The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

Posted on | June 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

If true, this is good news:

Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been the president’s third military action against targets in the Middle East. Mr. Trump had struck twice at targets in Syria, in 2017 and 2018.
It was not clear whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials. No government officials asked The New York Times to withhold the article.
The retaliation plan was intended as a response to the shooting down of the unmanned, $130 million surveillance drone, which was struck Thursday morning by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the military planning and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.
The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians.
But military officials received word a short time later that the strike was off, at least temporarily.

My hunch is that this report is true, and that the reason a “senior administration official” would share this information with the media is because President Trump wants Iran to know how close they were to getting hammered. The president approved the strike and then decided against it — we were this close to war, and Iran really doesn’t want that.



 

Category: Iran, Military

In The Mailbox: 06.20.19

Posted on | June 20, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.20.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: The Search For An Effective Police Handgun
357 Magnum: The Media Is Not Giving Us The Whole Story – Again
EBL: Housing Alone Will Not Solve Homelessness
Twitchy: Comfortably Smug Reminds Us It’s National Jon Ossoff Lost Day
Louder With Crowder: Dan Crenshaw Says Democrats Are “Living In A Different World”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: New Zealand Is On Its Way To Becoming A Totalitarian State
American Greatness: We Hold All The Cards In The Showdown With Iran
American Power: Inside The Secret Meeting That Changed Red China
American Thinker: Trump’s Orlando Speech – Unprecedented & Remarkable
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Random Notes News
Babalu Blog: President Trump Enjoying Strong Support From South Florida’s Cuban-Americans
BattleSwarm: Deposed Egyptian Islamist President Morsi Dead
CDR Salamander: Sorry, No Tanker War This Week
Da Tech Guy: Metallica – Heavy Metal Monsters With A Libertarian Message, also, Association > Definition
Don Surber: Democrats Embrace Their Segregationist Past, also, Three Good Court Rulings Today
Dustbury: Almost Erie
First Street Journal: The Compulsory Approval Doctrine & Mandatory Acceptance Of Transgenderism
The Geller Report: OR Republicans Refuse To Vote On Marxist Bill & Walk Out – Governor Orders State Police To Arrest Them And Bring Them Back, also, More Than 1500 Migrants In Central American Caravans Have US Criminal Convictions, Including At Least Three Murderers
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, First Amendment News
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood is Trump’s Secret Weapon In 2020
JustOneMinute: Oh, Boy! Say It Ain’t So, Joe
Legal Insurrection: Democrat Aide Who Doxxed Republican Senators During Kavanaugh Hearings Headed To Jail, also, Oberlin College Issues Tendentious FAQ On Gibson’s Bakery Verdict
Michelle Malkin: Dear Oberlin – You Had It Coming, And You STILL Don’t Get It!
The PanAm Post: Venezuela’s Professional Baseball Players – Many Zeroes, Few Heroes In Struggle Against Maduro
Power Line: What Was Mueller Up To? His Victims Speak, also, Roy Moore Will Run For The Senate Again
Shot In The Dark: Sins Of The Fore-Fore-Forefathers
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – The Dominican Republic & Raw Death Rates
The Political Hat: Nature Unnatural – Re-Engineering Humans, Nature Over Humans, & Abolishing Human Families
This Ain’t Hell: The Sky Is Falling! Save The Mantis Shrimp! also, Chief Gallagher’s Case Takes Another Turn
Victory Girls: September 11 War Authority Repealed By House
Volokh Conspiracy: Why We Shouldn’t Treat Survivors & Victims As Authorities On Policy Issues
Weasel Zippers: Burgess Owens Torches Democrats On Slavery, Abortion, The Klan, And Jim Crow, also, MSNBC Anchor Identifies Segregationist Senators As Republicans. Just One Problem…
Megan McArdle: Facebook Must Like Trouble, Because Its New Cryptocurrency Just Means More Of It
Mark Steyn: Where’s That Vatican Border Wall?

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Category: Linkagery

‘All the Leaves Are Brown …’

Posted on | June 20, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

One thing I’ve tried to do with my kids is what I call “cultural education.” Like, there’s no reason children should grow up without an awareness of rock-and-roll classics, and I’ve had many rewarding experiences like the time I heard my youngest son, born in 2000, in the shower singing along to his Spotify rotation of Led Zeppelin. How cool is that?

A couple of days ago, I was driving my youngest daughter (born in 2002) to her summer internship and told her to look up “California Dreamin'” on her Spotify. Why was that song in my mind? Probably some headline I’d read about California’s recent descent into Third World chaos. It’s a forlorn bit of nostalgia to recall what California signified in the 1960s, before Democrats turned it into a socialist nightmare of typhus infections, homeless encampments and heroin needles. At any rate, the song had been stuck in my head and so I asked my 16-year-old daughter to play it on her phone — she’d never heard it before — and when it ended, I said, “That was Number One for the Mamas and Papas in 1966.”

My daughter is quite the chip off the old block, however, and she quickly Googled up the fact that “California Dreamin'” only made it to #4.

That seemed wrong, an injustice. From the first notes of the classical guitar intro to the sonic crescendo of the vocal harmony ending, “California Dreamin'” is a musical masterpiece, two-and-a-half minutes of pure genius in the key of A-minor. In 2004, when Rolling Stone published its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” this 1966 hit was #89 on the list and yet it never actually topped the charts? When I got home, I decided to explore this mystery further and, being rather obsessive about research, I dived in deep.

 

The Mamas and the Papas were formed in 1965 after the breakup of John Phillips’s first group, The Journeymen. Phillips, the son of a Marine Corps officer, had grown up in Alexandria, Virginia, attended a military school and won an appointment to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but quit during his first year and then enrolled at Hampden-Sydney College before dropping out to pursue his musical career in New York City. Phillips became part of the folk-music scene in Greenwich Village, and The Journeymen landed a record contract in 1961, when Phillips was 25. (Click here to watch the group on the TV show Hootenanny in 1963.)

In 1962, while touring with The Journeymen, Phillips met a long-legged 17-year-old model in San Francisco. He divorced his first wife and married the model, Michelle Gilliam, but this new romance was one of the factors that contributed to the breakup of The Journeymen. The other factor was the arrival of The Beatles and the subsequent “British invasion,” which put an end to the folk-music scene. For a while, Phillips tried to keep going down the folk road, teaming up with Denny Doherty (from another Greenwich Village group, the Mugwumps) and Michelle to perform as The New Journeymen, but with little success. It was Doherty who suggested adding his former Mugwumps colleague and occasional girlfriend Cass Elliot (neé Ellen Cohen) to form a quartet. The new group’s name was inspired by the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who referred to their girlfriends as “Mamas.”

Meanwhile, there was a song inspired by Michelle Phillips’s first trip to New York in 1963. According to John Phillips, the couple went for a walk around the city “and all she had was California clothing . . . tennis shoes and . . . a tank top and jeans or something.” There was snow on the ground and Michelle was cold, so the couple went into a church to escape the weather and let her warm up for a few minutes. That night, in their Greenwich Village hotel room, Michelle was asleep while John was playing his guitar when the song began to take shape:

So I tried to wake Michelle up to write the lyrics down that I was doing. And she said, “Leave me alone. I want to sleep.”

He persisted until she did wake up, thus earning herself half the songwriting royalties of one of the greatest songs of the decade. The couple offered the song to folk singer Barry McGuire, who did them the favor of introducing them to Dunhill Records chief Lou Adler. The Mamas and the Papas performed background vocals on McGuire’s version of the song, but his gruff baritone didn’t give the record much energy. So what happened next is that, after Adler signed the Mamas and the Papas to their own contract, John Phillips took the master tape of the session, erased McGuire’s voice, and replaced it with him and Doherty singing the lead in duet. On the second verse (“Stopped into a church”), Doherty sings the solo lead in a strong bluesy tenor and then comes the song’s real magic moment. McGuire’s version of “California Dreamin'” had included a forgettable harmonica solo, but for the Mamas and the Papas version, Phillips brought in top studio pro Bud Shank, a veteran L.A. jazz musician. Shank listened to the track, improvised the alto flute solo, and “nailed it on the first take.” It was absolutely brilliant.

 

The success of “California Dreamin'” had an important influence on pop music in the 1960s, showing that the fusion of rock and folk — pioneered in 1965 by the Byrds — was a durable phenomenon. It helped establish the West Coast as the main scene for American rock music, solidified in 1967 when Jon Phillips organized the Monterrey Pop Festival, with a number of subsequently famous acts, including Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, performing in a show with the Mamas and the Papas as headliners. It’s possible that the subsequent careers of acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne might never have happened had it not been for “California Dreamin’.”

OK, so why did it never make it to Number One?

When my daughter informed me that “California Dreamin'” peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, my assumption was that this was because the top three slots at the time must have been held by classic hits by major groups — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, various Motown hitmakers. And indeed, after the song was first released in December 1965, the songs at the top of the chart included many such big hits by big names. For the week of Jan. 29, 1966, when the Mamas and the Papas were at #44, the Beatles had the #1 spot with “We Can Work It Out,” and upper reaches of the chart also included Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Going to a Go-Go,” #23), Stevie Wonder (“Uptight,” #21), the Rolling Stones (“As Tears Go By,” #6) and the Beach Boys (“Barbara Ann,” #2). But these weren’t the artists who ultimately froze “California Dreamin'” out of the top spot. Instead, on the week of March 12, when the Mamas and the Papas’ record peaked at #4, the song in the third-place spot was a wretched piece of drek by Herman’s Hermits. Why was this inspid tune, “Listen People,” at #3? Apparently because it was featured in a Connie Francis movie, When The Boys Meet The Girls.

OK, that was a fluke. Maybe there was some Hollywood payola involved, but what about the #2 slot that week in March? A one-hit wonder, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra. What luck, eh? But the real shocker was that the #1 song that week was another one-hit wonder, a patriotic tune by a military hero: “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Army Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler. Not a rock classic, to say the least.

Imagine that. You record one of the greatest records of the decade, but never get to Number One because of a stupid song from a crappy teen movie, a novelty tune by Frank Sinatra’s daughter, and a flag-waving tribute to militarism. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

So that was this week’s “cultural education” lesson. Kind of depressing, and the fate of the Mamas and the Papas makes it even sadder. The group broke up in part because Michelle Phillips cheated on her husband, first with Denny Doherty and then with Gene Clark of the Byrds. John Phillips became a heroin addict and, allegedly, raped his own daughter.

What’s perhaps weirdest of all about the Mamas and the Papas is that, whereas John Phillips was the leader of the group, Doherty sang lead on their first hit, and Michelle was movie-star beautiful, “Mama Cass” was the fan favorite, and the only member to have any musical success after the group broke up. The obese daughter of a Baltimore delicatessen owner, she had an IQ of 165 and had toured in a road company of The Music Man before becoming involved in the folk music scene.

Alas, Cass Elliot died at age 32, reportedly choking on a sandwich.

All this, you see, from a song stuck in my head and a conversation with my teenage daughter. The car broke down today. Hit the freaking tip jar.

UPDATE: The comments immediately included objections to my statement that Cass Elliot’s death was “reportedly” from choking on a sandwich. As I said in reply to these comments, I linked to a contemporaneous Rolling Stone article that included this version, attributed to a “post-mortem” examination and a “coroner’s hearing.” This account was also part of the New York Times obituary: “According to The Associated Press, her physician said the singer probably choked on a sandwich.”

 

(Click to enlarge the image.) Yes, of course, I was aware that this has since been classified as an “urban legend,” although I have found only unsourced secondhand stories of how this legend allegedly got started: Supposedly, when they found Mama Cass’s body — she was in England, where she’d just played the London Palladium — there was a sandwich on the nightstand, and this led the coroner to jump to an erroneous conclusion that she had asphyxiated. Heart failure was apparently the actual cause of death, and it has been suggested that Elliot’s health had been impaired by her extreme diets in an effort to lose weight. She had been hospitalized a few months earlier after collapsing prior to a scheduled TV appearance. Certainly, it was not my intention to malign Cass Elliot — a talented performer I always admired — by repeating a disproven story. However, in point of fact, I am still not certain the death-by-choking story has been disproven, because I could not find online any well-sourced account explaining how the original (and supposedly discredited) report made it into the mainstream media before the truth was discovered. So I guess the bottom line here is the same as always: Never trust the New York Times.

Oh, and what I said about my car breaking down? Not an urban legend. Our ancient Nissan overheated on the interstate and I’ve now got a tow bill to worry about, not to mention whatever the repairs cost, so please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Category: California, History, Music

Dear Democrats: Please Nominate the Notorious Gaffe Machine Joe Biden

Posted on | June 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Dear Democrats: Please Nominate the Notorious Gaffe Machine Joe Biden

 

Honestly, I don’t want to drag Joe Biden over this one, but since we’re all living through the Great Wokeness Witch-Hunt of 2019, why shouldn’t the Democrat front-runner pay his pound of flesh?

Several Democratic presidential candidates sharply criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday for invoking two Southern segregationist senators by name as he defended himself over accusations of being “old-fashioned” and fondly recalled the “civility” of the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mr. Biden, speaking at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City on Tuesday night, stressed the need to “be able to reach consensus under our system,” and cast his decades in the Senate as a time of relative comity. His remarks come as some in his party say that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is too focused on overtures to the right as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the event, Mr. Biden noted that he served with the late Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation. Mr. Eastland was the powerful chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Mr. Biden entered the chamber in 1973.
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” said Mr. Biden, 76, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
He called Mr. Talmadge “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.”
“Well guess what?” Mr. Biden continued. “At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Let me remind you of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, where a Supreme Court nominee was viciously smeared because of dubious claims about sexual misconduct in 1982, when he was 17.

That was just wrong, and it’s likewise wrong to drag Biden (or anyone else) for their political activity more than 40 years ago. Unfortunately for Biden, he was the one who raised the subject — quite deliberately — to make a point about how it is necessary, in order to accomplish anything in politics, to work with people who have very different opinions on important issues. And while this shows why Biden’s candidacy might not be the slam-dunk some pundits might think, my hunch is that this won’t actually hurt him much. Let’s face it: Lots of Democrat primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are probably as sick of this “social justice” identity politics stuff as we are. They want to support a Democrat who can beat Trump, and if that requires saying nice things about segregationists, well, “very fine people on both sides,” eh?

Like I said, it’s 2019, and practically everybody is “racist” according to the Left, and having Biden say this kind of stuff might help extinguish the bonfires on which the SJWs want to incinerate us all. But that wasn’t the only controversial thing Joe said Tuesday:

Former Vice President Joe Biden told affluent donors Tuesday that he wanted their support and — perhaps unlike some other Democratic presidential candidates — wouldn’t be making them political targets because of their wealth.
“Remember, I got in trouble with some of the people on my team, on the Democratic side, because I said, you know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who’s made money,” Biden told about 100 well-dressed donors at the Carlyle Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side, where the hors d’oeuvres included lobster, chicken satay and crudites.
“Truth of the matter is, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” Biden said. “We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change,” he said.
Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, both of whom spent decades on Wall Street, were among the attendees at the event.

Sometimes a Democrat accidentally tells the truth.



 

Category: Joe Biden, Racism

In The Mailbox: 06.19.19

Posted on | June 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #656
357 Magnum: What Happens When No One Wants to Work in Health Care?
EBL: Minnesota Nice? How About Wisconsin Whiny?
Twitchy: Chris Cuomo Just Dumped A Buttload Of Gasoline On Occasional Cortex’ Concentration Camp Trash Fire
Louder With Crowder: Devil’s Advocate – Tim Pool Debates Skyler Turden On Big Tech Censorship! also, House Dems Unanimously Pass Bill To Allow Men To Compete As Women

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Courage & Cowardice
American Greatness: Why Wasn’t Everybody Looking For Hillary’s Missing E-Mails?
American Thinker: Time To Indict McCabe, Not Impeach Trump
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Cuba Offers A Glimpse Of What Socialist “Healthcare For All” Really Looks Like
BattleSwarm: Still No Hard Evidence Russia Hacked The DNC, also, President Trump Launches Reelection Bid
Da Tech Guy: The Time To Counter Democratic Vote Fraud Is NOW
Don Surber: Trump Makes His Case For Four More Years
Dustbury: Not Sorry I Missed It
First Street Journal: Welfare For The Well-To-Do
The Geller Report: Obama’s Wholesale Destruction Of National Archive Records, also, State Department Identifies 23 Violations, “Multiple Security Incidents” Concerning Hillary
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Ignorant Or Malicious?
Hollywood In Toto: Taylor Swift Can’t Shake Off Social Justice Scolds
Legal Insurrection: Tens Of People Show Up At “Impeach Trump” Rallies, also, Anti-Zionist Jews Ban Jewish Pride Flag
The PanAm Post: As Brazil Reduces Bureaucracy, Personal Freedom Skyrockets
Power Line: Trump’s McCarthyite Enemies, also, Orlando And Dawn Of The Campaign
Shot In The Dark: The Very Difficult Simultaneous Right & Utterly Wrong Trick
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – How Many Deaths Until It’s No Longer A Coincidence?
The Political Hat: I, For One, Welcome Our Robot-Run Casino Overlords
This Ain’t Hell: Prosecution In Navy SEAL Case’s Murder Charge Hinges On Text Message, also, Documents Show Air Force Housing Contractor Falsified Records To Boost Income
Victory Girls: Occasional Cortex’ Petulant Response To Concentration Camp Criticism
Weasel Zippers: UK Lawmakers Try To Classify Islam As A Race, also, Here He Comes! Polls Say Trump Surging In Battleground States
Mark Steyn: The Brother Who Blew It

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Category: Linkagery

‘Parents Would Be Wise to Monitor the Activity of Their Children Online’

Posted on | June 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

Kayden McIntosh (left), Denali Brehmer (center), Caleb Leyland (right).

So says U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder, announcing new indictments in the bizarre murder of a 19-year-old girl in Alaska:

A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted two of the defendants in the killing of Anchorage teenager Cynthia Hoffman on new child pornography charges.
The indictments represent the latest twist in a tangled case involving two young people whose online relationship, prosecutors say, crossed over into real-world murder plot that drew in five Anchorage teenagers and led to the killing of a young developmentally disabled woman.
“For all the good the internet can do, it can be a very dark place,” said Bryan Schroder, the U.S. Attorney in Alaska, at a press conference in Anchorage on Tuesday. “Parents would be wise to monitor the activity of their children online.”
Denali Brehmer, 18, now faces four federal child pornography charges in addition to state murder charges in the slaying of Cynthia Hoffman.
Darin Schilmiller, the 21-year-old Indiana man who prosecutors say offered Brehmer $9 million to “rape and murder someone in Alaska,” was also included in the indictment announced Tuesday.
He’d already been arrested on federal child pornography offenses last week. The new indictment includes five federal charges against Schilmiller, including conspiracy to produce child pornography, production of child pornography, receipt and distribution of child pornography and coercion and enticement of a minor. . . .
Prosecutors say the murder plot was a bizarre online “catfishing” scheme in which the rural Indiana 21-year-old posed as a millionaire named “Tyler” on the internet and recruited Brehmer to kill Hoffman.
Brehmer, in turn, involved four other Anchorage teenagers in the plan, promising them money, prosecutors say.
Hoffman was taken to the Thunderbird Falls trailhead in Chugiak where she was bound with duct tape, shot and left in the Eklutna River on June 2, according to charges. Authorities say Brehmer sent Schilmiller Snapchat images of Hoffman both before and after the killing.
Hoffman’s family has said she considered Brehmer to be her best friend.
Six people have been charged in her death: Schilmiller, Brehmer, 16-year-old gunman Kayden McIntosh, 19-year-old Caleb Leyland and two unnamed juveniles. . . .
Detectives found images of Brehmer sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl, which she then shared with Schilmiller, who was posing as “Tyler.”
Text message exchanges included in other criminal complaints in the case show the Indiana man asking Brehmer to “rape” the girl, who was said to be 14 but was actually 15. . . .
The indictments do not add detail to the narrative of the killing of Hoffman, or answer the many questions about the interactions between Schilmiller, a 21-year-old from rural Indiana who had a troubling history of befriending people online only to ask them for pictures of their children.

Hey, kids, be careful about people who claim to be millionaires on the Internet. Also, don’t rape and murder people. That’s not cool.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)



 

Category: Alaska, Crime

He Survived Two Tours of Afghanistan, But Then His Crazy Wife Killed Him

Posted on | June 19, 2019 | 2 Comments

Marriage can be more dangerous than war:

An Alabama woman is charged with fatally shooting her Army sergeant husband just days after he obtained an emergency protection of abuse order against her, alleging she was “very mentally ill” and unstable.
Brittnay Ryals Paonessa, 27, is accused of gunning down Brandyn Lloyd Paonessa on Thursday in the front yard of a home in Phenix City, WTVM reports.
Paramedics tried to save the father of four, but Brandyn, a 26-year-old infantryman at Fort Benning who was shot once in the chest, was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators recovered a shotgun from the home and have preserved the weapon as evidence, deputies said.
Court records obtained by the station in Alabama show that the soldier had taken steps to protect himself days prior to his alleged murder, filing for and obtaining an emergency protection from abuse order against his wife just three days earlier, on Monday.
Brandyn accused his wife of being “very mentally ill” and “very unstable,” claiming she had refused to get treatment at a rehab center. He also accused Brittnay of stalking him, as well as his family and friends, and trying to ruin his job as an infantryman after he joined the Army in September 2013.
Brandyn also accused his wife of driving a truck into the couple’s home “3 feet from our children,” according to the filing.
The couple, who had been married since 2013, had three children together and Brittnay has a child from a previous relationship, Al.com reports.
Fort Benning officials confirmed Brandyn’s death in a statement, saying he was assigned to Task Force 1-28, 3rd Infantry Division, and had two combat tours of duty in Afghanistan.

She was “very mentally ill,” allegedly. How many women in Alabama does that describe? Also, never marry a girl named “Brittnay.” If her mother is too stupid to spell Brittany correctly . . .  Well, it’s Alabama, I guess.



 

Category: Crime

Trump Launches Re-Election Campaign With Monster Rally in Orlando

Posted on | June 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Trump Launches Re-Election Campaign With Monster Rally in Orlando

 

This guy is a political genius. A week ahead of the first televised Democrat debates, he stages a gigantic rally in a 20,000-seat Florida arena, with people lining up two days in advance. By doing this, on the four-year anniversary of his June 2015 escalator ride, Trump visibly demonstrates his continued popularity at a time when the media are claiming that polls show him trailing in his re-election race. A few highlights:

As soon as Trump took the stage in his signature red tie, the crowd seemed pleased to have waited. They greeted him with “USA” chants as he recalled the “movement” he started four years ago.
“It turned out to be more than just a great political campaign. It turned out to be a great political movement because of you,” the president said, echoing the same nationalist message that became a staple of his first presidential run. “It’s a movement made up of people … who believe that a nation must care for its own citizens first.” . . .
“Together we’re breaking the most sacred rule of Washington politics: We are keeping our promises to the American people,” he said. . . .
“They’ve been afflicted with an ideological sickness,” Trump said of Democrats, attracting deafening applause as he affirmed that “America is not a socialist country.”
“Republicans do not believe in socialism. We believe in freedom,” he added.
“The days of stealing American jobs and American companies, American ideas and wealth —those days are over,” Trump boldly declared.

Predictably, the media freaked out. CNN cut away from live coverage six minutes into the speech when the crowd started chanting “CNN sucks.”

 

Then, just as Trump was getting back on track and talking about how the election “was our chance to reclaim our government,” CNN fill-in anchor John Berman appeared.
“All right. We’ve been watching the President kick off his reelection bid. He’s been on stage for about six minutes. Within two minutes he did talk about the economy, but within four minutes it was attacks on the media,” he whined.
Berman then looked for a take from CNN political director David Chalian, who processed to lecture the President about wasting his opportunity to talk to the American people about his accomplishments:

But, is Donald Trump going to seize this moment to frame his argument to the American people as to why they should renew his contract for another four years, or is he just going to present us the Trump show, you know, and air his grievances and start the bashing of the free press.

“And he shows no desire whatsoever to try and actually seize this moment to do something different,” Chalian complained.

Having gone all-in on Hillary in 2016, when they earned the moniker “Clinton News Network,” CNN has been playing sore loser ever since. Guess what? Nobody likes a sore loser:

Fox News’ prime time lineup once again dominated its competition last week, besting both CNN and MSNBC combined, as CNN and MSNBC posted their lowest total day ratings of the year in a crucial demographic.
Fox News had the highest ratings on cable television for the week of June 10-16. Fox News’ prime time line up averaged nearly 2.3 million viewers and 315,000 in the critical 25-54 demographic, according to Nielsen Media Research. The network also averaged nearly 1.2 million total day viewers, including 187,000 in the 25-54 demographic. . . .
CNN was ninth in total day ratings and 14th in prime time ratings.
CNN averaged 519,000 in total day viewership, including just 173,000 in the ages 25-54 demographic, its lowest of the year. . . .
CNN’s ratings continue the network’s recent nose dive. Last week, the Home and Garden TV channel nearly doubled the 24 hour cable news network in prime time ratings, averaging 1,289,000 viewers compared to 762,000 viewers for CNN.

Twice as many people watch HGTV as watch CNN. And throwing on-air tantrums probably isn’t going to improve their ratings. Just sayin’ . . .



 

Category: CNN, Donald Trump, Election
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