“State lawmakers Tuesday gave final approval to designating a section of the 134 Freeway as the President Barack H. Obama Highway in honor of the 44th president of the United States. Supporters of the measure will now raise the private funds needed to place signs with Obama’s name along the section of the 134 between the 210 Freeway and the 2 Freeway, which includes parts of Glendale, Pasadena and Eagle Rock.
Obama, who left office in January, attended Occidental College in Eagle Rock in 1979 before transferring to Columbia University in 1981…”
Though it’s more than curious transcripts detailing Barry’s dubious achievements, if any, remain inaccessible by the public…or anyone else.
We lead off the last edition of the week with a question and a comment.
First, as we query at our On the Darker Side video, accessible through link #4 immediately beneath our Quote of the Day at the top of the page, why IS the world always so willing to accept the innumerable tantrums and human-rights abuses…
…of its tyrants?
Second, criticism of Trump’s end-run around Congressional Republicans in striking a horribly damaging debt ceiling deal with Dimocrats is further proof The Right is never averse to taking its leaders to task for abysmally bad judgement; something you NEVER see from the lockstep Left.
Here’s the juice: if Trump’s capitulation on the debt ceiling to Nancy and Chucky is evidence of his command of the “art of the deal”, it’s no wonder he’s repeatedly gone bankrupt.
Next up, as Ben Shapiro observes at Townhall.com, Trump isn’t the only one at fault in this fiasco:
“Politics is the art of shifting the playing field.
This is an art Republicans simply don’t understand. Perhaps it’s because they spend so much time attempting to stop the Democratic snowball from running downhill too quickly, but Republicans in power have an unfortunate tendency to conserve their political capital rather than invest it. That’s unfortunate because political capital doesn’t accrue when you save it; it degrades. Just as sticking your cash in a mattress is a bad strategy when it comes to investment, inaction in power is a bad strategy when it comes to politics.
Democrats understand that political capital must be used, not to pass popular legislation but to fundamentally change the nature of the political game itself. Democrats do not see Obamacare — a piece of legislation that cost them the House, the Senate and, eventually, the presidency — as a disaster area.They see it as an investment in a leftist future: By making Americans accustomed to the idea that the government is responsible for universal coverage, they understand that any future failures will be attributed to lack of government, not an excess of it. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, understood that in 2013 when he attempted to block Obamacare funding. He quite rightly explained that once Obamacare went into effect, it would be nearly impossible to dismantle it. That became obvious this year, just four years after its full implementation, when congressional Republicans obviously have no political will to get rid of Obamacare at all.
This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats: Democrats see their radical legislative moves as building blocks for the future. Republicans, afraid that their carefully crafted tower of electability will come crumbling down, make no radical legislative moves.
That basic formula is playing out yet again with regard to former President Obama’s executive amnesty.Obama implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, knowing full well that a Republican president could get rid of it with the stroke of a pen. But he also knew that Republicans would not want to be responsible for changing the status quo — they wouldn’t want to own the political consequences of allowing the deportation of DACA recipients.
And Obama was completely right. Republicans promised for years that they would get rid of Obama’s executive amnesty if given power. Finally, President Trump has pledged to get rid of it … in six months. And everyone knows that he is willing to trade away DACA enforcement for border-wall funding. The Democratic status quo will win out, one way or another.
Now, quickly: Name the last transformational conservative change Republicans have made — a change to the field of play; any change that would redound to the detriment of Democrats. It’s pretty tough. That’s despite Republican control of the legislature and the presidency from 2002 to 2006; that’s a longer period of unified control than Democrats had from 2008 to 2010.
Republicans have unified control of government once again. But they seem less willing to use it than ever, afraid that their tenuous control will dissipate.
That must end.If Republicans hope to set a foundation for future victory, they’ll need to do more than act as an impediment to bad Democratic ideas. They’ll need to take political risks in order to shift the playing field itself. If they don’t, they’ll lose quickly. And they’ll deserve to lose.“
Unfortunately, as we’ve noted before, Republicans may lose, but they still retire into cushy K-Street gigs with their Congressional pensions and healthcare intact…leaving it to the rest of us to pay their bills and suffer the consequences of their ineptitude.
Since we’re on the subject of the utterly undeserving riding into a comfortable sunset on the taxpayer’s dime, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel wonders, as regards…
“J. Edgar Hoover’s abuse of power as FBI director led Congress and the Justice Department to put new checks on that most powerful and secretive of offices. By the time Congress finishes investigating James Comey’s role in the 2016 presidential election, those safeguards may be due for an update.
Powerful as Hoover was, even he never simultaneously investigated both major-party candidates for the presidency.Mr. Comey did, and Americans are now getting a glimpse of how much he influenced political events.
Mr. Comey’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email probe are concerning enough. He made himself investigator, judge and jury, breaking the Justice Department’s chain of command. He publicly confirmed the investigation, violating the department’s principles.He announced he would not recommend prosecuting Mrs. Clinton, even as he publicly excoriated her—an extraordinary abuse of his megaphone. Then he rekindled the case only 11 days before the election.
An inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee has now shown that Mr. Comey’s investigation was a charade. He wrote a draft statement exonerating Mrs. Clinton in May, long before he bothered to interview her or her staff. This at least finally explains the probe’s lackluster nature: the absence of a grand jury, the failure to follow up on likely perjury, the unorthodox immunity deals made with Clinton aides.
But the big development this week is a new look at how Mr. Comey may have similarly juked the probe into Donald Trump’s purported ties to Russia.The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation took a sharp and notable turn on Tuesday, as news broke that it had subpoenaed the FBI and the Justice Department for information relating to the infamous Trump “dossier.” That dossier, whose allegations appear to have been fabricated, was commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and then developed by a former British spook named Christopher Steele.
But the FBI had its own part in this dossier, and investigators are finally drilling down into how big a role it played, and why.The bureau has furiously resisted answering questions. It ignored the initial requests for documents and has refused to comply with the House committee’s subpoenas, which were first issued Aug. 24. Republicans are frustrated enough that this week they sent orders compelling FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appear before the committee to explain the obstruction…”
Which leads inquiring minds to wonder why a Republican Administration would aid and abet the concealment of crimes committed by Dimocrats.
Unless of course, the swamp’s a lot more all-encompassing than we’ve been lead to believe.
“When CNN had to retract a story about a Trump campaign adviser named Anthony Scaramucci and his alleged ties to Russians this past June, the president crowed. This was before Scaramucci’s brief comic turn as White House communications director, and it encouraged President Trump to spend much of the following months railing at the bias of his press coverage. While what we knew at the time about why the network cleaned house at an investigative team it had just recently put together with great fanfare was stunning, a New York Times behind-the-scenes feature published this week gives us a lot more insight not only about the crackup at CNN but about what’s wrong with mainstream journalism in 2017.
What led to the retraction and the firings/resignations of three top people at CNN Investigates, including Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Frank, is fairly straightforward. The team’s story on Scaramucci was based on a single anonymous source that was “wavering” by the time it was ready to run. Moreover, it had not been passed through the normal multi-level fact-checking process in which other journalists might have questioned its assumptions and demanded more proof. That’s why when Scaramucci challenged the network, saying that the allegation was false and that there was no proof that there was any federal investigation into the charge, the network quickly folded.
…But the interesting question here isn’t so much the details of where each story went wrong as it is why it happened in the way it did and why it is that the people involved are still, as the Times noted, convinced that they were right.
The answer should be familiar to those whose memories date back to the 2004 presidential election. That fall, as the campaign headed into the homestretch, CBS’s prestige newsmagazine show 60 Minutes ran a story questioning President Bush’s National Guard service as a young man. But the evidence backing up the allegation, which was reported by CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, was a forgery.In what may have been the first major instance in which Internet bloggers debunked a major mainstream media story, CBS was forced to admit that the memorandums supposedly signed by Bush’s late commander were fakes. Rather than torpedoing Bush’s reelection, that journalistic disaster led to Rather’s resignation from CBS as well as the firing of producer Mary Mapes.
But an unrepentant Rather would continue to insist, as he does to this day, that the story was true even though the evidence was not. His conviction that Bush was lying and needed to be taken down was greater than his duty as a journalist to report facts rather than arguments.
While Rather’s conduct seemed to illustrate the traditional liberal bias of the mainstream media, his exit from CBS was also seen as an object lesson of what happens when journalists let their political opinions get the better of their professional judgment. But though his conduct was viewed, perhaps incorrectly, as an outlier in 2004, by 2017 such attitudes are now very much mainstream.
Since Trump took office, the willingness of journalists to mix opinion with news reporting has grown. Opposition to Trump and his policies is now seen as justifying any breech of the church–state divide between news and opinion.Any efforts to rein in this bias is denounced as buckling under to Trump’s intimidation even if those doing so are merely asking the press to play it straight rather than to signal their disgust and opposition to the president…”
We’re compelled to confess, though he doesn’t hold a candle to his predecessor, this President does offer much about which to be disgusted.
Since we’re on the subject of objects of disgust, in the Muslim Minute, FOX News offers a glimpse into America’s future, as a…
“A British University student who supports President Donald Trump has been subjected to an investigationfor putting “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear” after he mocked the Islamic State group on social media.
…In April, Travers celebrated the U.S. military bombing of an ISIS center in Afghanistan using the so-called “mother of all bombs” – a strike that killed at least 36 ISIS militants, Fox News reported. “Excellent news that the US administration and Trump ordered an accurate strike on an IS network of tunnels in Afghanistan,” Travers wrote on Facebook, adding, “I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.”
In another opinionated post, the student wrote: “I won’t give elements of Islam or Muslims who hold regressive beliefs a free pass for their assorted poisonous bigotries and regressive values because they face bigotry. “If you have terrible, oppressive views that seek to attack the rights of others, expect to be called out for those views, regardless of being oppressed yourself… ”
In a complaint filed by Esme Allman, a second-year history student and a former leader of an ethnic minority student group, Travers was accused of “targeting minority students and student spaces,” the Times reported. “Not only do I believe this behaviour to be in breach of the student code of conduct, but his decision to target the BME Liberation Group at the University of Edinburgh, and how he has chosen to do so, puts minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear while attending the University of Edinburgh,” said Allman in the complaint.
The former student leader, who describes herself as feminist, also accused Travers of “Islamophobia,” adding in her complaint that she takes “issue with this clear and persistent denigration and disparagement of protected characteristics and blatant Islamophobia.”
Travers denied the accusations of bigotry or incitement to violence, but acknowledged his remarks were opinionated. He said he was reported to the university officials out of spite by Allman after he once criticized her comments on social media…”
Coming soon to a city, county, state and country near you. As to whether Travers remarks were “opinionated”, aren’t…
…everyone‘s?!?
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this series of memes, in no particular order, from our sister-in-law Amy:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Faith Section, and what we deem a rather appropriate end to a churlish charade:
“Hillary Clinton said that the email her spiritual adviser, the Rev. Bill Shillady, sent her on the morning after she lost the 2016 presidential election helped her heal from her devastating defeat. It wasn’t until months later, when Shillady published that email in a book, that it came to light that he had plagiarized the words that so moved the candidate.
Now, less than a month after the book’s publication, the publishing house that printed it says it is pulling the book off the shelves because it’s riddled with plagiarism…”
Talk about birds of a feather flocking together. The only question now is whether Shill-“shady” remembers parachuting into Bosnia…
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