The Other McCain

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

Chicago PD: ‘Shameful … Despicable’ How Jussie Smollett ‘Smeared This City’

Posted on | February 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Chicago PD: ‘Shameful … Despicable’ How Jussie Smollett ‘Smeared This City’

 

America just got a lesson: Don’t ever mess with Eddie Johnson.

The Chicago Police Superintendent was visibly angry in a press conference this morning, denouncing the “shameful” and “despicable” way Jussie Smollett “smeared this city” with a hate-crime hoax Johnson said was motivated by the actor’s desire for a higher TV salary.

UPDATE 11:12 a.m. ET: The superintendent and Chicago’s top detective Edward Wodnicki laid out the case of how Smollett, “dissatisfied” with his salary on the Fox series Empire, first mailed a fake hate letter to himself and, when that failed to get the reaction he had hoped for, paid Nigerian brothers Abimbola “Abel” Osundairo and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo to stage an attack on him in the wee hours of Jan. 29. Even though police had “questions” about Smollett’s tale from very early in their investigation, Johnson said, they gave Smollett “the benefit of the doubt” as a potential victim until the Osundairo brothers confessed their role Friday.

“But when we discovered the actual motive, quite frankly, it pissed everybody off,” Johnson said in the press conference.

UPDATE 11:26 a.m. ET: There was never a chance that Smollett could have gotten away with the hoax, as Wodnicki detailed how Chicago detectives examined hours of video surveillance, interviewed more than a hundred potential witnesses, and executed more than than search warrants and subpoenas to solve the crime. Tracing the movements of the Osundairo brothers before and after the staged “attack,” investigators were able to locate the cabs and ride-shares they had used, which led them to identify the suspects, who had boarded a flight to Nigeria from O’Hare Airport hours after the incident. One of the Osundairo brothers had been an extra on Empire, and both were acquainted with Smollett.

UPDATE 11:41 a.m. ET: While detectives in Chicago had to wait for the suspects to return from Nigeria Feb. 13 before questioning them, Smollett’s fake hate crime received nationwide attention.

“Celebrities, news commentators and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor,” Johnson said at the press conference, contrasting this publicity with the usual indifference toward Chicago’s violent crime problem. “I wish the families of gun violence [victims] got this kind of attention.”

UPDATE 12:03 p.m. ET: Smollett claimed he was attacked by two white men who called him racial and homophobic slurs and shouted “This is MAGA country!” — a reference to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. This claim of a political motive sparked suspicion by Michelle Malkin and other conservative commentators, who wondered why two white Republicans would be in downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. on a night when a “polar vortex” brought sub-zero temperatures to the city. As I wrote in my Monday column for The American Spectator:

Anyone with common sense could see that Jussie Smollett’s story didn’t add up, but evidently none of the Democrats running for president in 2020 has any common sense. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Sen. Kamala Harris used almost identical language in proclaiming Smollett the victim of “an attempted modern-day lynching.” Former Vice President Joe Biden declared: “We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts.” Smollett was the victim of “the latest of too many hate crimes against LGBTQ people and people of color,” said New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, adding: “We are all responsible for condemning this behavior and every person who enables or normalizes it.” Other leading Democrats joined this chorus of condemnation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the “racist, homophobic attack… an affront to our humanity,” while New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez asserted that the attack on Smollett was indicative of “the rise of hate crimes.” No Democrat more explicitly pointed the finger of blame than California Rep. Maxine Waters who said “this is happening for a reason.… It’s coming from the President of the United States. He’s dog-whistling every day.”

UPDATE 12:21 p.m. ET: During his Thursday morning press conference, Chicago’s top cop focused his anger on the perpetrator of the hoax. “I’m offended by what has happened and I’m also angry,” Johnson said, condemning Smollett for faking a “publicity stunt” that had dragged “Chicago’s reputation through the mud.”

“We do not, nor will we ever, tolerate hate in this city,” the superintendent said, expressing outrage that Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career.”

UPDATE 12:34 p.m. ET: The final word, from the Commander-in-Chief:




 

PREVIOUSLY:

 

 

Category: Chicago, Crime, Racism

America’s Dog Rape Epidemic

Posted on | February 21, 2019 | Comments Off on America’s Dog Rape Epidemic

 

In the middle of a long Wednesday night post, I made mention of two recent cases — in Oldsmar, Florida, and South Euclid, Ohio — in which men were arrested for having sex with dogs. But these are not isolated incidents. There is a nationwide trend of dog rape.

PORTLAND, OREGON:

A Portland man was arrested [Feb. 13] after authorities say he admitted to raping his fiancée’s dog, which later was euthanized after the sexual assault caused internal injuries.
Fidel Lopez, 51, told Portland police that he and the dog, a Lhasa Apso mix named Estrella, were lying in bed last November while his girlfriend was out, and he got upset when she wouldn’t respond to his calls and texts, according to a probable cause affidavit. Lopez said he’d been drinking alcohol at the time and “out of anger” sexually assaulted the dog, the affidavit said. . . .
According to the affidavit, the girlfriend later brought the dog to DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital after she heard Estrella whining while hiding under the couch and discovered blood and injuries to the animal. She told staff that her fiancé “displayed some potential bestiality tendencies,” mentioning that he showed his genitals to dogs and bragged about watching another person sexually assault a dog.
The girlfriend said Lopez had asked her if she’d consider getting a dog bigger than Estrella, the affidavit said.
A necropsy was performed on Estrella after she was euthanized. Traces of Lopez’s DNA were found in the dog, the affidavit said.

HOUSTON, TEXAS:

A Houston man has been charged with three counts of bestiality after allegedly offering up three of his dogs for sex to an undercover police officer, according to the Houston Police Department.
Juan Pablo Tschen, 31, was arrested [Feb. 14] and has since been released after posting $3,000 bond.
Three of his dogs believed to be used for bestiality were also seized during his arrest, police said.
Tschen was collared during an undercover sting conducted by the Houston Police Department’s major offenders and animal cruelty units. He’s accused of participating in several online forums surrounding the illegal act, which grabbed the attention of investigators.
At some point, he offered up his dogs to an undercover officer, according to court documents.

BOSSIER CITY, LOUISIANA:

A state district judge has refused to lower bond for a Bossier City police officer accused of performing sex acts with a dog.
Terry Yetman, 38, will remain jailed under a $350,000 bond. . . .
Yetman, a four-year veteran of the Bossier City Police Department, was arrested in December on 40 counts of sexual abuse of an animal.
Prosecutors said Yetman engaged in sexual conduct with a dog and possessed pornographic images of a person and an animal engaged in sexual conduct. . . .
The dog, a Belgian Malinois, is being moved from the local animal shelter to an animal rescue in Texas, prosecutors said.

SUFFOLK, VIRGINIA:

Police in Virginia say a couple who owned a dog kennel engaged in bestiality caught on video.
Citing [an Oct. 15] release from Suffolk police, The Virginian-Pilot reports 42-year-old Christina Patterson was charged with multiple counts of bestiality and animal cruelty more than a year after the investigation began.
Police say any state charges against 47-year-old Richard Allen Patterson cannot proceed until his federal firearms charges from July 2017 are resolved.

BELLMEAD, TEXAS:

A Bellmead man was charged with trespassing, evading arrest and bestiality after officers responded to a report that a dog was being sexually abused [July 7] in the backyard of a home, police said . . .
Philip Mercon, 27, was arrested without incident, police said.
He was taken to the McLennan County Jail.
His name did not appear on the jail’s online roster late Monday morning.
Officers were sent just before 2 a.m. . . . to the 2000 Block of Montrose Street in Bellmead where a witness told them he observed a man “sexually abusing a dog,” police said in a press release . . .
When the man spotted the officers, he let go of the dog and tried to run, police said.

These cases are the tip of an iceberg of America’s dog-rape epidemic because, of course, most of these sick fiends are never caught. And while it’s impossible to estimate how common these heinous crimes are, they certainly are more common than MAGA-hat-wearing racist homophobes assaulting black actors at 2 a.m. on the streets of Chicago.

Think about that. The press conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET.

 

Category: Crime

Chicago Police Arrest Jussie Smollett in the Dumbest ‘Hate Crime’ Hoax Ever

Posted on | February 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Chicago Police Arrest Jussie Smollett in the Dumbest ‘Hate Crime’ Hoax Ever

 

Stupid is as stupid does:

“Empire” star Jussie Smollet was charged Wednesday night with lying to cops when he claimed to be the victim of a racist and homophobic attack — and authorities want him to surrender, police said.
Chicago PD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Smollett was charged with filing a false police report, a felony, after the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office approved the criminal complaint. Cops were seeking to have Smollett turn himself in as soon as possible, Gugliemi said.
“We’re trying to get in touch with his lawyers,” he told The Post.
Under Illinois law, Smollett, 36, could face up to three years in prison if convicted of the crime.
The development came hours after Smollett was formally classified as a suspect and followed a stream of recent reports that increasingly cast doubt on the TV actor’s story, including that two brothers told investigators Smollett had paid them $3,500 to stage the Jan. 29 incident.
Siblings Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo were escorted into the grand jury offices at Chicago’s Leighton Criminal Court Building about 30 minutes before Smollett was formally named a suspect.
The two men were surrounded by about a half-dozen people in civilian clothing as they walked into the secure area on the fourth floor of the courthouse around 3:45 p.m. local time.
A little over two hours later, 16 members of the grand jury were escorted out of the area and into a pair of elevators while reporters were kept at bay.
The brothers also left the building minutes later. Their lawyer, Gloria Schmidt, told reporters, “Jussie’s conscience is probably not letting him sleep right now.’’

Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Gugliemi announced on Twitter that Smollett was taken into custody this morning and that police superintendent Eddie Johnson and chief detective Edward Wodnicki will hold a press conference at 9 a.m. CT today. The obvious question: How stupid did Jussie Smollett have to be to think he could get away with this?

Well, he’s apparently stupid enough to violate 18 US Code 1038 — mail fraud, a federal crime that could earn him more time than the four years he’s facing under Illinois law. His lawyers insist that Smollett deserves the presumption of innocence, however, despite the fact that he is accused of a crime that was intended to defame innocent white males.




 

 

Category: Chicago, Crime, Racism

In The Mailbox: 02.20.19

Posted on | February 21, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.20.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #537
EBL: Father Knows Best – Kamala Harris Gets A Dressing Down From Her Dad
Twitchy: Blue Checks Whine Patriarchy’s Upcoming Version Of Ghostbusters Is Poking At “Festering Open Wounds”
Louder With Crowder: LGBTWTFBBQ Sports Group Drops Lesbian Martina Navratilova For Calling Trans Women Cheaters

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Child Sacrifice
American Power: CNN Hires Conservative Hottie Sarah Isgur, also, Kirsten Powers Apologizes
American Thinker: Ilhan Omar’s Hateful Anti-Semitism & Anti-Americanism
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Follow-Up – Houston To End No-Knock Raids
CDR Salamander: Small Is Big; Early Is Timely
Don Surber: Gays Oppose Trump’s Push For Gay Rights
Dustbury: Tales Of The Blue Oval
Fred On Everything: The Empire – Now Or Never
The Geller Report: Watch Bernie Sanders Praise Fidel In Video, also, SecState Pompeo Says ISIS Muslima Can’t Come Back To USA
Hogewash: Gleefully Seizing! also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: New Study Shows Daily Chocolate Protects The Brain
JustOneMinute: GA House Speaker David Ralston & The Silence of The Dogs, also, Bernie & Bloomberg
Legal Insurrection: Snopes Fact-Checks Babylon Bee, also, Sanders Blows Past Other Candidates, Raises $5.9 Million In First 24 Hours
Michelle Malkin: Malkin’s Handy History Of Fake Noose
The PanAm Post: Proof Of Extensive Cuban Military Presence In Venezuelan Armed Forces
Power Line: Not With A Bang But A Whimper, also, The Indoctrination Of Monica Witt
Shark Tank: Florida Republicans Form Space Caucus
Shot In The Dark: Gun Rights Rally. Saturday
STUMP: The Amazon Escape – On Negotiation & Leverage
The Political Hat: The European Union Censors The Internet
This Ain’t Hell: Former Army Vet, Dodgers Great Don Newcombe, RIP, also, Political Theater Or Simply Criminal?
Victory Girls: DC Swamp Creature Occasional Cortex Used PAC Money To Pay Boyfriend
Volokh Conspiracy: SCOTUS Rules Excessive Fines Clause Applies to States, Constrains Civil Asset Forfeiture
Weasel Zippers: $12 Million In Meth Hidden In Frozen Strawberries Seized On TX Border, also, Sanders Says Breadlines Are A Good Thing
Megan McArdle: We Should Have Been Cautious Of Smollett’s Dramatic Tale From The Start
Mark Steyn: What Not To Wear (Hard News Edition), also, Chasing Butts Across The Commonwealth


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Category: Linkagery

Fear and Loathing: Journalism in the Age of Trump Derangement Syndrome

Posted on | February 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Fear and Loathing: Journalism in the Age of Trump Derangement Syndrome

“In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of ‘lead’ — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
“What?
“Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
“Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to great lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag,” Rolling Stone, July 4, 1974 (collected in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)

You know who Hunter S. Thompson hated? Journalism professors.

He went out of his way to insult the academic a–holes at the Columbia Journalism Review, which published a review by a professor disparaging Thompson’s lack of objectivity in covering the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone. By the way, no one has ever proven Ed Muskie was not addicted to Ibogaine, and Big Ed never sued for libel, so we are entirely justified in concluding it must have been true.

As I remarked in July 2012, while I was up to my eyeballs in covering a presidential campaign, “there is nothing wrong with 21st-century journalism except (a) the continued existence of the Columbia Journalism Review and (b) the shortage of good, cheap mescaline.” Right-wingers aren’t supposed say things like that, but I got into the journalism racket long before I became a right-winger, and I started doing serious drugs in 10th grade, so even though I long ago became a responsible member of the bourgeoisie, I never lost my fondness for Hunter Thompson and his drug-addled anti-establishment radicalism. The fact that Thompson was a leftist has not diminished my appreciation for his work, despite my status as a sober adult and a conservative stalwart. What I liked about Thompson when I was a teenager I still like about him, namely that he wrote in a way that was fun to read.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971)

That’s it — grab the reader by the eyeballs in the very first sentence, so that he is absolutely compelled to keep reading the whole thing.

Too many journalists nowadays take it for granted that their readers will want to read whatever godawful clickbait they publish on the Internet, and yet when they get laid off, they won’t admit that the miserable quality of their work has anything to do with it. #LearnToCode is “harassment,” according to Twitter, and anyone who criticizes the media for publishing defamatory falsehoods is accused of “gleefully seizing.” If you’re gonna seize something, you might as well do it gleefully, but I digress . . .

Given his notorious hatred of journalism professors, what might we expect the late Hunter S. Thompson to say about Timothy Denevi, an assistant professor of creative writing at George Mason University who has recently published Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism? Is Professor Denevi afflicted with brain syphilis? To my knowledge, he has never denied it, and he might also be addicted to Ibogaine, for that matter.

At any rate, Professor Denevi’s book was recently reviewed under the headline “How fear and loathing of Nixon sent Hunter S. Thompson crazy,” which got linked at Instapundit by Ed Driscoll with the comment, “Something tells me that Dr. Gonzo would have consumed plenty of illicit substances no matter who had won in ‘72.” Indeed, and Thompson was such a natural-born hell-raiser he disliked more or less anyone associated with government or big business. For example, although he had originally liked Bill Clinton, he subsequently compared him to the Emperor Caligula and denounced Clinton as a “poison scumbag” and an “evil disaster.” It’s impossible to imagine that Thompson would have had anything good to say about Hillary’s 2016 campaign.

The review of Professor Denevi’s book was written by Anne Margaret Daniel who is — you guessed, didn’t you? — a professor at The New School, where she is currently teaching a course entitled “Gender and Modernism.” Professor Daniel has degrees from Harvard, Georgetown, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Princeton. Basically, she retired from a career of attending college — the “permanent student” type — and now is spending her AARP years teaching other people who want to avoid getting an actual job. But again, I digress . . .

It’s probably wrong of me to apply Hunter S. Thompson’s instinctive hatred of journalism professors to Thomas Denevi, who has sought to enhance Thompson’s reputation. You might wish to read Professor Denevi’s lengthy account of how Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was written, which I found interesting, but which isn’t as good as reading the book itself. (Whatever happened to Lucy, the runaway teenage “Jesus freak” with the Streisand paintings who got molested after being fed LSD by the “Samoan lawyer”? Don’t tell me Thompson imagined that whole weird scene; it was too vivid not to have some element of truth.) Thompson always evaded the question of how much journalism and how much fiction was in the Vegas book, because Nixon was president, after all and, if taken seriously as journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a detailed confession to multiple felonies. And really, what about Lucy? If she’s still alive, she’d be about 65 now, and perhaps still babbling incoherently about getting raped by a fat Mexican in a Vegas hotel almost half a century ago. Then the nurses give her another Haldol injection and she slumps down drooling in her cell in the state mental hospital . . .

The depravity and decadence to which Hunter S. Thompson was a witness at its inception has now become the New Normal. Every day, the headlines are filled with strange and savage tales of heinous things happening in places like Oldsmar, Florida, where just last week, a guy got arrested for having sex with a dog and posting the video online.

Also, Bernie Sanders is running for president again, which is perhaps not as heinous as raping a Siberian husky, but it’s close. Anyway, this is another one of those weird digressions that has nothing to do with Professor Denevi’s book about Hunter Thompson, but before you buy his book, shouldn’t you first read all of Hunter S. Thompson’s books? I’d recommend Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, as well as Hell’s Angels, just for starters. The Great Shark Hunt includes the earliest stuff Thompson wrote as a roving correspondent in Latin America, and if you’re really interested, I’d also recommend The Proud Highway, a collection of Thompson’s early correspondence that gives some insight into what his life was like prior to becoming notorious.

Maybe after you’ve read everything by Thompson, you’ll be ready to read a book about Thompson, written by a university professor of “creative writing.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but as a journalist? Denevi sucks. He tried to write some Thompsonesque coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and, among other things, managed to miss the “Unite to Stop the Hate” march down Euclid Avenue — whereas more or less by accident, I was there, and got pictures. The next day, my report for The American Spectator included this:

After a protester from the far-left group Code Pink attempted to stage a disruption Monday inside the Quicken Loans Arena, ABC New reporter Terry Moran claimed this incident was symbolic of what “a dark night” the convention had been. “Donald Trump has been a candidate whose approach has divided many people, drawn protesters,” Moran said, terming the lone protester’s act an illustration of “the kind of unsettled emotions that Donald Trump has sparked in many people around the country.” Of course, kooks from Code Pink — founded in 2002 by radical leftists Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin — have staged disruptive protests in all kinds of settings, but Terry Moran blamed their bizarre antics on Trump.
Meanwhile, on NBC, Tom Brokaw was accusing Republicans of communicating “a pretty divisive message.” According to Brokaw, the GOP convention made “no attempt to really pull the country together.” CNN is following the conclusion of each night’s RNC proceedings by doing a “Reality Check,” essentially a pro-Democrat pushback against major statements made by speakers at the Republican convention. Does anyone — anyone — believe that CNN will be diligently fact-checking Democrats when they convene next week in Philadelphia to nominate Hillary Clinton? Of course not. No one expects honesty or balance from the major media anymore. Every day brings new proof that most political journalists are simply “Democrats with bylines,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds calls them.
No one watching network coverage of this allegedly “dark” and “divisive” convention would suspect that the Republicans gathered in Cleveland this week are having a grand time. Restaurants and bars along Euclid Avenue and the 4th Street corridor are crowded with delegates and guests. Every day, there are cocktail receptions and every night, there are invitation-only parties, and so the people actually attending the RNC are seeing an event that is fun, fun, fun, while folks at home watching TV are being told that this convention is about fear, fear, fear. . . .

There is simply no truth in what the liberal media say about Republicans, and that’s kind of an important story, you see? The national media establishment have become propagandists and stenographers for the Democrat Party to such an extent that they go blundering from error to error, and now the Washington Post is facing a $250 million lawsuit for libeling a Catholic schoolboy from Kentucky whose only “crime” was wearing a MAGA hat in D.C. The media are quite literally publishing “fake news,” and you might think that professors of journalism would be concerned, but because academia is even worse than the media in terms of Trump Derangement Syndrome, this problem is likely to continue getting worse, as journalism students are being trained to think of themselves as part of the “Resistance.” Which makes sense if you think that Trump is Nixon and that Nixon was Hitler, which seems to be the basic theme of Professor Denevi’s book. Except IT’S NOT TRUE, YOU IGNORANT JACKASSES! How was Nixon comparable to Hitler? Hell, Hitler would have put Hunter S. Thompson in Dachau, and so far as I know, Thompson never got any kind of hassle from the Nixon gang despite every evil thing Thompson wrote about Our Commander-in-Chief. Nor has the Trump administration started shipping cattle cars full of journalists to concentration camps, so the whole Trump-is-Hitler-and-Republicans-are-latter-day-Nazis analogy just doesn’t function as a meaningful mechanism to understand the daily news, but journalists refuse to let go of this analogy, clinging to it like a frightened four-year-old hugging his teddy bear during a thunderstorm. Why?

Beats me. It was easy enough to explain Thompson’s political attitude. He grew up as a Southerner in an era when all Southerners were Democrats, so as a partisan, he spent the entirety of the 1950s disgruntled with life in Eisenhower’s America — as did a lot of liberals, even though it had not yet become fashionable to publicly accuse Republicans of being Nazis. That got started in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was widely accused of being a “right-wing extremist” (nudge, nudge) and the Republicans-are-Nazis rhetoric seriously ramped up during Nixon’s presidency despite the fact that Nixon was not in any meaningful way more “right-wing” than LBJ (or Hubert Humphrey, for that matter). That the press corps is obviously wrong in its quadrennial habit of declaring each new Republican presidential candidate to be Hitler does not stop them from doing it over and over again, and why? Isn’t it mainly because so many journalists are addicted to their grandiose narcissistic vision of themselves as Heroic Guardians of Democracy? And doesn’t President Trump have a point when he calls such pompous douchebags as Jim Acosta “The Enemy of the People”? Jim Acosta hates everyone who voted for Trump — all 62.9 million of them — and he is at least an enemy of those people (including my wife, I suppose). So here we are, in the “basket of deplorables,” and there is Professor Denevi, teaching his students that we deserve to be hated. Yet he doesn’t seem to understand why people who voted for Trump might not agree with Professor Denevi’s conception of himself as a Heroic Guardian of Democracy.

Well, I didn’t plan to write 2,000 words on this, and if the Trump administration ever starts loading journalists onto cattle cars bound for concentration camps, I might persuade my friends at the White House to spare Professor Denevi. Anyone who likes Hunter S. Thompson can’t be all bad, and maybe he knows where to get some good cheap mescaline. It’s been decades since I indulged in any heavy drugs — that 1979 psilocybin freak-out pretty much cured my appetite for hallucinogens — but the news has been getting pretty weird lately:

SOUTH EUCLID, OH — A warrant for domestic violence and sexual conduct with an animal has been issued for a man who allegedly hit his wife multiple times after he was caught engaging in sexual activity with a dog.
According to a South Euclid police report, officers received a call on Sunday from a woman on Cedar Road.
The woman stated to police that she heard her 10-pound Maltipoo dog crying from the bathroom.
When she opened the bathroom door, she observed her 27-year-old husband forcing the dog to perform oral sex on him, according to South Euclid police.
After confronting him, the man struck his wife several times until she was knocked to the ground, police say.
The man then took the woman’s cellphone and broke it into pieces before he left the apartment.

Was this man a registered voter, and if so, was he a Republican or a Democrat? Ohio’s a “swing state,” you know, and it’s entirely possible that this dog-sex freak went off the deep end because his mind was wrecked by the endless bombardment of campaign ads to which Ohio voters are subjected every four years. Would anyone be willing to bet me $20 that this guy was a Bernie Sanders supporter? But I digress . . .

My point is that America seems to be in the midst of a complete psychotic breakdown, with dog-f–kers running around all over the place, and every kind of craziness you can imagine, so that sometimes I feel like The Last Sane Man in America, which is scary, and maybe some serious drugs will be needed to restore my emotional equilibrium. “When the going gets weird, the weird don’t teach journalism,” as someone might have said.

Keep your dogs safe. Bernie Sanders supporters are everywhere.




 

Category: Fear. Loathing., Journalism

Can Nick Sandmann Win? Covington Student Sues the Washington Post

Posted on | February 20, 2019 | Comments Off on Can Nick Sandmann Win? Covington Student Sues the Washington Post

 

The Covington Catholic student whose “menacing smirk” became famous last month is suing the Washington Post:

Attorneys for Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann filed a lawsuit against the Washington Post on Tuesday, seeking $250 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
“The Post wrongfully targeted and bullied Nicholas because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap on a school field trip to the January 18 March for Life in Washington, D.C. when he was unexpectedly and suddenly confronted by Nathan Phillips (‘Phillips’), a known Native American activist, who beat a drum and sang loudly within inches of his face (‘the January 18 incident’),” the lawsuit filed by lawyers Todd V. McMurtry and L. Lin Wood in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky reads.
The total sum sought by Sandmann is the same amount Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post for in 2013. The newspaper’s vice president for communications, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said in a statement to Reuters: “We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense.”
In a tweet Saturday, Wood announced via Twitter that he would begin filing defamation lawsuits against several news outlets this week. “Nick Sandmann is 16 years old has 2+ years to identify accusers sue them,” he said. “No member of mainstream social media mob who attacked him should take comfort from not being sued in initial round of lawsuits which will commence next week. Time is Nick’s friend, not his enemy.”
The development comes after investigators hired by a Kentucky diocese have found that Catholic school boys did not instigate a January 18th confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial that went viral on social media. Covington Bishop Roger Foys initially condemned the students’ behavior after a video showed a teenage boy face-to-face with a Native American man. Days later, Foys apologized for “making a statement prematurely.”

The lawsuit mentions a crucial fact:

The Post rushed to lead the mainstream media to assassinate Nicholas’ character and bully him, publishing their first article no later than 1:37 p.m. January 19. This story was not “hot” or “breaking news.” To the extent the Post performed any investigation at all into what occurred, its unreasonable investigation did not take long, and contrary information did not stop it from publishing its first story in its Sunday newspaper the next day. One of the reporters on the story first retweeted the video approximately four hours before receiving credit for the Post’s first article. In the intervening time, the Post apparently managed to track down and interview Phillips, write a story, and fan the flames of the social media mob into a mainstream media frenzy of false attacks and threats against Nicholas.

In other words, the Post did not merely report on an online controversy, but by retweeting the video, one of its reporters was actually part of the Twitter mob that incited the controversy. And the newspaper raced to publish an article before it had conducted sufficient reporting even to know the name of the student whose “menacing smirk” may cost the paper an enormous amount in attorneys’ fees to defend this lawsuit.

Normally, I would not think the Post could actually lose this lawsuit. Libel law in the United States favors freedom of the press to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for a libel plaintiff to win. At least nine times out of 10, lawyers will advise against filing such a lawsuit. Yet the facts in this case are unusual and, perhaps, unprecedented. Editors at the Post decided to turn an Internet flame-war into an actual print-edition news story, and they did so with astonishing haste, repeating in print Phillips’s claim that the Covington boys “suddenly swarmed around him” without bothering to interview any of the students. (Link is to the Sydney Morning Herald, which republished the Washington Post article, which is behind a paywall.) If the Post reporters had done “due diligence,” as lawyers say, they would have discovered what Robby Soave of Reason magazine was able to prove by Sunday afternoon:

The Media Wildly Mischaracterized
That Video of Covington Catholic Students
Confronting a Native American Veteran

To produce that article, Soave watched more than two hours of online videos that showed what happened was quite nearly the opposite of what Nathan Phillips claimed — he approached them, not the other way around. Furthermore, contrary to the anti-Trump media’s narrative, it was the Covington boys who were the targets of racism in this incident, as they were insulted by a group of so-called “Black Hebrew Israelites.”

The Washington Post‘s Jan. 20 article by Antonio Olivo and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. put a misleading political spin on the incident:

The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Donald Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the US Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, whom Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas”.
In a statement, the Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organised the march, called the incident “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America”.

But once the facts emerged — facts that the Post was evidently in too much of a hurry to bother finding — it became apparent that “discourse in Trump’s America” had nothing to do with it, except insofar as that “discourse” involves bogus accusations of racism against white kids.

Do I think a Washington, D.C., jury will force the Post to pay $250 million to Nick Sandmann? No, I don’t, but I didn’t think a Florida jury would destroy Gawker with a $115 million verdict, either. People are getting fed up with the “fake news” media, and in a case like this, where one of the nation’s most influential newspapers rushed to join a Twitter mob in promoting a false narrative, even a D.C. jury might decide to punish them for their irresponsible journalism.

UPDATE: Whoa! Talk about sloppy journalism — I’m guilty. This lawsuit won’t be heard by a D.C. jury, because it was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. In which case, my advice to the Washington Post is, “Offer a generous settlement, because a jury full of angry Kentucky rednecks is not your friend.”




 

 

Category: Catholics, Kentucky, Media Bias, Racism

In The Mailbox: 02.19.19

Posted on | February 20, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.19.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Karl Lagerfeld, RIP
Twitchy: Fauxcahontas Asserts Child Care Is A “Fundamental Right”
Louder With Crowder: Dear Jussie Smollett – You’re A Bigoted, Racist, Attention-Seeking Piece Of Sh!t

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: An Australian Apartheid, also, Jordan Peterson As Approved Opposition
American Power: Stephen Miller On Fox News Sunday
American Thinker: Crime & Punishment For The Deep State
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Autophagia News
BattleSwarm: Seven Labour MPs Leave Party Over Brexit, Antisemitism
CDR Salamander: GWOT Fatigue Isn’t Just An American Thing
Da Tech Guy: Joe Biden Is A Fraud, also, She Didn’t “Build” That
Don Surber: “It’s Not A Hat, It’s A Crazy Detector”
Dustbury: With Neither Cheese Nor Cream
First Street Journal: We Should Never Trust The NYT When It Writes About Christianity
The Geller Report: Covington Catholic Student Nick Sandmann Sues Washington Post For $250 Million, also, AF Muslima Who Spied For Iran Radicalized At Georgetown U
Hogewash: Cutting Edge Astronomy, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Twitter Suspends User For mocking Jussie Smollett
Joe For America: Can The State Of Texas Stop Dallas From Destroying Its Largest Confederate Memorial?
JustOneMinute: Jussie Smollett Meltdown
Legal Insurrection: Bernie’s Running Again, Will Try To Out-Socialist The Other Dems, also, Lara Logan On Anti-Trump Press – “We’ve Become Political Activists…Propagandists”
The PanAm Post: Roger Waters – From Pink Floyd Icon To Maduro Puppet
Power Line: Trump – “The Twilight Hour Of Socialism”, also, Dissecting The Green Nude Eel
Shark Tank: Castro Says ICE Needs To Be Reconstituted
Shot In The Dark: “Wyatt”
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Meep Files Her Taxes, also, A Tribute To A Whistleblower & Watchdog
The Political Hat: Questioning Proffered Position Of Colonialism
This Ain’t Hell: Sailor Kissing Woman In Iconic V-J Day Pic Dies At 95, also, CNO Defends Hiding Scathing Report On Fitzgerald Collision From The Public
Victory Girls: Socialists Are Nothing More Than Parasites
Volokh Conspiracy: Justice Thomas’ Skepticism Of NYT v. Sullivan
Weasel Zippers: Protesters Storm Border Patrol Museum, Deface Memorial To Slain Officers, also, Alec Baldwin Whines That Trump Is Endangering His Family By Criticizing SNL
Mark Steyn: Watching Bricks Get Laid, also, A Presidential Medley Pt. 2


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Category: Linkagery

The Media ‘Think They’re Living in a Cartoon and White Men Are the Villains’

Posted on | February 19, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

We do not yet have an official statement about what happened to Jussie Smollett, but we do know what didn’t happen to him. He was definitely not assaulted at 2 a.m. in Chicago by white Trump supporters shouting “This is MAGA country!” Who could believe such a thing?

Over the years, the MSM has fallen for hundreds of hate crime hoaxes, reporting on them as if they were confirmed facts, rather than mere allegations. By the time the story is proven to be a hoax, the media has already moved on to the next manufactured outrage. This phenomenon has only increased since the election of President Trump. Yet people still expressed shock and surprise when it became obvious that Smollett had staged his own hate crime.

Matt Walsh explains the media’s gullibility:

 

 

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Apparently, those of us who doubted Smollett’s story from the start — Republicans stalking the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m.? Really? — are guilty of hate for not believing the media’s “hate crime” narrative, as Stephen Green has pointed out:

But it is awful that a hate crime didn’t happen. It’s always awful whenever a hate crime doesn’t happen. Because America is a hateful place full of hateful people who attack virtuous non-hateful intersectional people out of hate.
And when, on rare occasion, a hate crime doesn’t happen, that in itself is a hate crime because it allows the criminally hateful to pretend that they aren’t such hateful criminals.

Well, let’s leave it to police and the grand jury:

Chicago police are investigating a tip that on the same night “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett reported being attacked, he was seen in an elevator in his apartment building with two brothers who were arrested and later released from police custody in relation to the probe, according to a police spokesperson.
Smollett reported being attacked by two masked men who hurled racist and homophobic slurs at him, beat him and looped a rope around his neck in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood on the night of Jan. 29.
A person who lives in Smollett’s building or was visiting a resident reported seeing the three men together on the night in question, according to CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
Police have yet to confirm the person’s account, Guglielmi said. Detectives plan to interview the person on Tuesday.
The brothers and their lawyer were seen at the Leighton Criminal Court Building on Tuesday. The attorney was seen leaving about 3:45 p.m. without comment. Chicago police told ABC News that the brothers met with prosecutors and police but did not testify before a grand jury Tuesday.
On Monday, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told ABC News that the brothers told police that Smollett staged the attack on himself because he was upset a threatening letter he received a week prior did not get enough attention.

Oh, let’s talk about that letter, shall we?

If the remarkable grassroots journalists at CWBChicago are correct (as they have been all along), Jussie Smollett has a lot more to worry about than the state rap of a class four felony of making a false police report.  If he was indeed responsible for the sending of a letter to the Fox Chicago studios where Empire is produced, he has triggered federal charges that carry hard time.  Importantly, the feds don’t parole early to relieve overcrowded prisons the way the Great State of Illinois does.
You see, using the mail to make a threat that can be seen as a terroristic threat — even to oneself — is no small deal to Uncle Sam. . . .

According to CWBChicago, the investigation of this threatening letter “has been before a federal grand jury and multiple subpoenas have been generated over the course of the investigation.”

Again, we have no official confirmation at this time, but if this turns out to be the case, Smollett is likely to be in big, big trouble.

How many white guys were involved in this hoax? Zero. Exactly zero. We didn’t have to do anything at all to persuade this Trump-hating gay black guy to wreck his career and maybe earn a prison sentence.

We cartoon villains are fiendish like that.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

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Category: Chicago, Crime, Media Bias, Racism
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