draw attention to myself, in a way. Which I know is the wrong thing to say, because we have to be vocal for people who don’t have a voice… ” She trails off, then starts up again. “For someone to say ‘What are you doing after?’ during a casting session is not so unheard of. Yeah, it shouldn’t be done and lots of girls might feel vulnerable and not know what to do in that situation. For me it was like: really?” She laughs. “I do feel like what Harvey Weinstein did compared to Al Franken [the former senator of Minnesota] – there has to be some delineation. Instead they’re all grouped together.”More.
Was she just naturally buoyant enough to push back against casual propositions?
“I think maybe growing up around some men in my life who were a little chauvinistic [helped]; I don’t know. I can’t even remember now who said it to me, but a female casting director said, in a room full of people: ‘You have to make the men want to fuck you and the women want to be you.’”
Ew.
“Yeah. I almost wish I could remember who she was. Not that I want to call her out, but I feel like that was almost more damaging in a way. To think to myself, that’s really what I have to be? And then trying to figure out how to be that. This was from a casting person who was like, this is how you’re going to get the jobs and then that permeating through how I thought about myself, and the commodity I was. That was more damaging than the guy asking me what are you doing after or saying you should take your clothes off more. Shocker.”
It makes sense that Sevigny, while sensitive to all the nuances surrounding #MeToo, held back when approached by Farrow; to be in a room with her is to be reminded that Sevigny, while friendly and charming, is a non-conformist who makes up her own mind, thinking long and hard before she answers some questions and doubling back to qualify them once she has. She is politically at odds with her family, a situation she finds depressing, but is well used to by now. Sevigny grew up in Darien, Connecticut, the US equivalent of the conservative Home Counties, but after moving to New York at 19 and falling in with a fashionable art crowd, rapidly moved away from the opinions she’d grown up around. Her family watch Fox News, she says, “which I try to zone out whenever I go home. It’s a losing battle. They’re at an age when – now it’s just the sad undercurrent of tension, and me having to block it out or ignore.”
Opinion: Marx’s apologists should be red in the face, writes @DrPaulKengor https://t.co/diNstXSF9T
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 5, 2018
May 5 marks the bicentennial of Karl Marx, who set the stage with his philosophy for the greatest ideological massacres in history. Or did he?More.
He did, but deniers still remain. “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag,” writes Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life” (1999). Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, Mr. Wheen insists, created “bastard creeds,” “wrenched out of context” from Marx’s writings.
Marx has been accused of ambiguity in his writings. That critique is often justified, but not always. In “The Communist Manifesto,” he and Friedrich Engels were quite clear that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”
“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” they wrote. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.” And this: “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”
Marx and Engels acknowledged that their views stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.” Communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things” and represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”
Toward that end, the manifesto offers a 10-point program, including “abolition of property in land,” “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” “abolition of all right of inheritance,” “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” and the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”
In a preface to their 10 points, Marx and Engels acknowledged their coercive nature: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
They were right about that. Human beings would not give up fundamental liberties without resistance. Seizing property would require a terrible fight, including the use of guns and gulags. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and a long line of revolutionaries and dictators candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary...
I interviewed 38 Obama-Trump voters. Takeaway: Most Americans are not thinking very much about politics. They have busy lives. They don't have time for Twitter. https://t.co/KAFHZqVKTB
— Sabrina Tavernise (@stavernise) May 4, 2018
RITTMAN, Ohio — In the daily race that is her life, Sharla Baker does not think about politics very much.More.
She rises early, drives to the gas station to buy coffee, feeds her baby, dresses her two other children, ages 3 and 2, and hustles them all off to day care. By 9:30 a.m. she pulls into a hair salon 45 minutes away, where she is training to be a cosmetologist. She waxes and cuts all day long, making only the money she earns in tips, which on a recent day last month was $8.41.
But Ms. Baker does vote. She picked Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012. He seemed sincere and looked like a happy family man. But most important, he was a Democrat. Her great-grandmother, who grew up poor in Pennsylvania, always said that Democrats look out for the poor people.
In 2016, though, she voted for Donald J. Trump. Yes, he was rich and seemed mean on his TV show, “The Apprentice.” But she liked how he talked about jobs and wages and people being left out of the economy.
Now, more than a year later, she is wavering.
“I voted for Trump because I wanted some change going on,” said Ms. Baker, 28. “But then again, maybe he’s going to do the wrong change.”
The swing of Obama voters to Mr. Trump proved a decisive factor in the 2016 presidential election. Of the more than 650 counties that chose Mr. Obama twice, about a third flipped to Mr. Trump. Many were in states critical to Mr. Trump’s win, like Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.
John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University, has estimated that 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Mr. Obama ended up voting for Mr. Trump. Among white voters who had never been to college, it was 22 percent.
Now, as the country lurches into another election season — this time the prize is control of Congress — a crucial question for Democrats is whether the party will be able to lure these voters back. Democrats have had some early successes. Wins in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Virginia have given Democrats hope that voters might be souring on Mr. Trump — to the point that the party might flip control of the House and possibly even the Senate. Next week’s primary races in Ohio and West Virginia, both states that went for Mr. Trump in 2016, will also serve as tests of voter enthusiasm for Democrats.
We recently asked people who cast ballots for both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump to describe how they felt about the president and the Democratic Party ahead of the midterms. In interviews with 38 voters in 14 states across four months, a clear pattern emerged. Voters said they did not like Mr. Trump as a person and did not consider themselves die-hard supporters. Some were even embarrassed by him.
But many were basically satisfied with his policies. The tax bill was mildly positive, they said. Several had a bit of extra money in their paycheck. They liked that he was trying to address illegal immigration. Only a few regretted their vote...
In the long run, democracy seems to be the best way to govern developed countries. https://t.co/5zh8R2s2hi— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) May 4, 2018
To a large degree, the shifts between democracy and authoritarianism can be explained by the extent to which people feel that their existence is secure. For most of history, survival was precarious. When food supplies rose, population levels rose with them. When food grew scarce, populations shrank. In both lean and fat times, most people lived just above the starvation level. During extreme scarcity, xenophobia was a realistic strategy: when a tribe’s territory produced just enough food to sustain it, another tribe moving in could spell death for the original inhabitants. Under these conditions, people tend to close ranks behind strong leaders, a reflex that in modern times leads to support for authoritarian, xenophobic parties.Keep reading.
In rich countries, many people after World War II grew up taking their survival for granted. They could do so thanks to unprecedented economic growth, strong welfare states, and peace between the world’s major powers. That security led to an intergenerational shift in values, as many people no longer gave top priority to economic and physical security and no longer felt as great a need to conform to group norms. Instead, they emphasized individual free choice. That sparked radical cultural changes: the rise of antiwar movements, advances in racial and gender equality, and greater tolerance of the LGBTQ community and other traditional out-groups.
Those shifts provoked a reaction among older people and those holding less secure positions in society (the less educated, the less well off) who felt threatened by the erosion of familiar values. During the past three decades, that sense of alienation has been compounded by an influx of immigrants and refugees. From 1970 to 2015, the Hispanic population of the United States rose from five percent to 18 percent. Sweden, which in 1970 was inhabited almost entirely by ethnic Swedes, now has a foreign-born population of 19 percent. Germany’s is 23 percent. And in Switzerland, it is 25 percent.
All this dislocation has polarized modern societies. Since the 1970s, surveys in the United States and other countries have revealed a split between “materialists,” who stress the need for economic and physical security, and “postmaterialists,” who take that security for granted and emphasize less tangible values.
In the U.S. component of the 2017 World Values Survey, respondents were asked a list of six questions, each of which required choosing which of two goals was most important for their country. Those who chose things such as spurring economic growth, fighting rising prices, maintaining order, and cracking down on crime were defined as materialists. By contrast, those who gave top priority to things such as protecting freedom of speech, giving people more say in important government decisions, and having greater autonomy in their own jobs were designated postmaterialists.
In recent U.S. presidential elections, this split has had a major influence on voting patterns, dwarfing the effects of other demographic traits, such as social class. Consider the 2012 election: those who gave priority to materialist values in all six of their choices were 2.2 times as likely to have voted for the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, as they were for the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, and those who gave priority to postmaterialist values in all six choices were 8.6 times as likely to have voted for Obama as they were for Romney. This relationship grew even stronger in 2016, when Trump, an openly racist, sexist, authoritarian, and xenophobic candidate, ran against Hillary Clinton, a liberal and cosmopolitan one, who was also the first woman nominated by a major party. Pure materialists were now 3.8 times as likely to vote for Trump as they were for Clinton, and pure postmaterialists were a stunning 14.3 times as likely to vote for Clinton as they were for Trump.
Economic insecurity can exacerbate these cultural pressures toward authoritarianism. In 2006, the Danish public was remarkably tolerant when protesters burned Danish embassies in several Muslim-majority countries in response to a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper. At the height of the crisis, there was no Islamophobic backlash in Denmark. The next year, the anti-Muslim Danish People’s Party won 14 percent of the vote. But in 2015, in the wake of the Great Recession, it won 21 percent, becoming Denmark’s second-largest party. A backlash against the European migrant crisis was the immediate cause of the party’s support, but rising economic insecurity strengthened the reaction...
My Wednesday column: The Redistribution of Sex, which apparently has many readers on this platform already:https://t.co/Jb9vzkngKB
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 2, 2018
Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, both writers, represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies. And they are married, having the conversation their country is not. https://t.co/uoHdp8IPIR
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) May 1, 2018
VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.Well, I'm with her, to borrow a phrase, lol.
When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.
He accuses her of forgetting history. She accuses him of obsessing with history. He calls her a racist. She calls him a national masochist.
Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, are both writers. They represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies.
And they are married.
Their marriage is exceptional, incomprehensible even, but it is also a laboratory for tolerance and a rare window into how the other side thinks. Intimately and daily, they are having the conversation their country is not.
It is a very German love story (though the couple reside in Austria, where the husband teaches), one neatly pegged to the 50th anniversary of the counterculture movement that remains a touchstone of global postwar history — and to the ascent of the counter-counterculture movement of today.
May 1968 was as important in Europe as it was in the United States, fueled similarly by a youth bulge, sexual liberation, disgust with the Vietnam War and general discontent with the era’s political establishment.
And it spawned much the same trajectory for its baby boomers, from budding student revolutionaries to button-down liberal elites.
Germany was no exception. And neither was Mr. Lethen.
A student activist at the time, Mr. Lethen toyed with Communism, rebelling against Germany’s postwar elites which, as he put it, “still stank of the Nazis” — only to become part of the country’s cultural mainstream.
Ms. Sommerfeld, a philosopher in her own right, was swept up in another countercultural movement: In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Germany, she discovered the “New Right,” the intellectual spearhead of a nationalist movement that considers Islam and globalization existential threats.
Her husband had celebrated the arrival of the refugees: “I think it is the first time in our cultural history that we have welcomed the foreign in this way,” he said.
Ms. Sommerfeld, though, felt “anxious” and “repelled.”
Today, she hopes her own fringe movement is tapping into a shifting zeitgeist that will reverberate in Germany and beyond, just as her husband’s did in its day.
“We are the megaphone of a silent majority,” she claims...
Today is May Day. "Over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims."https://t.co/kfMLXupao7
— reason (@reason) May 1, 2018
While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had equally horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world. In terms of comprehensive state control over society and suppression of civil liberties, Soviet communism fell short of the even more thoroughgoing totalitarianism of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and North Korea.
Revolution and Worse to Come https://t.co/GH9xKTzfUx via @VDHanson pic.twitter.com/V5A8yAGh0G
— National Review (@NRO) April 25, 2018
On the domestic and foreign fronts, the Trump administration has prompted economic growth and restored U.S. deterrence. Polls show increased consumer confidence, and in some, Trump himself has gained ground. Yet good news is bad news to the Resistance and its strange continued efforts to stop an elected president in a way it failed to do in the 2016 election.Still more.
Indeed, the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.
First came the failed lawsuits after the election alleging voting-machine tampering. Then there was the doomed celebrity effort to convince some state electors not to follow their constitutional duty and to deny Trump the presidency — a gambit that, had it worked, would have wrecked the Constitution. Then came the pathetic congressional boycott of the inauguration and the shrill nationwide protests against the president.
Next was the sad effort to introduce articles of impeachment. After that came weird attempts to cite Trump for violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. That puerile con was followed by plans to declare him deranged and mentally unfit so that he could be removed under the 25th Amendment. From time to time, Obama holdovers in the DOJ, National Security Council, and FBI sought to leak information, or they refused to carry out presidential orders.
As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing. State nullification is no longer neo-Confederate but an any-means-necessary progressive tool. Suing the government weekly is proof of revolutionary fides, not a waste of California’s taxpayer dollars.
Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler. So if Trump is a Hitler who gassed 6 million or a Stalin who starved 20 million, then logically Trump deserves what exactly?The book industry is doing its part. Mythographer Michael Wolff’s hearsay Fire and Fury suggested that Trump was a dangerous child despised as much by his friends as by his enemies. As FBI director, James Comey leaked confidential memos, lied to Congress, misled a FISA court, admitted that he based his handling of the Clinton-email investigation on the assumption she’d win the presidency, misinformed the president about the status of his investigation. And the now-former director book-tours the country slamming Trump hourly on the assumption that he would certainly not be former, if only his prior obsequious efforts to appease Trump had saved his job. Comey is building perjury cases against himself daily with each new disclosure that belie past sworn testimonies, but that is apparently less scary to him than simply ignoring Trump.
Robert Mueller and his “dream team” were long ago supposed to have discovered proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia. A year later, they have found nothing much to do with this mandate. Then the alternative scent was obstruction of justice. Then the chase took another detour to follow some sort of fraud or racketeering. Now the FBI is reduced to raiding Trump’s lawyer in an effort to root out the real story on Stormy Daniels. One wonders what might have happened had Michael Cohen panicked and destroyed 30,000 emails before Mueller seized his computers. No matter, Mueller’s legal army presses on, even as it leaves its own wounded on the battlefield, as resignations, reassignments, and retirements for improper conduct decimate the Obama-era FBI and DOJ hierarchies....
Trump has left the intelligence community unhinged....
Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.
Trump has left the intelligence community unhinged....
This is a blow to our hopes for Afghanistan's future. May the journalists and the other victims of this bombing not be forgotten. https://t.co/KHfWyJyrnU
— Susan Page (@SusanPage) April 30, 2018
Nine journalists were killed today in a double suicide bombing in Kabul. The reporters had flocked to the scene of the first explosion. Then a terrorist in their midst, pretending to be a fellow journalist, detonated another bomb. https://t.co/9EOIBvcRN6
— Tricia L. Nadolny (@TriciaNadolny) April 30, 2018
Comedian Michelle Wolf's biting routine at Saturday‘s 2018 White House Correspondents' Association dinner has triggered one of Washington's most recurring conversations: Is one night of pomp and politics worth the headaches that usually follow?Still more, at Twitchy, "DAMN! AP’s Meg Kinnard dropped the MOTHER of all truth-bombs on the WHCD and Lefties can’t DEAL."
Almost immediately after Wolf, best known as a correspondent on “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,“ left the stage at the Washington Hilton, those who pack into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on a daily basis began to distance themselves from her performance. A number of journalists deemed her act too caustic.
"The spirit of the event had always been jokes that singe but don’t burn. Reporters who work with her daily appreciate that @presssec was there," NBC News White House correspondent Kelly O'Donnell wrote on Twitter.
At its core, the dinner is supposed to be a celebration of the First Amendment, an opportunity to laud the young journalists who have won the association's scholarships, and a place to applaud the current journalists whose work illuminates the public's understanding of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“My goal in putting together last night's dinner was to unify the room and the country around journalism and the First Amendment and I shared what I believe about those subjects in my own remarks,” Margaret Talev, a Bloomberg correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told POLITICO.
“The association by tradition does not preview or censor the entertainer's remarks,” Talev continued. “Some of them made me uncomfortable and did not embody the spirit of the night. And that is protected by the First Amendment. I appreciated Sarah Sanders for joining us at the head table and her grace through the program.”
A persistent criticism of the glitzy dinner is that it fuels perceptions of excessive chumminess between the press and the government officials they’re expected to hold accountable, a rationale that’s prompted the New York Times to back out more than a decade ago. But some journalists feared Saturday’s dinner could lead to a different perception, of being seen as the opposition to the president.
“If the #WHCD dinner did anything tonight, it made the chasm between journalists and those who don't trust us, even wider,” tweeted Meg Kinnard, a South Carolina-based reporter for The Associated Press. “And those of us based in the red states who work hard every day to prove our objectivity will have to deal with it.”
New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker concluded on Twitter after the event, “Unfortunately, I don't think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight.” And Baker suggested in a reply to comedian Kathy Griffin that he’d “vote to leave the comedy acts to comedy shows and stick to journalism at journalism dinners.”
"First Amendment would probably be OK without the dinner," CNBC's John Harwood added.
Historically, both sides of the political spectrum in America have supported the rule of law and the Constitution. Additionally, other than the Democrats' longstanding racist oppression of black people, the positions held by both sides were generally differences that people of goodwill could hold. For example, good people can disagree on just what the tax rates should be.There's still lots more, at the link.
Since Roe v. Wade, that has changed, and the change has accelerated rapidly in the last eight years. The left in America has openly embraced evil, rejected the rule of law, and denied that Americans they disagree with have constitutional rights.
That's why 2016 was a Flight 93 election: the political fight in America is no longer among people of good will, but between evil fascists and the American people. Most of the people who vote for the Democrats have no idea what the left actually stands for due to the actions of the media, who hide the truth.
Here are some of the evils perpetrated or supported by large numbers of leftists so you can convince those Democrat voters to switch sides:
1. They support the right of the British government to use force to prevent parents from taking their child to see doctors who might be able to save their child's life if the British courts decide that it's in the best interest of the child to die.
2. They support killing the unborn who can feel pain by literally cutting them to pieces, but they demand prison time for someone who mistreats animals.
3. They want to kill unborn babies with Down syndrome.
4. They want to kill the elderly, who are no longer a benefit to society in the minds of leftists.
5. They deny the settled science that human life begins at conception.
6. They spend their money on themselves by having fewer children and condemn those who have more kids even when they pay for them.
7. They don't care that black women are three times as likely to abort as white women.
8. They don't care that cheap illegal labor hurts black people by denying them jobs.
9. They don't care that their fake climate crisis will drive up energy costs and hurt the poor, who are disproportionately people of color.
10. They declare that giving inner-city black parents the choice of sending their kids to a school where they will get a good education is "racist."
11. They don't care that thousands of blacks are shot each year in Democratic-run cities.
12. They deny witness reports by black crime victims that show that blacks are more likely to commit crimes, though most blacks are law-abiding, and demand that blacks be incarcerated at the same rate as all other groups, ensuring that blacks continue to suffer from black-on-black crime.
13. They want to take money from people who never owned slaves and give it to people who never were slaves.
14. They refuse to accept any election result that doesn't favor them.
15. They approve of Hillary colluding with Russia to get fake news on Trump and use that fake news during the election campaign.
16. They believe that illegals should be counted along with Americans when apportioning House seats.
17. They can't win elections, so they import immigrants and illegal aliens who will vote for them.
18. They want to give convicted child-molesters, murderers, rapists, and major drug-dealers the right to vote.
19. They work hard to keep the folks in the military from voting.
20. They support policies that increase people's dependence on government in order to get more votes, even though that subjects 21. people to miserable lives.
21. They believe they should be able to use the full power of the government to spy on their political opponents.
22. They believe that the judiciary can make up laws, and they reject the idea of separation of powers by endorsing "resistance" by the judiciary.
23. They believe that our rights flow from the government and that the government can change our rights as it sees fit.
24. They support discriminating against Asian-Americans based on their race.
25. They support discriminating against whites based on their race so long as leftist kids aren't discriminated against.
26. They reject equality of opportunity and embrace equality of result.
27. They think it's fine for politicians to decide not to enforce laws they don't like so long as leftists don't like those laws, but they would throw a fit if Texas ignored the Supreme Court ruling, not a law, that makes abortion legal.
28. They believe that the if the president is a leftist, he can ignore the Constitution, but if he's conservative, he can be prevented from doing anything leftist judges don't personally like.
29. They believe that the Constitution is whatever they want it to be, and they directly reject the idea that it should be interpreted in light of the intent of those who wrote and ratified it.
30. They believe that the press should be a propaganda machine that ignores stories that are bad for leftists and makes up fake news to endorse leftist views.
Scarlett Johansson Bust Out Her Ginormous Cleavage For Avengers Flashback Friday, Woohoo! https://t.co/PpvaW2NZ4v #AvengersInfinityWar #BlackWidow #FBF pic.twitter.com/mPhjlquZ48
— Popoholic (@Popoholic) April 27, 2018
BREAKING: Trump admin plan would revoke California's authority to set fuel economy rules, and freeze 2020 mileage targets in place nationwide for six years. https://t.co/Qc2l9dvaXE
— Evan Halper (@evanhalper) April 27, 2018
The Trump administration is speeding toward all-out war with California over fuel economy rules for cars and SUVs, proposing to revoke the state's long-standing authority to enforce its own, tough rules on tailpipe emissions.
The move forms a key part of a proposal by Trump's environmental and transportation agencies to roll back the nation's fuel economy standards. The agencies plan to submit the proposal to the White House for review within days.
The plan would freeze fuel economy targets at the levels required for vehicles sold in 2020, and leave those in place through 2026, according to federal officials who have reviewed it. That would mark a dramatic retreat from existing law, which aimed to get the nation's fleet of cars and light trucks to an average fuel economy of 55 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead of average vehicle fuel economy ratcheting up to that level, it would stall out at 42 miles per gallon.
That would constitute the single biggest step the administration has taken to undermine efforts to combat climate change.
Cars and trucks recently surpassed electricity plants as America's biggest sources of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. And unlike the electricity industry, in which market forces have pushed utilities toward cleaner energy, including natural gas and renewable sources, relatively low gasoline prices in recent years have led consumers to pay less attention to fuel economy when they buy new cars.
As a result, the steady increase in fuel mileage standards championed by the Obama administration in partnership with California represented the most powerful action the U.S. has taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The biggest gains have been projected to happen in the years that the Trump administration's plan would target.
The plan from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration remains a draft, and White House officials could decide to back away from a direct fight with California and like-minded states.
Within the administration, officials have disagreed about how far and how quickly to push changes in fuel economy rules, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Some officials attuned to the concerns of the auto industry have warned against a proposal that over-reaches and could lead to years of litigation and uncertainty. Others, aligned with EPA chief Scott Pruitt, have argued for a more aggressive push.
EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman declined to comment on the details of the draft plan.
"The Agency is continuing to work with NHTSA to develop a joint proposed rule and is looking forward to the interagency process," she wrote in an email.
Environmental groups and California officials already have vowed to fight the administration in court. But if the EPA plan prevails, it would be a crippling blow to efforts in California and other states to meet aggressive goals for climate action as well as for cleaning their air.
"I find this to be an outrageous intrusion," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an email.
Alfie Evans's miraculous life bears witness against Europe's barbarous culture of death. My take. https://t.co/Ze5y4KyJ6O— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 24, 2018
Alfie Evans was supposed to die. On Monday evening, doctors at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, England, removed the 23-month-old toddler’s respirator following an effective death sentence handed down by Britain’s High Court of Justice. The court ruled that “continued ventilatory support is no longer in Alfie’s best interest” and prohibited his parents from flying their baby to Rome’s Bambino Gesù hospital for additional treatment at the Italian government’s expense. An international outcry led by Pope Francis failed to move British authorities.
In his decision, Justice Anthony Hayden of the High Court predicted that, owing to a little-understood and rapidly progressing brain condition, “Alfie can not sustain his life on his own. It is the ventilator that has been keeping him alive for many months, he is unable to sustain his own respiratory effort.” Some 30 police officers were posted outside the hospital to prevent Alfie’s supporters from attempting to rescue him overnight, and his parents were barred from supplying their own oxygen.
The most mother and father could offer their son was skin-to-skin contact—and love. He was, as I say, supposed to die. But he didn’t. Alfie continued to breathe independently for five, ten, fifteen hours. As I write, he has been going strong for more than 21 hours. Under moral pressure, the hospital finally relented and offered some oxygen and fluids on Tuesday morning. Yet the fluids were subsequently withdrawn, a source familiar with the situation tells me.
The Italian government granted Alfie citizenship on Monday, and the following day Italian diplomats sought to evacuate him by military air ambulance from his death chamber at Alder Hey. That final legal hope was dashed Tuesday evening, after the court dismissed the Italian appeal. It is unlikely that Alfie will survive for much longer. Even so, what has transpired in Alfie’s room—between Alfie and his parents, Tom and Kate—is nothing short of a miracle of love. It is also a rebuke to the callous judges and experts who would substitute their own judgement for that of parents in matters of life and death.
The medical complexities of the case, played up by the court and its defenders, serve to obscure this basic moral principle. No one is asking the U.K. National Health Service to expend extraordinary resources to keep Alfie alive. All Alfie’s parents ask is to be allowed to seek treatment elsewhere—again, at Italian expense—even if such treatment proves to be futile in the end. The same principle was at stake in last year’s Charlie Gard case. Once more, British courts have distorted the relevant legal standard—“the best interests of the child”—to usurp parents’ natural rights.
Laws that were enacted to give children a voice when parents were divided, or to protect children against neglectful or abusive parents, are now being used against parents who are united and determined to keep their children alive. As London-based canon lawyer Ed Condon wrote recently in the Catholic Herald, U.K. courts have broadened the relevant statutes “to include disagreements between unified parents and other authorities, be they educational, medical, or governmental.”
Nor is it possible to rule out the baleful influence of the European culture of death in Alfie’s case. It is true that the hospital is not proactively terminating Alfie’s life. Even so, Justice Hayden’s decision is full of references to dying with “dignity,” a favorite euphemism of the euthanasia movement...
Meek Mill’s story demonstrates the often excessive nature of probation in America, @nilabala3 writes via @usatodayopinion: https://t.co/54bxmeJsFB
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 25, 2018
Day To Night #GUCCI pic.twitter.com/rRuKeBdvfT
— Jessica Simpson (@JessicaSimpson) April 24, 2018
