Tagged with Antisemitism

The Government Shutdown, Democrat anti-Semites, and a mad, bad media

The government shutdown, anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party, abortion, and a mad, bad media — no matter I busy my day is, I must blog about them.

Did you know that a chicken without a head made it into an early edition of Ripley’s Believe It or Not? It’s true. The story goes back to 1945:

In a task he had done countless times before [i.e., lopping chickens’ heads off], [Farmer] Lloyd was caught completely off guard. Rather than succumbing to the fate of the cooking pot, this rooster without a head continued to “peck” the farm grounds for food.

[snip]

And so, farmer Llyod began feeding this rooster who he named Mike. He fed him grain and gave him water through an eyedropper.

Over the next 18 months, Mike grew to an incredible size. He started out at as a solid two-and-a-half-pounds and flourished into a hefty eight-pound rooster.

Poor Mike died when he choked on some food but it is rather inspiring that, even without his head, he kept going and going, kind of like a headless chicken Energizer Bunny.

I don’t know whether people use the expression “running around like a chicken without a head” nowadays, but it’s definitely how I felt today. I’m planning for a trip and there’s so much I need to do before I leave. If I think about everything I need to do, I get a little panicky, but if I just put my head down (and yes, I do still have a head) and do one task after another, I can actually see myself make headway (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t blogged today before now.

Headless chicken or not, I have been thinking about President Trump’s decision to suspend the government shutdown for three weeks. The usual members of the conservative chattering class (aka NeverTrumpers and their weak sisters) are saying “We told you he’s a poseur,” while the usual members of the hard Left Proggie class are saying, “Pelosi’s the real alpha in America and Trump’s a weak, pathetic moron.” I think they’re both wrong.

Trump doesn’t look like a loser; he looks like a reasonable man trying to strengthen American security without destroying federal workers. Never mind that the Proggies had no tears for the coal miners whose lives they gleefully destroyed nor do they ever have compassion for private sector people whose lives Big Government destroys.

Incidentally, with Buzzfeed and HuffPo laying off pathetically whining Proggies, many conservatives are engaging in pleasurable schadenfreude by suggesting that these newly unemployed workers learn computer coding. One of the thin-skinned Lefties who got laid off was so upset with my pointing out that she was a bathetic whiner that she blocked me. Woo-hoo!

Optimally, despite Pelosi ignoring the Constitution to say she really doesn’t see why there has to be a State of the Union speech, during the next three weeks Trump will (I hope) stand before the House and make his pitch to the American public. If there’s no deal in three weeks, Trump can then more freely than he would now exercise his emergency powers to build the wall. After all, if Obama could fund the murderous Mullahs, Trump can build a wall. Alternatively, if there is a deal, that’s good too, although I suspect the DACA kids will be here permanently. I hate that fact, but I’d still rather have a wall — and a deal would probably preclude years of litigation in the Ninth Circuit.

Kurt Schlichter and Thomas Lifson are also copacetic with all of this. If you’re upset, you may find comfort in their well-reasoned thoughts.

Also, remember that blame — and blame there is — doesn’t fall on Trump. It falls on lying Leftists who once ostensibly supported a wall, but walked away from the idea when they realized that, having abandoned America’s middle class and blue collar voters, they need votes from illegal aliens. Also, blame Paul Ryan who worked hard to keep the wall from coming to a vote during his tenure as Speaker. Ryan is a real piece of work, and there’s nothing good about that.

A few other points:

One: Baal worship continues unabated in New York, with Proggies dancing around the flames to celebrate human sacrifice in the form of unlimited abortion and a prohibition on caring for full-term infants who survive abortion. I’ve written about this death cult before, so I have nothing to add to that subject.

What has me most impressed this time around in a bad way is the fact that the bishops refuse to excommunicate the prominent Catholics who passed this law. That makes the bishops entirely complicit in this human sacrifice. I like devout Catholics; but I’ve really come to hate the Church hierarchy, which is an entirely Leftist infected institution. Even those in the church hierarchy who aren’t totally Leftist, like Cardinal Dolan, are elitists and refuse to take on their own “class of people.”

Two: New York Republican Representative Lee Zeldin is putting the increasingly antisemitic Democrat Party on the spot:

Democratic leaders are remaining quiet about a new congressional measure that rejects anti-Semitism and chides a new class of Democratic congressional members for the open embrace of notorious anti-Semites and anti-Israel causes, according to the leading Republican author of that new measure.

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.), one of just two Jewish Republicans in Congress, has introduced a new congressional resolution in the House that categorically rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms and calls out some newly elected Democratic members who have ridden a popular wave into Congress on the backs of anti-Semitic leaders and causes, Zeldin told the Washington Free Beacon in a wide-ranging interview.

Pelosi is paralyzed because, while the whole Dem Party stalwartly supported Israel (and got the Jewish votes), the new Dem Party is defiantly hostile to Israel — and openly so with the likes of Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez to name just a few of the people who join with other communist, socialist, and fascist governments in fanatic antisemitic hatred.

What saddens me is knowing that Democrat-voting Jews (that’s 70% of all American Jews), while they like to throw a few Yiddish phrases around, fast on the High Holidays, and make latkes for Hanukkah, couldn’t care less about the vote. Their Torah is the explicit Democrat Party platform and the Democrats’ implicit hatred for Israel and traditional Judaism.

Three: And here’s good news — Andrew Sullivan, who lost his mind (literally) over the Iraq War and, especially, Sarah Palin, seems to be returning to the fold. He’ll always be too Leftist for me, but once upon a time, Sullivan was actually sort of conservative and, when he was a conservative, he was actually smart. That intelligence shows up in his take on the attack on the Covington kids:

I did make time to watch the full 100 minutes of YouTube footage that covered the scene in front of the Lincoln Memorial long before, during, and after the smirk that was seen across the world.

What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

[snip]

To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

[snip]

How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the “white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s” or other white “high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.” Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation: The context didn’t “change the larger story” which, she explained, was bigotry toward Native Americans. She cited Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren as evidence. But using a bullhorn to call Native Americans “savages” and “drunkards at the casino” to their faces a few minutes earlier on the same tape was not worth a mention?

Graham was just one media voice among countless others, and I don’t mean to single her out. The reason I do is because her argument about the fuller context is now the norm in elite media, and it’s the underlying reason for the instant judgment. “Racism” now only means “prejudice plus power,” so what the adult Black Israelites yelled was nowhere near as bad as what a white teenager didn’t say. No empirical evidence could ever deny that underlying truth, as a piece at Deadspin insisted, after admitting that, well yes, there were “four black men who seem to belong to the Black Israelites … yelling insults.” No mention of the content of those insults, of course.

Sullivan is still Sullivan — a Lefty — so he did make time to insult Trump and his supporters, but he’s one of the few on the Left who has come had with a full-throated attack . . . on his fellow Leftists. That intellectual honesty goes a long way with me.

And last, please pardon my language, but Chuck Schumer is a  little shit. My new name for him, complete with hashtag, is #ShittySchumer:

And with that, I’m back to running around just like Mike.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Rashida Tlaib, unpleasant as she is, deserves to be taken seriously

Foul-mouthed, antisemitic Rashida Tlaib is the avatar of an incoming class of Leftist congresswomen that needs to be taken seriously in the realm of ideas.

Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-identifying woman who got herself elected to the American House of Representatives, gained instant notoriety when she excitedly announced that her single most important goal in Congress was to impeach President “Mother****er.” Then, one of her aides “jokingly” erased Israel from the map, renaming it “Palestine.”

While I don’t agree with her sentiments, I appreciate Tlaib’s honesty. At least she and her fellow freshman, women such as Ilhan “I married my brother” Omar, and Alexandria “Let’s turn America into Venezuela” Occasional-Cortex aren’t hiding the ball — which separates them from more seasoned, and dishonest, Leftist political operatives. They are openly letting American voters know what comes with electing them.

The Left is gloating about the attention conservatives are giving these women, which indicates that they think this attention does the women and their ideas an advantage. My instinct, therefore, is to ignore them, on the principle that this will deny them that advantage. After all, in politics, isn’t the saying that (unless you’re actually indicted) there’s no such thing as bad publicity? I’ve also seen conservative arguments that we shouldn’t be paying attention to Tlaib and her ilk because we’re giving them unnecessary oxygen.

Having thought the matter through, though, I’ve concluded that ignoring these women (and the Leftist men trailing mostly silently in their wake) is a mistake. What we’re currently doing, especially with Occasional-Cortex, is focusing solely on the abysmal ignorance that characterizes this new generation of Leftist politicians. That’s valid. They deserve to be called out on stupidity, and ridicule is a powerful weapon.

However, where we err is that not enough of us are challenging their ideas head-on. Even if we could ridicule Tlaib, Omar, Occasional-Cortex, and their fellow travelers into oblivion, their ideas are still out there. Moreover, even though Trump has proven incredibly effective at advancing his agenda — and doing so despite 98% negative coverage that focuses on every verbal slip, rather than on substantive achievements — he’s not one for arguing complex issues. I would love to see Trump give a speech directly attacking socialism, standing up for the rule of law, or explaining why our ally, Israel (which is the only open, pluralist society in the Middle East), does not deserve to be treated like a pariah nation across the Western world . . . but he’s not going to do it.

Andrew Klavan gets that there’s a problem with ignoring these women or limiting ourselves to attacking their outstanding moments of stupidity or crudeness:

AOC, a declared Socialist, is not just a dangerous ignoramus. At 29, the new congresswoman from Queens is a dangerous ignoramus who, in many ways, exemplifies her generation. She is confident and attractive. She radiates an endearing vitality and passion. And virtually everything she says and believes is either immoral or untrue.

If the steady stream of BS that poured out of her pretty face were just a matter of dishonesty, I would chalk it up to normal politics.

[snip]

Still, the fact that AOC lies is not what bothers me. I wouldn’t get much rest if I worried about politicians lying.

But there’s also the fact that her entire philosophy is based on an apparently bottomless ignorance about economics, history and America’s founding laws and values. When she talks about single-payer health care lowering costs, she speaks as if the money you earn is part of some big pot she gets to redistribute — and yet it never occurs to her to wonder whether the Constitution actually grants her that redistributive power. She denigrates Capitalism without apparent awareness of the fact that Capitalism and property rights have virtually eradicated extreme poverty worldwide just since the 1980’s.

[snip]

But again, if simple stupidity were a crime in a congresswoman, our prisons would be full of them. The problem is that she — like many of her generation — is attractive, vibrant, likable and a moral idiot. That’s what makes her a potential danger to the nation over the long run.

[snip]

Every time AOC dances delightfully over a rooftop or “slays a lewk” or speaks with the poignant idealism of youth, I feel she is telling me the same thing: “Socialism is the way my generation does it!”

Klavan is right that these women are the voice of their generation, a thought that should terrify us all. Worse, within the halls of Congress, these women are the thin edge of the wedge. They may be completely uneducated despite or, rather, because of their college degrees; they may be vulgar; and they may be liars — but we also have good evidence that they’re charming and clever in the ways of today’s media outreach. Alex VanNess has an excellent thread about both how awful Tlaib is – and how dangerous:

Let me repeat that final tweet:

As a freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib does not have much influence. Her bills will likely die before they hit the hopper.

However, she’ll have years to join caucuses & make friends, where she will slowly shift her party’s antisemitism further into mainstream acceptability.

I think the best internet expression to describe the above two paragraphs is “nailed it.”

Keep in mind that Tlaib, Omar, Occasional-Cortex and other incoming Leftist freshman aren’t the ultimate weapons. They’re not going to force our government to turn Left overnight.

The best analogy I can think of to describe what these new congress critters are is one of those urban legends about a woman who vacations in the tropics. While there, she gets what seems like an innocuous bug bite. However, as the days go by, the bite swells like crazy, becoming increasingly ugly and ominous. As soon as she returns home, the woman goes to the doctor. The doctor, thinking it’s an ordinary infection, lances it, only to have thousands of baby spiders pour out.

Tlaib, Omar, Occasional-Cortex, and all these other rising young Leftist (hard Leftist) political stars are the biting spiders. Unless we immediately address the poison or eggs they’re planting in the American body politic, much worse is to come.

We cannot just ridicule them for dancing or swearing or making stupid and ignorant statements. Instead, we must relentlessly challenge the substantive ideas they advance. That is a responsibility every one of us bears.

It’s therefore time for us to start selling our ideas – core conservative ideas – to the American people. And whether we’re on social media, at a party, in the office, or standing in line at the grocery store, it’s probably better to sell those idea through charm and humor, as opposed to insults and anger. After all, even if there’s a foul-mouth Leftist opposite you, there are probably other people watching and you want them to find you, not the Leftist, impressive.

Bookworm Beat 12/20/18 — the border wall edition

I went overboard in this Bookworm Beat, covering the border wall, Syria, Antisemitism, Europe’s fall, science, Michelle and Melania, media bias, and much more.

Good walls make good neighbors. Trump did it — he got the House to include $5 billion in the budget bill to build the border wall. I was actually worried that he wouldn’t fulfill a core promise he made both to get elected and to put Chuck and Nancy in their place by saying he’d shut down the government before walking away from the wall.

Yay, Trump! Of course, now I’m worried what the execrable Jeff Flake will do in the Senate.

If you want a reminder about why the Left is fighting the wall with everything it has, despite voting for it some years ago, and strongly criticizing illegal immigration at the same time, Victor Davis Hanson explains: Put simply, a wall destroys the Democrats’ base.

Federal judge opens borders. It’s great that Trump got funding for the border wall. It’s not so great that, just yesterday, Judge Emmet Sullivan, the same guy who erroneously excoriated Lieut. Gen’l Flynn as a “traitor,” decided that America has no borders:

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan — who a day earlier had excoriated former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — ordered the government to allow migrants with iffy claims to be given a full chance to make their case for asylum.

And he ordered the U.S. to un-deport plaintiffs in the case who already had been ousted under the new policy, saying they deserve to be brought back and allowed to claim asylum.

“Because it is the will of Congress — not the whims of the executive — that determines the standard for expedited removal, the court finds that those policies are unlawful,” Judge Sullivan wrote.

His decision overturns a move by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had tried to block asylum claims of migrants who said they faced gang violence or domestic abuse back home.

I am sorry that, for so many people, the world is a terrible place. I know that I’m singularly fortunate that sixty years ago my parents, after waiting patiently for years to get visas, legally immigrated to America allowing me to be a citizen of and grow up in this great country.

I also know that life is unfair and that we don’t make it more fair by destroying ourselves. The Leftists are demanding that we import into America the pathologies that have plagued Latin America for hundreds of years. I’m not willing to be a part of that suicide pact — although I don’t know what I, personally, can do to take away the gun the Left is figuratively placing in America’s mouth, with its finger on the trigger.

On withdrawal from Syria, I’m conflicted. Although I suspect a lot of Americans didn’t even realize we still had around 2,000 troops in Syria, it’s proving to be a hot button issue now that Trump has announced a troop withdrawal. His stated reason is that he promised we’d be in Syria to defeat ISIS and, having defeated ISIS, it’s now time to leave.

I think this was a good decision for a few reasons. First, Trump did what we keep asking our leaders to do, which is to state a clear objective and then, when that objective is achieved, to announce “victory!” and to withdraw. No quagmires for President Trump.

Second, as I noted, I bet a lot of Americans didn’t realize we even had troops in Syria. In other words, this was not a war that the nation supported. It was an “action,” the purpose of which was not obvious to most Americans. I firmly believe that you cannot endlessly demand that a nation send its blood and treasure to foreign shores without being able to articulate why. Without ISIS, no one was articulating a why, so Trump did the right thing by pulling our troops out.

Third, as long as the Western world refuses to tackle the problem of Islam head on, and without an imminent threat from a concerted non-government army such as al Qaeda or ISIS, these far-away battlefields are just band-aids. It makes no sense to send young men to die in Syria or Afghanistan to kill people who our leaders refuse to acknowledge are terribly dangerous. Again, without a clearly articulated purpose, why are our boys and men being sent to die?

Fourth, outside of Israel, which is a beacon of light, freedom, and innovation in a backwards, benighted region, I think the whole of the Middle East can go to Hell. I want them to leave us alone and I want them to leave Israel alone, but otherwise I don’t think we should be doing business there. Trump, by unleashing America’s energy sector, has cut the tie that bound us — namely, oil dependency.

Fifth, to the extent Iran is a threat, let the Sunni nations fight it. We can provide support for those nations (weapons, advice, etc.), but they should be their own front line. Making them the front line also forces them to make nice with Israel, because, as the Muslims say, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

For more on all these points, I suggest reading this post from Daniel Greenfield.

Still, I also worry that Trumps was a bad decision, and I have that worry for a few reasons. First, as someone commented on my Twitter feed, the withdrawal completely opens Syria to Iran, Russia, and China. On the other hand, the Axis of Totalitarian and Theocratic Evil (Iran, Russia, and China) is already in Syria (thank you, Obama). In other words, given the small number of troops deployed, I don’t have a sense that we are much of a bulwark against the evil already present in that benighted land.

Second, I do worry about Israel which is, as I said above, the only light in a bad neighborhood. But as I also said above, taking America out of the equation on the ground will force the Sunni nations to draw closer to Israel and, inevitably, become less of a threat to her as their mutual needs combine.

My worry about Israel initially increased when that astute Israel watcher, Caroline Glick, had as her first reaction to the withdrawal sheer horror:

As the day went on, though, Glick modified her reaction, which made me feel better:

By this evening, writing at Breitbart, Glick was more balanced in her approach, seeing the move as something with both bright and dark possible consequences:

Trump’s decision will have negative consequences. But it will also have positive consequences. Only time will tell if the positive implications of the move will outweigh the negative ones. But it is important to set out both to consider the wisdom of his decision.

On the negative side, the most immediate casualties of Trump’s decision are the Kurdish-dominated People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia. The YPG has been America’s partner and its ground force in the U.S.-led campaign against IS in Syria. YPG forces are the only forces on the ground in Syria that are loyal to the U.S.

At the same time, the U.S. partnership with the YPG has raised the prospect of a war between the U.S. and Turkey. Turkish dictator Recip Erdogan. Erdogan threatened last week to launch an offensive against the YPG forces. He spoke to Trump on Monday. Trump reportedly decided to announce the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria on Tuesday.

[snip]

Then there is Russia. Last January, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad concluded a deal that gave Russia control over Syria’s oil and gas. The following month, Russian mercenaries attempted to cross the Euphrates River to seize the Conoco oil field. The area is under YPG control. Forty U.S. forces blocked the Russian offensive. Hundreds of Russian mercenaries were killed.

Last month, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned an Iranian-Russia network that sent millions of barrels of Iranian oil to Syria and hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas and Hezbollah. The purpose of the network was to permit Iran to bypass the U.S. sanctions by passing its oil off as Syrian oil.

[snip]

From Israel’s perspective, the U.S. presence in Syria has served as a key deterrent against Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah aggression. The thought that U.S. forces in Syria will fight with Israel if Israel finds itself at war against Iran and its aligned forces in Syria and Lebanon has been a deterrent to Iranian aggression. It has arguably also been a rationale for Russia limiting the scope of its strategic partnership with Iran in Syria.

Trump’s announcement that he is removing U.S. forces from Syria, consequently, increases the likelihood of war just as Iran’s pending seizure of the Syrian-Iraqi border increases the likelihood of war.

[snip]

But that, then, brings us to the positive implications of Trump’s move.

From a U.S. perspective, it is fairly clear that if a full-blown war erupts between Israel and Iran-Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria will not be sufficient to make a significant contribution to their defeat. Instead the forces are liable to serve as a tripwire which could place pressure on Trump to deploy a much larger force to Syria.

Presuming that Trump has no interest in being sucked into a war that would place the U.S. in direct conflict with Russia, keeping the forces on the ground is problematic.

[snip]

One of the consequences of the U.S. pullout from Syria is that Trump will finally abandon Obama’s pro-Iranian policy in Syria. True, he isn’t replacing it with an anti-Iranian policy in Syria. But all the same, by abandoning a pro-Iranian policy in Syria, the move will lend some coherence to the U.S.’s overall strategy for countering Iran’s growing power and influence in the region and worldwide.

Israel’s Hadashot news channel reported on Wednesday that along with Trump’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Lebanon, U.S. officials told Israel that if Hezbollah gains a more powerful position in the next Lebanese government, the U.S. will end its support for the LAF and agree to Israel’s request that it place an economic embargo on the Lebanese government.

Read the rest here.

I should add that, while I am deeply concerned about Israel’s safety (after all, my parents played their own small parts in that nation’s survival in War of Independence), my first loyalty is to America. Trump has shown surprising wisdom in foreign affairs, so I trust him to have made a workable decision for the U.S. Regarding Israel, I don’t forget that Trump is probably the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.

Third, I can’t ignore the rumors that General Mattis quit his position because he disapproves of Trump’s Syrian withdrawal. I like Mattis. I like his ferocity, his love for his troops, and his patriotism. It concerns me deeply that he thinks Trump is making a mistake. Having said that, it’s not clear to me that Trump and Mattis are on the same page in terms of their goals for both the Middle East and American security. Again, I’ll just have to hope that Trump is acting wisely.

The one thing I know with comfortable certainty is that anything Trump does will be (a) smarter than anything Obama did in that region (which he set aflame) and (b) will be done with an eye, first, to America’s best interests and, second, with an eye to Israel’s long-term security.

As always, on such a complex subject, I’m interested in anything you have to say. Please chime in.

Mahmoud Abbas agrees with me. Based upon information from my parents, who were part of the Israeli War of Independence, and on my own studies about the history in the region, I learned this: In 1948, the Arabs living in the new state of Israel (few of whom had ties to the land that went back more than 150 years) left their homes voluntarily because the invading five Arab nations told the fellahin to get out of the way of the fighting and then to return later for the spoils. That is, Israel didn’t steal the land; the fellahin left voluntarily to aid the Arab armies, confident that they could return later for murder, rape, and looting. Serious miscalculation, that.

And you know who agrees with me? The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas:

By the way, that link I gave above, regarding the fellahin’s ties to the land, goes to one of my favorite posts, so if you feel like reading it….

The Deep State tries to kill the economy. After a flaccid economy during the entirety of Obama’s presidency, Trump supercharged it in several ways, ranging from that tax bill, to unleashing our energy sector, to lessening oppressive regulations, to fighting China’s predatory practices, to just being a cheerleader for American industry and ingenuity. And now the Fed is wreaking havoc with the economy, as Jim Hoft emphatically pointed out yesterday:

The Fed announced on Wednesday afternoon that they will increase rates and will also increase rates next year.

The Dow immediately dropped 350 points in 10 minutes.

The market was up 370 points and dropped to 20 points up.
UPDATE– Dow dropped 470 points in one hour.
UPDATE: 570 Points
UPDATE: Dow down 670 points from daily high before announcement.
UPDATE: (1 hr. 10 minute later) Dow down 770 points.
UPDATE: The Dow finished -350 points or down 720 points since 2 PM when Jerome Powell started talking.

Market was down at one point by 894 points!

[snip]

The Fed is clearly a political machine not working in the interest of President Trump or the American people.  As a result of Fed policies Americans are being bound with massive interest payments on Obama debt for years to come.

The Dow Jones shrank by 3,200 points since the Fed’s Jerome Powell’s insidious comments in early October to continue to increase interest rates.

The DOW reached another all-time high on October 3rd reaching 26,829.  It was up for the 103rd time since Donald Trump was elected President and 46% since the November 2016 election.

This was clearly too much for the Fed’s Powell who then scared investors with his message that he will raise rates well into next year.

And here’s some final food for thought:

Speaking of the evil Deep State…. Sharyl Attkisson has a savagely wonderful attack on the Deep State’s behavior towards Carter Page, who has never been charged as a Russian spy, despite the government’s repeatedly invading his civil rights:

Evidence revealed over the past two years indicates former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page is the most diabolical Russian spy ever known. Ever.

Ten pieces of evidence support this conclusion:
  1. We know Carter Page is a diabolical Russian spy because the FBI wiretapped him. Under our laws, FBI agents cannot wiretap a U.S. citizen based merely on suspicion or hunches, or to fish for information; they must possess hard evidence indicating the target is currently — or imminently about to become — a foreign spy. So the FBI would not have wiretapped Page if it couldn’t meet the legal evidence threshold. (At least they shouldn’t have.)
  1. Page became a Russian spy after he assisted the FBI in a Russian spy case in 2013. It takes the most diabolical sort to be an asset for the FBI in one Russian spy case, and then to go on to become a Russian spy yourself! (At least that’s what the FBI claims.)
  1. Page is so diabolical that he spied for Russia even as he knew the FBI was watching. (The FBI interviewed him in March 2016, prior to wiretapping him.) Only a seasoned operative with ice water in his veins would have the nerve to spy for Russia right under the FBI’s nose — and think he can get away with it! (At least that’s the FBI’s apparent theory.)
  1. After the FBI interviewed Page, he traveled to Moscow, where he used to live and do business, in July 2016 to give a university commencement address. Obviously, this was a diabolical cover for a diabolical spy trip. Fusion GPS, the Democrats’ political opposition research team, would later tell the FBI that Page met with Russian officials on the trip. (Page later denied it under oath, but I think we all know who to believe here, don’t we?)

Read the rest here.

I think Europe’s dead, but…. Bruce Bawer writes movingly about his Norwegian friend, Hege Storhaug, who thinks Trump might be Europe’s last, best hope. Storhaug has a lot at stake with this hope, since she lives in a secret location, surrounded by armed guards, to protect her from Norway’s Muslims and Leftists. Here’s Storhaug’s analysis of Europe’s plunge into an Islamic future:

Which country in Western Europe is in the worst shape? For my part, I sometimes think it’s Sweden, sometimes Britain or maybe Belgium, although the Yellow Jacket riots in Paris lifted France to the top of my current list. Hege was way ahead of me on this one. Her book contains a long, harrowing chapter entitled “Marseille: Report from the Lost City.” Another friend of mine, Claire Berlinski, in her important 2006 book Menace in Europe, held Marseille up as an example of relatively successful multicultural mixing; her chapter on the city (which is now 35% Muslim) was entitled “The Hope of Marseille.” Today, Hege sees no hope in Marseille or anywhere else in France. “The situation in France is much worse than the surface picture might suggest,” Hege said. (We spoke before the terror attack in Strasbourg.) At the end of her chapter on Marseille, she writes: “I believe that France has reached a ‘point of no return.’” In other words, all hope is gone. “After I wrote that sentence,” she told me, “I took it out. It sounded too stark. But then I thought, no, this is what I believe; I might as well say it. So I put it back in.”

Although she does consider France a lost cause, Hege wouldn’t make predictions about the rest of Western Europe. “There are so many things that could happen,” she said. “What will Erdogan do? What if there’s a massive terror attack in Norway or Sweden or the UK? Will the EU take control of its borders and the Mediterranean?” Perhaps some politicians will grow a spine. Perhaps the rioting in Paris will intensify and lead to political crisis. It has already spread to the Low Countries; perhaps it will continue to spread. All Hege knows for sure is that, at present, “not one country in Western Europe, except maybe Austria, has a government that’s taking the proper action.”

But what of Trump?

As for the U.S., the main reason Hege was eager to get her book translated into English was that she wanted to do her part to help America avoid Western Europe’s fate. She fully supports the idea of the U.S. subjecting potential immigrants to an ideological test that would weed out freedom-lovers from sharia-lovers. “It may seem extreme,” she admitted, “but we have to save our free societies.” Her friends in Pakistan, she noted, would pass such a test with flying colors. In our conversation, she was fervent in her expression of hope that Donald Trump would be able to introduce a test of this kind. It would not only rescue America, she contended; it could also rescue Western Europe, because if Trump actually took such a step, his Western European counterparts might actually screw up the courage to do the same thing.

“Trump,” she summed up, “can be Western Europe’s salvation.”

By the way, I think every one of those feckless, cowardly European leaders has blood on his or her hands from the Islamic slaughter of those two naive Danish women hiking in Morocco. If their leaders had been honest about the risk Islam poses to the entire Western world, those women would have known better than to travel alone in a Muslim country. As it is, buoyed by Leftist lies (“Islam is a religion of peace”), they were butchered like pigs.

Incidentally, do I need to say that I know there are good Muslims in the world? Indeed, there are millions of good Muslims who are people of kindness, decency, and high morals. However, the sad fact is that Muslims mostly tend to be good when they’re a tiny minority. The moment they reach critical mass, they are divided into two groups: those who passively believe in imposing sharia through jihad and those who actively believe in imposing sharia through jihad. Both are trouble.

And while I’m on the topic of good Muslims versus bad Muslims, I am willing to bet that the car that deliberately swerved into a bus stop in Germany, killing one and injuring eight others, will prove to have been driven by a Muslim. It is, after all, a tactic Arabs perfected in Israel and then started exporting to the world.

Of course, even if the attack was deliberate, that doesn’t mean anything will happen to the malefactor. After all, in England, a Muslim man who supported ISIS and who attacked police officers with a sword outside of Buckingham Palace, all the while screaming “allahu akbar” was acquitted. Why?

But during his trial Chowdhury, from the town of Luton, north of London, reportedly told jurors he only wanted to be killed by police and had no intention to hurt anyone himself.

After the not guilty verdict was read out, he saluted the jurors who had spent 11 hours and 36 minutes considering his fate, according to AFP.

Antisemitism is a good measure of human decency. Regular readers have probably lost count of the number of times I’ve pointed out that there is a straight-line correlation between a country’s level of freedom and its attitude towards Jews. Totalitarian societies hate Jews; free societies don’t.

Bishop Desmond Tutu reminds us that this theory applies to humans as well, with decent humans comfortable with Jews and horrible humans hating them. Bruce Bawer begins his article by pointing out how he once admired Tutu for his stance against apartheid. But oh! How things I’ve changed.

Bawer moves on to speak about the horrors in today’s South Africa, with daily murderous attacks on whites and the current movement to use government force to rob white farmers of their land (a move that reduced Zimbabwe from one of Africa’s most prosperous nations to one of its poorest):

And what, I wonder, does Tutu think?

Yes, it’s true that, since his golden days, he’s fallen from his pedestal. He’s compared Israel to apartheid South Africa. Repeatedly. Sometimes viciously. Indeed, as Alan Dershowitz noted some years ago, Tutu has demonstrated “a long history of ugly hatred toward the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and the Jewish state,” and “has minimized the suffering of those killed in the Holocaust … by asserting that ‘the gas chambers’ made for ‘a neater death’ than did Apartheid. In other words, the Palestinians, who in his view are the victims of ‘Israeli Apartheid,’ have suffered more than the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. … He has been far more vocal about Israel’s imperfections than about the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and Cambodia.”

Tutu is, then, an anti-Semite. Still, in South Africa he commands moral authority that he could put to some use in defense of his country’s white farmers. Why hasn’t he?

Bawer notes that Tutu’s advanced age is not a factor, since he’s bopping around here and there:

So he’s been a busy fellow. But what has he said or done about the war on white farmers? I’ve googled away, and scoured Lexis, and found nothing. Not a word. Have I missed something? Has he in fact urged South African politicians to change their minds, and begged marauders to stay their hands? I hope so. If I find out that, in fact, he still views all South Africans as “members of … one human family,” and that he has defended the right of white farmers to retain their own land, then I might consider taking that framed picture of him — which is now gathering dust under my bed — and putting it up on the wall somewhere.

On second thought, though, I think I’ll wait until he also drops the anti-Semitism.

Antisemites, as I said, are ugly human beings.

Kavanaugh cleared. It’s sort of a footnote to one of the ugliest, most embarrassing moments in American history, but it’s still good to know that a panel of federal judges dismissed the 83 ethics complaints filed against Justice Kavanaugh based upon the fact that he got upset at the hearings after being falsely accused over and over again of vile, brutal sexual assaults.

DNA and the Pill. I have written before about my belief that the Pill which, as a political hot potato, is almost impossible to study, might have something to do with the huge number of people claiming sexual ambiguity or confusion. My theory is that the Pill’s effects linger in a woman’s body long after she goes off the Pill. Thus, that powerful hormone may change the hormone wash in which a fetus bathes during pregnancy.

I was therefore struck by research indicating that men’s bodies are affected for up to six months after they last smoke pot, which may damage the DNA they pass to their children:

Men should stop using cannabis for at least six months before they hope to father children, scientists have warned.

Researchers took sperm samples from 12 men who used the drug at least once a week and found it altered the DNA of their swimmers.

Changes were found in the DNA that codes for both growth and organ development, with such genetic mutations even being linked to cancer.

Although unclear whether these changes may be passed on to their children, the scientists behind the study have advised men to assume the worst.

It seems to me that this “drugs linger in the body” theory could apply to the Pill as well.

The media lies and then it lies again. Okay, this a familiar theme, because the media lies constantly, most especially when it attacks Trump and those Americans who support him. In the latest attack on Trump, in connection with the little girl who died because her father dragged her across deserts without food or water, Joy Reid aired video of the Border Patrol dumping migrant water. The only problem…

And yes, the media’s lies always benefit the Left. Yesterday, when news broke about Claas Relotius, the young Der Spiegel journalist who made up stories, I put up this tweet:

Naturally, I was correct:

One story Relotius wrote last year was about a small town in Minnesota called Fergus Falls. If you’re guessing that this was a Gorillas In the Mist style feature designed to make middle-America look bad, you are exactly correct. Michele Anderson, who lives in Fergus Falls, remembers meeting Relotius last February when he came to live in the area for three weeks to supposedly get a clear view of small-town America. She was immediately skeptical about his motives:

I know I’m not the only rural advocate and citizen that is wary about the anthropological gaze on rural America in the wake of the 2016 elections, and has struggled with how or whether to respond to the sudden attention and questions, when before we really didn’t matter to mass media at all.

Suddenly we do matter, but only because everyone wants to be the hero pundit that cracks the code of the current rural psyche. There are only two things those writers seem to have concluded or are able to pitch to their editors — we are either backwards, living in the past and have our heads up our asses, or we’re like dumb, endearing animals that just need a little attention in order to keep us from eating the rest of the world alive.

When Der Spiegel finally published his 7,000 word story on Fergus Falls, Michele Anderson found her own town unrecognizable. She and a friend were so skeptical of so many details that they set out to catalogue the errors in the piece and worked on doing so for nearly a year. Today, after word broke that Relotius had been fired, Anderson published a list of the top 11 errors in his piece on Medium.

If you go to the article at Medium, you learn that Relotius made up this kind of thing:

“There is also a cinema outside of town, where fast food stores are lit up. In this cinema, a flat, rectangular building, there are two films on a Friday evening. The one, “La La Land”, running in empty rows, is a musical, a romance about artists in Los Angeles. The other, “American Sniper”, a war film by Clint Eastwood, is sold out. The film is actually already two years old, almost 40 million Americans have seen it, but it still runs in Fergus Falls.”

This anecdote that supported Relotius’ exaggerated story of an immigrant-fearing, gun obsessed small town one was the easiest to fact check and yet the strangest, most random lie for him to craft. American Sniper definitely has not played in Fergus Falls since its first and only run in 2015. To be sure, we even reached out to Isaac Wunderlich, the manager of Westridge Theatre.

And yet another story about the lying media. Okay, I don’t actually have a whole story. Instead, I have a headline that tells the whole story:

FAKE NEWS MEDIA UNREAL: NYT Claims $100,000 In Alabama Senate Race Has No Effect, But $100,000 By Russia In 2016 is Game-Changing

Incidentally, the whole article is worth reading.

How the mighty have fallen. When I was growing up, California had the best education system in the country. Now it has the worst education system. The only virtue of this fall from grace is that it kills dead the arrogant Leftist claim that “uneducated morons” reside only in Red States. As it turns out, they reside in the largest Blue State in America.

Michelle Obama is white trash. “White trash,” as I have always used it, does not refer to skin color, geographic location, or socio-economic status. It refers, instead, to a mindset that is, quite simply, trashy. White trash people crudely insult others; dress in ways that are offensive, rather than flattering, and often cost the moon; and are generally just creepy, low people. Doesn’t that describe Michelle Obama?

If you doubt me, I’ve got two pieces of evidence to support my claim. First, Michelle (“when they go low, we go high”) Obama, verbally attacked First Lady Melania Trump, a singularly classy and beautiful woman:

During an appearance Tuesday on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” Obama had some vicious things to say about the current first family while promoting her new book, Becoming. [Bookworm here: Becoming . . . a White Trash Bitch?]

Former First Lady Michelle Obama made several snide comments about President Donald Trump’s inauguration and insulted First Lady Melania Trump’s gift to her.

During an appearance Tuesday on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” Obama had some vicious things to say about the current first family while promoting her new book, Becoming.

Should Trump pardon General Flynn? VOTE HERE

The segment began when Fallon showed an image of the Obamas waving to the cameras as they boarded Air Force One to leave the White House for the final time on Jan. 20, 2017.

“This is you. This is after the Trump inauguration just waving from Air Force One,” Fallon said.

Fallon then showed pictures of Michelle greeting the Trumps at the White House and asked what going through her mind at the time.

“Can you just walk me through what —”

“Bye, Felicia,” Obama said, cutting off Fallon before he could finish his question.

“Bye, Felicia” is a viral term that means to express utter dismissiveness, sort of like a “get away from me” comment.

Michelle went on to complain about the gift that Melania gave her at the White House when the Trumps and Obamas greeted one another.
“And then there was the Tiffany’s box. It was just all, you know — a lot,” she said, referring to the gift that Melania gave her.

The second piece of evidence is visual. I have alternately labeled this photo “mutton dressed as lamb” and the “giant glittering banana slug.”

Michelle Obama

Here’s food for thought about the Left and its the media establishment: Despite having been out of the White House for two years, Michelle (see above) still shows up on the cover of fashion and other women’s magazines as an avatar of beauty and style.

Now, let me just remind you what Melania Trump looks like:

Melania has never been on the cover of a women’s magazine since Trump declared that he would run as a Republican.

One more thing: Those hideous sparkly unicorn boots, that would have looked ridiculous even on a stick-thin young fashion model, cost $4,000. The Obamas purport to represent “the little people” and Barack famously said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Apparently “hypocrisy” is spelled M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E.

The “party of science” is low, cheap, sleazy, and intellectually corrupt. Science is supposed to be cerebral and free of bias. It’s all about facts and where the facts lead. However, ever since the Left took over America’s colleges and universities, and then appropriated for itself the mantle of “science!”, we get garbage like this:

A blind, ground-burrowing, worm-like amphibian has a new and presidential name, after its physical features and habits drew comparisons to Donald Trump.

Meet Dermophis donaldtrumpi, a member of the group called caecilians (seh-SILL-yens), which are limbless amphibians found in the tropics. The creature was one of 12 unnamed species from Latin America; naming rights for each of them were offered at auction on Dec. 8, as part of a fundraiser for conservation organization Rainforest Trust, according to a statement.

EnviroBuild, a U.K. supply company of sustainable building materials, won the right to name the new-to-science caecilian from Panama. The company paid $25,000 for the privilege, the highest bid at the auction. EnviroBuild’s choice acknowledged Trump’s “commitment to environmental issues,” EnviroBuild representatives said in a statement. [11 Animals Named After US Presidents]

It may not seem like a worm-like, sightless creature that buries itself in the dirt has anything in common with a U.S. president. However, closer examination of Trump and his new namesake reveals that they share many similarities, EnviroBuild said.

Caecilians’ rudimentary eyes can distinguish only light and dark; their name comes from the Latin word “caecus,” which means “blind.” While Trump is not blind, his views on climate change demonstrate blindness to the evidence of a warming world, EnviroBuild representatives said. In 2012, Trump tweeted that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China, to make the U.S. less competitive. And though Trump recently admitted on the CBS program “60 Minutes” that climate change is really happening, he questioned whether humans were responsible (we are).

Nowadays, when I hear the word “science,” I don’t think of advances in human knowledge. I think of silly pop videos from the 80s:

Remy has been eavesdropping in my house. Long-time readers know that I bitterly resent the rebates on electric cars. I think it’s unfair to use taxes collected from all citizens to subsidize cars that only rich people can buy. Rich virtue signalers ought to dig into their own pockets if they want to buy electric cars. If the cars are not affordable, the marketplace, not taxpayer subsidies, ought to correct that.

Mr. Bookworm, however, adores electric cars and we have used the subsidies to pay for them. (And I should add that I’ve said yes to the money; if the government’s going to give it to me, I’m taking it.)

So it was that Remy perfectly captured the two points of view in our house:

The truly forgotten American man. I’ve played this video before, long ago, simply because I like it. I think Harry Warren’s melody, Al Dubin’s lyrics, and Busby Berkeley’s inspired choreography are superb. Together, they tell a very moving story set when the Depression had dug its claws deep into America.

However, when I watched it again the other day (I grab Gold Diggers of 1933 every time TCM shows it), I was struck by how particularly relevant it is to today’s world.

The musical number is relevant not because it fits in with today’s views about men, but because it is the antithesis of today’s approach to men. Back in 1933, men were men and they weren’t toxic. How different from today’s world:

And now I’m exhausted and done.