1. How can the White House not have a response prepared for this question?
2. How long can the mainstream media refuse to give this slowly exploding story the attention and coverage it obviously deserves?
3. It is true that everybody—I think literally everybody—knew that Joe Biden was lying when he said his son had “done nothing wrong” and when he said that he never discussed Hunter’s dealing with foreign governments with him. But is it possible that the President, his advisors and his party really think that they can duck the scandal with the Clinton “Deny, deny, deny!” formula?
That video above is now the only YouTube available record of last week’s viral TikTok video showing Kadia Iman, a “social media influencer” and OnlyFans model who spiced up her graduation from LaGuardia Community College by forcibly taking the microphone from the school official announcing the graduates and using it to give her own defiant message. The video is also evidence that the representations made by Iman regarding the justifications for her behavior may not be exactly accurate.
In her own TikTok video of her attack, Iman is heard saying into the mic, “I want the mic! Let go! You didn’t let me get my moment!” Then she says “I’m graduating today. I don’t like how you snatched the mic out of my hand, so today is going to be all about me!”before dropping the mic and walking away. Later, she took to social media to explain why her “moment” was justified, saying,
“To everyone saying I should be embarrassed or I’ll never get a job … I’m a black woman in America. I am always in the right … u will not gaslight me into thinking I’m the bad guy. I did it for girls that look like me. Love u.”
She claimed that the white graduating students were given an opportunity to say their names, majors and a few other details while up on stage, but that she and other black students were not granted the same privilege by the white administrator, prompting Iman’s anger and violent reaction.
“Basically, what happened was I was walking on and we had to say our names before we get on the stage,” she said. “So I was saying my name and she literally — my name is long, obviously, I have like three syllables in my name. So, I didn’t even get to finish saying my name, and then the people that went before me, they all got to say their name, their major, and even extras,” Iman continued. “Me and another girl noticed that she was pulling down the mic super fast for some black people.”
“I’m not a problematic person, I don’t want to ruin no ones day, I don’t want to violate anybody, but that is what she did. She didn’t even let me finish speaking, she put the mic down and cut me off and that was the only chance I had to speak. I just feel that wasn’t right,” she concluded.
I am having increasing difficulty figuring out what progressives and Democrats are trying to convey when they all a politician “racist.” As far as I can tell the current definition amounts to “Republican.”
DeSantis was recently asked by a CBN interviewer about his love of baseball, which he extolled as a “meritocratic” game because athletes of different sizes and skill levels can perform at a competitive level professionally, unlike basketball.”I think that there’s kind of a place for everybody in a baseball team if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to practice… I kind of thought it was always a very democratic game, a very meritocratic game.” He added, “Whereas I kind of viewed basketball as like ‘these guys are just freaks of nature.’ They’re just incredible athletes. In baseball, you know, you have some guys that might not necessarily be the best athletes, but maybe they’ve got you know that slider that nobody can hit, or they have the skills that allow them to compete at the highest level.”
I would take issue with DeSantis’s suggestion that basketball players are superior athletes to baseball players: as Bob Costas memorably replied to a similar claim by another sportscaster, check out Michael Jordan’s record when he tried to play in the minor leagues, where he never got higher than AA and washed out after a single (pathetic) season.
But never mind: the main thrust of his comments is irrefutable and true. The average height of an NBA player is nearly 6-feet-7-inches, nearly a foot taller than the average American man. Players under six feet are extremely rare. Major League Baseball players, in contrast, average about 6-feet-1-inch tall, with some superstars well under that level, like Houston’s Jose Altuve and the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts. There are some freaks in the mix (2022 MVP Aaron Judge, for example) but unlike in the NBA, they are an exception, not the rule.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, issued this on Twitter:
And thus once again we are faced with the question of just how stupid, civically ignorant and gullible an American politician thinks the public is. I can understand why Newsom might believe that the answer is “incredibly stupid, civically ignorant and gullible,” because someone like him was elected governor by Californians. However, there is hope that he is mistaken.
To begin with the most important point, his proposal is pure grandstanding. The chances of any Constitutional amendment being passed are vanishingly small, but the chances of that mess being passed are zero. It is unethical to make proposals that are impossible: call it the “Imagine” fraud. The cynical and manipulative individual putting forth the plan is seeking approval and support for a sentiment that is entirely useless and cruelly misleading, at least for the fools silly enough to take it seriously.
This “amendment” is a sop to the “Do something!” crowd. See? Gavin is doing something! He’s proposing a solution that is absolutely impossible, and that wouldn’t be a solution even if it somehow came to pass!
In addition to the cynical nature of proposing an impossible solution, what Newsom is proposing is an abuse of the amendment process, essentially using the Constitution to pass legislation so the legislation can probably never be repealed. It also isn’t what he says it is: a collection of “four gun safety freedoms.” How are any of those provisions “freedoms”? Newsom is casting a fake amendment in terms evoking the First and Second Amendments though it doesn’t involve “freedoms” at all. That’s OK: most of the amendments are about rights, not freedoms, but his using the term in this context should set off everyone’s snake-oil salesman alarms.
Every December, when I do an end-of-year legal ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, I discuss the Unethical Lawyer of the Year. It’s only June, but it’s hard to see how anyone, not even Alvin Bragg, can match Jason Kurland this year
Kurland, an attorney who represented lottery winners and was once a partner at the prestigious firm Rivkin Radler, one of the 200 largest firms in the nation, was sentenced last week to 13 years in prison. He had been found guilty of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and a related conspiracy charge.
Fraudulent representations by Kurland and his co-defendants caused his clients to lose more than $80 million. He also lifted $19.5 million from the account of one lottery winner to make an investment for the benefit of himself and his accessories.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said this during an interview on the “Lex Fridman Podcast”about his discovered wisdom about the difficulty of censoring social media:
“So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are obviously false, right, or they may be factual but may not be harmful. So are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong? If there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing? There’s a bunch of real issues and challenges there. Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being moredebatable or true. And that stuff is really tough, right?It really undermines trust,”
Boy, if Ireland thought they had mad cows before….
Ireland’s government is reportedly seriously considering plans to destroy 200,000 cows to meet its mandatory climate change targets from the nutsy-cuckoo European Union. Farmers will be offered financial inducements participate in the bovine holocaust. Thus the collateral damage of net zero emissions insanity, a sub-category of The Great Stupid, is extending to cows, just as AOC wants it to in her “Green New Deal.”
There shouldn’t be a lot to argue about here: killing 200,000 Irish cows now will have exactly no effect on the climate even if the most apocalyptic and hysterical scientific models are correct. It’s like the Biden and Obama killing pipelines: it’s just climate change theater and virtue-signaling, except that the pipeline decisions just killed jobs and brain cells of rational people thinking about them.
And yes, in this case, just seriously considering such an obviously wasteful policy is sufficient to justify Ethics Dunce honors even if ultimately rationality prevails. Even pondering such idiocy is signature significance, as when grandpa says, “Yeah, I was thinking about flapping my arms and flying out the window to visit Neverland, but decided it was too far away.” You call the rest home and double quick, even if Gramps had seemed lucid before.
I’m not sure Harvard’s hiring of failed Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot is quite as outrageous and incompetent as Berkeley hiring the pro-criminal ex-DA who helped turn San Francisco into a close approximation of Frank Miller’s “Sin City,” but it’s close enough to make me sick to my stomach.
Lightfoot will teach a course at Harvard later this year on “Health Policy and Leadership,” she announced yesterday, saying, “I learned a lot over the past four years, and this gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and perceptions of governing through one of the most challenging chapters in American history.”
This is an interesting concept: hire teachers to teach what they proved to have no skill at or comprehension of when they had actual responsibility in that area. This is like hiring Mario Mendoza (lifetime batting average: .215) as a hitting coach. It gives Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Bud Light responsible for the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, hope for a new career in academia.
Lightfoot demonstrated as Mayor of Chicago that she knew virtually nothing about leadership, policymaking or public health management, and now she’s teaching it. Perfect. Here’s how her hometown paper sympathetically describes her qualifications:
Early in the pandemic, when Black Chicagoans were dying at six times the rate of whites, Lightfoot and her team led by Dr. Allison Arwady …provided door-to-door outreach with masks and information in vulnerable communities and, when vaccines became available, prioritized them for South and West side residents. But Lightfoot also was slow to take action when the pandemic spurred Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to close schools and businesses across the state, following along only reluctantly. She later clashed with the governor over bar and restaurant rules and battled the Chicago Teachers Union in a push to return to in-person learning, even as she faced blowback over keeping the lakefront closed too long….Lightfoot also walked away from her campaign promise to reopen public mental health clinics closed by predecessor Rahm Emanuel. Lightfoot argued the city could better serve residents by giving money to vendors…
I wonder if Prof. Lightfoot will teach her students to accuse critics of sexism and racism when their policies crash and burn?
On the same pedagogical theory, she should team teach the course with ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who can explain what he learned by killing thousands of elderly nursing home residents by stashing pandemic victims in their midst.
Oh, all right, Berkeley hiring Boudin to head a new criminal justice center is more unethical than Harvard letting Lightfoot pollute student minds with her concept of leadership…after all, it’s just a single course, and the smart students can just skip it.
What is most amazing about this story is how transparent U. Cal at Berkeley is, even proud, about it. Amazing and alarming. The American far left is so confident now that it doesn’t attempt to disguise its most radical and destructive impulses.
Here’s the short version: the most radically progressive city in the country essentially fired its even more progressive district attorney for allowing the city to begin a death spiral into lawlessness. So despite that failure—indeed perhaps because of it— he was just named the founding executive director of the new Criminal Law and Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.
The city is San Francisco, and the former DA is Chesa Boudin. Boudin, who has been discussed here before, is really an antimatter prosecutor: he doesn’t believe in prosecution, law enforcement, or laws, really. The son of Sixties radicals, members of the violent Weathermen group, his mission in life is to “dismantle the system,” as they used to say (and are now saying again) on college campuses. Among all the so-called “Soros prosecutors” allowing cities to decline into urban hellscapes where shoplifting is considered a right and police are hesitant to police, Boudin was the worst by far. Imagine what it says about our elite educational institutions that one of them, after seeing him removed for placing his ideological delusions above his duty, said, “Hey! This is the perfect guy to head up our new criminal justice center in our law school!”
It boggles the mind, or would, if we had not already observed the rapid and so-far unimpeded ethics rot in academia. Here’s part of Berkeley’s announcement:
Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who accused President Biden of sexual assault as he ran for president in 2020, said on Tuesday that she had moved to Russia and was seeking citizenship there, according to Sputnik, a Russian-government-run news site.
Ms. Reade told Sputnik in a news conference that while her “dream is to live” in both the United States and Russia, she might reside only in Russia because that is where she feels “surrounded by protection and safety.”
I know when Iwant to feel “safe,” my first impulse is to defect to Russia….
This officially validates critics who accused Reid of being a fake #MeToo accuser with a political agenda, and even supports the claims that she was part of a pro-Trump “Russian disinformation” campaign. I don’t know what to think, other than I’m sorry I ever heard of her.
Next I expect to learn that Juanita Broaddrick has moved to Iran….
Ethics Alarms 