These are just some excerpts of guests discussing the Ukraine and the Democrats outrage [nothing burger 2.0] starting with the earliest show (AM) to the latest (PM). I had time yesterday to upload the following (Dr.’s Appointment), I hope to get to Larry Elder tonight.
HUGH HEWITT (+ Rep. Gallagher)
This is why I like listening to Hugh Hewitt. Apparently Nancy Pelosi didn’t start an inquiry into impeachment like the Republicans started one with Bill Clinton. Nothing has changed after Nancy Pelosi’s presser. In other words, we aren’t even one step closer to an impeachment trial or investigation. And representative Gallagher said that they are meeting to prematurely release The whistle-blower complaint, which was already scheduled for the end of the week. So the Washington Post noted that this was not first hand information from said whistle-blower. And the Wall Street journal debunked quid pro quo. In other words the Democrats have bupkis. But now President Trump has a new whipping boy. Which is: Hunter Biden getting $50,000 a month for 5 years for doing nothing but “going into business” with John Kerry’s son and Whitey Bulger’s son.
SEAN HANNITY (+ JOhn Solomon & Gregg Jarrett)
John Solomon and Gregg Jarrett discuss everything Ukraine, the Biden’s, and even some Russia thrown in for good measure — with Sean Hannity.
MARK LEVIN (+ John Solomon)
What a great interview! Have any misunderstanding or feel ignorant about how hypocritical Democrats are? Wonder no more.
With the Democratic Party presidential campaigns going full steam, a number of candidates have argued that systemic racism has infected America since its foundation. Larry takes a look at former President Obama and his transition from saying that race wasn’t important to fully embracing identity politics. Larry also looks further into how disadvantaged Black Americans truly are and finds some interesting information.
NOQ had a good post relaying the Democrats slamming AOC:
…As it turns out, the “toxic emissions” she thought she was viewing were actually just heat signatures and the “fracking” site she thought she was exposing wasn’t doing any fracking. This information came from multiple sources questioning her claims, most notably from a Democratic lawmaker in the area who scolded her for her false alarmism.
According to Mary Throne, a Wyoming Democratic public service commissioner, Ocasio-Cortez needs to stop ignoring “science and facts.”
Interesting video, but @AOC there is no fracking occurring at the site as shown and no way to determine compliance or lack thereof with CO air standards. As Dems, we do ourselves no favors when we ignore science and facts. Happy to discuss energy and the West any time. https://t.co/zI2WBXeGM2
“Statements regarding an infrared (FLIR) video tweeted by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez yesterday evening are categorically false,” Brian Cain, a spokesman for Extraction Oil & Gas, told The Daily Caller. “In the short video, the congresswoman claimed to see ‘toxic emissions’ through a camera and stated that the air was being ‘poisoned’ by oil and gas development. In reality, the operations she was viewing have been lauded as among the best anywhere in the United States for their management practices and facility designs that protect air quality, public health and the environment.”
“Using an infrared camera, the Congresswoman claimed to see ‘invisible emissions,’ when she was actually witnessing a heat signature caused by high-temperature (200-plus degrees) synthetic drilling mud being circulated to the surface against cooler fall temperatures in Broomfield,” Cain continued. “In fact, the camera angle used in the video viewed an area of our site that does not even include a possible source for the types of emissions being claimed.”
The sad part about all of this is that after 13K retweets and 40K likes of her original post, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans who will see her original Tweet and think it’s real. As for Throne’s debunking Tweet, it has 6 retweets….
(Video Description) Thanks to a “whistleblower,” Joe Biden says attention should be placed on President Trump for “threatening” the Ukraine president for dirt. But…what’s the dirt on what Biden did? Because the media isn’t talking about it. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, partnered with John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Hines, and an old roommate Devon Archer to create their own private equity firm, Rosemont Seneca. Obama made VP Biden the point person for Ukraine foreign policy, and before you know it, the company Hunter, Hines, and Archer developed is in a direct partnership with the Ukraine’s largest oil company, Burisma. Smell fishy to you?
Most important article wise comes from PJ-MEDIA… here are some excerpts:
The so-called whistleblower “scandal” that the media is hyping up every which way has Democrats once again falling all over each other to declare another “impeachable offense,” despite having virtually no details about the conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. But, like everything else that’s been thrown at Trump, this appears to be another phony scandal. The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow reported Saturday that the whistleblower complaint “is nothing more than a rumor reported by someone in the intelligence community.” In fact, CNN reported this fact, but buried it in an article:
The whistleblower didn’t have direct knowledge of the communications, an official briefed on the matter told CNN. Instead, the whistleblower’s concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work, and those details have played a role in the administration’s determination that the complaint didn’t fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law, the official said.
Schow noted, “this is yet another anonymous source giving more context on what another anonymous source told a different outlet, but it still calls the entire story into question.” The original Washington Post story, despite being on the front page, was vague, relying on “two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter” who were “speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.” They alleged that Trump had made a “promise” to a world leader—which, based on what we know right now, is incorrect.
The Post filled out its story with information about a “standoff” between Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire and Congress.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson – who was appointed by Trump – determined the whistleblower complaint to be of “urgent concern,” according to the Post. But Maguire argued he was not required by law to turn the complaint over to congressional Democrats seeking to impeach Trump.
The reason Maguire didn’t turn the complaint over is because of what CNN reported – that the person who made the complaint had no direct knowledge of what was said and was merely reporting a rumor. Why the inspector general determined it “urgent and credible” remains to be seen.
All the reactions to the story since have been based on speculation as to what occurred on the call. Trump is alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and offered a quid pro quo… which, according to the Wall Street Journal, there wasn’t:
President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe, according to people familiar with the matter.
“He told him that he should work with [Mr. Giuliani] on Biden, and that people in Washington wanted to know” whether allegations were true or not, one of the people said. Mr. Trump didn’t mention a provision of foreign aid to Ukraine on the call, said this person, who didn’t believe Mr. Trump offered the Ukrainian president any quid-pro-quo for his cooperation on an investigation…
[….]
So far, all we know is that the whistleblower at the heart of this situation didn’t actually overhear anything. The one thing we do know is that in 2016, Joe Biden successfully pressured then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to ax the country’s top prosecutor, who was investigating his son’s company, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Biden even bragged about it.
Here is the first episode of our new series, The Narrative vs The Truth. Jason takes on the narratives around the oil industry. (See also my recent post, “Climate Religion (Hey, Climate Turds, Grow Up!”)
The transcript can be found here: Facebook This story comes by way of TWITCHY:
Yesterday the world heard from “climate strike” activists, including students who took the day off to help the Left push the panic button about climate change and blame preceding generations for screwing things up. And now, in the name of equal time, comes a counterpoint:
Australia’s most popular talkback presenter, Alan Jones is a phenomenon. He’s described by many as the nation’s greatest orator and motivational speaker. Alan has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable to the largest Breakfast audience in Australia.
…Yesterday, I was fuming that my son’s school participated in the abysmal #ClimateStrike.
Fortunately, student participation in it was optional, and my boy gave the event a hard pass. As a parent, I would prefer students learn actual science and mathematics. If teachers are going to pursue climate-related activities, instead of promoting protests, they should review such concepts as the Milankovitch Cycles, Maunder Minimums, and the geologic record of major extinction level events….
…Perhaps my favorite moment is when Carlin goes into the subject of plastics. The comedian humorously ponders whether the reason for humans is that Earth wanted us to create plastic. Here’s a partial transcript:
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos.
Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic… asshole.”
As I watched the video, published in 2007 only a year before his death, I wondered how Carlin’s routine would be viewed a dozen years later. When he goes into the segment on man’s attempts to “save the planet” when the planet wipes out cities with volcanoes and earthquakes, I can’t help but think that there would be shouts to silence him today, for being insensitive to Pompeians, Mexicans, and Hawaiians who build next to volcanoes.
What we really need today is a movement to save comedy.
During this routine, Carlin mentioned that we can’t take care of each other much less the planet. This isn’t entirely true, though to actually clean the streets instead of virtue-signal over them at a banquet requires a quality many celebrities and politicians lack: Humility…
[Editor’s Note: watch the gallery reactions as well] (GATEWAY PUNDIT) So was liberal hack Kathleen Belew, a so-called expert on the ‘white power movement,’ who used her time to lie about Candace Owens.
Candace Owens was correct in referring to Belew as “despicable” after her vicious assault on Candace’s integrity.
After Belew accused Candace Owens of laughing at the Christchurch massacre, a complete lie, Rep. Mark Meadows granted Owens his time to respond to the accusations.
(NEWSBUSTERS) Since CNN’s counterterrorism analyst Philip Mudd has a reputation for being vociferously anti-Trump, it must have come as quite a surprise to Chris Cuomo on Wednesday when Mudd made comments extremely critical of the intelligence community whistleblower who filed a complaint about one of President Trump’s phone calls with a foreign leader.
As you can see in the video below, Mudd’s response seems to have been not at all what Cuomo expected to hear from him….
Comedians Bill Burr and Jim Jefferies slammed cancel culture in response to SNL firing its new cast member Shane Gillis over jokes GIllis made about Chinese people in the past.
After Shane Gillis was fired by Saturday Night Live over previous comments, former SNL comedians Rob Schneider and Norm McDonald stepped up to defend Shane. Even Bill Burr chimed in on “cancel culture” and how a bad joke shouldn’t ruin your life.
With economic pundits predicting disaster over the horizon for the Trump economy, Larry decides to compare the doom and gloom to the months prior to the 1992 presidential election, which propelled Bill Clinton to the presidency. Just what were the pundits saying leading up to that election, and what were they saying directly afterwards? How does this parallel the leadup to 2020? Larry answers all these questions and more. He also gives us a peak into a lucrative career path he decided to pass up, despite his obvious talent.
This is one of the many convos on SANTA CLARITA COMMUNITY’S Facebook Page about a meeting to “Stop Gun Violence: SCV’s Message to Mitch McConnell”
(ME) Stop gun violence, health insurance for all, free college, etc., etc. All these Utopian ideals are just that. Fiction.
(SANDRA RC) Hey Sean, not fiction as it works in other countries. Are you saying that we’re sub-standard?
(ME)Sandra RC mmm no, it doesn’t work in other countries. There is a myth about Australia. The first being that there are more guns now owned in Australia than before the 1996 massacre (3.2 million vs. 3.6 million).
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
In places like the UK, Jamaica, and the like, violent robbery and home invasions while the occupants are home are VERY high. It is a dangerous place to live in, and many wish they could protect their loved ones.
And of course there is this moving testimony of one of the patrons at Luby’s Massacre:
(STILL ME)Sandra RC — in other words, they [the countries you are thinking of] are sub-standard. Or the purported beliefs about what they have done and accomplished with gun control — those beliefs are sub-standard.
Got that? Gun ban in 1996. The government flat out confiscated weapons. It was mandatory. A gun grab. Now more people than ever have guns. Gun crime has not gone up. Because gun bans totally work…NOT….
Fact: Homicides were falling before the Australian firearm ban. In the seven years before and after the Australian ban, the rate of decline was identical (down to four decimal places). Homicides dropped steeply starting in 2003, but all of this decline was associated with non-firearm and non-knife murders (fewer beatings, poisonings, drownings, etc.). 33
Fact: Crime has been rising since enacting a sweeping ban on private gun ownership. In the first two years after the ban, government statistics showed a dramatic increase in criminal activity. 34In 2001-2002, homicides were up another 20%. 35
From the inception of firearm confiscation to March 27, 2000, the numbers are:
Firearm-related murders were up 19%
Armed robberies were up 69%
Home invasions were up 21%
The sad part is that in the 15 years before the national gun confiscation:
Firearm-related homicides dropped nearly 66%
Firearm-related deaths fell 50%
Fact: Gun crimes have been rising throughout Australia since guns were banned. In Sydney alone, robbery rates with guns rose 160% in 2001, more than in the previous year. 36
Fact: A ten-year Australian study has concluded that firearm confiscation had no effect on crime rates. 37A separate report also concluded that Australia’s 1996 gun control laws “found [no] evidence for an impact of the laws on the pre-existing decline in firearm homicides” 38and yet another report from Australia for a similar time period indicates the same lack of decline in firearm homicides. 39 Fact: Despite having much stricter gun control than New Zealand (including a near ban on handguns) firearm homicides in both countries track one another over 25 years, indicating that gun control is not a control variable. 40
MYTH: THE AUSTRALIAN GUN BUYBACK REDUCED MASS HOMICIDES
Mass Homicides in Australia Before/After 1990s Gun Control Initiative
Incidents
Deaths
22-years
Total
Average
Total
Average
Before
0.13
0.08
0.13
0.08
After
0.09
0.10
0.09
0.10
Per 1,000 Population
Fact: The number of mass homicides and the number of people killed in mass homicides in Australia has gone up since the gun control initiatives of the mid 1990s.
(33)Australia Institute of Criminology, AIC NHMP 1989/90 to 2011-12 (34)Crime and Justice – Crimes Recorded by Police, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000 (35)Report #46: Homicide in Australia, 2001-2002, Australian Institute of Criminology, April 2003 (36) Costa targets armed robbers, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2002 (37) Gun Laws and Sudden Death: Did the Australian Firearms Legislation of 1996 Make a Difference?, Dr. Jeanine Baker and Dr. Samara McPhedran, British Journal of Criminology, November 2006. (38) Austrian firearms: data require cautious approach, S. McPhedran, S. McPhedran, and J. Baker, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2007, 191:562 (39)Australian firearms legislation and unintentional firearm deaths a theoretical explanation for the absence of decline following the 1996 gun laws Public Health, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, Public Health, Volume 122, Issue 3 (40) Firearm Homicide in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand: What Can We Learn From Long- Term International Comparisons?, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, and Pooja Singh, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, March 16, 2010
The American Spectator has this great information that sets the record clear by giving guidelines to the debate:
Type “mass shootings” and “common” into a search engine and you’ll get all sorts of breathless commentary that might lead one to believe there Americans face a genuine epidemic of shooting rampages. A few headlines:
Vox: “Mass shootings on campus are getting more common and more deadly.”
ThinkProgress: “Mass Shootings Are Becoming More Frequent.”
NPR: “Study: Mass Shootings Are On The Rise Across U.S.”
Washington Post: “Why are mass shootings becoming more common?”
[….]
Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review…
I want to break here and post something Mother Jones said in trying to define what a Mass Shooting is… “she” says this:
Broadly speaking, the term refers to an incident involving multiple victims of gun violence. But there is no official set of criteria or definition for a mass shooting, according to criminology experts and FBI officials who have spoken with Mother Jones.
Mother Jones then goes on to quote the definition — after being ambiguous about it — as four or more [excluding the shooter]. Wikipedia says this:
The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others.
Aggrawal A. (2005) Mass Murder. In: Payne-James JJ, Byard RW, Corey TS, Henderson C (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 3, Pp. 216-223. Elsevier Academic Press, London
“Serial Murder – Federal Bureau of Investigation”. Fbi.gov. Retrieved 2012-03-07.
It is odd to me why Mother Jones would be ambiguous about it while at the same time use the accepted FBI terminology/definition. At any rate, I HIGHLY suggest reading this Debunking of Mother Jones’ “10 Pro-Gun Myths,” worth the read.
Obama recently praised Australian gun-control.
ANN COULTER tackles this “Australian Stat” often mentioned. She quotes the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal as saying this:
Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia’s gun laws, as if it’s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:
“After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. … Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent … said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.”
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
…This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country. That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.
A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .
Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels. One doesn’t need a semi-auto to commit suicide. While Australia’s population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent. If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that. Obviously that pattern wasn’t what was observed….
Crime is dropping recently in Australia, but this can be attributed to gun ownership rising back up to the previous rates before the ban. GAY PATRIOTcomments on the before mentioned Obama quote about Australia:
I reiterate the two hidden rules of “Common Sense Gun Laws:”
1. “We only want to keep guns away from dangerous persons.”
2. “Anyone who owns a gun is a dangerous person.”
NATIONAL REVIEW also makes the point that in order to praise Australian “success,” one is praising anti-Constitutional actions:
Let me be clear, as Obama likes to say: You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.
[….]
Obama gave the impression that gun-violence is on the increase. This is false. As both Pew and the Department of Justice recorded last year, the majority of Americans believe that gun violence is proliferating when it is in fact dropping. This year marked a 20-year low. More than anything, America has a copycat problem in its schools.
…The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.
Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings). “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.
The rare nature of these incidents also holds true for safety in K-12 schools, which garnered a significant amount of attention in the wake of the tragedies in Columbine and Newtown. According to two reports by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of a child “dying in school in any given year from homicide or suicide was less than one in 1 million between 1992 and 1994 and slightly greater than one in 2 million between 1994 and 1999.”
Of course any story like the above needs a positive one added to it. The Blaze has this:
Two armed criminals reportedly put a gun to a 17-year-old girl’s head on Monday night as she was outside retrieving something from a car. The man, whose intentions still aren’t entirely clear, then ordered the teenager to take them into her house — a decision that would prove to have deadly consequences.
Peering out the window of the St. Louis home were the girl’s mother and father, each prepared to protect their daughter with deadly force. There was also a 5-year-old boy in the house, though his relationship to the family wasn’t known on Tuesday.
The girl’s father, a 34-year-old man, reportedly observed the men walking towards his home while holding a gun to his daughter’s head, a sight that no father ever wants to see. He quickly retrieved his firearm and his wife did the same.
The brave dad then confronted the two criminals and opened fire, hitting both suspects with accurate shots…
Jojo Ruba, executive director at Faith Beyond Belief discusses the recent conversion therapy ban passed by Edmonton city council and what the ban will mean for Christian counselors and Christians in general.
