Breaking from The Hamas/BLM News division at The Hill: Israeli babies die in hand-to-hand combat

Harvard BA, JD

 Briahna Joy Gray, co-host of The Hill’s online morning show Rising, has drawn fire from staffers at the Beltway political outlet for what some describe as her “pro-Hamas” and “fringe” commentary. ...

“We also have to hold space for 140 Palestinian children who have been killed in this last weekend of conflict,” Gray said on Wednesday. “And it is awful, even if we don’t have the same images of them and even if they were killed from bombs from the sky instead of in hand-to-hand combat.”

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LOL, griftor Louder with Crowder in $50 million contract dispute with griftee The Daily Wire

 “We here at Mug Club, we thought that we were all in this together, that we were fighting the media-entertainment industrial complex,” he fumed. “We thought that we were all genuinely taking it to Big Tech. But, too many of those in charge of the big conservative platforms are verifiably in bed with them. Big Tech is in bed with Big Con. The people you thought, the people I thought were fighting for you, a lot of it has been a big con.” ...  (Crowder, in his initial rant, failed to mention that he was offered $50 million over four years.)     

More.

There's a lot of money to be made in so-called conservatism.

The Department of Energy has fired Sam Brinton according to The Daily Beast last night

 

Insurrectionists don't answer the phone, lol

 Republicans this cycle are practicing the art of being ungovernable, and the progressives at The Daily Beast are frustrated as hell that no one can predict today's outcome from data:

 Republicans seem less and less inclined to answer poll questions. ... It’s hard to get a truly random sample online the way you can with phone numbers. ... According to Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report, the big problem is that “response rates suck. We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” he told The Daily Beast.

LOL, fear-mongering spending lunatic at The Daily Beast gets nothing right about Nigeria, which has Africa's largest economy and a COVID-19 death record 55 TIMES better than the world's, and: "A few trillion in U.S. government spending isn't a lot of money"

Gee, and Nigeria is only 14% jabbed . . . after all this time.

The U.S. is COVAX’s biggest donor, but not its most generous. Both Germany and Japan have donated a greater share of their gross domestic product. And another big injection of American money looks unlikely as Republicans pull tight the purse strings.

That means fewer vaccines for poorer countries as the pandemic grinds toward its fourth year and vaccination rates in the poorest countries remain stubbornly low—14 percent in Nigeria, for example, compared to the global rate of 63 percent. Starving COVAX “will only enhance global inequities,” Gostin said. ... A few trillion in U.S. government spending, spread out over years, arguably isn’t a lot of money . . ..

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Someone who takes her libertarianism far too seriously is haunted by a hobgoblin, amusingly faults so-called folk libertarians for inconsistency and channels her inner liberal Lionel Trilling to jeer at their "irritated" jerking

 Real libertarianism like hers is a creature of liberalism and the left, not of the right, and so is primarily critical in nature, distinguishing as she does no fewer than five different types in her short polemical foray against Ron DeSantis.

Put a hundred of these people in a room and none will find another person with whom to agree about libertarianism, except maybe that the buffet was OK. 

In The Daily Beast here:

Yet even linking this impulse to that new center may suggest a more formal political program than folk libertarianism entails. Douthat characterized it as “a reflexive individualism disconnected from the common good,” and the reflex is fundamentally reactive, a series of irritated jerks away from unwanted strictures as they come. Folk libertarians have “an instinctive dislike of being bossed around,” as my former colleague Samuel Goldman has observed in The Week, but they lack the broader principle of opposition to bossing others.

 

Breakthrough cases in the news: 300 undergrads at Duke, Gene Simmons of KISS, Chicago Cubs team manager and its president, Reba McEntire and her boyf, boxer Oscar De La Hoya

 Meanwhile . . .

Fully Vaccinated 35-Year-Old Dies of COVID While Waiting for Last-Ditch Treatment

Famous Israeli doctor can't explain new outbreak in Israel, fires shotgun blaming India variant's transmissibility, waning Pfizer immunity, lack of mask discipline

 

Asked what has brought Israel to peak transmission even as the country has already provided third doses of vaccines to 1.5 million citizens, Rahav, who has become one of the best known faces of Israel’s public health messaging, sighed, saying, “I think we’re dealing with a very nasty virus. This is the main problem—and we’re learning it the hard way.”

“It is a combination of waning immunity, so that inoculated people get reinfected, and at the same time the very transmissible Delta variant,” Rahav said, adding that Israelis lacked the discipline to revert to mask usage as the numbers began rising. “But it is not an Israeli problem,” she added. “It is everywhere.”

In other words, they have no idea why.

More.

Now that Rush Limbaugh is dead, The Daily Beast fills the gap with a chopadickoffame story

 Inside the World of Backstreet Castrators, Cutters and Eunuch-Makers :

Some people born with penises and testicles want to keep the former, but lose the latter—though some choose to keep their empty scrotums. (There is a dedicated Reddit forum for the latter group to share photos of their genitals: Empty Sacks, “for those who had the balls to give theirs up.”) Others want to keep the genitalia they were born with and add new genitalia on top. ... (Mexico and Thailand have both been hot spots for quick-and-easy but largely unregulated clinical castrations, penectomies, and similar procedures for at least a couple of decades now.) ... the greater availability of open and official care—far more than horror stories and crackdowns—has led to a drastic decline in demand for cutters, which means there are now fewer of them practicing than there were five or ten years ago. 

Farmers' market pest Abby Ang worries her picture's on 8chan when it's already on Twitter

Farmers’ Markets Have New Unwelcome Guests: Fascists:

While the city deliberates, locals like Ang plan to keep handing out “Don’t Buy Veggies from Nazis” buttons in the market. But those activists know there’s a risk. On multiple recent weekends, Schooner Creek Farm supporters passed out flyers of their own at the farmers’ market.

“We had a couple people counter-flyering,” Ang said, “saying we were just defaming [Dye and Mackey’s] good name.”

Since penning an open letter condemning Schooner Creek Farm this spring, Ang has received an email with racial slurs, and had her picture posted on the troll hotbed 8chan, along with suggestions of violence against her, she said.

China accused of imposing exit bans on American citizens

From the story here:

It’s difficult to know exactly how many U.S. citizens have been affected. The State Department declined to confirm the number of cases, citing privacy concerns, but [John] Kamm said he knows of about two dozen cases over the past year and half alone.

“One of the problems with exit bans is that you don’t know that there is an exit ban on you until you actually get to the airport,” said Kamm. “There may be people in the country who have exit bans on them and they don’t know it.”

The socialist backlash is coming

Rasmussen says 46% already favor government guaranteed jobs.

Hillary admits 41% of Democrats already are socialists.

All it will take for socialism to finally succeed is the onset of the depression the Feds keep intervening to prevent. One can intervene only so many times after which that doesn't work anymore. The problem is the interventions distort the course of capitalism so much that its natural mean-reverting ways will have to be by definition quite severe next time. Enter outright socialism because the young have been brainwashed against capitalism and will clamor for something other than capitalism or the Fed interventionism (aka state capitalism) which hasn't worked.

There will be blood.

John Batchelor: The professors are lying about the Medicaid "cuts"

Here, where we learn that the Obamacare Medicaid expansion actually was UNFAIR because it is far more generous, by 100%, to childless, non-disabled, non-elderly adults earning less than $16,000 a year than it is to poor children, the disabled and seniors who were already on Medicaid.

The Republican Senate plan cuts that back 50%, equal to the existing, traditional reimbursement for poor children, the disabled and seniors on Medicaid.

Equality. It's a bitch brought to you by Republicans, not Democrats. 

Unhinged John McCain says Rand Paul is working for Vladimir Putin: The American people were right not to elect McCain

Imagine this guy in charge of the nuclear arsenal, quoted here:

“You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin... trying to dismember this small country [Montenegro] which has already been the subject an attempted coup.

If they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin and I do not say that lightly.

I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken.

That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number—perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues—would come to the floor and object and walk away.

The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians.

So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

Who is dumber, Sheila Jackson Lee of flag on Mars fame, or the people of Texas who keep reelecting her since 1995?

The flag on Mars story from 1997 was reported here.

For Lee's more recent embarrassments of Yale University, the US Congress and Texas, see here.

A caller to Steve Gruber this morning incorrectly attributed the flag on Mars remark to Maxine Waters.

Eleanor Clift says goodbye to John McLaughlin, the way it should be done

You should read it, here:

Every issue was deeply researched, and John relished weightier issues like NATO enlargement, making us eat our vegetables before we would get to the easy headlines. ... We will miss his signature phrases, beginning with Issue One, and ending with Bye-Bye. And we will miss the man, who was always a blast to be around. John was an original, and while there are many imitators, he will never be overtaken. He got there first, and he created something that in its own way is as iconic as The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason, a comparison I know John would love.

Documents released last week implicate Cheryl Mills in covering up Hillary's private e-mail server

From the Daily Beast here:

The top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was told in late 2012 that a non-profit watchdog group had requested information about Clinton’s email, including the number of accounts she used, according to documents released Wednesday. ... [The aide] was alerted to the request, from the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), via an email from a State Department spokesman, Brock Johnson, on Dec. 11, 2012. [The aide] was told that the group had filed a “significant” request seeking “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton…” The aide, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and other Clinton advisers knew at the time that the secretary was using a private email system to conduct official business. But despite the information request, the State Department told the group that it had found no “responsive” records. “This is evidence that Cheryl Mills covered up Hillary Clinton’s email system,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that sued for information about that original 2012 request, said in a statement. “She was aware of the [Freedom of Information Act] request about Clinton’s email accounts and allowed a response to go out that was a plain lie. And you can bet if Cheryl Mills knew about this inquiry, then Hillary Clinton did, too.”

#Anti-Trump crashes and burns in the rules committee: Can anything good come out of Utah?

An ignominious moment for Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who suddenly developed a tin ear for politics. Or maybe he's never had an ear for politics?

Story here.

The opposition finally figures out that Trump will use eminent domain to build The Wall

We told you he would weeks ago.

Randal John Meyer, in "The Great Wall Of Trump Would Be the Ultimate Eminent Domain Horror Show":

The Government Accountability Office reports (PDF) that “federal and tribal lands make up 632 miles, or approximately 33 percent, of the nearly 2,000 total border miles.” What of the remaining 66 percent? “Private and state-owned lands constitute the remaining 67 percent of the border, most of which is located in Texas.”

That means that if Trump’s plan to build another 1,000 miles of wall is carried to fruition, thousands more homeowners will see their property destroyed or partially walled-off. ...

The fence built so far goes extends [sic] to Texas, which ... means it mostly covers land that was already federally owned. Trump’s new fencing would be built primarily on state-owned and private lands.

The author never tells you Trump beat Texas home boy Ted Cruz in several of the border counties, and reduced his victory to single digits in others.

The Wall has support in Texas.

Washington Post graphic

P. J. O'Rourke was more right about John Kasich than he knows

According to careful vote counting by FiveThirtyEight, "Kasich could lay off winner-take-all states where only Cruz has a chance to beat Trump: Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota" in a last ditch strategy with Cruz to divide and conquer Donald Trump's march to 1,237. "Kasich and Cruz’s choice is simple: wage war on Trump on two separate fronts, or lose."

But Kasich is having none of it, in keeping with his previous refusal to work with Marco Rubio in Rubio's quest to keep Florida out of Donald Trump's column. John Kasich is "all in" to the convention, convinced he's the party's savior from the so-called outsiders Trump and Cruz. Kasich already has four events planned in Wisconsin between now and April 1 leading up to the primary there on April 5.

The reason? He is convinced he's a better candidate everywhere than is Cruz, but especially in the Midwest, insisting he wants the presidency and is not interested in "a parlor game of who gets this or who gets that". And as Rush Limbaugh has observed, John Kasich takes himself way too seriously. The man is delusional.

"We don't want to work with those people [Democrats]. We want to defeat them politically, and here comes Kasich! It's all about him. That whole thing, saying that he would be way open to choosing a Democrat? Kasich is taking the occasion here to try to sell himself as something unique and special."

Of course Kasich's not unique and special. The party's problem is that it's given us such Republicans too many times before, candidates whose vision of politics is nothing more than white flag bipartisanship. John McCain was infamous for it in 2008, and his lackey Lindsey Graham also puked out that line this time around, before ignominiously crashing and burning.

It's conventional wisdom out there that Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party as we know it. But the truth is closer to what P. J. observed last fall, that it has simply killed itself.

John Kasich is just the Republicans' two word suicide note.