Saturday roundup

This is the essence of the aloofness, skewed priorities and federal-level heavy-handedness with which the Most Equal Comrade and his Justice Department tyrannize post-America:

President Obama has refused so far to survey the Louisiana flood disaster, but he did let state and local officials know that he’s watching to make sure they don’t engage in racial discrimination.

In a 16-page guidance issued Tuesday, the Obama administration, led by the Justice Department, warned Louisiana recipients of federal disaster assistance against engaging in “unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (including limited English proficiency).”

The guidance’s frameworks “highlight the importance of complying with nondiscrimination requirements of civil rights statutes, addressing the needs of the whole community, and ensuring equal opportunity to access recovery efforts.”

Needless to say, some Louisiana residents were offended, including the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, who took umbrage at receiving an anti-discrimination lecture from Washington, D.C., as locals struggle to rescue, house and feed their neighbors.

“[E]verywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis,” Mr. Dreher said in a Thursday post.

He referred to the guidance as a “long bureaucratic memo” issued by the “Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled to Leave Martha’s Vineyard.”

Charles Krauthammer at NRO on how theMEC's agenda of planned decline has create a vacuum that Russia is only too glad to fill:

his week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now. The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace.

Where for 40 years the U.S.–Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia–Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq, and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. 

He goes on to enumerate other fronts on which Russia is showing the world who's picking up the chalk and chairing the meeting, such as the eight staging areas along the Ukraine border where Russia has amassed tanks, artillery and troops, as well as the joint naval exercises with China in the South China Sea.

Speaking of Russia, don't think that, just because Manafort has resigned as Squirrel-Hair's campaign manager, S-H's Russia issues are all resolved:

Navy Senior Chief Michael Nance was on MSNBC discussing the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and he believes there is another bomb yet to drop.

Nance, as well as many in the intelligence community, believe it is quite possible that Russian intelligence agent(s) were embedded within the Trump campaign. This goes along with the theory that many believe to be true; Russia is seeking to influence the Presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, their preferred candidate. Trump has repeatedly called for better ties with Russia, even at the cost of abandoning our NATO allies.

Manafort was let go from the Trump campaign presumedly to save face after evidence began to surface of his ties with Russia, but it is concerning that the Trump campaign didn't actually care about Manafort's ties until there was actual evidence. Now this isn't some cold war fiction novel, and there is probably not a horde of Russian spies embedded within Trump's campaign, but these ties to Russia could be deeper than we thought before. Hopefully the American people see this as alarming, as Russia is one of the last countries on Earth that we want to be aligning with.

Not if you listen to Squirrel-Hair.

The Stupid Party is finally looking at a strategy for legislative races in the event of the nearly inevitable:

Republicans, worried about preserving their House and Senate majorities in the face of fierce headwinds, are accelerating their plans to distance themselves from Donald Trump – and may soon concede, if only implicitly, his defeat.

Party strategists are mapping out blueprints for down-ballot candidates, in TV ads and on the campaign trail, to present themselves as checks on a Hillary Clinton presidency. It’s an approach that would essentially admit a Trump loss. In interviews, nearly one dozen Republican operatives said they had begun poll-testing the idea – which one labeled a “break glass in case of emergency” strategy - to gauge how the public would react to it.

Do you think Assad gives a diddly about post-America's support for the Kurds?

Syrian regime jets pounded US-backed Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria for a second day, even after the US-led coalition scrambled jets to protect its military advisers working on the ground.

In another escalation of Syria's bloody conflict, warplanes from President Bashar al-Assad's regime were bombarding the city of Hasakeh -- targeting Kurdish forces that for months have worked closely with coalition military advisers helping local fighters combat the Islamic State group.

On Thursday, the United States sent fighter jets to head off air strikes conducted by regime planes and to protect coalition advisers, but the Syrian planes had left by the time they arrived.

I wonder if Hillionaire still thinks of Assad as a "stabilizing force."

I din't really watch any of the Olympics. Generally speaking, my interest in them is passing at best. But what a sad capper the Ryan Locate affair is on a summer Olympics characterized by an opening ceremony that emphasized "climate change" hooey, raw sewage in the swimming water, severed body parts washing up on the beach, and Arab athletes refusing to compete against Israelis. That 32-year-old man-boy needs a spanking.