Mike LaChance:

“…For years, conservatives have pointed out the liberal biases of the media, but the Trump era has brought the subject into focus never seen before now. The media’s reaction to the death of ISIS leader al-Baghdadi may have been a turning point.

Progressives in media are so dedicated to opposing Trump, that the Washington Post eulogized the terrorist with more warmth than they have ever afforded President Trump, or even certain high school students caught on camera wearing MAGA hats.

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and the other usual suspects also had spectacularly bad takes on the death of al-Baghdadi, all of which were framed to discredit Trump or downplay his role in the situation.

In years past, the media tried to remain subtle in their bias but that all changed on election night in 2016. Anyone who was paying attention that night saw the media completely transform in real time. Many of the same cable and network news hosts who played palace guards for the Obama administration for eight years, became members of the angry mob at the palace gate, overnight.

One day the White House was an institution which could do no wrong and must be protected at all costs, the next it was a potential hotbed of corruption. We suddenly needed journalists who were willing to speak truth to power in supposed defense of our democracy.

In case you haven’t noticed, the vast majority of the media is working in direct partnership with the Democrat Party to undo the results of the 2016 election and to remove Trump from office…”

Original

STEPHEN KRUISER:

“…A very clear picture of why the Democrats have been so fiercely protecting his identity also came into view. He has connections to Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, the Democratic National Committee, and the awful Trump-hating stain on so many news cycles: John Brennan.

This thing stunk when we first found out that the whistleblower didn’t even have firsthand knowledge of the call. If he’s Biden and Brennan’s puppet the stench becomes permanently toxic…”

Original

MIRANDA DEVINE:

“…It’s not climate change that has set California on fire, as Gov. Gavin Newsom claims.

It’s human mismanagement and green obstinacy.

Locking up forests and preventing tree clearing and the systematic fuel reduction required in any prudent management of nature has been a disaster in a state that is “built to burn.”

Now that the cataclysm predicted by world forestry and fire experts has come to pass, the culprits are blaming climate change.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They warn of cataclysmic climate change if we don’t suddenly remove the cheap, fossil-fueled energy on which this nation’s economic prosperity was founded.

Then they work against any sensible management of California’s forests which would reduce the severity of routine regular wildfires.

Then, when the wildfires become record-breaking conflagrations, they point and say, “See, I told you so.”…”

Original

Madeline Osburn:

“…A new report from RealClearInvestigations reveals that the anti-Trump “whistleblower” who prompted the current impeachment proceedings against President Trump is a registered Democrat who worked with a Democratic National Committee opposition researcher who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Federal documents reveal that the whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, previously worked in the Obama administration with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan. RealClear reports that Ciaramella remained there into the Trump administration, and headed the Ukraine desk at the National Security Council, eventually transitioning into the West Wing, until June 2017.

Officials told RealClear that Ciaramella strongly opposed Trump’s foreign policy…”

Original

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

“…More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates — add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child…”

Original

Conrad Black:

“…You may read it here first: This sordid, contemptible impeachment ruse is finally disintegrating. It was another fraud, and I predict that this time the polls will move clearly in the president’s favor. There are limits to how often his enemies can get the public and the world to the edges of their chairs with their fantastic accusations. The Economist, a long-respected magazine in earlier times, told us a year ago that the Trump presidency was hanging on the thread of Michael Cohen’s testimony. Most of the U.S. media gave the public to understand for two years that there was a high chance that he would be thrown out once the Mueller investigation established his “treasonous” links to the Russians. Trump appalls many reasonable people by some of his antics and utterances, but his supporters are rock-solid at only slightly less than half the country, and enough to have got him elected. But the vitriolic antagonism of about 90 percent of the media, and the fear and loathing of the political class, which he assaulted in its entirety, have sustained an artificial levitation of morbid expectation that he will be overthrown and removed.

My research and intuition indicate that we have reached a turning point, and that all but the outright Trump-haters are disconcerted, and in growing numbers disgusted, by the cumulative pettiness, nastiness, and dishonesty of the assault on this president…”

Original

Original

America’s religion of anti-racism reaches peak absurdity

And a great analysis by Heather MacDonald

I don’t agree with much of what Mr. Taibbi thinks, but I can agree with this.

“…When important events take place now, commercial news outlets instantly slice up the facts and commoditize them for consumption by their respective political demographics. We always had this process, to some degree, but it no longer takes days to sift into the op-ed pages…”

Original

How The Obama Administration Set In Motion Democrats’ Coup Against Trump

Schiff Directing Witnesses Not To Answer GOP Questions

Sally Zelikovsky:

“…The Senate should change its rules or enact new rules establishing that it will summarily dismiss any impeachment from the House and not hold a trial, when that impeachment is based on any of the following: partisan politics (this can be proven since impeachment has been their clarion call since Election Night 2016);  conduct that falls squarely within the executive’s constitutionally-enumerated powers (among others, the executive’s ability to conduct foreign and national security policy, to protect the homeland, and to fully execute the laws of the United States, including investigating and prosecuting corruption carried out by citizens); hearsay evidence and any other evidence that would be inadmissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence; information protected by executive privilege or that is classified; evidence that has been obtained in violation of the accused’s constitutional guarantees or any other laws; or evidence that was illegally obtained.

The Constitution states that the President shall be “removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”  That requires that a trial take place, but if the Senate determines, in accordance with Senate rules, that there are no grounds for a trial, it’s hard to see a reason why the Senate cannot “throw out” the impeachment.

Gutsy? You bet.  Likely to rile up the Dems?  Don’t care.  Effective?  Damn right.

Changing existing senate rules or enacting new ones might require deploying Harry Reid’s 2013 nuclear option which allows the Senate to close debate with a simple majority (51 votes) versus 60, or the 67 votes required to amend a Senate rule.

Republicans don’t have 60 votes but can easily meet the 51-vote threshold as long as they employ  Nancy Pelosi-style tactics to muscle every Republican senator to vote with the pack.  They will have to pressure Republicans who threaten to stray with losing committee appointments or chairmanships they might have or want.  They must be made to understand that any legislation they might propose will fall on deaf ears and that the NRSC will withhold funding for their re-election bids and support primary challenges instead.  If some pansy like Romney or Collins insists on voting his or her conscience, they should be pressed by every other Republican to, at the very least, not show up on vote day (remember:  the Constitution requires 2/3 of the members present)…”

Original

The Real Reasons Why Legacy Media Are Freaking Out Over Trump’s Successful Baghdadi Mission

It’s a great day when a fiend is chased into a hole and blown to bits.

But you wouldn’t know it from our media.

The Washington Post marked the death of the Islamic State’s leader with this headline: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies.”

Yep. He’s described not as a rapist and mass murderer, but as an austere religious scholar.

They later changed it, not because they realized it was obscene, but because they got caught.

That’s our media. Even in big moments, they look small.

Baghdadi took his kids with him when he blew himself up. I guess that makes him a family man, too.

From now on, whenever the Post judges President Trump’s words, let’s remind them that they called a deviant fiend an “austere religious scholar.”

The upside: it led to a fun Twitter contest for other Post obituaries.

“Adolf Hitler, passionate community planner and dynamic public speaker, dies at 56.”

“Acclaimed mass transit administrator Benito Mussolini, dead at 61.”

“Jeffrey Dahmer, lover of exotic cuisine, dies at 34.”

The ISIS spokesman also got killed. Or, as the Post would say, “Another outspoken activist silenced by Trump.”

So, as people cheered, the media smeared.

They can’t cut the guy one break.

And at the World Series, the D.C. crowd heckled Trump.

What a contrast. As America cheers a victory over terror, swamp fans boo the guy bringing the news.

But it’s a risk an outsider takes when he shows up in a place full of journalists and bureaucrats.

If you play the same tune 24/7, life has a way of mocking the song.

But it’s all good. It’s even all great.

Terrorism will never die, but at least be glad that one terrorist did.

And our hero dog will recover, even if the media won’t.

Original

A great article. Worth clicking over for the whole thing.

Stephen B. Presser:

“…Nevertheless, we are quite likely soon to witness the most important revelations that, as the president has maintained, he has been the wrongful victim of a witch hunt, of a manufactured conspiracy, of an attempt to frame and discredit him by officials of the Obama administration. This is the expected outcome of the report coming soon from the DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who is likely to report that criminal acts were performed in the original surveillance of the president and his aides on fabricated evidence of Russian involvement in his campaign.

This report, coupled with the recent transformation of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the beginnings of that surveillance into a criminal investigation, is, according to some astute observers, likely finally to result in grand jury indictments and trials of some senior officials, and may turn out to be the greatest political scandal of our era.

Even when this happens, however, and even if many independent and objective observers become convinced that great wrongs were perpetrated against this president, his most rabid detractors are likely to be unmoved. His principal tormentors, Congressmen Adam Schiff and Jerold Nadler, with exquisite chutzpah, have already denounced Durham’s investigation and Attorney General Bill Barr’s similar efforts, as a wrongful politicization of our criminal law.

What could account for such spectacular hypocrisy or, to be a bit kinder, such obduracy on the part of the Democrats? I have sought to argue here that what is going on is an ideological battle, one where reality is colored by cultural preferences, where one sees only what one wants to see, and where, given the now clear lines drawn between conservatives and liberals on charged matters such as race, religion, abortion, gender, wealth redistribution, and regulation, political compromise seems impossible.

And yet — if it is true that partisans in the Obama administration flagrantly and wrongly twisted the law to serve their own selfish political ends, perhaps this sorry episode will offer an opportunity for the nation to make a long-overdue renewal of commitment to the rule of law and the Constitution itself.

For too long all three branches of our government have been rejecting prior precedent, and have been making up law, policy, and procedure out of whole cloth, and the same has been true in many of our administrative agencies — the bureaucracy and the “deep state,” so much lamented by Mr. Trump.

All of this has led to the arbitrary actions most feared by our framers, an alarming loss of state and local political power, and a concomitant failure of local governance, as many of our cities become increasingly unlivable.

If the revelations of wrongdoing are as dramatic as expected, they just might shock Americans into realizing that the 2020 elections ought to be about returning this country to more honest, and, perhaps, more modest federal government, and restoring the original Constitutional doctrines of federalism and separation of powers…”

Original

An interesting review of Kanye West’s new christian album. I think West is talented and I think he has insight into popular culture and business, but I have a hard time taking West seriously. Is this conversion going to stick? Or is this the next cycle of a brilliant, but weakly focused mind?

ANDREW T. WALKER:

“…On Friday, anyone with a pulse would have seen the news of the release of Kanye West’s newest album, Jesus Is King. It comes after months of news stories about West’s very public conversion to Christianity, a Christianity that bears no resemblance to the vague spiritualism of Moral Therapeutic Deism that is often associated with celebrity conversions.

The lyrics to each song in Jesus Is King are shockingly Christian. It is not an album of feel-good Christian spirituality aimed primarily as a message of uplift. West co-wrote and sang the hit “Jesus Walks” on his debut album The College Dropout (2004), but Jesus Is King is different. Throughout the whole of the new album, West is in many respects deeply critical of modernity and cultural progressivism. There are calls for a focus more on the family than on individual glory. He seems to applaud Chick-fil-A, which in our age is tantamount to endorsing bigotry. Social-media obsession should be exchanged for family prayer. Fatherhood is characterized as a virtue. Materialism is pilloried. Calls for worshiping Christ redound to such effect that West’s first Christian album is arguably more Christian than what most contemporary Christian artists could similarly muster.

But in the media rollout of West’s album, it’s worth paying attention to other statements he’s made. He’s criticized abortion and believes that the African-American community is getting played by Democrats. He remains defiant in the face of political correctness. A man of evolving identities who has struggled with mental illness in his past, he told Zane Lowe during a two-hour long Beats 1 interview that during the planning of the album, he insisted that those around him fast and abstain from premarital sex. In the interview with Lowe, West has the anthropology of C. S. Lewis, the economics of Wilhelm Röpke, the cultural mood of Wendell Berry, and the defiance of Francis Schaeffer. In Jesus Is King and in interviews, we see a Kanye West upholding what Russell Kirk referred to as the Permanent Things.

He’s rejecting the hyper-sexualization of culture that he admitted he helped create. In an ode to the Niebuhrian Christ-and-culture typology, he said he’s now living his life for Christ and ostensibly against culture.

In a word, Kanye West is now a cultural reactionary by the standards of our society, and could be, in time, a cultural wrecking ball that dislodges so much of the assumed, comfortable, and unchecked cultural liberalism that dominates the most elite sectors of our country and mocks anything resembling traditionalism and social conservatism. In an age of libertarian sentiment, when the currency of American society appear to be glamorization and the notion that consent is the only reasonable moral standard, West is calling for restraint and limits…”

Original