Santa Cruz’s “Okay” Skate Symbol (A #MAGA Hoax)

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2017

ROLL THE TAPE PLEASE:

Of course the left thinks this “okay” symbol is racist, like everything is now “racist” (milk, the term “athletic,” criticizing the IRS, saying that Barack Obama lied, wanting lower taxes, Star Wars, your baby, craft beer, being white, lunch bags, etc., etc. TOWNHALL | TWITTER [Tucker Carlson] | WASHINGTON TIMES | NATIONAL REVIEW | ZERO HEDGE [Tucker Carlson]).

See, of course, my previous posts on the “okay” symbol, here and here. I assume that “racist things” and the list of things caused by “Global Warming” will compete with each other.

Of course, if you are not familiar with the original graphic from SANTA CRUZ, it made #3 in the TOP 50 GREATEST SKATE LOGOS.

I was happened upon DICTIONARY.COM’s definition of the “Okay” symbol — and can you guess what I found? And the reason for Savory Agent’s version of the Santa Cruz Symbol? Here is the WRONG DEFINITION description first:

Important context: While the OK hand emoji 👌 has many harmless meanings, it was co-opted as a white supremacist symbol in the late 2010s. One should now be mindful of context when using or coming across this emoji.

This is just factually wrong. The “okay” symbol as a white supremacist symbol was first a hoax by 4Chan dating to 2017, and, the media made such a stink about it [thinking  it was true] that after the media freakout, white supremacist groups adopted it.

Here is WIKIPEDIA’S noting of it:

In 2017, users on the message-board site 4chan aimed to convince the media and other people that the OK gesture was being used as a white power symbol as a joke. According to The Boston Globe, users on 4chan’s /pol/ (“Politically Incorrect”) board were instructed in February 2017 to “flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy,” as part of a campaign dubbed “Operation O-KKK”.

The satirical association of the gesture with white supremacy derived from the assertion that the three upheld fingers resemble a ‘W’ and the circle made with the thumb and forefinger resemble the head of a ‘P’, together standing for “White Power.” While some members of the alt-right used the symbol after the launch of the 4chan campaign, it initially remained ambiguous whether or not it was being used to communicate genuine adherence to white supremacy, or with deliberately ironic motives.

In September 2019 the ADL revised their earlier position and added the OK gesture to its “Hate on Display” database. The listing notes that the usage of the OK hand gesture is sometimes benign, but that it is intended as a symbol of hate in some contexts, as some white supremacists have begun using the OK symbol “as a sincere expression of White Supremacy”. White supremacists have acknowledged using the symbol as a gesture of White Power. As a result of white supremacists’ co-opting the symbol….

Dennis Prager says it often, “everything the Left touches it ruins.” The Mainstream Media and Democrats [the Left] had their grubby hands/paws/mitts all over this story as factual — and because of the perceived power play seen in using this politically — they even ruined the “okay symbol.”

Here is the ADL’s dealing with it — take note the “circle game” was ruined as well by the Democrats and Media:

In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.

In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.

Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.

Other, similar-seeming hand gestures have also been mistakenly assumed to have white supremacist connotations as a result of the “okay” hoax. One of these is the so-called “Circle Game,” in which people attempt to trick each other into looking at an okay-like hand gesture made somewhere below the waist. Another is the hand sign of the Three Percenter movement, a wing of the anti-government extremist militia movement. Three Percenters, who are right-wing extremists but are not typically white supremacists, often make a hand gesture to symbolize their movement that uses the outstretched middle, ring, and pinky fingers to represent a Roman numeral “3.” This gesture, from certain angles, can often resemble an “okay” hand gesture and has been misinterpreted by some as a white supremacist symbol.

But hey…. our dictionaries. Lol.

You know who get’s it right? BLOG EMOJIPEDIA!

  • The myth of the OK gesture as a secret symbol of white supremacy begins in 2017 as a deliberate effort on 4chan to spread the sign as such. It was chosen in part due to its use by the controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos and some white nationalists in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Its creators also claimed that the fingers of the OK gesture represent a W for white and the ring a P for power, as illustrated below. (read it all, it’s good)

I rarely say anything positive about VOX, but the link in the bullet point above surprised me. Bravo.

The “OK Sign” Hoax | Joe Rogan & Tim Pool

CNN, MSNBC, ABC are Hamas’s Air Force | Verdict Ep. 184

CNN is Hamas’s air force. MSNBC is Hamas’s Air force. ABC is Hamas’s Air force. That may seem like hyperbole and exaggeration but look at the facts! In this episode of “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” we show you example after example of how the mainstream media repeats Hamas’s lies.

CNN, MSNBC, ABC are Hamas’s Air Force

Rape Is The Norm In Illegal Immigration | “Rape Trees”

So the real question after going through this post is:

  • “Do you [government officials] dissuade or encourage illegal immigration?(deportation back to your country, build walls, etc. | VS. | cut razor wire to allow into country, invite to swarm the border, reverse previous policies shown to dissuade people making the trip up to our border, etc.)”

In other words, do you encourage more rape? Put another way: do you sacrificially offer more women up to the rapists? Or do you dissuade this offering?

JUST AN UPDATE TO THE BELOW:

Just read this DAILY WIRE story this morning, and thought of this post:

Migrant women are reportedly being raped on the Mexican side of the southern border as they wait and seek to enter the U.S.

Sexual violence has ticked up in the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros, both of which are across the border at the southern tip of Texas, Reuters reported.

Both border cities are major destinations for migrants who make the treacherous journey north in hopes of coming to America.

The two cities have seen record criminal investigations into the rape of foreign nationals this year, state data stretching back to 2014 shows. Eight sexual assault survivors and more than a dozen local aid workers also confirmed the rise in sexual violence to Reuters.

The sexual attacks are often perpetrated by human smugglers who demand cash from migrants. The details are graphic.

One woman, Carolina, said she arrived in Reynosa on a commercial bus with her 13-year-old son, but she was quickly kidnapped and brought to a house where she and other migrants were raped. At dawn one morning in late May, she was pulled out of the stash house by the men and raped on a broken-down bus.

“It’s the saddest, most horrible thing that can happen to a person,” she told Reuters.

She was released when her family paid a $3,100 ransom, and she was interviewed by Reuters after she had arrived in Chicago.

Another woman from Ecuador said she was also held hostage in Reynosa, and her captors allowed a drug dealer to rape her in exchange for a white powder he gave them, possibly cocaine. She escaped through a window one night holding her Christ child figurine as her kidnappers were sleeping.

She was interviewed by Reuters after she arrived in New Jersey and said, “I still have nightmares.”

Rape is also reportedly one of the torture tactics used by smugglers to get migrants to pay them more money……

END OF UPDATE

(As an aside, the “rape culture” Democrats always mention is being created at the border and the trip up here by their invitation to come, illegally.)

Just wanted to excerpt a portion of a larger post where I detail three lies by the media and Democrats about President Trump. Before that excerpt however, I want to add a more recent story regarding a portion of what will follow:

JUST THE NEWS reports on Senator Ted Cruz’s above mention of “rape trees”:

Mexican cartels are moving millions of people into the U.S. over the border, and “rape trees” are a reminder that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to stop them, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said during a news conference with a group of Republican senators who visited the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We heard multiple reports of something, I’ll be candid, I had never heard of before until today — something called a rape tree, which are trees where the traffickers would violently rape young women and then hang their undergarments in the tree as a trophy,” Cruz said on Friday.

According to an Amnesty International report, about 60% of the women and girls who make the trek to the U.S.-Mexico border are raped.

Cartels reportedly charge thousands of dollars to bring someone through Mexico to the U.S. illegally. Republican senators have noted that migrants who cannot afford to pay the fee end up working for the cartel to repay the debt once they enter the U.S.

“How do you think the young women pay off their 5, 6, 7, 8 thousand dollar human trafficking fee?” asked Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. “I think we all know,” he said, referring to the “rape tree.”

I mentioned this way back in November of 2016, as well as the Amnesty International report… here is the excerpt.


EXCERPT


OKAY… I will now post three responses to items of discussion that my guess is those who are very distraught over Trump’s win and view either him or a large segment of the population who voted for him as racist or bigoted, or mean to disabled persons, is more complicated than these labels. First up is this:


Is Mexico Sending Rapists?


When I ask people to offer me an example of Trump’s “racism,” I get a reference to this example most often:

  • “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you…. They’re sending people that have lots of problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” ~ Donald J. Trump

Before I add information that I doubt a millennial has heard because either they or their friends are quick to label Trump as being bigoted or racist for saying this, and moving on without further reflection, I want to note that all Republican politicians said to round up illegals in America would be an impossible task. Trump has evolved on his statement that many understood as rounding up 11-million (actually, there are 30-million). ALSO, every Republican politician noted that the Constitution would not allow for the banning of all Muslims coming to our country. Again, our Constitution forbids this. It allows for banning all persons from a country, but not a religious or sectarian belief. He [Trump] has backed away from this as well, as all of us knew he would. In fact, this was removed from his site. Trump is not a politician, but his team is counseling him well.

…Continuing.

Okay. What of Trump’s statement? It surely sounds bigoted at best.

I will shock the reader.

I think that is the most pro-woman statement in a long time by a politician regarding real — violent — crime against women.

Let me explain.

This is from the HUFFINGTON POST:

As the number of Central American women and girls crossing into the U.S. continues to spike, so is the staggering amount of sexual violence waged against these migrants who are in search of a better life.

According to a stunning Fusion investigation, 80 percent of women and girls crossing into the U.S. by way of Mexico are raped during their journey. That’s up from a previous estimate of 60 percent, according to an Amnesty International report

[….]

Through May, the number of unaccompanied girls younger than 18 caught at the US-Mexico border increased by 77 percent.

But while many of these girls are fleeing their homes because of fears of being sexually assaulted, according to the UNHCR, they are still meeting that same fate on their journey to freedom

For clarity in the sources for the HUFFPO article, for those that are of the impatient and research non-oriented generation:

✦ 60% Amnesty International Report (PDF)
✦ 80% Is rape the price to pay for migrant women chasing the American Dream? (FUSION)

(UPDATED EDITORIAL BY RPT) To be clear, these rapes are happening by residents who live in towns and districts these migrants are passing through. Other rapes are happening by Coyotajes, as well as many by the men making the trip as well. We know that many Honduren gang-members make the trek, and so, a high percentage of these men (criminals) do in fact cross our border into our nation. Where American women of all ethnic background are subjected to assault. Since we know illegals commit crimes at double the rate of native-born rape is also part of these increased stats.

NEW STORY

80% of C. American Illegals Raped on Trip to US, Still Dems Encourage Them to Come

“According to a stunning Fusion investigation, 80 percent of women and girls crossing into the U.S. by way of Mexico are raped during their journey. That’s up from a previous estimate of 60 percent, according to an Amnesty International report,” the well-known news outlet continued….

So, many of the men they travel with are rapping them. Many of the Coyotajes as well take advantage of them. There are what are now being called “RAPE TREES,” which you can learn more about on a previous post of mine, here. Here is how a conversation using this understanding went in the real world:

  • The above exchange was discussed a bit wrong, like Trump, the main idea is lost in the presentation. Gavin McInness made it sound as if the rapes were happening at the border when in actuality they are happening during the entire trip. And the girl thought he meant Coyotes, the real animal. Not Coyotajes. (That was very funny BTW, and why I ended the video like I did.)

What would be the most compassionate step to take? I would say, to control our border. That would help the migrant woman AS WELL AS our own mothers, daughters, and wives. Many from these countries that are experiencing these horrible circumstances are experiencing it because of their government models they have chosen. But this is neither here-nor-there.

The bottom line is that Trump, while not explaining this well at all, was actually making a statement about policy that in the end will protect women. There is this as well dealing with drugs and violence aspect of the comment:

A fresh wave of crime from the infamously violent MS-13 gang in the District of Columbia is being driven by the heavy recruitment of young illegal immigrants.

A surge of minors crossing the U.S. southern border is helping the notorious gang boost their ranks and instigate a new string of violent attacks in the city, reported The Washington Times. Over the past few years a wave of illegal migrant children crossed the U.S. border, and MS-13 appears to be targeting them for recruitment.

“They are certainly susceptible,” Ed Ryan, gang prevention coordinator in Fairfax County, Virginia, told The Washington Times. “They are new, they have very little family, they don’t know the language very well. They are looking for someone who looks like them, talks like them.”

Experts say violence from MS-13, which originally started in California, historically occurs in waves. Currently MS-13, on orders from El Salvador, is ramping up efforts in cities across the U.S. to reestablish their dominance on the streets, reports The Washington Times….

This is just a very short clip of a longer audio (here: ) of John and Ken discussing Mollie Tibbetts and her murderer, Christian Bahena-Rivera. According to the DAILY CALLER, he was employed by a Republican small business owner

  • “He worked on Yarrabee Farms, which is owned by the family of GOP official Craig Lang, who was a former 2018 Republican candidate for state secretary of agriculture, according to reports by the Des Moines Register.”

who may have illegally had him in their employ? However, he was an example of the DACA young so did he have his temporary papers? I have no idea. Nor would I know if he immigrated legally if he would have passed all the checks/balances.

As an side…

Is this man a racist or bigot? He was the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, and spoke out against the racist organization, La Raza, as well as calling workers who crossed the border “illegal immigrants” and “wetbacks.”

“In the mid 1970s, he conducted the ‘Illegals Campaign’ to identify and report illegal workers, ‘an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott’ (of produce from non-unionized farms), according to Pawel. She quotes a memo from Chavez that said, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.”

“Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration,” Levin said during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News’ Hannity

After saying that the premise that “compassion is an open border” is a “new idea” that has been pushed in recent times, Levin said that “a nation has a right to secure its border” and its citizens have a right to know who is coming into their country. 

Chavez, who was also against ethnic organizations like La Raza, would tell illegal immigrants to get out of the country, especially because they lowered the wages of American workers. And he was often far from compassionate in handling illegal immigrants….

(NATIONAL REVIEW, BREITBART and the HUFFINGTON POST)

Barstool Sports Founder Dave Portnoy Exposes WaPo’s Emily Heil

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy joins ‘Jesse Watters Primetime’ to discuss his phone conversation with a Washington Post reporter.

I Caught Wind That The Washington Post Was Writing A Hit Piece About Me And My Pizzafest So I Did What I Do. I Went on the Offensive

“Most Biased Encyclopedia in History” | Wikipedia Co-Founder


I just discovered that Wiki considers NO right-leaning outlet “reliable.” Not Fox News Politics, The Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, the FDRLST, or New York Post. What DOES Wiki consider “reliable?” CNN, MSNBC, Jacobin, Vox, and Buzzfeed! Give me a break!


Wikipedia Co-Founder Condemns WIKI: “Most Biased Encyclopedia in History” The entire opening/interview starting at the 10:37 is HERE.

here is the hat-tip AMERICA FIRST REPORT:

….Sanger says he noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he started noticing that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery.

In 2012, evidence also emerged revealing a Wikipedia trustee and “Wikipedian in Residence” were being paid to edit pages on behalf of their clients and secure their placement on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did You Know” section, which publicizes new or expanded articles — a clear violation of Wikipedia rules.

“It really got over the top between 2013 and 2018,” Sanger says, “and by by at the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now. It’s amazing, you know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has ever been as biased as Wikipedia has been

I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Book not mentioning my favorite topics, [and] presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.”….

In 2007 a hacker and tech whiz named Virgil Griffith revealed that the CIA, FBI and a host of large corporations and government agencies were editing pages on Wikipedia to their own benefit (or the benefit of associates). Now Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is reporting that the intelligence agencies are still at it, routinely editing pages relating to the Iraq War body count, treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and China’s nuclear program. In the video below Jimmy mentions Aaron Maté. Jimmy Dore interviewed him regarding this incident of the Syrian chemical attack (HERE), and the article can be found on Aarons GRAYZONE.

REUTERS (2007)

The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.

The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.

The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.

WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.

Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.

[….]

It violates Wikipedia’s neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization….

Here is HEARTLAND INSTITUTE’S quick noting of the bias:


Heartland Institute President Tim Huelskamp discusses Wikipedia bias.


Media Changes Narrative To Protect Biden

Over the past four years, President Biden has said that he did not know about, and did not benefit, from Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

BRIETBART has more on the exact dates these lies were spoke:

President Joe Biden “lied” at least 16 times about his family’s elaborate business schemes, the House Oversight Committee recounted Thursday.

The committee says Joe Biden lied in five different ways about his family’s foreign business endeavors:

1) That Joe Biden never spoke to his family about their business dealings;
2) His family did not receive $1 million through a third party;
3) Hunter Biden never made money in China;
4) Hunter Biden’s dealings were ethical;
5) and his son did nothing wrong.

This is a bit of a FLASHBACK PIVOT, but one worth making as it leads into a new talking point. Remember, the previous lkie told to get Biden across the finish line was that the laptop was Russian disinfo:

A MATT TAIBBI FLASHBACK

Burying the lede just a bit, the New York Times on March 16th published a long, spirited piece about the federal tax investigation of Hunter Biden. This is the 24th paragraph:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020…..

(READ IT ALL)

NOW THEY REJECT RUSSIAN DISINFO

Now that it has been confirmed, Democrat politicians and the MSM have switched gears, saying, that there is no evidence that Biden benefited from these [now proven] transactions. Let me re-word it how the MSM and Dems do:

“NO DIRECT EVIDENCE OF BENEFIT.”

BREITBART again notes this newest pivot by Dems and media:

….After Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s best friend in business, testified Monday before the House Oversight Committee, Democrats and members of the media used a joint talking point to try to discredit his testimony.

Archer told House investigators that then-Vice President Joe Biden spoke on speakerphone over 20 times with Hunter Biden’s business associates to promote the Biden “brand.”

Breitbart News reported that Archer’s testimony produced evidence implicating Joe Biden in a bribery scheme in which a foreign company paid Hunter Biden in return for use of the Biden “brand.”

“So far they [Republicans] have not been able to prove any evidence of wrongdoing,” a reporter said on ABC News’ Good Morning America.

“House GOP members continue to try and link Hunter’s business dealings to the president, though they have yet to produce any concrete evidence,” NBC News’ Today morning show claimed. “Now it is important to keep in mind while Republicans believe that there is a tie between Hunter Biden’s business dealings and the president himself, they have yet to provide any hard evidence that the president himself has done anything wrong.”

“Republicans have not tied the president, Joe Biden, to profiteering from them,” MNSBC reported. “They didn’t have the evidence yet.”

“Where’s the evidence?” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) asked on CNN. “There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the President.”

“There is today zero evidence — zero evidence — that Joe Biden, the president United States, knew about what his son was doing,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) claimed.

    • “And if the President of the United States committed the kind of offenses that in the Republican fever dreams they’re saying he committed without any evidence,” he continued, “there is at this point zero evidence that Joe Biden is guilty of anything. What the Republicans are doing, of course, is they’re just very, very angry that their guy got impeached twice, and so they’re just casting about for a way of revisiting retribution on the Democrats and this is their latest fever dream.”

However, 15 pieces of evidence strongly suggest Joe Biden was involved in his family’s business dealings:

  1. Biden family Suspicious Activity Reports of wire transfers
  2. Texts
  3. Emails
  4. WhatsApp messages
  5. Photos of Joe with Hunter’s business partners
  6. Joe Biden’s voicemail to Hunter Biden
  7. Five individuals referencing Joe Biden as the “big guy”
  8. Two whistleblower testimonies
  9. FBI FD-1023 form alleging recorded phone calls and text between Biden and Burimsa executive
  10. FBI informant alleging bribes 
  11. Video of Joe Biden bragging about firing the Ukrainian prosecutor
  12. Hunter’s statements about giving half his income to his dad
  13. Ex-White House Aide saying FBI ignored Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine business dealings
  14. Millions flowing into Biden family bank accounts
  15. Hunter Biden paying for Joe Biden’s expenses

(READ IT ALL)

THEY THINK THEIR VIEWERS ARE DUMMIES

Professor Turley make the most salient point when discussing the Democrats position:

  • “Being a crook doesn’t mean you’re a moron, and it would take a moron to do a direct deposit into an account to the Biden family or send him some Zelle transfer. It’s not done. The Bidens are very good at this,”

Here is more from DAILY CALLER:

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said that the media and Democrats were offering “ridiculous” excuses about bribery allegations involving Hunter Biden.

“The media is now acknowledging that, sure, Hunter Biden was selling influence and access but it was an illusion and there’s no proof that Joe Biden got an envelope full of money or a direct deposit to his account; therefore, there’s nothing here,” Turley told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “Democrats have constantly said stop asking questions because you don’t have that type of direct evidence of benefits. Well, that’s just ridiculous. I mean, obviously, all of these payments benefit Joe Biden. It’s going to the Biden family fund.”

[….]

“Being a crook doesn’t mean you’re a moron, and it would take a moron to do a direct deposit into an account to the Biden family or send him some Zelle transfer. It’s not done. The Bidens are very good at this,” Turley said. “They have been in the influence peddling business for decades. There’s been articles, not just Hunter but the president’s brother openly selling his access according to critics, so they have been at this a long time.”

“Here’s the weird thing is that you have got this labyrinth of accounts, right? Two dozen different shell companies’ accounts that have no discernible pursuance except to hide the money transfers going to the Biden family and, yet Democrats are demanding the one thing that is the least likely to appear,” Turley added. “Despite that whole apparatus to transfer money, someone was giving a direct deposit slip to Joe and Jill Biden. I mean, how crazy is that? So we have to, I think, deal with the reality that this is what influence peddling is.”

Eric Schwerin, a former business partner of Hunter Biden who visited the White House at least 19 times during the Obama administration when President Joe Biden served as vice president, will testify before the House Oversight Committee, Republican Rep. James Comer told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow earlier Thursday.

(DAILY CALLER)

CAVING TO FACTS… SLOWLY

Much like their other positions, this narrative is [grudgingly] starting to [have to] conform to evidence.

It’s so bad that like the “trump called NAZI’s good” lie, CNN has caved again to facts after a long holdout:

Maybe this fact will someday make the MSM?

9 VS. 6

Remember, Democrats challenged more states electors in 2016 with the election of President Trump in 2020, which is that in 2017 Democrats challenged nine state’s electors and in 2021 Republicans challenged six state’s electors:

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won 304 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton‘s 227. During the joint session on January 6, 2017, seven House Democrats tried to object to electoral votes from multiple states.

According to a C-SPAN recording of the joint session that took place four years ago, the following House Democrats made objections:

  1. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) objected to Alabama’s votes.
  2. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) objected to Florida’s votes.
  3. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) objected to Georgia’s votes.
  4. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) objected to North Carolina’s votes.
  5. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) objected to the votes from North Carolina in addition to votes from South Carolina and Wisconsin. She also stood up and objected citing “massive voter suppression” after Mississippi’s votes were announced.
  6. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) brought up allegations of Russian interference in the election and malfunctioning voting machines when she objected following the announcement of Michigan’s votes.
  7. Maxine Waters (D-Calif) rose and said, “I do not wish to debate. I wish to ask ‘Is there one United States senator who will join me in this letter of objection?'” after the announcement of Wyoming’s votes.

[….]

In 2017, House Democrats objected to votes from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Objections also were made after the announcement of votes from Mississippi, Michigan and Wyoming, adding up to nine states. None of the nine objections was considered because they lacked the signature of a senator.

[….]

In total, Republicans made objections to votes from six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. By the end of the joint session, Biden’s 306 electoral votes were certified, just as Trump’s votes had been certified in 2017….

(NEWSWEEK)

THE BIG LIE DEM VS. GOP

Democrat’s “Stolen” Election Claims | “Stolen” 2016 Election

The NEW YORK TIMES notes the following about the Democrats 21st century strategy:

Few objections were filed in accordance with the Electoral Count Act in the 20th century. But starting with George W. Bush’s victory in the 2000 presidential election, Democrats contested election results after every Republican win.

In January 2001, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida objected to counting his state’s electoral votes because of “overwhelming evidence of official misconduct, deliberate fraud, and an attempt to suppress voter turnout.” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas referred to the “millions of Americans who have been disenfranchised by Florida’s inaccurate vote count.” Representative Maxine Waters of California characterized Florida’s electoral votes as “fraudulent.”

Vice President Al Gore presided over the meeting in 2001. He overruled these objections because no senator joined them. Part of the reason they didn’t join, presumably, was that Mr. Gore conceded the election a month earlier.

In January 2005, in the wake of Mr. Bush’s re-election, Democrats were more aggressive. Senator Barbara Boxer of California joined Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio to lodge a formal objection to Ohio’s electoral votes. The objection compelled Congress to spend two hours in debate, even though Mr. Bush won Ohio by more than 118,000 votes.

Representative Barbara Lee of California claimed that “the Democratic process was thwarted.” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York said that the right to vote was “stolen.” Ms. Waters objected too, dedicating her objection to the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 2004 movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” painted a dark (and at times factually debatable) picture of the Bush presidency.

The motion failed, but not before 31 members of the House, and Ms. Boxer in the Senate, voted to reject Ohio’s electoral votes — effectively voting to disenfranchise the people of Ohio in the Electoral College.

In January 2017, after Donald Trump’s victory, Democrats in Congress once again challenged the election outcome. Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts cited “the confirmed and illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia.” Ms. Lee of California argued that Michigan’s electoral votes should be thrown out because “people are horrified by the overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in our elections.” She also cited “the malfunction of 87 voting machines.”

There were objections against the votes in at least nine states. To his credit, Vice President Joe Biden rejected each objection on procedural grounds, stating that “there is no debate” and “it is over.”

Then as now, each member of Congress was within his or her rights to make an objection. But the objections were naïve at best, shameless at worst. Either way, the readiness of members of Congress to disenfranchise millions of Americans was disconcerting…..

The NYT article went on to say Hillary conceded, but so did Trump — as much as Hillary did:

“Rigged” Election Claims | Trump 2020 vs Clinton 2016

Not only that, but, Also, remember, more “unfaithful” electors went to Hillary than they did Trump. An often forgotten stat.

DEM VS. GOP FAITHFULNESS

GATEWAY PUNDIT did what I wanted to do… and GP notes the following: “…Hillary Clinton lost more electors than any politician in the last 100 years. Not since 1912 has a candidate lost more electors.” The Final Count:

8 Clinton defectors

  • 4 WA (successful)
  • 1 HI (successful)
  • 1 MN (attempted)
  • 1 ME (attempted)
  • 1 CO (attempted)

2 Trump defectors

  • TX (successful)

Gateway Pundit goes on to list past “unfaithful electors” of the past, a great summary of our history in this regard, here’s the list:

The popular belief was that many electorates were going to defect (called, “unfaithful”) from Trump. In the end, more “unfaithful electorates” defected from Hillary Clinton than from Donald Trump. I find this HILARIOUS! Why? Because Trump even came out a winner in this arena as well. As Powerline notes, only two electors were “unfaithful” to Trump. Four ignored Clinton’s win in their states. In fact, there would have been more unfaithful electorates for Hillary if state law didn’t prohibit it, like the “chaos” over state rules in Colorado:

(MORE AT RPT)

THE BIG LIE MSNBC

Katie Phang is still [April 2023] saying that Trump stole the election!

RPT FLASHBACK


DEMOCRATS WERE FOR CHALLENGING ELECTORS
BEFORE BEING AGAINST IT


  • The last three times a Republican has been elected president — Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004 — Democrats in the House have brought objections to the electoral votes in states the GOP nominee won. In early 2005 specifically, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., along with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs, D-Ohio, objected to Bush’s 2004 electoral votes in Ohio.

Over the past 20 years, Democrats have on three separate occasions objected to the validity of electoral votes on the floor of Congress. Wednesday, Jan. 6, will mark the first time Republicans choose do so in the past two decades.

(DAILY WIRE)

My sons and I have discussed the January 6th issues, and, some historical aspects as well. Firstly, people saying Trump should be impeached are just as radical as the people breaking into the Capital. The throwing around of the “sedition” label is funny, and shows how people are not aware of the recent history of the lawful process of debate in Congress about just such topic. Here is one blogger noting Chuck Todd’s biased lack of awareness:

NBC host Chuck Todd, who is always in the running to overtake CNN’s Brian Stelter as the dumbest newsman in the news media, had it out with Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) over a number of Republican members of Congress who are planning to dispute the certification of Joe Biden winning the 2020 election due to questions of massive election fraud.

After being accused of trying to thwart the democratic process, Johnson hit back by telling sleepy eyes Todd that they are trying to protect it.

“We are not acting to thwart the democratic process, we are acting to protect it,” Johnson said to Todd.

[….]

Todd and others in the Fake News media are acting like the Republicans contesting the election results is an unprecedented affair.

Let me remind them that the last three times a Republican won a presidential election the Democrats in the House brought objections to the Electoral votes the Republican won.

Lest they forget that the House Democrats contested both elections of former President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and President Trump’s win in 2016.

(DJ-MEDIA)

PJ-MEDIA however has an excellent notation of this history when they point out Democrats outrage that Republicans objected to the certification of electoral votes. “It’s ‘conspiracy and fantasy,’ says Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.” PJ further states,

“The effort by the sitting president of the United States to overturn the results is patently undemocratic,” the New York Democrat said. “The effort by others to amplify and burnish his ludicrous claims of fraud is equally revolting.”

“This is America. We have elections. We have results. We make arguments based on the fact and reason—not conspiracy and fantasy,” he added.

There’s only one problem with Chucky’s “argument based on fact and reason.” Democrats have been challenging the electoral vote certification for two decades.

The last three times a Republican has been elected president — Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004 — Democrats in the House have brought objections to the electoral votes in states the GOP nominee won. In early 2005 specifically, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., along with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs, D-Ohio, objected to Bush’s 2004 electoral votes in Ohio.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin appears to be even more incensed at Senator Josh Hawley’s plan to object to the Electoral College vote.

Fox News:

“The political equivalent of barking at the moon,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said of Hawley joining the challenge to electoral slates. “This won’t be taken seriously, nor should it be. The American people made a decision on Nov. 3rd and that decision must and will be honored and protected by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.”

Brave Sir Dick seems to forget he was singing a different tune in 2005. Then, it was Democrats questioning the results of the Ohio vote, which went narrowly for George Bush.

Durbin had words of praise for Boxer then:

“Some may criticize our colleague from California for bringing us here for this brief debate,” Durbin said on the Senate floor following Boxer’s objection, while noting that he would vote to certify the Ohio electoral votes for Bush. “I thank her for doing that because it gives members an opportunity once again on a bipartisan basis to look at a challenge that we face not just in the last election in one State but in many States.”

In fact, the Ohio electoral vote challenge was only the beginning. Rumors and conspiracy theories swirled around the outcome on election night that saw Bush winning Ohio by a close, but the surprisingly comfortable margin of  120,000 votes. So why are so many of these headlines familiar to us today?

(READ THE REST)

And THE BLAZE also referenced it’s readers to the same issues in their post (BTW, these are the two videos I used for my upload):

TheBlaze’s Chris Enloe noted this weekend that while Democrats are rebuking Republicans for planning Wednesday to oppose the Electoral College certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory due to fraud concerns, Democrats themselves have a robust history of doing that very thing.

And a damning, resurfaced video underscores what’s already on the public record.

The video is a compilation of clips from congressional sessions following the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, both won by Republican George W. Bush — and in the clips Democrats launched protests against Bush’s electoral votes.

[….]

That wasn’t all. The Washington Post reported that during the January 2001 session, words such as “fraud” and “disenfranchisement” were heard above Republicans calling for “regular order.”

More from the paper:

The Democratic protest was led by Black Caucus members who share the feeling among black leaders that votes in the largely African American precincts overwhelmingly carried by [then-Democratic presidential nominee Al] Gore were not counted because of faulty voting machines, illicit challenges to black voters and other factors.

“It’s a sad day in America,” Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) said as he turned toward Gore. “The chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois, but . . . ” Gore replied.

At the end of their protest, about a dozen members of the Black Caucus walked out of the House chamber as the roll call of the states continued.

(THE BLAZE)

How the Media Handles Left/Right Sex Scandals | Larry Elder

(ORIGINALLY POSTED IN NOVEMBER OF 2011)

This was most likely grabbed by me in November of 2011. I just came across it in my files and it made me search out and reproduce the [I think] full QG article by Michael Kelly titled: “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks: A Sober Look At The Senator.” (Posted underneath the audio.) I almost didn’t upload this, but I wanted to connect it to the GQ article on my site. The graphics in the upper left that “fade-in-and-out” are the old pictures from the original VIMEO upload. To wit 》》My Vimeo account was terminated many years ago; this is a recovered audio/video from it. (Note: a short WaPo article is after this very long GQ article.)

Here is a related example I use often:

It was loyalty to that extreme agenda that accounts for Democrats holding back their ire during a far worse underage homosexual scandal: that of Gerry Studds, a Democratic Massachusetts congressman, for more than two decades.

According to the 1983 House ethics committee report, one congressional page allegedly traveled to Europe with Studds and testified that he took him to his apartment in Georgetown three or four times and that there was sexual activity between them each time. The two later took a 2 1/2-week trip together out of the country, according to the page, and “engaged in sexual activity every two or three days.”

According to the ethics panel’s report, “the relationship may have begun when the page was 16…. At that time, Rep. Studds was 36 years old.” What’s more, the underage page had told Studds that he would have preferred not to engage in sexual activity with him. “I mentioned that to him,” the former page testified.

The report added that “two other former pages, both male,” stated under oath that Studds made sexual advances to them. “One was 16 or 17” at the time of the alleged incident, “the other was 17.”

Studds never apologized, and when he was censured by his colleagues, he defiantly stood in the House well looking up at Speaker Tip O’Neill, hands casually folded behind his back. Afterward, Studds not only remained in Congress for more than a decade; the House Democratic leadership allowed him to rise in the congressional ranks and for years hold a full committee chairmanship.

Some of Studds’ Democratic colleagues even voted against the slap on the wrist of censure. Then-Rep. Parren Mitchell of Maryland, for instance, complained of the “absolute humiliation and degradation” Studds had already suffered and said censure would “cannibalize him.”

When Studds returned home to his district, an August 1983 editorial — in the liberal Washington Post of all places — asked with astonishment, “What is it exactly, or even inexactly, that those Massachusetts Democrats were so loudly cheering when they gave Rep. Gerry Studds three standing ovations last weekend? What accounts for this extraordinary response to a man just censured for having taken sexual advantage of a youthful congressional page?”

Why were Democrats cheering? Maybe the answer lies in the causes they support and the ideological company they keep.

(Democrats Are Lecturing ME About Ethics and Trump!? Please)

Ted Kennedy on the Rocks: A Sober Look At The Senator | Michael Kelly (GQ | AR15)

(see also: NEWSBUSTERS | REAL CLEAR POLITICS | DAILY WIRE)

(AR15 COMMENT: It’s long, but damn…homie had another 19 years of boozin’ and screwin’ to go.)

  • When GQ sent Michael Kelly to profile one of America’s most powerful men, Kelly was a young writer, and unknown. But after three months of reporting, thousands of pages of research, and over seventy interviews with everyone in Washington, from congressmen to waiters on Capitol Hill, he filed this famous portrait of Edward M. Kennedy, remarkable not only for its courage in exposing a senator’s vices but also for the balance of its tone. GQ has published many celebrated political articles over the years—profiles of George W. Bush and Colin Powell, interviews with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, to name a few—but this one may well be the best. Michael Kelly went on to cover the Gulf War for this magazine and to edit The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly in turn. Tragically, in 2003, his Humvee crashed under enemy fire in Iraq.

GQ, February 1990

Edward Moore Kennedy works harder than most people think, and this morning he is working very hard at a simple but crucial task. He is trying to face the day. It is 9:30 A.M, September 26, and Kennedy is in Room 138 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to introduce a bill to lure new and better teachers. This kind of thing is ice cream and cake for any practiced politician, a simple piece of business that will provoke few tough questions and at least a few approving editorials. But for Kennedy it seems a great challenge, and no fun at all. He hastens tonelessly through his prepared statement like a court stenographer reading back testimony to the judge. He passes off most of the perfunctory and easy questions to the other politicians and education-Establishment figures joining him, and he stares into space as the other men do the job. When he goes to the podium to introduce his fellow speakers, he walks with a nervous, cautious shuffle, like Steve McQueen after he’s been let out of solitary in Papillon. When he holds out the piece of white paper to read the introductions of men he’s known for decades, it flutters and shakes in the still air.

Up close, the face is a shock. The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks. The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip. Deep corrugations crease the forehead and angle from the nostrils and the downturned corners of the mouth. The Chiclet teeth are the color of old piano keys. The eyes have yellowed too, and they are so bloodshot, it looks as if he’s been weeping.

Edward Kennedy was once the handsomest of the handsome Kennedy boys, with a proudly jutting chin, a Nelson Eddy jaw and Cupid’s-bow lips under a thatch of chestnut hair. When he is dieting and on the wagon, there is a glimpse of that still, which makes it all the harder to see him as he more often is. There is a great desire to remember him as we remember his brothers. The Dorian Grays of Hyannis Port, John and Robert, have perpetual youth and beauty and style, and their faces are mirrors of all that is better and classier and richer than us. Ted is the reality, the 57-year-old living picture of a man who has feasted on too much for too long with too little restraint, the visible proof that nothing exceeds like excess.

After the press conference, as reporters hustle around Kennedy for follow-up questions, it becomes clear that something is especially wrong today with his left eye, which he has been poking and rubbing. He has lost a contact lens. Motioning for room, he slowly searches the floor. A reporter spots the lens and scoops it up with a forefinger. Kennedy takes out a contacts case and screws it open so the reporter can drop in the lens. But there is a problem. The senator’s right hand is shaking so violently that he cannot hold the case steady. The reporter hovers his finger over the case, trying to coordinate the path of the lens with that of the case—but the case is all over the map, jiggling up, down, left, right. For a second, Kennedy gets it steady and the reporter swoops in—but there goes the hand again, and the case is off, jogging to the right and the left for another few agonizing seconds before Kennedy stills his hand and the reporter drops the lens home, safe. The senator slowly screws the top back on, to the evident relief of a young aide who stands at his elbow, clutching the boss’s bottle of Visine.

I grew up on Capitol Hill, the son of Kennedy Democrats and the child of an age shaped by Kennedy myths, and I remember playing on the Capitol grounds one fall day, watching the young Senator Kennedy stride importantly by. He seemed a great man: tall, broad-shouldered, with a big, deep chest that stuck out like the prow of a ship as he rushed forward. The man in front of me now seems, as the writer Henry Fairlie described him a few years ago, a “husk,” dried up and hollowed out.

But as I watch, a startling thing happens. With a heave of the chest, a deep-lunged breath, a squaring of the shoulders, Kennedy abruptly pulls himself together, becoming suddenly full of himself once more. As reporters press, he expounds on his bill with knowledge and enthusiasm. The Excellence in Teaching Act of 1989 would establish a new National Teaching Corps, like the old LBJ model Reagan killed in 1981, by giving scholarships to students who sign for four-or five-year teaching hitches. Kennedy has spent his political career pushing the religion of the Great Society and he remains devout, even if it often seems these days that he’s no longer preaching to masses of the converted but to two old ladies there for vespers and a guy looting the poor box.

“By God, this is exciting,” Kennedy says, talking fast and sure, jabbing his finger at a reporter. “What we can do with this bill, we can go into inner-city neighborhoods, we can go into places where there is very little hope, and we can say to the young people ‘Become a teacher! Here is an option for your life! Here is a mission for you!’ ”

In his autumn years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy is a man of parts. Sometimes, especially in the mornings, he seems as weak and fluttery as a butterfly. Sometimes, especially in the evenings, he seems a Senator Bedfellow figure, an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde. But he is also a man who can rise above that caricature to stature: the leading voice of what is left of the Left in American politics, a lawmaker of great and probably increasing power, the self-appointed tribune of the disenfranchised, the patriarch of America’s most famous political family and the world’s most conspicuous Democrat. He is in obvious ways tragic. His three brothers and one of his sisters died violently, two by public murder. His cruel marriage ended in divorce, with his wife a recovering alcoholic. He suffers still from a back broken in a near-fatal airplane crash. His elder son lost a leg and almost his life to cancer.

The parts of his life collide with each other like bumper cars, the Teddy of the tabloids giving a boozy shove to the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the sordid tragedies of his unprivate private life darkening the face of the public man.

The Kennedy brothers always perpetuated their own glorious images, but over the years the last brother has built an image—not glorious at all—of his very own. For his hard public drinking, his obsessive public womanizing and his frequent boorishness, he has become a late-century legend, Teddy the Terrible, the Kennedy Untrammeled. In Washington, it sometimes seems as if everyone knows someone who has slept with Kennedy, been invited to sleep with Kennedy, seen Kennedy drunk, been insulted by Kennedy. At Desirée, a private Georgetown club where well-heeled fat men mingle with society brats and party girls, Kennedy is known as a thrice-a-month habitué and remembered by at least one fellow customer for the time he made a scene with his overenthusiasm for a runway model during a club fashion show. In a downtown office, a former congressional page tells of her surprise meeting with Kennedy three years ago. She was 16 then. It was evening and she and her 16-year-old page, an attractive blonde, were walking down the Capitol steps on their way home from work when Kennedy’s limo pulled up and the senator opened the door. In the backseat stood a bottle of wine on ice. Leaning his graying head out the door, the senator popped the question: Would one of the girls care to join him for dinner? No? How about the other? The girls said no thanks and the senator zoomed off. Kennedy, the formal page said, made no overt sexual overtures and was “very careful to make it seem like nothing out of the ordinary.” It is possible that Kennedy did not know that the girls were underage or that they were pages and, as such, were under the protection of Congress, which serves in loco parentis. Nevertheless, the former page said she did find Kennedy’s invitation surprising. “He didn’t even know me,” she says. “I knew this kind of stuff happened, but I didn’t expect it to happen to me.”

A former mid-level Kennedy staffer, bitterly disillusioned, recalls with disgust one (now ex-) high-ranking aide as “a pimp…whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy.” The fellow did have a legitimate job, she says, but also openly bragged of his prowess at getting attractive and beddable dates for his boss. The former staffer also recalls attending a party at Kennedy’s McLean, Virginia, mansion and finding it “sleazy and weird” to see that senator had apparently established as his live-in girlfriend a young woman known to the staff as the T-Shirt Girl, a New Englander who had previously sold tees at a beach resort and who had reportedly met the senator through his son Teddy junior. A waiter at La Colline, a French restaurant near the senator’s office, remembers a drunken Kennedy and a fellow senator recently staging a late-night scene out of The Three Musketeers, grabbing long-stalked gladiolus from a vase in the front hall and fencing “just like D’Artagnan.” At the same restaurant in 1985, Kennedy and drinking buddy Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut did a “Mexican hat dance” on their own framed photographs. According to The Washingtonian magazine, which broke the story, “Kennedy spotted Dodd’s framed photo [on the wall] and shouted ‘Who’s this guy?’ Laughing, he grabbed the photo from the wall and threw it on the ground, breaking the glass in the frame. Dodd, not to be outdone, located Kennedy’s photo and returned the favor.” A new Kennedy photo adorns the wall today, inscribed with “Laissez les bons temps rouler—Let the good times roll.”

Lobbyist John Aycoth recalls a recent afternoon meeting he arranged between Kennedy and several of Aycoth’s potential clients, representatives of an African government. Aycoth says Kennedy “was incredibly rude” and “was drunk…stumbling and slurring his words and red in the face and smelling of alcohol.” One of the visiting dignitaries—a Kennedy devotee who had called on JFK at the White House—presented the senator with a necklace to give to his mother for her forthcoming ninety-ninth birthday. Kennedy’s appreciation? “When we were walking out, he just pitched it on the desk, right in front of them,” says Aycoth. “Didn’t open it. Didn’t say thanks. Nothing.” (After my talk with Aycoth, his associate, former Delaware Congressman Tom Evans, who was also at the meeting, called to say nervously that he had heard what Aycoth had said and that while the account of rude behavior is true, in his opinion Kennedy had been “perfectly sober.”)

Kennedy regularly finds himself in unseemly scenes. One East Coast playboy recalls an incident a few years ago in a popular Palm Beach bar when “a definitely drunk” Kennedy shoved him against the bar and spilled his beer as the senator rushed out the door with a blonde so young, the man at first mistook Kennedy for an angry father come to take home an underage daughter. Dropping in for a 2 A.M. drink in the Manhattan bar American Trash in January 1989, Kennedy reportedly got into a shouting match with an obnoxious (and possibly intoxicated) off-duty bouncer, which climaxed with the senator’s throwing his drink in the other fellow’s face. Unkind Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr writes of Kennedy as “Fat Boy” and says it isn’t really considered summer in Cape Cod until the senator drives on the sidewalk for the first time. Reporters wonder at his behavior. “He really will do anything at all,” says veteran Washington gossip columnist Diana McLelan, “I think he’s mad.” Says Bill Thomas, writer of the “Heard on the Hill” column for Roll Call, the well-regarded newspaper of Capitol Hill, “He’s off the reservation…out of control…He has no compunctions whatsoever.” Thomas likens Kennedy and Dodd to “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world.”

Perhaps this seems unfair. From all available evidence, God created our elected officials to drink and screw around. Arrogance, too, is common. So is sexual recklessness (witness Gary Hart, Robert Bauman and Barney Frank); power dements as well as corrupts. But Kennedy’s behavior stands out. The two most infamous Terrible Teddy stories make the point. Both take place at Washington’s La Brasserie, where Kennedy is a favorite customer.

Brasserie I: In December 1985, just before he announced he would run for president in 1988, Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress. The woman, Carla Gaviglio, declined to be quoted in this article, but says the following account, a similar version of which first appeared in Penthouse last year, is full and accurate:

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.

Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ‘cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”

According to Loh, Kennedy “was sort of leaning” on Gaviglio, “not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up.” Dodd, she adds, “said ‘It’s not my fault.’ ” Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, “Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country.”

Giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, it’s quite possible he did not intend an assault but meant to be funny, in a repulsive, boozehead way. Drunks are notoriously poor judges of distance, including the distance between fun and assault.

Brasserie II: On September 25, 1987, Kennedy and a young blonde woman—identified by several sources as a congressional lobbyist—allegedly got carried away at a wine-fueled lunch in a private room upstairs and succumbed to the temptations of the carpet, where they were surprised in a state of semi-undress and wholehearted passion by waitress Frauke Morgan. The room, located next to the restrooms, is secured only by a flimsy accordion door, which could not be fully closed. Morgan declined to be interviewed for this story or to comment on or refute the accounts of other sources.

However, waitress Virginia Hurt, who says Morgan described the scene to her shortly after witnessing it, recalls, “He was on the floor with his pants down on top of the woman, and he saw her and she just kind of backed away and closed the door. The girl didn’t see Frauke. So Frauke went downstairs and told the manager and [another waitress] overheard.”

A waitress to whom Morgan spoke just after the incident says, “She told me…she went up to offer them coffee and when she opened the door…there they were on the floor.” Morgan said explicitly, the other waitress goes on, that Kennedy had his pants down and his date “had her dress up,” and the two “ ‘were screwing on the floor.’ ”

Says another waitress to whom Morgan immediately related the episode, “She said she had walked in to ask them if they needed anything else before she gave them the check, and she just sort of found Senator Kennedy on top of this [woman] on the floor and they were sort of half under the table and half out.”

A copy of La Brasserie’s reservation list for that day shows that a luncheon table for two in the back room was reserved for Kennedy. A copy of the check, signed “Edward M. Kennedy,” shows he was billed for two bottles of Chardonnay.

Kennedy’s friends, family and aides are a little skittish about questions on any of this. I asked the senator’s nephew Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II if the man portrayed so scandalously in gossip columns and tabloids was the Ted Kennedy that he knew. “Hey! Hey,” said Joe in alarm. “I got—I can’t—I, uh, have really no comment on that…There’s no answer I can give you that isn’t going to be explosive, that’s all.” Recovering slightly, he added, “You know, Teddy’s a grown man and he can do whatever he wants.”

When I asked Utah Senator Orrin Hatch—a conservative Republican who nevertheless works closely and likes Kennedy—if he thought his colleague had a drinking problem, I got a similarly telling response. “I wouldn’t comment on that. I wouldn’t comment on that. All I can say is that I consider him a friend,” said Hatch. “I have found [him to be] a vulnerable human being who has a very good side to him. I think he has some bad sides too, but there is a good side to him that I choose to look at.”

Kennedy’s staffers do what they can to suppress unflattering reports. In researching this article (three months, more than seventy interviews, fifteen books, a couple thousand pages of news reports and speeches), I asked for an interview with the senator. After a long, elaborate quizzing by his press secretary, Paul Donovan, and deputy press secretary, Melody Miller, about the nature of the article and the questions I might ask, Kennedy decided to stick to a blanket policy of not doing interviews with “life-style magazines.” Donovan explained: “Frankly he doesn’t do interviews with life-style magazines because they tend to ask life-style questions.”

I later asked Donovan if he or the senator would like to comment on or deny reports of heavy drinking or unusual behavior by Kennedy, and to comment specifically on the accounts of Kennedy’s behavior with the congressional page, the Brasserie waitress and the luncheon date on the floor. Donovan said Kennedy would stick to his standard reply: “It has been and remains his policy never to comment on this sort of endless gossip and speculation.” Donovan did say that the “slight tremor” in Kennedy’s hands is attributable not to drinking but to an inherited medical condition that worsens with age. (Brasserie co-owner Campet also declined to comment on either story involving his restaurant. Asked if he would care to deny the incidents, Campet said, “Did you hear me, sir? I have absolutely no comment.” Dodd’s press secretary did not return numerous phone calls.)

There is not, really, much else that Donovan can say. Kennedy’s personal life has always been a press secretary’s nightmare. During his twenty-two-year marriage, his extramarital affairs were numerous and barely hidden. “He was philandering from the moment he was married,” recalls old Kennedy-family associate Dick Tuck. “Not one-night stands, but not much more than that. Kind of affairs of convenience…I think most normal people might have more than one affair [during a marriage] but not every week, like Teddy. He was always chasing, looking for the conquest.”

Of odd and reckless behavior, there are many examples, including Kennedy’s photographed 1982 nude promenade on the public sands of Palm Beach, reportedly in the presence of several old ladies. The columnist Taki, chronicler of Europe’s idle rich, still calls Kennedy “a boorish and uncivilized philistine” because of an incident in the mid-Seventies. At the time, Taki was a UPI reporter in Athens and a well-known playboy. One day, he got a call from Kennedy’s staffers, who asked him to “round up two dates, American girls preferably,” for the senator and his nephew Joe during their brief visit to the Greek capital. Taki says he showed up at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the Kennedys were staying, with his girlfriend and dates for the Kennedys. “Teddy was…pretty much drunk,” says Taki. “In fact, he was really out of it.” Taki says he and the others left the senator and his date, a proper young Connecticut woman who was “very, very impressed with the Kennedys,” at the hotel while they went nightclubbing. Back home later than night, Taki was awakened by Kennedy’s hysterical date. Taki says the drink-befuddled young woman became frightened when she “saw Ted Kennedy coming naked at her,” and adds, “that would scare me too, and I would like to say I am a pretty brave man.”

Biographers first note obvious public drunkenness in the terrible aftermath of Bobby’s murder. In April 1969, flying back from a congressional trip to inspect the living conditions of poor Indians in Alaska, a hard-drinking Kennedy pelted aides and reporters with pillows, ranged up and down the aisles chanting “Es-ki-mo power” and rambled incoherently about Bobby’s assassination, saying, “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby…”

Three months later, on July 18, came the defining moment of Kennedy’s life, when he drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, sending young Kennedy staffer Mary Jo Kopechne to her death and drowning his chances of ever getting to the White House. This much-explored accident is worth mentioning because the factors surrounding it are the same ones so apparent before and so apparent still in Kennedy’s personal life: a childish belief that the rules of human behavior do not apply to himself, a casual willingness to place himself in a compromising positions with an attractive young woman and, most probably, a reckless use of alcohol.

Kennedy has never told anything close to the whole story of Chappaquiddick, the details of which were covered up by Kennedy associates with the help of compliant local authorities, but he has denied that he was driving drunk, or on his way to an assignation when he turned down the deserted dirt road to Dike Bridge. No writer who has seriously studied the events of the night—and there have been many—has believed him. Leo Damore, whose 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up, is the most thorough examination of the accident, offers strong evidence that Kennedy was probably drunk behind the wheel and probably on his way to a tryst (not, as he claimed, to the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard). Indeed, it is otherwise difficult to explain the actions Kennedy himself called “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable”: leaving the party alone with Kopechne and without his driver; failing to notice that the had taken a ninety-degree turn that led down a very bumpy dirt road away from the smooth asphalt road that led to the ferry; never calling the police for help in rescuing the trapped drying Kopechne but relying solely and clandestinely on his two closest aides; and failing to report the accident until after it was discovered ten hours later.

There have been many theories advanced to explain Kennedy’s behavior, all of which make much of the extraordinarily competitive and amoral atmosphere (especially as far as the treatment of women was concerned) in which the Kennedy boys were raised. As Garry Wills makes clear in his elegant The Kennedy Imprisonment, Ted Kennedy was born and bred to act like the last of the Regency rakes: to be a boor when it pleases him, to take what he wants, to treat women as score-markers in the game of sport-fucking and to revel in high-stakes risks. Joseph Kennedy Sr. flaunted his affairs in front of his wife and children, made crude passes at his sons’ dates and well past his middle years was still chasing doxies. John Kennedy’s mad womanizing—frolicking with nudettes in the White House swimming pool, banging a call girl in Lincoln’s bed, carrying on barely secret affairs with admitted mobster girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner, with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield—was beyond anything Teddy has ever done or, for that matter, anything anybody has ever done. Neither Joe nor Jack was punished by church, state or wife for such behavior and the late-born Teddy, coming into the family when its adult behavior patterns were already mythologized, presumably figured that neither the rules of decency nor of retribution applied to a Kennedy. The boy grew to manhood without learning how to be an adult. His drinking suggests nothing so much as a frat boy on a toot. His actions with women seem to be more evidence, as writer Suzannah Lessard put it in 1979, of “a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed.”

Kennedy’s only real grown-up job has been serving as a U.S. senator, and the greatest men’s club in the world became his second family, giving him the same kinds of special privileges and protections as his first. Michael Barone, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics, sees Kennedy as a victim of environmentally induced inertia. “In the old days, you could get away with this stuff,” says Barone. “The senator would be at his desk and there would be a pair of high heels sticking out from underneath and you weren’t supposed to notice it. Maybe Ted Kennedy didn’t realize times have changed.”

But arrested development doesn’t explain why Kennedy seems to be getting worse as he gets older. According to a theory currently popular in Washington, such incidents at Brasserie I and II are evidence that Kennedy, freed at last by the knowledge that he will never be president, is simply giving his natural inclinations full vent. In the opinion of Roll Call’s Thomas, “He’s beyond caring about anything since he knows he’s not going to be president…He’s what Kennedys always were, and [as] the only thing that kept them under control was the ambition for higher office…he’s no longer under control.” Says another Washington reporter, “He seems to be going through a second adolescence…I think he realizes his day in the sun is over. Whereas he might have made a pretense of being a good family man years ago, he doesn’t have to pretend anymore…He figures he is never going to run for president again. He has no great ambition beyond being the once almost prince.” In short, with nothing left to lose politically (he’d have to hit the pope and pee on the Irish flag to lose his Senate seat) and long inured to ridicule, he has become the Kennedy Untrammeled, Unbound.

All the theories, however, still leave you wondering. Neither family history nor generational attitudes nor a lifetime as one of the privileged elite nor the liberation of renouncing the presidency fully explain Kennedy’s behavior, although all play a part.

A longtime associate of Kennedy’s thinks the full explanation must take into account one other factor. He says, “The problem with Kennedy theories is that people are looking for psychological Rosetta stones when the answer is a far more common malady. If you forget he’s a Kennedy, it’s textbook, it’s just textbook.”

This man, who asked that he not be identified, is a recovering alcoholic who spoke because he believes Kennedy needs help. He thinks Kennedy’s episodes of disgraceful behavior are due to the simple fact that he periodically drowns his few, faint natural inhibitions in a sea of booze. “He’s what we call in the trade a binge drinker,” says this man, who says he has seen Kennedy drunk enough to lapse into baby talk with his young dates. “We are talking serious binge drinking, really pouring it down.” He adds, “There is an extensive conspiracy effort” among Kennedy’s close friends “to make him face up to the fact that he’s got a problem…There are occasional plots of confrontation and one thing or another to shake some sense into him. The conversation is far more than idle and it involves just about anyone you can think of who has been exceptionally close to him, especially in the last five or six years.” There have been, he says, “hints dropped here and there. You put a hook in the water and see if he bites.”

This man, who has known the senator for many years, says Kennedy goes for relatively long periods without drinking “and then, every once in a while, ka-boom”—a binge triggered by the breakup of a brief affair or a break in work. Is drinking the sole explanation for his behavior? Obviously, no. Lots of men, including some of his fellow senators, got tanked pretty regularly and don’t end up on the floor of a restaurant. A cosseted upbringing, a juvenile nature, a powerful sexual greed, the liberation of putting aside the White House, the arrogance of vanity inherent to a Kennedy, the tragedies of his life—they all play a big part too. But periodic excessive drinking does seem to be the catalyst that brings those forces together and releases them.

Certainly, the anecdotal evidence relating to Kennedy’s drinking suggests relatively long periods of sobriety interrupted by bouts of excessive drinking. Younger son Patrick says his father “has the most disciplined life of anybody I know as far as the seriousness with which he takes his work.” There are “other times,” says Patrick, when he is less disciplined, but “those represent such an infinitesimal part of who my dad is that I get disturbed when people get a misunderstanding of it.” Many who speak of his drinking talk of his ability to hold great amounts of liquor and his discipline about exactly when he drinks. “He can control when he drinks,” says long-time associate Milton Gwirtzman. “He never drinks when he’s working.” Former legislative aide Thomas Susman says he has never seen Kennedy drink except socially at night, and he adds, “I have been at his house as early as six in the morning and he’s up. He may have been slosh-faced until four [but] he’s never staggered in, he’s never had trouble getting started, he’s never had to have a little hair of the dog before he could work…”

On the other hand, eyewitness reports of heavy drinking are plentiful. Washington Times editor John Podhoretz recalls seeing Kennedy, at La Brasserie in 1986, drink a bottle and a half of wine by himself in twenty-five minutes. A recent dinner guest at Kennedy’s home recalls with similar amazement Kennedy’s guzzling three screwdrivers in one twenty-minutes period. “I was chugging to keep up with him,” the guest says. “I’ve drunk with the best of them, and he’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

A former La Brasserie waitress calls Kennedy and Dodd “drinkers’ drinkers” whose demands led management to put a makeshift bar near their habitual table. “They drank so much you couldn’t get to the [regular] bar fast enough,” she relates. In a “standard evening,” she says, each man would knock off half to three quarters of a bottle of hard liquor, then switch to wine or champagne, and sometimes then to after-dinner drinks: “They would [sometimes] stay at the restaurant till three o’clock in the morning, just drinking and drinking. By the time they got up, they could hardly stand.”

A woman in her mid-twenties who dated Kennedy steadily a few years ago also describes the senator as largely controlled, occasionally drunk. It was true, she says, that “when you go out with Chris Dodd, go out with the boys, you do get drunk and so on.” But Kennedy drank little when he was with her, and the couple would often spend the evening by the fire at the senator’s home, reading books or talking. The Ted Kennedy she knew was not the Bad Boy of La Brasserie but “a golden retriever,” a “romanticist” who let her have the last bite of his dessert at night and kissed her good-bye on the forehead in the morning. Yet it is hard to believe that this picture is wholly accurate. At the time this woman was dating Kennedy, she was a fixture on the nightclub scene and a heavy partyer.

But even giving the woman the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she and Kennedy did pass many quiet, contented evenings together, I question whether it would have been that fascinating for the 57-year-old senator to sit cozily around the fire, engaged in conversation with a woman who says that she developed a crush on him largely because they both had “blue eyes and fair hair” and who was surprised to learn that her ex-boyfriend had been the subject of several biographies. I wonder whether Kennedy is even really enjoying any of this anymore.

As the former girlfriend and I were finishing up our talk, she told me of a big party to which she was going that night. “It’s going to be reeelly, reeelly great!” she said. “They’re going to have these drinks called sharks, which are reeelly, reeely fun. You have this plastic shark in your glass and you also have a plastic mermaid and you push the shark and the mermaid together and then pour some red stuff over the mermaid that looks like blood.”

“Grenadine?” I said.

“I think so,” she said.

At what age does it stop being fun and start being hell on earth to spend your evenings with someone who gets reeelly, reeelly excited about novelty cocktails?

The recovering alcoholic quoted earlier thinks Kennedy has passed that point: “He is a very unhappy man personally. He’s very unhappy and lonely [because of] his inability to find someone after his marriage fell apart…Getting laid has long since ceased being fun.”

Fun? A Boston reporter recalls seeing Kennedy on a morning after: “I had to cover him taking part in the Hands Across America thing on Boston Common and, Christ, it was like someone had poured Jack Daniel’s in his hair. It was like he was shpritzing Jack Daniel’s. And he’s holding hands with these two 50-year-old ladies, and it was just really pathetic. You look at the guy and you think, My God, he must be dying for a drink. You think, He’s really killing himself.”

Fun? “He has the kind of personal wealth where he can do just about anything he wants to do,” says Orrin Hatch. “But I wouldn’t trade life with him for ten seconds. I’d rather be poor and in the condition that I’m in than trade with Ted.”

The better part of Ted Kennedy’s life is found, as it is with so many men, in his work and in his children. When Teddy came to the Senate in 1962, inheriting the seat his big brother John had vacated when he was elected president, he was conspicuously only in his youth and inexperience. Twenty-eight years later, his is the fifth-ranking member and the liberal leader of what remains, despite all its current confusion, the most important legislative body in the world.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Congress watcher, Norman Ornstein, only goes a little beyond others when he declares that “Kennedy is going to go down as one of the most significant senators in history, in terms of concrete things accomplished and things put on the agenda that will get accomplished in years to come.” Illinois Democrat Paul Simon calls his colleague one of the “three or four shapers of what happens in the Senate,” and adds, “in terms of moving the agenda of the Senate, I can’t think of anybody who has had a greater impact.” Republican hatch calls Kennedy “the most powerful, effective liberal in the Senate” and says history will view him as “one of the all-time-great senators.”

Even a partial listing of the major bills in whose passage Kennedy has played a part is impressive. Whether you admire them or not, these are the measures that transformed—mostly liberalized—America in our time: the first Immigration Reform Act; the Voting Rights Act and its extensions; the Freedom of Information Act; the Gun Control Act; the Campaign Financing Reform law; the Comprehensive Selective Service Reform Act; the Eighteen-Year-Old Vote law; the Occupational Safety and Health Act; the War on Cancer bills; the recodification of federal criminal laws; the Bilingual Education Act; the Fair Housing Acts; the Age Discrimination Act; the Airline and Trucking Deregulation bills; the Job Training Partnership Act; the South African sanctions; and the Grove City Civil Rights Restoration Act.

Far more than either of his brothers, who were lackluster senators, Kennedy, over the past three decades, has been responsible for changes in the complexion of this country and in the lives of its citizens. He has been an ally of blacks, American Indians, the poor, the sick, the aged, the mentally ill, starving refugees worldwide and immigrants. He has been an outspoken liberal, unafraid to take the controversial positions—on issues such as busing, abortion, gun control, the Vietnam War (late but forcefully), the nuclear freeze and capital punishment—that other senators clearly avoided.

Since Kennedy assumed the chairmanship of the Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1986, upon the Democrats’ regaining control of the Senate, his power has grown markedly and he is now, by all accounts, in the prime of his career. He has become not only the most consistent counterforce to the long-running Republican administrations in pushing for government activism in health, education, labor and science, but has also become adept at building Republican-Democrat, Right-Left coalitions that can ensure passage of compromise domestic-policy legislation. Hatch, for instance, says he “came to the Senate to fight Ted Kennedy.” Yet, because Hatch likes him and trusts him—and because with Kennedy behind it, a bill automatically receives serious attention—he now often joins Kennedy in sponsoring relatively uncontroversial measures.

Kennedy has abandoned the costly Utopian reforms he pushed in the Seventies—such as government-financed universal health insurance and welfare payments that guaranteed an income above the poverty level for all—and now focuses on less-budget-busting programs. He is increasingly successful and increasingly prolific. The 100th Congress (1987-1988) was the best period he or almost any senator has ever had: Kennedy moved more than twenty major pieces of his own legislation through the Senate, including a comprehensive plan to assure medical care, support services and discrimination protection for people with AIDS.

A great part of his legislative strength comes from the fact that he likes his colleagues and they like him. A clubman at heart and endowed with a youngest son’s natural deference, he is as uncommonly decent toward his peers as he is uncommonly indecent toward his lesser. Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, says he will never forget the way Kennedy treated him during the seven months in 1988 that Biden was recovering from a brain aneurysm. “He would call my home and speak to my wife and offer to make contacts with doctors he thought were good,” Biden recalls. “Once, he got on the train and came to the house in Wilmington, sat up here all day with me, talking. He brought a gift, too—a lovely engraving of an Irish stag.” Much more importantly, says Biden, Kennedy did not take advantage of his associate’s illness and reassert his authority over the Judiciary Committee, which Kennedy had previously chaired.

Another great strength is his staff—the best and probably the hardest-working on Capitol Hill—which numbers about a hundred people, including committee staffers. Kennedy depends heavily on four or five top advisers, while dozens of mid-level staffers work under great pressure to keep churning out the bills. His public appearances are carefully scripted and stage-managed. For committee hearings, Kennedy’s staff provides him with big black briefing books that can run to more than a hundred pages, with an opening statement, detailed questions, background on the issues involved and bios of the speakers he will hear. Moreover, Kennedy has continued his brother John’s habit of gathering experts from Harvard and elsewhere for informal briefings, holding frequent “issues dinners” at his home. No senator has ever had greater access to a wider range of paid and free counsel.

But no matter how excellent it may be, staff work can take you only so far. Much of what Kennedy does every day he must do himself, no matter how he feels in the morning. And you can’t look at his labors without being impressed by his willingness to stick to the tedious daily tilling of the legislative field. Take congressional hearings. Please. As chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee and of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, and as a member of the Armed Services Committee and of the Joint Economic Committee, Kennedy must chair or attend a couple hundred hearings a year. And while some of them are fascinating, a great many more are dull morality plays. Even more so than life itself, congressional hearings are not one damn thing after another but the same damn thing over and over again. Still, unlike many senators, who are content to make only brief appearances at these hearings, Kennedy often plays an active role even in the hearings that he does not chair.

“He does work at being a senator,” says Michael Barone of The Almanac of American Politics. “And that’s impressive. He could easily sink in a life of alcoholism and do-nothingism. He doesn’t have to do anything to get elected.”

There are times, however, when patience and collegiality do not meet the occasion. When it comes to a clear-cut Left-versus-Right fight, says Hatch, Kennedy “will murder you, he’ll roll right over you…He’ll trample you in the ground and then he’ll grind his heel in you.”

Robert Bork still has Kennedy’s heel marks on his forehead. Forty-five minutes after President Reagan nominated Bork for a Supreme Court seat in 1987, Kennedy was on the floor of the Senate and on the attack: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids…”

It was, in the words of Kennedy’s former aide Thomas Susman, “outrageous…pretty tough and pretty early on and pretty judgmental and very aggressive.” Bork recently told me with still-hot bitterness, “There was not a line in that speech that was accurate…It was a series of untruths. I didn’t want police breaking down your door. I didn’t want evolution banned from public schools. I didn’t want to force women to have back-alley abortions. The whole thing was false.”

Even Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden, Kennedy’s close ally and coleader of the stop-Bork forces, says Kennedy’s speech was “technically accurate but unfair” and that it “drew lines in ways that were starker than reality.” Biden says he wouldn’t have made such a speech. But, he admits, he is glad Kennedy did. Both he and ranking Republican committee-member Hatch say that without that speech, and without Kennedy’s aggressive personal lobbying against Bork with hundreds of civil-rights leaders and liberal activists around the country, the candidate probably would have been confirmed.

Kennedy’s role in the Bork fight stems from and illustrates his overarching position in American politics. In a rare moment of irritation with the American Civil Liberties Union, the senator once said, “The ACLU thinks that it defines liberalism in the country. I define liberalism in this country.” He was exaggerating only a little. In the religion of liberalism, Kennedy is the guardian of orthodoxy. He is the voice of the interest groups that define the Democratic Party; the black activists, the trade unions, the feminists, the environmentalists, the teachers’ unions and the perennial progressives.

Kennedy is strong and unswerving in his beliefs because they are personal, rooted not in theory but in an emotional commitment to government activism—a continuation and expansion of the leftward direction in which his brother Robert had been heading before his murder. Milton Gwirtzman, who wrote speeches for both Bobby and Ted, says the latter does not have “an articulated set of principles” that rises to the level of an ideology. “There’s no such thing as ‘Kennedy’s thoughts,’ ” says Gwirtzman. “It’s reactions, gut instincts. And they’ve been bent occasionally, but they have always remained the same.”

The world, however, has changed. For all of Kennedy’s achievements as a senator, there is a strong sense of anachronism about him as a politician. Alvin From, executive director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, among other critics, says Kennedy’s “soft, cuddly liberalism, his politics of entitlement,” have achieved a viselike grip on the mind of the Democratic Party. And perhaps that is true; as one Democratic National Committee insider says, “It’s not as if we’re all sitting around thinking we’ve got to do more for [Kennedy’s] cause. It’s just that everyone [on the committee] thinks the same way he does.”

But while Kennedy’s politics maybe influential in the party hierarchy, the party hierarchy isn’t influential with the voters—or even with other elected Democratic officials. Says former party chairman John White, “It’s the dilemma of Teddy Kennedy and it’s the dilemma of the party.”

“Kennedy is always invited to speak at the convention, always make a speech in prime time, but when it comes to the general-election campaign, if you bring Kennedy to Texas, you send him down to Rio Grande Valley to speak to the Hispanics,” says political reporter Jack Germond. “If you bring him to Florida, you send him to Miami to talk to the blacks. He is always used exclusively to talk to special interests. And not all of that is related to Chappaquiddick; its is related to issues.”

Patrick Kennedy says his father gets depressed about feeling left out in the cold as the political climate shifts. “He genuinely gets sick when the country doesn’t go in the right direction in his view,” says Patrick. “He gets upset because, you know, he’s trying to change it and he just feels as if he’s run up against the wall sometimes.”

There is a solution available, of course. Kennedy could escape dinosaur status by doing what the oldest male Kennedy is supposed to do—run for president. A lot of people, including many of the aides and advisers close to Kennedy, say he is content in the Senate. But Patrick and his cousin Michael Kennedy, Bobby’s fourth son, say Ted would, in fact, very much like to run for president again. “I think he still says, you know, I could be a better president than these other jokers,” Michael says. “I mean, who else is on the horizon, particularly on the Democratic side?” He says his uncle knows that Chappaquiddick remains “the first question out of the box, so that would make very difficult for him to run on a national level” but that Ted holds out hope that there will come a “backlash” against the reporting of “this personal stuff” that is so damaging to him and thinks “therefore, I’ll be able to run in 1998, or whatever.”

My own guess is that Kennedy does still harbor presidential dreams of varying degrees of seriousness, depending on his mood (he has apparently never accepted Chappaquiddick as the career killer that it was; he seriously considered running in 1984 and 1988, despite the fact that the voters had made their feelings brutally clear in 1980), but ultimately he won’t run. It’s time to sink gracefully into the tar pits; the next chance goes to the next generation.

In the end, dynasty is everything. Joseph Kennedy Sr. is the only man in history who ever consciously set out to make one of his sons the President of the United States of America—and succeeded. The father taught his children that that goal could be won. They have never let it be forgot. To the Kennedys, the White House is the once and future home. It is Ted’s duty to help make sure one of them gets it back. There are twenty-eight members in the up-and-coming generation of Kennedys, and they are coming up fast. Joe II, elected twice to the House, makes no secret of his hopes to step higher. Michael, who succeeded Joe as the head of a Boston-based nonprofit company that sells fuel at a discount to the poor, did not make an expected run for state office last year but says he “would not be averse to serving in politics” in the relatively near future. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Michael and Joe’s sister, lost in her 1986 bid for a Maryland congressional seat but plans to run again. In New York, crown prince and teen heartthrob John F. Kennedy Jr. is being groomed for a big job—if he can ever pass the bar exam.

And, of course, there are Ted’s own sons. Ted junior, 28, harbors ambitions in Massachusetts. And Patrick, a sweet-natured 22-year-old senior at Providence College, was elected to the Rhode Island Legislature in 1988, despite opposition to his candidacy even within the Democratic camp. After all, Jack Skeffington, the man who had held the seat for nine years, had lived in the blue-collar Ninth District all his life, was backed by the state Democratic Party and was a Kennedy supporter as well. Some raised eyebrows over the fact that young Patrick’s expenditures were the greatest in the history of the state to win one of the $300-per-year jobs: $87,694, or $66 for each of the 1,324 votes he won. And, some people said, the emphasis on the fact that Patrick was a Kennedy was a little naked, what with the kid’s dad and mom and brother and sister and cousins John, Joe and Michael posing for snapshots with everybody at the polling booths on Election Day.

But let them say what they want. They said the same kind of stuff about Teddy twenty-eight years ago, when the family gave him his first job. The family is the thing. The family is everything. No man is a failure if he does right by his children. And even if the senator was a lousy husband, he is, by all accounts, a caring father. Sitting in his district office in Providence, Patrick—a fair, fragile-looking young man, gentle like his mother and with a shy, skinny kid’s way about him—talks about his father. His voice is as soft and as loving as a puppy. “I don’t think I can ever be as giving a person as he has been to me,” he says. “He’s the most important person in my life.” On the wall of Ted Kennedy’s Senate office, prominent among all the pictures of his famous brothers, hangs one of himself and Patrick taken the day Patrick won his seat in the state legislature. Patrick has inscribed on it “To my dad, my friend and my hero.”

“Ted Kennedy never was born to be president or wanted it terribly,” says Milton Gwirtzman. “I think the reason he ran has to do with something his father once said to him: ‘If there’s a piece of cake on the plate, take it. Eat it.’ ”

The last Kennedy had so few choices, really. He was born to be the baby of the family, not the patriarch; the fourth brother, not the only one; the also-Kennedy, not the President Kennedy. When he was a chubby-cheeked little boy, the family was packed with grown-ups. They all went away. Joseph junior died when Teddy was 12. Kathleen died when he was 16. Jack died when he was 31. Bobby died when he was 36. The king himself, Joe senior, died when he was 37.

“To be truly human,” Ted Kennedy once said, “is to shape your own world.” And he has, far more than most men dream of, done just that. He has made laws. He has been at the front of sweeping change, improving the lives of many people. He has helped perpetuate a dynasty. The truth is, however, the world shapes us far more than we shape it. The truth is, the forces of the world—the rules of primogeniture, the warp of genetics and the woof of environment, the killing power of bullets and the grip of alcohol—shaped Ted Kennedy and shape him still. It is the sad irony of his life that while he has wrought his will on the world at large he remains unable still to control his own life. He started out in this world dangling from strings held by his father and his brothers. They’re gone now, but Teddy dangles still, dancing to the echoes of an old and tired tune.

Carrie Fisher on her blind date with Chris Dodd
WASHINGTON POST

Carrie Fisher waited until her sixth book, “Shockaholic,” to share the tale of her infamous blind date with Chris Dodd.

It was 1985 when the “Star Wars” actress, shooting a mini-series in Baltimore, was set up with the junior senator from Connecticut. “Not a handsome man,” writes Fisher, “but he was far from unattractive.” They ended up at a fancy restaurant in Georgetown, where they were joined in a private room by Dodd’s drinking buddy, Ted Kennedy, his date and an unnamed couple from McLean.

The liquor flowed but Fisher, fresh from her first stint in rehab, was sober and subdued. Suddenly, Kennedy turned to her and asked, “So, do you think you’ll be having sex with Chris at the end of your date?”

Dodd looked at her with “an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face,” writes Fisher. That probably won’t happen, she told them. Why? demanded Kennedy. “I’d have to be truly loaded to just fall into bed with someone I’ve only very recently met,” she explained. “Even if that someone is a Democrat.”
Fisher saw Dodd a few more times; when he ran for president he described their relationship as a “courtship.” “Is that what they call sleeping together a few times?” she writes. Dodd, now head of the MPAA, had no comment.

Nuclear Power – Still Our Best Hope

While I disagree with the points regarding the “Climate Crisis,” this video is solid in it’s dealing with the fears of nuclear power safety issues and how many are frightened by misinformation. They link to two other videos that are worth a watch as well. They are:

  • Worst Nuclear Accidents in History (YOUTUBE);
  • The Economics of Nuclear Energy (YOUTUBE).

The Truth About Nuclear Energy

How Dangerous Is Nuclear Waste?

Even environmentalists concede that nuclear power is a clean source of abundant, reliable energy. But they stop short of supporting it. Why? Because of the “waste problem.” But how real are their concerns? James Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, answers this question.

Nuclear Energy: Abundant, Clean, and Safe

If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video.

The above video mentioned Will Siri, the President of the Sierra Club a few decades ago. Here is an excerpt from Michael Shellenberger’s article from FORBES (via CLIMATE DEPOT):

In the mid-1960s, the Sierra Club supported the building of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to replace fossil fuels. “Nuclear power is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation,” argued Sierra Club President Will Siri in 1966.

“Cheap energy in unlimited quantities is one of the chief factors allowing a large, rapidly growing population to set aside wildlands, open space and lands of high-scenic value,” added Siri, who was a biophysicist, mountaineer, and veteran of the Manhattan Project….

* THE BONUS BELOW WILL EXPLAIN THE FRUITION OF WILL SIRI’S POSITION – JUMP

And there is a letter the ANS is floating around as well that many are signing:

The letter: Already signed by such notables as James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Richard Muller, Meredith Angwin, and James Hopf, the Generation Atomic letter notes that, in its early years, the Sierra Club supported nuclear technology.

“Early in the technology’s history, the Sierra Club recognized nuclear energy’s power-dense and emission-free environmental benefits,” the letter states. “Many of the Sierra Club’s members at the time were strong advocates for the energy source. Among them were Will Siri, the club’s president at the time, and the photographer and Sierra Club board member Ansel Adams.”

(AMERICAN NUCLEAR SOCIETY)

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste

Nuclear waste is scary. Maybe you’ve seen it as glowing green goop in The Simpsons, or as a radioactive threat on the news. Either way, you likely know it has been a major block to the use and improvement of nuclear power. Over the last few decades, experts, politicians and the public have had heated debates over what to do with this radioactive material created by nuclear power plants.

But what if there were a way to not just store nuclear waste, but actually USE it?

This video is about the effort to make electricity out of nuclear waste. Really. It turns out, we developed the tools to do this decades ago. This story is about a technology we left behind and the people who want to bring it back.

This Environmentalist Says Only Nuclear Power Can Save Us Now

Michael Shellenberger believes The Green New Deal’s focus on wind and solar is a waste of time and money.

Calling climate change an existential threat to humanity, congressional Democrats introduced a policy proposal in February called the Green New Deal, which would mandate that 100 percent of U.S. energy production come from “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources” like wind and solar by the year 2050.

But some environmentalists say Green New Dealers are neglecting one obvious source of abundant clean energy already available: Nuclear power, which an accompanying Green New Deal FAQ explicitly states should be phased out alongside fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.

“If you want to save the natural environment, you just use nuclear. You grow more food on less land, and people live in cities. It’s not rocket science,” says Shellenberger. “The idea that people need to stay poor… that’s just a reactionary social philosophy that they then dress up as a kind of environmentalism.”

Watch the above video to learn more about the history of nuclear energy and to hear more from Shellenberger about his case for nuclear, as well as his response to concerns about radiation, nuclear weapons, and the economic viability of nuclear energy. The video also features solar energy advocate Ed Smeloff, who served on the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District board during the shutdown of California’s Rancho Seco nuclear plant and who makes the argument that nuclear power simply can’t compete in the marketplace.

PANDORA’S PROMISE:

This documentary film is about nuclear energy and other energy sources. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming. The film emphasize that more deaths is caused by coal powered power plants than nuclear power plants.

— PART ONE —

— PART TWO —

— PART THREE —

The below deals with the broken promises and the amount of land in the United States in order to reach a “net zero” dream. This is actually merely a combining of a few of my past posts under one umbrella.


* BONUS *


“Apocalypse Never” – Michael Shellenberger Talks With Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager had Michael Shellenberger on his show to discuss his new book entitled “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (Amazon: ). In an article by Michael, you see him transitioning into a “Bjorn Lomborg” type of category. Here is the opening paragraph of that article:

  • On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. (ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS)

Facts through reason and common sense have made it through to this gentleman, and this is nice to hear. In another review of the book, it is noted that Mr. Shellenberger is a long time environmentalist and contributed “rationalism [that] is in woefully short supply in present day environmental discourse. Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never succeeds in providing a welcome boost” Here is the opening of that review:

The way to a cleaner, sustainable planet is not to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power, but rather to expand their use, especially in developing countries to bring economic growth and prosperity, the way such sources did for the developed world.

This is one of the primary themes in the new book, Apocalypse Never, written not by a “climate denier” or “corporate shill.” Instead, author Michael Shellenberger is a 30-year environmental activist with street cred in various causes including saving California’s redwood forests and co-founding a “progressive Democratic, labor-environment push” in 2002 for the New Apollo Project, a renewable energy initiative that long predated the Green New Deal. He also is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment.”…..

(PA PUNDITS – Peter Murphy)

Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and noted climate activist, used to think so. Now he’s not so sure. He explains why in this important video. (See my previous Prager audio with Michael)

The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin | Shellenberger

  • “It was the West’s focus on healing the planet with ‘soft energy’ renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.” — Michael Shellenberger

Armstrong and Getty read some of Michael Shellenberger’s article titled, The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin. An article of similar nature is found over at THE FEDERALIST, and it is titled: Stop Letting Environmental Groups Funded By Russia Dictate America’s Energy Policy.

Both are must reads.

State Sized Chunks Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy

Why were federal tax subsidies extended for wind and solar by Congress? Again. For the umpteenth time! We are against subsidies because they distort markets. Those politicians who support these market-distorting policies should at least be forced to answer the question: “How much is enough?” Taxpayers have been subsidizing wind and solar corporations for more than 40 years! These companies have gotten fat and happy on your money, and Congress keeps giving them more of it. This video is based on a Texas Public Policy Foundation report that explains why it’s long past time to stop wind and solar from stuffing their bank accounts with your tax dollars.

  • To give you a sense of scale, to replace the energy from one average natural gas well, which sits on about four acres of land, would require 2,500 acres of wind turbines. That is a massive amount of land. You would have to cover this entire nation with wind turbines in an attempt to replace the electricity that we generate from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, and even that would not get the job done. (CFACT)

This is from a recent BLOOMBERG article:

At his international climate summit in April, President Joe Biden vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The goal will require sweeping changes in the power generation, transportation and manufacturing sectors. It will also require a lot of land.

Wind farms, solar installations and other forms of clean power tend to take up more space on a per-watt basis than their fossil-fuel-burning brethren. A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 13 square miles (36 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.

Achieving Biden’s goal will require aggressively building more wind and solar farms, in many cases combined with giant batteries. To fulfill his vision of an emission-free grid by 2035, the U.S. needs to increase its carbon-free capacity by at least 150%. Expanding wind and solar by 10% annually until 2030 would require a chunk of land equal to the state of South Dakota, according to Princeton University estimates and an analysis by Bloomberg News. By 2050, when Biden wants the entire economy to be carbon free, the U.S. would need up to four additional South Dakotas to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories and more.

Earth Day 2021 is April 22nd. Therefore, eco-activist groups will be preaching the gospel of wind & solar power and the importance of biodiversity. What those trying to “save the planet” fail to understand (or more likely ignore) is that these two priorities are in direct conflict. Wind & solar require far more land than nuclear, natural gas and coal power. They are also far more destructive to regions of high biodiversity as well as large birds, bats and endangered species. As we celebrate Earth Day, let’s consider the significant environmental consequences of attempting to provide electricity through low density, unreliable sunshine and breezes.

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?


FLASHBACK


We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Shellenberger: Exposing the Censorship Industrial Complex | SpectatorTV

TWO SHORTS FIRST:

Michael Shellenberger Rips Zuckerberg’s Threads Censorship

  • “There is no democracy without freedom of speech. Everybody knows this, and yet they’re trying to curtail freedom of speech in the name of democracy. It’s creepy. It’s totalitarian. I never thought I would see it in my own country in my lifetime. And yet that’s exactly what’s happening at this very moment”

Over ONE MILLION FISA queries were conducted ILLEGALLY under FBI Director Wray’s watch. No one has been held responsible or accountable.

Spectator-TV

Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files journalist and founder of Public is in London to discuss the international censorship industrial complex. He explains to Winston how the complex web of government, big tech, intelligence and media collude to suppress speech in the UK, America and beyond.

4th of July ~ History 101

VIDEOS OF PEOPLE WHO DO NOT KNOW HISTORY…

FOLLOWED BY SOME HISTORY,

PATRIOTISM, REMEMBREANCE

Just a quick word regarding Mark Dice — who is the guy in the first video (and 3rd n 4th):

While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

Media analyst Mark Dice asks beachgoers in San Diego, California some basic questions about America’s 4th of July Independence Day celebration and their answers are quite disturbing.

MORE SADNESS:

FOR THE HISTORICAL RECORD:

The signers of the Declaration of Independence (ALL BIOS HERE)

Delaware

George Read | Caesar Rodney | Thomas McKean

Pennsylvania

George Clymer | Benjamin Franklin | Robert Morris | John Morton | Benjamin Rush | George Ross | James Smith | James Wilson | George Taylor

Massachusetts

John Adams | Samuel Adams | John Hancock | Robert Treat Paine

New Hampshire

Josiah Bartlett | William Whipple | Matthew Thornton |

Rhode Island

Stephen Hopkins | William Ellery |

New York

Lewis Morris | Philip Livingston | Francis Lewis | William Floyd |

Georgia

Button Gwinnett | Lyman Hall | George Walton |

Virginia

Richard Henry Lee | Francis Lightfoot Lee | Carter Braxton | Benjamin Harrison | Thomas Jefferson | George Wythe | Thomas Nelson, Jr. |

North Carolina

William Hooper | John Penn |

South Carolina

Edward Rutledge | Arthur Middleton | Thomas Lynch, Jr. | Thomas Heyward, Jr. |

New Jersey

Abraham Clark | John Hart | Francis Hopkinson | Richard Stockton | John Witherspoon |

Connecticut

Samuel Huntington | Roger Sherman | William Williams | Oliver Wolcott |

Maryland

Charles Carroll | Samuel Chase | Thomas Stone | William Paca |


Reagan, Cash, and Harvey



Dennis Prager


Video Description:

Dennis Prager reads from the popular leftist website, VOX. From newspapers such as the N.Y. TIMES, the L.A. TIMES, and the N.Y. DAILY NEWS. These mainstream opinion pieces bemoan and degrade America to the point of hatred. Anti-Americanism is growing on the Left, and in taking these positions these people benighted themselves as our cultural commissars… dishing out their version of history to those unintelligent lap-dog readers they call customers.


Some More History


I want to thank Israel Matzav for the following, good stuff!

With thanks to the Heritage Foundation:

During the 1700s, Philadelphia was an unpleasant place in the summer. Malaria and yellow fever were rampant. There were no cures and no known ways to prevent infection. Most people of means tried to escape the city, if they could.

But in the scorching summer of 1776, scores of our country’s leading men remained behind closed doors in Philadelphia. They were kept there by their work. And what a monumental work it turned out to be.

The 56 leaders, representing all 13 British colonies, signed a declaration that would birth a great nation and illuminate the very future of humankind. It’s this Declaration of Independence that Americans celebrate each July 4.

The document’s first job was to officially announce to the world that all the colonies had decided to declare themselves free and independent states, absolved from any allegiance to Great Britain. That was momentous enough for the years ahead, since in order to make good on that declaration, the colonies would have to defeat the British in a war that stretched until 1783.

But the greater meaning of the Declaration — then as well as now — is as a statement of the conditions that underlie legitimate political authority and as an explanation of the proper ends of government.

The signers proclaimed that political power would spring from the sovereignty of the people, not a crowned hereditary monarch. This idea shook Europe to its very core.

The Declaration appealed not to any conventional law or political contract but to the equal rights possessed by all men and “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and nature’s God” entitled them.

What is revolutionary about the Declaration of Independence is not that a particular group of Americans declared their independence under particular circumstances. It’s that they did so by appealing to –and promising to base their particular government on — a universal standard of justice.

It is in this sense that Abraham Lincoln praised “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

Of course, it required another war to extend those rights to all Americans, but the fact that they were written down in the Declaration was crucial in 1865, in 1965 and remains so today as well.

“If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence,” wrote noted historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, “it would have been worthwhile.”

As Thomas Jefferson, lead author of the Declaration, put it in 1821, “The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”

Those flames, the flames of freedom and opportunity, continue to spread. That’s a truth worth celebrating on the Fourth — and all year ’round.

From, The Spirit of the American Revolution:

Even the Minutemen reflected strong religious involvement. While they are generally recognized for their exploits as a group, few today know many specifics about them. For example, these men who stood to fight for their liberties and defend their town were often groups of laymen from local congregations led either by their pastor or a deacon!  Records even indicate that it was not unusual that following their militia drills they would go to church “where they listened to exhortation and prayer.”

The spiritual emphasis manifested so often by the Americans during the Revolution caused one Crown-appointed British governor to write to Great Britain complaining that:

If you ask an American who is his master, he’ll tell you he has none. And he has no governor but Jesus Christ.

Letters like this, coupled with statements like that delivered by Ethan Allen, and sermons like those preached by the Reverend Peter Powers (“Jesus Christ the King”), gave rise to a motto of the American Revolution. Most of us are unaware that the American Revolution even had a motto, but most wars do (e.g., World War II—”Remember Pearl Harbor”; the Texas’ war for independence—”Remember the Alamo”; etc.). The motto of the American Revolution was directed against King George III—considered the primary source of the conflict; for it was he who was arbitrarily, capriciously, and regularly violated “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The motto was very simple and very direct:

No King but King Jesus!

“Peer-Reviewed” Covid Article Failures | Unfollow the #Science

Wow, some amazing news as of late. I will start out with the bad news for the cult of vaccines, then a good peer-reviewed story. Including this flashback 6-months ago (video to the right).

Here is the video description for it:

As of November 18, 2022 Retraction Watch has documented 270 peer reviewed articles about COVID-19 that have been retracted by their publishers. Articles about the unusually high retraction rate have appeared in the journal Accountability in Research and in the journal Nature. The articles about the high retraction rate suggest that lowered stringency and standards on the part of publishers and the eagerness to publish on the part of researchers may have been driving forces in the unusually high retraction rate (typically only about 4 out of 10,000 research papers are retracted).

The high rate of flawed / junk science published raises questions about the effectiveness of the peer review process which was greatly expedited to get articles published quickly.

That FLASHBACK aside, here is the latest news via DAILY CALLER on the issue:

At least 330 COVID-19-related medical papers have been retracted since the coronavirus pandemic began, oftentimes for scientific errors or ethical shortcomings, according to watchdog Retraction Watch.

Many of the papers were published in smaller, less influential publications, although a number were published in the highly-prestigious Lancet and other influential journals like Science. The topics covered in the papers ranged from alternative proposed COVID-19 treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to false COVID-19 side effects.

One example of a U-turn from researchers occurred at the University of Manchester, where researchers two years ago asserted that hearing loss could be a result of COVID-19. Now, those researchers admit that was a faulty assumption.

Professor Kevin Munro of the University of Manchester audiology department admitted that many COVID-19 studies had been rushed. “There was an urgent need for this carefully conducted clinical and diagnostic study to investigate the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the auditory system. Many previous studies were published rapidly during the pandemic but lacked good scientific rigour,” he said.

One retracted paper published in Science examined the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in South Africa. It was withdrawn after social media users pointed out that some of the samples used could have been false positives. A number of the retractions were also social science papers, including one that used an inadequate sample size and imbalanced search terms to try and report on COVID-19 vaccine “misinformation” on social media……

This is why PJ-MEDIA headlines it as “Unfollow the Science.” and HOT AIR has a decent little break down as well:

More than 300 COVID-19-related articles have been retracted — long after they’d done their damage — due to a lack of scientific truthfulness and ethical guidelines, according to Retraction Watch, a website that monitors retractions of science-related articles.

A total of 330 COVID-related papers have been retracted thus far.

According to Gunnveig Grødeland, a senior researcher at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Oslo, many researchers took ethical shortcuts when writing their essays.

[….]

The Lancet journal (which dubs itself as “The best science for better lives”) was described as having used “fraudulent research” when it concluded that hydroxychloroquine “caused an increased risk of heart arrhythmia and even death” in COVID patients. The World Health Organization used those findings as a justification to shut down their research into what turned out to be a very effective medication for treating COVID and the media lectured us endlessly about the dangers it posed, particularly after Trump endorsed it.

Another paper from the University of Manchester that has since disappeared reported that COVID “was associated with vertigo, hearing loss, and tinnitus.” They later admitted that this is not the case. The author of the paper apparently had no research to draw on, but since viruses such as measles, mumps, and meningitis can cause auditory damage, she said “it was reasonable to assume” that COVID would do so also. I see. So policy was being made based on assumption.

And then there was the whole Ivermectin debacle. (Also endorsed by Trump initially.)

So all of that unpleasantness is simply disappearing from medical journals and research archives. And the media would like us all to pretend that it never happened. But it did happen. And if we don’t learn anything from all of this, it will happen again when the next pandemic inevitably comes along. The need for speed must be moderated by adhering to proven practices from the past. And if you’re trusting the government to deal with you honestly and fairly based on the best available science rather than “The Science,” I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in purchasing.

HEADLINE USA notes some of the main ideas in the general public that were overturned pre and post pandemic:

  • Studies about the effectiveness of masking and other COVID-related control efforts pushed by government officials are under intense scrutiny. Some second looks even revealed that masking and other measures put people in more danger than was necessary.

And don’t forget that these retractions happened while the general public still went on having their mind warped by previous headlines and what they thought was “honest reporting”


JIMMY DORE SHOW w/Dr. Jay Bhattacharya


LA Times Prints DUMBEST Covid Article In History!

Even as the dominant COVID narrative rapidly unravels more every day, the establishment’s wagons are being circled, and a perfect example is a recent LA Times article by Michael Hiltzik insisting that the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration should have faced professional consequences for “getting COVID wrong.” Except that the horrific consequences of COVID took place following establishment guidelines, NOT The Great Barrington Declaration.

Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger talk to The Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya about this LA Times hit piece filled with blatant misinformation.

I forgot to add this when I posted this originally… then I was off for a quick turn-around d to Arizona Thurs/Fri. So here is the missed PJ-MEDIA post I wanted to share. The entire post is worth linking over to, but I will emphasize the last sentence in my excerpt:

The pre-print for this study, prior to the peer review process, came out late last year. It showed, in a nutshell, that more COVID-19 shots correlated to a greater risk of contracting COVID-19.

But the COVIDians predictably, in eternal denial as is their nature, pounced on the fact that the initial paper was a pre-print. They dismissed it for not being peer-reviewed, which is often described as the “gold standard” stamp of approval by The ScienceTM.

Mind you, the corporate state media expresses no such criticism of pre-print studies that say what they want them to say about the alleged efficacy of masking, the wonders of Pfizer’s mRNA injections, etc. It’s only when a study counters the narrative that they pump the brakes.

Via McGill, February 2023:

Recently, some people have been spreading the idea that getting additional doses of the COVID vaccine increases the risk of catching the virus. The suggestion was made in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal and repeated recently by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The notion seems to stem from a preprint uploaded last December by researchers from the Cleveland Clinic. Opponents of vaccines have been using it to argue their case, worrying a fair number of people, if the emails I have received on the subject are any indication.

Well, now it is peer-reviewed, and none of the conclusions have changed….