The Philadelphia Eagles have decided to make a massive, in-kind donation to Trump’s re-election effort: Trump has disinvited them to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl victory because some players are still carping about kneeling during the anthem. Trump has this ability to make his opponents do stupid, self-destructive things. It is why I consider his re-election in 2020 to be near-certain. Right now, he’s got them once again defending kneeling during the anthem – not even a couple weeks after they thought the NFL had put the issue to rest.
The EU and Italy are in dispute about economic and migration policy – with the Italian government bucking against EU-imposed economic strictures and also not happy at all with what the EU has utterly failed to do with Italy’s influx of migrants. Powerline has a nice run-down on what is at stake. The biggest problem with the EU is that the people didn’t create it. They were willing to go along with it while it, apparently, ensured prosperity and peace…but right now, especially in places like Italy, it is providing neither…and the people of Italy are getting fully awake to the reality that no people of Europe gets to set EU policy…it is all set by un-elected bureaucrats who hold the people of Europe in profound contempt.
Don Surber notes how Trump just plays the MSM like a fiddle – this time over whether the President can pardon himself. The reality: Trump is working to make the 2018 mid-terms at least in part a referendum on whether or not he should be impeached. He knows – as I’ve long known – that if it is a central issue, his Trumpsters will troop to the polls in numbers never seen in a mid-term election. Naturally, the MSM is falling for it.
Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, got himself all bollixed up over questions about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Kurt Schlichter has been pointing out – as I have, too – that Never Trump is a gateway drug to being a Progressive. Here’s your proof.
Blogs For Victory 
“Trump just plays the MSM like a fiddle.”
Yes, so much fun to watch. A beautiful touch was having Melania simply avoid the cameras for a week or two after her surgery. It accomplished several things:
1. MSM went nuts speculating why, with increasingly outrageous suggestions. All of which exploded into more proof of fake news when she reappeared.
2. It emphasized that the press has no empathy or class, invading her privacy for no good cause. Everyone can sympathize with someone wanting some time to privately recover after a medical condition.
3. Showed again the MSM’s desire to avoid real news, like NK.
4. Showed Melania to be a class act, as always, who is not seeking personal press.
All massively self inflicted damage on the MSM, with hardly any effort by Trump except refusing to react or explain when they demanded he produce her for cameras.
And then yes, speculating he could pardon himself (Could he? Hmm… but he sure as hell CAN pardon anyone unfairly prosecuted by Mueller. Isn’t that the hidden subtext.)
And those NFL clowns who want to use football to score personal political virtue signaling? Say goodbye to your sport! The Marine Band will play you off the field.
There was even speculation that Trump has been abusing Melania, and she didn’t want to be seen in public with cuts and bruises. YCMTSU!
Who can blame her for wanting to distance herself from the unrelenting stench of the radical Left?
One of the most mesmerizing videos I’ve ever seen. Everyone who believes man can destroy the planet by driving vehicles with internal combustion engines and heating and cooling our homes with electricity produced by burning fossil fuels should watch this.
And this is only one of many natural disasters that happen EVERY year. The destructive power of nature is astounding, including but not limited to, tornados, hurricanes, forest fires, mudslides, sinkholes, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, avalanche, landslides, tsunamis, floods, blizzards, cyclones, droughts, hailstorms, heatwaves, tidal waves, etc… During the course of any one of these events, the damage can be a minor inconvenience, or leave death and destruction that affects hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands. And none of this takes into account the destruction that occurs when man screws up, like with massive oil spills or the devastation of chemical / biological events. Yet somehow, earth continues to transition thru these, renewing itself with amazing resilience.
That video is awe inspiring and eerily pre historic. We are witnessing in real time how land mass formed – awesome
It is why I consider his re-election in 2020 to be near-certain.
If he isn’t so mentally and emotionally beat up that he decides not to run. I know he’s a tough guy. You don’t excel in the world of global commercial real estate development without possessing a fairly high level of mental toughness. But he and his family have been the target of such relentless attacks by Democrats, GOP never-Trumpers and the media since the day he announced his candidacy that it has to be taking a toll on them. In fact it’s kind of interesting how the attacks against him have evolved, from trying to prevent him from winning, to trying to reverse the results of the election, and now transitioning into battering him into not seeking re-election by simply making his and his family’s lives as miserable as possible.
I agree, there is a movement to make not only Trump but any conservative rethink getting involved by making clear that being a mover and shaker in the conservative movement will mean, automatically, efforts to make that person’s life a living hell, and to punish that person’s family and friends and neighbors as well.
I say bring it ….. confrontational conservatism means taking progressive crap and throwing it right back in their smug faces until they choke on their own feces ……
We have just begun
“… he and his family have been the target of such relentless attacks by Democrats, GOP never-Trumpers and the media…”
I would almost think it’s the opposite with Trump. He likes to win. I think there might have been a chance that after one term of improving the economy, cutting regulation and restoring rule of law, he might have been willing to rest on his laurels and retire in victory. But the continuing determination of the Democrats and MSM to smear his reputation, will probably urge him to keep fighting until he totally wipes them out. Which will take a second term.
Moreover, the longer they play the relentless smear game, the less and less it works. No one questions now that the MSM is fake news. Or that the Democrats are complete hypocrites. I think Trump is on the verge of a total victory that even he might not of believed possible, but he needs to keep his fingers on the controls long enough.
One of the Eagles spokespeople kept insisting that the kneeling is not disrespecting the flag or the military or the country,” it’s all about police departments shooting people.”
So protest at the police departments, not against the anthem in front of millions. Protest at City Hall in whichever city is allegedly the seat of vile racist violence. What does the national government have to do with it? The anthem? The flag?
But hey, where’s the glory in that? That would be like, you know, like actually DOING something. Maybe even without cameras. And maybe even exposing themselves to some inconvenient truths. That would just not gratify the publicity hounds and glory seekers and virtue signalers.
Making government smaller, and pissing progressives off one pink slip at a time:
…..acting director Mick Mulvaney has just fired the entire 25-member advisory board
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/06/07/youre-fired-mick-mulvaney-fires-entire-cfpb-advisory-board-n2488201
This kind of sums up the idiocy of the pro-choice stance.
Sorry… Keep messing up the link code. Try this.
One of the things that is so odd/hypocritical about the pro-death-to-babies movement is their denial of science. They love to toss around the term “science denier” yet their basic agendas are anti-science. From denying the humanity of the unborn, as well as simply ignoring its life essence, its heartbeat, the proofs that it already has a personality, its sensitivity to pain, its preferences for thing ranging from position of the mother to what she eats, it is all denied. “My body, my decision” simply acts as if there is only one body. Gee, where’d that other heartbeat come from? One cannot support abortion without denying science,not without admitting to a basic lack of humanity.
The science of gender is now also denied. DNA is science? Oh,no it ain’t. Not when it says there are only two genders.
The reasoning of these people is so convoluted, so bizarre, it defies rational thought.
DEEP STATE –
A former employee of the Senate intelligence committee has been arrested on charges of lying to the FBI about contacts he had with multiple reporters, one of whom was reportedly his lover, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
James A. Wolfe, the longtime director of security for the committee – one of multiple congressional panels investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign – was indicted on three false statement counts after prosecutors say he misled agents about his relationships with reporters.
Though Wolfe is not charged with disclosing classified information, prosecutors say he was in regular and suspicious contact with multiple journalists who covered the committee, including meeting them at restaurants, in bars, private residences and in a Senate office building.
He also maintained a three years long personal relationship with one reporter, which prosecutors say he lied about until being confronted with a photograph of him and the journalist.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5819719/Ex-Senate-aide-charged-lying-reporter-contacts.html
First domino, or Fall Guy? Time will tell. But it is a very strange thing – this guy was very high up in the food chain and he suddenly starts having an affair with a nobody of a junior reporter and, apparently, feeding her all sort of information that far more experienced reporters would kill to have. Who set this up? I mean, of course I understand a middle aged man getting it on with a young, pretty lady…that story is as old as humanity: but this was a long term thing…and its not like a low-level person gets a lot of access to someone like Wolfe. Who brought them together to begin with? There’s a lot more to this story than we know, I suspect.
One of the online magazines I read commented that the woman had a “hot librarian” vibe. I think once a spark is recognized, the rest is predictable even if one party is at the top of his game and the other is just getting started in her field.
There is the Mentor aspect of the older, more successful, teacher of the younger student/mistress, and I can imagine that being very appealing to a man like Wolfe. I read a couple of his emails and they were not “sexy” but him talking about how exciting it was to be part of what she was doing and him being proud of her. There was also the illicit aspect of what he was up to, which had to have been exciting. He might not have been able to win over and control an older, wiser, woman. This younger reporter seems like the perfect match for an older guy whose job has been pretty rewarding but who has all this really exciting secret information bubbling up inside him and no one to impress with it, no way to use it to make himself feel like a real player. But she’s there, she’s evidently smitten, she’s malleable, and she’s got that hot librarian vibe. It made sense to me.
And he was playing other reporters as well, so he was clearly enjoying the thrill of being kind of an undercover agent. I think that was probably most of it, with a little sex romp on the side.
Could be – but the other question, now, is how many other reporters are paying their sources? Sex or money, makes no difference. After all, someone who leaks does (as we see) risk jail time. Who does that for free? I’d really like this dug into…but I worry that it’ll be treated as a one-off and swept under the rug as there’s likely no one who can’t be burned by this sort of thing.
The great tragedy of George Carlin’s life was that he stopped being funny before he stopped performing comedy. The great tragedy of Samantha Bee’s life is that she stopped before she started.
A great line, and a good article
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/25/monkey-hear-monkey-laugh/
So one the most intellectually challenged people on the planet, Nicole Wallace on MSNBC, is convinced that Mueller has almost got what he wants with this new indictment of Manafort and is counting down the days to indicting Trump. Here’s a problem the “not so very astute” Wallace is ignoring – the indictments have nothing to do with Russia meddling, and the larger problem which is never discussed is the fact that Manafort resigned from the campaign after being isolated by Trump for not delivering on his promises – so wouldn’t it stand to reason that Manafort would turn on Trump in a heartbeat to stay out of jail if in fact he knew anyting? That’s just common sense and basic human nature.
It just gets more and more stupid as time goes on…Mueller is doing what he’s doing because that is what the 13 Angry Democrats on his team have been ordered by the DNC to do (ie, try to make trouble for Trump and the GOP)…but for anyone who doesn’t have a dog in the Democrat hunt, it is clearly just an absurdity at this point.
I’ve read a couple of mournful and surprised comments online and heard a couple on radio shows about the Anthony Bourdain suicide. I didn’t watch his TV show but evidently he connected with a lot of people.
What I did do was read his book, Kitchen Confidential, and anyone reading that book would not only not be surprised that his brain cells were probably permanently disordered, it’s a miracle he lived past the age of 30. It is a fascinating book, at least it was to me, but then i was a restaurant manager and married at one time to a chef—-who, coincidentally, was in Bourdain’s class at the Culinary Institute of America (the fun CIA). But don’t read it if you get fluttery at nonstop F-bombs and other crudities. Haha, kind of made a food joke there, but I was referring to one form of crudity after another. And all it fueled, nonstop, with a truly astounding volume and variety of drugs and alcohol.
This man, for most of his adult life, was on the fast track to self destruction with the pedal to the metal. It was a 150 MPH tour of life in the fastest lane, with a raging ego to go along with it. He redeemed himself a little at the very end when he talked about visiting a three star restaurant in NYC—-he never got more than 2, or maybe it was 4-star and he never got more than 3—and commenting, as if not quite believing it, that the kitchen ran like a Swiss watch. There was no screaming, no throwing of pots or pans or knives, no profanity, no insults, no hysteria. It was calm and orderly and highly professional. And he said, reflectively and with admiration, that was the difference between the rating of this restaurant and his. The other chef was the better chef. It was a moment of humility and insight that offset, to some extent, the raging A-holedness of his persona up until that point.
He was a man of massive appetites, and an amazing ability to taste, really taste, food and know how it got to be good, why it was not good, and how to make it better. There was a story about being taken out to eat in Japan, at some back-alley kind of place that had the best food he’d ever eaten. The cooks were told to bring whatever they wanted, and to keep it coming, and the account of what they ate, the quantities and the kinds of food—-live seafood chopped in half at the table and still squirming as they ate it, etc.—was astounding.
When his daughter was born, he decided to change his lifestyle, and that was pretty much where the book ended. I recognized his name when it came up in ads for food shows and so on, but I don’t think I ever watched him, I took his advice and bought a Japanese knife when he said they were better than the German knives, and while I still have it I prefer my German steel, but I respected his expertise enough to give it a try.
The thing is, those appetites didn’t go away when he decided he wanted to be a good dad and there for his daughter. I don’t know what he did about them, but the cumulative effect of those years of marathon drug and alcohol binges, days without sleep while cooking, playing, fornicating, traveling and doing it all over again, had to have damaged his brain chemistry—-which was clearly out of balance from the get-go. It’s sad that his demons won, but from reading his book I felt they were always hot on his heels.
James Lileks, as usual, had some pithy commentary on Leftist “logic” regarding, among other things, the Fairness Doctrine. (People on the Right are pithy. People on the Left are jutht pithy.)
(So you want the government to monitor all speech and use the power of the state to require the expression of certain viewpoints and mandatory contradiction of ideas with which the government disagrees. Why, exactly?
“To prevent authoritarianism and fascism!”) and the state of feck and how to achieve it.
The Fairness Doctrine’s return wouldn’t be enough, of course; it would have to be applied to YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, so Wrong-Think could be hunted down no matter what hidey-hole it bolted into. C’mon, kids! There’s someone who disagrees about the eventual impact of human-caused global temperatures. Get that feckless dolt!
As long as we’re worried about unfairness and a “deeply fractured nation,” shouldn’t we do a study to see whether feck is equally distributed? If “feckless” means “weak and ineffective,” then we should engineer a government program to re-feck the needy.
Thus enfeckenated, perhaps they can make their points heard without demanding the government take the microphone away from someone else and give it to them. Sound fair?
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/06/25/athwart-fair-as-feck/
And this, of course, started me thinking about feck: what is feck, why does it matter, how do you lose it and if you want more how do you get it?
Samantha Bee clearly feels that she has enough feck to be comfortable pointing out fecklessness in someone else. But what is enough feck? Does she consider herself adequately fecked, or (given that smug smirk that never seems to leave her face except when she is screaming) “overfecked”?
If one were to feel underfecked, if not actually feckless, how would one strive to become, as Lileks put it, more enfeckenated? Is there a spectrum of feckness, ranging from feckless to feckish to fecked-up? And where, oh where, does the pursuit of feck stop? Is a person born with feckability, making it easier to acquire feck? At what age does feck begin to manifest itself? And in what circumstances does being feckless play a significant role? “She was feckless, so she couldn’t carry a tune”? He’d be a pretty good ball player if he were not so feckless”.
I’m not that concerned about the use of the c-word, as it no longer just applies to women so is not sexist, merely crude. When “not all women have c**ts” it becomes pretty abstract. I don’t think anyone cared but Sally Field, who was enchanted by the word, but I think that was mostly just nostalgia.