46 thoughts on “News/Politics 9-21-19”

  1. It’s child abuse what they’re doing to the children. And it’s turning them into young adults unable to cope.

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  2. It’s a religion now. And infiltrating some churches, complete with rituals.

    This is what a religious cult looks like.

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    https://twitter.com/FatherLeoFeeds/status/1175146330273898496

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  3. A weapon of war.

    And as I said to Chas yesterday, the smear is the point, to taint others as they’re tainted.

    The Propaganda of the Left Is a Weapon of War

    “The Propaganda of the Left Is a Weapon of War

    You can answer propaganda lie by lie, but it does little good. We have to go after the liars. We have to stop them with legal action when they cross the legal line.”

    “The hallmark of propaganda is that outright lies are more useful than the truth. The New York Times’ vile lies about Justice Brett Kavanaugh were so flimsy, they couldn’t last the day.

    Yet even after the Times’ correction (which amounted to a retraction), Democrats kept shooting the fake ammunition. That’s because their target isn’t actual investigations or impeachment proceedings. The lie itself is the goal. Once out, even if retracted, it serves their purpose: to smear and intimidate. Truth need not apply.

    The more outrageous, ugly, and frightening the propaganda, the more powerful it is. That’s all that is necessary for success. The lie doesn’t even have to be plausible. It just has to meet the base desires of the targeted audience.

    Democrats want to believe President Trump supports neo-Nazis, and that Justice Kavanaugh is a sexual predator, so that political norms of two-party rule need not be followed.

    Democratic Party voters today want to believe that the admirable and upright Justice Brent Kavanaugh is a moral monster, because of the coming showdown on abortion.

    Classic propaganda reverses black and white, truth and falsehood. Abortion must be presented as the moral high ground, and pro-life as a moral cesspit.

    Propaganda is crude and ugly because it is not meant to convince the opposition. It is purely for motivating one’s own side to unjust, even horrific, deeds, such as destroying a fine man with false sexual accusations.

    The New York Times, once again, is leading the political charge to bring down the political enemies of the Left, just as they did with the Russian collusion hoax attempted coup against President Trump.”

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  4. Well at least now they’ll have less money, since he was a favored donor.

    https://nypost.com/2019/09/19/ed-buck-hit-with-federal-charge-in-mans-2017-overdose-death/

    “Democratic donor Ed Buck was hit Thursday with a federal charge in connection to the 2017 overdose death of a man at his West Hollywood home — and newly released court documents detail allegations that painted Buck as a sex fiend with an underwear fetish who solicited men and injected them with meth during sexual encounters.

    The feds charged Buck, 65, with one count of distribution of methamphetamine resulting in the overdose death of 26-year-old Gemmel Moore. Buck faces up to life in prison, if convicted.

    Moore, a homeless prostitute, had suffered a fatal crystal meth overdose in Buck’s home on July 27, 2017. He was found unresponsive and naked, wearing on white socks, on a mattress on the living room floor of Buck’s home by police, according to a federal criminal complaint filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California.

    “Witnesses who knew Moore told law enforcement officers that Buck paid Moore in money and drugs in exchange for Moore to engage in sexual activities with Buck,” an affidavit by Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force Officer John Mundell says.

    Moore, who had been living in Texas at the time of his death, was flown out to Los Angeles by Buck.”

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  5. Excellent idea.

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  6. And one I’m not at all a fan of. I understand the need for keeping the world oil markets stable, but strongly dislike taking sides in a religious war where both sides are atrocious to their citizens. Not a fan of providing arms to either side either. I get that they say it’s defensive, but it puts a target on our soldiers.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/u-s-deploy-military-forces-saudi-arabia-after-drone-attacks-n1057216

    “U.S. to deploy military forces to Saudi Arabia, UAE after drone attacks on oil sites

    “The president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces which will be defensive in nature,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Friday.”

    —-

    “Answering reporters’ questions about the deployment, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the troop deployment as “modest” and “not thousands.”

    Dunford said he planned to confer with U.S. Central Command and Saudi officials to work out details of the deployment, which he said would be announced next week.

    Esper said troops would be primarily focused on air and missile defenses.

    The United States will also accelerate shipment of military hardware to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he said.”

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  7. Don’t look now, but Trump is reshaping one of, if not the most, liberal Appeals Courts in the US. Winning! 🙂

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/09/trump-continues-conquest-of-9th-circuit-with-two-new-nominations/

    “Trump continues conquest of 9th Circuit with two new nominations
    “Approaching the flipping point.”

    “Liberals were late to wake up to the fact that while they were obsessing over supposed Russia collusion, Trump was reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation.

    The notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit has not yet flipped, with 16 Democrat-nominated and 12-Republican nominated Judges, but it’s getting there with two new nominations, including one opposed by California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. Courthouse News reports:

    President Donald Trump announced six new judicial nominees on Friday, including two to seats on the once reliably liberal Ninth Circuit and four to federal courts in California.

    One of the nominees to the Ninth Circuit will be familiar to senators, as Trump has now three times chosen Patrick Bumatay for a federal judgeship. Trump first chose Bumatay, a prosecutor in the Southern District of California, for a seat on the Ninth Circuit in 2018, but the Senate never took action on the nomination.

    Trump tapped him for a judgeship again earlier this year, this time for a position on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

    Bumatay, who is openly gay, currently leads the appellate and narcotics sections of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, and worked as counselor to the attorney general in 2018, advising on opioid strategy and other issues.

    California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, both Democrats who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, raised concerns about Bumatay’s lack of judicial experience during his first pass at the Ninth Circuit position.

    In a statement, Harris said she will oppose Bumatay’s nomination going forward, citing a “troubling prosecutorial record” and inexperience.

    Carrie Severino writes at National Review, Who is Patrick Bumatay?

    41 years old, Bumatay graduated cum laude from Yale University in 2000, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2006, where he was articles editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy — a leading law journal for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship… Bumatay has been an active member of The Federalist Society since law school.

    The Wall Street Journal says Trump is right to renominate Bumatay:”

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  9. Warren is the Democrat I dislike the most. I fear she could:
    A. Beat Trump; and
    B. Give us 4-8 really unpleasant years.
    There won’t be Paul Ryan and Co. to neuter her after her first two years as happened with Obama. Unlike Obama, she will not be content to play golf and make speeches. It will be interesting to see how many conservatives switch parties and vote for Biden to try to keep Warren from getting the Democrat nomination.

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  11. Justin Amash disagrees with AJ … and with Nancy Pelosi as well.

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  12. Oh yes, please do try impeachment (which requires an actual crime, morons, which this isn’t). I dare ya’s. 🙂

    But hey, you and the Bulwark clowns and their other 6 readers can keep trying. You’ll get that Bad Orange Man this time for sure. 🙂

    You clowns never learn. You have nothing. There is no crime, just more pearl clutching from nervous Deep Staters.

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  13. Pressing another world leader to investigate crime is not a crime.

    But what Joe Biden did is. 🙂

    Which is why Dems are nervous.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-conversation-with-ukraine-leader-11568993176

    “President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.

    “He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” if his lawyer’s assertions that Mr. Biden acted improperly as vice president were true, one of the people said. Mr. Giuliani has suggested Mr. Biden’s pressure on Ukraine to fight corruption had to do with an investigation of a gas company for which his son was a director. A Ukrainian official this year said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son Hunter Biden.

    Mr. Trump in the call didn’t mention a provision of U.S. aid to Ukraine, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on any investigation.”

    —-

    (Oh look, set up by the Deep Staters again)

    “The August meeting came weeks before the Trump administration began reviewing the status of $250 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, which the administration released earlier this month. Mr. Giuliani said he wasn’t aware of the issue with the funds to Ukraine at the time of the meeting.

    He said his meeting with Mr. Yermak was set up by the State Department, and said he briefed the department on their conversation later. The State Department had no immediate comment.”

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    You. Still. Have. Nothing.

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  15. Even the NY Times knows this story is trouble.

    For Biden…..

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  16. I thought information was supposed to make us bolder. Not scared to get out of bed in the morning. People with information on an upcoming disaster as supposed to become emboldened to find ways to save the survivors. It is in all the movies.

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  17. Hmmmmm……

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  19. Probably not, Bill. But if I am correct and the truth is JTDSS, the truth will be followed by laughter.

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  22. I will say this. That’s some pretty nimble dodging for a man of his advanced age. 🙂

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-sidesteps-questions-sons-foreign-business-dealings-promises/story?id=63820806

    “Biden sidesteps questions about his son’s foreign business dealings but promises ethics pledge”

    “Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden declined to answer questions on the campaign trail this week about his son’s overseas business dealings in countries where the then-vice president was conducting diplomatic work, an issue his political opponents have already begun to wield against him as he wades into the 2020 presidential campaign.

    More than once, after his father engaged in diplomacy on behalf of the United States in foreign countries, Hunter Biden conducted business in the same country. At two separate campaign stops on Monday, Biden avoided questions about his son while his staff blocked reporters from approaching the candidate.

    Biden’s campaign did provide ABC News with a statement saying the former vice president has always adhered to “well-established executive branch ethics standards,” adding that if Biden wins the White House he will issue an executive order to “address conflicts of interest of any kind.”

    “”This process will be set out in detail in the executive order,” the statement reads, “that President Biden would issue on his first day in office.”

    The ethics pledge follows renewed questions about a pair of overseas business opportunities involving Hunter Biden – one in Ukraine, another in China – that already have begun to generate political attacks from Joe Biden’s conservative critics. Ethics experts interviewed by ABC News said these are legitimate questions about possible past and future conflicts of interest.”

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    Sure you will Joe, now that your family has already made their millions, right?

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  23. Trump and company should recall what happened the last time the US stationed troops in Saudi Arabia.

    Questions should also be raised about the business connections between Trump Inc and the Saudi royal family. Given Trump is sending US troops abroad, conflict of interest should thoroughly be investigated before a US soldier dies protecting Saudi/Trump business interests.

    A consistent feature of the Trump presidency is the belief his opponents are capable of the same misdeeds as his family. Don Jr and Ivanka are conducting Trump business while privy to govt information and using presidential connections. Trump can’t imagine why Biden would do anything differently.

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  25. ————–

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  26. I’m getting pretty good at calling these. 🙂

    “(Oh look, set up by the Deep Staters again)”

    ———–

    It’s the Comey Russia set up meeting all over again.

    Same type of stuff they pulled on Lewandowski.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/462422-missing-piece-to-the-ukraine-puzzle-state-departments-overture-to-rudy

    “Missing piece to the Ukraine puzzle: State Department’s overture to Rudy Giuliani”

    “When I was a young journalist decades ago, training to cover Washington, one of my mentors offered sage advice: When it comes to U.S. intelligence and diplomacy, things often aren’t what they first seem.

    Those words echo in my brain today, as much as they did that first day. And following the news recently, I realize they are just as relevant today with hysteria regarding presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s contacts with Ukraine’s government.

    The coverage suggests Giuliani reached out to new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team this summer solely because he wanted to get dirt on possible Trump 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s business dealings in that country.

    Politics or law could have been part of Giuliani’s motive, and neither would be illegal.

    But there is a missing part of the story that the American public needs in order to assess what really happened: Giuliani’s contact with Zelensky adviser and attorney Andrei Yermak this summer was encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. State Department.

    Giuliani didn’t initiate it. A senior U.S. diplomat contacted him in July and asked for permission to connect Yermak with him.

    Then, Giuliani met in early August with Yermak on neutral ground — in Spain — before reporting back to State everything that occurred at the meeting.

    That debriefing occurred Aug. 11 by phone with two senior U.S. diplomats, one with responsibility for Ukraine and the other with responsibility for the European Union, according to electronic communications records I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

    When asked on Friday, Giuliani confirmed to me that the State Department asked him to take the Yermak meeting and that he did, in fact, apprise U.S. officials every step of the way.”

    “I didn’t even know who he [Yermak] really was, but they vouched for him. They actually urged me to talk to him because they said he seemed like an honest broker,” Giuliani told me. “I reported back to them [the two State officials] what my conversations with Yermak were about. All of this was done at the request of the State Department.”

    So, rather than just a political opposition research operation, Giuliani’s contacts were part of a diplomatic effort by the State Department to grow trust with the new Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former television comic making his first foray into politics and diplomacy.

    Why would Ukraine want to talk to Giuliani, and why would the State Department be involved in facilitating it?

    According to interviews with more than a dozen Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Ukraine’s government under recently departed President Petro Poroshenko and, now, Zelensky has been trying since summer 2018 to hand over evidence about the conduct of Americans they believe might be involved in violations of U.S. law during the Obama years.”

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    Trump has done nothing wrong.

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  27. Read the entire Hill piece. It’s well worth the time. You can clearly see the same type of entrapment at play. Set up a meeting with a Trump ally and a known foreign asset. Then use that against an unknowing victim in order to insinuate criminal activity happened, when none actually did. Then use that “evidence” to launch a further witch hunt.

    Lather, rinse, repeat. Same script folks. They’re trying the exact same set-up.

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  28. So the Trumpers now believe that Trump and his key aides keep falling for the same tricky technique used by the same people (the “Deep Staters”) over and over again. I would suggest that anyone who actually believes this has joined my group which believes that every mess is JTDSS. Welcome aboard!

    Now that we are on the same team, I am willing to make a suggestion. Do you think it might help Dear Leader if we required all “Deep Staters” and “Globalists” to wear badges. This might help Trump, Lewandowski and the rest to spot what is going on before they are duped again. At a minimum, it might force the Deep State to develop a new technique. I think the old DS would agree to the badges. They would wear them with pride, and they are probably getting bored tricking Dear Leader the same way every time.

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  29. You know that Lindsey Graham and Josh Hawley are getting pressure from Dear Leader to go on the Sunday news shows. Let’s see if anyone sells out.

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  34. Poor Toomey drew the black bean. Sure enough, Trump pulled the rug out from under him.

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  35. Amen.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/impartiality-is-the-source-of-a-newspapers-credibility-11568109602

    OPINION COMMENTARY
    Impartiality Is the Source of a Newspaper’s Credibility

    That means honestly reporting, editing and delivering the news without opinion or bias.

    By Walter Hussman Jr.
    Sept. 10, 2019 6:00 am ET

    Mr. Hussman is publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

    ______________________

    … America has a vital interest in good journalism. But journalism confronts serious challenges. The advertising-based business model that supported it for more than a century has been disrupted. More than 1,800 U.S. newspapers have closed in the past 15 years—mostly weeklies, but also 75 dailies. Many surviving midsize metropolitan newspapers are shadows of what they once were. They have significantly reduced their news staffs and pages.

    Yet journalism faces another serious challenge: a loss of public trust. A recent Gallup poll shows that of 15 American institutions, newspapers and television news are both near the bottom in the public’s confidence. While news organizations claim they are fair and objective, and many try hard to be, Americans perceive widespread bias in news reporting.

    Two years ago I heard a prominent journalist say she doesn’t believe in the “false equivalency” of presenting both sides, and that she sees her job as determining the truth, then sharing it with her audience. That’s not what I learned in journalism school in the 1960s.

    I decided then that I needed to let our readers know that we didn’t agree with those statements. …

    So I drafted a statement of core values. For the past two years, every day we publish this statement on page 2 of all 10 daily newspapers our company publishes, including the flagship Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

    During the 19th century, few news organizations existed other than newspapers. Generally they were highly partisan. Around the turn of the century most newspaper publishers came to believe they could get more readers by being fair and objective. When radio and television came along, they pursued the same goals. …

    … But with the internet it was a different story. It is full of not only one-sided information, but plenty of disinformation. So far in the 21st century, we seem to be reverting to 19th-century ideas about news and partisanship. While cable-news networks have all done good journalism, they also feature highly opinionated commentators and shows. The problem is that there isn’t a sharp delineation between news and opinion …

    … The pursuit of truth is a noble goal of journalism. But the truth is not always apparent or known immediately. Journalists’ role is therefore not to determine what they believe at that time to be the truth and reveal only that to their readers, but rather to report as completely and impartially as possible all verifiable facts so that readers can, based on their own knowledge and experience, determine what they believe to be the truth. …
    _______________________________

    Liked by 1 person

  36. DJ, I think you and I grew up in a time of unusual consensus among the press and the public at large. Before we were even born, the Depression and WWII brought the nation together. Then we were largely unified by The Cold War though there were flash points of disagreement such as Vietnam.

    Federal regulation helped give us the three major TV networks. During Watergate, the three major TV networks, AP, UPI and Reuters were basically telling us the same thing. The WP and the NYT were doing the heavy lifting with Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report also bringing the news to millions.

    In the 70s and 80s, I would go to National Review, the columnists from the Dallas Morning News and USN&WR for a conservative slant, but everyone agreed on most basic facts.

    My son has recently told me the same thing you have said: He struggles to find a good source for basic facts. We are in this weird place where conservatives who want to stay informed have rejected the major media for liberal bias on economic, moral and cultural issues. Yet those same conservatives cannot believe anything the alternative conservative media says because that most of that bunch have become the propaganda arm of The Trump Cult.

    Whenever Trump is gone, we need to see what is left of conservatism and then see if we can reach any common ground with educated liberals and disillusioned Trumpers on basic facts.

    Liked by 1 person

  38. Then there was the C team.

    Is SwampnMedia a synonym for globalist or pearl grabber in the Trump lexicon?

    Did Giuliani explain if the Bidens bought a Coke with the $1.50 they got from China?

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  39. Ricky, it seems also to me that the political press, now in pursuit of deigning what the truth is in some of these evolving and always-changing news stories and situations, is disrespecting the public and the common man’s (and woman’s) ability to sort things out fairly when given the facts and both sides of the story.

    Today, it’s aimed at taking Trump out, whatever the cost, and I just think that’s a bad motive for doing journalism. Check your bias and personal motives at the door, remove your own ego from the equation, be straight and fair with the people you cover and the people you write for, report the news fairly and squarely, and the people will sort it out. Instead, we have these constant screeds coming at us to the point where no one believes much of it anyway (even when it’s true). We’re in a very bad state of affairs when it comes to both journalism and politics (on both sides, the Repubs and Dems have devolved into deep poop, in my view).

    Liked by 1 person

  40. DJ, The NYT, the WP and the three major TV networks in the 1980s were just as liberal as they are now. They constantly ran stories against Reagan’s domestic budget cuts, defense buildup and tax cuts. It was similar to their current reporting on immigration. Their treatment of Bork was virtually identical to their treatment of Kavanaugh.

    Other than immigration and judges, Trump’s Presidency has not been ideological. He has raised discretionary spending faster than Obama and pushed for the bill freeing prisoners who were jailed under Clinton’s tough laws. Rather than ideology, Trump’s Presidency has been about scandal: the constant lying, feuding with allies, “falling in love” with enemies and ridiculous behavior such as when he referred to his porn star ex-mistress as “Horseface” when it came out that he had violated election law to buy her silence.

    Compare 2017-2019 to 1998 which was The Year of Lewinsky. In 1998, if you watched FoxNews, MSNBC or CNN, you heard the same set of facts every night. I know because I watched all three. Today you get completely stories if you watch Fox, CNN or MSNBC.

    I see the press covering Trump as being like referees covering a player who commits an outrageous foul or double-dribble or traveling on almost every play. Do they call more violations (negative stories) on Trump than other presidents? Yes. Does Trump get away with more uncalled violations (false statements and unethical or stupid behavior) than any other president? Yes. He overwhelms them.

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  41. Ricky, granted, but there was still the ideal — theoretically — in place of objective reporting (before cable, I’d allow).

    I wonder if some of it isn’t an outgrowth of Watergrate, a period in popular journalism that inspired many college students to major in journalism (that wasn’t my inspiration, per se, but I was of that era as well as a college journalism major and yes, the WaPo and Watergate fascinated all of us to some degree).

    After that, it seems to me that journalists became pretty full of themselves. And since most lean left, then yes, the bias in the reporting began to creep in more and more. You also had the advent of cable news on the horizon, although CNN in its earlier days was a solid news network (which I still miss).

    But the goal even then was still objective reporting, not “finding the truth and telling the ignorant masses what it is.”

    Then came the Internet and the partisan explosion of news sites and outlets.

    We have a situation now where Trump is seen by many as a Hitler in the making, thus the non-stop haranguing and belief that such tilted coverage is warranted. But it’s become almost amusing to see how so many national outlets are absolutely obsessed with Trump. And that the industry is blind to this mindset and behavior is even more curious.

    Liked by 1 person

  43. I agree that Watergate changed journalism and Woodward and Bernstein got more credit than they deserved. Judge Sirica’s sentencing strategy helped the truth to emerge. Cox and Jaworski were fair, but relentless. Finally, unlike 1998 and today there were people like Howard Baker who thought it was very serious for a president from their party to obstruct justice.

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  46. Oh look, Max Boot is showing off his conservative credentials again.

    Oh wait… no, never mind. I forgot, he’s gone full on leftist now.

    —————

    https://twitter.com/SpawnOfDanelaw/status/1175778401048596480

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