I see that the fallout from Covington is still falling well, admittedly not on the front pages of the Establishment National Media (the ENM for short) but I hear the echoes quite clearly still, especially among those of a conservative or libertarian inclination. Oh, not the encounter itself; it was still bleedingly obvious to most of us within days that the Covington Catholic schoolboys held up rather well in the face of blatantly racial and relentless barracking on the part of the Black Israelite nutters, and harassment by a drum-pounding professional “activist” whose account of the whole shenanigans afterwards bore only the most coincidental resemblance to those facts easily verified from the numberless videos available. That no one in the Establishment National Media has the least particle of interest in outing the Black Israelite nutters by name and number, or of asking Chief Reefer Ranger to account for the discrepancies in his own personal narrative would lead one to conclude that representatives of the ENM have forsaken impartiality in favor of the “narrative” which posits that MAGA-hat wearing, white, religiously-observant residents of Flyoverlandia are wicked, evil, non-persons, and Persons of Color/Minority no matter what their conduct and words may be are blameless and above all criticism.
Law Enforcement
How is the Shutdown Going ?
We are now in week three of the partial government “shutdown” over the refusal of Democrats to fund any of Trump’s wall. They see this as another “Read My Lips” situation which, if they can make Trump back down, it will kill his re-election campaign just as it did to Bush in 1992.
But Trump’s base takes the wall itself seriously, and, like George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge on taxes, the wall has become the president’s “read my lips” albatross. His supporters may not abandon him over it, but Trump’s re-election hinges entirely on their enthusiasm. Yes, they will vote for him, but will they engage in the get-out-the-vote activities that drive to the polls enough additional voters to put Trump over the top?
How is that going ? Even Texas Monthly, no friend of Republicans agrees.
Jet skis dropping off pregnant women. Chinese border crossers in fancy workout attire. A park full of could-be spies. These sights of the Rio Grande are almost hallucinatory, but they don’t seem to alarm Spratte. They seem to fatigue him. Not long ago, he says, agents’ mouths would drop open when they’d hear about a group of fifty immigrants getting caught. Now, he says, “if you tell me, I’ve got a group of fifty, I need help, I would laugh at you. If you said, I’ve got a group of three hundred, now that would be cool, because that would be a new record. And the records are only going to keep increasing.” (According to Spratte, agents in the Valley have had a single pickup of around 280 immigrants.)
Trump visited the wall yesterday and CNN’s Jim Acosta gave Trump a hand at making his case.
I know this might be hard for you to comprehend Jimbo, but the reason why all of Twitter has been mocking you today is because you were at a part of the border WITH A WALL. So yes, of course it was working. Replicate that across the border & we’ll all be safer. #RealNews #ByeBye
It did not look too good for Acosta to brag about how safe it was near a wall. OR fence, if you prefer.
Ahh – the New Year!
Well, it certainly started off with a bang … or, strike that, a number of spectacular public tantrums on the part of people that ordinary humans might have expected to have cultivated a more mature approach when it came to coping with others in the public sphere. I speak of the Gamestop shop customer of indeterminate sex who went off on the cashier for addressing … ummm, the customer as a man, when on the thin basis of some eye makeup, the customer apparently hoped to pass as a woman and not a member of a 1980s tribute rock band. Let me break it to you gently, guy as a woman myself, you’re doing the woman-thing all wrong. A little more care with the coiffure, a skirt and some nice stockings and low heels, and a soft-spoken Southern lady demeanor even adorning a six-foot-something frame with shoulders like a football quarterback would make it easier for those you encounter in public to go along with a pretense of you being a delicate little flower of womanhood.
Of the vape-store clerk (now a former vape-store clerk) feeling all righteous and entitled to go off on an abusive rant against a customer wearing items of clothing identifying him as a Trump fan … seriously, when did it become OK to be an abusive butthead in public? Or is it just that incidents like this are more likely to be documented in this age of practically everyone having a telephone capable of recording short video? Cannot we all agree on a new year resolution to act like mature, well-adjusted adults in public?
Remember that “White Nationalist ” rally where a woman was hit by a car and killed?
Remember the “White Nationalist”demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017? Many have forgotten but the trial of the driver who killed a “Democratic Socialist” demonstrator is going on now.
Why are the news media not reporting? Why do we have to read “Russia Today” articles about it?
Maybe it is not going well for the left ?
Fifteen months after the now notorious Unite the Right rally (UTR), James Alex Fields is finally having his day in court.
Fields is facing a slate of charges including first degree murder for crashing his Dodge Challenger into a crowd in downtown Charlottesville two hours after UTR was forcibly disbursed by police. He was arrested minutes after the incident, denied bail, and has been imprisoned ever since. He has also been charged with federal hate crimes, for which he will likely face prosecution next year.
Who is he ? The “Unite the Right” group is on trial.
the outcome will affect several other key cases. One such case is Sines v. Kessler, a sprawling civil suit brought on behalf of 11 plaintiffs against every key figure and organization who participated in UTR. The suit is being argued by two New York-based law firms, Boies Schiller Flexner and Kaplan Hecker & Fink, whose ethnic composition is worth noting. The suit alleges that UTR attendees conspired to commit violence because of “hate,” “racism,” and other species of badthink. The Fields trial will also likely affect the trials of four UTR attendees who were recently arrested in California and accused of “conspiracy to riot.”
Testimony for the defense is going on.
On Aug. 12, 2017, a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville turned deadly when a 20-year-old Ohio man allegedly accelerated his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and leaving 19 others injured, five critically.
Now, some of the same right-wing groups involved in those events in Charlottesville are planning another protest to coincide with the anniversary this weekend. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and the city of Charlottesville declared states of emergency ahead of this weekend’s anniversary. The governor said in a press conference Wednesday he will allow agencies to call in the National Guard to assist in security efforts.
That was ABC at the time. What does the defense say ? First the Prosecution.
The prosecution isn’t pulling any punches. The facts are not on their side, so they are going in for maximum emotional effect. During her 20-minute opening statement, Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s attorney Nina Antony stressed the gruesome nature of victim’s injuries, and suggested that Fields had premeditated the whole thing, mentioning that three months before UTR, Fields had posted an image of a car running into a crowd of people on Instagram. “Fields was here in Charlottesville with anger and images of violence fixed in his mind.”
Now the Defense.
Hill did provide some useful details about Fields’ activities and interactions in the two hours between the time when UTR was forcibly (and illegally) dispersed and when the car crash happened. Fields left Lee Park by walking west–the safer way–and returned to the UTR staging ground at McIntyre Park. He went back to his car at the McDonald’s up the road (presumably this one). At the Shell gas station across the street, he met three other UTR attendees, who needed to get back to their cars, all parked in the still-dangerous downtown. Fields volunteered to give them a lift back to their cars. Dropping them off, Fields and his new acquaintances resolved to meet up later for lunch.
Next: a rifle toting leftist testifies.
The defense called Dwayne Dixon, an “anti-racist activist,” to testify about his actions that day, and about a Facebook post, in which Dixon claimed that he had used an AR-15 rifle “to chase off James fields from our block… before he attacked the marchers.”
And:
Continuing Derangement
By the Mystic Marbles of Matagorda, I thought that last week’s bout of Trump derangement was the far frozen limit, but here it is only Wednesday and the establishment media is already running around in hair-on-fire fits of hysteria, the distributed radical insurgency known as Antifa has declared bloody war on the employees of the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a writer employed by the New Yorker magazine as a fact-checker has singlehandedly undermined the intellectual coinage working for that magazine, having been a Fulbright scholar and a graduate of Harvard … and after a nearly fifty year hiatus from public consciousness, Peter Fonda has hove once again into sight. Like a groundhog, only hairier and on a longer rotation.