Texas is a mess and the Left can’t let a good tragedy go to waste.
And Trump lays into Mitch McConnell.
Rest in Peace, Rush!
Rush Limbaugh, the monumentally influential media icon who transformed talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone, helping shape the modern-day Republican Party, died Wednesday morning at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer, his family announced.
Limbaugh’s wife, Kathryn, made the announcement on his radio show. “Losing a loved one is terribly difficult, even more so when that loved one is larger than life,” she said. “Rush will forever be the greatest of all time.”
The radio icon learned he had Stage IV lung cancer in January 2020 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Trump at the State of the Union address days later. First lady Melania Trump then presented America’s highest civilian honor to Limbaugh in an emotional moment on the heels of his devastating cancer diagnosis.
Limbaugh is considered one of the most influential media figures in American history and has played a consequential role in conservative politics since “The Rush Limbaugh Show” began in 1988. Perched behind his Golden EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) Microphone, Limbaugh spent over three decades as arguably both the most beloved and polarizing person in American media.
The program that began 33 years ago on national syndication with only 56 radio stations grew to be the most listened-to radio show in the United States, airing on more than 600 stations, according to the show’s website. Up to 27 million people tuned in on a weekly basis and Limbaugh has lovingly referred to his passionate fan base as “Dittoheads,” as they would often say “ditto” when agreeing with the iconic radio host.
Temperatures throughout the country have been plummeting. Right now, 74% of the country is suffering through freezing weather. Texas is being hit hardest.
In Texas, where temps are hitting 6 degrees. This is the coldest weather in Texas in over a hundred years. Needless to say, power to heat homes spiked and the entire power grid went down. As of this writing, 17 people have already died though more are expected to be found.
Ninety percent of Texas power comes from a company called ERCOT. Texas governor, Greg Abbott said there will be an investigation. He said:
“This was a total failure by ERCOT. ERCOT stands for Electric Reliability Council of Texas … and they showed that they were not reliable. These are specialists, and government has to rely upon these specialists to be able to deliver in these types of situations.”
Never Let Disaster Go to Waste
Of course, AOC decided this is a perfect time to blame climate change and the fact that Texas did not have green energy.
She was called out almost immediately.
Here are the facts:
The power outage had a bunch of problems.
Coal and natural gas lines froze.
They have two nuclear reactors. One failed because of a frozen emergency sensor.
Solar panels were frozen over.
Windmills froze over.
What the Left is forgetting is that Texas generates the most power from wind in the country.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.
In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up.
So, the baseload failed and it failed because there was not enough generation of power from reliable energy like coal, gas and nuclear.
According to ERCOT stats, even though gas and coal failed, wind and solar were a disaster. The only form of energy that performed was…nuclear.
Here are the stats:
Coal – 63%; Dependable 13,630 GW; Producing 8616
Gas – 61%; Dependable 52,523 GW, Producing 32,108
Nuclear – 80%; Dependable 5153 GW, Producing 4141
Wind – 45%; Dependable 7070 GW, Producing 3153
Solar – 0%; Dependable 304 GW, Producing 0
What is amazing is the Nameplate projections. Nameplate projections are what a company says their source will produce.
Coal, gas and nuclear are at 100%
Wind projects 28,755 GW but produces only 7070 GW. That’s 25%.
Solar predicts 4898 GW but only produces 304 GW. That’s 6%.
Here’s the thing: we should find alternate fuel sources. Oil is finite and too valuable a resource to burn. But, let the private sector do it. Government standards, regulation and fear mongering are not going to fix anything and will lead, dare I say it, to people dying.
Look at what we have done with the electric car. Five years ago, we could not drive to the grocery store without the damn things running out of juice. Now, we can drive tp Vegas on a single charge. It was the free market that innovates and creates. Not government. You think the private sector doesn’t want to be innovative?
Right now, the alternate energy ideas Leftists want to push are inefficient, expensive and actually harm the environment. I think depending on this and forcing everything to change in ten years is going to cost lives. Let technology grow.
The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political “leaders” like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm. McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from Majority Leader to Minority Leader, and it will only get worse. The Democrats and Chuck Schumer play McConnell like a fiddle—they’ve never had it so good—and they want to keep it that way! We know our America First agenda is a winner, not McConnell’s Beltway First agenda or Biden’s America Last.
Have you ever been accused of being a conspiracy theorist because you believed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump? Do you believe that the Democrats and their minion fixed the election? Are you afraid that this mess will happen again and there will not be another Republican President again because the fix worked so well? Have you been banned from social media because you said the election was fixed?
Well, Time Magazine has said the quiet part out loud and has justified the stolen election. I’m not kidding.
Remember this: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t after you.
The Secret of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election by Molly Ball
Feb. 4 2021
A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.
Why is anyone surprised? Over the six months before the election, what violence had right-wing groups done?
A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
“Odd thing”? How is corporate American turning on Trump an “odd thing”? The media had been pissing on Trump from day one.
Also, it makes sense that big corporations would jump on the Biden band wagon.
They want to stay on the good side of the Biden administration so it will leave them alone.
They want big regulations to choke off the competition.
Most big companies are liberal (leftist) including Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Nike and Apple.
Biden is friendly to China, a source for big corporations’ cheap production through China’s slave labor.
This is an attempt to hide the Leftism of the institutions. It’s not like these institutions were suddenly Leftist. They just couldn’t do what they wanted until Biden got elected.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Again, this conspiracy has always been there.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Couple of things:
This was not bipartisan.
This was dedicated to, not so much Biden winning the election, but to Trump losing the election. And to think that this was separate from the Biden campaign is absolutely insane. Joe Biden hid during the entire campaign. He did not answer any questions. He did not state any policies. He wanted to cancel all debates. The Joe Biden campaign knew what was going on. They knew the fix was in. This is not conspiracy theory, this is simple observation and reason.
Also the concept of “fair, credible and uncorrupted” elections is not going to be forwarded by no voter IDs, mail-in ballots, closed off counting areas, ballot harvesting, automatic voter registration, polling that proved completely wrong, early voting (even before the debates) and changing election law during the election. And, if there is manipulation, doesn’t that mean the election was rigged?
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
In other words, they manipulated the election. They are not even hiding it any more. Maybe all of Trump’s “conspiracy theories” of a stolen election tuned out to be true. This article seems to indicate that.
But I’ll go a step further: This election was trying to be manipulated way ahead of 2020.
They accused Trump of stealing the election with help from the Russians.
They promoted a story about Stormy Daniels.
They accused him of not paying his fair share of taxes.
When he refused to hand of his taxes, they started investigations into fraud.
They accused and impeached him for a ten minute phone call to Ukraine.
They manipulated his speech after Charlottesville.
They manipulated his speech about the border and created the narrative that he hated Mexicans.
They called him a despot, a dictator, a Nazi, a Hitler, a madman who needed to have the 25th Amendment used to pull him out of office.
And, every day, he’s being called a racist, xenophobe, misogynists, anti-Semitic bigot.
This election was being manipulated four years ago.
For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.
The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”
Jimmy Carter, the 39th President and a Democrat, said that mail-in balloting was just asking for corruption in an election. We already went over this in a previous podcast.
Like I pointed out earlier, Trump wanted the election to be run legally. It was the Left that manipulated the election including changing the laws within states like Pennsylvania. The vote count were not transparent. There was auditing of the votes. A lot of votes that did not have signatures or valid addresses were counted.
As far as I’m concerned, the country is going through a very dangerous moment. If our elections can be manipulated, we may never see another Republican in office again. This will just lead down to tyranny. China could not have drawn this up better. And we can see this through Cancel Culture, the reaction to religion and the redefinition of our norms.
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
Like I said earlier, they aren’t even hiding it. They did rig and fix the election and it was done by the elites of this society. But this is seen as a good thing because Trump was do evil and it was to…save the democracy? Save it from what? We dumb people who don’t know what’s good for us?
If this is true, and I think it is, then our Democracy is lost and, in no time, we
Impeachment is done and it goes like we thought it would.
Black Lives Matter and Antifa are at it again. Some much for Blue Lives Matter being a thing.
Star Wars goes woke…sort of.
And Andrew Cuomo has some ‘splaining to do.
Impeachment Update
Things went absolutely insane on Saturday during the impeachment trial:
The Senate voted to call witnesses. In a hail Mary because the did not have witnesses, all Democrats and five Republicans voted to have witnesses. One of the Republicans was Lindsey Graham.
Graham said that he thinks Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris needed to be called as witnesses.
Graham said that this would delay the trial and Biden’s push for policies for weeks. This would be a good thing.
Mitt Romney and Ron Johnson got into a fight about something.
In what appears to be a de-escalation of the previous witness call, both sides agree to enter Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s statement into evidence. This will end the call for witnesses. Darn.
Impeachment managers start their closing statements.
Trump’s defense team had their closing statements.
Trump was acquitted in the Senate by a 57-43 count.
The seven GOP senators who joined with all Democrats in finding Trump guilty were: Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
What’s disturbing is that the Democrats were completely united but seven Republicans pussed out. This is bad for the Republican party. It’s bad because these Republicans just voted because of politics not evidence. Not because the impeachment managers proved a damn thing.
All these people are squishes and never-Trumpers. They should be taken out of office.
Nancy Pelosi was losing her crap. She had this to say when she finished her initial statement about implementing a censure:
Again?
Black Lives Matter, again, decided to hold a protest in New York City and, again, it ended up violent.
A photographer for the Daily News was beaten up because the rioters thought he was a police officer.
Two police officers suffered minor injuries.
Eleven rioters were arrested.
The reason I am bringing this up, because it happens every weekend, is that no one is talking about it.
It Will Come for You
Disney faced widespread backlash late on Wednesday after a production company that they own announced that it had parted ways with conservative actress Gina Carano after the actress posted some things to social media that some claimed were offensive.
Carano played Cara Dune in The Mandalorian and was also a professional MMA fighter. She is also a Conservative and hates Cancel Culture.
She had two tweets which led to Disney firing her from the popular Disney+ online entertainment site.
The first was a change she made to her profile. Apparently, her “people” wanted her to add her pronouns on Twitter to show her support for the trans community.
I think its funny. Disney didn’t think it was funny and she ended up on their radar back in November.
The big post that got her into trouble was this one:
This had nothing to do with Jews. It’s a Cancel Culture comparison. The first thing the Nazis did was demonize the Jews so they would be hated by the non-Jew German citizens. Does this sound familiar? Then they segregated the Jews from the rest of the population. Finally, the Jews were herded up and exterminated.
That’s what she was saying. Nothing really controversial about this. But she used “Nazi” when pointing to the Left. This was bad. Especially for the Leftists at Disney. She had to go.
Also, if you ever want to get into trouble or sound like an idiot, make a Nazi comparison. If you’re a Leftist, it’s OK but you sound stupid. If you’re a Conservative, you will get into trouble and, sometimes, sound stupid. I didn’t think this post was actually too bad and is actually a bit of a foreshadow to the future of this country.
The funny thing is the star of The Mandalorian also tweeted about the Nazis. He had a picture showing children in cages during the Holocaust and children being in cages, supposedly, at the border of the United States. He tried to compare the U.S. Border Patrol to the Nazis.
Couple of problems with the post. First, the children weren’t in the United States, the were jailed in a Central American jail. Oops. The other problem is this policy was started during the Bush administration and it was the Obama administration that actually pushed the policy, not the Trump administration.
But nothing happened to Pedro. Sounds kind of sexist to me.
There are now calls to boycott Disney. If you don’t want to watch Disney, don’t. Boycotts are stupid and rarely accomplish anything. But if people stop watching, Disney will realize what they’re doing is not acceptable.
Good, announced today. Gina Carano will produce and star in a movie that will be in a film that will be distributed by The Daily Wire.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.
The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.
DeRosa said:
“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes. He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”
In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”
“And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call.
“Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation. That played a very large role into this.”
After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for “a little bit of appreciation of the context” and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration’s first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic.
But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the Health Department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25 state Health Department directive that nursing homes admit infected patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them.
“So we do apologize,” she said. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.”
The reactions from New York Democrats was less than forgiving.
Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan) said:
“I don’t have enough time today to explain all the reasons why I don’t give that any credit at all.”
State Senate Aging Committee Chairwoman Rachel May (D-Syracuse) said:
“And the issue for me, the biggest issue of all is feeling like I needed to defend — or at least not attack — an administration that was appearing to be covering something up. And in a, in a pandemic, when you want the public to trust the public health officials, and there is this clear feeling that they’re not coming, being forthcoming with you, that is really hard and it remains difficult.”
Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) said:
“(It’s) like they admitted that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the [Health Department] in further trouble with the Department of Justice. That’s how I understand their reasoning of why they were unable to share, in real time, the data. They had to first make sure that the state was protected against federal investigation.”
Kim, whose uncle is presumed to have died of COVID-19 in a nursing home in April, also said he wasn’t satisfied with DeRosa’s apology.
“It’s not enough how contrite they are with us,” he said. “They need to show that to the public and the families — and they haven’t done that.”
Bill DeBlasio, mayor of New York City:
“It’s very troubling. We’ve got to know more. We now need a full accounting of what happened. Think about seniors, who their [sic] lives were in the balance and their families, you know, just desperate to get them the help they needed. We need to know exactly what happened here. We need to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
So now there is a bipartisan call for:
The DOJ to open a criminal investigation.
Calls for Cuomo’s emergency powers to be stripped.
Calls for Cuomo to resign.
Of course Cuomo, who won and Emmy, wrote a book about how well he did and released a poster for sale on the progression of the virus decided to straighten us all out on who was to blame for lying about the death counts:
Democrats finish up their opening statements (16 hours) and their case looks very weak.
The Mandalorian is having a casting change. Might be time to stop watching it.
Rest in Peace, Aunt Jemima.
And it’s hard to believe that this gal can vote.
Oops!
I watched the impeachment hearings. I think I just lost several IQ points but I wanted to be able to intelligently talk about this. The Democrats are not running this thing like a trial. They are just blustering and using well-edited videos to drive, I think, a narrative that they believe will be enough to convict Donald Trump in the Senate. I find this a little weird because edited videos are typically not great evidence for conviction.
I watched all day Thursday and most of Wednesday. I know the news media, including Fox News, is saying how impressive the opening was by the impeachment managers. I wasn’t impressed at all. In fact, I think a normal person with any kind of reason would throw this who thing out already.
Here’s what I got out of the last two days:
One of the first things I noticed is the prosecutions keeps saying “incitement”, “insurrection” and “overwhelming evidence” like these words mean something without actually proving anything. I was watching this thing for two days and there was not one shred of evidence, just rhetoric.
They also played a bunch of videos, well edited I might add, from the attack on the Capitol building. These were all terrible things and the amount of violence and damage will provoke emotions. But none of these videos is evidence and the even less than evidence. They were edited when Trump said, “fight for the country” or whatever. But they failed to bring the entire speech especially when Trump said to “peaceably and patriotically protest”. This stuff would have been objected to in a court room and thrown out.
Insurrection and incitement are very specific. Trump must make a call to violence. I heard the speech and he never called for violence or that the protestors should storm the Capitol. In fact, all their videos that the impeachment managers showed, not one should Trump calling for a storming or violence.
They are pushing that Trump knew this was going to happen and one manager even suggested that he helped plan it through Twitter, presenting specific Tweets. At least the Tweets could be considered evidence. The problem is, the prosecution interpreted the tweets. Reading them literally, one would never come up that this was Trump inciting violence. In fact, any direct tweet to Trump supporting him did not seem to incite violence when read literally. This is misdirection. Telling you not to believe your lying eyes or suggesting, in lawyer-speak, that one can’t read.
They started talking about what other countries thought about our little issue and saying that is enough reason to impeach Trump. We want to save our reputation with the rest of the world. They even quoted what the Chinese national news says. Yeah, the same country that is spying on us, stealing our data, invading Hong Kong and is committing genocide against the Wyuigers. Yeah, I care what they say. I think this argument is weak tea for a lot of Republicans. I’m not sure why the impeachment managers thought this was worthy evidence.
For some reason, they brought up the white supremacy. There is no evidence this whole thing had anything to do with white supremacy. Even the FBI and DHS said white supremacy had nothing to do with this. Then, for some reason, they brought up the fictitious Charlottesville event and that he “never” condemned white supremacy.
Trump did condemn white supremacy hundreds of times.
He condemned white supremacy during his speech after the the attack. And…
What the hell does this have to do with what happened at the Capitol?
Uh, nothing.
Finally, Ted Lui of California put it best: If they don’t convict Trump, he could run for President again. It amazes me that the Democrats are so stupid they always end up showing the thong under their skirt at some point. This is not a reason for impeachment.
What Can We Take From This?
The Democrats are disregarding legal principles for rhetoric. They are calling emotion evidence. I understand that this trial is a political process but being able to say words well does not mean someone is guilty of something. Legal principles of testimony and evidence must be part of this process. Grandstanding is not evidence and not worthy to convict someone.
Through their rhetoric, the Democrats are trying to make this thing into a common sense argument. Trump is guilty and everyone knows it. That’s not an argument. That’s not evidence. And if I need evidence, that doesn’t mean I don’t have any common sense. This is kind of an insulting strategy. Wave the shiny object and we dupes will miss the point and forget about, you know, evidence.
They are also talking about how our democracy almost ended and is in danger if Trump would be allowed to run again in 2024, when he’s 78 years old. They said that President Trump started a coup and almost succeeded.
What a crock of crap.
Democracy is fine. It was never in danger. Two hundred people were acting like idiots, left and the Senate went back to work right after. Not these idiots, half unemployed and living with there parents, are now being arrested and prosecuted, as they should. And this was no where near being a coup. A coup is when the military takes over the government because, theoretically, because it has become corrupt. This was no coup. But the Democrats need to make this into as much a disaster as they can. What I’m afraid of is politicians love and embrace this kind of language. Some may be swayed by it.
There Was A Big Screw Up
But the solemn tone was broken Wednesday during a spat between Lee, R-Utah, and the impeachment managers — and it could escalate Thursday if the impeachment managers try to “relitigate” the point as Schumer, D-N.Y., said may happen.
As lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was preparing to close down the House’s arguments for the day, Lee requested to be recognized and said that the impeachment managers had incorrectly described what happened when Trump called his phone on Jan. 6. He asked that the statement, made by Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., be removed from the record of the trial.
This forced Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, to make a glaring admission. Listen:
As you heard, Raskin said he would withdraw the quote since it appears not to be true. But that wasn’t it. The Democrats also edited a tweet earlier in the hearing. They also had to withdraw that.
Question: If the Democrats have such overwhelming evidence, why did the use misquotes, edit every video they used that did not show the whole story and edit tweets?
The Trump lawyers really do not need to do much and the said that. Instead of sixteen hours, they plan to use around four. They should:
Show a video with Democrats actually inciting violence.
Show the actual speech Trump made on January 6.
Keep pushing that this trial is unconstitutional.
Point out that not one shred of evidence has been presented and this is just a show trial.
Get of the podium.
The impeachment managers failed…again. Don’t weave a rope to hang yourself. They have won. Move on. I’m not even sure they need to put on a defense.
Tessica Brown, the Louisiana woman who was forced to seek medical treatment after using Gorilla Glue to style her hair, says she’s heading off to see a surgeon for help removing the product.
“I will be leaving tomorrow to go see a surgeon,” she wrote on Instagram Tuesday afternoon. “I will update you guys the second I have news again.”
Brown had previously admitted herself to an emergency room in Chalmette, La., where she was reportedly instructed to sterilized water and nail polish remover to try and soften the glue. Now, she’s said to be flying to Los Angeles to meet with Dr. Michael Obeng, a plastic surgeon, who has offered his services for free, TMZ reports.
Now, the plastic surgeon in Los Angeles will try to remove the rest of the glue from her hair and scalp in a procedure that can take up to three days and cost over $12,000, the outlet reports.
Brown, meanwhile, has already raised more than $17,000 via an online fundraiser she had arranged to cover medical expenses. It’s unclear if she will use that money to cover travel costs, too.
The impeachment circus has started and the trials begins today. Trump is not thrilled with his attorneys on the first day.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is screwing up the country and no one is paying attention.
I guess the NBA viewership is still too high so they make a move and, apparently, I wasn’t the only one that forgot about the Super Bowl.
Here We Go Again
The Video
On Tuesday, the Senate got together to debate and eventually vote on whether or not the impeachment trial of Donald Trump is Constitutional. Full disclosure: I did not watch it. I actually watched the Steven Crowder live stream. The show only shows clips of the trial and the rest is commentary and jokes. It makes the political process bearable.
The first thing the Democrats sis was play a 13 minute video of the January 6th attack with the Trump speech superimposed into it. It showed the riots, police being assaulted and berated. It shows people going through fences and entering the Capitol grounds.
It shows the Senate convening for the certification of the vote while Trump is encouraging Pence to overturn the election and, at the end of the speech, he tells them to march to the Capitol building.
It shows the Senate proceeding while the riot gets into full swing.
It shows the clearing of the Senate and House chambers because of the breach and the killing of Ashlii Babbit.
It ends with Trump making his speech about needing peace and to stop attacking the Capitol building.
It was a violent video that put Trump at the lead of the assault. It was an emotional video and looks horrible. But it also skips a lot of things. It skips that the assault started before the speech was over and that it was planned well before the speech. It also skips the words, “Now go and peacefully and patriotically protest” which Trump said and was recorded saying. So it was a cynical video edited together to promote Trump’s strongest words.
The video really did little to prove Constitutionality. It was just an emotion thing.
The Trump defense team also ran a video showing all the Democrats that have been saying they are going to impeach Trump all the way back to 2017.
The idea with this is the argument that the Democrats have been after Trump since day 1 of his Presidency. This is also an effective video for the trial but really did little to prove how this trial is not Constitutional.
Jamie Raskin Get Emotional
One thing I hate is when politicians try to pull at our heart string. It is disingenuous and usually has nothing to do with the debate at hand. That’s what lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin did:
The Vote
The Senate agreed to consider the case against Trump by a 56-44 vote following hours of arguments by the former president’s legal team and House impeachment managers.
A total of six Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania – sided with Democrats in calling for the trial to proceed.
Cassidy voted to proceed with the trial just two weeks after he joined other Republicans in a vote to dismiss the impeachment charge on grounds that proceedings against a former president would be unconstitutional. The Louisiana senator explained his reversal shortly after the first day of arguments concluded.
Cassidy said:
“We heard arguments from both sides on the constitutionality of having a Senate trial of a president who has since left office. A sufficient amount of evidence of constitutionality exists for the Senate to proceed with the trial. This vote is not a prejudgment on the final vote to convict.
“If anyone disagrees with my vote and would like an explanation, I ask them to listen to the arguments presented by the House Managers and former President Trump’s lawyers. The House managers had much stronger constitutional arguments. The president’s team did not.”
Trump Is Pissed
Former President Trump was “furious” and “beyond angry” over his defense team’s showing on Day One of his second impeachment trial despite his ultimate acquittal almost certain.
The sources, who spent time with Trump, said he was particularly incensed with the effort thus far by his attorney Bruce Castor. Trump believes Castor gave a rambling opening argument.
Castor’s 45-minute opening remarks were widely panned on social media after he praised the House impeachment managers for a job “well done.”
“The American people just spoke and they just changed administrations,” Castor said at one point. He said the public is smart enough to “pick a new administration if they don’t like the old one, and they just did.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, was impressive and is “a serious lawyer.” He said Trump’s team did not have the most “effective” performance.
This is all true. Castor was terrible. He was all over the place and made few points. I also think his voice is way too monotone and he seemed to be putting me to sleep. I don’t expect him to say much in the trial.
I will give them a break, though. They did only have a week to prepare since Trump’s original lawyers all quit before the trial. Let’s face it, Trump is not the easiest guy to work with.
I also think that there is enough question about the constitutionality of this. I do not think this is constitutional and I do not think this trial is constitutional. But people don’t read the Constitution. So I am not surprised this was going to get through.
What Was David Schoen Doing
David Schoen unwittingly gave Twitter a lesson in orthodox Jewish customs during former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Tuesday.
Schoen, Trump’s attorney, rested his hand on top of his head each time he took a sip of water while making his opening argument that the case is unconstitutional.
Several viewers noted Schoen’s seemingly unusual drinking habit, with some even suggesting he was trying to keep a toupee from falling.
But the lawyer was likely making the ritual move because he is religiously observant.
Rabbi Menachem Genack, CEO of the kosher division of the Orthodox Union, explained that since Schoen is an observant Jew, he must cover his head and say a blessing whenever he eats or drinks.
“Each time we eat or drink something we say a blessing to thank God and we cover our head, typically with a yarmulke, to show respect and to acknowledge that there’s someone above us,” Genack told The Post.
“Since he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke he wanted to at least cover his head with his hand.”
While we are all listening to this stupid impeachment, we are missing the what is really happening: The destruction of the country by a dottering old fool.
Joe Biden is completely transforming our country, mostly by Presidential edict.
About to pass a $1.9 trillion stimulus package. This will:
Give money to schools that are not even open.
Give money to Democratic states that have mismanaged their budgets to get them out of debt.
Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The CBO says this will cost 1.4 million jobs.
He bowing to the teacher’s unions by saying schools can reopen in April. His goal? Open 50% of the schools for one day a week.
Will allow boys who say they are girls to dress in the girls’ locker room and compete in girls’ sports.
He fired every one of the U.S. attorneys hired by Trump.
He stopped the monitoring of the Confucius Center, a Chinese government propaganda company, from advising on school curriculum.
He has signed 52 Executive Orders in his first 20 days. He is ruling like a tyrant and not asking for Congress to do anything.
Maybe They Should Play the Chinese National Anthem
Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks’ decision to ax the playing of the national anthem drew a ton of reaction Tuesday.
Cuban confirmed to The Athletic that it was his decision to no longer play the national anthem prior to home games at American Airlines Center. The Mavericks haven’t played the national anthem prior to home games this season, and the team doesn’t plan on playing it for the foreseeable future.
“It was my decision, and I made it in November,” Cuban told The New York Times.
NBA spokesman Tim Frank clarified the rules to The Associated Press.
“Under the unique circumstances of this season, teams are permitted to run their pregame operations as they see fit,” Frank said.
The decision to nix the anthem drew reaction from both those disagreeing and those supporting it on social media.
“If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas said:
“NBA is telling everyone who stands for the flag, who honors our cops and our veterans, to ‘piss off’? In Texas, no less?”
Twitter had some mixed reactions:
Well, all that didn’t last long. The NBA issued a statement today, Wednesday, stating that all teams will play the National Anthem before the games. It is mandatory. Apparently they figured alienating fans more was not something they wanted to do.
Meanwhile, Super Bowl LV had the lowest ratings in 15 years. They scored 96.4 million views which was the most in the time slot. But, what is disturbing is that it included bars that might have played the game with multiple people watching at once. Some of the biggest cities actually banned televisions being on within restaurants. That means that a lot of people, between 15 and 25 million, just skipped it.
This is going to scare the NFL. Their attendance and viewership has been going down for the last five years since St. Kapernick decided to kneel for the National Anthem. In 2020, during the pandemic when everyone should have been excited to see something other than reruns of Law and Order, the viewership dropped another 10%.
The NFL did a pretty good job suppressing the social justice warrior crap until the end of the game. I’ll give them that. But the game was not great, the halftime show sucked and the commercials sucked. I did not finish the game. I was bored.
But, in general, sports is going to take it on the chin. Baseball, basketball and football need to begin to realize people watch sports to get away from the real world, not to have it thrown in our face every time some millionaire player
But, today, let’s go over the philosophy the Left has about Conservatives, Republicans and Trump voters. This article from the L.A. Times pretty much sums it up.
The Article
Column: What can you do about the Trumpites next door?
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.
How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?
We now see that this gal is obviously an elite. She is at a “pandemic getaway”. Must be nice to be so rich and be too arrogant to realize it is kind of off-putting.
She admits that unity is not a thing.
When did niceness become aggressive?
Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?
These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in the neighborhood.
How much thanks? How about thanks enough deserving of one who plowed your driveway?
They like cops? This is a reason to force yourself to dislike them and not give them thanks for doing you a favor?
If this gal is such a diversity nut, why is she living in an all white neighborhood?
And how does she know how these people would treat black neighbors? She doesn’t even know their names.
This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.
Maybe it’s like what Eddie Murphy discovered in that old “Saturday Night Live” sketch “White Like Me.” He goes undercover in white makeup and finds that when white people are among their own, they pop free champagne and live the high life. As Murphy puts it: “Slowly I began to realize that when white people are alone, they give things to each other. For free.”
This is the stupidest thing in the article. OK, that’s a lie. Eddie Murphy’s SNL skit was comedy. It was parody. It is satire. It is funny.
It makes fun of how blacks think of how whites look and act.
It makes fun of prejudice. On both sides.
It’s not real. It’s a joke.
The idiocy of this shows how the Left has no sense of humor whatsoever.
Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party in Lebanon, also gives things away for free. The favors Hezbollah does for people in the cities Tyre and Sidon probably don’t involve snowplows, but, like other mafias, Hezbollah tends to its own — the Shiite sick, elderly and hungry. They offer protection and hospitality and win loyalty that way. And they also demand devotion to their brutal, us-versus-them anti-Sunni cause. Some of us are family, the favors say; the rest are infidels.
The same is true with Louis Farrakhan, who currently helms the Nation of Islam. While the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies him as a dangerous anti-Semite, much of his flock says he’s just a little screwy and unfailingly magnanimous. To them.
Huh? So, the Trump supporters next door are like Hezbollah and Louis Farrakhan because they cleaned the snow off your driveway? This is lady has been made nuts because the Trump Derangement Syndrome made her brain spongy.
When someone helps you when you’re down, or snowed in, it’s almost impossible to regard them as a blight on the world. In fact, you’re more likely to be overwhelmed with gratitude and convinced of the person’s inherent goodness.
Yeah, that’s how it should be.
You might end up like the upper-middle-class family I stayed with in France as a teenager. They did not attend a citywide celebration for the 100th birthday of Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who orchestrated the liberation of his country from Nazi Germany in 1944. They did have several portraits of Philippe Pétain, Nazi collaborator, on their wall.
When I screwed up the courage to ask how it was for them during the occupation, the lady of the house replied, “We were happy because the Nazis were very polis.” I didn’t know the word, so I excused myself to consult a French-English dictionary. I was in tears when I found the entry: “polite.”
Couple of things here.
First, she stayed with an upper-middle-class family in France? She has a winter home? Can you guys smell the elitism in this bitch? So far while reading this article, I don’t get that the Trump people are bad. In fact, all we know about them is that they plowed her driveway and they voted for Trump. But, what I am getting out of this article is that the writer, VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN, is an elitist, snobby, spoiled, unappreciative, condescending bitch.
And this also says something about the news media in general. You’ve got to assume that this article was read by several people at the L.A. Times including “fact checkers”, associate editors and the papers editor. None of these people who read this article said, “Hey, Virginia, you kind of sound like an an elitist, snobby, spoiled, unappreciative, condescending bitch.”
You know why no one at the L.A. Times said? Because they are all elitist, snobby, spoiled, unappreciative, condescending bitches. No wonder regular people do not trust the media.
My second point forces me to foreshadow my conclusion to this story. Her “polis” story is bullshit.
My grandparents and father were in Germany during World War II. The Nazis were hardly polite. If you are walking down the street and see an SS troop walking, you cross the street. If the SS visited, you were dead. They were not polite.
And the Nazis were not polite to the French. The Nazis invaded France. The overthrew the government. They forced the population to fight in the war. They burned and destroyed their cities.
I’m just beginning to think this gal had a deadline, ran late because she was skiing in Aspen and made some shit up to meet her deadline. She knew if she could it easily published by saying how bad Trump people are.
So when I accept generosity from my pandemic neighbors, acknowledging the legitimate kindness with a wave or a plate of cookies, am I also sealing us in as fellow travelers who are very polis to each other but not so much to “them”?
Loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.
This is this whole collective thing that the socialist media embraces. The Left always puts people into buckets and those buckets have preset assumptions. All Trump supporters are racist, xenophobic, misogynist, bigots that are Nazis. This is the very definition of bigotry.
Definition: A bigot is a person who is intolerant of opinions, lifestyles, or identities that are different from his or her own. Mostly, the person’s opinions are based on prejudice.
This is why Conservatives can’t unite with the Left. We don’t group people together. We believe in individuality. If I meet a black guy and he turns out to be an a-hole, I don’t think that all black people are a-holes. I think that individual black guy is an a-hole.
I’ll even go a step further: I do not see that black guy as a black guy. He’s just a guy. That’s why I hate those hyphens people use for identity. You’re either an American or not. You know where I earned that? From a black guy who told me he didn’t want to be referred to as an African-American (because he was from the Caribbean). He referred to himself as an American.
What do we do about the Trumpites around us? Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who spoke eloquently this week about her terrifying experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we’ve even stitched up our wounds. Or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.
My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans. They kept him in business with their support.
When you say that AOC is eloquent, you’re probably an idiot. That broad can’t get through a sentence without saying “like” eight times.
Also, AOC’s “terrifying experience” has been debunked. She wasn’t even at the Capitol building during the riot. Again, this is another reason this article cannot be taken seriously.
Finally, why is Trump always being blamed for this pandemic? And not just blamed for his handling of it, which no one in the world handled well, but being called a murderer? No one blames China. No one blames the Left-wing governors who shipped old folks infected with COVID back into retirement homes and then lied about the number died. I don’t see anyone blaming the WHO for lying about how the disease was transmitted.
Trump:
Closed travel from China which Dems called xenophobic.
Mentioned COVID as a threat during the State of the Union speech, which Nancy Pelosi tore up.
Sent PPE, respirators, ventilators and hospital ships to struggling states, which he was thanked for.
Sent monetary aid and tax breaks to small businesses, which Congress fought against.
Through Operation Warp Speed, had two, and now three, vaccines developed in record, which Dems said they wouldn’t take.
I think Trump did as good a job as can be expected and far better than any other government in the world. Let’s face it, with our current death toll (which the CDC admits is exaggerated), we are currently between 12 nd 15 in deaths per 1 million.
You might not like how Trump handled the pandemic, there are things I didn’t like, but to call him a mass murderer or think he should be convicted of murder is being myopic.
But the plowing.
On Jan. 6, after the insurrection (I’d actually call it a riot), Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors. The United States, he said, “isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, this blood feud forever.” And, he added, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”
At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.
When Ben Sasse made that statement, he was talking about all the riots over the last year. That the Left and the Right need to stop the violence and the fighting. This gal ignores the Leftist organizations, BLM and Antifa, that caused $2-$3 billion dollars of damage over the summer. She ignoring the fact that Antifa was protesting, with the threat of rioting, this past weekend in Washington D.C. If it weren’t for the National Guard, Washington D.C. would have burned. He was condemning all violent groups.
But she doesn’t see that. It’s only about January 6.
I’m going to get more into this in the next section, but why would a Trump supporter, who had nothing to do with the Capitol riot, try to reconcile with a Leftist?
So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.
I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.
But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.
This bitch is insane. She has taken all of the Left’s stance that all Conservatives are evil and need to be purged. That we need to come to their side on bended need and then…maybe we’ll be forgiven.
Here’s the secret: I think her beliefs and values are evil and bad. I see her as a bigot and a racist. Her opinion is irrelevant of me are irrelevant.
In fact, I would be thrilled to know she hated me. If Satan came up from Hell, all muscly, with his pitch fork and fire blowing out his ears and ass and said he hated me and threatened my gold fish, I’d be good with it. I can’t unite with this even to keep peace.
Remember this: Submission is not promoting peace. Embracing tyranny is not embracing peace.
We are going to see a lot more articles like this.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing a Democratic firing squad for saying some really weird things. But is this a good idea for the Democrats to pull the trigger?
What the hell is QAnon? We should probably find out because all conservatives and Republicans are being thrown into the QAnon bucket. Let’s talk about them or us or whatever.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
What Happened?
A rural part of Texas, a very small district, elected Marjorie Taylor Greene as a Representative to the House of Representatives. Telling you that the size of the district is important as you will see later.
A few years ago, before she was elected, she would participate in some really odd conspiracy theories.:
She said that 9/11 was not by terrorists but by the U.S. government.
She said that the forest fire in California were caused by a Jewish space laser.
All sorts of other weird theories.
At first, reps wanted her to resign her seat. But these posts were all made before she was elected to office. The theory is that the people in her district knew what they were getting when they elected her. So getting rid of her was out.
Republicans voted on whether or not she should be removed from her two committee assignment. They held a vote on it and she was allowed to keep her committee spots. I understand the reason for it. She was elected and she can’t do any good just sitting on the sidelines. It would not be fair to her constituents. But I also understand why her committee assignments should be suspended, at least for a little while. I thought it was kind of a mistake to let her keep her committees because the Republicans would get hammered by the press and Democrats. OK, they already are so what difference would it make.
Democrats decided they didn’t want Greene to have any assignments to committees. They decided they were going to hold a vote to expel Greene from committees. This is unheard of and has never happened before. The minority party has a history of choosing their members to House committees and expelling them. It is not up to the majority party. It is party of the minority rights thing that the Founding Fathers had in mind. The majority party has no say to who the minority party puts into a committee.
Kevin McCarthy made it clear that this was unprecedented and, like ending the judicial filibuster, Democrats were going to regret it in the future.
Another issue that McCarthy professionally points out is the hypocrisy of the Democrats. They have had plenty of opportunity to kick bad apples out of their committees including Eric Swallwell for having sex with a Chinese spy, Ilhan Omar for her anti-Sementic rants and Maxine Waters for her call for violence against Trump supporters.
The strongest defense for Greene was Greene herself. She sat in front of Congress and apologized for the unwise things she believed way back. She made clear she did not believe in these things now. It was only during the very insecure times that she fell for the conspiracy theories.
Listen, I know people who believe in this stuff. Seriously. Someone close to me believes in a lot of this stuff. It’s crazy stuff. But, said the right way and it advantages those you like, it can be believable. I don’t believe in any of it and we are going to talk about what their belief system in a few minutes.
Democrats didn’t buy it. They voted her out of all committees along with 10 Republicans. This is not a good vote and should have been ignored by all Republicans out of sheer ethics of the whole thing. The Democrats have no say as to who the Republicans put on a committee and the Republicans should have no say who Democrats put on committees.
Well, they do now.
The New Narrative
The goal of the Democrats for the last twenty years is to vilify the Republicans. At first, this was just by questioning the policies and ideas of the Republicans. Whether what they were doing would work, was moral or ethical. Later, Democrats would point out that the Republicans were lying. The Iraq War was an example of that. By the way, the Iraq war proved to be legitimate and the United States did find terrorists and yellow cake uranium.
But, as the Democrats went more Left, their claims about Republicans became more extreme. And, with the help of the entertainment, news media and the education system, people are beginning to believe some of these things. But, I think it is a very few people. And, in the future, it could backfire.
You might be asking, “What does this have to do Marjorie Taylor Greene?” That’s a good question. This is a first-time elected official to the House of Representatives. She is from a rural area in Texas and probably won her elections with a few thousand votes. No one knows her. I don’t even know what she looks like. Why is this a big deal?
Because it is a new narrative. The theories that Greene was embracing is the theories of QAnon. This is an alt-right, radical conspiracy group. It is way out there. And when I say, “way out there” I mean, nuts. What the Democrats and the media are putting out there now is that all Republicans are part of this conspiracy group. In other words, all Republicans and Conservatives are nuts too.
I had never heard of QAnon. I am not much of a conspiracy guy either. I think John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln because he hated Lincoln. I think FDR didn’t know about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK because he was a communist. We did land on the moon. Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the world is round. I don’t believe in conspiracies.
So, since my philosophies and beliefs, yours too, are being wrapped up into this QAnon thing, let’s define what QAnon is and what it does.
QAnon
What Are They?
QAnon is what the media says all us Conservatives and Republicans believe in. It is what makes us what we are and it is the reason we are bad and evil and bigots and racists and whatever. So I decided to look it up so that I and you know what we believe.
First things first, I do have a ton of sources for this. Most are Left-wing in nature so I am not sure if what I’m writing is completely correct. I have heard that this group was way out there so I assume some of it is right. All I’m saying is take this with a grain of salt. It might not be completely correct.
QAnon is an alt-right Internet group that was started after the Trump election in 2017. Again, I am not sure the starting date is correct. This is a Wikipedia post (Left-wing) after all. They are primarily a conspiracy group that some classify as a cult.
They believe:
The government is run by a satanic cabal.
Government officials are part of a global pedophile ring that traffics in children throughout the world.
President Trump was sent by God to destroy the cabal and it would take two terms for him to do it.
They say that a “storm” would take place. This is when the government would arrest the QAnon folk, thousands of them, and jail them in places like Guantanamo Bay. Trump was there to stop them.
They believe that the Russia probe was a ruse started by Trump to enlist Robert Mueller to expose the child sex trafficking and prevent a coup by Obama, Clinton and George Soros.
Got that? That’s what you believe. That’s what the media is telling you that you believe. This is why Democrats should totally ignore you, condemn you and cancel you.
This is the new media narrative. Don’t believe me? Watch CNN or MSNBC. That’s what they are saying. Don’t think this is something we should take seriously because most normal people don’t believe in this crap? I also didn’t believe in the Russian hoax. I also don’t believe in Jewish space lasers and a satanic cabal. O think we would have heard about it before 2017. Even CNN might have reported it.
QAnon was first started as a 4-Chan post. 4-Chan is an alt-right message board, much like Reddit but for white supremacists and weirdos like that. Anything on 4-Chan is usually pretty extreme.
The “Q” in QAnon comes from the first person who posted. Supposedly, he is a big deal because he has a Q-level clearance with the government. Only those who deal directly with the President have that clearance. So you can imagine, this guy has a lot of knowledge (except there is no such thing as a Q level clearance that I know of).
The “Anon” part stands for “anonymous”. Got it, QAnon.
The government did investigate this group as they do all groups on 4-Chan. The QAnon account has had its posts stylistically analyzed and it was found that at least two other people were working under the account. The FBI believes it is actually a group of people. That’s a lot of people with a Q security clearance.
The popularity of the group led to other QAnon-type groups including CIAAnon, FBIAnon and others. The group, though originates in the United States, is gaining popularity in the UK, Germany, Australia and Japan. In 2018, the group was listed by the FBI as a possible domestic terrorist organization.
Trump has not helped himself with separating himself with this group:
In 2018, members began showing up to Trump rallies.
Bill Mitchell, a QAnon member, showed up to the White House for the Social Media Summit held by Trump.
The QAnon motto, “Where we go one, we go all” was used at a Trump rally by the guy introducing Trump.
In 2020, Trump did not reject the group during a press conference though he did admit he did not know anything about them.
Trump is a hero of QAnon and is considered the “Q+”. Though that’s not really Trumps fault.
But the bizarre things they believe is just incredible.
Kim Jong Un is a puppet leader of North Korea placed by the CIA.
DNC leader, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had an MS-13 gang member kill Seth Rich. The 27-year-old Rich was an employee of the Democratic National Committee(DNC) who is thought to have leaked DNC E-mails.
German Chancellor, Angela Merkle, if Adolf Hitler’s granddaughter.
The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 made the United States run by a corporation. They believe, on March 4th, 2021, the law will be overturned and the country will revert to what the Founding Fathers set the country up as. Donald Trump will become President again but, this time, the 19th President of the Founder’s country. Weird. I know people who believe this.
After learning about QAnon, this is a dangerous group. They take their beliefs in an almost religious way, which is weird. They are kooks and they should be seen and treated as kooks. They should also be seen and treated as dangerous. It only takes one to get so radical, he starts trying to take out President Biden. I do not like President Biden but I don’t want the guy assassinated.
There has been a backlash against QAnon. Facebook and Twitter have suspended and taken down known QAnon accounts. Media Matter (a far Left-wing outlet that validates news and is a “fact checker”) says that Trump and his minions have been using “dog whistles” to QAnon, sending them secret messages. I don’t put much value into this. Media Matter has called Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, a white supremacist.
I would not mind people going after QAnon too much if these same groups went after Antifa and BLM also. I think QAnon is a crazy group, and with crazy comes dangerous typically. But they have done no damage like that of BLM and Antifa, even including the January 6th riot at the Capitol building.
Understand this: I think QAnon is bad. But I also think Antifa and BLM are bad. All three groups should be condemned. The difference is two promulgate Leftist ideas and the other does not. This is not “whataboutism”. This is me condemning both groups. Me pointing out that I condemn both groups and the Left only condemns groups that don’t go along with their agenda.
On the subject of conspiracy groups, they have been with us forever. There was a book I read about why conspiracies come about. Usually, it is because a tragedy took place that was so horrific that people cannot believe that what happened could be something so simple.
How could the Japanese attack Pearl? Conspiracy: They couldn’t. The United States must have known about it.
How could a lone gunman kill the most powerful man in the free world, John F. Kennedy? Conspiracy: He couldn’t. The CIA, industrial military complex, the mob and LBJ all conspired to kill JFK and bury the evidence.
The moon is really far away and my cell phone is stronger than the computers used in 1968. How could we have landed on the moon? Conspiracy: We didn’t land on the moon. It was all staged in Burbank.
How can nineteen terrorists hijack four jets with nothing more than box cutters and kill 3000 Americans? Conspiracy: They can’t. It was the U.S. government shooting missiles into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
See how this works? Here’s the problem with conspiracy theories: They require large numbers of people to keep quiet and not spill the beans. This is not a thing. Someone will always be the “whistleblower”. None of these conspiracies had a whistleblower.
If you can’t get rid of a Constitutional Amendment, let’s make it impossible for the people to use that freedom. This is the most important story today that no one is talking about.
Maxine Watters, the Democrat from California and the dumbest person in Congress, proves just how dumb she is.
H.R. 127
The 117th Congress is off to a flying start. That means they are working hard to circumvent the Constitution and take away our freedoms that were given to us by God. Of course, the Left doesn’t believe in God so it is no big deal to take away our freedoms.
Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democratic Representative from Texas, has put in bill, H.R. 127 that has decided to really restrict gun rights and the ability to get or keep a gun and ammo.
I think this is an important bill that needs to be defeated so we should look at it. But this bill, which probably will be defeated, opens up other questions that we should all be asking and should have us a little nervous.
So, here’s what the bill does:
Gun Registry
This bill will create a searchable gun registry which will hold quite a bit of personal information. Here are the details:
Will be available to all government agencies including federal, state and local governments and the military.
Will be open to the general public.
Will give our personal information including:
Gun model.
When purchased.
Serial number.
Dates acquired.
Licensing information.
Location of the gun within the residence.
There are some real problems with this:
Government sucks at everything. This database won’t be different. Hint: hacking.
The information can be used by the government for future raids and confiscation.
This data is an invitation for criminals.
Pissed off neighbors now can watch you very intently like you’re a terrorist.
This data invites harassment and doxing by anti-Second Amendment folks.
If this information is combined with gun storage laws, a person can get convicted if his gun is stolen during a burglary.
Who Am I Getting a License From?
I live in California. California has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. It is very difficult to get a gun or ammo in California. But California law does allow one to get a carry permit and a concealed carry permit. But you must register through the Sheriff’s department.
Guess what happens? The bureaucracy is so thick and the state so doesn’t want to give these permits, it could take years before one even gets an interview for the permit. Don’t believe me? The process can be viewed on YouTube. It’s impossible.
California also restricts everything so much, I’m afraid to go out and buy a gun or ammo.
This law will make California laws into federal law. Here’s what they do:
The individual must petition the Attorney General to get a license for owning a gun. If the AG is anti-gun, good luck. This also invites the bureaucracy into the mix.
The applicant must go through a psychological exam. Looking at how psychology is a soft science, I can’t see what would go wrong here.
Family members must be interviewed by law enforcement. That includes current spouse, children and…ex-spouses. Yeah, nothing wrong there. My ex-wife would have me suspected of killing Jimmie Hoffa after he interview.
The license will last five years. After that, the whole process starts over again including petitioning the Attorney General and all the training and it can be revoked for whatever reason. If revoked, all weapons must be turned in to the government.
Oh, yeah. I forgot that one will need to pay $800 a year for “firearm insurance”. So, I buy a $200 shotgun and am spending a year, thousands of dollars and have to navigate the bureaucracy to buy a gun? Nice.
But it gets worse. You have that nice 18th century musket that hangs on the wall? You need an antique gun license for that. Better not have a criminal record.
Talk about a little bit of government overreach.
Restrictions on Weapons and Ammunition
What is a gun control bill without restrictions. And this bill has a bunch of them:
Any weapon that is a replica of a “military style weapon”, whatever that means.
All AR-type pistols.
The Colt AR-15.
Some semi-auto shotguns.
Magazines with 10 or more rounds. There go your automatic hand guns that average 12-18 rounds.
Ammo that is .50 caliber or above. Home one doesn’t run into any bears.
The Penalties
So, what happens if you don’t follow these way too restrictive rules. As you can imagine, the penalties are far more brutal than one can imagine. Hell, there are degrees of murder that get less time in jail than just owning a gun without the government’s approval. Heck, child molestation and rape can get one less time.
If you possess a gun or ammo without a license, you face 15-25 years in prison and/or $75-$150 thousand in fines.
If you transfer a gun to an unlicensed person, you face 10-15 years in prison and/or $50-$75 thousand in fines.
If you give a gun or ammo to an unlicensed person, you face 5-10 years in prison and/or a $30-$50 thousand in fines.
Loan a gun or ammo to an unlicensed person, you face a $5-10 thousand dollar fine.
What’s funny is that if you lit a business on fire last summer, you were unlikely to get any jail time.
Conclusion
This is insane and, what more insane, is this law could pass. What’s ironic, after the Revolutionary War, men of fighting age were required to have a gun and a certain number of rounds. This was in order to form a militia if the government got too big or fight against foreign enemies like Britain or France.
Fortunately, I don’t think the particular bill is going to go too far. Some moderate Democrats, like Joe Machin from West Virginia, will be a bit tentative to vote for it. But it is scary. This is only the first bill. The Left will do anything they can to go around the Second Amendment.
I do want to point something out. All the Democrats do is talk about democracy, freedom and the Constitution. But they are the ones that are slowly taking away the rights of the people:
Eliminate free speech.
Deplatform conservative press.
Demonize religion.
Call peaceful protest that goes against their values insurrection.
Eliminate gun rights.
Steal money through taxes.
Allow illegals aliens to enter the country with no say from legal citizens.
Eliminate the electoral college.
Eliminate the filibuster.
End capitalism.
Interesting, huh? The party of the people doesn’t seem to care much about the people. And a lot of the population are still buying their bullshit.
Auntie Maxie is a Nut Job
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) says former President Donald Trump should be charged with “premeditated murder” because of the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Auntie Maxine said:
“He absolutely should be charged with premeditated murder because of the lives that were lost for this invasion with his insurrection. For the president of the United States to sit and watch the invasion and the insurrection and not say a word because he knew he had absolutely initiated it – and as some of them said, ‘He invited us to come. We’re here at the invitation of the president of the United States.’”
“What’s so interesting about all of this is they tried to make themselves the victim when indeed they are following the president of the United States of America who had advance planning about the invasion that took place in our Capitol. Even there’s information that some of the planning came out of individuals working in this campaign.”
“When he rallied, he said go to the Capitol, fight hard. This is, take back your country. So if that’s not inciting the kind of violence that we witnessed, I don’t know what is.”
Maxine Waters is an absolute idiot. She has to be the dumbest person in Congress. Let’s not forget what she said in 2017 after Trump was elected.
Do as I say, don’t do as I do. It’s to bad she doesn’t take care of her district like she prepares for stupid, inciteful and violent speeches.
Last week, Josie and I watched a Netflix miniseries called Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Actually, I saw it twice because Josie fell asleep once and had to leave my place once. I finished it because I was transfixed.
Now I remember this case. I was 17 years old at the time and lived in Los Angeles. Josie was only 6 years old and lived in San Diego. I wasn’t into news at the time but I followed this one. I remember that we would lock all our door and windows. I remember that there were hourly reports on the case. I remember that the news, only daily at the time, spent 15 to 20 minutes out of an hour on the murders. And there were a lot of murders. One every few days.
The documentary, which I recommend if you are into true crime stories, was excellent. There were a lot of things that were skipped probably because of censorship reasons. Richard Ramirez, who ended up being the Night Stalker, was a seriously twisted…human being? No, he was an animal. Filth. But, outside of that, the story was pretty accurate.
But the Left wing news outlet, Vox, had a problem with it. one could tell by there title, Night Stalker Review: Netflix misguided Night Stalker series treats cops like gods by Aja Romano. The bad grammar on the title is theirs.
It said:
The climactic moment of Netflix’s true crime docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, is probably supposed to feel cathartic. In the final minutes of the four-part series’ third installment, San Francisco detective Frank Falzon recalls how he tracked down a friend of the California serial killer whose string of attacks throughout 1984 and 1985 made him a household name among true crime followers.
Falzon describes this moment with relish almost four decades later. In his recounting, the friend — who’d originally contacted police himself with a tip about the Night Stalker’s identity — balked when Falzon asked him to reveal the Night Stalker’s full name. So Falzon forcibly dragged the friend-turned-informant into his police car, threatened him, and punched him in the face. This is a lie. That’s not what happened and that’s not what the movie said had happened.
A woman calls saying her father, who was homeless, might be hanging out with Ramirez in Skid Row.
Police find the man and he admits that Ramirez confessed the murders.
He said that Ramirez gives him a gun and sold it to someone in Tajuana.
Police fly to TJ and get the gun. They also find a radio which has a matching serial number to one that was stolen during one of the murders. At this point, they know Ramirez is the murder but only know him as “Rick”.
An informant gives a bracelet to police.
Police question the woman who owned the bracelet and said it was a gift from her boyfriend.
The boyfriend was, then, confronted by police and that’s when he got smacked down for not turning over a serial killer.
Worse, he knew what Richard Ramirez was doing.
“It wasn’t my best punch, but it definitely wasn’t my worst,” Falzon says. After further threats, Falzon says, he lunged toward the informant, who cringed away from him, “threw his hands up in a cross,” and stammered out: “Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez.”
As Falzon repeated the name, the music swelled and grew more ominous. The episode cut to the docuseries’ cliffhanger end credits. And all I could think was how terrified this person must have been of the police.
Um, he should have been terrified of the police. He was hiding the name of a serial killer, rapist and child rapist. A man who had victimized over 20 people that the police knew of.
On the one hand, the production must have felt it would be satisfying to deprive Ramirez of some of that notoriety. To some extent, it is satisfying. In particular, it’s inspiring to hear from Ramirez’s survivors, including one couple who narrowly escaped their brush with Ramirez, and one victim who was assaulted by Ramirez when she was a child. Seeing her declare with certainty that she’s fine feels like the ultimate victory over Ramirez.
But Ramirez’s life arguably fits into a conversation about the cyclical nature of abuse and the cyclical horror of war — each a form of trauma. Likewise, a more thorough examination of Ramirez’s actions in the context of Satanic Panic could have made for a fascinating discussion within the series, had it been handled well. To what extent was Ramirez responding to the Satanic Panic of the era, and to what extent was he acting independent of it, but still becoming a part of the larger societal hysteria? These are all themes I’d have loved to see explored.
So, what this is saying, is that the film unjustly made the police into heroes for capturing a serial killer who left few clues and was completely random in his crimes. Instead, the documentary should have showed how a rapist, serial killer who kidnapped children and raped them was a victim. Nice.
The absence of Ramirez from his own story wasn’t that confusing to me because I could see what Night Stalker was trying to do. But it was confusing to other viewers I’ve spoken with, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with Ramirez’s story and naturally expected to learn about the titular serial killer.
There’s an obvious argument to be made that “understanding the mind of a serial killer” is too often used to justify overblown, glorified serial killer narratives. Sure. But we also need to understand the minds of serial killers, as well as the societal and personal circumstances that can lead to criminal behavior, if we’re ever going to fully understand criminality and attempt to rehabilitate potential offenders before it’s too late.
The only thing that would have confused me is why the writers didn’t say all that Richard Ramirez did. A lot of that was cut out because of the shear brutality of his crimes. There was more than enough as far as the timeline goes and pictures and videos of the crime scenes. In fact, other critics said that the documentary was too violent.
Perhaps it was. Carrillo and Salerno seemed to do good police work, even if the clue that led to the killer came from a Northern California citizen who apparently got punched in the face for his good deed. We need dedicated police officers who have positive relationships with their communities. Whenever cops do good work — work that truly serves the public — that moment feels like a victory. It comes with deep relief and pride in the justice system for functioning as it should.
But herein lies the difficulty of being a true crime fan: We have to recognize that police officers as a group perpetuate an inherently flawed and racist system of justice that fails people of color and marginalized communities far more often than it serves them. We can never lose sight of the reality that for every moment when the cops and the community are in harmony, there are countless others when the police force is the oppressor. And cases like Ramirez’s are often used as excuses for police to crack down and enact violence on people who aren’t serial killers.
Night Stalker doesn’t acknowledge this paradox at all. Instead, it treats Carrillo and Salerno like demigods. It approvingly lets a cop talk about punching an informant in the face and edits it like a pivotal, satisfying moment of triumph rather than a horrifying example of police brutality. And that strange omission — I mean, it’s dealing with the LAPD in the ’80s, perhaps the most notoriously racist police force to exist outside of the LAPD in the ’90s! — undermines Night Stalker’s effort to excise the bad seed at the heart of its story. Especially given the racial tensions between the police and their communities that erupted across the nation in 2020, I’m wondering if the production team ever stopped to think about how their approach to the police might be perceived.
Do you know how the police could reach out an support the community? By capturing a serial killer who was raping and sodomizing women, girls and boys. Arresting a man who was killing people every couple of days with no discernable pattern and would not leave any clues. Guess what? The community thought that too. Ask the 50 people who beat the crap out of Richard Ramirez when the caught him.
These detectives were not demigods. They made mistakes. They problems in their family lives. They were drinking too much. They made mistakes during the investigations. All this was in the show including that the police officer lost his temper and smacked down that guy who wouldn’t tell them who Richard Ramirez was.
And about that guy. This author is making the guy who got punched into a “citizen”. This is crap. He knew what Richard Ramirez was doing. He was fencing the stuff Ramirez was stealing during his crimes. How do you think the cops found him. He was also be belligerent and was picking a fight. This is something the writer of the article kind of leaves out. That guy was not an individual that the community of color would have embraced.
But, the writer has to say this because it validates the narrative that cops are bad and they abuse innocent civilians. And any story or documentary that show how the police did their jobs and how they felt cannot be celebrated. Here’s the thing: this case may never have been solved simply because the assaults and murders were so random and there were no clues left.
Night Stalker is a reminder that building a true crime story around the non-criminals isn’t enough. You need balance — and more crucially, context — for every narrative beat, especially because these are real crimes, still sending ramifications and echoes throughout society decades later.
Those echoes are clear, just from the fact that so many people who witnessed and lived through the Ramirez story are still around to talk about it nearly four decades later. History is living and walking — and very occasionally still stalking — among us. In the case of Night Stalker, that history deserved more careful attention.
The story was about how Richard Ramirez was caught. So it makes sense that the writers would talk to the cops who were involved in the investigation. This was not about the mental capacity of Richard Ramirez, his life that may have made him, or what the community thought of the police. This is a true story.
The last line where “history is living and walking” is a lie. History is history. It does not change. This podcast is history and it’s not going to be change. It’s people who change history. The revisionist history. That doesn’t mean the history actually changed. We are seeing this in our history books today. We are seeing this in our children who cannot tell us who the first President was and can’t pass the civics exam to become an American citizen
Overall I thought the movie was very good. It brought back a lot of memories and showed aspects of the case that were not known back then. I did not know how much of an unimaginable bastard Richard Ramirez was until this documentary and how much effort the police had to make to catch him. It’s worth a watch if, for nothing more, because Vox says you shouldn’t see it.
New York doesn’t believe in science. So all the scientist quit.
Europe, once again, shows that the Nobel Prize is worthless.
An let’s talk culture.
It’s Science, All!
Andrew Cuomo continues to prove he is the worst, most arrogant, incompetent and corrupt governors in the United States today. That is saying a lot.
New York has always led the way with Wuhan flu infections. This is not a shock because it is heavily populated and people are always smooshed together.
Andrew Cuomo issued an order that allowed old people who had the Wuhan flu to be put back into retirement homes.
At the time, we already knew that the elderly were more susceptible.
Thousands of the elderly died, helping to make the state the second highest in COVID deaths in the country behind New Jersey.
That’s right! It’s Trump’s fault! He doesn’t blame the CDC or the WHO or China or Dr. Fauci. It is Trump’s fault cause I guess Trump is going around and spreading this thing and not helping anyone.
Oh, wait! President Trump did help New York and other states.
Trump sent tons of PPE to New York.
Trump sent thousands of respirators and ventilators to New York.
Trump sent two hospital ships from the Navy to New York.
The Navy ships, ventilators and respirators were not used.
Cuomo specifically thanked Trump for all his support.
The media were all in on Cuomo. They saw him as the savior against the Wuhan flu and kept pointing out that New York is the way all states should have been handling the virus. Listen to this from Grabien:
Andy embraced the sudden fame.
He wrote a book about how he handled the pandemic.
He created a map of the pandemic’s progress over the last year. There was a bit of irony here.
He won an Emmy over his press conferences.
But everyone was not a fan of Andy. There were people who wanted explanations. That’s when Andy’s lies started coming to light. An investigation was done by the state Attorney General. Oops!
New York’s top prosecutor, Letitia James, has determined that Cuomo’s administration may have attempted to cover up mistakes by undercounting the number of elderly who died in nursing homes from the coronavirus. The deaths were shorted by over 50%.
What they did was call COVID deaths from nursing homes, hospital deaths.
A COVID patient from a nursing home is about to die.
The retirement home will send the patient to the hospital.
The patient dies of COVID.
The death is a hospital COVID death not a retirement home death
This softens the blow of Andy’s incompetence. Oops.
Andy’s response was less than sympathetic.
This guy is so out of touch. He is so arrogant. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. It’s just incredible. What’s more incredible is no one in the media is talking about it and even editing interviews that blame Andy Cuomo.
But that isn’t it. Andy’s behavior caused a lot of friction with his own health department. You know, the health department that is run and advised by doctors. Mr. Follow-the-Science decided he was going to run the COVID policy and, now, the vaccine distribution from his office, no matter what his health department says.
At least nine top New York health officials have left their posts since March of last year over Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic.
According to the NY Times, The governor ignored advice from his public health experts while using them as a foil during a recent press conference while answering questions on the pandemic.
State health officials have grown increasingly irritated at Cuomo’s approach to the pandemic, claiming that the governor has issued top-down orders to combat the coronavirus without first notifying health department staff.
One of the latest incidents occurred in Cuomo’s shaping of the state’s vaccine distribution plan. The governor scrapped a plan that health officials at all levels of state government had been working on in some fashion for about two decades.
The NY Times stated:
In the fall, Mr. Cuomo shelved vaccine distribution plans that top state health officials had been drawing up, one person with knowledge of the decision said. The plans had relied in part on years of preparations at the local level — an outgrowth of bioterrorism fears following Sept. 11 — and on experience dispensing vaccine through county health departments during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.
As a result, local officials across the state complained that their efforts to vaccinate were undercut by the Cuomo plan.
“Wait a minute, why are we not doing this?” Anthony J. Picente Jr., a Republican who is county executive in upstate Oneida County, said he remembered thinking.
Cuomo’s plan was to have hospitals deal with the vaccination, something his advisors quickly advised against. They believed the vaccinations should be handled by the local governments. This is because hospitals could not manage it because…they were busy.
Guess what happened? The hospitals could not keep up.
Andy Cuomo stated:
“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts. Because I don’t. Because I don’t.”
The Nobel Peace Prize list of nominees for 2021 have been released. Some make sense others will just make you go, “hmm”.
These Guys Make Sense
Jared Kushner – Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law, and Berkowitz, who was the Middle East envoy, were key figures in negotiating deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Donald Trump – Duh. Signed the Middle East Peace deals. Defeated the terrorist organization, ISIS. Was the only President in, forever, not to start a new foreign war. Oh, yeah, and he never started a nuclear war.
Alexei Navalny – Man who is running the Opposition to Russian President Vlad Putin.
Wait…What?
Black Live Matter. What?
Norwegian Member of Parliament Petter Eide (a socialist) writes:
“I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality. Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice. They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice. They have been able to mobilize people from all groups of society, not just African-Americans, not just oppressed people, it has been a broad movement, in a way which has been different from their predecessors.”
Politifact reported:
Officers injured: The New York Post reported on June 8, citing the U.S. Justice Department, that more than 700 law enforcement officers were injured on the job during nationwide protests over Floyd’s death.
People killed: In early June, news accounts reported the number of people killed during the Floyd protests at roughly a dozen, or as many as 19. The victims include a 77-year-old man who was a retired St. Louis police captain and a 22-year-old woman from Davenport, Iowa.
Damage caused: In late June, Fox News reported that according to insurance experts and city officials, the Floyd protests could eclipse the 1992 Los Angeles riots to become the most expensive civil disturbance in U.S. history. The 1992 riots, which followed the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, cost $1.4 billion in 2020 dollars, according to the report, which did not give a specific damage estimate for the Floyd protests. A spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute told Scripps National News that “most likely” the Floyd protest “would lead to higher losses,” but did not provide an estimate either.
Black Lives Matter didn’t respond to our requests for comment.
They also support what most Nobel voters support:
Socialism.
Hatred of the United States.
Breaking up of the family.
Anti-religion
Anti-capitalism.
Stacey Abrams. This is the person who lost the governor election in Georgia but thinks she’s still governor of Georgia.
NBC reported:
Abrams, who played a critical role in helping to register thousands of voters for the 2020 presidential election and Senate runoff election in Georgia, is being nominated for her work to “promote nonviolent change via the ballot box.”
“Abrams’ work follows in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights,” Lars Haltbrekken, a Socialist Party member of Norway’s parliament, said.
Abrams has done absolutely nothing in her career except bitch that she lost the gubernatorial election in Georgia. I’ll go a step further: her bitching about having had the election stolen from her (she lost by 50K votes) was a self-centered pitch to make her more relevant in the next election.
The media loves her and Europe can’t get enough of her. That’s because she’s a socialist.
Greta Thunberg is back. Who cares.
The environmental activist has done nothing except travel around the world in a boat, missing school, yelling at adults for ruining her life. I don’t know.
At least she turned 18 and we can not fuck with her without being accused of being closeted pedophiles.
The World Health Organization. Wow.
Let’s see:
They were wrong about how COVID was spread.
They were wrong about how transmissible it was.
They did not press China to let them analyze it.
They lied about how China was handling the disease.
They were wrong about how deadly it is.
They were lied about how many people died in China.
They did not acknowledge that this virus was developed in a lab and not a natural outgrowth.
They called travel restrictions xenophobic.
They spread the Chinese talking point about COVIS. And SARS. and Swine flu. And Bird flu. And they were all lies.
They ignore the enemies of China including Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Yeah, they did such a great job on the Wuhan flu.
Do you guys see something with the Nobel Peace Price? Yeah, it’s bullshit. It’s such bullshit, I would question whether Jarod Kushner or Donald Trump were closeted communists.
Last week, Josie and I watched a Netflix miniseries called Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Actually, I saw it twice because Josie fell asleep once and had to leave my place once. I finished it because I was transfixed.
Now I remember this case. I was 17 years old at the time and lived in Los Angeles. Josie was only 6 years old and lived in San Diego. I wasn’t into news at the time but I followed this one. I remember that we would lock all our door and windows. I remember that there were hourly reports on the case. I remember that the news, only daily at the time, spent 15 to 20 minutes out of an hour on the murders. And there were a lot of murders. One every few days.
The documentary, which I recommend if you are into true crime stories, was excellent. There were a lot of things that were skipped probably because of censorship reasons. Richard Ramirez, who ended up being the Night Stalker, was a seriously twisted…human being? No, he was an animal. Filth. But, outside of that, the story was pretty accurate.
But the Left wing news outlet, Vox, had a problem with it. one could tell by there title, Night Stalker Review: Netflix misguided Night Stalker series treats cops like gods. The bad grammar on the title is theirs.
It said:
Falzon describes this moment with relish almost four decades later. In his recounting, the friend — who’d originally contacted police himself with a tip about the Night Stalker’s identity — balked when Falzon asked him to reveal the Night Stalker’s full name. So Falzon forcibly dragged the friend-turned-informant into his police car, threatened him, and punched him in the face.
“It wasn’t my best punch, but it definitely wasn’t my worst,” Falzon says. After further threats, Falzon says, he lunged toward the informant, who cringed away from him, “threw his hands up in a cross,” and stammered out: “Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez.”
As Falzon repeated the name, the music swelled and grew more ominous. The episode cut to the docuseries’ cliffhanger end credits. And all I could think was how terrified this person must have been of the police.
Um, he should have been terrified of the police. He was hiding the name of a serial killer, rapist and child rapist. A man who had victimized over 20 people that the police knew of.
On the one hand, the production must have felt it would be satisfying to deprive Ramirez of some of that notoriety. To some extent, it is satisfying. In particular, it’s inspiring to hear from Ramirez’s survivors, including one couple who narrowly escaped their brush with Ramirez, and one victim who was assaulted by Ramirez when she was a child. Seeing her declare with certainty that she’s fine feels like the ultimate victory over Ramirez.
But Ramirez’s life arguably fits into a conversation about the cyclical nature of abuse and the cyclical horror of war — each a form of trauma. Likewise, a more thorough examination of Ramirez’s actions in the context of Satanic Panic could have made for a fascinating discussion within the series, had it been handled well. To what extent was Ramirez responding to the Satanic Panic of the era, and to what extent was he acting independent of it, but still becoming a part of the larger societal hysteria? These are all themes I’d have loved to see explored.
So, what this is saying, is that the film unjustly made the police into heroes for capturing a serial killer who left few clues and was completely random in his crimes. Instead, the documentary should have showed how a rapist, serial killer who kidnapped children and raped them was a victim. Nice.
The absence of Ramirez from his own story wasn’t that confusing to me because I could see what Night Stalker was trying to do. But it was confusing to other viewers I’ve spoken with, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with Ramirez’s story and naturally expected to learn about the titular serial killer.
There’s an obvious argument to be made that “understanding the mind of a serial killer” is too often used to justify overblown, glorified serial killer narratives. Sure. But we also need to understand the minds of serial killers, as well as the societal and personal circumstances that can lead to criminal behavior, if we’re ever going to fully understand criminality and attempt to rehabilitate potential offenders before it’s too late.
The only thing that would have confused me is why the writers didn’t say all that Richard Ramirez did. A lot of that was cut out because of the shear brutality of his crimes. There was more than enough as far as the timeline goes and pictures and videos of the crime scenes. In fact, other critics said that the documentary was too violent.
Perhaps it was. Carrillo and Salerno seemed to do good police work, even if the clue that led to the killer came from a Northern California citizen who apparently got punched in the face for his good deed. We need dedicated police officers who have positive relationships with their communities. Whenever cops do good work — work that truly serves the public — that moment feels like a victory. It comes with deep relief and pride in the justice system for functioning as it should.
But herein lies the difficulty of being a true crime fan: We have to recognize that police officers as a group perpetuate an inherently flawed and racist system of justice that fails people of color and marginalized communities far more often than it serves them. We can never lose sight of the reality that for every moment when the cops and the community are in harmony, there are countless others when the police force is the oppressor. And cases like Ramirez’s are often used as excuses for police to crack down and enact violence on people who aren’t serial killers.
Night Stalker doesn’t acknowledge this paradox at all. Instead, it treats Carrillo and Salerno like demigods. It approvingly lets a cop talk about punching an informant in the face and edits it like a pivotal, satisfying moment of triumph rather than a horrifying example of police brutality. And that strange omission — I mean, it’s dealing with the LAPD in the ’80s, perhaps the most notoriously racist police force to exist outside of the LAPD in the ’90s! — undermines Night Stalker’s effort to excise the bad seed at the heart of its story. Especially given the racial tensions between the police and their communities that erupted across the nation in 2020, I’m wondering if the production team ever stopped to think about how their approach to the police might be perceived.
Night Stalker is a reminder that building a true crime story around the non-criminals isn’t enough. You need balance — and more crucially, context — for every narrative beat, especially because these are real crimes, still sending ramifications and echoes throughout society decades later.
Those echoes are clear, just from the fact that so many people who witnessed and lived through the Ramirez story are still around to talk about it nearly four decades later. History is living and walking — and very occasionally still stalking — among us. In the case of Night Stalker, that history deserved more careful attention.
