In The Mailbox: 12.24.19 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | December 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Statistics Are Racist
EBL: The Narrator That Ruined Christmas, also, The Aeronauts
Twitchy: This Delightful Woman Hopes You Take Her Advice For Sticking It To “Your Christian Co-Workers” This Christmas
Louder With Crowder: Top Five Liberal Morons Of 2019

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #130 – The Lessons From Conan Episode
American Conservative: Learning Nothing From The Ghost Of Congress Past
American Greatness: Donald Trump, American Hero
American Power: GPA vs. SAT – Which Better Predicts College Success?
American Thinker: He’s My President, Not My Pastor
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Lifestyles Of The Rich & Communist
Baldilocks: Most Popular Posts Of 2019
BattleSwarm: Wokeness Vs. The Working Class, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Cafe Hayek: “Laissez Faire Is The Best Medicine”
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Pelosi Plays Her Role, also, I’m Old Enough To Remember When “Is The Pope Catholic?” Was A Rhetorical Question
Don Surber: The Rest of The Christianity Today Story
First Street Journal: I Thought Chicago Had Strict Gun Control!
The Geller Report: AG Barr Blasts Soros For His Hand In Promoting Anti-Police Sentiment, also, “The Queen Is The Enemy Of Islam And Must Die”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Interesting Giving
Hollywood In Toto: Killer Tomatoes Is Worse Than You Remember, also, Rambo: Last Blood – Not Racist, Just Rushed & Raw
JustOneMinute: Truth Bombs From Cocaine Mitch
Legal Insurrection: Low Ratings For Last Debate Suggest America May have Tuned Out 2020 Democrats, also, The Democrat Beating Trump In The Polls Isn’t Running…Yet
The PanAm Post: Argentina Needs A Real Alternative To Peronism, also, Why Feminism Needs Men
Power Line: The NYT’s Hate America Project, also, Coming In 2020 – A Nightmare Year For The Left?
Shark Tank: Rooney’s Would-Be Successors Mostly Running As Trump Supporters
Shot In The Dark: City Slickers
The Political Hat: The Twelve Posts Of Christmas (Day 9) (Day 10)
This Ain’t Hell: Tennessee Man Arrested For Stolen Valor, also, Barking At The Moon
Victory Girls: Rep. Debbie Dingell & The Glory Of Inherited Privilege
Volokh Conspiracy: The First Amendment Doesn’t Protect A Right To Smoke
Weasel Zippers: Christianity Today Editor Backs Off, also, Former Dem Rep Jeff Van Drew – Dems Told Me To “Obey” And Vote For Impeachment
Megan McArdle: This Christmas, Let’s Be Thankful For The Gifts Of Innovation & Trade – Also, Cake
Mark Steyn: The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, also, A Walk On The Wilder Side

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Category: Linkagery

The CIA and Conspiracy Theories

Posted on | December 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

For most of my adult life, the Central Intelligence Agency featured prominently in the paranoid worldview of the Left. After all, it is a matter of fact that the CIA fomented coups against pro-Communist governments in various Third World countries, so why shouldn’t the Left — which during the Cold War was always supportive of America’s Communist enemies — fear the shadowy influence of the CIA everywhere?

During the 1970s, for example, some radical feminists cited the fact that Gloria Steinem had once been involved in a CIA “front” group as evidence that the Women’s Liberation Movement had been “infiltrated” by government agents. That kind of Nixon-era paranoia persisted into the Reagan/Bush years, because hadn’t Bush the Elder once been CIA director? Also, “Skull and Bones” at Yale? And what about Cointelpro, huh? Remember Fred Hampton! Free Huey Newton!

The paranoid tendencies of the Left have, however, taken a different turn lately, and now they are convinced the CIA is their friend:

Ever since the impeachment bandwagon got rolling in September, anything said in defense of President Trump is automatically dismissed by Democrats and their media allies as either (a) “Republican talking points,” (b) “Russian propaganda” or (c) a “conspiracy theory.” The self-evident purpose of this rhetoric is to delegitimize the president’s defenders as either dishonest partisans, agents of a foreign enemy, or purveyors of paranoid delusions. It is impermissible, by the rules of the game as played on CNN and in other “mainstream” media outlets, to ask whether such accusations are more properly directed at Democrats. Are they never guilty of partisanship? Didn’t Democrats spend three years promoting a “collusion” conspiracy theory? And why is it that Russia is the only foreign power whose influence deserves our vigilance?
The near-universal loathing of Trump in the N.Y./D.C. media axis has made it difficult to get a fair hearing for the evidence that points to the role of the so-called “Deep State” in creating the circumstances that have led us to this impeachment circus. With few exceptions — notable among them Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone — journalists on the Left have completely abandoned their traditional skepticism toward our national security apparatus and the foreign-policy elites in Washington. Some of us are old enough to remember the 1970s and ’80s, when left-leaning media sought to expose the shadowy machinations of the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI. Now that opposition to Trump has become the media’s idée fixe, however, every journalist is expected to celebrate former FBI Director James Comey’s honesty and patriotism, and none of them seem interested in asking questions about why former CIA Director John Brennan’s fingerprints seem to be everywhere on the effort to destroy Trump. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

Category: Democrats

The Strange Career of Eric Boehlert

Posted on | December 23, 2019 | Comments Off on The Strange Career of Eric Boehlert

Over the weekend, Breitbart News editor Alex Marlowe gave a speech at a Turning Point USA conference in which he invoked the memory of the late Andrew Breitbart. Coincidentally, I happened to be present at the 2007 Young America’s Foundation conference where Andrew first met Alex, who was then a student at UC-Berkeley, but I digress . . .

At the TPUSA event, Marlowe played a video clip for the attendees — most of them too young to remember Andrew in his heyday — in which Breitbart expressed his populist contempt for the elite media. And if you remember how Andrew operated on Twitter, one of his frequent targets was Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America.

You may recall the notorious paranoia of MMfA’s David Brock, and may even remember Brock’s ugly lawsuit against his ex-boyfriend, but surely the kids at TPUSA don’t understand the history of MMfA, which is basically this: During the presidency of George W. Bush, progressives became quite desperate to defeat what they saw as the success of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (to use Hillary Clinton’s phrase) in shaping the media environment. In particular, they hated the influence of Fox News, and feared that “mainstream” journalists were being too friendly to Republicans. With money from George Soros, among others, MMfA was created as an attack machine, compiling dossiers on “right-wing” figures in the media, in an effort to discredit anyone who disagreed with the Democrats’ left-wing agenda. Boehlert, who had previously worked for Salon-dot-com after getting his start in print media covering entertainment at Billboard and Rolling Stone, joined MMfA in 2006 and worked there for more than a decade. But in the past two years, Boehlert left MMfA and, since December 2018, has been blogging at DailyKos.

Excuse me? How does a veteran journalist go from a full-time position at a major left-wing 501(c)3 to doing a free DailyKos blog? Was there some kind of scandal or perhaps a falling-out with David Brock?

At one point, Boehlert was calling himself an employee of ShareBlue Media (an attempt by Brock “to build the left’s answer to Breitbart News,” which has since morphed into The American Independent) but it would seem that Boehlert left that gig sometime in late 2018.

There’s been no explanation of Boehlert’s career change, but he continues to pound away at his favorite themes in his DailyKos blog:

The press doesn’t have — or won’t use
— the proper language to describe
today’s radical Republican Party
— Dec. 8

Media pushes ‘Dems in disarray’
over impeachment — again
— Dec. 15

The New York Times’ impeachment coverage
devolves into Republican talking points
— Dec. 16

Media fail: The press keeps
covering impeachment through
the eyes of the Republican Party
— Dec. 18

Boehlert is a one-trick pony, endlessly repeating the same argument, that the liberal “mainstream” media is too nice to Republicans. You really have to be living in an alternative universe to believe, for example, that the New York Times is publishing “Republican talking points,” but in Boehlert’s mind, the only acceptable media coverage of politics would be nothing but press releases from the DNC. Boehlert denounces any “mainstream” news organization that ever treats Republicans as representing a legitimate point of view. Boehlert clearly desires to exercise the authority of a commissar in a totalitarian Ministry of Truth.

Boehlert’s weird worldview was on display Sunday morning:

MSNBC guest Eric Boehlert said the media’s focus on white working-class voters is “dangerous” and “racist” during an appearance on AM Joy.
“This obsession, and it goes back to the day after he was inaugurated, this obsession with interviewing white, Midwestern Trump voters and asking them what they think about Trump, it is a dangerous, it is a racist message,” Boehlert said. “Because the message is, white Republicans are who matter in this country. Their opinions are what really matter. The press invented this beat out of whole cloth after Trump was elected.”
Boehlert said that the opinions of white working-class voters are not news.
“After impeachment, article after article: ‘Trump voters, what did you think of impeachment?’ What’s the point? That’s not news,” he said. “That’s just not news. And again, I think it’s dangerous and I think it’s frankly racist.”

Could it be that Boehlert’s monomaniacal obsession has made him unemployable? Has he become so paranoid that nobody wants to hire him? Or maybe that “vast right-wing conspiracy” is to blame . . .

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Media Bias

Crazy People Are Dangerous (and They’re All Using Online Dating Apps Now)

Posted on | December 23, 2019 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous (and They’re All Using Online Dating Apps Now)

See if you can’t spot the red-flag warning here:

A Melbourne woman who met a man using an online dating app, invited him over for sex and then strangled him in bed has been found guilty of manslaughter.
Jamie Lee Dolheguy was charged with murder over the death of Indian student Maulin Rathod at a Sunbury house in July 2018.
But a Supreme Court jury instead found she was guilty of manslaughter.
It was never disputed that Dolheguy killed Mr Rathod but her barrister questioned whether she had “murderous intent”.
She was 18 when she met her victim via the online dating app Plenty of Fish and they exchanged brief messages before agreeing to meet up.
Her online profile indicated she was dating for the first time, had borderline personality disorder, suicidal ideation and extreme fetishes, including bondage.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” Mr Rathod told Dolheguy via text before he drove over to her house.
While Mr Rathod, 24, was on his way, the teenager went online and searched “I’m going to kill someone tonight for fun” and “I will kill someone tonight, I want to commit murder”.

If she tells you she’s crazy, believe her.

When my brother Kirby told me about this story, I Googled “Plenty of Fish murder” and guess what? Online dating is a good way to get killed:

Mom of 3 killed in apparent murder-suicide
by man she met on dating app, family says
— KDFW-TV, July 19, 2019

Christine Wood met accused killer
on Plenty of Fish dating site, court told
— CBC, April 30, 2019

Ohio woman, 24, ‘shot dead man, 27, she met
on dating site Plenty Of Fish and robbed him’
— Daily Mail, Feb. 14, 2019

Suspected serial killer hunted victims
on Tinder and Plenty of Fish as survivors
reveal he was a ‘cool guy’ until he ‘flipped’
— UK Sun, July 31, 2018

Man jailed for life after murdering
woman he met on Plenty of Fish
— UK Independent, March 21, 2018

Parolee Met Woman On Plenty Of Fish;
He’s Accused Of Killing Her
— Patch.com, Feb. 15, 2018

Florida dad killed after woman
he meets on online dating site PlentyOfFish
sets him up to be robbed
— NY Daily News, Aug. 23, 2016

Violent fantasist who killed young teacher
on their first date after meeting her
on Plenty of fish is jailed for life
— Daily Mail, June 3, 2016

Seems to be kind of pattern here, you might say. And what have I been telling you for years? Online dating is for losers. The mere fact that someone is on a dating app tells you that nobody who knows them in real life wants to date them — an automatic red-flag warning. And coincidentally, you may remember this case:

Ayoola Ajayi, 31, was charged in June with murdering 23-year-old University of Utah student Mackenzie Lueck. There was a related development in the case last week:

The man accused of killing 23-year-old University of Utah student MacKenzie Lueck is one step closer to a trial for unrelated charges alleging he kidnapped and sexually abused another woman in March 2018.
Ayoola Ajayi, facing four felony counts, is accused of abusing a woman he met on the Latter-day Saint dating app Mutual. After hearing testimony and arguments from attorneys, 3rd District Judge Vernice Trease determined Friday that there was enough evidence for the case to move forward to trial.
Ajayi pleaded not guilty Friday to aggravated kidnapping and three charges of forcible sexual abuse. A trial has been set for February.
In that case, prosecutors allege that Ajayi invited a woman to his home to cook her dinner on March 10, 2018, and that while they watched TV on his couch, he started “intensely” kissing her and trying to touch her inappropriately and forcefully.
When the woman attempted to get away, Ajayi allegedly pinned her down and bit her at least three times, “causing her significant pain, and left bruising and bite marks,” the charges said.
The woman came forward to police after Ajayi was arrested for allegedly killing Lueck in June.
He faces charges of aggravated murder, aggravated kidnapping, obstruction of justice and abuse or desecration of a human body in connection with Lueck’s slaying. . . .
Investigators have searched Lueck and Ajayi’s social media profiles and online activity, and have said evidence showed the two were texting the night Lueck disappeared. But police have not disclosed how they first met.

We may never learn the details in the Lueck case. Ask yourself why prosecutors are bringing Ajayi to trial first on this earlier sexual assault case, and the obvious answer is that they want to convict him of this felony before they move forward with the murder case. Once he is convicted in the sexual assault case, Ajayi will be a prison inmate and there will be no chance of him making bail. Then the prosecution will have more leverage to get Ajayi to accept a plea bargain. They want him to plead guilty, I suspect, because they want to spare Mackenzie’s family the ordeal of learning exactly why it was their daughter agreed to meet a complete stranger at 3 a.m. She was reportedly meeting men through “sugar baby” sites, which isn’t exactly prostitution, but close enough.

Category: Crime

Rule 5 Sunday: Christmas With Attila The Santa & The Queen Of The Underworld

Posted on | December 22, 2019 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Every year, the mobile game Fate/Grand Order has a Christmas event, each more bizarre than the last, usually featuring Evil Jeanne d’Arc cosplaying as Santa by way of repenting for her evil deeds. This year, though, all the Santa!AlterJeannes – and all the other servants in Chaldea – are stricken with Sumerian Summer Fever, and it’s up to Attila the Santa and her magic sheep Doomzy (pictured below) to accompany you to the underworld and find out why the queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal (also pictured below), has turned on her former allies before Christmas is ruined for everyone. Oh, and everyone dies of the fever. It’s a goofy, madcap sort of Christmas tale, with Attila handing out all manner of semi-appropriate presents to friends and enemies alike. Except for Nergal, who is definitely getting some hot tongue and cold shoulder from his wife the Queen…

Santa Attila and her magical sheep Doomzy.

Ereshkigal, not to be confused with her sister Ishtar.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny starts the preparations with Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #839, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five UFO Kookery, Friday Evening Culture, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL brings us Joan Blondell, Zooey Deschanel, Alyssa Milano, Not Peaches & Cream, Eartha Kitt, Vintage Christmas, and Hollywood for the Holidays.

A View From The Beach offers The Hunted Melissa George, Fish Pic Friday, Emergency Morning Post, Great Moments in Climate Hypocrisy, Atlantic States Governors Ask Feds to Shut Down Menhaden Fishery in Bay, Tattoos for Tuesday, Mounds of Monday and Great Moments In Climate Hypocrisy – Flying Nun Uses Jet Fuel to Cross Continent for Warming Protest.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe of the week is Ann Sothern, and at Bacon Time, there’s a nip in the air.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

A Fitting Memorial to Lonell Irvin

Posted on | December 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

Saturday would have been Lonell Irvin’s 23rd birthday. Unfortunately, Lonell wasn’t there to celebrate the occasion, because he was stupid.

In April, Lonell tried to carjack a guy’s BMW at gunpoint, but the driver had a concealed carry license, and that was the end for Lonell.

Despite his fatal stupidity, Lonell was beloved by his family in Chicago, so they had a memorial for him on Saturday, and it seems to have been attended by many similarly stupid people:

Chicago police are questioning a person of interest after 13 people were wounded, four of them critically, during a shooting inside a memorial gathering early Sunday in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, authorities said. . . .
The violence began at about 12:40 a.m. at a house party in the 5700 block of South May Street commemorating the birthday of a man who died in a previous shooting. Someone at the party opened fire, sending 13 people to area hospitals, according to Chicago police.
The injured ranged in age from 16 to 48, and a 16-year-old boy was one of those in critical condition though it was later improved to “serious,” said Fred Waller, who heads the patrol division for Chicago police.
Two people remained in critical condition as of Sunday afternoon, according to Officer Michelle Tannehill, a police spokeswoman: a 40-year-old man who’d been shot in the chest and was being treated at the University of Chicago Hospital, and a 21-year old man suffering from a gunshot wound to the back, who was at St. Bernard Hospital.
Two people initially were detained and questioned after the shooting, though only one of the two is thought to have fired shots, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. No charges have been announced.
The party was in honor of Lonell Irvin, a 22-year-old man fatally shot near the intersection of State Street and Ida B. Wells Drive during an attempted carjacking April 26 in the Loop, according to multiple people at the scene. . . .
Waller said there was a dispute during the party and someone started shooting. Once people started running outside, video surveillance from a city police camera captured images of someone firing more shots outside the home.
A different person also was caught on surveillance video shooting at a vehicle, Waller said.
“From outside, definitely there was two different shooters,” Waller said. “It looked like they were just shooting randomly at people as they exited the party.”

Question for the reader: Has anyone ever started “shooting randomly” on your street after midnight? If you throw a party at your house and someone has a “dispute,” does this lead to gunfire? If you answered “no,” then you probably don’t live in Chicago, where such activity is routine.

So far this year, 449 people have been shot to death in Chicago, and more than 2,000 others were wounded by gunfire. So the good news is, more than 80% of Chicago shooting victims survive. About 45 people get shot in an average week in Chicago, but the murder rate is actually down significantly from 2016, when more than 700 people were killed.

A 29-year-old woman near the scene of this latest shooting told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune: “Your kids can’t grow up, you can’t do nothing. This is what our life is going to be about. . . . Y’all can try your best to stay out here and watch these streets all night, but no matter how they do it, it’s going to be multiple deaths, multiple shootings, innocent people getting shot. I cannot wait to leave Chicago.”

Hey, good luck with that. Hope you make it out alive.

Category: Chicago, Crime

Who the F*** Is @EmmaVigeland?

Posted on | December 22, 2019 | Comments Off on Who the F*** Is @EmmaVigeland?

“I’ll take ‘Stupid Progressive Twitter Hot Takes’ for $400, Alex.”

We were at dinner last night following the conclusion of The Other Podcast when I saw Emma Vigeland’s bizarre tweet about Tulsi Gabbard on my phone and said, “Who the f**k is this Emma Vigeland?” To which my buddy John Hoge calmly replied, “Oh, you’re just now seeing her?”

Evidently, many people on Twitter consider Ms. Vigeland an obnoxious idiot but declaring “white male bitter incels” the chief supporters of Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign was unusually offensive even to those long familiar with Ms. Vigeland’s oeuvre.

Who is this person? The first rule of warfare is, “Know your enemy,” and whenever I encounter someone like this for the first time, I immediately start researching their background. The first thing you have to know about Emma Vigeland is that, in 2016, she was all-in for Bernie Sanders, and was at that time a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard, who was also a Sanders supporter. In 2016, Ms. Vigeland praised Gabbard for calling out the “corporate Democrats” who had rigged the 2016 primaries on behalf of an “unbelievably corrupt candidate” (i.e., Hillary Clinton). In fact, Ms. Vigeland at that time said of Gabbard: “God, I hope she runs for president in 2020 and just rubs it in your face.”

Well, what changed in the past three years? In 2016, Ms. Vigeland had just graduated from LaFayette College, a private liberal arts school where the cost of attendance is more than $70,000 (including room and board). That summer, she worked as an intern for The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur’s progressive YouTube channel, which then hired her as a political correspondent. Of course, supporting Bernie was more or less mandatory for anyone involved in The Young Turks. Cenk was like the original “Bernie Bro,” and Ms. Vigeland . . . well, she’s very close to Cenk.

Look, I never even heard of Emma Vigeland until Saturday night, and I don’t even know if she is heterosexual or not, so I certainly would not suggest that she has anything other than a professional relationship with Cenk Uygur. Readers are free to draw their own conclusions, of course, but don’t blame me, you dirty-minded right-wingers.

In early 2018, Ms. Vigeland interviewed a certain Democratic congressional candidate in a certain New York congressional district:

“Within minutes of meeting her, it was undoubtedly clear: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a progressive star.”

You have to be a progressive star to recognize who the progressive stars are, I guess, and who can deny that Emma Vigeland has enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom? Just a working-class girl from a gritty blue-collar neighborhood in New Jersey who got lucky. Oh, wait a minute, let me check my notes . . . No, it seems that Emma grew up two blocks from the Glen Ridge Country Club, in a five-bedroom home valued at $1 million. Her father is a big-shot lawyer who got his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth and his law degree from Columbia — “double Ivy,” as they say. Her father spent $35,000 a year to send Emma to the prestigious private Kent Place School before sending her to LaFayette College, because only the best will do for Daddy’s Little Princess.

Why is socialism so appealing to rich girls like Emma Vigeland? And what explains Ms. Vigeland’s seething hatred of all white males, with the notable exception of the elderly socialist Bernie Sanders?

Well, I’m a blogger, not a psychiatrist, so I’ll leave it professionals to explain Emma’s deep-rooted neurotic tendencies. But now you know the answer to the question, who the f*** is Emma Vigeland?

Category: Democrats