Category: Democrats

Outrage After Emails Show Top Clinton Campaign Aides Insulting Catholics

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Abortion, Sodomy and Socialism are the three key components of the Democrat Party platform in the 21st century, and if you don’t like it, Team Clinton believes it’s because there’s something wrong with you:

Catholic groups are upset at the Clinton campaign after hacked emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that were released by WikiLeaks showed top Clinton aides making offensive comments toward Catholics and Catholicism.
The Hill reports that in the 2011 exchange, a fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, John Halpin, sent an email to Podesta and Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri about Rupert Murdoch.
“Friggin’ Murdoch baptized his kids in Jordan where John the Baptist baptized Jesus,” Halpin wrote. “Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic from the SC and think tanks to the media and social groups.”
“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” Halpin continued. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”
Palmieri responded while Podesta stayed silent.
“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” Palmieri wrote. “Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

‘The Fire Under All of This Smoke is … Barely Enough to Light a Cigar’

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So says Jazz Shaw of Hot Air in addressing the “October surprise” of the New York Times report on Donald Trump’s taxes. What the Times seems to have done is to extrapolate from the documents it mysteriously obtained to guess about what might be found in documents it does not have. They assert that, because Trump reported major losses of business income in one year, therefore Trump could have avoided income taxes in subsequent years. This may be true, but we don’t know.

Donald Trump Tax Records Show He
Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly
Two Decades, The Times Found
— New York Times

As news of Trump’s taxes broke, he goes
off script at a rally in Pennsylvania
— Washington Post

Some comments on the New York Times
story about Donald Trump’s tax returns
— Bronte Capital

Donald Trump Tax Returns Reportedly
Show $916 Million Loss in 1995
— ABC News

The New York Times Paid No Taxes in 2014
— Breitbart

The New York Times risked legal trouble
to publish Donald Trump’s tax return
— Washington Post

Those are today’s headlines at Memeorandum, and CNN’s going wall-to-wall on it, as if Trump were a cop who shot an unarmed black man. The unmistakable pro-Clinton cheerleading at CNN is the tip of a massive iceberg of liberal media bias in this campaign, which is arguably the secret of Trump’s success so far. Trump appeals directly to voters who don’t trust the media, so that whenever the media report something negative about Trump, his basic answer is always, “See? Media bias!”

Whether or not this will be enough for Trump to win the election, however, is the important question. The latest Fox News poll has Clinton leading by 5 points, 49%-44%, and the Real Clear Politics average of national polls show Clinton expanding her lead from a virtual dead heat on Sept. 19 (when it was Clinton 44.9%, Trump 44.0%) to 2.5 points (47.5%-45.0%) now. How much faith we can put in polls is always a matter of dispute, but the closer we get to Election Day, the more likely the polls actually do predict the vote. What the polls cannot predict, however, is whether some event between now and Nov. 8 — for example, a major terrorist attack — might cause voters to shift toward Trump. There are limits to how far media bias can help Democrats, and this election may yet demonstrate that fact. We shall wait and see . . .



 

Miss Universe’s Reality TV Sex Scandal

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Hillary Clinton’s reference to Alicia Machado in Monday’s debate (“No, Miss Universe Can’t Be 170 Pounds”) drew attention to the Venezuelan beauty queen’s sordid past, e.g., the time she wrecked her engagement to a baseball star by having sex with another man on a reality TV show:

In a now infamous 2005 episode of ‘La Granja,’ [“The Farm”] Alicia apparently had sex in front of the cameras with Spanish TV host Fernando Acaso.
Machado was engaged to Philadelphia Phillies baseball star Bobby Abreu at the time.
He quickly called off the wedding after clips of the show appeared online.
The broadcast showed Acaso on top of her, with Machado whispering in Spanish about his manhood.

Ms. Machado is now a U.S. citizen, a Democrat voter and, according to Hillary Clinton, a role model for America’s young women.

 

No, Miss Universe Can’t Be 170 Pounds

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It should not be necessary to explain why a beauty queen is obliged to maintain her physique at or near her pageant-winning form during her yearlong tenure as the reigning Miss Whatever. She wins a local beauty contest, which qualifies her to compete at higher levels, on up to a national title and, perhaps, eventually to become Miss Universe. To be acclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world is a high honor, and those who wear the crown must uphold the prestige of that title.

Only in the Through the Looking Glass world of 21st-century feminism — and amid a presidential campaign where the media are Hillary Clinton’s propaganda squad — would former Miss Universe Alicia Machado’s claims of victimhood make it into the New York Times:

For 20 years, Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after she won the Miss Universe title: shame her, over and over, for gaining weight.
Private scolding was apparently insufficient. Mr. Trump, who was an executive producer of the pageant, insisted on accompanying Ms. Machado, then a teenager, to a gym, where dozens of reporters and cameramen watched as she exercised.
Mr. Trump, in his trademark suit and tie, posed for photographs beside her as she burned calories in front of members of the news media. “This is somebody who likes to eat,” Mr. Trump said from inside the gym.
On Monday night, Hillary Clinton turned Ms. Machado’s pain into a potent political weapon on the biggest stage. . . .

Question: When did it become the job of the media to amplify, and give credibility to, the Democrat Party’s campaign themes?

Let us make no mistake about why the New York Times devoted 600 words to this story: To help Hillary Clinton win the election. This “news story” is in fact an unregulated contribution-in-kind to the Clinton campaign, written to reinforce the Democrat’s message. And what is that message? Well, apparently, the message was that Trump should have ignored the fact that the former Miss Valenzuela — who weighed 116 pounds when she won the Miss Universe title in 1996 — reportedly ballooned to almost 170 pounds within months of winning the crown. How much weight Ms. Machado gained is a subject of dispute, as she claimed at the time it was only 19 pounds. Trump discussed the controversy in a 1997 broadcast of the Howard Stern radio show:

Stern introduces the topic by saying, “The Miss Universe, it turns out, the woman who won last year, blows up to a fat pig. I mean, like obese.”
Trump can be heard chuckling in the background as Stern recapped the events.
“You whipped this fat slob into shape,” Stern continued. “I don’t know how you did it. I see all these diet plans, everything else. God bless you. You whipped her into shape, and you held the whole pageant together. Congratulations.”
“Well, that was an amazing one,” Trump responded. “She went from 118 to almost 170.”
“And you got her right down again to 118, didn’t you?,” asked Stern.
“Well, she’s going to be there,” replied Trump. “She’s probably 145 or something.”
Trump and Stern said Machado looked beautiful when she won. “Right,” said Trump. “She gained about 55 pounds in a period of nine months. She was like an eating machine.”
“What does a girl eat in less than a year to gain [55 pounds]?” Stern asked.
“I think she ate a lot of everything,” answered Trump.

Let me say this: I have never liked Howard Stern, a man who became a leading agent of cultural degradation in the 1990s, treating porn performers as legitimate celebrities. Calling a woman a “fat pig” is certainly not the worst thing Stern ever said, but this was “shock jock” radio in New York in the late 1990s, and Trump was just doing that circus as part of the usual publicity stuff he did as a businessman.

Ah, but now Trump is not just a New York businessman, and the Clinton campaign team (which includes the New York Times) is promoting Ms. Machado as a victim of “fat-shaming” and misogyny:

Ms. Machado, in a series of interviews this year with The Times, recalled the experience and its long-term effect on her life for an article about how Mr. Trump treats women. . . .
“Over the past 20 years,” Ms. Machado said, “I’ve gone to a lot of psychologists to combat this.”

Don’t cry for me, Miss Valenzuela! This bizarre idea, that a beauty pageant contestant’s weight problems are a political issue, shows how far the media is willing to go in its servile loyalty to the Democrat Party. Whatever Team Clinton decides is an “issue,” the media feels obliged to convince us really is an issue, no matter how silly and trivial it may be.

UPDATE: Huge hat-tip to Kathy Shaidle for pointing out Steve Sailer’s column on Ms. Machado, which includes a 1998 Associated Press item:

VENEZUELAN BEAUTY QUEEN ACCUSED
Associated Press
Jan. 23, 1998 6:39 PM ET
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The Venezuelan beauty queen who made headlines two years ago for putting on weight after being crowned Miss Universe is back in the news.
A lawyer for a man who was shot outside a church in November said Friday that Alicia Machado, 21, was seen driving the car in which her boyfriend sped away from the scene of the shooting. Francisco Sbert Mousko suffered brain damage when two bullets punctured his skull outside a church where his dead wife was being eulogized.
Sbert’s family said the alleged gunman, Sbert’s brother-in-law Juan Rodriguez Reggeti, had accused Sbert of driving his sister to commit suicide.
“Our accusations against Alicia Machado are based on coinciding testimony from witnesses, who place her in the vehicle in which Juan Rodriguez fled the scene,” said Omar Arenas Candelo, one of three attorneys who presented the allegations to a criminal court late Thursday.

Steve Sailer details a lengthy list of scandals Ms. Machado has been involved in over the years. She’s a typical Democrat, I guess.




 


No, Donald Trump Won the Debate

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Liberals are calling Monday night’s debate a win for Hillary Clinton, as might be expected, and even producing snap polls claiming to support this claim as a fact, as might also be expected, I guess. However, the reality is that Donald Trump did not lose the debate, and thereby won.

What was Trump’s basic challenge going into the debate? That he was “not presidential,” without the necessary standing to challenge an experienced politician like Hillary. And yet there he was, side-by-side on stage with her, clearly unintimidated by her.

Did he score any knockout blows? No. Did he persuade any liberals? No. But no one could have reasonably expected such an outcome. Trump committed no great gaffes or blunders, he evaded moderator Lester Holt’s “gotcha” questions and, if at times Trump was “not presidential,” he was not so un-presidential as to disqualify himself in the eyes of any voter who prior to Monday night had considered voting for Trump.

Ross Douthat makes some apt criticism of Trump’s debate performance, but it’s not Harvard-educated pundits who are Trump’s core constituency. This is one of the basic problems with political punditry: Highly educated (and highly ideological) commentators have difficulty imagining how things look to the average voter in Ohio or Florida. Remember how the Bernie Sanders boom during the Democrat primaries caught much of the journalistic world by surprise, in much the same way that Trump’s success in the GOP primaries shocked professional pundits on the Right.

 


Yes, #BlackLivesMatter Is About Hate

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“With Election Day only weeks away, it is possible the chaos in the Tarheel State is part of a left-wing get-out-the-vote effort to foment unrest in the state’s black communities. . . .
“Riots, of course, are the stock in trade of radical speculator George Soros, the preeminent funder of the Left who has given generously to Black Lives Matter. Soros has a long history of underwriting violence and civil unrest not just in America but all over the world.”
— Matthew Vadum, “Charlotte Burning,” Sept. 22, 2016

“Seriously, what are you supposed to do if an angry mob surrounds your car and you’re trapped? I guess you can sit and wait for help to arrive, and pray that help arrives in time. But when the angry mob is also trying to throw white people in fires, the help might be too busy to get there in time to save you. So really, what the hell do you do?”
— The Lonely Conservative, “If Your Car Is Surrounded By A Rioting Gang Of Thugs What Do You Do?” Sept. 22, 2016

It should not be necessary, after a year of CNN-inspired race riots, to explain that #BlackLivesMatter is not a spontaneous grassroots movement about curbing police brutality. The movement launched last year is led by professional activists, funded by a network of “progressive” tax-exempt foundations (connected to billionaire George Soros) in consultation with Democrat Party operatives. A major goal of #BlackLivesMatter is purely political — i.e., driving black voter turnout to help elect Hillary Clinton and other Democrats — and also to influence public policy, to undermine law enforcement and, arguably, to infringe free speech protections. (Glenn Reynolds has been suspended from USA Today for his “run them down” tweet.) By inciting riots in the black community, the Left simultaneously incites fear in the white community, and when white people condemn the kind of criminal violence #BlackLivesMatter inspires — first in Ferguson, then in Baltimore, most recently in Charlotte — this response is labeled “racism.” No one can credibly claim Professor Reynolds is a racist, and yet his “run them down” tweet made him a target of the Thought Police, and the online progressive bully mob turned its rage against him. Thus are the limits of discourse increasingly narrowed in a way that favors the Democrat Party.

This is not an accident.

These consequences of the #BlackLivesMatter movement — which the Democrat Party’s media machine, particularly CNN, have helped promote — were predictable, and it is therefore not a paranoid “conspiracy theory” to assume that these consequences are entirely intentional. It would be naïve in the extreme to suppose that the professional activists who descended on Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 didn’t know what they were doing, or what the results would be. Militant anarchists produce violent chaos, racial mau-mauing begets hostility, and history provides enough lessons about where such movements lead that only fools could believe that the sponsors of #BlackLivesMatter (including CNN and the Democrat Party) did not foresee the consequences.

 

That message to truck drivers (including my brother Kirby) to “avoid the area near I85 and I77 if at all possible” was sent out Wednesday night after a criminal mob descended on the freeway in downtown Charlotte, intent on perpetrating violence. As Professor Reynolds pointed out in his statement to USA Today, his “run them down” tweet was in response to a local TV reporter’s interview with a driver whose truck had been looted by the vandal horde: “She is still inside her truck as people loot her cargo and burn it. She fears for her life. . . . ‘I understand they want to make a statement but they are hurting innocent people trying to make a living.’ . . . This was an absolutely horrifying interview. She kept asking me where police are. She’s trapped inside as people destroy her truck and cargo.” It was this threat to an innocent civilian — a female truck driver, surrounded by a mob of dangerous thugs, with no police protection amid the violent riot #BlackLivesMatter activists had deliberately provoked — that brought back a vivid memory of the past for Professor Reynolds: “I remember Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was beaten nearly to death by a mob during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.”

 

Young people have no memory of the 1992 riots, which were arguably caused by CNN’s dishonest editing of the video in which Rodney King was arrested by Los Angeles police. If you watched the full-length video, and knew that Rodney King was under the influence of PCP at the time he was confronted by police after a high-speed pursuit, you realized that the baton-wielding police were dealing with a dangerously violent suspect who had already been tazed and was still resisting arrest. How are police to handcuff a suspect who is resisting arrest? When a criminal is apprehended and refuses to comply with the commands of officers armed with pistols, this always creates a life-or-death situation for police, because a struggling suspect may attempt to grab the officer’s weapon. Does “social justice” require police suffer death or injury rather than to use their batons to subdue a violent criminal? This was what anyone with common sense could see, once the full video of the Rodney King arrest was shown and the relevant facts had been reported. However, because CNN had spent several days repeatedly broadcasting a deceptively edited version of the video before the full version was finally shown, they created a false impression of the situation that led to the L.A. riots in which the truck driver Reginald Denny was nearly killed.

History teaches us lessons, and anyone old enough to remember 1992 knew what the consequences of #BlackLivesMatter would be. Are we to believe that #BlackLivesMatter leaders, and their accomplices at CNN and in the Democrat Party, did not also foresee this result?

 

Let’s be clear that these riots are anti-cop and pro-criminal. The Charlotte riot was about the police shooting of Keith Scott:

A public records search shows that Scott was convicted in April 2004 of a misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon charge in Mecklenburg County. Other charges stemming from that date were dismissed: felony assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and misdemeanors assault on a child under 12, assault on a female and communicating threats.
In April 2015 in Gaston County Court, Scott was found guilty of driving while intoxicated.
In 1992, Scott was charged in Charleston County, S.C., with several different crimes on different dates, including carrying a concealed weapon (not a gun), simple assault and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He pleaded guilty to all charges.
Scott also was charged with aggravated assault in 1992 and assault with intent to kill in 1995. Both charges were reduced, but the disposition of the cases is unclear.
According to Bexar County, Texas, records, Scott was sentenced in March 2005 to 15 months in a state jail for evading arrest. In July of that year, records show, he was sentenced to seven years in prison on a conviction of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman said Scott completed his sentence and was released from prison in 2011.

Keith Scott was a career criminal with a record in three states. He had a history of armed violence. His victims included women and children. Certainly, he was not a symbolic hero of “social justice.”

#BlackLivesMatter is a racial hate movement, organized with the assistance of the Democrat Party and its media apparatus, with the goal of exploiting hatred in order to elect Hillary Clinton president.

Rioting May Tip Presidential Scales
in Crucial North Carolina
— Bloomberg News

Charlotte protesters ‘hate white people,’
NC Congressman Robert Pittenger says
— Charlotte News-Observer

“Run them down”? Or vote Republican. Same difference.




 

#Charlotte ‘RUN THEM DOWN’ Gets @Instapundit Suspended From @Twitter

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Professor Glenn Reynolds’ response to the anarchy in Charlotte — where a criminal mob of hate-filled Democrat voters looted stores, attacked police and white civilians, and shut down a major freeway — was three words of advice to endangered motorists: “Run them down.”

The Twitter Thought Police suspended Professor Reynolds’ account.

What are we permitted to say about marauding gangs of thieves and thugs? The owners of Twitter have evidently hired Democrat Party activists to control the narrative on their platform, effectively turning it into a propaganda platform for a violent anti-white terrorist organization (to call #BlackLivesMatter what it actually is). Twitter’s policy can be considered an “in-kind” political contribution to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which is counting on #BlackLivesMatter to help her win key swing states like North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Ohio.

Do law-abiding citizens have no right to defend themselves against mob attacks? If a family is in their car on the highway and find themselves surrounded by a gang of criminals who have been roaming the streets committing violence, what are they supposed to do?

 

Todd Starnes analyzes the reality in Charlotte:

It was a night of terror in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A rioting mob shut down Interstate 85 and attacked terrified motorists. A horrified female truck driver told a reporter thugs had boarded the truck and were stealing the cargo and setting it ablaze.
Looters pillaged and plundered a Wal-Mart.
More than a dozen police officers were injured — along with an untold number of civilians and at least three journalists.
The mayhem started earlier in the day after a black police officer shot and killed an armed black man. The dead man’s family disputes the police department’s account of what happened.
Regardless, that does not give agitators a right to engage in acts of domestic terrorism.
I’d like for someone to explain to me how looting a Wal-Mart and shutting down a major interstate advances their cause.
Since 2008 our nation has been rocked with political and racial unrest. But it should come as no surprise.
This is what happens when a nation elects a community organizer to the highest office in the land. This is what a fundamentally transformed nation looks like.

Democrats deliberately foment hatred, and they don’t care who gets hurt, just so long as they can exploit hatred to elect Hillary Clinton.

#FreeInstapundit!

UPDATE: @Instapundit is back: “They reinstated me on the condition that I delete the offending tweet.” Yes, they did that to me a couple of times before I was finally banished to the gulag.