GOING YARD

Where I am.

"I think this whole Ukraine thing is playing out like the Russia hoax. But what if it's real? I don't think for one second that it *is* real, but let's say it is. Let's say that Trump did-- well, whatever it is that he's supposed to have done, called up the Ukraine and had one of his oligarch buds send a bunch of prank pizzas to Joe Biden's house late at night, or whatever. That's impeachable, isn't it? So what if he did? The question is, how would we know? They're all liars. The Democrats lied their asses off for nearly three years about a Russian conspiracy that didn't exist, and their media allies lied their asses off for nearly three years about a Russian conspiracy that didn't exist, so how do we know they're not lying now?

"When it comes to our national media, we're living in a boy-who-cried-wolf world now. CNN could show live footage of Donald Trump receiving sacks of cash from Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office, and my first thought would be, eh, it's CNN, so it's obviously fake. This is the network that pushed the Russian collusion hoax for nearly years and came up with a big plate of nothing with a side order of bupkis. Like when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vault. And when it became obvious that their reporting was crap, instead or apologizing to their viewers for their crap reporting, they congratulated each other for a job well done. So why should I believe *anything* they say? The media simply doesn't realize how badly they've damaged their credibility. And the damage is probably permanent.

"You know, perhaps that's a good thing. Because I'd like to see a media that actually does their job rather than act as cheerleaders for people who hate me."

OVERLY-ENTHUSIASTIC HYPERBOLE?

Maybe.  But since this is the Organization of Sweden, I'm not sure I'd bet that way.

 

The [Organization] of Sweden, with Lutheran roots, affirmed through the social media “Twitter” that Thunberg and her discourse is the most similar image of Christ nowadays.

 

This statement created a controversy on social media and among believers. Many followers of Christ disliked these words. They assumed that calling Thunberg “The successor of Christ” can initiate Blasphemy [Gee.  Ya think? - Ed].

 

The Limhamns Kyrka Curch wrote on Twitter: “Announcement! Jesus of Nazareth named one of his successors, Greta Thunberg."

 

Text edited slightly.

 

The truly sad thing about this is that lots and lots of Christians are going to pronounce themselves shocked by that statement.  But since 2003, the year the Episcopal Organization officially went Scripture-optional, I've attempted to follow the misadventures of all sorts of pseudo-Christian entities, not just the Episcopalians, and blithering idiocy like this is pretty much par for the course as far as Scandinavian "Christianity" is concerned.

PULITZER MATERIAL

Who says journalism is dead?

Take this to the bank.  NOTHING gets by the Bordge.

UPDATE: Annnnnnnnnnd...scene.

NOSTALGIA

Remember when Democrats didn't think paralysis was funny?

JOHNSON'S FIRST LAW OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THERMODYNAMICS

Actions only become impeachable when Republicans commit them.

Former national security adviser Susan Rice acknowledged last night that the Obama administration moved transcripts of conversations with foreign leaders onto the same top-secret server where the Trump administration stored his recent phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The revelation from Rice comes amid media reports and comments from political leaders that have painted the use of this top secret server as proof that Trump was trying to cover up the contents of his conversation with the Ukrainian leader, a full transcript of which the administration has now released to the public.

While Rice admitted that the Obama administration also used this server to protect sensitive presidential phone calls, she left open the question of whether the Trump administration used the server in this particular case to save the president from damaging, perhaps even impeachable, comments he made to Zelensky regarding investigations into political rival Joe Biden.

But reporting from ABC News shows that this practice of securing presidential phone transcripts has been in use in the White House since early 2017, after sensitive conversations with foreign leaders were leaked to the press.

One source cited by ABC News described the practice as “basically standard operating procedure.”

Or as this guy put it.

Word.

KRUGSHEIMER'S DISEASE

Because writing Advanced Stage Trump Derangement Syndrome takes too long.



DON'T TAKE THE BROWN ACID

And FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, steer well clear of whatever Nicolle Wallace is smoking.

NICOLLE WALLACE: [Life-Sized Cardboard Mitt Romney Cutout] doesn’t see it either. I think when you look at public opinion, I always thought the most devastating thing for Hillary Clinton was that Bernie Sanders from the far, far left said the same things about her that Donald Trump said from the far, far right. And I’ve spent my career studying public opinion, and the most credible messages are the ones echoed from both sides of the political spectrum. So if independent voters, swing voters, the kind of voters that have fled Donald Trump since his election, the ones that gave Democrats their big wins in the 2018 midterms, if they see [Life-Sized Cardboard Mitt Romney Cutout] saying the same thing as Nancy Pelosi, they’re a whole lot more likely to believe it.

Quote edited slightly because Life-Sized Cardboard Mitt Romney Cutout is such a major influence with actual American conservatives.  End acidic, corrosive sarcasm.

FASCINATING

Welcome to America's first slow-motion coup d'état.  The coffee's fresh and free and somebody brought several metric tons of donuts.

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

The internal properties of the newly revised “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.

Phase Two: when the bodies start turning up.

#WhatsADeepState

#IKnowNothingNUTHThing

SITTING BY THE PHONE

Kammi's loyal, you have to give her that.  Considering her current polling numbers, Kammi has to take her friends wherever she can get them.  But there she waits, night after night, thinking the same thing.  The Narrative will call tonight, Kammi's certain of it.  But since the Narrative is currently plowing a 20-year-old exotic dancer on a regular basis, I don't like Kammi's chances.

DROPPING THE MASK

Thus far, the American news media's ongoing project to remove Donald Trump from American political life, We've Got The Orange Bastard Now!, has been a series of monumental failures.  The recently-introduced Version 4.0, Talking On The Telephone With Ukrainians, has proven to be such a dumpster fire that the media began lying about it before the ink was even dry.

CNN, MSNBC (Jason?  @KatyTurNBC has never been "better than this.") and the Washington Post all deliberately hacked hundreds of words out of the released material, completely distorting its meaning, just so they could claim that Trump said something that he clearly didn't.  Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times even lied through his teeth about an impeachment poll.

At the New York Times, fresh off yet another unsuccessful round of Brett Kavanaugh fan fiction, NYT White House correspondent Maggie Haberman notices that President Trump has, of late, seriously ratcheted up his anti-media rhetoric.

It's one thing for randos to comment, "You know, Trump's not wrong."  These days, lots of people have been saying that as they have with "enemies of the people" and other Trumpisms that are supposed to horrify all right-thinking Americans.  It's quite another when an observer as sober-minded and professional as Mollie Hemingway thinks that "corrupt" is a perfectly valid and acceptable way to describe the modern American news media.

Will Mags feel the need to look in a mirror and maybe...you know...reassess?  Doubtful.

So what's going on here?  Why does the American news media feel the need to destroy the few remaining shreds of its credibility just to get rid of Donald J. Trump?  To answer that, we need to understand something basic.

Trump has committed an impeachable offense.  Two of them, in fact.

Since both offenses are interrelated, we could justifiably say that Trump's committed only one impeachable offense but for the sake of clarity, we'll say two.  And if the American news media still had a modicum of honesty, they'd already know what those two offenses are.

So what's the first one?  Easy. 

Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

In the entire history of this country, from the victory at Yorktown through the ratification of the Constitution and on down to the present day, no political conclusion has ever been more definitively and defiantly foregone than that Hillary Clinton was supposed to have succeeded Barack Obama as president of the United States of America.

Even the legal necessity of holding an election at all was incredibly insulting to Her Majesty; Mrs. Clinton should simply have been allowed to move into the White House the day after the Obamas moved out, given her inaugural speech from the Oval Office and immediately gotten down to business.  Considering the conduct of her breezily insouciant campaign, insulting half the electorate ("basket of deplorables") and mistaking Michigan and Wisconsin for Canadian provinces, Gam-Gam seems to have felt that she was entitled to be president.

Fast forward to November, 2016.

Most of us are still greatly amused by all those various pictures of Clinton supporters the moment they realized What Had Just Happened.  But as far as I'm concerned, if American television and its associated industries and institutions were to last for a thousand years, men will still say Election Night, 2016 was their finest hour.

Schadenfreude has never been even remotely as intense, pure, unalloyed and glorious as it was that amazing night as I watched all those news professionals turn themselves into stammering dolts trying to explain exactly why they had gotten 2016 as wrong as it is possible to get anything and why Hillary Clinton was not going to be the next president of the United States.  So not only did Donald Trump deprive Hillary Clinton of her rightful presidency, he made the American news media look and sound like babbling idiots in the process.

Granted, that's not all that hard to do.  But that really wasn't Trump's second impeachable offense, at least not all of it. 

This was.

Media hostility toward Republicans in general and conservative Republicans in particular is, of course, nothing new.  To varying degrees, it's existed for as long as I've followed politics in this country.  There have been American journalists who, regardless of their personal politics or personal feelings, have attempted to play it down the middle, at least pretending to respect Republican candidates.

But that tendency is just about dead.  These days, the media/conservative relationship is supposed to work like this.  During primaries and campaigns, the media will rip the conservative up one side and down the other.  Words like "racist" and "homophobe" will be casually bandied about.  It's okay for the conservative to strongly object to the media's characterizations as long as that conservative makes it clear that his criticism should in no way be taken as a criticism of the journalistic profession.

Once the conservative is safely defeated and out of the way, he or she must utter the right words and disapprove of the right people (and it doesn't have to be outright hostility; as long as it is clearly communicated, aristocratic scorn is perfectly acceptable.  Think of the long-time attitude of Pro-Cons toward pro-lifers or deeply-conservative Christians).  If all that is done to the media's satisfaction, Strange New Respect^TM is then granted to the conservative.

So along comes Trump who, for all practical purposes, tells the American news media, "Let's cut the crap.  You don't like me and you aren't going to cover me with anything remotely resembling fairness or objectivity.  I get that because I don't like you and I have no reason whatsoever to respect you or your 'profession.'  So you go ahead and do you and I'll let you know when you fail because you will.  Often."

There it is.  Trump needs to go primarily because he doesn't respect "journalism."  Do it badly, sloppily or dishonestly and he'll not hesitate to call you out.  And American journalism cannot ever permit itself to be judged by non-professionals.  Because if that is ever allowed to happen, American journalists will learn what I learned at the end of 2012.

What happens when your profession becomes irrelevant.

RAIN FOUND TO BE WET

Not seeing a problem here, hacks.

DON'T LOOK NOW

The Babylon Bee acquires serious competition.

Today, 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the U.N. Climate Summit, scolding world leaders for their inaction and accusing them of “Stealing the dreams of [her] childhood.” After the speech, experts agreed that the best way to treat this child’s anxiety would be to completely restructure of the world economy.

While it may be technologically unfeasible, potentially lead to the impoverishment of billions, and require unprecedented control of civilian populations, they can see no other way to get this young girl to calm down.

“She is extremely upset,” said one member of the U.N. General Assembly, “And as the adults, we need to do everything in our power to weaponize her distress and re-make the world according to her wishes.”

Washington Post hardest hit.

THIS JUST IN

Babylon Bee Named New US Paper Of Record

"Hell, Nobody Believes The New York Times Anymore."

 

Democrats are bringing a new tactic to the next presidential debate. Each candidate will arrive on the debate stage with a child to hold up whenever someone tries to question or challenge any of the statements they make.

 

"This cable TV debate format doesn't allow for long-winded answers and rebuttals. You gotta make your point and you need people to move on," said news anchor Anderson Cooper in support of the new debate technique.

 

Recently, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was asked about accepting lobbyist money and she immediately lifted up a five-year-old girl named Sophie.

 

"Why are you attacking this child? Are you some kind of monster?" she asked, leaving her interviewer speechless.

"These are the kind of people I'm up against," Warren later said to her supporters after dropping Sophie into a carrying case for later. "People who ruthlessly attack children."

UPDATE: This just inner.

At the same press conference where she announced plans to begin formal impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also announced Democrats’ intent as soon as possible to get involved in a land war in Asia.

 

Pelosi said the two initiatives would be grouped together in a legislative package called “Easy Wins with No Unintended Consequences that Could Never Go Wrong and Blow Up in Our Faces for the Children Act of 2019.”

GRETA THUNBERG?

Hate to be the one to break this to you, square head, but if you actually cared about the climate as much as you claim you do, you'd be back in Sweden right now delivering this little speech of yours over the Internet.  The technology exists.  For that matter, if they cared anything at all about the environment, all the rest of the wastes of perfectly good oxygen that make up the United Nations would be back in their various national homes watching you over their computers.

Greta Thunberg has excoriated world leaders for their “betrayal” of young people through their inertia over the climate crisis at a United Nations summit that failed to deliver ambitious new commitments to address dangerous global heating.

In a stinging speech on Monday, the teenage Swedish climate activist told governments that “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”

But Thunberg predicted the summit would not deliver any new plans in line with the radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are needed to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” a visibly emotional Thunberg said. “And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”

Considering all the airplanes that flew you and all those UN officials to New York City for that conference, probably doing more harm to the environment in a few hours than most people are capable of doing in a year in the process, you and your supporters are in no position to bitch and lecture.  So until you learn what the word "videoconference" means, you need to realize that nobody with a functioning brain is going to listen to anything you say about anything at all.

ANNOYING FRIENDS AND ANGERING PEOPLE

No more effective form of environmental protest can be conceived, never mind actually pulled off, than causing tens of thousands of people to sit in traffic on a work day while their cars idle more and more Bad Stuff^TM into the atmosphere.  Mad props, hippies.

'BURBS

Most of the time, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a self-important douchenozzle but there's a pretty good chance that he's on to something here.  For years, I've thought that the real reason the Aliens^TM have never officially dropped by is that we're nowhere near as big of a deal as we think we are.  It could be that other places in the universe are Manhattan while Earth is Fergus Falls. 

THE WORST GENERATION

Survive the Great Depression?  Big deal.  Defeat the Germans and the Japanese in World War II?  Who couldn't do that?

Meet a generation facing real problems.

LOUSY JOBS

When you're the Publishers Clearing House guy who has to tell a Rutgers football player that he's just won $10,000 a week for the rest of his life.  Dude'll probably stab you in the heart.

ANDY?

Three questions.  Aren't cows going to cut the cheese whether we eat them or not?  If everyone in the entire world stops eating cows, won't that mean that there will be more cows letting one rip than there would be otherwise?  And if that's the case, won't cutting out the occasional New York Strip get us to Doomsday^TM even faster than we'd get there if we kept on eating cows?

UPDATE: A top-shelf sirloin isn't the only thing Andy thinks that you'd better start getting used to the idea of not having ever again.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC's climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.

"What we're really selling is not the car, it's mobility," he said. "So if you have mobility that's then tied into a much more, if you had like, for example, this constant roving fleet of electric cars that you would just order up, then you could diminish the impact of ground transportation on our environment very, very quickly."

Okay by me.   Since I don't have enough money coming in to keep a car gassed up and repaired, I don't own a car and I doubt if I'll ever again own a car for what remains of my life.  I let my driver's license expire and I live where I currently do because there's a supermarket/pharmacy right across the street.  If I have to be farther away (my doctor's office, say), I call Uber or Lyft.

Gotten rid of your car yet, Andy?  I love being better than other people.

Nevertheless, a few questions suggest themselves.  How much would these electric car rides cost me?  Will I still be able to take the car trips to the American Southwest that I used to love so much?  What happens to your electric fleet when the St. Louis area is hit with a MASSIVE storm which knocks power out for several weeks so that the fleet can't recharge? 

What happens when a delightfully playful group of Young People Who Are Our Future play a fun prank and summon the entire fleet to one small section of town, causing me to miss my vitally-important meeting, costing my company an account which it desperately needed to survive and throwing me and all my coworkers out of our jobs?

Andy?  You can't toss ideas around just because you recently cleaned your bong and your weed was high-grade.  Think these things through.  War game them, you might say.

UPDATE: Props for your honesty, Andy.  But serious Democrats know full well that this crap doesn't sell in Flyover Country.

RED RED ROBIN

Bob finds a whole new set of asses to kiss.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke unveiled his plan Thursday for federal legalization of marijuana, which includes a tax on the industry to fund a monthly stipend to repay people who served prison time on nonviolent marijuana charges.

 

The former congressman from Texas would combine a newly regulated marijuana market with restitution for policies that resulted in lengthy prison time for low-level drug crimes. The goal is to see that those who were harmed by the strict “war on drugs” policies of the past can now benefit from the money made in the marijuana business.

 

“We need to not only end the prohibition on marijuana, but also repair the damage done to the communities of color disproportionately locked up in our criminal justice system or locked out of opportunity because of the War on Drugs,” O’Rourke said in a statement.

 

O’Rourke’s tax would seek to fund a monthly grant program he calls the “drug war justice grant,” which would be given to people who were incarcerated for marijuana offenses. The grants would be offered for a period of time based on how long they were in prison. The tax money would also support substance abuse treatment programs and assist those affected by marijuana laws with housing and job support, as well as provide help for breaking into the marijuana business.

 

It's a good thing Bob doesn't have a chance in hell of becoming president because I can see all kinds of problems with this idea.  If it should actually gain traction, I can see duh gaze wanting in at some point.  Can you actually put a price on the trauma of not being allowed to legally force someone to bake you a wedding cake?  I know I can't.

 

Then Bob'll have to start a similar program for prostitution.  National legalization followed by financial restitution for anyone who did hard time for paying for sex.  Since there are only so many dollars to go around, Bob will, at some point, have to start a cabinet-level Department of Reparations to decide what group should receive free tax money and how much they should get. 

 

And don't get me started about the lobbyists.

A TIME FOR TRUTH AND A TIME FOR LYING

Bob's candor isn't polling well, is it, Chuckie?

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that Beto O'Rourke's proposed assault weapon buyback program is unrepresentative of Democratic views, according to Albany's Times Union.

Why is that, Chuckie?

Schumer's dismissal of O'Rourke's proposal signals that some top Democrats are concerned that it could derail ongoing talks about gun control legislation and may allow Republicans to claim during the 2020 election cycle that Democrats intend to take Americans' guns away.

Which it will because they do.  But the Democrats can't come right out and admit that to all those Southern racists and Flyover Country rubes since they can still vote and everything.  Once we figure out a way to negate the votes of all the idiots and the deplorables out there, we can be as upfront and as honest with our intentions as we care to be. 

But not before.

DICTIONARY OF MODERN AMERICAN POLITICS

political - Adj. - Anything that reflects badly, or might reflect badly, on Democrats. 

"I sincerely hope that my Republican opponent doesn't try to make anything political out of the fact that 24,637 images of child pornography were recently found on my laptop."

WIN/WIN

None of the following is wrong.

And I don't see how this does anything but help Trump politically.  The people in Cali who hate Trump are going to keep right on hating him while what few Cali supporters Trump has probably agree wholeheartedly with this assessment.  Why should Sacramento keep being allowed to waste more and more American tax dollars to continue its failed policies?

POTTED PLANTS

I spent about a decade making whatever Internet rep I have from those wacky liberal Christians.  Episcopalians, mostly, but I was never a sectarian; I had at stupid, pseudo-Christian "spirituality" wherever I found it.  Like this Union Theological Seminary chapel service.

Not a damned thing.  In fact, I told the arugula in one of my recent salads that if it wanted a from-scratch vinaigrette, it could damned well make one by itself.  Otherwise, it was going to get plain-label Thousand Island and LIKE it.

 

GIVE IT UP FOR AMERICAN JOURNALISM!!

BOOMER POST

Don't take the brown acid.

DECOMP

The putrefaction at the Democratic Party Steno Pool is far more extensive than I realized.  Meet a New York Times fact-checker.

UPDATE: Ku Klux Candyass issues as limp and pro forma an "apology" as I've ever seen from anybody about anything.  Do I think she means it?  Not even a little bit.  Because if you're genuinely repentant about this sort of thing, you completely shut down your Twitter presence for at least a couple of YEARS or so and then, down the road somewhere, quietly creep back on.

Important note, kids.  The Internet is forever.

CRAPPED OUT

The Democratic Party Steno Pool takes a break from its recent public libel of Brett Kavanaugh to run an entire column examining feminine bowel movements. 

So to speak.

Insert "New York Times editorial judgment" joke here.

PONTIUS PILATE

The Democratic Party Steno Pool.  All the fiction that advances the narrative.

Pogrebin reveals her approach to fact in the final moments of the interview. Of the woman at the party, she says, “Remember that she was incredibly drunk at that party as was everyone. And so I think we’re talking about memory here as really kind of a questionable issue. There are plenty of things that are conceivable that could happen when people are too drunk to remember them.” So the standard here is not whether something is true, it’s whether it’s “conceivable.” If a story is “of a piece with a kind of behavior,” even if such behavior is itself not established, and if a story is “conceivable” when filtered through that confirmation bias, and even if it’s undercut by the person the story supposedly happened to, and even if the person telling the story was “incredibly drunk,” you just go with it anyway.

The fact of the matter is that to the DPSP, there's truth and then there's truer truth.  There's stuff that actually happened and there's stuff that while no one can prove that it happened, it might conceivably have happened and we need for it to have happened so we're just going to go ahead and assume that it happened. 

I don't know if the DPSP or gutless media toadies like CNN's Brian Stelter quite understand yet what's going on.  But do you remember Trump's phrase that we were all ordered to be horrified about, the one about the American "news media" being the "enemy of the people?" 

More and more, I'm seeing people quoting that line approvingly or saying things like "You know what?  Maybe Trump was on to something."  There are still great American journalists out there.  Sharyl Attkisson and Brit Hume come to mind while Jan Crawford's reporting suggests a profound discomfort with what the Democratic Party Steno Pool has allowed itself to become.

UPDATE:  I guess this is going to be the Democratic line.  Kammi weighs in.

“Someone should investigate this because the fact that something has not been proven, it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur, right?” Harris said.

Tell you what, Kams.  I'll agree to this if you agree to an investigation of whether or not Joe Biden was actually the guy who shot John F. Kennedy.  I mean, Joe's old enough.  And because the fact that something has not been proven, it doesn't mean it didn't occur. 

Right?

WHACK JOBS

Since it was not all that long ago that the Democratic Party Steno Pool tried to convince the world that Brett Kavanaugh was the reincarnation of Ted Kennedy and immediately had to scurry away, it's journalistic reputation in tatters, it's hard to understand why the DPSP would want to take another run at it so soon.  Unless, of course, insanity really is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

Actually, it's not hard to understand at all.  The left knows that even now, Dred Scott Roe v. Wade is in mortal danger.  And if Ruth Bader Ginsburg buys the farm any time soon, Dred Scott Roe is pretty close to dead, de facto if not de jure, and just the possibility of having to financially support a kid whenever you plow your girlfriend suddenly becomes alarmingly real.

In other words, no more free sex.  Ultimate nightmare becomes terrifying reality.

I don't know for a fact that that's what's at work here or not (I suspect that it is) but I do know this.  Because of the work of entities like the Democratic Party Steno Pool and others like them, I'm seeing sentiments like the following more and more often.

ROCK BOTTOM

You know you can't fall any farther when you're looking up at this guy.

UPDATE: The thick plottens.  More here.

I'M THE MOST EMBARRASSING DEMOCRAT!!

NO, I'M THE MOST EMBARRASSING DEMOCRAT!!

WHOOPS

CBS's Jan Crawford accidentally commits journalism (and a little more).


Screen-capped in case CBS orders her to pull it.

BETO THEATRE

"With guns or immigration or any other vitally-important issue, there comes a point where you have to take your stand, say this far and no farther.  When I served in the New Model Army, I remember telling Cromwell, "There's no longer any way around it.  You have to purge the House of Commons of the Presbyterian royalists."

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED...

Libel, libel again.

The New York Times on Sunday was forced to walk back a new sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, updating a bombshell article to clarify that the alleged victim has no memory of the incident.

The opinion essay by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly details their upcoming book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation” and describes several sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, including a previously unreported claim that the FBI did not investigate during the judge’s contentious confirmation process.

The Times reporters detailed a previously unreported alleged incident similar to the Ramirez one. Another Yale classmate, Max Stier, who now heads a Washington nonprofit, told Congress and the FBI that he had witnessed Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” The FBI did not investigate that allegation.

However, the paper updated the story later to say that the book “did not include one element of the book’s account” of the new incident.

“The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident,” the Times’ correction reads.

The New York Times Opinion Twitter account also deleted and apologized for an “offensive” tweet on the Kavanaugh opinion essay.

One wonders why the Times so enthusiastically crapped all over what little is left of its journalistic reputation.  Perhaps they heard back-channel that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not much longer for this world and they seriously believe that they can convince Trump to nominate Merrick Garland. 

Or maybe they're sending Amy Coney Barrett an indirect warning.  You saw what we did to this guy, just think what we'll do to you.  Accept Trump's nomination and your life will be a living hell. 

Your guess is as good as mine.

THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED WATCH

Bobby's lying through his teeth hallucinating again.

New O'Rourke anecdote: He says a longtime Republican chatted him up today in @BUCEES bathroom on guns. "He said, 'This is gonna be strange — not strange that I’m talking to you while we’re both at a urinal ... but strange because I'm telling you you're absolutely right on guns."

UPDATE: Bobby's got a rich fantasy life.

Beto O'Rourke with another [outright lie]: “Texans who own AR-15s, they’ve told me, 'I don’t need this. I don’t need it to hunt, I don’t need it to protect myself…if giving this back, or cutting it to pieces, or selling it to the gov helps to keep us safer, then by all means do it’”

For crying out loud, Bobby, try to make this crap at least SLIGHTLY plausible.  For one huge-ass thing, why did your fictional Texan buy an AR in the first place?  Be kind of like me shelling out huge money for a top-of-the-line tennis racket only to eventually remember when I got home, "What the hell was I thinking?  I don't play tennis."

YOU WANT TO DO WHAT WITH THE WHICH NOW?

I have to think that this would be an awfully tough thing to fence.

A gang of thieves on Saturday stole an 18-carat gold toilet from Britain's Blenheim Palace, police said, causing flooding that damaged the world-famous stately home.

The fully-functioning toilet, dubbed "America", was created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and estimated to be worth around £1 million.

TOTES ADORBS

How little does The Washington Post understand the last three and a half years?  The newsletter of the Washington, DC office of the Democratic Party Steno Pool believes that conservatives still care what Life-Sized Cardboard Mitt Romney Cutout says or does about anything.

The former GOP presidential nominee and current U.S. senator from Utah said Thursday ahead of the third Democratic debate that he does not intend to endorse anyone in 2020.

Mitt Romney told CNN he would not endorse in the Republican primary or the general election. Romney’s decision to sit out the GOP primary isn’t surprising given his friend and predecessor, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, is running against President Trump. But it would be extraordinary if Romney held back his endorsement when Trump is up against a Democratic nominee in the general election.

PERSPECTIVE

A 5-year-old girl tries as best she can to comfort her leukemia-afflicted 4-year-old little brother.

I survived prostate cancer.  I was diagnosed in 2007, operated on a few months after that and I'm still around.  But this picture makes me want to run as fast as I possibly can away from the term "cancer survivor."

Because the very worst thing I ever had to deal with during the whole experience was spending a week with a Foley catheter up my penis.  Those things can sometimes irritate tissue so there's nothing quite like looking Down There and seeing blood dripping out.  Like expecting a Chardonnay and getting a fine Merlot.

Then there was spending about a year having to wear Depends or pads but that would have been less if I'd been more zealous about doing the suggested exercises.  Buying Depends or pads was never embarrassing. I just made up my mind to respond to anybody who said anything, "I'm just getting over cancer and sometimes you need these things.  Is there anything else that you'd like to know?"

I guess I looked sufficiently surly because nobody ever said anything.

The meds I took never affected me the way his meds seem to be affecting this poor little guy.  There was one medicine in particular that my doctor was so anxious for me to take that he literally gave me the stuff.  I never paid for it the entire time I took it and it never adversely affected me in any way.

Viagra.  Gets the blood flowing Down There and speeds healing.

True story.

So send up a prayer for this little guy.  Send up some prayers for his family as well because I guess the only thing worse than going through something like this is having to watch somebody that you love go through it, all the while knowing that there really isn't much of anything you can do to make the bad stuff go away.

NAILED IT

Alex the Chick goes yard.

Oh to be young again. Seriously. There are a great deal of people on here who act like all of this is new and it makes me laugh. None of this is new. None of it.

We just all assume history started when we first noticed it.

DAMN

At the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania, two victims are listed.

WELL DONE, THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT

This is Bretagne, the last of the dogs who charged in and began assisting with the 9/11 rescue efforts.  She is on her way into an animal clinic to be euthanized.

It's like I always say. 

We don't deserve dogs.

SERIOUSLY, FRISCO?

Last July, my rent went up.  But for about half of what this idiocy costs, I get an entire apartment, including a room I don't even use except for storage.  That the public thoroughfares in and around St. Louis are free of human excrement is an added bonus which costs me nothing.

EPITHETS

I've been called lots of names in my life but I've never been called this.

PANDER BEAR

How do you know when your presidential campaign is dead in the water?  When you seriously believe that the following stupid crap is a legitimate policy position.

Living close to work shouldn't be a luxury for the rich. It's a right for everyone.

Wildly flail about much, Bobby?  How in the world are you ever going to enforce this "right?"  Are we going to see mandatory house "buybacks" in case the government needs the space so someone can exercise their "right" to "live close to work?"

Hell, Bobby, you might as well have jammed the pedal to the metal and said something like, "Driving drunk, damn near killing someone in an accident and then leaving the scene shouldn't be a luxury for the rich or the well-connected.  It's a right for everyone."

Shut it down now.  Dumbass.

BUSTED

The county council of Montgomery County, Maryland HATES people who point out the obvious.

Officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, blamed conservative media, the White House and a top immigration official Thursday for drawing attention to a recent spate of sexual assaults carried out by illegal aliens.

What good can possibly be accomplished by accurately listing certain crimes committed in Montgomery County as well as who committed them?  Sounds kind of racist if you ask us.

“There has been a lot of inaccurate information spread by the White House, President Trump, Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli, local and national conservative news outlets and neo-Nazi sympathizers regarding our criminal justice system and its process,” the county council said in a statement.

That "neo-Nazi sympathizers" line is a dead giveaway, particularly since the county went out of its way to declare that crimes recently committed by illegal aliens really weren't that big of a deal.

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, a Democrat, signed an executive order in July barring county law enforcement officers from asking about individual’s immigration status. The order also prohibits county law enforcement from working with federal immigration agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

So Montgomery County, Maryland is the real victim here.

UPDATE: Montgomery County racks up another one.

LURNDA KOAD

Prog site ThinkLeninism goes belly-up.

ThinkProgress, the influential news site that rose to prominence in the shadow of the Bush administration and helped define progressivism during the Obama years, is shutting down. 

The outlet, which served as an editorially independent project of the Democratic Party think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), will stop current operations on Friday and be converted into a site where CAP scholars can post.

Top officials at CAP had been searching for a buyer to take over ThinkProgress, which has run deficits for years, and according to sources there were potentially three serious buyers in the mix recently. But in a statement to staff, Navin Nayak, the executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said the site was ultimately unable to secure a patron.

“Given that we could find no new publisher, we have no other real option but to fold the ThinkProgress website back into CAP’s broader online presence with a focus on analysis of policy, politics, and news events through the lens of existing CAP and CAP Action staff experts,” said Nayak. “Conversations on how to do so are just beginning, but we will seek to reinvent it as a different platform for progressive change.”

A dozen ThinkProgress employees will be losing their jobs, a CAP aide said, as many who were on staff had already gone to work elsewhere and some were incorporated into the larger CAP infrastructure. Those who are being laid off will be given a severance package that runs through the end of November and health care coverage that lasts through the year, said the CAP aide.

THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED WATCH

That's odd.  Before he was born, the fetus inside my niece told her that Bobby O'Rourke's fears were wildly hysterical nonsense.

SEPPUKU

For reasons not immediately apparent, CNN decided to provide an in-kind contribution to the reelection of Donald Trump

Put it this way: the most benign climate-change plan proposed during CNN’s seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate town hall was more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. Democrats were not merely proposing massive societal upheaval but mass coercion.

CNN says it’s a “crisis,” though, so Democrats were free to offer one insane Nostradamus-like prediction after the next. Not only is every weather event now a manifestation of global warming, but Beto O’Rourke says our communities will soon be “uninhabitable,” and Pete Buttigieg says the challenge of warming is on par with World War II, a conflict that took more than 400,000 American lives and tens of millions of others.

When Joe Biden, the “moderate” front-runner, was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if the Green New Deal — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unifying climate plan that bans all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat within the next decade — “goes too far,” or whether it was “unrealistic, promising too much” (“promising,” of course, suggests that GND’s goals are desirable), he answered, “No, no it’s not.”

In fact, the Green New Deal — which also promises to “retrofit” every building in the entire country and provide government-guaranteed jobs, free higher education, and salubrious diets to all Americans — “deserves an enormous amount of credit,” said the front-running candidate of the nation’s serious party.

Candidate Elizabeth Warren, who’s now adopted Jay Inslee’s plan to force every American to surrender fossil fuel and nuclear energy in 20 years, claims solar panels are the way forward. To put this in perspective, remember that natural gas makes up about 23 percent of our energy consumption while renewables make up about 11 percent. Only 8 percent of that 11 percent is solar energy — much of it both already subsidized and mandated by government.

Americans use about 19.96 million barrels of petroleum products per day. To replace it, we’d have to create millions of unproductive taxpayer-funded jobs, layer every inch of available land with solar panels and windmills, and then pray to Gaia that every day is simultaneously sunny and windy. 

All for the low cost of $93 trillion.

EYE CARAMBA

You have to admit that this is pretty good.

GOOD NAME

It's hard to see how the family recovers from this.

TOUGH BUT FAIR

SMARTY PANTS

Kyle Smith on the World's Foremost Authority.

Hello, I’m Tom Nichols. I have very fierce facial hair. I am a super-brain expert authority (™) on all things. You can find me in the Naval War College, USA Today, and in the dictionary, under the word “insufferable.”

I am in fact an expert on all things, except the management of time, 100 hours of which I spend on Twitter each week unclogging my nose at you fools who voted for Trump, you fools who are reluctant to vote for Socialists, and you fools who consider it conservative to appoint conservative judges. Which I have wittily dubbed “muh judges” while deriding you weirdos who oppose abortion. My Twitter handle is @RadioFreeTom because I’m sort of like the patriots who carried the message of freedom to Eastern Europeans suffering under the Soviet yoke, though I’m also on record as saying I’d vote for USSR fanboy Bernie Sanders over Trump. I am truly super-conservative and am in fact the suzerain, archduke, and General Secretary of all conservatives, so you have to listen to what I say, and I say vote Socialist.

My brand is being unorthodox, by which I mean “as predictable as Max Boot.” Frequently I say something like “As a conservative . . .” before adding that I’d vote for Bernie even if he taxed used kitty litter, for Elizabeth Warren even if she made me wear waffles as underpants, and for Kamala Harris even if she made me drive to work in a golf cart covered with Barbie decals.

JEOPARDY

I'll take "Television No One Will Watch" for $2,000, Alex.

WHEN "HISTORY" GOES BACK A YEAR

How much time do you have?

Sincerely,

HRH King Charles I

HAMMER AND SICKLE

The Democratic Party makes it official.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) passed a resolution Saturday praising the values of "religiously unaffiliated" Americans as the "largest religious group within the Democratic Party."

I leave it to someone else to explain how "religiously unaffiliated" Americans can constitute a "religious group" because I sure-as-hell can't.

The resolution, which was unanimously passed at the DNC's summer meeting on Aug. 24 in San Francisco, Calif., was championed by the Secular Coalition of America, an organization that lobbies on behalf of atheists, agnostics, and humanists on public policy. The group celebrated the DNC's move as the first time a major party "embraced American nonbelievers."

In other words, the Democrats went full Leninist.  It's never a good idea to go full Leninist.

"Religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values," said the resolution, which adds they should advocate for "rational public policy based on sound science and universal humanistic values."

Uh huh.

The move comes as Democratic presidential candidates have ramped up their religious rhetoric on the campaign trail, but the party announced it is targeting "nonreligious voters" to try to beat President Trump, who solidified the evangelical vote in 2016.

Good luck with that considering that there aren't nearly enough of them to put you Communists over the top, you've just publicly declared that you'd really rather Christians, Jews, Muslims and others not vote for you and you're going to be constantly having to explain this resolution away from now until next November (the first ads are no doubt being written as I type this).  And if you think that this resolution is merely a case of the Democrats tolerating a wide spectrum of opinions, remember.  To these people, there is only one right answer.

And on Saturday, Democrats took a shot at believers who use "religious liberty" to threaten the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans.

David French?  You have a call on the white courtesy phone.