She’s Nuts on Venezuela, Too [Updated] | Power Line

She’s Nuts on Venezuela, Too [Updated] | Power Line

SHE’S NUTS ON VENEZUELA, TOO [UPDATED]

...when she vents on foreign policy, we have to take her seriously as a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi. So this idiocy is newsworthy:

Ilhan Omar

✔@IlhanMN

A US backed coup in Venezuela is not a solution to the dire issues they face. Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition will only incite violence and further destabilize the region. We must support Mexico, Uruguay & the Vatican's efforts to facilitate a peaceful dialogue.

There is no “US backed coup” in Venezuela, nor is the opposition to Maduro “far right.” 

Omar just makes this stuff up. 

Omar cites left-wing support for Maduro from the governments of Mexico and Uruguay (as well as the appalling Pope Francis), but for some reason doesn’t mention that Russia, China, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority are, like her, pro-Maduro. 
She also doesn’t mention that Brazil, Argentina, Chili, Canada, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Honduras, Panama, Guatemala and Costa Rica have all joined the U.S. in recognizing Juan Guaido, the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, as interim President of Venezuela. 

Nor does she manifest any awareness that “the dire issues they [Venezuelans] face” are the inevitable product of socialism. 

The end stage of Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez/Omar socialism is when people have eaten their pets and zoo animals, and rats are in short supply, along with toilet paper..."

Read on.

#1 This day 1990-----Michael Bolton - How Am I Supposed To Live Without You (Official Music V...

MUST READ IT ALL!-----Nathan Phillips, character assassin: what even his critics seem to be ignoring about him – The New Neo

Nathan Phillips, character assassin: what even his critics seem to be ignoring about him – The New Neo
"...It was Phillips himself who quite early on, during his Saturday interview with CNN that set the original tone and was widely disseminated, gave the following description of the Covington boys:

It looked like these young men were going to attack [the Black Israelites]. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln — Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality.

That is not some disagreement about who went up to whom, or whether the wall was mentioned by the boys, or what caps some of them wore. 
This is an extremely defamatory statement by a political agitator, designed to shape perceptions that the boys were vicious racists with a killer instinct. The language is purposefully inflammatory and of the harshest variety.

It is a lie, and unless Phillips is clinically insane and out of touch with reality (something I don’t believe is the case), it is a knowing and purposeful lie about a bunch of teenagers who were minding their own business. 
It is a lie so egregious, so foul, that I really lack words to describe the depth and depravity of that lie.

And as far as I can see, just about everyone is ignoring it now.

The lie wasn’t a one-off, either. 
This incredibly misleading article in Rolling Stone(written that same Saturday) is typical of reactions to the incident as well as to another statement by Phillips that he gave (in an interview with the Detroit Free Press) on Saturday [emphasis mine]:

“There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey,” Phillips told the Detroit Free-Press. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals [the Black Israelites] was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”

So that saintly elder Nathan Phillips, casting himself as peacemaker, defames the boys once again, in terms designed to inflame the left into a frenzy of hatred against them as beasts preying on innocent black people. 

And the left (and some on the right) bought his peacemaker-against-beasts story, perhaps because of his Native American status and because his demeanor while telling the story fed into some other stereotypes that he, as an activist, was well aware they held.

Read on!

Democrats!

Disease at border puts migrants at risk: 'There’s a crisis here'

Disease at border puts migrants at risk: 'There’s a crisis here':

There is a health crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border that was deliberately covered up during a visit by members of Congress, according to the head of a sanitation company supplying outposts there.
Tricia Elbrock, the owner of Elbrock Water Systems in Animas, N.M., supplies portable bathrooms at facilities near the border. She told the Washington Examiner that after she dropped off two portable toilets near the border at the request of the Border Patrol, her cleaning staff was "overwhelmed" after hundreds of migrants used them.

Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters.

Reason Matters - Posts

• Bjørn Lomborg: Fewer and fewer people die from climate-related natural disasters.

This is clearly opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we're often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening.
The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect).
For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976..."
Read all!
Source: The International Disaster Database, http://emdat.be/emdat_db/

AM Fruitcake

History for January 27

History for January 27 - On-This-Day.com
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756, Lewis Carroll 1832, Hyman Rickover 1900


David Seville (Chipmunks) 1919, Donna Reed 1921, Bridget Fonda 1964 


1967 - At Cape Kennedy, FL, astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo I spacecraft.


1998 - U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared on NBC's "Today" show. She charged that the allegations against her husband were the work of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Dershowitz on Mueller move against Roger Stone: 'Trump is the target'

Dershowitz on Mueller move against Roger Stone: 'Trump is the target':

Robert Mueller is trying to force Roger Stone to "flip" and incriminate President Trump by indicting the veteran Republican operative on charges that leave him facing the prospect of dying in jail, according to Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
"The obvious purpose of indicting him on these obstructing and false statement charges is to put pressure on him to flip. That's the goal,” said Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus.

The way we were----American Bandstand 1967 -Swing Dance Contest Finalists- You Got To Me, N...

Boob-tube-----Sanford and Son (1972-1977) TV series

This IS the democrat party-----Nancy Pelosi is trying to federalize California's bad election laws

Nancy Pelosi is trying to federalize California's bad election laws
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made a gargantuan overhaul of election law, campaign finance, and ethics rules the top priority of House Democrats.
...H.R. 1, her proposal, is not likely to clear the Senate, but that’s not the point.
It is a marketing document intended to broach the idea of federalizing some progressive state policies while trying to squeeze more conservative locales into adopting them as well.

• H.R. 1 would require that you be registered without your consent when dealing with any government office...
• If you gave your middle name to one government office and your middle initial to another, you could become registered twice. 
• If a green card holder seeks a driver’s license and gets registered automatically...
• When a county clerk sends mail to a registrant and it bounces, that indicates the intended recipient no longer lives there. Under federal law, that can initiate a four-year process for the record’s eventual removal. 
• Pelosi wants to change that and prevent states from cleaning voter rolls of nonresidents, even after the Supreme Court found such procedures were constitutional under the Husted decision. 
• The bill goes even further to prevent states from sharing data to see who is registered in more than one place — for example, like Democrat congressional nominee Wendy Rosen was when she voted twice in multiple federal elections in Maryland and Florida..."

Read all.

WELL, YES: “It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about ‘micro-aggressions’ ...

Instapundit  Blog Archive  
"WELL, YES: “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. 

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?”

Well, it helps that the “elite journalists” are mostly trash. 
Though it’s a fair question whether a society that allows so many awful people to occupy such positions will able to function for long as a democracy.---Posted by Glenn Reynolds "

Border Patrol: Watch This Video Of 110 Migrants Scaling Border Wall; MS-13 Gang Members Arrested | Daily Wire

Border Patrol: Watch This Video Of 110 Migrants Scaling Border Wall; MS-13 Gang Members Arrested | Daily Wire:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Arizona released footage Wednesday showing over a hundred illegal immigrants scaling the southern border wall in the Yuma sector. The illegal actions of the "110 " migrants ended in their arrest Monday. Shortly after posting the surveillance footage, CBP Arizona announced that they had detained two MS-13 gang members a day later.

Nothing to see here, folks-----St. Louis officer charged after deadly game with revolver

St. Louis officer charged after deadly game with revolver
"ST. LOUIS (AP) - A male St. Louis police officer was charged Friday with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a female officer during what was described as a deadly game with a revolver.

• ...Alix was with two male officers at an apartment when she was killed just before 1 a.m. Thursday . 
• ...“The defendant emptied the cylinder of the revolver and then put one cartridge back into the cylinder,” the statement said. He allegedly spun the cylinder, pointed the gun away and pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire. The statement said Alix took the gun, pointed it at Hendren and pulled the trigger. Again, it didn’t fire. Hendren “took the gun back and pointed it at the victim (and) pulled the trigger causing the gun to discharge,” the statement said. “The victim was struck in the chest.”
• The two men were on-duty at the time of the shooting. Police Chief John Hayden has declined to answer questions about why the officers had gathered at the apartment, which was home to one of the men.
• Alix, a military veteran who was married, was not working but met the men at the apartment...

Fans of Best of the Web Today--Michael Smith

"The main reason institutions (i.e. the church, academia, charitable organizations, even government) are created is for the propagation and defense of commonly shared beliefs, ideals and actions specific to certain groups of people. 

They are the result of humankind creating "rules of the road" for the care and feeding of their civilization.

But humans are undoubtedly the most fickle and feckless beasts of God's creations - and being a human construction, institutions live and institutions die, history notes that their rise and fall is as natural as the changing of seasons

Institutions fail, not at first because their walls are pulled down from without by an invading horde, they do so because they weaken themselves when they fail to enforce their own rules and regulations. They fall after the rot from within weakens those walls enough that they can be breached - or in many cases, the people behind the wall tear them down on their own..."

Read all!

Lunch video-----Part one: 13 Investigates IRS tax loophole

Noon-toon

U.S. officials to start pushing asylum seekers back across the border - Los Angeles Times

U.S. officials to start pushing asylum seekers back across the border - Los Angeles Times:

U.S. border officials finalized plans Thursday to require asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases are considered in the United States, the latest escalation of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Border officers will start pushing asylum applicants back across the border as soon as orders become operational on Friday, beginning at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego, a Homeland Security official said on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.

Here’s a new one: “The Little Ice Age could offer a glimpse of our tumultuous future.” | Watts Up With That?

Here’s a new one: “The Little Ice Age could offer a glimpse of our tumultuous future.” | Watts Up With That?
"The Little Ice Age was a bona fide climate crisis… Famines, cannibalism, Frankenstein, Dickens, glaciers bulldozing villages…

The Little Ice Age was really bad. It was the coldest climatic phase of the Holocene…

Holocene Climate Reconstruction, Andy May WUWT.

The fact that it’s warmed a bit more than 1 °C since the nadir of the Little Ice Age is a climatic miracle, not the precipice of a “coming climate crisis.”

Barely 40 years ago, we were on the precipice of “The Ice Age Cometh”…

According to the models Gorebal Warming saved us from The Ice Age Cometh.

If not for the miracle of climate models and all of the warming they can’t explain without tripling the climate sensitivity to CO2, we’d still be on the precipice of “The Ice Age Cometh”… "
Read all!

Settled Science: Liberals More Closed-Minded and Intolerant Than Conservatives | Power Line

Settled Science: Liberals More Closed-Minded and Intolerant Than Conservatives | Power Line
'The conventional wisdom is that conservatives are closed-minded, only listen to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and are intolerant. 
There’s some very dodgy, but popular (with the left) social science that purports to back up this convenient narrative.

I’ve been sitting on an interesting piece of social science that came across the transom that is freshly relevant in the wake of the Covington Catholic school disgrace (the media/left disgrace—not the school or its students). 

The fall 2018 issue of the Journal of Social Media and Society published an article entitled “Social Networking Site as a Political Filtering Platform: Predicting the Act of Political Unfriending and Hiding.” While repeating some of the commonplace claims, the authors however find:

It is plausible that liberals are more likely to embrace cross- cutting ideas than conservatives, however, several studies found that liberals are more likely to block, unfriend, or hide contacts because of polarizing messages. Colleoni et al. (2014) argued that online networks of Democrats are actually more homogeneous than those of Republicans.  Even though liberals are known as open-minded to political information, such results suggest plausible evidence for liberals to unfriend others to achieve a homogeneous space. . .

Read on. 

#1 This day 1973-----Stevie Wonder Superstition

Nolte: Four Massive Media Hoaxes in First Three Weeks of 2019 | Breitbart

Nolte: Four Massive Media Hoaxes in First Three Weeks of 2019 | 
"We are only three weeks into 2019, a mere 22 days, and already the establishment media have hit us with four massive hoaxes, four flaming piles of fake news.
Led primarily by CNN, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, NBC News, and the New York Times — the same media that have spent two years crybabying about being labeled fake news — have already run these cons on the American people with a full week still left in the first month of this new year.
Worst still, the media continue to stand by these debunked hoaxes, including one that resulted in death threats against children..."
Read all. 

Hypocrisy!

Venezuelans set fire to Hugo Chavez statue: It has started

Venezuelans set fire to Hugo Chavez statue: It has started:

To underscore just what this nightmare was about, late last night, angry Venezuelans burned the big statue of their late, unlamented strongman, Hugo Chavez, whose socialism – so praised at the time by Bernie Sanders and the Hollywood left – turned their formerly rich country into a wasteland. Someone needs to let Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about this vaunted socialism – and where it leads. Watch Chavez go up in flames:

The Democrat presidential candidate was handled with kid gloves while the Republican faces a spiked and studded gauntlet of a medieval knight.(2) Fans of Best of the Web Today

Fans of Best of the Web Today--Michael Smith
"The literal persecution of people caught up in the process crime frenzy of the Mueller investigation has a larger meaning.
If you compare the Mueller investigation to the Clinton email server sham investigation, where unlike in the alleged "collusion" investigation, crimes are known to have been committed, any reasonable person can see the tactics being employed by the special investigator today were not employed during the Clinton investigation.
So, we have a special counsel indicting people left and right for process crimes and crimes that were committed decades ago with no ties to the supposed "collusion" and a grand total of zero indictments for any crimes whatsoever in the other.The difference?
The Democrat presidential candidate was handled with kid gloves while the Republican faces a spiked and studded gauntlet of a medieval knight.
This is nothing less than an attempt to punish anyone associated with a Republican presidential campaign so that these people will think twice about working on, or contributing to, any Republican effort in the future."

AM Fruitcake