Gee, I hope the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is going to subpoena the guys at The Washington Free Beacon to testify under oath that they knew absolutely nothing about a Trump dossier

 

This report sounds like there's wiggle room for Israel to take out Iran's Supreme Leader after missile strike on Israeli hospital

 Dozens of Iranian missiles strike major Israeli hospital and residential buildings — as Israel hits nuclear sites 

... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to hit back even harder at Iran following the strike.

“We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran,” he vowed in an X post.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, backed up Netanyahu’s threat.

“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he tweeted.

“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.” ...          

And there it is:

 

 

Kamala Harris' confused messaging on fossil fuels, reported by Politico and given publicity by CNN's KFILE, continues to melt down lol

Camila Thorndike, a top Harris-Walz campaign climate adviser, abruptly walked back her recent comments stating that Vice President Kamala Harris would be hostile to future oil and gas drilling as president—effectively reversing her reversal of the candidate's position.

In a statement Monday, Thorndike lamented that she wasn't clear enough when she told Politico last week that Harris is not "promoting expansion" of oil drilling and suggested Harris was not fond of a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act mandating fossil fuel leases. Thorndike serves as Harris's "climate engagement director."

"I didn't explain myself clearly here," Thorndike said Monday. "Contrary to Trump's claims, the VP has not banned fracking, doesn't support banning fracking, and in fact cast the tie-breaking vote on the biggest pro-climate law ever, which, yes, opened new fracking leases. People know that's her position." ...

It remains unclear how Thorndike's new statement clarifies her comments from last week. 

More. 

It's hard to run away from a former position which had no nuance.

Harris was, and remains, an extreme opponent of fossil fuels, a Kool-Aid drinker like Hillary Clinton who thought you could mandate solar panels on every home in the United States.

More importantly, her political support comes from the extreme opponents of fossil fuels, and they have to be assuaged as Harris runs away from them in order to win in pro-fracking Pennsylvania, at whom the Monday statement was aimed.

Harris' climate adviser is being forced by the campaign to say words she doesn't want to say.

 

 

The Harris-Biden messaging is in complete disarray: Kamala boasts right now about spending millions to aid Lebanon, which harbors Israel's enemies, while her own DHS Secretary is warning FEMA is running out of money for hurricanes

 And Mayorkas couldn't care less about FEMA running out of money or the suffering in the Southeast. He went clothes shopping on Saturday.

This administration excels at in-your-face bad optics in addition to doing a horrible job.

The Vance-Walz debate highlighted yet another case of Tim Walz lying about his past, claiming he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Massacre when he was still in Nebraska

 ‘I’m a Knucklehead’: Walz Gives Disastrous Answer When Questioned on Inaccurate Claims at Debate

Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz stumbled while answering a question about his inaccurate claims about himself on Tuesday night, boasting about his “service” riding his bike as a kid and admitting “I’m a knucklehead” in a rambling answer. ...

Walz says he ‘misspoke’ after unearthed newspaper reports undercut claim he was in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square protests 

... Walz’s claims that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests have been repeated in media reports. But contemporaneous newspaper reports first resurfaced by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, place Walz in Nebraska around that time. An issue of the Alliance Times-Herald dated May 16, 1989, features a photo of Walz touring a Nebraska National Guard storeroom. In the photo’s caption, the paper notes that Walz “will take over the job” of staffing the storeroom from a retiring guardsman and “will be moving to Alliance,” Nebraska. A separate newspaper article about Walz’s planned trip to China published by a Nebraska-based outlet in April 1989 reported that he planned to travel to China in early August of that year. ...

 

 

 

Oh gee, what a surprise, Kamala Harris has a radical black anti-American, anti-semitic pastor named Amos Brown, just like Barack Obama had Jeremiah Wright

The guy's so bad Senator Diane Feinstein walked out on him, as did Governor Gray Davis, both Democrats:

At a memorial service for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks held just six days after al Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, Brown used the occasion to point the finger at the United States in remarks that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "set a lot of people’s teeth on edge" and "left politicians stunned."

"America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?" Brown asked the audience. "Ohhhh—America, what did you do?"

"America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up?" Brown continued, referring to his participation in the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which the United States and Israel boycotted citing concerns about anti-Semitism.

Brown’s diatribe jarred a mostly liberal audience, the Chronicle reported, noting that the late California senator Dianne Feinstein (D.) and former California governor Gray Davis (D.) left during his remarks. ...

Brown’s radical politics have also veered into anti-Semitism. He served as a delegate to the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, and best known for equating Zionism with racism. The United States and Israel walked out of the conference over that resolution, expressing dismay that a conference ostensibly devoted to combating hatred had devolved into a hate fest. ...

He serves on the California Reparations Task Force and has called for cash payments to the descendants of slaves from "billionaires in San Francisco," according to the New York Times.  The pastor held a "Solidarity for Reparations" event at his church in 2022 and told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021 that "America is a racist country." ...

He has visited Harris at the White House at least twice and told Religion News Service this week Harris remains a "dues-paying member" of his church. "For two decades now, at least, I have turned to you," Harris said of Brown in her remarks to the National Baptist Convention 2022.

The story is here.

Rate of public educator sexual misconduct is 10 times higher in a year than in five decades of abuse by clergy, two thirds of the predators are male, most of the victims are high school females

 

Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America. ...

“In any given year they have failed to report thousands of these situations, and instead they’ve papered them over, acted like it’s not an issue,” former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told RealClearInvestigations. Stunned by a 2018 Chicago Tribune investigation that found 523 incident reports of sexual misconduct by employees of the city’s schools during the past decade, DeVos during the Trump administration launched the process of including specific questions about such cases in the Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a process it undertakes every two years. Previously, the Office for Civil Rights asked only general questions about sexual misconduct incidents, without a breakdown of alleged perpetrators.

The Biden administration initially sought to remove those questions, saying it wanted to avoid data duplication, but it backtracked after fierce criticism it was doing so as a sop to teachers unions. Consequently, the question will be included on future questionnaires, but, as of today, the Department of Education “has no data,” a spokesperson told RCI. These days, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, even a cursory review of local news reporting brings disquieting revelations of teachers accused of or arrested for alleged sexual relations with a student. ...

Pointing to research from Hofstra University that found roughly 1 in 10 students in K-12 schools have suffered “some form of sexual misconduct by an educator,” Terri Miller, head of the advocacy group SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation), said the number of victims is staggering.

More.

Just as the treacherous Biden cut off arms to Israel he issued military export waivers to Israel's enemies Qatar, which hosts Hamas, and Lebanon, which harbors Hezbollah

 The perfidy of Joe Biden knows no bounds.

Less than a day before the Biden administration announced its intent to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel, it issued a sanctions waiver to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to a host of Arab nations that boycott the Jewish state, including Hamas ally Qatar and Iran-controlled Lebanon, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

More.

Kristen Clarke, Biden's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and promoter of anti-semitic black supremacist Anthony Martin, now revealed to have lied under oath at Senate confirmation

  

 

She had attacked her ex-husband with a knife but lied about her arrest.

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke admitted Wednesday that she was arrested and chose not to disclose the legal matter during her Senate confirmation process because it had been expunged from her record.

More.

Her appointment stank in 2021, and it reeks now. She aggressively prosecutes peaceful abortion protesters but turns a blind eye to actual violent attacks on pro-life facilities.

Clarke not only invited notorious anti-Semite and black supremacist quack Anthony Martin — whose racist theories happen to comport perfectly with the ones she presented in her letter — to speak at Harvard, but also praised his intelligence and the veracity of his work. In her letter, Clarke specifically points to a doctor named Carol Barnes to claim “melanin theory” is what gives “Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.” In those days, bigoted pseudo-intellectuals such as Martin and Leonard Jeffries were quite popular on campuses.

-- National Review reported. 

 

Abraham Lincoln was no Socrates, pretending that a man can be neither slave nor master

 "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

If a man is not a master of himself, however, he will be a slave . . . to his passions, which include the desire to rule others.

In The War Between The States we exchanged the one tyranny over the Negro for a still more universal and thorough-going tyranny of the self.

The only free man who exists is the one who can say No to himself.

This is quite the concession about Abraham Lincoln

 Lincoln’s principled stance was one of the causes of the Civil War.

In other words, Lincoln forced the issue, which is what tyrants do.

Lincoln was not a peacemaker.

 

Update:

It's too bad Nikki Haley didn't say Lincoln was a cause of the Civil War during her failed presidential run. That would have been REALLY fun to watch.

Washington Free Beacon lol: "Abraham Lincoln could not conceive of wonder drugs"

Um, he took blue-mass, which made him angry as all hell but did alleviate his depression.

He could not conceive of "wonder drugs," which (had they been available) might have saved his son from dying of pneumonia.

Rufo only scratched the surface, Claudine Gay of Harvard reportedly has a long history of plagiarism according to Aaron Sibarium

 Along with her dissertation, the decades-long pattern paints a picture of sloppiness, at best, and willful dishonesty at worst.

The whole sorry business is recounted here. 

 

The plagiarism matter is entirely separate from the main show, however, in my opinion.

The character pattern of willfully omitting attribution involved in plagiarism is certainly related to the habit of Hamas defenders ignoring Hamas' crimes against Israel, of course, but it distracts from the issue which made Claudine Gay an issue in the first place.

She and the other university presidents could not bring themselves to say unequivocally that calls for a genocide of Jews violated their campus bullying and harassment policies.

Focusing on Gay's academic failings is already obscuring that.

Dingbat Mary Trump for all you physics fans lol

 The next panelist I had only ever seen in heavily photoshopped headshots. Mary Trump, the anti-Trump author and psychologist, looks so much like her uncle Donald under the stage lights it is hard to concentrate on what she's saying. That's just as well, because it's getting late and the self-avowed expert on Trump's "physic energy" has just repeated her baseless accusation that the former president enabled the Hamas atrocities in Israel.

Here.

LOL, Democrat named Wackerman, $400 donor to Lincoln Project, arrested for setting July 2022 "Oak Fire" in Yosemite National Park which Democrats blamed on global warming

 The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.     

More.

Soft-on-sex-crime liberal Democrat in Wisconsin could make it to its Supreme Court on April 4

 

The Kelly commercial isn’t the first to attack Protasiewicz’s sentencing record. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business association, launched an ad campaign highlighting multiple convicted rapists and pedophiles who received light sentences from Protasiewicz.

More.

Yeah, that's the ticket

 THREAT TO SHOOT DOWN PELOSI PLANE

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

Horsecrap from The Washington Free Beacon: "The economy is gangbusters" when it's actually underperforming the post-war by over 50%

Here.

Through 3Q2019 the US economy over the last ten years as measured by the compound annual growth rate from 3Q2009 and using the government's own gross domestic product measure known as GDPC1 is underperforming the previous 62 year period from 3Q1947 until 3Q2009 by 29.39%.

We're growing at 2.33% now vs. 3.3% then, and that calculation removes the worst of the 2008 debacle from the now column and puts it in the then column.

If we measured as we really ought to from the previous peak in 4Q2007 and included the downturn in the now column, the picture is much much worse.

To keep it simple the full 12 years from 3Q2007 through 3Q2019 (third estimate just reported) comes in at a miserable 1.67% vs. the previous 60 year period at 3.47%. In other words, this so-called gangbusters economy is really underperforming the post-war by 51.87%.

We're not even half as good as we used to be.

The only thing that is going gangbusters right now is Trump cheerleaders from Andy Puzder to Rush Limbaugh and all the usual idiots in between trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Thinking Americans are not fooled.

Loser in Georgia gubernatorial contest Stacey Abrams says her vote was suppressed while taking credit for turnout surge

Ding dong.

Abrams Complains Race Was Stolen Through Voter Suppression, Boasts of Huge Turnout Increases in Same Interview:

"I ran a race where … we tripled Latino turnout, Asian-Pacific Islander turnout, increased youth participation rates by 138 percent, increased black turnout by 40 percent, and I got the highest share of white voters in a generation," she said. "It is not a zero-sum game, and we have to remember that winning elections is about building the largest coalition possible." ...

"I'm not saying I absolutely know I would have won, but we know that thousands of Georgians had their voices stolen because they were not able to cast ballots and they cannot be guaranteed that their votes will be counted in 2020 if we don't do this right," she said.

Georgia voter turnout surged from 43 percent in 2014, the last governor's race year in the state, to 57 percent in 2018. ... Abrams lost by less than 55,000 votes but failed to force a runoff as Kemp continued a Republican state-wide winning streak. However, Abrams has refused to officially concede she lost, saying "we won," accusing Kemp of systemic voter suppression tactics, and saying the race was "stolen" from the voters of Georgia.