Category: US Politics

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We’re All Going To Die (Again)!!!! Scientists Predict Apocalyptic Mass Extinction in 2100 Because Of Global Warming

Hey, what’s a good false prediction every 50 years or so? At some point, it’s got to be right…

Via NY Post:

A mass extinction that wipes out humanity will be under way by the year 2100, scientists have claimed.

By the end of the century, it’s feared that so much carbon will have been added to the oceans that the planet will have passed a “threshold of catastrophe” which leads to the destruction of our species.

In the past 540 million years, the planet has endured five such wipeouts — including the extinction of the dinosaurs.

This disaster killed off more than 95 percent of marine life when the seas suddenly became more acidic.

Now geophysicist Professor Daniel Rothman says we are seeing a disturbing parallel today — this time because of man-made global warming.

He came up with a simple mathematical formula that predicts that the oceans will soon hold so much carbon that a mass extinction is inevitable.

Keep reading…

via Weasel Zippers

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Report: Samantha Power made 260 requests last year to “unmask” Americans in intel reports

That’s … a lotta unmasking. The fact that Samantha Power is at the heart of the “unmasking” investigation in the House barely qualifies as news at this point, as her name has been floating around in connection with it for months. In fact, Trey Gowdy quizzed John Brennan about a mysterious ambassador and her strange unmasking requests at a House hearing all the way back on May 23. By mid-July the Free Beacon’s sources had identified her as a “central figure” in the probe. Note this quote from that piece:

“Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly habit. It is rare, even at the National Security Council, and ought to be rarer still for a U.N. ambassador,” according to one former senior U.S. official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Well, it wasn’t a weekly habit for Power, if Fox’s sources are to be believed. It was a daily habit:

Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was ‘unmasking’ at such a rapid pace in the final months of the Obama administration that she averaged more than one request for every working day in 2016 – and even sought information in the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, multiple sources close to the matter told Fox News.

Two sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said the requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking, exceeded 260 last year. One source indicated this occurred in the final days of the Obama White House.

When asked for comment, Power’s spokesman noted that she wasn’t just the ambassador to the UN, she was a member of the National Security Council. But so what? Note again what the senior official told the Free Beacon — even at the NSC, unmasking is rare. The Council also includes the head of OMB and the head of the National Economic Council, incidentally. Should Mick Mulvaney and Gary Cohn be unmasking American citizens in intelligence reports at will just because they’re members?

Here’s an easy way to gauge whether Power’s practices were appropriate: How did her volume of unmasking requests stack up to Susan Rice’s and John Brennan’s? Rice was national security advisor, Brennan was head of the CIA. If anyone in the Obama administration had reason to be unmasking U.S. citizens for valid intelligence purposes, it was them. You’d certainly expect Brennan to have made more unmasking requests than someone more peripheral to the intelligence process, like Power. So let’s know the numbers. How many unmasking requests per week on average were Rice and Brennan filing compared to her?

Another question: How many of Power’s requests were actually granted? An official can ask to have the redacted name of an American in an intelligence report revealed but it’s up to the FBI and NSA to grant that request. And they don’t do it lightly, as Fox notes:

“We [the NSA] apply two criteria in response to their request: number one, you must make the request in writing. Number two, the request must be made on the basis of your official duties, not the fact that you just find this report really interesting and you’re just curious,” [Mike Rogers] said in June. “It has to tie to your job and finally, I said two but there’s a third criteria, and is the basis of the request must be that you need this identity to understand the intelligence you’re reading.”

What was a UN ambassador doing in her “official duties” that required her to know the identities of so many Americans who turned up in intelligence reports? If it turns out she did in fact “just find this report really interesting” and was “just curious” and the NSA or FBI *granted* unmasking requests made along those lines then this scandal will blow up far beyond Power herself. A lone official trying to go rogue on intelligence by making a ridiculous number of unmasking requests is one thing. The FBI and NSA abetting her by granting those requests and outing Americans to someone who may have had no legitimate intelligence purpose in knowing who they are is another thing entirely. *If* that’s what happened here, Comey and Rogers will become the center of the probe, not Power. Why were their agencies not more exacting in demanding proper justification for unmasking, investigators will wonder, particularly given the alarming number of requests from Power and the fact that her job didn’t obviously require her to have this information?

One point in Power’s defense, though. What are the odds that she would be allowed to go on making hundreds of improper unmasking requests without it leaking and with no one stopping her? If the FBI and NSA were rejecting her applications daily, you would think someone would have stepped in at some point and either told her to cool it or whispered to the papers that she was abusing the process. And if the FBI and NSA were granting most of her applications, it’s hard to believe they were so systematically crooked that they would risk their institutional reputations and a major scandal to rubber-stamp requests made by a figure as tangential to the natsec process as Power. This wasn’t Brennan or James Clapper demanding the information, it was a diplomat who spent most of her tenure impotently defending Obama’s impotent Syria policy. Would Comey and Rogers gamble their careers by looking the other way at improper applications made by her for months on end?

Maybe Power had reason to suspect there were Americans working at the UN, maybe even on her own staff, who were quietly double-dealing with foreign powers in the building? That would be a legitimate intelligence purpose for unmasking, but why the UN ambassador would be left to make those requests instead of Brennan or Rice, I have no idea. American double agents at the UN would be a big deal, worthy of attention from the big cheeses of natsec.

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Time to End Birthright Citizenship

Donald Trump took a lot of heat when he announced his candidacy for President, stating that he would build a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville and make Mexico pay for it, all to keep Mexico’s “unwanted” and “undesirables” from flooding the United States. In August 2015, on the campaign trail, he shed light on a flawed interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that has caused much of the problem of illegal immigration.

That misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, written to guarantee the citizenship rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, has morphed the amendment into a guarantee of birthright citizenship. Merely being born on American soil is said to make you a U.S. citizen. Sneak past the U.S. Border Patrol, have your baby, and you not only have a U.S. citizen but what is called an “anchor baby” allowing you to stay and bring others in under the banner of family reunification.

During the campaign, Trump correctly called the flawed concept of birthright citizenship the “biggest magnet” for illegal immigration. He would end it, and as for family reunification, Trump is all for it, just saying it should happen on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border. As the New York Post reported:

Trump described his expanded vision of how to secure American borders during a wide-ranging interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” and in a position paper he later released, saying that he would push to end the constitutionally protected citizenship rights of children of any family living illegally inside the US.

“They have to go,” Trump said. “What they’re doing, they’re having a baby. And then all of a sudden, nobody knows… the baby’s here.”

Birthright citizenship is the exception and not the rule worldwide. Even our European brethren, as fond as they are of refugees and open borders, do not embrace it. As Liz Peek writes on FoxNews.com, birthright citizenship is indeed a big magnet for illegal immigration:

The United States is one of only two developed countries in the world that still bestows citizenship on every person born on our nation’s soil. Having a child become a U.S. citizen is the greatest reward possible for someone who enters the country illegally. Such status is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in free education and benefits, not to mention the incalculable value of our country’s security and freedoms. Historically, there was bipartisan enthusiasm for dumping this program; even Democrat Harry Reid had proposed its termination.

The costs of birthright citizenship are staggering, especially when you consider the costs of what is called “chain migration. Once of age, the baby born here can sponsor others. It has even given rise to what is called “birth tourism” where pregnant women are brought to the United States, ostensibly as tourists, to give birth here and have their child dubbed an American citizen by birth As Ian Tuttle writes in National Review:

Peter and Ellie Yang,” the subjects of Benjamin Carlson’s fascinating new Rolling Stone essay, “Welcome to Maternity Hotel California,” paid $35,000 to have their second child in the United States. In 2012 Chinese state media reported 10,000 “tourist births” by Chinese couples in the United States; other estimates skew as high as 60,000…

The cost of this is not negligible. Inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that a child born in 2013 would cost his parents $304,480 from birth to his eighteenth birthday. Given that illegal-alien households are normally low-income households (three out of five illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live at or near the poverty line), one would expect that a significant portion of that cost will fall on the government…

There are long-term costs, too. U.S.-born children of illegal aliens can sponsor the immigration of family members once they come of age. At 18, an “anchor baby” can sponsor an overseas spouse and unmarried children of his own; at 21, he can sponsor parents and siblings…

Trump said he would end birthright citizenship and critics have said that the task, even if justified, is well nigh impossible, requiring amending the U.S. Constitution. In reality, it may not require altering the 14th Amendment — only correctly interpreting it — perhaps through clarifying legislation.

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed, on July 3, 1866, reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was done, again, to guarantee the citizenship rights of freed slaves, not illegal aliens. The 1857 Dred Scott decision held that no black, not even a freed black, could be considered a citizen.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in October, 2008, John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, argued that illegal aliens are still foreign nationals and are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, except for purposes of deportation, and therefore their children born on American soil should not be automatically considered U.S. citizens.

During debate on the Fourteenth Amendment, Sen. Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan added jurisdiction language specifically to avoid accident of birth being the sole criteria for citizenship. And if citizenship was determined just by place of birth, why did it take an act of Congress in 1922 to give American Indians birthright citizenship, if they already had citizenship by birthright under the14th Amendment?        

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, who is regarded as the father of the 14th Amendment, said it meant that “every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your constitution itself. A natural born citizen…”

Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia sought to clarify the situation through HR. 698 the Citizenship Reform Act of 2005, which would have amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny automatic citizenship to children born of the United States of parents who are not U.S. citizens or are not permanent resident aliens.

HR. 698 declared: “It is the purpose of this Act to deny automatic citizenship at birth to children born in the United States to parents who are not citizens or permanent resident aliens.” The bill undertook to clarify “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” to the meaning originally intended by Congress in the14th Amendment.

The current interpretation of birthright citizenship may in fact have been a huge mistake and given the burden illegal aliens have imposed on our welfare, educational, and health care systems as well as through increased crime on our legal system, a very costly one.  

There may be hope of correctly interpreting the 14th Amendment through a court case as President Trump reshapes the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, with justices of a more “originalist” bent. As noted, the misinterpretation could be corrected through clarifying legislation. We can correct it judicially or legislatively and we should. Donald Trump was right — becoming a U.S. citizen should require more than your mother successfully sneaking past the U.S. Border Patrol.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.      

Donald Trump took a lot of heat when he announced his candidacy for President, stating that he would build a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville and make Mexico pay for it, all to keep Mexico’s “unwanted” and “undesirables” from flooding the United States. In August 2015, on the campaign trail, he shed light on a flawed interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that has caused much of the problem of illegal immigration.

That misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, written to guarantee the citizenship rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, has morphed the amendment into a guarantee of birthright citizenship. Merely being born on American soil is said to make you a U.S. citizen. Sneak past the U.S. Border Patrol, have your baby, and you not only have a U.S. citizen but what is called an “anchor baby” allowing you to stay and bring others in under the banner of family reunification.

During the campaign, Trump correctly called the flawed concept of birthright citizenship the “biggest magnet” for illegal immigration. He would end it, and as for family reunification, Trump is all for it, just saying it should happen on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border. As the New York Post reported:

Trump described his expanded vision of how to secure American borders during a wide-ranging interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” and in a position paper he later released, saying that he would push to end the constitutionally protected citizenship rights of children of any family living illegally inside the US.

“They have to go,” Trump said. “What they’re doing, they’re having a baby. And then all of a sudden, nobody knows… the baby’s here.”

Birthright citizenship is the exception and not the rule worldwide. Even our European brethren, as fond as they are of refugees and open borders, do not embrace it. As Liz Peek writes on FoxNews.com, birthright citizenship is indeed a big magnet for illegal immigration:

The United States is one of only two developed countries in the world that still bestows citizenship on every person born on our nation’s soil. Having a child become a U.S. citizen is the greatest reward possible for someone who enters the country illegally. Such status is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in free education and benefits, not to mention the incalculable value of our country’s security and freedoms. Historically, there was bipartisan enthusiasm for dumping this program; even Democrat Harry Reid had proposed its termination.

The costs of birthright citizenship are staggering, especially when you consider the costs of what is called “chain migration. Once of age, the baby born here can sponsor others. It has even given rise to what is called “birth tourism” where pregnant women are brought to the United States, ostensibly as tourists, to give birth here and have their child dubbed an American citizen by birth As Ian Tuttle writes in National Review:

Peter and Ellie Yang,” the subjects of Benjamin Carlson’s fascinating new Rolling Stone essay, “Welcome to Maternity Hotel California,” paid $35,000 to have their second child in the United States. In 2012 Chinese state media reported 10,000 “tourist births” by Chinese couples in the United States; other estimates skew as high as 60,000…

The cost of this is not negligible. Inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that a child born in 2013 would cost his parents $304,480 from birth to his eighteenth birthday. Given that illegal-alien households are normally low-income households (three out of five illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live at or near the poverty line), one would expect that a significant portion of that cost will fall on the government…

There are long-term costs, too. U.S.-born children of illegal aliens can sponsor the immigration of family members once they come of age. At 18, an “anchor baby” can sponsor an overseas spouse and unmarried children of his own; at 21, he can sponsor parents and siblings…

Trump said he would end birthright citizenship and critics have said that the task, even if justified, is well nigh impossible, requiring amending the U.S. Constitution. In reality, it may not require altering the 14th Amendment — only correctly interpreting it — perhaps through clarifying legislation.

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed, on July 3, 1866, reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was done, again, to guarantee the citizenship rights of freed slaves, not illegal aliens. The 1857 Dred Scott decision held that no black, not even a freed black, could be considered a citizen.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in October, 2008, John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, argued that illegal aliens are still foreign nationals and are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, except for purposes of deportation, and therefore their children born on American soil should not be automatically considered U.S. citizens.

During debate on the Fourteenth Amendment, Sen. Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan added jurisdiction language specifically to avoid accident of birth being the sole criteria for citizenship. And if citizenship was determined just by place of birth, why did it take an act of Congress in 1922 to give American Indians birthright citizenship, if they already had citizenship by birthright under the14th Amendment?        

Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, who is regarded as the father of the 14th Amendment, said it meant that “every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your constitution itself. A natural born citizen…”

Rep. Nathan Deal of Georgia sought to clarify the situation through HR. 698 the Citizenship Reform Act of 2005, which would have amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny automatic citizenship to children born of the United States of parents who are not U.S. citizens or are not permanent resident aliens.

HR. 698 declared: “It is the purpose of this Act to deny automatic citizenship at birth to children born in the United States to parents who are not citizens or permanent resident aliens.” The bill undertook to clarify “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” to the meaning originally intended by Congress in the14th Amendment.

The current interpretation of birthright citizenship may in fact have been a huge mistake and given the burden illegal aliens have imposed on our welfare, educational, and health care systems as well as through increased crime on our legal system, a very costly one.  

There may be hope of correctly interpreting the 14th Amendment through a court case as President Trump reshapes the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, with justices of a more “originalist” bent. As noted, the misinterpretation could be corrected through clarifying legislation. We can correct it judicially or legislatively and we should. Donald Trump was right — becoming a U.S. citizen should require more than your mother successfully sneaking past the U.S. Border Patrol.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.      

via American Thinker

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Explaining the Narcissistic Rage of the Left

How to account for the scorched-earth hatred of Donald Trump?

He inspires a darkly fanatical dislike, disapproval, and disgust in his most ardent detractors.  He is a distillation for millions of unhappy Americans of all things repugnant, repulsive, and wretched.  The fever pitch at which he has been mocked, ridiculed, condemned, and threatened is beyond anything anyone in living memory has been subject to – let alone a sitting American president.  From Colbert’s “holster” to Madonna’s fantasy of blowing up the White House to Kathy Griffin’s decapitation stunt, and De Niro’s thug life wish to “punch him in the face,” the gloves are most certainly off – if only to better grasp a bludgeon.  And that’s just the celebrities.  Even a state senator from Missouri hoped for Trump’s assassination on Facebook. 

Why such unabated arch-loathing?  One possibility is that Trump’s triumph dealt the progressive left a narcissistic injury from which they are still reeling.  Is there another explanation for why previously sober, thoughtful Americans have abandoned the rational in such numbers?

The elite see their virtue, rectitude, and moral superiority reflected back to them in the films, newspapers, advertisements, TV shows, and magazines they themselves create, and it is intoxicating – a gauzy reverie of self-ratifying congratulation.  Is it any wonder, after such unmitigated success, that the left is apoplectic about having its echo chamber shattered by a barbarian like Trump?

The belief system of the progressive left includes the shared understanding that leftists have been anointed to determine what is good and right in American life and what is not.  Their candidate was ordained to hold the highest office in the land as the inevitable consequence of this orthodoxy.  That belief system was shattered at 2:30 AM on November 3, 2016, when the Associated Press called the election for Trump.

Cue shock, horror, denial, and a rage that might be termed the VSO – the Veruca Salt Option.  Named after the spoiled rich girl in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose nuclear tantrums at not getting what she wants result in her being literally relegated to the nut bin, the Veruca Salt Option is an apt descriptor for the infantilizing behaviors many on the left have engaged in following Trump’s unthinkable electoral college win. 

Exhibit A was the spectacle of a “women’s march,” featuring a sea of resisters in the bright pink, knit wool “vagina” hats of first-graders – a march that hypocritically and explicitly excluded pro-life women.  Further instances of acting out included Reza Azlan of CNN calling Trump a “piece of [s—],” Maxine Waters’s unhinged calls for impeachment mere months into the new administration, and Johnny Depp’s mumble-joke about assassinating the president.

The groupthink that the most qualified nominee in history was unbeatable begat a bubble that Trump popped like a schoolyard bully.  In the parlance of the day, this “triggered” leftists throughout the land into dyspeptic, unbecoming tirades that have made for some galling exposures of untethered ultra-bias in media and political personalities.  This is a familiar strategy for a wounded narcissist: blame others, rage, and attack.  But it’s disheartening to see it manifest so baldly.

The specter of Trump in all his gloaming menace, spouting his incendiary, charm-challenged rhetoric, only serves to further infuriate those already suffering great spasms of hate.  Taking exception to a man whose policies you find abhorrent is understandable, but when did the left – in the words of David Byrne – stop making sense? 

Trump is in favor of redefining marriage, has a ten-point plan for renewal of the inner city, employs more women than men as executives in his businesses, has been married to two immigrants, and has a Jewish daughter and three Jewish grandchildren.  These would seem to put the lie to claims Trump is racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ.  So why, given these many things on which his opponents might agree with the president, are they unmoved to acknowledge common ground?

Intellectual dishonesty is possible.  Sheer hatred is more likely.  Democratic representative Brad Sherman admitted that the animus against the president is so strong in the California legislature, for example, that he would be forced to oppose Mother’s Day if Trump supported it.  Trump’s win was not only a repudiation of globalism, elitism, and Obamism, but also a devastating rebuke to the core identity of the left.  The rage and denial are, in some ways, easy to understand.

In spite of or because of their outsized antipathy for Trump, this might have been an important moment for the Democratic left to undertake a clear-eyed accounting of why they lost an un-losable election.  Instead of honest forensics on their efforts, the left became a verb and began flame-throwing the administration early and often with an impressively hateful and single-minded campaign.  But a funny thing happened on the way to impeachment: Democrats stopped standing for anything at all, other than pitched loathing and hysteria. 

The Democrats of old, authors of the flawed but well intentioned Great Society programs and champions of working-class Americans, have self-abnegated in recent years to become ghosts of their own past.  Riven with identity politics, the progressive left is shot through with a central hypocrisy: that diversity is revered above all things – except for diversity of thought, which is reviled.  This core intolerance has resulted in an abasement of everything for which the left formerly stood.  

The real-time destruction of the left has been brought about by the wrecking ball that is Donald J. Trump.  He represents the razing of everything they stand for – for the impeccably curated façade of caring, competence, and open-mindedness the left has traded on for decades.  The tragedy of it is Greek in proportion.

The left, and the many “conscientious conservatives” who Venn-diagram them, have lost power, influence, and reason like gouts of blood from the infliction of this narcissistic wound.  With historically few seats held in Congress and at the state level; no cogent message beyond “Trump is a goat rodeo on fire”; and a series of perverse policy positions on immigration, the First Amendment, and school choice, the Democrats have now reached a watershed moment.  Do the progressive left and the elites who lead them acknowledge that political correctness, however worthy it might have been, has Frankensteined into a kind of creeping McCarthyism?  Do they unpack this slow-motion train wreck of a once consequential party to seek the truth of their own responsibility for its demise – or do they continue to resist?  (And by resist, I mean tantrum.)  

I’m rooting for them – every yin needs a yang.  But the odds on entitled brats evolving into mature adults who take responsibility for their actions aren’t great.  Why take a long, hard look in the mirror when you can smash that mirror instead – and unleash the Veruca within?

How to account for the scorched-earth hatred of Donald Trump?

He inspires a darkly fanatical dislike, disapproval, and disgust in his most ardent detractors.  He is a distillation for millions of unhappy Americans of all things repugnant, repulsive, and wretched.  The fever pitch at which he has been mocked, ridiculed, condemned, and threatened is beyond anything anyone in living memory has been subject to – let alone a sitting American president.  From Colbert’s “holster” to Madonna’s fantasy of blowing up the White House to Kathy Griffin’s decapitation stunt, and De Niro’s thug life wish to “punch him in the face,” the gloves are most certainly off – if only to better grasp a bludgeon.  And that’s just the celebrities.  Even a state senator from Missouri hoped for Trump’s assassination on Facebook. 

Why such unabated arch-loathing?  One possibility is that Trump’s triumph dealt the progressive left a narcissistic injury from which they are still reeling.  Is there another explanation for why previously sober, thoughtful Americans have abandoned the rational in such numbers?

The elite see their virtue, rectitude, and moral superiority reflected back to them in the films, newspapers, advertisements, TV shows, and magazines they themselves create, and it is intoxicating – a gauzy reverie of self-ratifying congratulation.  Is it any wonder, after such unmitigated success, that the left is apoplectic about having its echo chamber shattered by a barbarian like Trump?

The belief system of the progressive left includes the shared understanding that leftists have been anointed to determine what is good and right in American life and what is not.  Their candidate was ordained to hold the highest office in the land as the inevitable consequence of this orthodoxy.  That belief system was shattered at 2:30 AM on November 3, 2016, when the Associated Press called the election for Trump.

Cue shock, horror, denial, and a rage that might be termed the VSO – the Veruca Salt Option.  Named after the spoiled rich girl in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, whose nuclear tantrums at not getting what she wants result in her being literally relegated to the nut bin, the Veruca Salt Option is an apt descriptor for the infantilizing behaviors many on the left have engaged in following Trump’s unthinkable electoral college win. 

Exhibit A was the spectacle of a “women’s march,” featuring a sea of resisters in the bright pink, knit wool “vagina” hats of first-graders – a march that hypocritically and explicitly excluded pro-life women.  Further instances of acting out included Reza Azlan of CNN calling Trump a “piece of [s—],” Maxine Waters’s unhinged calls for impeachment mere months into the new administration, and Johnny Depp’s mumble-joke about assassinating the president.

The groupthink that the most qualified nominee in history was unbeatable begat a bubble that Trump popped like a schoolyard bully.  In the parlance of the day, this “triggered” leftists throughout the land into dyspeptic, unbecoming tirades that have made for some galling exposures of untethered ultra-bias in media and political personalities.  This is a familiar strategy for a wounded narcissist: blame others, rage, and attack.  But it’s disheartening to see it manifest so baldly.

The specter of Trump in all his gloaming menace, spouting his incendiary, charm-challenged rhetoric, only serves to further infuriate those already suffering great spasms of hate.  Taking exception to a man whose policies you find abhorrent is understandable, but when did the left – in the words of David Byrne – stop making sense? 

Trump is in favor of redefining marriage, has a ten-point plan for renewal of the inner city, employs more women than men as executives in his businesses, has been married to two immigrants, and has a Jewish daughter and three Jewish grandchildren.  These would seem to put the lie to claims Trump is racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ.  So why, given these many things on which his opponents might agree with the president, are they unmoved to acknowledge common ground?

Intellectual dishonesty is possible.  Sheer hatred is more likely.  Democratic representative Brad Sherman admitted that the animus against the president is so strong in the California legislature, for example, that he would be forced to oppose Mother’s Day if Trump supported it.  Trump’s win was not only a repudiation of globalism, elitism, and Obamism, but also a devastating rebuke to the core identity of the left.  The rage and denial are, in some ways, easy to understand.

In spite of or because of their outsized antipathy for Trump, this might have been an important moment for the Democratic left to undertake a clear-eyed accounting of why they lost an un-losable election.  Instead of honest forensics on their efforts, the left became a verb and began flame-throwing the administration early and often with an impressively hateful and single-minded campaign.  But a funny thing happened on the way to impeachment: Democrats stopped standing for anything at all, other than pitched loathing and hysteria. 

The Democrats of old, authors of the flawed but well intentioned Great Society programs and champions of working-class Americans, have self-abnegated in recent years to become ghosts of their own past.  Riven with identity politics, the progressive left is shot through with a central hypocrisy: that diversity is revered above all things – except for diversity of thought, which is reviled.  This core intolerance has resulted in an abasement of everything for which the left formerly stood.  

The real-time destruction of the left has been brought about by the wrecking ball that is Donald J. Trump.  He represents the razing of everything they stand for – for the impeccably curated façade of caring, competence, and open-mindedness the left has traded on for decades.  The tragedy of it is Greek in proportion.

The left, and the many “conscientious conservatives” who Venn-diagram them, have lost power, influence, and reason like gouts of blood from the infliction of this narcissistic wound.  With historically few seats held in Congress and at the state level; no cogent message beyond “Trump is a goat rodeo on fire”; and a series of perverse policy positions on immigration, the First Amendment, and school choice, the Democrats have now reached a watershed moment.  Do the progressive left and the elites who lead them acknowledge that political correctness, however worthy it might have been, has Frankensteined into a kind of creeping McCarthyism?  Do they unpack this slow-motion train wreck of a once consequential party to seek the truth of their own responsibility for its demise – or do they continue to resist?  (And by resist, I mean tantrum.)  

I’m rooting for them – every yin needs a yang.  But the odds on entitled brats evolving into mature adults who take responsibility for their actions aren’t great.  Why take a long, hard look in the mirror when you can smash that mirror instead – and unleash the Veruca within?

via American Thinker

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Sharyl Attkisson explains what we are up against

This is easily the read of the day.  Sharyl Attkisson is the bravest reporter of her generation, so much of a threat to people with access to the capabilities of our intel agencies that she was spied upon and worse. Today she faces the ugly truth about what recent reports (if true) reveal:

Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.

She goes on to review a number of instances of us being lied to about spying, about spying on journalists, and then gets to her personal experience in fighting back against an actual hack she experienced while at CBS News:

I have spent more than two years litigating against the Department of Justice for the computer intrusions. Forensics have revealed dates, times and methods of some of the illegal activities. The software used was proprietary to a federal intel agency. The intruders deployed a keystroke monitoring program, accessed the CBS News corporate computer system, listened in on my conversations by activating the computer’s microphone and used Skype to exfiltrate files.

We survived the government’s latest attempt to dismiss my lawsuit. There’s another hearing Friday. To date, the Trump Department of Justice — like the Obama Department of Justice — is fighting me in court and working to keep hidden the identities of those who accessed a government internet protocol address found in my computers.

Sharyl is fighting back, and is not shying away from what she sees, though she wisely avoids terms like deep state or establishment. She is reporting:

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

·       The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.

·       In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.

·       In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.

·       Two weeks before the election, at a secret hearing before the FISA court overseeing government surveillance, NSA officials confessed they’d violated privacy safeguards “with much greater frequency” than they’d admitted. The judge accused them of “institutional lack of candor” and said, “this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

Read the whole thing, I mean it.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky

This is easily the read of the day.  Sharyl Attkisson is the bravest reporter of her generation, so much of a threat to people with access to the capabilities of our intel agencies that she was spied upon and worse. Today she faces the ugly truth about what recent reports (if true) reveal:

Nobody wants our intel agencies to be used like the Stasi in East Germany; the secret police spying on its own citizens for political purposes. The prospect of our own NSA, CIA and FBI becoming politically weaponized has been shrouded by untruths, accusations and justifications.

She goes on to review a number of instances of us being lied to about spying, about spying on journalists, and then gets to her personal experience in fighting back against an actual hack she experienced while at CBS News:

I have spent more than two years litigating against the Department of Justice for the computer intrusions. Forensics have revealed dates, times and methods of some of the illegal activities. The software used was proprietary to a federal intel agency. The intruders deployed a keystroke monitoring program, accessed the CBS News corporate computer system, listened in on my conversations by activating the computer’s microphone and used Skype to exfiltrate files.

We survived the government’s latest attempt to dismiss my lawsuit. There’s another hearing Friday. To date, the Trump Department of Justice — like the Obama Department of Justice — is fighting me in court and working to keep hidden the identities of those who accessed a government internet protocol address found in my computers.

Sharyl is fighting back, and is not shying away from what she sees, though she wisely avoids terms like deep state or establishment. She is reporting:

It’s difficult not to see patterns in the government’s behavior, unless you’re wearing blinders.

·       The intelligence community secretly expanded its authority in 2011 so it can monitor innocent U.S. citizens like you and me for doing nothing more than mentioning a target’s name a single time.

·       In January 2016, a top secret inspector general report found the NSA violated the very laws designed to prevent abuse.

·       In 2016, Obama officials searched through intelligence on U.S. citizens a record 30,000 times, up from 9,500 in 2013.

·       Two weeks before the election, at a secret hearing before the FISA court overseeing government surveillance, NSA officials confessed they’d violated privacy safeguards “with much greater frequency” than they’d admitted. The judge accused them of “institutional lack of candor” and said, “this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

Read the whole thing, I mean it.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky

via American Thinker Blog

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Lesbian Couple Who Abused Son So Badly He’s Had Two Strokes Gets 20 Years in Jail

Lesbian Couple Who Abused Son So Badly He’s Had Two Strokes Get 20 Years in Jail

by Warner Todd Huston21 Sep 20170

21 Sep, 2017
21 Sep, 2017

A lesbian couple arrested and convicted of beating and torturing their five-year-old boy so badly that he had two strokes from years of beatings has been sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Police in Muskogee, OK, arrested the boy’s mother, Rachel Stevens, 28, and his “stepmother,” Kayla Jones, 25, last year for what doctors said appeared to be months of vicious child abuse.

Police became involved after the child was transferred from a Muskogee, Oklahoma, clinic to St. John Medical Center in Tulsa because of lesions on his face and after a series of seizures. But when he got to Tulsa, doctors became suspicious over his injuries and determined that he was abused and not just suffering some sort of ailment as claimed by the lesbian couple.

The women even had the gall to create a GoFundMe page to raise money to help them pay for the child’s medical care.

After doctors suggested the child was abused, police arrested the pair and charged them with child abuse.

Court documents revealed that the child told police that he was repeatedly tied up, confined with duct tape, locked in a small room for extended periods of time and that both women would periodically beat him sometimes with a belt. He said his own mother once smashed his hand with a hammer and his “stepmom” repeatedly kicked him in the groin hard enough to cause bleeding.

Stevens and Jones pleaded no contest last Friday to child abuse and child neglect charges. As part of a plea deal, they were sentenced to 20 years in prison, according tothe Daily Mail.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

via Breitbart News

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Poll: Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan Hit New Lows with Republicans

Poll: Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan Hit New Lows with Republicans

by Charlie Spiering21 Sep 20170

21 Sep, 2017
21 Sep, 2017

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that Republicans are increasingly dissatisfied with their leaders in Congress.

Only 36 percent of Republican voters say they are satisfied with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, while 59 percent are dissatisfied, according to the poll. 

McConnell suffers the most, as 25 percent of Republicans have a negative impression of the Senate Majority Leader while only 17 percent have a positive impression.

Trump, however, still earns 83 percent of support from Republicans, despite his deal with Democrats on funding the government.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans in the poll said that they considered themselves more of a Trump supporter than supporters of the Republican party. Only 38 percent of Republicans cited party support above Trump.

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via Breitbart News

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Climate Realists Strike Back: No Blaming Harvey and Irma on ‘Climate Change’

A sober, fact-based analysis from researchers has debunked hysterical reactions to recent devastating hurricanes that sought to attribute these phenomena to man-made global warming.

“Man-made warming did not cause Harvey and Irma,” writes economist and environmental expert Nicolas Loris. “As carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions have increased, there have been no trends in global tropical cycle landfalls.”

In fact, prior to Harvey and Irma, the United States “was in a 12-year hurricane drought,” he wrote. “More importantly, the average number of hurricanes per decade reaching landfall in the U.S. has fallen over the past 160 years.”

Loris’ analysis, unlike much of the media panic surrounding recent storms, is based on mainstream science, available to anyone willing to look for it.

In its most recent scientific assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that no “robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency,” Loris observes.

Even the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has promoted the idea of global warming, said that it is “premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming – have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”

Loris notes that even more moderate claims, such as the idea that global warming didn’t “cause” Harvey and Irma but “supercharged” them because of higher air moisture have likewise turned out to be false.

University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass studied precipitation levels in the Gulf and found that there is “no evidence” that global warming is influencing Texas coastal precipitation in the long term and “little evidence” that warmer than normal temperatures had any real impact on the precipitation intensity from this storm, Loris wrote.

Along with the paucity of evidence that manmade global warming is having any real effect on weather patterns, Loris also comments on the flip-side of the question, namely what we could do to prevent it if we wanted to.

The policies that tax or regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are “costly non-solutions,” Loris wrote. “The U.S. could slap a $40 tax on all carbon dioxide emissions, and the ‘climate benefits’ would be hardly noticeable. By the year 2100, the averted warming would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius, and the averted sea level rise would be less than 2 centimeters.”

While benefits from such programs would be negligible, the costs would be “staggering,” Loris observes.

“Because carbon dioxide-emitting conventional fuels meet 80 percent of America’s energy needs, the tax would harm families multiple times over as energy is a necessary component for almost everything we make and do,” he writes. “Between now and 2035, the country would experience an average employment shortfall of 400,000 lost jobs, a total loss of income exceeding $20,000 for a family of four, and a $2.5 trillion hit to the overall economy.”

In other words, President Trump was right.

In his June 1 Rose Garden address, the President explained his reasons for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, noting its insignificant benefits and enormous disadvantages for the American people.

“The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries,” Trump said, while leaving American workers and taxpayers “to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.”

Compliance with the terms of the Climate Accord, Trump noted, could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025—including 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs—according to the National Economic Research Associates.

Meanwhile, even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100, Trump added.

In blunt language, the President said that this agreement “is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States.”

In his report, Loris concludes that the political opportunism of the moment is distracting Americans from what is important: helping the people in Houston, Florida and the islands.

“Policymakers should focus on improving natural disaster response, resilience and preparedness. Blaming man-made climate change on Harvey and Irma is truly denying the data,” he said.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter

via Breitbart News

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ISIS Propaganda Online Draws More Clicks in U.S. Than Anywhere in Europe

An image grab taken from a propaganda video released by the Islamic State

An image grab taken from a propaganda video released by the Islamic State / Getty Images

BY:

September 19, 2017 8:00 am

Islamic State propaganda disseminated online draws more clicks in the United States than in any country in Europe despite much-publicized counter efforts by Silicon Valley, according to a new report published Monday night.

Analysts from the Britain-based Policy Exchange think tank reported that over a six-month span beginning in February, the United States was the second most frequent location from which jihadist content was accessed online, preceded only by Turkey.

By a conservative estimate, ISIS produces about 100 items of new content each week, including execution videos and orders for suicide attacks, despite significant territorial losses in Iraq and Syria over the past year.

The analysts said ISIS penetrates western social media platforms through an online “ecosystem” in which content is first disseminated to its core followers through the encrypted Telegram app, and then dispersed by so-called “missionaries” across various mainstream domains such as Twitter and Facebook. The strategy enables the group to reach tens of thousands of users worldwide, many of whom are based in the United States.

The report arrives before British Prime Minister Theresa May is set to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron this week to deliberate possible measures to crackdown on online extremism. Penalties could include fines against tech companies such as Google and Facebook if they fail to ramp up efforts to remove jihadist content.

The summit comes after the attempted bombing of a subway in London on Friday using an explosive device that can be built from instructions found online.

Martyn Frampton, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange and the lead author of the report, said the findings underscore the failure by western governments and tech companies to tackle online radicalization.

“After three-to-four years of various initiatives announced by companies and governments, they’ve basically made no headway countering the extremist groups. In fact, there is more extremist content out there today than there was in 2014,” Frampton told the Washington Free Beacon. “We’d ideally like the companies to take the lead on this, but we may be at the point where authorities have to step in and apply pressure.”

The analysts said ISIS content production has remained consistent over the past three years despite the death of key figures and the loss of territory. The group’s propaganda campaign is reliant on “swarmcast” tactics—an interconnected network of social media platforms that constantly reconfigures itself and is highly resilient to interference.

The report featured a forward by retired Army general and former CIA director David Petraeus, who said that international counterterrorism efforts to combat online extremism have so far been “inadequate.”

“Jihadists have shown particular facility in exploiting ungoverned or even inadequately governed spaces in the Islamic world,” Petraeus wrote. “This new Policy Exchange report shows they are also exploiting the vast, largely ungoverned spaces in cyberspace, demonstrating increasing technical expertise, sophistication in media production, and agility in the face of various efforts to limit its access.”

via Washington Free Beacon

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