Joe’s Dementia Song

 

And now for something completely different. Thomas Lifson is the founder of American Thinker and he posted a short video (2:13) compilation of Biden’s gaffes and memory lapses, all set to music.  Here’s his introduction:

Were the fate of the free world not in the hands of this man, the setting of Joe Biden’s many dementia moments to a catchy tune would be hilarious. Actually, it still is hilarious despite the awful reality underlying it. This is a brilliant satire that is also self-evidently accurate. . . .

Click here, scroll down to the video, and then laugh or cry.

All we need now is another compilation video, set to goofy dance music, of Joe wandering around, looking lost, shaking hands with invisible people, sniffing hair, and sucking Jill’s fingers.

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Another reason to oppose EVs

 

As we watch the footage of the damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thomas Lifson (American Thinker founder and editor) explains in detail why converting to all-electric vehicles is such a bad – and dangerous –idea:

. . . It is fortunate that as of the current moment, electric vehicles constitute only about 100,000, out of nearly 8 million vehicles registered to drive on Florida’s roads. What if they all were electric, the (impractical) dream of greenies?

Depending on how heavily loaded they were, even assuming everyone had a full battery charge, cars from southern Florida would start running out of juice after 100 – 250 miles. They would then have to spend hours at recharging stations, which would rapidly be clogged with other cars and trucks waiting their turn, since an electricity “fill up” can easily take an hour or more, as compared to a couple of minutes for gasoline.  Cars waiting to be charged would spill onto the highways, potentially blocking traffic.

Those cars that ran out of juice on the highway would block traffic. Even assuming that emergency service vehicles could get to them (unlikely if the entire fleet were electric cars), towing a portable generator (powered by fossil fuels, of course) and recharging the stalled vehicles would take plenty of time, as well, further blocking traffic.  The stranded cars would, of course, have no air conditioning, no wipers, no GPS.

In all likelihood, the highways would become vast parking lots, trapping their passengers wherever they happened to be stalled, waiting for the storm and flood waters to reach them, unable to get to safety. . . .

More here.

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The Post-Inauguration World

 

Over the past couple of months, several contributors to the American Thinker blog reported on probable election fraud, including fraud allegedly related to the Dominion voting machines.  Apparently, Dominion threatened to sue the blog out of existence, and as a consequence, the proprietor, Thomas Lifson, published an abject apology for publishing such outright misinformation.  His “apology” was so out-of-character, so craven, that I for one did not believe one word.  However, some comments turned up at other blogs that linked to the apology, indicating that some readers took Mr. Lifson’s “apology” at face value.  (Mr. Lifson also discontinued publishing reader comments.  The heavy hand of censorship is silencing so many conservative voices.) 

I don’t think Mr. Lifson had a choice.  As I read it, had he not issued his “apology,” his blog – which is a labor of love – would have been crushed. So I continue to visit the American Thinker blog and frequently share content with Cleveland Tea Party readers.  Today, I’m sharing some extracts from an article by E.M. Cadwaladr:

I don't think any of us will be going back to normal anytime soon.  Recent events have broken not buildings and a few thousand lives, but the last weak remnants of the institutions that our founders left us.  We have passed, in the course of a couple months, from a world in which some grudging impulse toward fairness usually prevailed into a world in which raw power is being wielded without the slightest principle.  From a world in which legalities were worth the hope of pursuing into a world in which they are merely the formal decoration on the underlying blunt trauma of the ruling class's cudgel.  From a fragile but functional republic into a grotesque parody of one.

. . .

Unless you are willfully blind or constitutionally numb, there is a pretty good chance you are quietly, or not so quietly, afraid.  You have good cause.  If you love the country that you have rightfully inherited, you now have a target on your back.  Our institutions have completely failed us.  We alone, you and I and the insulted tens of millions, are now the only obstacle between our descendents and totalitarianism.

In the sobering and dangerous days to come, let us lose neither our principles nor our humanity.  If we must journey through the darkness, let us walk proudly as freeborn men and women and not as lawless animals or broken slaves. . . .

Read the rest here. 

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Beware False Flag riots

 From Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:

Mr. Lifson's article with links is here.

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The Final Debate This Week: The Fix Is In

 

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker is outraged at the corruption of the Presidential debates.  As well he should be.  Among his criticisms is the choice of “moderator”:

Two recent actions by the Commission on Presidential Debates reveal the outrageous information control strategy being implemented.  Kristen Welker, the debate moderator, is a highly partisan Democrat working for highly partisan NBC News.  Welker even celebrated Christmas at the Obama White House with her parents, major donors to Obama.

And she gets to choose the topics – favorable to Biden, of course.

Foreign policy, where President Trump has triumphed in the Middle East, is verboten.  And any mention of Hunter Biden's activities as bagman for his father in selling American foreign policy — despite being the major theme of Trump's campaign activities — is MIA.  But once again, climate change, already discussed in debate #1and far down on the list of issues that most concern Americans, is on the agenda.  

But it just got worse — much worse.  The AP reports:

The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced Monday that the second and final debate between the two candidates will have each nominee muted while the other delivers his two-minute remarks at the outset of each of the six debate topics. The remainder of each 15-minute block will be open discussion, without any muting, the commission said.

Welker's handpicked, Dem-favoring topics will get a monopoly in establishing the character of each segment of the debate.  This obviously is intended to force Trump to stick to the subject Dems want covered.  And pardon me if I do not trust this assurance that the mute button, whose very existence is an outrage, will not be further employed to silence Trump if he brings up Hunter's crooked deals on behalf of his father, who gets a cut of 10 to 50 percent on the proceeds, according to a text Hunter sent.

Mr. Lifson’s article is here.

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Lockdowns vs the Constitution

Here’s a glimmer of sanity during our months of house arrest. Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports:

Two state supreme courts have stepped up to constrain abuse of civil rights in the name of fighting an epidemic.  The concept of a "state of emergency" can be used to suspend constitutional limitations on the powers of government, as has been the case with the response to the Wuhan virus pandemic.  But under our system of justice, there has to be a reckoning, and finally we are beginning to see state supreme courts acknowledging what Barack Obama notoriously called "negative liberties," also known as limits on governmental powers, also known as protections against tyranny.

Using their respective state constitutions (which generally mirror the U.S. Constitution when it comes to fundamental rights), the supreme courts of Wisconsin and Texas have spoken up for liberty in the face of two months of "state of emergency" punishing restrictions on liberty.

. . .

In Texas, Justice James D. Blacklock, the majority [opinion held that] the default position must always be to protect rights, and any contravention of thise rights must be minimal and justified.  This is what our revolution was fought to protect.

. . .

These judicial actions — and there will be more later — will help solidify the growing public revulsion against loss of liberties in the name of fighting an epidemic that, while concerning, has not lived up the scary estimates driven by computer models that have not proved out as remotely realistic.  Politically, Democrats have wagered that the public will remain frightened enough to accept a new Great Depression in the name of avoiding a phantom catastrophe . . .

Read the article here; it includes extracts from the judicial rulings.  

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“Hate speech” and Facebook

image credit: hubpages.com

Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:

While in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.

The document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.

“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”

The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.

“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free expression.”

Read the rest of this report here. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker summarizes:

Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it spreads out to the world.

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Censorship creep

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports (“The next stage in tech overlords' censorship: De-platformingun-PC blogs”):

It's no longer just Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are censoring online content that offends political correctness.  Wordpress.com, a blog-hosting site that offers anyone the opportunity to create and publish a blog at no cost, has decided to de-platform — in other words, kill — a blog that has been operating for 15 years: Creeping Sharia.

As Pamela Geller points out, this move by Wordpress.com is itself an example of the blog's focus of creeping sharia happening in real time.  Shutting down a critic of creeping sharia is an example of creeping sharia.

Related: Newsbusters reports on a development (which may be a start, but doesn’t seem to me to go far enough):

The White House has announced a new system that gives Americans the power to call out foul play by tech companies.  

As of May 15 it read, “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” 

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” it continued before delivering a bipartisan message that freedom of speech is a right held by all Americans. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

The submission form begins with a survey asking users to submit their names and confirm that they are citizens of the United States. It then asks whether they were censored via major Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It also listed an option for “Other” acknowledging that there are plenty of other platforms which deplatform users.

It then asks, if possible, for a link or screenshot of the restricted post. 

In a reversal of Trump’s earlier praise of Twitter as a way to reach his audience free of being filtered by the media, this White House page asked users for permission to send newsletters via email so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

The Trump administration said it was “fighting for free speech online,” while the liberal Washington Post characterized the new system as part of Trump’s “war against Facebook, Google and Twitter.” 

Rest of the report is here. Hmm. Either these companies need to be trust-busted, or they need to be subject to regulation by the FCC.

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Google memo 'The Good Censor'

image credit: spartareport.com

Yesterday’s blog was about the film Gosnell, free speech, and free markets. Now comes an American Thinker report by Thomas Lifson titled

“Stunning 85-page Google memo 

'The Good Censor' leaked to Breitbart”

Lifson's blog begins:

If you are not worried about the power of Google to shape debate and elections according to its leftist political bias, you're not paying attention.  I congratulate Breitbart.com for the scoop, and I urge everyone – I am looking at you, President Trump and Congress – to read and ponder the fate of the Republic unless this company is defanged, most likely by antitrust action, but possibly also via civil courts. 

He then quotes Allum Bokhari's introduction and summary of the memo here, including:

An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the "American tradition" of free speech on the internet is no longer viable. ...

[T]he 85-page briefing, titled "The Good Censor," admits that Google and other tech platforms now "control the majority of online conversations" and have undertaken a "shift towards censorship" in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a "utopian narrative" that has been "undermined" by recent global events as well as "bad behavior" on the part of users. ...

It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers.  "This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations," says the document.

The briefing argues that Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are caught between two incompatible positions, the "unmediated marketplace of ideas" vs. "well-ordered spaces for safety and civility."

Terrifying. The Breitbart scoop is here. Our household is exploring alternatives to Google, including Brave. Does anyone see an alternative to Facebook? 

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Where is the Attorney General?

“You know we talk about special prosecutors, but enough of that…I don’t want new prosecutors, I want prosecutions.” Fitton demanded.

 

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was talking to the CPAC audience about the Clintons and other scandals that never seem to result in grand juries or indictments. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation grinds on.

For those who are frustrated at Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s seeming invisibility or failure to take action, maybe it’s simply that we don’t know what is going on behind the scenes. Thomas Lifson at American Thinker makes a good point:

One other thing to never forget: Jeff Sessions spent 12 years as a U.S. attorney in Alabama and went on to spend two years as the attorney general of Alabama before becoming a United States senator.  He is a veteran prosecutor, and he knows that you keep evidence secret, and that when you bring an indictment, you must have all your ducks in line, not compromised by leaks and not requiring more investigation.

The rest of Lifson’s article is here.

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More info on DACA / DREAMers amnesty

art credit: beforeitsnews.com

Re: Amnesty for DREAMers, I’ll be re-posting the Action Alert from last week, starting tomorrow, Monday (DC weather prevented most calls from being answered last week). But over the weekend, several blogs, especially American Thinker, have reported on some facts and developments that relate to DACA.   

From American Thinker blogs: Are most of the DREAMers “valedictorians and Medal of Honor-level military heroes” or are they “functional illiterates” and “underachievers”? Thomas Lifson reports here. And in another blog, Lifson sums up the dilemma for the Democrats pushing for DREAMer amnesty, and asks whether Sen Chuck Schumer can risk a government shutdown:

President Trump engineered this dilemma for Schumer by rescinding Obama’s executive order creating the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, but giving Congress until March 2018 to come up with an alternative approach. That trap is now closing in on Schumer. He has 10 Democrat senators up for re-election in November in states that voted for Trump. Will Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, John Tester of Montana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri be willing to tell their voters that they think amnesty for a group that includes MS 13 members is so important that the government ought to be shut down? Or, if President Trump and the GOP offer some form of amnesty that does not include chain migration (thereby rewarding the parents that illegally brought their children here) but does include border wall funding, are they willing to vote against it?

We are watching another negotiation-in-process.

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Fake News Propaganda – a Case Study

art credit: Henry Payne cartoon at Townhall 

Happy New Year! I’m starting off 2018 with a close-up look at how the media manufactures Fake News.

Frank Miele publishes news commentary in the Daily Inter Lake, a Montana newspaper. On Dec. 30, he ran an editorial about an AP wire report, the misinformation it contained, and his subsequent efforts to wrench a correction out of the AP higher-ups (h/t Thomas Lifson). It is a bit of a read, but I am linking to it, because it provides a look inside a newsroom and how “Fake News” gets so widely disseminated. It is also a classic illustration of Trump Derangement Syndrome infecting the media pushing progressive propaganda. The Russian Collusion phony baloney is starting to collapse of its own weight, and Miele’s report is related to that, insofar as Andrew McCabe is one of the cast of characters at the FBI. Miele’s report starts off:

I took a rare shift as news editor last Saturday, which gave me an unexpected chance to put my finger in the dike holding back the flood of fake news caused by those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. 

As I was sifting through the Associated Press news report looking for wire stories worth putting into the Sunday paper, one story on the news digest caught my attention right away: “President Donald Trump reacts to reports about the retirement of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by retweeting falsehoods about McCabe’s wife.” 

“Oh no,” I thought. “What has Trump done now?” Because even though I am a Trump supporter, I’ve learned that Twitter can be a cause of trouble in the Trump administration as well as a frequent force for good.

But when I looked up the story, I discovered that my worries were unfounded. So, unfortunately, was the story.

When I read AP reporter Darlene Superville’s story, it was immediately obvious that she had either misunderstood Trump’s tweet or intentionally lied about it. She also plainly didn’t know the meaning of the verb “retweet,” since Trump had tweeted an original statement, not a quoted one.

Getting to the truth will take a bit of context, so here goes . . .

And he goes on from there in some detail. He eventually gets a correction from the AP, but here’s his conclusion, and one which I will put in my mental file for the next time I have a conversation with a liberal on media propaganda:

It was a small step, but an important one. Yes, I felt like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to stop the floodwaters, but it may be a hollow victory in the war on fake news. I have to wonder about all those hundreds of editors who put the same erroneous story in their newspapers or websites last weekend without question. Didn’t anyone other than me question the accuracy of the report? Besides, with the power of the Internet, the damage may be irreparable. I checked on Tuesday and found out that the fake version of the story was listed in a Google search 7,790 times whereas the corrected version only appeared on 5,710 websites.

Let the reader beware. 

You can read the rest here. It’s an uphill battle, so please pass it on!

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Minimum wage updates: paging Mayor Jackson!

 art credit: The Tunnel Wall

The Washington Post reports that the state of Maine’s House voted on a bill to reduce the minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers. An earlier Cleveland Tea Party blog reported on Mayor Frank Jackson’s hopes of increasing the minimum wage for City of Cleveland employees.

Today, Thomas Lifson at American Thinker has more on the minimum wage debate:

Minimum wage laws are a perfect example of feel-good statism, in which the professed goal is noble, but the execution inevitably fails and makes things worse.  The state can no more repeal the law of supply and demand than it can the law of gravity.

But don't tell that to the Seattle City Council, which just commissioned a new study intended to get the answer it wants, from a scholar who has contended, in effect, that supply and demand don't really work at the bottom of the wage scale.  The wonderful thing about working with numbers is that by choosing baselines, time periods, and sample bias, you can find almost whatever you want.  As a graduate student who got a Ph.D. in sociology, I saw this clearly and was sickened by people openly proud of the ways in which they got to the conclusions they wanted for ideological reasons.  Nobel laureate Ronald Coase famously summed it up: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

Will somebody tell Mayor Frank Jackson?

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Eric Holder named to lead effort to destroy GOP

art credit: OtterLimits

If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. It's not a headline from The Onion, either. From Thomas Lifson at AmericanThinker:

Eric Holder named to lead effort to destroy GOP

after Hillary wins the presidency

This election is for keeps: plans are being implemented, with President Obama already signed on, staff hired, and money being raised.  Perhaps lulled into complacency by the MSM polls, the Democrats have already constructed and staffed their strategy to permanently disable the Republican Party.  Eric Holder is the perfect henchman, a man above nothing in his quest for political dominance, unbound by old-fashioned concepts of justice.

The GOP will remain in existence as the token opposition, useful for legitimizing the actual one-party regime, the essential element of the election rituals reminding us of the Republic we once enjoyed.

Edward Isaac-Dovere of Politico has the scoop:

As Democrats aim to capitalize on this year’s Republican turmoil and start building back their own decimated bench, former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair a new umbrella group focused on redistricting reform—with the aim of taking on the gerrymandering that’s left the party behind in statehouses and made winning a House majority far more difficult.

The new group, called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, was developed in close consultation with the White House. President Barack Obama himself has now identified the group—which will coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps—as the main focus of his political activity once he leaves office.

The group is moving forward in a systematic way, assembling talent and money:

Though initial plans to be active in this year’s elections fell short, the group has been incorporated as a 527, with Democratic Governors Association executive director Elizabeth Pearson as its president and House Majority PAC executive director Ali Lapp as its vice president. They’ve been pitching donors and aiming to put together its first phase action plan for December, moving first in the Virginia and New Jersey state elections next year and with an eye toward coordination across gubernatorial, state legislative and House races going into the 2018 midterms.

Redistricting, aka Gerrymandering (depending on the eye of the beholder), is now a science, thanks to the data-mining capabilities of all the Silicon Valley Big Money corporatist allies of the Democrats.  Assembling masses of data from Google, Facebook, and others, they can put together districts micro-targeted with just enough Democrats to win and shove the GOP voters into 90% majority districts, shut out forever from control of state legislatures and the House of Representatives.

As Richard Baehr emailed me, "so long as there is an opposition, it must be destroyed."

It will be, if these well designed, politically connected, well financed efforts are implemented under a President Rodham.  

Combined with a Supreme Court committed to the living Constitution fantasy, the Uniparty will rule us all any way it desires.

The continuing avalanche of Wikileaks confirms just how corrupt the entire political and governmental structures are. Sharyl Attkisson (who quit her CBS job a couple of years ago amid concerns of media bias) has a long column focusing on the corrupt corporate media scandal she is calling “Newsgate.” It looks like it's merely the tip of the iceberg. 

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