The Leftist lies never stop

Forget any idea you’ve ever held about the “truth” and the application of “common sense” and hoping for its return to the mainstream politic and media in America.

From the looks of things, it’s gone. There seems to be zero interest in reviving it. And we are all doomed if we don’t take back control.

The last several days of this first week in 2022 proved excessively revealing. The world spun, we went back to work (as best we could,) but did we ever learn a thing or two about the left’s playbook for the year.

Here it is in a nutshell: literally make up anything you wish in order to “make your point.”

This isn’t surprising in theory. They’ve operated like this since we were all asked to believe that a guy who couldn’t fill 15 circled seating spots in an empty gym somehow defeated the guy who packed in 100,000’s of attendees in stadiums and airport hangers in sub-freezing weather.

It’s election cycle again so the plan is straightforward. Make up the most fantastic, breath-taking claims and pass them off as true.

Kamala Harris insists that you believe that the disruption of January 6 2020 was the equivalent of the downing of the twin towers of September 11.

Full stop.

Aunt Crazy should be dismissed from her job right there but sadly she will live to cackle nervously in days yet to come.

President Biden claimed this week that we lost several police officers in the events of the Capitol protests. Which we didn’t — not one. (We did however have a Capitol police officer shoot a service member from the Air Force at point blank range and kill her. But why confuse the confused-in-chief?)

The White House also released a graphic on social media this week “showing” that they are “creating” jobs in excess of 500,000 per month. They also graphed it with the jobs numbers of all other modern era administrations — which they supposedly dwarfed. The problem was they released the graph on the same day that the new jobs numbers were released clocking in at 199,000 jobs created for the month, missing the estimates of 400k+. So they literally missed the estimate by a margin larger than the number of jobs created.

Nancy Pelosi claimed this week that “Trump supporters” killed a soul on the Capitol grounds days after the protests. But how many “Trump supporters” hate the former president and are devout followers of Louis Farrakhan?

And no amount of dishonesty, gas lighting, or pure ignorance could beat the left leaning associate justices of the Supreme Court. Justice Elena Kagan claimed repeatedly that the vaccine would insure that elderly and vulnerable people wouldn’t get the newest CoVid variant despite the fact that the vaccines have performed poorly against the current strain.

Justice Stephen Breyer claimed 750 million new cases had been reported the day previous. There are less than half that number of living persons in America.

And Justice Sonia Sotomayor who couldn’t be bothered to be in attendance on the bench, presumably for health reasons, but was spotted that very night dining out in Washington DC with Democrat Senators Amy Klobuchar and Dick Durbin, was the most clownish of all. She went so far as to claim that there were more than 100,000 children hospitalized because of CoVid and “many of them” on ventilators.

A quick pull of the stats of the day showed 114,000 people (all ages) were currently hospitalized “with CoVid.” Only 20,000 or so of those in actual ICU units.

Children make up less than five hospitalizations out of every 100,000. And that follows the 48% increase from less than 3 out of 100,000 from weeks previous.

And as of this writing I was unable to source even one current account of a child on a ventilator due to CoVid.

Add to this the fact that New York finally stopped counting all persons “with CoVid” as persons hospitalized “DUE to CoVid.” In the first reports since the change the numbers dropped by an astounding 47%.

This amount of abject ignorance or flat out falsehoods all occurred in just the final two days of this past week. From every branch of government, from every level of office, from the lips of their very own leaders.

They are criminally dishonest, or they are the most buffoonish know-nothings in American history.

And a sizable wager would likely be won by betting they are both!

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2022/01/09/gaslighting-dishonest-buffoons-n2601601

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The filibuster has been bad, but repealing it would be worse

by Jeff Jacoby

IN A "Dear Colleague" letter on Jan. 3, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a warning: If Republicans continued to block the Senate from passing two sweeping elections-related bills supported by Democrats, he wrote, then the chamber would "debate and consider changes to Senate rules on or before January 17." That was a threat, as everyone understood, to invoke the "nuclear option" and blow up the filibuster. If successful, Democrats would no longer require 60 votes to pass their controversial measures; a bare majority would suffice.

That was on Monday. On Tuesday, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia came out against the nuclear option, saying he would find it "very, very difficult" to support any unilateral move to kill the filibuster. So did Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. During a Democratic caucus lunch, the news site Axios reported, she told her colleagues that "she will not support any effort to get rid of the 60-vote threshold."

So much for Schumer's threat to go nuclear. The filibuster is safe for now.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Arguments can be made both ways, but my view has long been that the filibuster ought to be reformed by returning to the rules that prevailed before 1970. The Senate should revive the old "talking filibuster," under which a senator or group of senators could indefinitely forestall a vote on any measure by the means Jimmy Stewart dramatized in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" — taking to the floor to speak and refusing to sit down until the majority agrees to compromise. When a filibuster was in progress, all other Senate business came to a halt.

Those two crucial stipulations — a filibuster had to be conducted in person and it superseded other Senate activity — made the maneuver both powerful and rare. Consequently, it was a weapon deployed with great caution. During the entire 19th century, for example, there were fewer than two dozen filibusters.

But in 1970, the rules changed. Under a new two-track system, a bill being filibustered would be put aside while the Senate took up other matters. Senators no longer had to emulate Jimmy Stewart to block a piece of legislation — they merely had to threaten to do so. In effect, the filibuster became a blackball, which could be overcome only with supermajority support. Before long, it was taken for granted that every significant bill needed 60 votes to pass.

Though the filibuster continued to exist, its core purpose had been inverted: A parliamentary tactic meant to ensure debate and encourage compromise had become an artificial gimmick to prevent debate. Mixed with the toxic partisanship and angry polarization that now dominate American politics, the modern filibuster's impact has been to make the Senate more dysfunctional and less deliberative.

And then there's the hypocrisy.

Dozens of Democrats are decrying the filibuster as an antidemocratic travesty, a threat to voting rights, an unconscionable obstruction of the will of the majority — even, as former president Barack Obama called it, a "Jim Crow relic." Yet as recently as 2017, a majority of Senate Democrats signed a bipartisan letter defending the filibuster and "opposing any effort to curtail the existing rights and prerogatives of Senators to engage in full, robust, and extended debate."

What changed? Democrats and their allies claim that the stakes now are so high, and the measures they support so urgent, that the nation can no longer afford any impediment to legislating by straight majority rule.

Here's a simpler explanation: In 2017, Senate Democrats were in the minority and a Republican was in the White House. Back then, Democrats were making vigorous use of the filibuster to block Republican priorities — over the next four years, they would filibuster hundreds of bills and nominations — while Donald Trump was the one clamoring to eliminate the 60-vote rule. "Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW!" Trump tweeted angrily. "It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!"

In a thoughtful Politico essay a few months ago, Ronald Weich, dean of the University of Baltimore Law School and a former top aide to senators Edward Kennedy and Harry Reid, warned his fellow liberal Democrats that if they kill the filibuster today, they will find themselves in a "nightmare" tomorrow.

In 2005, when he was a member of the Democratic minority in the Senate, Barack Obama stirringly defended the filibuster. "If the majority chooses to end the filibuster," he warned then, "the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse."

"Progressives pushing to end the filibuster are suffering from a bad case of amnesia," Weich wrote. "The past three decades, in fact, are filled with moments when the filibuster prevented Republicans from pushing through legislation that would have made America a far darker place." Personally, I think that some of the GOP legislation Democrats blocked would have made life in America considerably brighter. But Weich's essential point is that if Democrats deep-six the filibuster, they will enjoy no more than a short-term victory. Sooner or later, perhaps as early as next January, Republicans will regain control of the Senate. At which point — if the filibuster has been nuked — there will be nothing to prevent them from repealing with 51 votes whatever the current Senate passes by a similar bare majority.

In 2005, when Republicans were in the majority, they were tempted to do to the filibuster what Schumer and most Democrats want to do now. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, understood what was on the line.

"I understand that Republicans are getting a lot of pressure to do this from factions outside the chamber," he said in a floor speech. "But we need to rise above an 'ends justify the means' mentality because we're here to answer to the people — all of the people — not just the ones wearing our party label.... One day Democrats will be in the majority again, and this rule change will be no fairer to a Republican minority than it is to a Democratic minority."

It's one of the oldest rules in two-party politics: What goes around comes around. If only both parties could manage to remember it — at the same time.

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/25927/the-filibuster-has-been-bad-but-repealing-it

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Where is the outrage over the killing of Baltimore police officer Keona Holley?

It was an iconic moment in the coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol: CNN anchor Don Lemon wept at video footage of police officer Daniel Hodges being crushed in a door by the mob. Officer Hodges survived but suffered headaches for a week.

If Lemon has cried over previous or subsequent attacks on officers, an informal search of the record does not reveal it. The rest of the media were similarly — and uncharacteristically — moved by the Jan. 6 assaults. The New York Times and other outlets ran long reports on the emotional trauma experienced by the Capitol defenders, none of whom was lethally injured in the attacks. In what might be a first in modern media history, the lieutenant who killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt was even given a sympathetic interview on NBC, after half a year of media inattention to the seemingly unjustified shooting. The interracial aspect of that officer-involved killing (black officer, white victim) was not deemed noteworthy, unlike officer-involved killings where the races are reversed.

On Dec. 16, 2021, Police Officer Keona Holley was assassinated sitting alone in her patrol car at 1:30 a.m. in southern Baltimore. Travon Shaw, 32, a violent felon awaiting trial on a gun possession charge, shot her from behind, according to his accomplice — striking Holley twice in the head, once in the leg and once in the hand. A week after the ambush, Holley was removed from life support and died, leaving behind four children and a stricken police force.

A bystander filmed the aftermath of the shooting and posted the video on Instagram. He can be heard urging viewers not to report the assault, since the police harass members of the community.

Much of the media seem to have taken his advice. The New York Times has not run one story on the murder, though it has published in the interim several long features on police shootings and alleged police racism.

The Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post have covered the incident, but elsewhere, the coverage has been thin to ­nonexistent.

And yet the murder of police officers is, on a per-capita basis, a far more significant problem than fatal officer shootings of civilians. And the killing of police officers by black civilians is a far more significant problem than the killing of unarmed blacks by police officers. As of Nov. 30, 2021, 67 police officers had been feloniously killed by criminals. Conservatively using the 2019 national headcount of 697,196 sworn officers (now undoubtedly lower), 9.6 officers per 100,000 officers were feloniously killed through ­November.

As of Dec. 27, 2021, four unarmed black people have been slain by police officers since the start of the year, according to the Washington Post. The Post’s “unarmed” category includes violently resisting crime suspects. Those four unarmed black people represent .000008 percent of the nation’s nearly 47 million self-identified blacks, or less than 1/100 of one person killed by a cop per 100,000 blacks.

Rioters set fire to a multi-story affordable housing complex under construction near the Third Precinct. Protester and police clashed violently in South Minneapolis as looters attacked business on Lake Street on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 in Minneapolis.

Historically, black males have made up over 40 percent of cop-killers nationwide, though black males are 6 percent of the population. Conservatively estimating that 40 percent of the cop-killers this year have been black, 26 officers have been killed by a black suspect in 2021, for a rate of nearly four cops per 100,000 officers killed by black civilians. A police officer is about 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police ­officer.

Murders of police officers were up nearly 56 percent through the end of November compared with 2020, a year that already saw surging anti-cop violence in the wake of the George Floyd race riots. Like the assassination of Baltimore officer Holley, those killings get almost no attention from the national media, since they occur disproportionately as part of the daily gun violence that afflicts inner cities and that is also beneath media ­notice.

Yet such officer killings strike at the very heart of our civilization. A society that turns its eyes away from attacks on law enforcement (except when they confirm a favored media narrative) is a society that is heading for anarchy. The crime wave of the last two years suggests that we are well on our way to just such a disintegration of law and order.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/where-is-the-outrage-over-the-killing-of-keona-holley/

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Talk of an ‘insurrection’ is way off the mark

In 1983, Marxist revolutionaries, dedicated to the overthrow of the US government according to the FBI, detonated a bomb late at night in the US Capitol building, tearing a hole in the Senate wing as a warning to congress and the Reagan administration of worse to come if the US didn’t withdraw from Grenada in the Caribbean.

It was a heinous act of domestic terrorism, and a more calculated and dangerous one than the ramshackle mob that lurched into the Capitol on January 6 last year.

For Vice-President Kamala Harris, though, speaking last week on the first anniversary of the pro-Trump riot, January 6 was on par with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, a day that would change the course of history, perhaps more than any other.

For her, President Joe Biden, and what seems to be the entirety of the Democrat establishment, the anniversary marked an in ­“insurrection” – ie, an attempt to overthrow the government.

This is a ridiculous claim, yet emblematic of an age filled with deliberate and gross exaggerations and distortions for naked political self-interest.

January 6 was a protest gone wrong, and one that former president Donald Trump could and should have done more to rein in after it spiralled out of control. But that’s it.

After a year, not a single person of the 725 arrested has been charged with insurrection. Only a tenth have received criminal sentences. Government prosecutors have even had to resort to a law written to combat financial crime, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to find crimes with penalties tough enough to match the insurrection charge.

History teaches us real insurrections, especially successful ones, are dangerous and rare.

The Turkish generals, commanding thousands of troops, who failed to oust Recep Erdogan in 2016, would be shocked to learn the January 6 rebels’ weapons of choice: baseball bats, walking sticks, knifes, and even a few crutches.

Police recovered only a handful of guns among the protesters.

The picture of a relaxed Richard Barnett, with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s office desk, must have been taken before he got off the phone with the Pentagon to learn the world’s most powerful military wasn’t on board.

Then again, maybe the rioters were relying on the soaring rhetoric of the shirtless, horned man with face paint, the so-called QAnon Shaman, to win over congress, just as Napoleon had in his coup of 1799.

Relative bloodlessness is about all January 6 has in common with the Coup of 18 Brumaire.

No police and only a handful of rioters died on January 6, and those mainly by accident, including one who overdosed – a very inadvisable pursuit during an insurrection – and another who was trampled to death by other protesters.

Taking selfies with police can’t have helped the insurrection either, providing officers time to ­assess the enemy at close quarters and regroup.

Maybe, despite all this, Trump was frantically shoring up military support back at the White House? Actually, he was glued to cable TV and boasting about the size of the crowd to his staff, according to staff members. Augusto Pinochet wouldn’t have been watching the TV in 1973, when he seized power in Chile.

If January 6 illustrated what right-wing extremism was capable of in the US, American democracy appears safe indeed.

Even if the rioters had disrupted the certification of the election, congressional members would have come back the next day to finish the job – hardly a revolution – after the police had cleared the building.

Whatever January 6 was, it was doomed to failure.

“Those involved must be held accountable, and there is no higher priority for us,” Attorney-General Merrick Garland said in a fiery speech last week, vowing to leave no stone unturned in his search and prosecution of anyone involved in the riot, “present or not”.

Yet only a few years ago, in 2014, then chief judge Merrick Garland in effect rescinded charges against Elizabeth Ann Duke, one of the 1983 Capitol bombers, who skipped bail after her arrest in 1985 and remains on the FBI’s most wanted list.

So much for the sanctity of the Capitol.

Another of the bombers, Susan Rosenberg, had her jail sentence commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office in 2001; she now serves as a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter groups.

In his January 6 speech last week, Biden mocked, rightly, the idea that the 2020 election was “stolen”, pointing out that every legal challenge, even those heard before judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans, had failed.

But by calling January 6 an “armed insurrection”, none of the 71 per cent of Republicans who wrongly believe that would have changed their mind.

Far from fading into the background, in the year since January 6, Trump has grown more powerful in the Republican Party.

The implied characterisation of Trump supporters as insurrectionists patently hasn’t helped bring the country together.

It’s harder to dissuade others of ridiculous claims if you, yourself, are making ridiculous claims.

The abuse of language isn’t restricted to the January 6 riots. The pandemic has supposed created an “emergency” and “overwhelmed” the health system.

Covid-19 has not been a genuine emergency for some time, and very few hospitals in the world were ever “overwhelmed”, as ordinary people would understand those terms to mean.

English is a rich language. Reasonable people arguing in good faith, whatever their politics, should be able to agree on the facts.

The congressional committee charged with investigating January 6 will issue an interim report in the coming months.

It would be in Democrats’ as much as Republicans’ interest, as well as the cohesion of the US, to walk back the insurrection charge, which no one could seriously believe based either on history or semantics.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/talk-of-an-insurrection-is-way-off-themark/news-story/a2d0eee249f42b5228220415c29756e7

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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