Who will succeed McCain?

Monica Showalter  "With the passing of Senator John McCain, all eyes are going  to be on Arizona's Republican governor, Doug Ducey, who was a friend of McCain's, to appoint a successor.

"McCain's death comes three days before a primary in Arizona, but that's not a big deal, because Ducey himself is expected to win the GOP nomination for the gubernatorial election handily, Arizona Republic reports. Farther out, the House looks more in danger than the Senate of falling into Democrat hands, according to political strategists, so again, another bullet is dodged.

"But there is intense interest in a new appointee, particularly in light of McCain's tendency to declare conservative principles, yet disappoint, at voting time. It was the idiosyncracy of his being a maverick. Will it be a reliable conservative that voters expect when they pull the lever next time? Or will it be someone just as chancy as McCain?

"The Wall Street Journal has this list of possibilities:

Among the names that have been mentioned recently are Barbara Barrett, a former U.S. ambassador to Finland and the wife of retired Intel Corp. Chief Executive Craig Barrett, as well as Kirk Adams, chief of staff to Mr. Ducey. A name that has been floated as a long shot is former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, who was close to Mr. McCain.

Three other names have circulated: Michael Bidwill, president of the Arizona Cardinals and son of the team’s principal owner; Karrin Taylor Robson, who runs a land-use firm in Arizona and was appointed to the Arizona Board of Regents in 2017 by the governor; and Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy. Her name is often mentioned, though conservatives have bristled at the prospect—a factor that could weigh on Mr. Ducey.

. . . "It's not a certainty that she would be an awful Senator if she is appointed, but on the other hand, she has made many liberal statements, so there's a significant chance she would swing to the left on critical votes, as well as fight with Trump. Ducey himself seems to be a solid conservative and will in turn be pressed by conservatives to appoint a more reliable conservative. The press will beat back with the emotional factor, and that will be the kind of pressure he is under." . . .

CNN versus Fox News on John McCain’s death

Peter Barry Chowka  "John McCain died at home in Arizona at 7:28 PM EDT on Saturday, August 25, and it took less than an hour for the news to be made known to the world. The media had been prepared for this day on Friday by the McCain family announcement that the 81-year-old Senator had discontinued medical treatment for his aggressive glioblastoma brain tumor and was preparing for the inevitable.

"I had the Fox News Channel on when the news of McCain’s passing broke, after 8 PM ET. Within seconds of each other, all three major cable news channels went to non-stop coverage of McCain’s life and death, most of it commercial free for the first several hours.

. . . 

"This news release suggested that the story of McCain’s passing had legs and would dominate FNC’s, and presumably the other news channels’, coverage into the overnight hours and beyond.

"After Jeanine Pirro went off the air at 10 PM ET, I became frustrated with Fox News’s coverage – it seemed to settle into an endless repetitive loop of a small number of still photos and short video clips from McCain’s life with audio of reporting by in-studio anchor  Jon Scott and commentary by several guests – all of it and them almost entirely off-camera." . . . 

Obviously not a fan of CNN these days, I did appreciate this production, especially coming so soon as it did after McCain’s passing. It was, after all, a serious attempt to review his life’s high, and a few low, points and to place him into (CNN’s) perspective with new interviews conducted by Bash with people like Hillary Clinton. The use of archival film, video clips, and still photos also added a lot to its value.

With mainstream media biographical programs like this one, I tend to take the narration and predictable hagiographic point of view with a grain of salt, while I pay closer attention to the soundbites and historic archival material documenting the past that helps me to form or expand my own opinions. The interviews confirmed that, in death as during his long life in national politics, John McCain was the Democrats’, and the media’s, favorite Republican.

Showtime's New 'Anti-Republican Hit-Job' Show Kicks Off With Rape Joke

"Showtime's new Sacha Baron Cohen-starring prank show series kicked off with a marital rape joke that has many already condemning the series as tasteless and, worse, unfunny.

"Cohen teased his new series with a politically-charged promo featuring a slightly amused former Vice President Dick Cheney signing his "waterboad kit." Soon after the promo dropped, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin revealed online that Cohen posed as an injured U.S. war veteran to "dupe" her into a fake interview (which she ultimately walked out of), then dropped her and her teenage daughter off at the wrong airport so they'd miss their flight. Amid reports that the whole show was "nothing more than a Hollywood hit job on Trump supporters and the Republican Party," Cohen's "Who Is America?" finally premiered Sunday night — and promptly disappointed viewers." . . .

Company Pulls Sponsorship Of NASCAR Driver Conor Daly For Something For His Father Said 30 Years Ago

Weasel Zippers

"PC gone truly wild, not to mention across generations.

Via Indy Channel:

ELKHART LAKE, Wis. (AP) — Lilly Diabetes has pulled its sponsorship of Conor Daly’s No. 6 car in the NASCAR Xfinity race at Road America, citing a racially insensitive remark made by the driver’s father in the 1980s that surfaced this week.Lilly said in a statement Friday that its sponsorship was intended to raise awareness for treatment options and resources for people living with diabetes." . . .“Unfortunately, the comments that surfaced this week by Derek Daly distract from this focus, so we have made the decision that Lilly Diabetes will no longer run the No. 6 at Road America this weekend,” Lilly said.Primarily an IndyCar driver, Conor Daly is making his NASCAR debut at the rural Wisconsin road course Saturday with Roush Fenway Racing. Messages left for a team spokesman seeking comment were not immediately returned on Friday night.

Keep reading…

John McCain's prison in Hanoi for years

40 years after release, POWs at Hanoi Hilton reflect on experience

HANOI — Little remains downtown of the prison known as Hoa Lo, a name loosely translated as “hell hole.” 

"Most of the French colonial-era complex was razed to make way for a luxury apartment high rise. The Vietnamese government turned what was left into a museum exhibiting a few of the dank cells where Vietnamese revolutionaries were held and sometimes executed by the French in the mid-20th century. 

"There is one small room near the back devoted to a different group of inmates who languished for years: American prisoners of the Vietnam War. 

"To those POWs this was the Hanoi Hilton, a nickname that oozed irony and defiance, the kind of petty “thumb in your eye” that provided some small pride in a place designed to strip dignity away. 

"Forty years ago on Feb. 12, the first of those long-held POWs were released as part of the Paris Peace Accords that ended America’s decadelong war with Vietnam. 

"They boarded a waiting plane and landed free men at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. They flew on to Hawaii, then to their families at home. 

" 'Forty years later as I look back on that experience, believe it or not, I have somewhat mixed emotions in that it was a very difficult period,” said Sen. John McCain, shot down and captured in 1967. “But at the same time the bonds of friendship and love for my fellow prisoners will be the most enduring memory of my five and half years of incarceration.” 

"The POW experience at Hoa Lo — and in the archipelago of other prison camps in North Vietnam — was unlike anything American prisoners had encountered before or since." . . .

On the less honorable side of McCain, back in May:

John McCain tells close friends he doesn’t want Trump at his funeral, report says

But heaven help any of these cute creatures if they support President Trump!

GREEN WEENIE OF THE WEEK: PETA. AGAIN  . . . Really, sometimes I think PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals, er, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) exists mainly to make fools of themselves and offend as many normal people as possible. We reported back in June how Friends of the Earth (with PETA along for the ride) had come out against the new “meatless” burgers that actually taste like burgers. Can’t have that! Veggie-burgers have to taste like. . . well, like veggie-burgers, because what’s the fun of being an environmental scold if you can’t make life miserable.

PETA’s latest stunt is this billboard in Baltimore—the capital of crab cake country:

 . . . "Well, at least PETA has liberated animals from the cruelty of Animal Crackers packaging:

Animal crackers’ animals “freed” as boxes get new look

After more than a century behind bars, the beasts on boxes of animal crackers are roaming free. Mondelez International, the parent company of Nabisco, has redesigned the packaging of its Barnum’s Animals crackers after relenting to pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA, which has been protesting the use of animals in circuses for more than 30 years, wrote a letter to Mondelez in the spring of 2016 calling for a redesign.

Which all brings to mind these golden oldies from PETA:

PETA Wants Giant Tombstone Erected In Memory Of Chickens Killed In Truck Wreck

PETA Attempts To Make Fish More Adorable

" 'PETA thought that by renaming fish sea kittens, compassionate people who would never dream of hurting a dog or a cat might extend that sympathy to fish, or sea kittens," PETA campaign coordinator Ashley Byrne says.
"Byrne says that rebranding fish as sea kittens was obvious."

And these people vote.

Silliness destroys the greatness of a nation

Let’s All Tell More “White People” Jokes!  . . . "Not used to being made fun of? White people would probably have to go back to sometime in the mid-1960s to recall a time when they weren’t constantly being mocked. Young white people, especially, were born into a world where whites were the ONLY people it was OK to mock. Not only can one’s career be ruined by mocking nonwhites, one risks eternal social pariah status merely for pointing out the double standard. For those in media, mocking white people is a form of career advancement, as we all learned when The New York Times hired Sarah Jeong despite—or maybe because of—her history of saying virulently anti-white things." . . .

No, you dimwit, unlike you, we haven’t all swallowed that line of obviously fraudulent sophistry. If the word “racism” is to have any meaning at all, and if we even want to pretend we’re going to avoid a cultural civil war, we should keep the word confined to meaning what I was taught it meant when I was a kid—negative feelings or thoughts toward other races. From memory, there was no double standard for about, oh, eighteen months sometime in the mid-1970s, and since then, you can’t say a good word about white people or a bad word about anyone else without being socially and financially destroyed.  . . . 

Prepare yourselves. The ignorant and stupid, and those who control them, are telling us they are coming, what they think of us, and what they hope to do to us.  . . . "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."  So said Martin Luther King, Jr.  The danger lies, in part, in the fact that these characteristics are both intellectual and moral defects, which render the possessor of these flaws vulnerable to manipulation by those who use the illusion of morality to accomplish utterly immoral ends.  Never in our lifetimes have these two flaws been more proudly demonstrated and celebrated than now, in reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump.  Because of his effect, the incoherent emotionalism of the left, coupled with leftists' carefully taught inability to think rationally or critically, has been revealed to us on a disturbingly grand scale.  The extent had been largely hidden from us for decades as liberals and progressives felt safe and thus had no need to openly fight for the overthrow that was coming incrementally, without violent conflict." . . .

The Washington scandal volcano is rumbling

American Thinker  "In D.C., when the gods are angered, the P.R. volcano needs human sacrifices, but it will not get President Trump. 

"As the Drudge Report featured, it could have been considered a "Hell Day" for the president when Paul Manafort got his split decision while blaring headlines concurrently reported that a now proven  doofus lawyer had pleaded out to legitimate crimes and one count of a non-crime.  The P.R. timing of the criminal plea, on the day the Manafort verdict was reached, was a tactical and strategic move designed to really hurt the president.

"However, as the singer Peggy Lee smoothly crooned, is that all there is? 

"It is commendable that the president doesn't drink, but his opponents do, perhaps now early and often.

"I am old enough to recognize an inoperable "modified limited hangout" from the Nixon presidency:

[Bruce] Ohr is scheduled to give testimony to the Oversight and Judiciary Committees behind closed doors on Tuesday.  In previewing what GOP investigators are poised to ask, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, told Fox News on Sunday that he and his colleagues would ask Ohr about whether there was a bias campaign against Trump that led even further up the power chain in the Obama administration, particularly by ex-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

"The real question that we need to find out from Mr. Ohr: Was he just a rogue employee acting improperly on his own or did he have some authority from within the Department of Justice and was Sally Yates aware of what he was doing?" Ratcliffe said.

"Sources told ABC News that Yates's and Ohr's other superiors were kept in the dark about his actions." . . .

Democrats: Be careful what you ask for   "We are watching the political equivalent of a blitz against President Trump.  In other words, they are throwing everything that they have at him.

"My guess is that they are trying to make it difficult for many Republicans to continue their support.  They may also be hoping a committee of wise GOP men walks over to the Oval Office to tell the President that it's over – i.e., Nixon 1974!

"A good example of this thinking may be Thursday's editorial in the Dallas Morning News:

At some point, we won't be alone in pointing out that the chaos Trump seems to relish creating is actually swamping his presidency.

"Time will tell where all of this goes, but I think Democrats are the ones who may end up losing big time." . . .

Mueller the blackmailer  . . . "This is an old FBI trick that was used to bring down crime lords.
"But Donald John Trump is not a crime lord.
"He is the president of the United States of America. Bring him down and you bring down the nation.
"Mueller does not care. He has convinced himself that President Trump and his supporters are so deplorable that they are not worthy of fairness." . . .

Netflix Star Apologizes After Being Outed For Liking Shapiro, Rubio, Trump (Updated)

Daily Wire

"After being outed for "problematic" tweets and likes — including liking tweets from Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump, and Senator Marco Rubio — actor Israel Broussard of Netflix's "To All The Boys I've Loved Before" has officially apologized for his "inappropriate and insensitive words and likes on social media."

" 'I am deeply sorry for my inappropriate and insensitive words and likes on social media," Broussard, who plays Josh Sanderson in the series, tweeted Tuesday after backlash over his past social media activity. "I take full responsibility for my actions and I sincerely apologize. This has been a pivotal life lesson for me. I am dedicated to becoming a more informed and educated version of myself." . . .

HOW A COMMUNIST BRAINWASHING METHOD WAS EXPORTED TO THE UNITED STATES  . . . "The technique of “criticism and self-criticism” (kritika i samokritika) was developed during the early days of the Soviet Union. This got results. When the early Soviet show trials and purges took place, the targets would confess to committing treason—the details stretching credulity—and beg for execution. The Maoists (Chinese Communists) used it too, typically during “struggle sessions.” Also, forced confessions were required in Vietnam for prisoners in reeducation camps.

"What happened wasn’t much different from a medieval inquisition. Those targeted would be badgered until they confessed to whatever it was they supposedly did. Of course, physical forms of coercion were also an option. These weren’t actual trials; their fates were already decided." . . .

Update: #CancelWhitePeople.   . . . "The tweets that Mohney sidesteps entirely are the ones where Jeong repeatedly says white people have “no culture,” that they invented nothing, that it was her “plan all along” for them to go extinct, and that she posted the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople.

Marie Harf Wonders When America Was Ever Great. [VIDEO]

One has to keep in mind that Harf was once Hillary's State Department spokeswoman.

Victory Girls Blog

American Thinker cartoon added by TD

"Fox News’s Marie Harf is the embodiment of a Dumb Blonde joke. Now I apologize to any blondes out there who are sick of hearing those gags.

"But when you go on national television and can’t think of when America was great because of. . . credit card restrictions?

"Yes, Marie Harf went there.

"She appeared on Fox News “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday morning while the panel was discussing NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s comment that America “was never that great.”

"Marie Harf said that Cuomo certainly “flubbed what he was trying to do.” And then she went Full Stupid with this:

“But I keep asking President Trump supporters, when is he referring to when America was great? When I couldn’t vote? When I couldn’t get a credit card without my husband?”

"So America wasn’t great when women “couldn’t vote” or “get a credit card” without their husbands. Let that sink in.

"Dear readers, here we have on full display the progressive mindset: America is great only when she makes life ideal, especially for designated victims. And if she doesn’t, then America is not great." . . .

Mollie Tibbits, Elizabeth Warren and liberals

The left is willing to sacrifice our citizens in order to garner more votes, namely from the same illegal immigrants breaking our nation’s laws and endangering our communities. It’s time that citizens #WalkAway from the party that believes that individuals who cross our border illegally and commit heinous acts of violence are worthy of the same rights and privileges of those they’ve abused. MWN

Illegal Who Killed Mollie Tibbetts Has One Demand — And Some Liberals Are Siding With Him  "After brutally murdering 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, illegal immigrant Cristhian Bahena-Rivera and his lawyer have announced a sickening demand that the liberal media are already obliging.

. . . "After confessing to kidnapping and murdering 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts before dumping her body in a cornfield, 24-year-old illegal alien Cristhian Bahena-Rivera has made a shocking and downright offensive legal demand. According to Breitbart, Bahena-Rivera and his legal team are seeking a gag order to prevent the accused murderer from being referred to as an “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant.' ”
(Emphasis in the original)

Mollie Tibbetts was killed so that somebody in Iowa could have cheap labor, and she was killed so that the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the rest of the Washington – Wall Street – Silicon Valley Axis could hit this quarter’s earnings target, and most shamefully, she was killed so that virtue signaling liberal politicians could get reelected and because their bootlickers in the media and their urban elite supporters in the gated communities and the security-doored co-ops and condos feel superior to her, and the other victims like her, and don’t think their lives are worth protecting. George Rasley, CHQ Editor

Townhall

Bye, Iowa: Elizabeth Warren dismisses illegal's murder of Mollie Tibbetts, says 'real problems' are family separations  . . . "They're all just trying to change the topic.  Why is that?  Because the reason we have 12 million or as many as 30 million illegals in this country is because of the Democrats' open borders and illegals-first policies, all in the name of building a loyal indigent voter base from the sort of people who vote Chavista back in their home countries." . . .

But socialism has such a great promise for us all

Every single one of the 246 bullet points is for the dismantling of existing laws or institutions (for example, they call for an end to the War on Terrorism and the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security), but there is not one positive point made, such as saying "We want to keep and continue to build on the pillars of the rule of law and the freedoms that we enjoy as a republic."  Their entire program is one of tearing down and radically altering the way of life we enjoy now.  E. Jeffrey Ludwig

Rich Terrell

How Far Left Can Democrats Go?

The Socialist Party Platform Is Pathetic and Ignorant  "The socialists in the U.S. have been attempting to reject capitalism and our constitutional system for over 100 years.  They have never controlled the House or the Senate and never won the presidency.  The most votes a Socialist Party candidate ever received was 6% of the popular vote in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs was the candidate.  Nevertheless, the striking reality is that a large percentage of the Socialist Party platform of 1912 has been implemented, including the graduated income tax.  Most of the implementation came during the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Only in their program of "Collective Ownership" were the goals of the Socialist Party not met over time.  The people of the U.S. decided on regulation instead of ownership.  The socialists wanted ownership of all banks, all transportation, all mines, all means of communication, and all land.
"Now, the Socialist Party has updated its platform of 106 years ago.  A century of monumental historical events has transpired since 1912, and we can see that while the rhetoric has changed, the contempt for and vilification of the USA are the fundamental premises of the socialists' 2018-2019 document." . . .