How Orwellian of CNN! When former Trump administration official Tricia McLaughlin explained why residents of Springfield, Ohio was being “overrun” by Haitian immigrants, “CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip” host Phillip insisted that using words like “overrun” was “part of the problem.” Part of what problem? The problem of letting the American public know exactly what is happening in their country as a result of Biden Administration open border policies? Yes, that is a problem for Democrats, and I can certainly understand how our Big Brother party wants to eliminate words that can accurately explain the situation.
What is the nice word for what’s going on when 20,000 recent immigrants from a third world country and hopelessly messed up culture descend on a struggling town of just 60,000? That’s a 30% influx of completely unassimilated foreigners in a town that is having trouble caring for the people living there already. Is the town being “visited”? No, these arrivals are planning on staying: Springfield must seem like Disney World to someone from Haiti. Are the Haitians enhancing the town? No, because such a large group of new residents lacking familiarity with English and other cultural norms can’t avoid causing serious problems, and they are. “Overrun” is as good a word for what’s happening as I can think of.
As he does so often, Donald Trump accepted something he read or heard as gospel truth and repeated it as fact, this time in a Presidential debate, and was promptly ‘factchecked” and subsequently ridiculed. The back-ground: a large number of Haitian “migrants,” who may or may not be here legally, seem to have ended up in Springfield, Ohio. One resident complained that they were eating pet geese and cats, her claim went viral, and the meme-makers have had a field day…
Yikes. A performer who did this in one of my shows would have to enter the witness protection program, because I would be hunting her down. With a crossbow.
South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to uproarious applause, was performing an encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” a famous aria in the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at an opera house in Seoul. His co-star, celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu who was singing the title role, marched onstage and demanded that he stop.
Without intense preparation, without biased and complicit moderators helping her along, without being able to shift focus to an adversary, this is what Kamala Harris is. Here we have just a ten minute interview featuring soft-ball questions from a friendly Philidelphia journalist, and the result is evasiveness, gibberish and vacuous non-answers.
Some highlights:
Asked about the ephemeral “opportunity economy,” Harris says,
“For example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it’s about investing in areas that really need a lot of work and maybe focusing on, again, the aspirations and the dreams but also just recognizing that at this moment in time some of this stuff we could take for granted years ago, we can’t take for granted anymore.”
Oh. What????
Here’s Harris filibustering the basic and easy question, “Talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people. What are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?”…
Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hardworking people. You know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. I try to explain to some people who might not have had the same experience, but a lot of people will relate to this.
You know, I grew up in a neighborhood of people who were really proud of their lawn, you know, and I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity and that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams, but not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So, when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business.
The only competent response to that babbling is to repeat the question as if Harris had a coughing fit or something, which the interviewer did not.
Here’s another Harris gem: “My focus is very much about what we need to do over the next 10-20 years to catch up to the 21st century around, again, capacity, but also challenges.”
Right. I do a lot of public speaking, and if I ever hear myself talking like that, I will check myself into the hospital on suspicion of suffering a stroke.
This is the candidate the Democratic Party believed was so superior to all other options that she was nominated by acclamation, without having to face any opposition at all. Here I would typically add, “Democracy!” but “Idiocracy!” seems more apt.
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Can anyone explain this? The WordPress AI bot was apparently completely confused by Harris’s blather and told me to tag this post “Harry Potter,” “Football” “Dreams” and “Fantasy.”
It is amusing, in a mordant way, to hear Kamala Harris tell her rallies that Donald Trump has an obligation to voters and democracy to agree to a second debate with her. She might as well be wearing a giant blinking “I am a shameless hypocrite!” neon sign on her head, as would be her party, if it had a literal head.
Democrats in general are ethically estopped from making this complaint. President Biden and his party rejected debates before the Democratic primaries. Harris was awarded her DEI Presidential nomination without having to test herself against any other potential nominees, in a debate or on a ballot. Trump, meanwhile participated in a training-wheels debate against whom he was assured would be his opposition in November, and when that presumed nominee metaphorically burst into flames, the Democrats demanded and got a Mulligan.
If I were Trump, I wouldn’t have agreed to the last debate.
The way ABC rigged the debate to boost Harris’s chances made Trump’s decision to eschew future public muggings by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) obvious and unassailable. The moderators “factchecked” Trump five times and Harris not at all: now there’s neutrality for you. (Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!) It’s not as if Harris didn’t repeatedly misrepresent facts and repeat familiar Democrat Big Lies, because she did. The decision had apparently been made by ABC brass to “Get Trump!”
In the much-revered 1988 Kevin Costner film “Bull Durham,” veteran minor league catcher “Crash” Davis mentors a raw, talented rookie pitcher (Tim Robbins) and gets him ready for major league stardom. One of the catcher’s most audacious teaching devices is that when the cocky and none-too-bright pitcher insists on shaking off his signs, “Crash” tells the batter what the next pitch is going to be. Resulst: a massive home run and an chastened pitcher. It’s funny in the film.
The Minnesota Twins apparently have no sense of humor. The team released minor league catcher Derek Bender yesterday for emulating “Crash.” Bender was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Low-A affiliate, and in the second game of a doubleheader last week, Bender tipped off several hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, regarding the next pitch starter Ross Dunn was going to throw. Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to capture the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention.
Usually I introduce these Friday fora with some reference to current events, but I woke up sick for the second straight day, and this time I feel too foggy to focus.
So I’m counting on you while I have two cups of Italian roast and some DayQuil. Yum.
So how could this academic narcissist, Dr. Rachael Gunn, who hopped around like a kangaroo in her Olympic routine be the #1 ranked women’s breakdancer in the whole wide world in the latest rankings when her total score of 0 points put her in last place among the 16 breakers in the main Olympic competition?
My answer: it’s the “March of Folly” phenomenon. Everyone knows this honor makes no sense, and everyone knows that such a self-evidently absurd rankig will discredit everyone involved. However, just as in the Charge of the Light Brigade, the launching of the Challenger Space Shuttle, and so many other disasters throughout history where it seemed easier to just stay on the path to chaos than to stand up and scream, “NO! Stop! This is insane!” the World DanceSport Federation decided it was easier to look ridiculous than to avoid an obvious fiasco.
Winston Churchill is often quoted as as observing that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all others.” In truth he was not so cynical: what he really said in a speech to the House of Commons in 1947 was that “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”
If he were around today and watching recent developments in our depressing Presidential race, however, I think Winston might go with the misquoted version.
Item: MoveOn, a progressive public policy advocacy group that has been much-derided on Ethics Alarms over the years, is partnering with Ben & Jerry’s radical Left co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to release a special Kamala Harris-inspired ice cream flavor. (Send in related joke suggestions, by all means.) Limited edition pints of “Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee”are being released in a limited edition; it is a coconut flavored ice cream layered with caramel and topped with red, white and blue star sprinkles. Why coconut? This, apparently. (Winston is starting to roll already.)
The new flavor will be the center of the “Scoop the Vote” free ice cream truck tour that kicks off next week. Cohen and Greenfield will be on board while the truck makes 20 stops in the so-called battleground states as part of a push to register voters. Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told USA TODAY that the tour aims to inspire voters to register and cast their votes for Harris in the 2024 presidential election, noting that even non-political activities like getting free ice cream have an impact on the election.
Dr. Bruce Levy, a Nashville, Tennessee, medical examiner who testified under oath 24 years ago that Russell and Kaye Maze’s young son, Alex, had been shaken to death by his father now says, “Oopsie!”—he was wrong.
“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” he stated in a sworn affidavit. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.” He swears that would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.”
Gee, that’s nice. The father, Russell Maze, was convicted of aggravated child abuse before Bryan’s death and of murder after the child’s death . He is now serving a life sentence, and has been in prison for more than two decades.
Ethics Alarms 