Trump Tries His Hand at Rat Fishing in Baltimore...

... and the Pied Piper Media Pretend that All Vermin in Baltimore have been Dealt With and that the REAL Problem are the Racist Fishermen...

....As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

What the Media fails to acknowledge is the President's argument by analogy:

If Elijah Cummings is to be taken seriously as an expert or professional in his Border Patrol criticisms and recommendations, shouldn't the Congressman have some experience in fixing/ solving like problems? And has Cummings fixed his Baltimore District on a restricted budget, or does Cummings blame his lack of success on inadequate funding and instead perpetually seek more money for his own Baltimore District at the expense of the border and other districts?

Is THAT the argument that the Media is attacking? Or is the Media attacking the President on a False-Light Argument by presenting an "implied" analogous argument that the President's criticism is all about the Congressman's race?

What a disservice to the public. Government and media no longer cooperate to fix problems, they just blame all their problems that need fixing on racial animosity and the bad intentions of others... tsk, tsk.
Elijah Cummings casting stones from a glass House Committee Hearing Room

The "Science" Behind the Mueller Report

...or, "On Using a Razor Blade of Half-Truths" to make visibles out of invisibles"

Where there's smoke, there's GOT to be FIRE!

Mueller/Russian Collusion Hoax Exposed

We're Havin' a Heat Wave...

The Bernie Bro Alternatives...

$15 an Hour or...

NEET is a acronym that stands for (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) the term NEET refers to a person who is unemployed not in school or vocational training.

The 4-1-1 on the Squad Manufactured Border Crisis

Trump on the International Trade Front

Ted Cruz Exposes the Democrats Secret Tech Get Out the Vote (2.6 to 10.4 million) Advantage

Washington ICE detention center attacker Willem Van Spronsen wrote 'I am Antifa' manifesto before assault

from National Review

Mostly unnoticed beneath the storm of idiotic presidential tweets and the Democratic struggle session over exactly how minority legislators should behave, a 69-year-old man conducted a terrorist attack on a government facility this weekend.

Willem Van Spronsen, armed with a rifle and “incendiary devices”, set a car on fire and was shot and killed by police officers who were responding to the scene. He also attempted to light a propane tank on fire, which “could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility had he been successful,” according to Shawn Fallah, head of the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility.

Van Spronsen reportedly had been arrested for lunging at and grabbing a police officer during a 2018 anti-immigration protest at the Tacoma facility. Presumably, he attacked the facility out of anger at ICE’s role in the crisis on the border.

This hardly registered in the national media. Granted, all the major outlets ran news stories — but there was no outcry of protest, no concern over political violence directed at government officials.

It is very easy to imagine how a similar attack, with political loyalties reversed, would have been reported. In fact, you don’t have to imagine it: Look to last year’s Cesar Sayoc “pipe bomb spree,” which became a referendum on whether President Trump’s “violent rhetoric” somehow encouraged violence of this kind. Conservatives warned then, and should say again now, that tying lone attacks by obvious lunatics to some kind of aura cast by controversial politicians is a toxic kind of discourse which needlessly and dangerously escalates the moral stakes of political disagreement.

So no one should be blaming any politician or political group for this assault (except possibly Antifa, of which Van Spronsen was a member — the Seattle branch posted a eulogy on Facebook). But the comparative lack of interest in this attempted bombing should be concerning.

I don’t think the downplaying of this story is malicious, but it’s a good example of how media bias manifests itself under the radar. Bias is less an attempt by journalists to impose beliefs and more journalists’ beliefs affecting which stories they cover.

In this case, attacks on Trump critics fit into a media worldview that sees Trump and his supporters as basically proto-fascist, ready to use violence against their adversaries. People like Cesar Sayoc fit into that narrative: They’re “stories” that help explain why Trump supporters are dangerous.

In contrast, Van Spronsen and Antifa are aberrations from the Left’s (and by extension, large sectors of elite media) own self-conception: peaceful, progressive, and ethical. Their actions, while worthy of basic reporting, aren’t worth covering in exhaustive detail. Not being representative of the Left, they don’t really “explain” anything about national politics.

Of course, the reasonable thing to say is that dangerous, violent, lunatics have always existed and will continue to exist, and attempting to attach the blame for bomb-throwing to Democrats or Republicans is absurd. But that wouldn’t drive traffic.

Willem Van Spronsen's Manifesto

One Democrat with Integrity...

Kudos out to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D)

Time to Do Some House Cleaning...

Four Virtue Signalling Republicans who need to be voted out of office for calling President Trump a racist:

• Rep. Hurd (TX)
• Rep. Upton (MI)
• Rep. Fitzpatrick (PA)
• Rep. Brooks (IN)

Exploding Green Energy Myths

If man wants to progress, he must create new forms of energy of greater and greater densities.

--Lazare Carnot (1753 - 1823)
Source

Is DiEM25 all that is Left of the European Left?

Kyriakos Mitsotakis's New Democracy party won 39.8 percent of the vote in Sunday's Greek elections
Yascha Mounk, "The Rapid Fall of the Left"

Sunday’s elections in Greece provide the strongest indication to date that the left is now in deep crisis.
A few short years ago, the far left was resurgent. Fringe politicians such as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, and France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon were turning into the standard-bearers of the mainstream left. Meanwhile, in the United States, Bernie Sanders was staging a surprisingly robust primary challenge against Hillary Clinton, the anointed heir to the Democratic Party.

Progressive commentators, activists, and politicians argued that the far left was about to conquer Europe, and that the best way forward for Democrats was to ride the red wave to victory. “Jeremy Corbyn has given us a blueprint to follow for years to come,” wrote Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin. Representative Ro Khanna, the leader of the Justice Democrats in the House, argued that the populist message adopted by leftist leaders in Europe “is not just morally right—it’s also strategically smart.”

But reports of socialism’s resurrection were greatly exaggerated. Recent electoral defeats in Europe suggest that the much-heralded red wave crested before it reached the shore.

For decades, the European left was dominated by moderate social democrats. Though the far left had a minor presence in most European parliaments, and many establishment parties contained radical currents within them, it was the moderates who ultimately called the shots.

Then came the Great Recession. With the old guard spent or discredited, and voters longing for a new start, those traditional power relations were upended. The first sign of the new era came in January 2015 when Syriza, a party forged from a potpourri of leftist splinter groups, won national elections at the height of Greece’s devastating currency crisis. The party’s young leader, Alexis Tsipras, became the first far-left politician in decades to head a western European government.

That summer, Corbyn took over Britain’s Labour Party on the promise of breaking with the “neoliberal” policies of his predecessors. By the end of the year, Pablo Iglesias, a young Marxist academic, had succeeded in turning an inchoate protest movement into one of Spain’s biggest parties. And when Emmanuel Macron’s election obliterated France’s traditional parties in the spring of 2017, Mélenchon, a hard-liner with close connections to a variety of communist factions, became the de facto leader of that country’s left.

These upsets seemed to demonstrate that the far left had greater electoral potential than previously recognized. But in the excitement, many observers failed to absorb that these victories mostly consisted of a reordering of power within the left, rather than a triumph over the right. Even in Greece, the one case where the left did manage to win a general election, it needed the support of a far-right populist party to form a government. A big question thus hung over the success of these new leaders: Would they be able to retain the loyalty of their most ardent fans, and expand the ranks of their supporters, once the public got to know them better?

The first serious sign of trouble came in late May, when elections for the European Parliament provided a snapshot of the far left’s standing across the continent. In Spain, Podemos, down to 10 percent of the vote, was eclipsed by the PSOE, its center-left competitor. In France, Mélenchon sank to 6 percent. Other far-left parties in countries from Germany to Italy posted similarly disappointing results.

Corbyn, the European leader most heralded as a harbinger of the future by leftist cheerleaders in the United States, has met with an even more radical reversal: He now ranks as one of Britain’s least popular politicians. The Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that had once looked mortally wounded by its participation in an unpopular coalition with the Conservatives, beat Labour in the European elections, and might just be able to repeat that performance in the next general elections. One recent poll even raised the possibility that Corbyn could then lose his own seat, a constituency in central London that Labour has held since before World War II.

Sunday’s elections in Greece provide the strongest indication to date that the left is now in deep crisis: Less than four years after he took office, Tsipras has been swept aside by New Democracy, the center-right party that has governed the country for much of the past 40 years.

With the benefit of hindsight, there may be a simple explanation for the rapid rise and rapid fall of the far left: Its appeal was always more negative than positive.

When Tsipras unexpectedly won power in 2015, he came to office on a political program riddled with contradictions: He styled himself as a left-wing revolutionary, but relied on right-wing support for his parliamentary majority. He promised to ignore the demands of the country’s creditors, but assured his compatriots that Greece would stay within the single currency zone. He vowed to do away with the special interests that have long strangled Greece’s public and economic life, but never implemented real reform measures.

So long as Tsipras remained in opposition, his incoherence mattered less than the apparent authenticity of his anger. But once he came to power, his inability to deliver alienated Greeks on all ends of the political spectrum.

Corbyn’s Labour Party has never gotten the chance to prove its competence or incompetence in government. But it too is weakened by incoherence. Corbyn remains instinctively opposed to international institutions such as the European Union at a time when many in the Labour Party are passionately opposed to Brexit. As a result, Corbyn has failed to take a clear stance on the most important political issue of the day, trying to stay true to his euroskeptic instincts without alienating his increasingly Europhile base—and succeeding only in alienating both.

Perhaps Corbyn wasn’t so popular because he promised to nationalize the railways or declared his lasting solidarity with Fidel Castro and Nicolás Maduro, but because he could credibly claim to be a pain in the establishment’s neck. And perhaps Sanders did so well in 2016 not because Democratic primary voters were desperate for an avowed socialist, but because he was the only real alternative to Clinton.

In the wake of a massive economic crisis, the far left was given a rare opportunity to move from the fringes to the mainstream by channeling the anti-establishment fervor of ordinary voters. The past years have shown that the task of sustaining that initial surge of support is far harder than the movement’s most bullish cheerleaders recognize. If American leftists want to fare better than their European comrades, they urgently need to take note.

On Hyper-Woke America!

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