It's going to go this way for the duration

You surely know by now about Khizr Khan's speech to the DNC.

And probably Squirrel-Hair's boneheaded, self-referential, recklessly speculative response:

Standing on a stage in front of America, Khizr Khan slammed Donald Trump, saying his son sacrificed his life for the Constitution. "You've sacrificed nothing," he said directly to Trump from that stage. Donald Trump has responded to the speech and of all the ways to respond to something like that, he took what was arguably the most Donald Trump route possible.

Speaking with George Stephanopoulos, Trump seemed to try to empathize with Khan before going on to say that Khan's wife had nothing to say and may not have been allowed to say anything (he cites "several people" who have written that claim because sure why not), as though that might be reason enough to completely disregard what Khan had to say. Stephanopoulos asked him if he had sacrifices, and this happened:

Pressed by Stephanopoulos to name the sacrifices he’d made for his country, Trump said: “I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot.”

And then there was the counter-response.

I wasn't sure whether to even blog about this. If I discuss every little "barstool eruption," as Charles Krauthammer calls them, that is gong to occur between now and November, I'm going to be very busy indeed.

But the point of any and all of them is that they allow Hillionaire to assume a position of credibility she would not have were she being opposed by a sane, grown-up candidate. She'll be able to point to each one and say, "I say not only to my base, but to Republicans, even conservative Republicans, can you even remotely consider making someone like this as president?"

And she'll be right.

Here's the deal: Those conservatives - and "conservatives" - who are so resigned to - or, in the case of the "conservatives," actually enthused about - Squirrel-Hair's candidacy that they feel compelled to try somehow to portray him a a great, if perhaps flawed, man are going to have to be more honest about how awful he is. If their point is to persuade any still-undecideds to not vote for Hillionaire, they're going to have to match the credibility she has when she points to him and says, "Can you believe this buffoonery?" And that's going to start with acknowledging that S-H is at least nearly as horrifying a prospect. Yay-rah sugarcoating will look phony, more so the more of these that pile up.


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Who was Harvey Milk really?

You probably know about this by now:

“The Navy is set to name a ship after the gay rights icon and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, according to a congressional notification obtained by USNI News.
“The July 14, 2016 notification, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, indicated he intended to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206).”

Now, even if he'd been a model citizen, who'd had a relationship of deep commitment and fidelity to one homosexual sweetheart throughout his life, we'd still be talking about this nation's military making a "hero" out of someone specifically on the basis of his sin.

But he was no such person:

What would you call a man of whom, as regards sexual preference, his own close friend and biographer confessed, “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems”?

Let's recall the circumstances that form the basis for the hard left regarding him as a martyr:

Harvey Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first openly homosexual candidate to be elected to public office (San Francisco city commissioner). His chief cause was to do away with the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In 1978 Milk was murdered over a non-related political dispute by fellow Democrat Dan White.

Now, for some specifics:

Harvey Milk was both a pederast and, by extension, a statutory rapist. One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the streets.

Randy Shilts was a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and close friend to Harvey Milk. Though Shilts died of AIDS in 1994, he remains, even today, one of the most beloved journalists in the “LGBT” community.

Shilts was also Harvey Milk’s biographer. In his glowing book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” he wrote of Milk’s “relationship” with the McKinley boy: “… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. … At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”

McKinley later killed himself.

Or there was this one:

Another teen who crossed paths with Harvey Milk was Christian convert and former homosexual Gerard Dols. In a 2008 radio interview with Concerned Women for America, Dols shared of how – as a physically disabled teen – the “very nice” Harvey Milk had encouraged him in 1977 to run away from his Minnesota home and come to San Francisco.
According to Dols, Milk told him, “Don’t tell your parents,” and later sent him a letter with instructions. Thankfully, the letter was intercepted by Dols’ parents, who then filed a complaint with the Minnesota attorney general’s office.
The incident was swept under the rug.
Milk was also reputed to offer room and board in his San Francisco flat to young sailors in exchange for sodomy. His history of child sexual abuse was (and is) no secret to Obama or the homosexual community.

The closest Milk ever came to the kind of hypothetical relationship[ I describe above was these:

“The information Shilts provides about Milk’s sexual partners is revealing about the nature of male homosexual life in America,” concluded Sprigg. “Milk’s first long-term lover, Joe, had his ‘introduction to gay life’ when he performed sex acts upon men in a movie theatre for money – at age 9. Milk’s next lover, Craig, had been arrested after having sex with a 40-year-old man – when Craig was 14. He met Milk when he was 17. ‘[I]t would be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early 20s that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life,’ Shilts reports. Another lover, Jack, moved in with Milk when he was 16 and Milk was 33. Jack attempted suicide several times, and once when he physically attacked Milk, ‘Harvey literally tied him up and threw him in a closet,'” reports Shilts.

And it's not like this ship will be the only way he's being "honored" in post-America:

So what does a man like Harvey Milk get for his crimes and predatory predilections? While most sexual predators get time in prison and a dishonorable mention on the registry of sex offenders, Harvey Milk got his own California state holiday(“Harvey Milk Day”), officialU.S. postage stamp, aposthumous Presidential Medal of Freedomand, now, is honored with a U.S. Naval ship in his own name.

God help us.

Hillionaire in a nutshell

The editors at NRO note that the point of Hillionaire's speech last night was to "reintroduce herself."

They provide their own take on what that is about:

 . . . if you need a reintroduction to Mrs. Clinton, we will oblige: She is an opportunist without anything resembling a conviction with the exception of her unwavering commitment to abortion, a “public servant” who along with her husband grew vastly wealthy exploiting her political connections and renting access to everybody from Goldman Sachs to Vladimir Putin, a petty, grasping, vindictive, meretricious time-server whose incompetence and dishonesty have been proved everywhere from Little Rock to Benghazi.

They take a look at the specifics into which she delved, such as they were:

To the extent that she ventured down from the lofty heights of moral preening and celebrating herself as a semi-divine agent of History, she mostly cleaved to her familiar list of free stuff and a proposal for punitive tax hikes on unpopular individuals, companies, and industries. Maybe there are some rubes out there who think that this will result in tuition-free college for “the middle class,” as though shifting around costs made things less expensive. (How’s that working out for your health care?) Her strategy on the Islamic State? Same thing we’ve been doing, but with an added “We will prevail!”

Hardly the recipe for restoring post-America to its former status as the United States of America.

The planned-decline agenda: right on track

Latest economic numbers:

The US economy continues its pattern of stagnation, and once again economists got fooled into thinking that it had changed. According to a new Bureau of Economic Analysis advance report, gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annualized rate of 1.2% in the second quarter, beating the last two quarters but falling far short of estimates. Markets had predicted a GDP increase of 2.6% — itself no great shakes:

Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 1.2 percent in the second quarter of 2016 (table 1), according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 0.8 percent (revised).

The Bureau emphasized that the second-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see “Source Data for the Advance Estimate” on page 2). The “second” estimate for the second quarter, based on more complete data, will be released on August 26, 2016.

The Q2 report also has downward revisions to Q1, especially in gross domestic income (GDI). Some economists consider GDI a better measure of economic growth, but in Q1 it didn’t matter much either way. The new report revised Q1 GDI from +2.9% to +0.9%, which might make the argument that we should stick with GDP after all. As noted above, Q1 GDP got revised from 1.1% to 0.8%.

Just how long has it been since we’ve seen decent quarterly growth? It’s been two years since the US economy produced an annualized growth rate of 3% or better:

Weakest expansion since 1949.

The Most Equal Comrade and all his economic advisors and Treasury Department pointy-heads past and present - Jack Lew, Austin Goolsbee, Timothy Geithner et al - are not idiots. They had to know their policies were going to result in stagnation. But wedded as they were to their vision of "fairness" and a strong government role in the nation's economic activity, they were incapable of rearranging their priorities.

And so here we are.

Pubs and Bots, how much longer do you want to go on owning this clown?

Cheeto Jesus gets his petty and vindictive on:

Davenport, Iowa (CNN)Donald Trump, after hearing speeches at the Democratic convention this week, said Thursday he wanted to "hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin."

"They'd never recover," he said. 

Trump often uses the term "hit" to mean verbally attack, rather than physical contact.

The Republican nominee zoomed in on one speaker especially, though he didn't mention his name.

"I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy," Trump said to laughs at a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa. "I was going to hit this guy so hard his head would spin, he wouldn't know what the hell happened."

Trump said this individual "came out of nowhere" and had done work with Trump in the past. "He made deals with me. 'Will you help me with this? Would you make this deal and solve the problem?' I solved the problem," Trump said. 

His campaign did not respond to a request asking to clarify who Trump was talking about.

Several speakers this week have gone after Trump in Philadelphia, including Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City mayor made a surprise endorsement over the weekend for Hillary Clinton, and described Trump in his DNC speech Wednesday night as a "dangerous demagogue."

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine also targeted Trump, mocking the businessman's tendency to accentuate his promises with a plea of "believe me."

"He said a lot of things about me, I never met the guy," Trump said. "I mean the things that were said about me. I mean, should I go through some of the names?"

Trump recalled telling a friend this week that he wanted to retaliate against the people who slammed him at the convention, mentioning current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio by name.

"I was going to say that de Blasio is the worst mayor in the history of the city, but I didn't say it," Trump said to laughs. "He's a terrible mayor. I was going to say that, but now I won't say it."

Trump said his friend, who he labeled a "very great governor," urged him to stay focused on attacking Clinton, not other Democrats.

"He said, 'Don't hit there. Don't hit down. You have one person to beat. It's Hillary Rodham Clinton,'" Trump recalled, adding that he initially objected to the advice. "I said, 'But I really want to. I don't like what they're saying because a lot of it is lies. Not all of it but a lot of it is.' I said, 'I just really ... it makes me feel good.' "

Yeah, you ought to listen to your governor friend, but you won't. You don't have the dignity to rise above  such remarks. You have no ability to remain focused on core principles and your vision, because you have no principles and vision.

I become more convinced every day that Mike Pence probably threw up in his mouth a little after calling Squirrel-Hair a "great man" during that 60 Minutes interview.

Thursday roundup

Some names you want to remember and be up to speed on when discussing the Clinton Foundation:Uranium One, Frank Guistra, and Laureate International Universities.

Some names you want to remember and be up to speed on when discussing slavery's role in American history:  Anthony Johnson, John Casor, C. Richards.

The constabulary in a British community is hoping that rainbow-colored patrol cars will help it fight hate crime.

How many jobs would the Dems' proposed $15 minimum wage kill? 7 million.

They smell weakness: Russia and China are set to conduct joint naval drills in the South China Sea.

They smell weakness:

The Iranian army’s Deputy Chief of Staff Brigadier General Ali Shadmani said Tuesday that “If the enemy makes a small mistake, we will shut the Strait of Hormuz, kill their sedition in the bud and endanger the arrogant powers’ interests,” according to the Fars news agency.

And speaking of post-America's partner in patty-cake, Iran destroys 100,000 satellite dishes. The head of the Basij says that "most satellite channels . . . deviate the society's morality and culture."

The Most Equal Comrade speaks to the adoring faithful

His address last night to the Freedom-Haters in Philadelphia was an interesting mixture of ideological astuteness, his trademark self-absorption, and the F-Hers' signature mangling of the founding documents and the principles on which they are based.

Jim Geraghty at NRO covers these aspects:

Obama Makes His Anti-Trump Pitch… to Conservatives and Republicans The two most extraordinary sections of President Obama’s convention speech last night:

Look, we Democrats have always had plenty of differences with the Republican Party, and there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s precisely this contest of ideas that pushes our country forward.  But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican – and it sure wasn’t conservative.  

Every other Democrat in the country is pulling out all the stops to tie every Republican on the ballot in 2016 to Donald Trump and his toxic favorable/unfavorable numbers, and along comes the President of the United States, the preeminent foe of the conservative movement and GOP for the past eight years, to say, “look, he doesn’t really speak for them.”

The second amazing part:

Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that together, We, the People, can form a more perfect union. 

The Obama version skips over a few words; the actual Declaration of Independence declares, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the point is that the Democrats – the Democrats! – are citing the Founding Fathers and the document of our national creation in their argument. This used to be the Republicans’ style. By leaving it unused, the Democrats are picking it up and using it.

The most insufferable assertion from Obama’s speech came from the preceding sentences:  

Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order.  We don’t look to be ruled. 

Oh, really, Mr. “I have a phone and a pen”? Careful, years of Obama-messiah talk from his true believers are being sent to the memory hole.

The damn thing is that he does have Squirrel-Hair's number. "Wasn't particularly Republican and sure wasn't conservative" has to sting unless you're a completely ate-up Trump-bot.


And Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media has compiled a video montage of the MEC referring to himself 119 times in a speech ostensibly about Hillionaire.

 

The fruits of planned decline - today's edition

Here's what China thinks of post-America's role as guarantor of the world's recognized international sea lanes:

The head of the Chinese navy told U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson July 26 China will “never stop” construction of illegal man-made islands in the South China Sea.

China’s hardline position comes just two weeks after an international tribunal rejected all of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. China has pledged to ignore the ruling and has since announced it will commence war drills and combat air patrols in the disputed waters. Richardson’s visit was meant to begin bilateral naval talks between the two countries, but positions have not changed.

Chinese naval officials told Chinese media, the South China Sea is “China’s inherent territory,” and that its construction of man-made islands is “reasonable, justified and lawful.” Richardson pressed back that the U.S. will continue to sail through the South China Sea as it always has, and will not recognize China’s territorial claims. China responded, “Any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect.”

So, according to China, post-America should lay off:

China’s navy also warned Richardson that the U.S. should not continue to conduct naval exercises near its islands and respect China’s territorial claims. The U.S. exercised its right to freedom of navigation and sailed the USS Lassen, a guided missile destroyer, near an important artificial Chinese island in October, 2015, protesting China’s actions in the South China Sea. China was so incensed it summoned the U.S. ambassador and told him the move was “extremely irresponsible.”

Again, we can objectively call the Most Equal Comrade's (and Hillionaire's and Global Test's) foreign policy a failure, but according to their own standards, by which post-America has needed to be knocked down a peg on the world stage, it's a great success.

It's a good week for dismissed charges

The Freddie Gray officers aren't the only ones breathing easier today. The investigators into the diabolical practices of Sanger "crush-below-crush-above" Enterprises are likewise exonerated:

This morning Texas District Court Judge Brock Thomas dismissed charges against Center for Medical Progress investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt. The two investigators released numerous videos implicating Planned Parenthood in trafficking baby body parts for profit which is a violation of federal law, as well as, violating the federal partial-birth abortion act.

A grand jury that was convened to investigate charges brought up in the evidence indicted Daleiden and Merritt instead with a felony count of tampering with a government record for using false identification. They used this to access Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast which is based in Houston. Both faced up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

“The dismissal of the bogus, politically motivated charges against CMP project lead David Daleiden and investigator Sandra Merritt is a resounding vindication of the First Amendment rights of all citizen journalists, and also a clear warning to any of Planned Parenthood’s political cronies who would attack whistleblowers to protect Planned Parenthood from scrutiny. Planned Parenthood tried to collude with public officials to manipulate the legal process to their own benefit, and they failed. A year after the release of the undercover videos, the ongoing nationwide investigation of Planned Parenthood by the House Select Investigative Panel makes clear that Planned Parenthood is the guilty party in the harvesting and trafficking of baby body parts for profit,” Center for Medical Progress said in a statement on their website.

Liberty Counsel who represented Merritt released the following statement. “Realizing that its deficient indictment against Sandra “Susan” Merritt was bogus, the State of Texas has finally agreed to dismiss its baseless and frivolous charges.  The decision today clears Sandra of any criminal wrongdoing.  She no longer faces a jail sentence for exposing the truth about Planned Parenthood.”

An uplifting bit of evidence that the lights haven't gone completely out on Western civilization.

The final toppling of Mosby's folly

Race-hustling and the cops-are-bad narrative took a major blow this morning:

All charges have been dismissed against all the officers who still faced trial in connection with the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray last April.

The prosecutors’ decision came at a pretrial motions hearing for Officer Garrett Miller, who faced charges of second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby is set to hold a news conference at 10:30 a.m. at Gilmore Homes in West Baltimore, near where Freddie Gray was taken into custody.

Mosby was fiercely defiant at her presser. She's apparently the kind who doesn't learn from reality.


Where do the officers go to get their reputations back?

How's this for a tortured argument?

Check out the lame blurts of defiance, in response to Billy Jeff the Zipper's call for unity of national purpose in his speech at the Freedom-Hater confab last night, from post-American Muslims who claim the ordinary-citizen mantle. All he did was call on peace-loving Muslims to be a strong element in the war on jihad (okay, he called it "terror"), and he got this:

Journalist Sara Yasin tweeted: "Aaaand Clinton reiterates this idea that Muslim-Americans are mostly valuable for the cause of fighting terror."

"Just once I want, as a muslim, my value not to be tied to helping fight terror. We have more to offer," tweeted Rabia Chaudry, a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Tweeted Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan: "Sorry @billclinton, my Muslim American daughters are part of the 'us'. They're not a separate category (or subgroup)."

"If you're a Muslim and you hate terror, WTF? Imagine if he said, If you're black and you hate crime," tweeted Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Isn't the position of these people tantamount to saying that jihadism brings no discredit to their religion?

This is exactly why LITD remains #NeverTrump

And why I no longer consider myself a Republican.

Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Wayne Allen Root, Conrad Black, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, spin this chunk of dog vomit:

This is your candidate, Republicans.

After a GOP convention filled with liberal, Socialist ideas, such as cradle-to-grave big government care, the end to the “culture wars,” which means a push back against religious freedoms, now the new face of the Republican party is taking another step left.

Donald Trump said Tuesday night that the federal minimum wage must be raised, and promised to implement a $10 per hour wage if elected president.

"I would say $10," Trump told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly when asked about the specific figure he would recommend. "But with the understanding that somebody like me is going to bring back jobs. I don't want people to be in the $10 dollar category very long. I believe it should be raised."
Trump is laying down this proposal in response to Democrats, who have said he wanted to lower the minimum wage.
Not to be outdone by his liberal pals, Trump is pretty much blowing up everything conservatives and small government proponents have stood on.
The billionaire businessman said he would use the federal wage as a base and encourage states to implement their own minimum wage that is higher than the $10 figure. But he also said some states need higher wages while others do not.
"If you take New York, it's very expensive to live in New York," Trump said.
It's not his first foray into hating heartless Republicans over the minimum wage. We knew about this long before his nomination was official.

Republicans, you had one job ... 

As I've said before, several bloggers and columnists I've long admired - Ace, Bookworm, Kurt Schlichter - accuse us #NeverTrumpers of moral preening, basically saying, "Look, pal, Russell Kirk and Fredrich Hayek aren't on the ticket. The choice in November is going to be binary, and Hillary Clinton is a rabidly power-hungry criminal." They say there is absolutely nothing productive about continuing to point out the ways in which Squirrel-Hair is unfit to be president.

What the hell am I supposed to do with the kind of thing he spouted on O'Reilly's program?

Sweep it under the rug? I can't in good conscience, as a conservative whose principles are sacred to me, do that.

No, the conservative movement may be mortally wounded, but conservative principles are as true and right as they ever were.

And we will not shut up about them. No matter which completely unfit charlatan takes the helm in post-America this coming winter.

Hillionaire's impossible task: happy-talking the current state of post-America

Great Ben Shapiro piece at NRO on how the last eight years - the era of the Most Equal Comrade - have forced the Freedom-Haters - particularly Hillionaire - to drag the delegates at their convention into an escapist realm of identity politics and we're-making-America-great-by-imposing-social-justice nonsense.

It's one of those I-could-easily-excerpt-the-whole-thing pieces. For purposes of the point I want to make here, we'll take some segments out of sequence. Let's start with just what it is about the MEC era that has left Hillionaire unable to be candid about what will be facing the next president:

Barack Obama has been a highly unsuccessful president by any objective measure. His foreign policy has led to the single most explosive rise in terrorism since the empowerment of al-Qaeda in the late 1990s by Hillary’s husband. His last two years have been plagued by a national increase in violent crime, particularly murder in major cities. The economy has continued to stall under his redistributionist, anti-capitalist watch.

And the Democrats have paid the price. The media that built Obama into a godhead for racial progress couldn’t abandon Obama; instead, they kept happy-talking their way through an increasingly dystopian America. So did Obama’s fellow Democrats. The result: massive Republican gains at the state and local level, and historic elections in 2010 and 2014 in Congressional races. 

The media still can’t escape the Obama trap. When Donald Trump rightly pointed out a series of problems facing America at home and abroad, ranging from rising crime and economic malaise to the rise of jihadism, the media and the Obama administration responded by pooh-poohing Trump’s critique. No, they said, Trump’s wrong: Everything’s hunky-dory. He’s just being too “dark.”

Except he isn’t.

And Americans know that.

Hillary knows it too, but she’s stuck in a bind. 

Now let's back up and look at what Shapiro points out as Hillionaire's most pressing problem in regard to her own character and personality:

But Bill Clinton’s wife is one of the least empathy-driven candidates in the history of politics. She’s manipulating, cynical, and nasty. She’s instinctively defensive, brutally cutting, and utterly cold. 

The polls show it. This week’s CNN poll demonstrated that 68 percent of Americans consider Hillary dishonest, and 54 percent think she’s running for personal gain. 

This is why there's such a push in Philadelphia this week to "humanize" her.

The only thing she has going for her in this regard is that nobody really thinks of Squirrel-Hair as a warm-hearted, other-centered fuzzball, either.

But like kids in a dysfunctional family, the post-American cattle-masses have no higher standard to wish for, as evidenced by voting patterns, social-media comment threads, and the sewage that spews forth in university classrooms, and the spiritually grotesque creatures we choose to make into celebrities.

But back to my original point, Hillionaire is not the most credible dispenser of happy talk in a year like 2016. All candidates have challenges, and that's hers.

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

Europe under siege:

Terrorist savages have struck Europe again, claiming another life in a seemingly endless tide of violence.

It is horrific. Indeed, it is especially horrific – a Catholic priest had his throat cut in the middle of Mass.

But attack after attack strains everybody’s ability to respond with the levels of emotion such atrocities demand.

Earlier today a doctor was shot dead by a patient in a German clinic, but attention was dragged elsewhere by events in Normandy almost immediately.

In the previous week in Germany alone there has been a fatal machete attack, an axe attack on a train, a suicide bombing and a shooting rampage in a shopping mall.

It is twelve days since crazed trucker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel mowed down 84 people – ten of them children – in Nice. 

It was only late March when three suicide bombers killed more than 30 people in Brussels, which in turn came months after the larger-still rampage in Paris – about which horrors are still emerging.

Memo to the good folks of that continent: never let the term "new normal" come from your lips.

 

 

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

Took the German authorities a little while to confirm the obvious but now we know where this particular suicide bomber - like most suicide bombers - was coming from:

We reported on this attack earlier today. At that time, the latest information said:

Police said that they do not yet know whether the attacker had a radical Islamist background. The investigation currently focused on the attacker’s communications.

Now we know that this killer had pledged loyalty to ISIS.

From The New York Post:

Bavaria’s top security official says a video has been found on the Ansbach bomber‘s phone showing him pledging allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.

Joachim Herrmann says that according to an initial translation of the Arabic-language video the 27-year-old man announced a “revenge” attack against Germany.

Herrmann told reporters Monday that the video strongly suggests the bombing was a “terrorist attack.”

Bavaria’s top security official says Ansbach bomber had received asylum in Bulgaria.

 We have been sounding the alarm about the Obama Regime’s desperate efforts to flood Middle America with unvetted Middle Easterners. We told you that in May, in the wake of the Orlando terrorist attack, we admitted 441 Syrians. How many were Christians? Five.

Angela Merkel, call your office.

Philly cops union insulted by lineup of Freedom-Hater convention speakers

Not feelin' the brotherly love in Philly:

Philadelphia's police union issued a scathing rebuke of Hillary Clinton for including relatives of victims of police shootings at the Democratic National Convention but no relatives of slain police officers.

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 said in a statement that it was "insulted by the exclusion of police widows and family members" as speakers at the convention, from Monday to next Thursday.

"It is sad that to win an election Mrs. Clinton must pander to the interests of people who do not know all the facts, while the men and women they seek to destroy are outside protecting the political institutions of this country," the statement read. "Mrs. Clinton you should be ashamed of yourself if that is possible."

The statement came days after the Clinton campaign announced that former President Bill Clinton would speak Tuesday night along with members of Mothers of the Movement, a group that includes Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; and Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown.
Clinton's campaign responded Wednesday, noting that two members of law enforcement are scheduled to speak at the convention, including former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

"As Hillary Clinton has said, we need to support heroic police officers who put their lives on the line every day as well as listen to the voices of mothers who have lost their children," said Stephanie Formas, Pennsylvania communications director for Hillary for America. 

Reached by phone, FOP vice president Roosevelt Poplar said the union felt the speaker list was "a slap in the face to our men and women and their families, who were victimized by the same type of violence, especially in the past weeks when we've had eight officers assassinated."

While the police union is obviously in the right here, surely they didn't expect a gaggle of Alinskyites to seek its sign-off on their lineup of revolutionaries.

 

What's the latest with the "A"CA?

It's not front and center on the national radar screen in this blazing sumer of 2016, but it is, after all, since its midnight railroading through Congress without a single Pub vote, affecting pretty much everybody's health care costs.

So how are things going?

Badly:

Count it as another nail in ObamaCare’s coffin: Humana, one of the country’s top insurers, announced Thursday that it’s pulling out of ObamaCare exchange plans in all but a few states next year.

It will offer policies in “no more” than 11 state marketplaces, down from 19. The numbers don’t add up: Humana took nearly $1 billion in losses from the coverage this year.

This follows the exit from the exchanges of such other giants as Cigna and UnitedHealth Group, also after outsized losses.

It’s the much-feared “death spiral”: Too many older, sicker folks are resorting to ObamaCare policies, and not enough younger, healthy folks. So the average enrollee is running up higher bills than the insurers expected — and raising rates will only scare away even more lower-cost customers.

Meanwhile, the Obama Justice Department is moving to block health-insurer mergers — including an Anthem-Cigna deal as well as Aetna’s bid to buy Humana. Why? As The Post’s Josh Kosman reports, the “move would be a blow to the president’s state-focused ObamaCare.”

The White House fears the mergers would give the combined firms too much power to set rates, limiting consumer options.

Funny: The ObamaCare law encourages lots of other anti-competition mergers, of hospitals and other providers, in the name of “efficiency.” And doctors across America are giving up on traditional independent practices — as the law pushes them to do.

And countless people stuck buying policies on the exchanges have been shocked at how limited their options — like choice of doctor and hospital — turn out to be.

Hey, post-America, how about if we try the free market?

Nah, too elegantly simple and self-evident.

Trouble in Freedom-Hater-land

All is not well as the F-Hers descend upon Philly.

Mayonnaise Hair feels the need to hang it up in light of what the hacked correspondences reveal about her, um, character:

The embattled chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, announced she would resign at the end of her party’s convention this week, a victim of her toxic relationship with peers and a trove of embarrassing internal emails.

“Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals [of winning the presidency for Hillary Clinton] is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,” the Florida congresswoman said Sunday in a written statement. “As Party Chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans.”

What kinds of specifics might have catalyzed this sudden move?

Wasserman Schultz became fatally damaged goods in her own party after the WikiLeaks release showed Wasserman Schultz referring to Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver as "damn liar" and an "ASS" and said the senator has “never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do.” 

Speaking of Sanders, his devotees have no plans to go gentle into that good night:

Bernie's delegates to the Democratic convention are PISSED about the revelations in the wikileaks document dump, as well as the revelation that Hillary is bringing DWS onto her campaign and thus is showing absolutely no contrition. A group of Bernie delegates just sent out an email indicating that they are going to release their plan tomorrow morning to both block Hillary's pick of Tim Kaine for VP and also attempt to sway Democrat super delegates to their side . . . 

Disarray seems to be the fashion this summer.

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

Re: yesterday's blast in Kabul: Who do you think did it?

The Islamic State has taken credit for an explosion on Saturday in Kabul that killed at least 80 people and injured hundreds more. The explosion happened during a protest against a power line attended by mostly Shia Muslims. ISIS is a Sunni group.

But let's focus on real problems, like the hydrofluorocarbons our refrigerators and air conditioners are producing, or making the transgendered feel comfortable.

Well, Bots, what do you think of your man's post-nomination behavior?

There's the doubling down on the Rafael Cruz-having-breakfast-with-Lee-Harvey-Oswald outburst:

Fewer than twelve hours after Republicans rallied in support of his nomination for the presidency, Trump once again implied that Rafael Cruz, Ted Cruz’s father, was involved in the JFK assassination. At a press availability during an event to thank campaign volunteers Friday morning, Trump revived suggestions that the elder Cruz was an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin, and that they two were together months before the assassination

"I don't know his father. I met him once. I think he's a lovely guy. I think he's a lovely guy. All I did was point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. Now, Ted never denied that it was his father. Instead, he said Donald Trump—I had nothing to do with it. This was a magazine that, frankly, in many respects should be very respected."
He continued: "Did anybody ever deny that it was the father? They're not saying: 'Oh, that wasn't really my father.' It was a little hard to do. It looked like him."
Trump believes it is a picture of Cruz and Oswald. "I know nothing about his father. I know nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald. But there was a picture, on the front page of the National Enquirer, which does have credibility—and they're not going to do pictures like that because they get sued for a lot of money if things are wrong, okay?"

Stephen Hayes is exactly right:

There are two explanations. Either Trump believes Rafael Cruz was involved or he's making the implied accusation in a continued attempt to discredit Cruz's son. In either case, this isn't the behavior of a rational, stable individual. It should embarrass those who have endorsed him and disgrace those who have attempted to normalize him.

And there was Pence standing behind him, grinning nervously, no doubt thinking, isn't it time to focus on Hillionaire? Mike's going to be on cleanup duty a lot this year. Will it get to the point where he says, "I can't engage in this charade anymore. I have to answer to my Creator"?

Well, in answer to the question he was probably thinking, the answer is: not quite yet. Squirrel-Hair has to engage in vulgar bragging about the sway he holds over his Bot throng:

Donald Trump’s first post-nomination interview is to air tonight on Showtime’s The Circus which seems to me to be so apropos. Apparently he still thinks he is campaigning against Cruz instead of Hillary Clinton so he had to discuss Cruz’s refusal to kiss his ring.

Bloomberg reports:

Donald Trump said he prevented Ted Cruz from being ripped off the stage by entering Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena as hundreds of angry delegates lashed out at the Texas senator.

“You know what, he’s lucky I did it,” Trump told Bloomberg Politics’ Co-Managing Editor Mark Halperin in an interview to air Sunday night on Showtime’s “The Circus.” The interview was conducted midday Friday on a flight from Cleveland to New York on one of Trump’s private planes.

“I walked in and the arena went crazy. Because there’s great unity in the Republican Party and people don’t know it,” Trump said. “Had I not walked in, I think that audience would have ripped him off the stage. I think I did him a big favor.”

When asked point blank if he entered the arena at the conclusion of Cruz’s speech on Wednesday to “tweak” his former primary rival, Trump responded: “Tweak him? I would never do a thing like that. But yes.”

Apparently Trump believed Republican delegates are a mob. Then again, I had my doubts considering how some Trump delegates treated Heidi Cruz. The delegate behavior was unbecoming, but considering who they nominated it is unsurprising.

Hey, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Wayne Allen Root, Jeff Sessions, Sean Hannity, Charles Hurt, isn't it getting just a wee little bit hard to excuse this stuff?

Squirrel-Hair and the crackup on the Right

I wish I could juxtapose these links / excerpts side by side. That's how they really should be displayed, for maximum conveyance of the cognitive dissonance they exemplify.

But, like so much in this fallen world, the ideal is not an option.

So we'll start with the guy I'm more inclined to agree with, Erick Ericsson.:

Since February, I have been warning both that Trump could not beat Hillary Clinton in November and that there is no way that I -- or many conservatives of faith -- could actually support him. There is no grand and elaborate conspiracy of pollsters in America. Trump has only been ahead in nine polls since January and the majority of those are Rasmussen polls, which are not worth the paper they are printed on.

The warnings have all fallen on deaf ears. The GOP had one job this year and that was to beat Hillary Clinton. I believe they have failed at that task and have not only failed, but they have put a Clinton donor in charge of their own party.
I have done my bit to sound the alarm, raise the red flag, and point out the now near certain future of a Clinton administration. There have been at least a half dozen elected Republicans who took the stage in Cleveland this past week who have privately, personally told me they agree that Trump will lose. Others, like Tom Cotton, have not told me this, but are already beginning to woo the South Carolina, Iowa, and New Hampshire delegations -- already campaigning for 2020 because they too know Clinton is going to win.

He has paid a real price for speaking out. Not just some comment-thread dissing.

It is no easy thing to see what is coming and have the party ignore you, friends reject you, and others assail you. Advertisers of my show have been targeted for harassment with some stepping back. Listeners and readers email me on a daily basis to say they are done with me. People have shown up on my doorstep at my home and at my office. Random strangers have berated me in public in front of my kids that I am ruining my kids' future.

If we're going to give the benefit of the doubt to those who have harassed him so aggressively, I guess at least the most noble-minded of them are so impassioned about the stakes that they have to go to such lengths. In that spirit, we shall give Ace a hearing on the matter:

All choices have consequences. By supporting Trump, I am responsible for the consequences of a Trump victory -- and those consequences could indeed be dire.

But a childish morally-unserious fantasy has infected the #NeverTrump not-so-intellgentsia, that they can agitate for Hillary Clinton -- by relentlessly disparaging Trump -- and somehow, they are not responsible for the consequences of the Hillary presidency they are bucking for.

They've dreamed up this self-pleasing, responsibility-evading dreamscape in which those who plump for Trump are responsible for the outcomes of a Trump presidency, but, for no explanation thusfar discoverable, they are not responsible for the outcomes of the Hillary presidency they're agitating for.

I tried to explain to them that there is no such thing as a consequence-free choice -- all choices have consequences, both on the upside and the downside -- and both the upside and downswide consequences must be considered by any adult, intellectually-serious person in making his choice.

But they like this idea that, like little children, they are free to gambol and play in the fields and this does not even perturb the leading edge of a butterfly's wing, and so they just keep teling me "No you're wrong" without saying why I'm wrong.

Which, seriously, is a rather important part of any argument beginning with the words "You're wrong."

I ask people: When you knocked Obama in 2012, and wrote posts and comments noting his flaws, did you think you were doing nothing to improve Mitt Romney's chances of winning the presidency?

If so-- why the fuck did you bother?

Of course, this is silly; everyone knows that when one buys ads attacking a candidate, one is helping that candidate's opponent win.

The #NeverTrumpers are filling their blogs, magazines, and Twitter timelines with nonstop political advertising (free) against Trump, and maintain, just because they say so and because it pleases them to think so, this does exactly nothing to help Hillary, and they are therefore not responsibe for her election.

Or let me put it this way: I am not hoping for Trump to get into some serious international snafu by supporting him. Yet I know that is a very real possibility if he's president.

Should this happen, I can't just say "But I didn't want trump to screw up so badly."

People would say -- no, but you knew the risks in supporting him, and you supported him anyway; you are therefore morally responsible for this.

Yet the #NeverTrumpers claim that the obvious, inescapable outcome of their position -- that Hillary Clinton will be the president -- is not their responsibility, just because they didn't intend that as a pirmary matter.

No, but they were completely aware it was the natural and inevitable consequence of their position.

So why would a Trump supporter be responsible for a foreign policy catastrophe he didn't even know for a fact would happen, when a #NeverTrumper claims to be innocent of the Hillary Presidency they know beyond a shadow of any doubt is the direct and inescapable consequence of the NeverTrump posiition?

They're responsible for it. They don't want to be, but they are.

I don't particularly want to be on the hook for a Trump presidency, but, being a morally serious person who has not yet delegated my thinking to the Twitter Hivemind, I recognize that by taking the action of lending him my support, I am responsible for the conseqyences of that act.

Why do the childish #NeverTrumpers mewl that they, alone in the universe, are not responsiblee for the consequences of their own choices?

I understand the #NeverTrump impulse. I've expressed it myself. After Trump's boorish, vulgar, half-insane attack on Cruz's wife, I announced "I'm done" with Trump and vowed to never vote for him.

I understand #NeverTrump, emotionally. I think there's merit in the position.

However, we have difficult choices to make. And difficult choices should be treated as what they are -- difficult, hard choices requiring moral seriousness and rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

They should not be made --artificially and falsely -- into easy-breezy decisions where one just says "I will do everything I can to make sure Trump is defeated, and I shall never give a thought to the prospect of a Hillary presidency, and I should never allow my shoulders to feel the burden of the consequences of the choice I am making."

Real men -- and tough-minded women -- do not go fleeing tough choices by simply hallucinating an "Officer Dimes, please come and save me" miracle solution.

Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be president in November.

If you think Hillary would be a better president -- or if Trump is so repulsive to you you cannot support him even if you think Hillary would be worse -- fine. I respect your opinion.

We all have different brains. We all have different priorities.

But what I must insist you cannot do -- what i will not permit you to do -- is fantasize that while a Trump supporter is resonsible for the gaffes and disasters of a President Trump, you are somehow innocent of the purges and witchhunts of a President Hillary.

Trump supporters will own the consequences of a Trump presidency -- and Hillary supporters, both those who declare it proudly and those who wish it secretly -- own the consequences of a Hillary presidency.

Adults accept the consequences of their choices.

Only children run from them, or cross their fingers behind their backs and claim that's a charm insulating them from the consequences of their choices.

Some decisions are hard. They should be respected as being hard.

Every time I'm tempted to see it Ace's way, though, I think about the photo of the Clintons and Trumps at Squirel-Hair's wedding, about S-H telling Greta Van Susteren in 2012 that he thought Hillionaire was doing a terrific job as Secretary of State, about his donations to their foundation and campaigns, about his bragging to Howard Stern about his sexual adventures, about his name in gold-plated letters on his jet, about his lame attempt to separate Planned Parenthood's abortion business from its other functions, such as they are, about the jitters his foreign-policy pronouncements give NATO, about his vulgar and thuggish use of Twitter.

I'm still praying about what to do that first Tuesday in November, but I can tell you this: you'll see no signs for that chunk of dog vomit in my yard, nor bumper stickers for him on our cars.

Maybe my position is something like this: If you have to vote for him, at least acknowledge - publicly - that he is a very bad man.

Downward spiral roundup

I'm having a bracing cocktail to kick off my Friday evening, and not a minute too soon.

I have a major case of disconnect to process.

I had a great day on a personal level.  Just about ideal, actually. Sat here at my desk working on a truly enjoyable article for a local lifestyle magazine. I kept my Uber app on and occasionally got a ride request, upon getting which I'd close up my file and head out. No real interruptions to speak of. A satisfying day of work, an activity essential to human fulfillment.

But, jeez, was there ever a grim backdrop to it.

There is, of course, the Munich McDonald's / Olympia mall mass shooting. Conflicting reports re: whether it was jihad, but this Daily Mail report says witnesses say that's what it was.

And in case there was any question as to whether the NBA was an agent of cultural rot - it has had a "green" program for a few years now, among other signals - such doubt was laid to rest today when it announced it was pulling its 2017 all-star game out of Charlotte, North Carolina in response to that state's law that says that just because you resent the DNA you were born with, you don't get to use the other gender's restroom.

And your tax dollars continue to pay the salary of this purveyor of dog vomit:

Air conditioners and refrigerators pose as big a threat to "life on the planet" as the threat of terrorism, Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday.

Kerry was in Vienna negotiating a global climate deal to phase out chemicals used as refrigerants in basic household and commercial appliances such as air conditioning and refrigerators, called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The chemicals are a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions that many scientists blame for contributing to global warming.

Kerry made the remarks as part of a pep talk for negotiators working through the weekend to amend a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to deal with the chemicals.

"Yesterday, I met in Washington with 45 nations — defense ministers and foreign ministers — as we were working together on the challenge of [the Islamic State], and terrorism," he said. "It's hard for some people to grasp it, but what we — you — are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself."

The EPA's Gina McCarthy is keen on codifying an international agreement on hydrofluorocarbons by the end of the year.

And once again, I am in a position where I must issue a dare to the Squirrel-Hair-Bots to spin this:

For the Trump supporters reading this, back a long, long time ago, there was this big country called the USSR. And they were ruled pretty much the way Donald Trump wants to rule the United States. I mean they were YUGE and awesome. But, for reasons that aren't clear, the losers who ran the United States and Western Europe didn't like the USSR and decided to be mean to them. In 1949, that is Year 3 in The Year Of Trump, they created this thing called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.  On of the main features of the NATO Charter is Article V, not unlike Article XII of the US Constitution it is the most important, which states, approximately, that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all.

Let me end the sarcasm here.

The NATO alliance has proven to be a useful tool not only for the common defense of Europe but as a mechanism for integrating many former Soviet client states into the political and economic framework of Western Europe. In fact, in 2004, three former captive republics of the USSR, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, became actual NATO members.

Yesterday, however, Donald Trump threw NATO into a panic by stating that a Trump Administration might very well refuse to honor its mutual defense obligations under the NATO charter.
SANGER: Since your time is limited, let me ask you about Russia. You’ve been very complimentary of Putin himself.
 TRUMP: No! No, I haven’t.
SANGER: You said you respected his strength.
TRUMP: He’s been complimentary of me. I think Putin and I will get along very well.
SANGER: So I was just in ——
TRUMP: But he’s been complimentary of me.
SANGER: I was just in the Baltic States. They are very concerned obviously about this new Russian activism, they are seeing submarines off their coasts, they are seeing airplanes they haven’t seen since the Cold War coming, bombers doing test runs. If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?
 TRUMP: I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do. I have a serious chance of becoming president and I’m not like Obama, that every time they send some troops into Iraq or anyplace else, he has a news conference to announce it.
SANGER: They are NATO members, and we are treaty-obligated ——
TRUMP: We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.
 SANGER: That’s true, but we are treaty-obligated under NATO, forget the bills part.
TRUMP: You can’t forget the bills. They have an obligation to make payments. Many NATO nations are not making payments, are not making what they’re supposed to make. That’s a big thing. You can’t say forget that.
 SANGER: My point here is, Can the members of NATO, including the new members in the Baltics, count on the United States to come to their military aid if they were attacked by Russia? And count on us fulfilling our obligations ——
 TRUMP: Have they fulfilled their obligations to us? If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.
HABERMAN: And if not?
TRUMP: Well, I’m not saying if not. I’m saying, right now there are many countries that have not fulfilled their obligations to us.

Excuse me. I see that my glass is empty.