Fiddling With Feelings While Minneapolis Burned

Intellectual Takeout

. . . "Will regulations continue? Will unrest increase? Will we be subjected to more politically correct ways of dealing with problems which were non-issues when common sense was still valued?

"Sadly, that all seems likely given that both media and our government seem prone to covering up these issues. As Alan J. Levine writes in the October issue of Chronicles Magazine, “there has been an incredibly weak reaction to mass violence by most of our political leaders, including by President Donald Trump.” Levine continues by saying, “It took three days for the TV networks to admit that riots, not just peaceful demonstrations, were taking place.”

"But the national government and media weren’t the only entities to drag their feet in response to the sudden outburst of violence. A new report from the epicenter of the 2020 riots – Minneapolis and St. Paul – details what local leadership was doing in the days following the death of George Floyd.

"Except for a few blurbs from local media, the report, released by the Joint Transportation and Judiciary and Public Safety Committee of the Minnesota Senate, has largely been ignored by the press. Yet since Minneapolis was the match that lit the national firestorm of unrest, it seems only fair to look at the disturbing evidence the report contains. Here are a few of the findings for Minnesota:

• More than 1,500 businesses were burned
• Property damage costs totaled around $500 million
• Law enforcement not only reported injuries, but a damaged moral

. . . 

With Murkowski's Announcement, Amy Coney Barrett's SCOTUS Confirmation Is Assured

 Townhall

Still annoyed by the procedural shenanigans, senator, but good call. On Monday, Judge Amy Coney Barrett will become Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. 

"Okay, I might have overreacted toward Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), but her vote to not enter an executive session in the Senate regarding the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett should have raised red flags for everyone at the time. This is the weak sauce caucus, folks. Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins (R-ME) are the three amigos when it comes to making trouble within our ranks in the Senate. 

. . . 

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announced her support for Amy Coney Barrett Saturday during a floor speech in the Senate, strengthening the Republican votes to confirm the judge on Monday

Murkowski said she's still opposed to the Senate taking up a Supreme Court nominee so close to Nov. 3 election, but the senator said she already lost that procedural fight and she must evaluate Barrett's qualifications to the bench. 

"I will be a yes," Murkowski said Saturday in a floor speech. "I have no doubt about her intellect. I have no doubt about Judge Barrett's judicial temperament. I have no doubt about her capability to do the job -- and to do it well."

Murkowski, the only GOP senator to oppose Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, threaded the needle Saturday by announcing she'd still vote "no" on the procedural motion on Sunday to advance Barrett's nomination. The senator still opposes the process but won't "hold it against" Barrett and therefore will vote "yes" on the merits of her nomination Monday." . . .

The Democrats’ Undeserving and Uncivil Campaign

Conrad Black

Joe Biden’s party doesn’t deserve to win with such nasty media support, a campaign so dishonest, such an extreme platform, and such mediocre candidates.

. . . "This problem is compounded by the grossly unprofessional bigotry of 90 percent of the national political media. The New York Times apologized for failing to inform its readers of the rise of the Trump phenomenon shortly after the 2016 election. They have since declared as a matter of policy that they are not so much engaged in presidential reporting as in opposing this president, and the principal token dissenter from that position at the Times, Bari Weiss, resigned in July, disillusioned by the farcical tokenism of her position.

 "In the last few weeks, we’ve seen numerous examples of the naked bias of the television media. CNN’s Don Lemon urged Democrats to oppose the rioting rather than continue to ignore it, because the polls were turning against his network’s favored party on the issue. The same network’s Jake Tapper has been giving partisan tactical advice to Pennsylvania Democratic congressional candidates. Recordings of the same network’s Christopher Cuomo have been released in which Cuomo carefully coached convicted former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on how to present his pre-discredited allegations of wrongdoing against his former client in the now very tired folkloric tale of Stormy Daniels. 

"No one wants political campaigns to be bland, and in this election there are clear and important policy choices. But even Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders acknowledges that the president is gaining ground because all the Biden campaign is doing is slagging off Trump, and so are 90 percent of the national political media. The normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain, and especially Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, have been almost completely ignored by the media. " . . .  

The Biden Slime Operation

"This is the Democratic canon: malicious lies supported by stupid lies and disseminated to the world by the morally bankrupt, reflexively partisan Trump-hating media."

New York Police Invade The Home Of A Jewish Family Because They “Have Too Many People In Their House”

Weasel Zippers

"Reminder to Conservatives, police represent the state and its authority over you."

Jewish City Girl

@ConservCityGirl

New York law enforcement now entering PRIVATE HOMES. “We came because we had a vehicle parking complaint. Then I look up and I see you have over 10 people in a crowd!” Gestapo at work. Never vote BLUE! They are communists.

 Video

Joy Reid Says ‘Zero Evidence’ BLM Pushed for Anti-Police Violence, but Videos Prove Otherwise

At MSNBC and CNN, is there no sense of decency or journalistic integrity?

 Legal Insurrection

“There is absolutely zero, none, zero evidence that Black Lives Matter has
ever pushed for anything violent, pushed for anything violent to
happen to police,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed after the presidential debate"

"During Thursday night’s presidential debate, President Trump said a number of things that set off MSNBC’s Joy Reid. The one that seems to have triggered her the most, however, was when Trump condemned Black Lives Matters’ hatred and violence towards police officers.

"Before we get to Reid’s comments, here’s the exchange between Trump and debate moderator Kristen Welker, who is also a White House correspondent for NBC News:

Welker:Mr. President, you’ve described the Black Lives Matter movement as a symbol of hate. You’ve shared a video of a man chanting white power to millions of your supporters. You’ve said that Black professional athletes exercising their first amendment rights should be fired. What do you say to Americans who say that kind of language from a president is contributing to a climate of hate and racial strife?

Trump: Well you have to understand the first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter they were chanting ‘Pigs in a blanket’, talking about police, ‘Pigs, Pigs’, talking about our police, ‘Pigs in a blanket, fry’ em like bacon’. I said, ‘That’s a horrible thing’. And they were marching down the street. And that was my first glimpse of Black Lives Matter. I thought it was a terrible thing. As far as my relationships with all people, I think I have great relationships with all people. I am the least racist person in this room.

. . . 

Mazie Hirono Is Confronted About Her 'Sexual Preference' Attack on ACB, Her Response Is Something Else

  Sister Toldjah

Dontcha just love her packingthecourt face mask?

"Not that this was a surprise to anyone familiar with her penchant for saying and doing stupid things, but Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) did not exactly cover herself in glory during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

"To quickly recap, Hirono actually asked Judge Barrett if she had ever sexually assaulted anyone. Here was her exact question: “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?”

"In another moment that sealed Hirono’s place in the wackadoodle hall of fame, Hirono took issue with Judge Barrett’s use of the term “sexual preference” when talking about gay rights cases. “Sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term, it is used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that sexual orientation is a choice — it is not,” Hirono claimed at the time.

“ 'So even though you didn’t give a direct answer I think your response did speak volumes,” the senator stated. “Not once but twice you used the term ‘sexual preference’ to describe those in the LGBTQ community.”

"It was pointed out at the time by conservatives that the term “sexual preference” was actually used by, among other prominent Democrats, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as well as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. But Hirono was never confronted about this by the mainstream media because that would mean having to do actual journalism in a way that would reflect badly on a Democrat." . . .

Biden’s Campaign Blew Up in a Bad Way

"The fraudulent Biden campaign effectively blew up on Thursday night in Nashville. 

"After five days of intensive subterranean preparation, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was coherent and gaffe-free for the first hour and got to the end without any horrifying blunders, though he trailed off into grammatical chaos and jumbled articulation a couple of times. There were relatively few interruptions and no persistent interruptions and neither candidate was acoustically or behaviorally irritating. 

"The moderator, Kristen Welker, was fair and efficient. President Trump skillfully cast himself as an “outsider” who gets and has produced results, facing an insider who has accomplished precious little useful after 47 years paddling and wallowing in the public trough and moving steadily to the left.

"Trump finally gave a spirited and plausible defense of his COVID leadership and gave voice to the national impatience with a policy of panic and defeatism. He exhorted the audience: “Learn to live with it,” and the former vice president, in what presumably he thought was a clever rejoinder, said that “We will have to learn to die with it.” Trump, in turn, referred effectively, but unhistrionically, to his own bout with the coronavirus." . . . 

Coming soon, food desert: BLM shakes down Seattle Trader Joe's for a 15% cut

 Monica Showalter  "Grocery retailer Trader Joe's, which refused to cave in to political correctness in its product names, is experiencing new problems with Black Lives Matter protestors in Seattle, according to Breitbart News:

Black Lives Matter protesters pushed their way into a Seattle Trader Joe’s demanding the company give “15 percent at least.” The group has repeated the tactic of harassing the store’s staff and customers over the past few months.

A video tweeted Thursday night shows a large group of BLM activists entering a Seattle Trader Joe’s store. They chanted and beat drums as they marched through the grocery chain location.

"Seattle has five Trader Joe's locations and Breitbart reports that three of them have been hit in this way. It shows that Trader Joe's, which resisted the demands, remains a target, based on Seattle's failure to send police to protect them." . . .

Hear the juvenile voices in this video:

BLM of course, is led by "trained Marxists" who just happened to have learned their tactics at Hugo Chavez's knee. Here's a piece I did on their pilgrimages to Caracas, where these kinds of shakedowns are what goes on in that hellhole. And don't think the Chavista agenda they embrace isn't to harm the entire U.S. Here's one I wrote from 2019. And Venezuelans have noticed the similarities.

A Serious Debate that Leaves Biden with Lingering BRUISES

 Socio-Political Journal

"Will allegations of Biden family corruption ever be properly scrutinized?"

. . . "It matters, obviously, that neither candidate won a decisive victory and that Trump needed one more because he’s trailing, according to polls. But the debate helped Trump in another way. Biden said things he will regret. Time and again, he made false or misleading claims and politically-questionable promises. Three stand out: ‘super predators’, fracking and family corruption.

"Fracking is important because it has led to much lower energy prices and freed America from foreign oil supplies. Whether to continue fracking or significantly reduce it is part of a larger debate about fossil fuels. How much are Americans willing to pay to move away from cheap hydrocarbons? How quickly they wish to do it? On the debate stage, Joe said he has never wanted to ban fracking. But that’s ‘General Election Joe.’ Last winter, ‘Democratic Primary Joe’ had a very different position. His running mate Kamala Harris was even more emphatic. Even in this debate, Biden acknowledged he wants to ban fracking on federal lands.

"Biden and Trump differ sharply on America’s energy future, and those differences came through in the debate. Biden made aggressive statements supporting alternative energy, pledging to gradually phase out the entire oil and gas industry and add thousands of new, high-paying jobs as he did so. There are really two issues here. One is whether voters have a clear sense of what Biden will do and how much it will cost. The other is how these promises will play in states that rely on energy production (such as Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio) or on energy-intensive industries (Michigan). How Pennsylvania voters, in particular, see Biden’s energy policies is crucial because, if Trump loses the state, he’ll have a very hard time winning reelection. That’s why Trump was so quick to jump on Biden’s ‘green energy’ promises during the debate. He thinks Biden is hurting himself in Pennsylvania and Ohio." . . .

That moment when Trump just let Biden keep talking...

I"t ought to be enough to sink him. Trump knew what he was doing when he did the moderator's job for her, and drew Biden out."

  Monica Showalter  "President Trump had several good moments in the final debate, as Andrea Widburg noted in her excellent curation here.

"In my own view, the standout moment came last, when Trump just drew out Joe Biden on energy, first on fracking, and then on the entire energy industry, setting him up and then ... letting him keep talking.

"In response to debate moderator Kristen Welker's question about poor communities living downwind of refineries and having health issues, Trump spoke of the jobs that drew them to the area, which had some strength, but he might have added that any such issues were local issues in Democrat-run cities, underlining the importance of not voting for Democrats. It worked well enough, though.

"But what really helped him was when he got Joe Biden talking. 

"Like a good probing moderator, Trump drew Biden out on what he really had in mind when he put out maudlin stories of the smokestack era of his youth, and Biden took the bait every time.

"Here's the transcript:" . . .

ben-garrison-cartoon/

What the Toobin scandal really exposes

. . . "In fact, that's the single most disturbing aspect of the entire incident, and one that has no doubt caused many of us to be stricken with a new phobia: the fear of getting on Zoom meetings."

P.F. Whalen  . . . "For clarity, and contrary to Ms. Lazarus's suggestion, it seems obvious that Toobin's race has had no role in his employers' disinterest in discipline or the media's lack of accountability.  Toobin is getting a pass not because he is white, but because he is a leftist who hates Donald Trump and conservatives, and who works for CNN.  If a non-white person had behaved similarly, he would likely be treated the same as Toobin, provided he were on the left.  Imagine if an identical incident happened with a conservative legal pundit from Fox News.  Would the media be satisfied with an explanation of "my mistake was not that I was playing with myself during a business meeting; I just screwed up by allowing my laptop's camera to show it"?  We all know the answer.

"The larger tale is how this mindset continues to infect the entire left and its media.  When email messages from Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and other Democrats at the DNC became public knowledge in 2016, the focus of Democrats and the mainstream media was not on the content of those emails, some of which was highly damaging to the Clinton campaign.  No one from the DNC disputed their authenticity, but all the media wanted to talk about was how they were acquired.  Those mean old Russians did this, and how dare they let the American public know the truth about how we operate?" . . .

This...is CNN!

Trump Won the Debate—But Won Bigly the Post-Debate

Final thoughts on the debate: The moderator Kristen Welker was far better than the prior debate and town-hall moderators, in avoiding the scripted stuff like the Charlottesville distortions and ‘when did you stop beating your wife’ questions. That said, she interrupted Trump far more than she did Biden, and focused more on Biden-friendly questions. But most importantly, Trump kept his cool, was deferential to Welker, and was tough but not cruel to Biden.

Ian Macfarlane

  Victor Davis Hanson  "There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum. 

"In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate. 

"He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil. So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. 

"But far more importantly, the back-and-forth repartee will not matter other than Trump went toe to toe, but in a tough, dignified manner and beat Biden on points. Biden did not go blank — although he seemed to come close, often especially in the last 20 minutes. Had the debate gone another 30 minutes, his occasional lapses could have become chronic.

"What instead counts most are the days after.  The debate take-aways, the news clips, the post facto fact checks, and the soundbites to be used in ads over the next ten days all favor Trump. In this regard, Biden did poorly and will suffer continual bleeding in the swing states. 

"We will know that because by the weekend Biden will be out of his basement and trying to reboot his campaign and actually be forced to campaign. 

"So we are going to hear over the next week that Biden simply denied the factual evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop computer, the emails, the cell phones, and the testimonies from some of the relevant players as a concocted smear, a Russian disinformation attack. That denial is clearly a lie. It is absolutely unsupportable. And Biden will have to drop that false claim.  

"Biden will suffer for unequivocally denying what is now a demonstrable fact: there is evidence that his family ran a systematic shake-down operation to peddle inside access and influence for millions of foreign dollars in profits. In the debate, Biden seemed bewildered why anyone could ever conclude the obvious." . . .