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Mon/Med-AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Las Vegas and the left's dangerous amorality
by ERIK RUSH
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IRS Malfeasance Meets Equifax Ineptitude
k8-wyncQ6_o8_jBx9tTTgCQUiR6hm7NkgHHH0Kg7KqqMx3tB6C71gxrJeqQkqDl_wfxf-1dQ5sJDn4NH7omSb5N1QlwlfcJHYVDlSV6Bq9AEhVk6FkJET4kftHu0iDY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2015-10-07-acf66d22_large.png" width="454" height="227" />
by Jordan Candler:  It was just a few weeks ago when Equifax finally came clean about a staggering security breach that imperiled the data of some 145 million Americans. Earlier this year, hackers infiltrated the company’s database and retrieved troves of intimate consumer data, including Social Security and credit card numbers. Security breaches happen, but this case was particularly infuriating due to some company officials’ lackluster — perhaps even criminal — response and the preventable way in which the breach occurred.

          Another agency that retains some of your most personal information is the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS isn’t exactly trustworthy either, as demonstrated through the actions of Lois Lerner, who walked away with impunity after targeting conservative groups. The last thing consumers and taxpayers want these two agencies doing in teaming up. So guess what? That’s exactly what they’re doing. What could possibly go wrong?
          On Sept. 29, the IRS awarded a $7.25 million contract “to establish an order for third party data services from Equifax to verify taxpayer identity and to assist in ongoing identity verification and validations needs of the Service.” How ironic — and damning — it will be when some untold number of IRS applications are flagged for fraud by Equifax due to the leaking of information … by Equifax. At this point it’s basically inevitable.
          According to Fox News, “The contract stated that Equifax was the only company capable of providing these services to the IRS, and it was deemed a ‘critical’ service that couldn’t lapse.” That may or may not be true. But as Rep. Early Blumenauer made very clear, “I am shocked that the IRS would contract with this firm for activities that they are clearly unfit to carry out.” The agencies are either tone-deaf or perverse — or both. Hardly surprising — but nonetheless exasperating — coming from such contemptuous agencies.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51696

4064036047?profile=original
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Stolen Valor Blumenthal Holds Phony 
Newtown II PR Stunt To Grab Guns
{rickwells.us} ~ Richard “Stolen Valor” Blumenthal was in his home state of Connecticut and still the crowd size was so pathetically small that deceptive staging had to be used to avoid exposing just how tiny it was... Aside from being able to hear the individual hands clap as a signal of the small size, there were other giveaways. The wide aisle in front of the speaker probably isn’t an aisle at all, it looks like they positioned their few participants behind and to Blumenthal’s left, with one to his immediate right, to provide the illusion, the assumption, that both sides were equally populated. They also kept the crowd shot tight, since backing out any further would expose the dismal turnout. He focuses primarily on that side as he claps like a school boy at a Thanksgiving program rather than a grown man who is supposedly a leader of a state and our nation. Of course Blumenthal is neither, he’s an operative for the enemy, the globalist left attacking our nation and our 2nd Amendment... https://rickwells.us/stolen-valor-blumenthal-grab-guns/
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Lawsuit demands Mueller 
reveal spending on Russia probe
by BOB UNRUH
{wnd.com} ~ Former FBI director and now special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating alleged influence by Russia on the 2016 presidential election... and he reportedly has expanded the scope to the business interests of associates of President Trump, but has yet to present evidence of any crime. Now, he’s declining to release details of his spending on the probe, prompting Washington watchdog Judicial Watch to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice. Last summer, Mueller submitted a proposed budget to the DOJ, but Judicial Watch said officials declined to make the document public and committed only to releasing reports of the team’s expenditures every six months...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/lawsuit-demands-mueller-reveal-spending-on-russia-probe/
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liar-nObama and His Cushy Pension Just 
Got Massive Bad News From the GOP
by DAVIS
{conservativetribune.com} ~ One of the many perks of becoming the president of the United States is that you have been guaranteed an income for life worth millions of dollars... thanks to the American taxpayers — no matter what other earnings might be coming in. However, the days of the federal treasury paying presidents huge amounts of money they’ll never need may finally be over thanks to a bill that is making its way through the Senate, The Daily Caller reported. On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs unanimously approved a bill that would cut presidential pensions, saving the taxpayers millions... https://conservativetribune.com/obama-bad-news-gop/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=minutemennews&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance
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Trump Considering Replacing 
Tillerson With CIA Director
by JACK CROWE
{dailycaller.com} ~ President Donald Trump is reportedly mulling whether to dismiss embattled Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replace him with trusted confidante CIA Director Mike Pompeo... days after Tillerson reportedly referred to him as a “moron.” Pompeo’s name recently surfaced as Tillerson’s potential successor due to his strong relationship with the president and the stability that comes with choosing a replacement from within the existing cabinet, according to Axios. A member of Trump’s inner circle, Pompeo enjoys unique access to the president, delivering his daily briefings and offering consultation on all foreign policy decisions...  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/06/trump-considering-replacing-tillerson-with-cia-director/
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As Harvey Weinstein Scandal Grows, Democrats Rush to Give Back Donations
{newsmax.com} ~ Congressional Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck clown-Schumer and potential 2020 presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth dinky-Warren among them... are starting to give charities thousands of dollars in donations they had received from disgraced Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein and his family have given more than $1.4 million in political contributions since the 1992 election cycle, virtually all of it to Democratic lawmakers, candidates and their allies, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The party's effort to separate itself from the 65-year-old film executive came after The New York Times reported that he settled sexual harassment lawsuits with at least eight women...  https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/us-harvey-weinstein-democrats/2017/10/06/id/818267/?ns_mail_uid=29878495&ns_mail_job=1757136_10072017&s=al&dkt_nbr=0105042mpiim
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Las Vegas and the left's dangerous amorality
by ERIK RUSH
{wnd.com} ~ One of the first admonitions that came from cooler heads in the hours following Stephen Paddock’s deadly shooting rampage at a country music festival in Las Vegas Sunday night was a recommendation that those analyzing the incident refrain from politicizing the tragedy. It didn’t take long, however, for liberal politicos including those in the press to cast aside this counsel in favor of wholesale politicization of the shootings.

My thinking on the matter is that considering the magnitude and nature of the tragedy, the avoidance of politicizing same would be prudent unless the perpetrator himself was attempting to make some sort of political statement in carrying out the assault, but this has not been reliably established.

As one may have noticed, conspiracy theories concerning Paddock’s rampage abound. There have been as yet unsubstantiated reports that Paddock converted to a radical form of Islam at some point, as well as other reports of multiple shooters and the like. While lack of an apparent motive and information in general as regards Mr. Paddock could speak volumes, it could simply be indicative of measures he took to keep his life – and subsequently, his intention to kill a lot of people – a secret.

Although it would behoove anyone seeking the truth to take heed of the word “unsubstantiated” as regards some of the more controversial reports, it would also be wise to take a couple of other items into consideration: One, it’s been established that clandestine groups both inside and outside of government have been known to cultivate unbalanced individuals and fanatics to carry out such attacks as instruments of their agenda advancement. The second is that the left is operating under extreme duress, as I have indicated in this space many times since Donald Trump’s election; this has already given rise to all manner of desperate action on the part of the left.

On Monday night, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel made several false statements about gun laws, presumably to precipitate efforts on the part of Washington lawmakers to impose increased gun control measures. liar-Hillary Clinton offered up some truly embarrassing statements relating to firearms and firearms laws, and claimed that the availability of firearms was some sort of dark conservative-Republican- National Rifle Association (NRA) conspiracy. She also criticized a “slow and creaky” infrastructure for firearms background checks.

The ever-mouthy, squat Hollywood goblin Lena Dunham said on social media that there was “no way not to politicize” the incident, and that Paddock’s shooting orgy was “about gender and race as well as access to guns.” I won’t even attempt to unravel that bit of logic.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw, instead of reporting the news, admonished citizens to organize against the NRA. Actress and perennial moron Alyssa Milano tweeted a link to “a list of the members of the House and Senate, and their twitter handles, that have taken money from the NRA.” A large and lively bunch of Hollywood ignoramuses weighed in with similar advice vis-à-vis the NRA, and a Drexel University professor blamed the shootings on a supposed narrative of white victimization advanced by – you guessed it – President Trump and his surrogates.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that country music itself hasn’t been cited by the left as a catalyst for this sort of violence, but I suppose there’s still time for that.

Let’s not mince words here: Those on the left who are driving the exploitation of the Las Vegas massacre to advance gun control are not interested in measures that might reduce gun violence, because no manner of precautions are capable of deterring a determined perpetrator with a gun – or a knife, a bomb, or any other weapon one might obtain or devise. They are interested in neutralizing the Second Amendment and disarming the American people. liar-Hillary Clinton and her ilk would probably adore a nationwide ban on firearms and mandatory electronic gunpowder sniffers in every home wherein a “hot” reading would result in a visit from the local SWAT team, all to ensure our safety, of course.

Potential conspiracies and the progressive fantasy of an unarmed populace aside, my observation this week speaks to the recurring theme that the true believers among liberals as opposed to the deluded, who simply lack epistemic reference for their beliefs have become dangerously amoral people. One of the most offensive yet telling reactions to the Las Vegas shootings came from Hayley Geftman-Gold, a CBS senior counsel who said on Facebook that she was “not even sympathetic to the shooting victims because country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

Geftman-Gold was quickly sacked by CBS, but she wasn’t the only person on the left to publicly articulate that correlation. She was, however, the only one audacious enough to suggest that the killed and injured country music fans – being Republican gun-toters and by logical extension, likely Trump supporters – had it coming.

I would submit that this level of callousness and inhumanity has become commonplace among the aforementioned liberal true believers. Liberal politicos and the press have worked tirelessly to dehumanize their political opponents, and while even many conservatives might disbelieve, I think that this is in preparation for some truly draconian social-engineering measures in future. These people are the sort who would turn their neighbors in to police-state authorities, even if they knew that in so doing they would consign said neighbors to enslavement, torture and death in concentration camps.

The response of those on the left to the Las Vegas shootings illustrate once more that they should be regarded as our mortal enemies, as opposed to fellow citizens with a somewhat divergent political viewpoint.
Read more…

Midterm 2018 Revolution

Midterm 2018 Revolution
President Trump / Trump tagged Congress / midterms 2018 / revolution / vote by MelissaM
 
 
I found a very encouraging article out of Breitbart. I have been talking about this for some time now. The midterms 2018 will be the real revolution, and the people will change the government once and for all. We have to, and only we can.
 
 
Then we will really see things happening once President Trump doesn’t have to deal with the obstructionists anymore!
 
It is more important in these times, then ever before, for all of us to pay attention to who is running for congress, as well as all other offices, in our states and get out there and VOTE when the time comes! Bring everyone with you, just like we did in the general election. Remember, massive turnout defeats voter fraud!
Read more…

School Teaches Kids, Staff How to ‘Witness Whiteness’

An expensive St. Louis kindergarten-through-grade 8 school is making sure its students are aware of race from the moment their enrolled until they time the graduate.

Thanks to the “Witnessing Whiteness” program, the $17,500 per year College School actually starts the racial consciousness in pre-kindergarten, with teachers pointing out to students, for example, how “few specific shades [of crayons], ranging from beige to brown” can be used as “the skin colors of figures in their drawings.”

According to The St. Louis American, the program is part of the “school’s approach to addressing race at every educational level.” For teachers and staff, they get to participate in discussions designed to get them to “rethink” how they view race. (Read more from “School Teaches Kids, Staff How to ‘Witness Whiteness'” HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/10/school-teaches-kids-staff-witness-whiteness/

Read more…

Mon/Med-AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Las Vegas and the left's dangerous amorality
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by ERIK RUSH
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IRS Malfeasance Meets Equifax Ineptitude
k8-wyncQ6_o8_jBx9tTTgCQUiR6hm7NkgHHH0Kg7KqqMx3tB6C71gxrJeqQkqDl_wfxf-1dQ5sJDn4NH7omSb5N1QlwlfcJHYVDlSV6Bq9AEhVk6FkJET4kftHu0iDY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Jordan Candler:  It was just a few weeks ago when Equifax finally came clean about a staggering security breach that imperiled the data of some 145 million Americans. Earlier this year, hackers infiltrated the company’s database and retrieved troves of intimate consumer data, including Social Security and credit card numbers. Security breaches happen, but this case was particularly infuriating due to some company officials’ lackluster — perhaps even criminal — response and the preventable way in which the breach occurred.

          Another agency that retains some of your most personal information is the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS isn’t exactly trustworthy either, as demonstrated through the actions of Lois Lerner, who walked away with impunity after targeting conservative groups. The last thing consumers and taxpayers want these two agencies doing in teaming up. So guess what? That’s exactly what they’re doing. What could possibly go wrong?
          On Sept. 29, the IRS awarded a $7.25 million contract “to establish an order for third party data services from Equifax to verify taxpayer identity and to assist in ongoing identity verification and validations needs of the Service.” How ironic — and damning — it will be when some untold number of IRS applications are flagged for fraud by Equifax due to the leaking of information … by Equifax. At this point it’s basically inevitable.
          According to Fox News, “The contract stated that Equifax was the only company capable of providing these services to the IRS, and it was deemed a ‘critical’ service that couldn’t lapse.” That may or may not be true. But as Rep. Early Blumenauer made very clear, “I am shocked that the IRS would contract with this firm for activities that they are clearly unfit to carry out.” The agencies are either tone-deaf or perverse — or both. Hardly surprising — but nonetheless exasperating — coming from such contemptuous agencies.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51696

4064036047?profile=original
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Stolen Valor Blumenthal Holds
Phony Newtown II PR Stunt To Grab Guns
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{rickwells.us} ~ Richard “Stolen Valor” Blumenthal was in his home state of Connecticut and still the crowd size was so pathetically small that deceptive staging had to be used to avoid exposing just how tiny it was... Aside from being able to hear the individual hands clap as a signal of the small size, there were other giveaways. The wide aisle in front of the speaker probably isn’t an aisle at all, it looks like they positioned their few participants behind and to Blumenthal’s left, with one to his immediate right, to provide the illusion, the assumption, that both sides were equally populated. They also kept the crowd shot tight, since backing out any further would expose the dismal turnout. He focuses primarily on that side as he claps like a school boy at a Thanksgiving program rather than a grown man who is supposedly a leader of a state and our nation. Of course Blumenthal is neither, he’s an operative for the enemy, the globalist left attacking our nation and our 2nd Amendment... https://rickwells.us/stolen-valor-blumenthal-grab-guns/
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Lawsuit demands Mueller 
reveal spending on Russia probe
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by BOB UNRUH
{wnd.com} ~ Former FBI director and now special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating alleged influence by Russia on the 2016 presidential election... and he reportedly has expanded the scope to the business interests of associates of President Trump, but has yet to present evidence of any crime. Now, he’s declining to release details of his spending on the probe, prompting Washington watchdog Judicial Watch to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice. Last summer, Mueller submitted a proposed budget to the DOJ, but Judicial Watch said officials declined to make the document public and committed only to releasing reports of the team’s expenditures every six months...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/lawsuit-demands-mueller-reveal-spending-on-russia-probe/
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liar-nObama and His Cushy Pension
Just Got Massive Bad News From the GOP
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by DAVIS
{conservativetribune.com} ~ One of the many perks of becoming the president of the United States is that you have been guaranteed an income for life worth millions of dollars... thanks to the American taxpayers — no matter what other earnings might be coming in. However, the days of the federal treasury paying presidents huge amounts of money they’ll never need may finally be over thanks to a bill that is making its way through the Senate, The Daily Caller reported. On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs unanimously approved a bill that would cut presidential pensions, saving the taxpayers millions...  https://conservativetribune.com/obama-bad-news-gop/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=minutemennews&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance
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Trump Considering Replacing Tillerson With CIA Director
w60350B16n9i8Zcv4-onOs_bX2F5fNDQvgN2biDP15LzNffNf8iYsnIGUThovSSfEaHsE--SFs0WjT9yfT1uZhAM36y4hsI2BS6Po4qiyKkJ6VK7ZZq8e-_KwwpoCuf4hX6pEPyXfElP=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500
by JACK CROWE
{dailycaller.com} ~ President Donald Trump is reportedly mulling whether to dismiss embattled Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replace him with trusted confidante CIA Director Mike Pompeo... days after Tillerson reportedly referred to him as a “moron.” Pompeo’s name recently surfaced as Tillerson’s potential successor due to his strong relationship with the president and the stability that comes with choosing a replacement from within the existing cabinet, according to Axios. A member of Trump’s inner circle, Pompeo enjoys unique access to the president, delivering his daily briefings and offering consultation on all foreign policy decisions...  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/06/trump-considering-replacing-tillerson-with-cia-director/
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As Harvey Weinstein Scandal Grows,
Democrats Rush to Give Back Donations
7CPJeADKpf2GVnBRt8gQaU-Ns-kRlnrh-h_Oj82GQQ0-GbqKhGrh5Mxa1l1Fxf44hXP7w324ROQUT-vwvdYqd7mKLPv3O7gg9X93EK0HSE7BDcMAWoKyWEorgfLEdVIoEi1ItZE5s-36tJgiOD0NS1wIQ8dVaRoWrxZTYVzzaeN1o1CB_IwGIowTJnDxQg=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500
{newsmax.com} ~ Congressional Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck clown-Schumer and potential 2020 presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth dinky-Warren among them... are starting to give charities thousands of dollars in donations they had received from disgraced Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein and his family have given more than $1.4 million in political contributions since the 1992 election cycle, virtually all of it to Democratic lawmakers, candidates and their allies, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The party's effort to separate itself from the 65-year-old film executive came after The New York Times reported that he settled sexual harassment lawsuits with at least eight women...  https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/us-harvey-weinstein-democrats/2017/10/06/id/818267/?ns_mail_uid=29878495&ns_mail_job=1757136_10072017&s=al&dkt_nbr=0105042mpiim
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Las Vegas and the left's dangerous amorality
pjs7qG1me52znO9JEbLTdeeJJgOK5216ReKhRvpGRfX5VAiKsBO7hf06gc20s3fXMsSwFvbl8-z5BSG9dM0ml5VVAjeTU6hhhfYj=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=125
by ERIK RUSH
{wnd.com} ~ One of the first admonitions that came from cooler heads in the hours following Stephen Paddock’s deadly shooting rampage at a country music festival in Las Vegas Sunday night was a recommendation that those analyzing the incident refrain from politicizing the tragedy. It didn’t take long, however, for liberal politicos including those in the press to cast aside this counsel in favor of wholesale politicization of the shootings.

My thinking on the matter is that considering the magnitude and nature of the tragedy, the avoidance of politicizing same would be prudent unless the perpetrator himself was attempting to make some sort of political statement in carrying out the assault, but this has not been reliably established.

As one may have noticed, conspiracy theories concerning Paddock’s rampage abound. There have been as yet unsubstantiated reports that Paddock converted to a radical form of Islam at some point, as well as other reports of multiple shooters and the like. While lack of an apparent motive and information in general as regards Mr. Paddock could speak volumes, it could simply be indicative of measures he took to keep his life – and subsequently, his intention to kill a lot of people – a secret.

Although it would behoove anyone seeking the truth to take heed of the word “unsubstantiated” as regards some of the more controversial reports, it would also be wise to take a couple of other items into consideration: One, it’s been established that clandestine groups both inside and outside of government have been known to cultivate unbalanced individuals and fanatics to carry out such attacks as instruments of their agenda advancement. The second is that the left is operating under extreme duress, as I have indicated in this space many times since Donald Trump’s election; this has already given rise to all manner of desperate action on the part of the left.

On Monday night, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel made several false statements about gun laws, presumably to precipitate efforts on the part of Washington lawmakers to impose increased gun control measures. liar-Hillary Clinton offered up some truly embarrassing statements relating to firearms and firearms laws, and claimed that the availability of firearms was some sort of dark conservative-Republican- National Rifle Association (NRA) conspiracy. She also criticized a “slow and creaky” infrastructure for firearms background checks.

The ever-mouthy, squat Hollywood goblin Lena Dunham said on social media that there was “no way not to politicize” the incident, and that Paddock’s shooting orgy was “about gender and race as well as access to guns.” I won’t even attempt to unravel that bit of logic.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw, instead of reporting the news, admonished citizens to organize against the NRA. Actress and perennial moron Alyssa Milano tweeted a link to “a list of the members of the House and Senate, and their twitter handles, that have taken money from the NRA.” A large and lively bunch of Hollywood ignoramuses weighed in with similar advice vis-à-vis the NRA, and a Drexel University professor blamed the shootings on a supposed narrative of white victimization advanced by – you guessed it – President Trump and his surrogates.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that country music itself hasn’t been cited by the left as a catalyst for this sort of violence, but I suppose there’s still time for that.

Let’s not mince words here: Those on the left who are driving the exploitation of the Las Vegas massacre to advance gun control are not interested in measures that might reduce gun violence, because no manner of precautions are capable of deterring a determined perpetrator with a gun – or a knife, a bomb, or any other weapon one might obtain or devise. They are interested in neutralizing the Second Amendment and disarming the American people. liar-Hillary Clinton and her ilk would probably adore a nationwide ban on firearms and mandatory electronic gunpowder sniffers in every home wherein a “hot” reading would result in a visit from the local SWAT team, all to ensure our safety, of course.

Potential conspiracies and the progressive fantasy of an unarmed populace aside, my observation this week speaks to the recurring theme that the true believers among liberals as opposed to the deluded, who simply lack epistemic reference for their beliefs have become dangerously amoral people. One of the most offensive yet telling reactions to the Las Vegas shootings came from Hayley Geftman-Gold, a CBS senior counsel who said on Facebook that she was “not even sympathetic to the shooting victims because country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

Geftman-Gold was quickly sacked by CBS, but she wasn’t the only person on the left to publicly articulate that correlation. She was, however, the only one audacious enough to suggest that the killed and injured country music fans – being Republican gun-toters and by logical extension, likely Trump supporters – had it coming.

I would submit that this level of callousness and inhumanity has become commonplace among the aforementioned liberal true believers. Liberal politicos and the press have worked tirelessly to dehumanize their political opponents, and while even many conservatives might disbelieve, I think that this is in preparation for some truly draconian social-engineering measures in future. These people are the sort who would turn their neighbors in to police-state authorities, even if they knew that in so doing they would consign said neighbors to enslavement, torture and death in concentration camps.

The response of those on the left to the Las Vegas shootings illustrate once more that they should be regarded as our mortal enemies, as opposed to fellow citizens with a somewhat divergent political viewpoint.
Read more…

The ability of the left-wing propaganda machine to demean any action by the Trump administration is on full display following the decision by Vice President Mike Pence to leave an NFL game because players knelt during the National Anthem.

Pence and his wife Karen attended the Indianapolis Colts Sunday game that was going to honor former quarterback Payton Manning by retiring his football jersey.

A group of the opposing players from the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the National Anthem and the vice president and his wife left the game.

The Washington Post reports on the decision by Pence:

“I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem. At a time when so many Americans are inspiring our nation with their courage, resolve, and resilience, now, more than ever, we should rally around our Flag and everything that unites us,” he said in a statement. “While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask NFL players to respect the Flag and our National Anthem. I stand with President Trump, I stand with our soldiers, and I will always stand for our Flag and our National Anthem.”

Following the news coverage of Pence, the left-wing propaganda machine swung into action and called the vice president’s action an expensive “stunt.”

Breitbart News reports on a Tweet from California Democrat Adam Schiff:

After all the scandals involving unnecessarily expensive travel by cabinet secretaries, how much taxpayer money was wasted on this stunt?

The Washington Examiner reports on Democrat reaction to Pence:

“This was orchestrated to make a point?” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, asked on Twitter. “That’s not an inexpensive thing to do.”

MSNBC program “Morning Joe” continued to promote the expensive stunt message point:

Mediaite reports:

MSNBC’s Steve Schmidt kicked things off: “It’s truly amazing. So he took Air Force 2, full package of Secret Service from Las Vegas to Indianapolis for a stunt, inconvenienced tens of thousands of Colts fans.”

“To, again, use the flag and the anthem as a prop,” Schmidt said. “And the greatest desecration of that flag is the assault on its foundational values which occurs every day with this administration with their attacks on the spirit of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of expression.”

CNN also weighed in:

How much did Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Indianapolis to watch — and then abruptly leave — a football game Sunday between the Indianapolis Colts and San Francisco 49ers cost?

Finally, a 49ers player also called it a stunt:

And 49ers safety Eric Reid, who was one of the players to start kneeling with Kaepernick in 2016, told reporters that he thought the whole thing was a ‘PR stunt.’

‘So this looks like a PR stunt to me,’ he said in a post-game interview.

‘He knew our team has the most players protest[ing]. He knew that we were probably going to do it again. This is what systematic oppression looks like.

Read more…

The ability of the left-wing propaganda machine to demean any action by the Trump administration is on full display following the decision by Vice President Mike Pence to leave an NFL game because players knelt during the National Anthem.

Pence and his wife Karen attended the Indianapolis Colts Sunday game that was going to honor former quarterback Payton Manning by retiring his football jersey.

A group of the opposing players from the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the National Anthem and the vice president and his wife left the game.

The Washington Post reports on the decision by Pence:

“I left today’s Colts game because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem. At a time when so many Americans are inspiring our nation with their courage, resolve, and resilience, now, more than ever, we should rally around our Flag and everything that unites us,” he said in a statement. “While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask NFL players to respect the Flag and our National Anthem. I stand with President Trump, I stand with our soldiers, and I will always stand for our Flag and our National Anthem.”

Following the news coverage of Pence, the left-wing propaganda machine swung into action and called the vice president’s action an expensive “stunt.”

Breitbart News reports on a Tweet from California Democrat Adam Schiff:

After all the scandals involving unnecessarily expensive travel by cabinet secretaries, how much taxpayer money was wasted on this stunt?

The Washington Examiner reports on Democrat reaction to Pence:

“This was orchestrated to make a point?” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, asked on Twitter. “That’s not an inexpensive thing to do.”

MSNBC program “Morning Joe” continued to promote the expensive stunt message point:

Mediaite reports:

MSNBC’s Steve Schmidt kicked things off: “It’s truly amazing. So he took Air Force 2, full package of Secret Service from Las Vegas to Indianapolis for a stunt, inconvenienced tens of thousands of Colts fans.”

“To, again, use the flag and the anthem as a prop,” Schmidt said. “And the greatest desecration of that flag is the assault on its foundational values which occurs every day with this administration with their attacks on the spirit of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of expression.”

CNN also weighed in:

How much did Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Indianapolis to watch — and then abruptly leave — a football game Sunday between the Indianapolis Colts and San Francisco 49ers cost?

Finally, a 49ers player also called it a stunt:

And 49ers safety Eric Reid, who was one of the players to start kneeling with Kaepernick in 2016, told reporters that he thought the whole thing was a ‘PR stunt.’

‘So this looks like a PR stunt to me,’ he said in a post-game interview.

‘He knew our team has the most players protest[ing]. He knew that we were probably going to do it again. This is what systematic oppression looks like.

Read more…

Monday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Can the Government Keep Us Safe?
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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The NRA Responds to Leftist Hypocrisy
wZbabU1sa07Ng1JpLhGlkV11DVtPhfNLiIZa895HSW7ASkBMsvMKsHKm-HSqwW2SPDJAiM_MFd-J98ydY61nSuGg9Qjm-Yd2oe01Q2x67pFndzQDaN-cVs5J_TuiLBI=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Political Editors:  As the investigation into Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock continues, authorities have yet to determine his motivation. This fact hasn’t stopped Democrats, leftist celebrities and the anti-gun lobby from laying the blame on America’s “gun culture” and specifically the National Rifle Association. Thursday evening, NRA executive director Chris Cox responded in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, calling for Americans to have an honest conversation about what problems motivate murderous actions like those seen in Las Vegas.

          Cox noted that Paddock was not a NRA member, but that NRA members were murdered and wounded in his shooting rampage. He emphasized that the NRA exists “so that good honest people aren’t left defenseless.” He also pointed to a simple fact: “Gun control is a failed policy. And it’s safe to say that it doesn’t keep people safe.”
          In what was his most poignant defense of the NRA, Cox said, “The NRA spends millions of dollars each year teaching safe and responsible gun ownership, and Hollywood makes billions promoting and glorifying gun violence. And then the same hypocrites come in and say that we’re to blame for this.”
          Carlson then asked him specifically about “bump stocks” and whether the NRA was calling for them to be banned. Cox responded, “Barack liar-nObama’s administration approved the sale of bump stocks and these other devices. What we have said is that the ATF needs to do their job. ATF needs to look and if there is technology that has come to the market that allows a semi-automatic rifle to function as a fully automatic rifle they need to be regulated differently. We didn’t talk about banning anything, we talked about ATF going back and reviewing whether or not these are in compliance with federal law. And if not let’s look at working together and figuring out a way to address this moving forward.”
          Cox closed by once again emphasizing the need for honesty. “We need to have a broader conversation about a violent culture and what’s happened with gratuitous violence out of Hollywood; what’s happened with prescription drugs. Being honest with one another that if we’ve tried something and it’s failed it’s time to move on.”
          Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pulosi (D-CA) yesterday hinted at exactly why the NRA exists — to defend our first civil right. In calling for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to schedule a vote on a Democrat bill that would ban bump stocks, Pulosi was asked if she viewed this bill as a potential slippery slope toward further gun restrictions. She replied, “I certainly hope so.”  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51712

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Dobbs – Gorka Recommends Tillerson Replacement
He Says WILL Drain State Dept Swamp
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{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs asks Sebastian Gorka for his input regarding the conflicts at the White House... between President Trump and Secretary of Defense Mattis as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Gorka takes the somewhat safe route while leaving little doubt as to what he thinks, saying, “I’m not going to cast aspersions or critique individuals inside the administration, but I will say one thing. I got to know Mike Pompeo when I came into the administration.” Gorka says, “He is a hard charger. He is a  101% Trump loyalist. If anybody can shake the State Department into some kind of sense after decades of not acting in the best interest of the United States and being devoted ideologically to multi-lateral kumbaya globalism, it might just be DCI Mike Pompeo.”... https://rickwells.us/dobbs-gorka-tillerson-swamp/
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We can't stop mass murder
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by Shikha Dalmia
{theweek.com} ~ In the wake of massacres like the Las Vegas mass shooting, many Americans reflexively demand gun control. The instinct is understandable... But that doesn't mean such initiatives will be effective beyond the margins. So what should we do instead? How about focusing less on preemptively thwarting prospective attackers and instead boosting the defensive capacities of prospective victims. The grim lesson is this: There is nothing we can do to completely stop all killers at all times. The possibilities for mayhem are infinite. A society's means to stop them are finite. Psychotics and terrorists will always find ways to exploit the cracks. No government can create an entirely foolproof system...  http://theweek.com/articles/728581/cant-stop-mass-murder?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWldZd016RTJOVFZoT0RjeSIsInQiOiJQenQ0M1wvUmZqV2E3SlFYcXBXYWxKbWNYT1NtdmJ0Z281MUFKMnRDb1Y4MG50RlZmMytKc2V2RTZLNVVLbGNWTjFlNnRKd1I4SFlDTHk1cDVnSlF2b0ZpdUVuWktWa1BYQjlCZmhTUU5ROW5RbWljQnZrY25rdG4xajVwU0NvVW4ifQ%3D%3D
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ISIS is losing badly. Should 
Trump or liar-nObama get the credit?
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by Jamie McIntyre
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ It is becoming increasingly clear that the Islamic State is on the ropes in Iraq and Syria, and its defeat is just a matter of time... What is less clear is whose strategy produced the victory. This week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the group's "fraudulent caliphate in Iraq and Syria is on the brink of being completely extinguished," and credited "an aggressive new strategy led by the president." On Thursday, U.S. and Iraqi officials announced that troops had seized control of Hawija in Iraq, the last major town held by the terror group in that country...The credit goes to Trump.  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/isis-is-losing-badly-should-trump-or-obama-get-the-credit/article/2636767?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20From&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20From%20-%2010/07/17&utm_medium=email
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Indicted Aide Gives Feds 
SHOCKING Details On Dem Reps

{goppresidential.com} ~ House Democrats ordered the systematic falsification of records showing how they spend their taxpayer-provided office budgets, according to lawyers for two former House information technology (IT) aides...
 It’s a remarkable accusation that pits sitting lawmakers against the former aides, Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his wife Hina Alvi. Imran was arrested in July while trying to board a flight to Pakistan, and then indicted on four counts of bank fraud involving moving money to that country. Imran and Hina, who was also indicted, face a court date Friday. One of Imran’s lawyers, Aaron Page, acknowledged the invoicing discrepancy Aug. 21, telling The Daily Caller News Foundation, “This is just how things have been done for forever. This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing.”...
 http://goppresidential.com/2017/10/05/indicted-aide-gives-feds-shocking-details-on-dem-reps/
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Collusion and the Trump Dossier
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by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
{nationalreview.com} ~ If the Trump dossier is a tissue of lies, why are the Justice Department and FBI, now controlled by Trump appointees, concealing information about it?... It is an article of faith among the president’s most ardent supporters: The Trump dossier is a completely discredited piece of garbage. Hence, its relevance is limited to one matter and one matter alone: The dossier’s suspected use by the liar-nObama administration specifically, the Justice Department and the FBI as a pretext to spy on the opposition party’s presidential campaign — a ruse that included cribbing the dossier’s sensational allegations in secret court applications for wiretap warrants. It appears that this Trumpist tenet is going to be tested. The dossier that did so much to fuel the collusion controversy is assuming center stage once more... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452427/trump-dossier-russia-collusion-investigation?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-10-07&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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Can the Government Keep Us Safe?
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by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ Here we go again. The United States has been rattled to the core by an unspeakable act of evil perpetrated by a hater of humanity. A quiet, wealthy loner rented a hotel suite in Las Vegas, armed it with shooting platforms and automatic weapons, knocked out two of the windows, and shot at innocents 32 floors below. Fifty-nine people were murdered, and 527 were injured.

The killer used rifles that he purchased legally and altered illegally. He effectively transformed several rifles that emit one round per trigger pull and present the next round in the barrel for immediate use (semiautomatics) into rifles that emit rounds continuously when the trigger is pulled -- hundreds of rounds per minute (automatics). Though some automatic rifles that were manufactured before 1986 can lawfully be purchased today with an onerous federal permit, automatic weapons generally have been unlawful in the United States since 1934. Even the police and the military are not permitted to use them here.
 
I present this brief summary of the recent tragedy and the implicated gun laws to address the issue of whether the government can keep us safe.

Those who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution knew that the government cannot keep us safe. Because they used violence against the king and his soldiers to secede from Great Britain, they recognized that all people have a natural right to use a weapon of contemporary technological capabilities to protect themselves and their liberty and property. They sought to assure the exercise of this right by enacting the now well-known Second Amendment, which prohibits the government from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms.
 
When the Supreme Court interpreted this right in 2008 and 2010, it referred to the right to keep and bear arms as pre-political. "Pre-political" means that the right pre-existed the government. It is a secular term for a fundamental, or natural, right. A natural right is one that stems from our humanity -- such as freedom of thought, speech, religion, self-defense, privacy, travel, etc. It does not come from the government, and it exists in the absence of government.

The recognition of a right as fundamental or natural or pre-political is not a mere academic exercise. This is so because rights in this category cannot be abrogated by the popular will. Stated differently, just as your right to think as you wish and say what you think cannot be interfered with or taken away in America by legislation, so, too, your right to own, carry and use arms of the same sophistication as are generally available to bad guys and to government officials cannot be interfered with or taken away by legislation. That is at least the modern theory of the Second Amendment.

Notwithstanding the oath that all in government have taken to uphold the Constitution, many in government reject the Second Amendment. Their enjoyment of power and love of office rank higher in their hearts and minds than does their constitutionally required fidelity to the protection of personal freedoms. They think the government can right any wrong and protect us from any evil and acquire for us any good just to keep us safe, even if constitutional norms are violated in doing so.
 
Can the government keep us safe? In a word, no.

This is not a novel or arcane observation but rather a rational conclusion from knowing history and everyday life. In Europe, where the right to keep and bear arms is nearly nonexistent for those outside government, killers strike with bombs and knives and trucks. In America, killers use guns and only stop when they are killed by law-abiding civilians or by the police.

The answer to government failure is a candid recognition that in a free society -- one in which we are all free to come and go as we see fit without government inquiry or interference -- we must be prepared for these tragedies.

We must keep ourselves safe, as well as those whom we invite onto our properties.

Surely, if the president of the United States were to have appeared at the concert venue in Las Vegas to address the crowd, the Las Vegas killer would never have succeeded in bringing his arsenal to his hotel room. Government always protects its own. Shouldn't landowners who invite the public to their properties do the same?

Add to government's incompetence its useless, intrusive omnipresence. In present-day America, the National Security Agency -- the federal government's domestic spying agency -- captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message, as well as all data sent over fiber-optic cables everywhere in the U.S. Thus, whatever electronic communications the Las Vegas killer participated in prior to his murders are in possession of the federal government.
 
Mass surveillance is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, but the government does it nevertheless. It claims it does so to keep us safe. Yet this exquisite constitutional violation results in too much information for the feds to examine in a timely manner. That's why the evidence of these massacres -- from Sandy Hook to Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino to Las Vegas -- is always discovered too late. At this writing, the government has yet to reveal what it knew about the Las Vegas killer's plans before he executed them and executed innocents.

This leaves us in a very precarious position today. The government cannot keep us safe, but it claims that it can. It wants to interfere with our natural rights to self-defense and privacy, but whenever it does so, it keeps us less safe. And in whatever arena it keeps us less safe and falsely fosters the impression that we are safe, we become less free.
Read more…

JUST IN: Kaepernick Caught In Criminal Plot

Notorious national anthem kneeler, Colin Kaepernick, is like an anchor around the neck of the NFL. He is sinking fast and is dragging the NFL down with him.

On September 22nd, President Trump told a crowd in Huntsville, Alabama that kneeling NFL players deserved to be fired. Protesting the national anthem “disrespects our flag,” he said, referring to a hypothetical protesting player as a “son of a b—-.” While the protests launched by Colin Kaepernick were originally confined to a small group of players, President Trump’s comments galvanized the league, and many players felt personally attacked. Now, hundreds of players are protesting the national anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, however, few of these players understand that Kaepernick is a radical ideologue who has donated $25,000 to honor a cop killer, reports The Washington Times.

In April, The Colin Kaepernick Foundation donated $25,000 to Assata’s Daughters, a radical “direct action” organization dedicated to honoring the legacy and spread the teachings of notorious cop-killer Assata Shakur.

Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the violent Black Panther Party. Shakur entered into a gunfight with police on the New Jersey Turnpike in May 1973 which resulted in the death of Officer Werner Foerster. Shakur was found guilty of first-degree murder, in addition to seven other felonies, and was sentenced to life in prison. Assata Shakur managed to escape prison in 1979 and flee to Cuba, where she lives under political asylum.

Of the $25,000 dollars donated to Assata’s Daughters by Kaepernick, $2,500 will be directed towards a program dubbed CopWatch, which encourages volunteers to follow and videotape police. Another $15,000 was directed towards education, to “develop and train young people, ages 4-19, in the Black queer feminist tradition and in the spirit of Assata.”

Immediately after President Trump insulted Kaepernick at the Alabama rally, NFL players, owners, and coaches spoke out. Now, full teams are kneeling for the national anthem, or are waiting in their locker room until after the anthem ends to head onto the field in a show of solidarity.

Kaepernick is a radical ideologue who has donated $25,000 to honor a cop killer. When NFL players emulate him,do they realize they are honoring a cop killer?

Targeting the NFL, targeting the quality of the character of guys in this league for that very protest. I find that very alarming,” said Alex Smith, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback. “We know what went on this week,” chimed in Julius Peppers, a defensive end with the Carolina Panthers. “So, I felt like it was appropriate to stand up with them.”

Smith and Peppers are not alone, and many players expressed that they were personally offended by President Trump’s comments. This is understandable. However, the NFL and the players showing support for Kaepernick’s protests should determine if the radical is really worth supporting. It could spell a media firestorm.

Kaepernick claims that his protests were about police brutality, but since leaving the league, The Colin Kaepernick Foundation has supported numerous radical causes — such as pro-open border advocates, pro-abortion groups, The Women’s March, and cop killers. Are the NFL and their players really prepared to take a stance on these controversial issues, and come out in support of a radical?

Read more…

JUST IN: Kaepernick Caught In Criminal Plot

Notorious national anthem kneeler, Colin Kaepernick, is like an anchor around the neck of the NFL. He is sinking fast and is dragging the NFL down with him.

On September 22nd, President Trump told a crowd in Huntsville, Alabama that kneeling NFL players deserved to be fired. Protesting the national anthem “disrespects our flag,” he said, referring to a hypothetical protesting player as a “son of a b—-.” While the protests launched by Colin Kaepernick were originally confined to a small group of players, President Trump’s comments galvanized the league, and many players felt personally attacked. Now, hundreds of players are protesting the national anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, however, few of these players understand that Kaepernick is a radical ideologue who has donated $25,000 to honor a cop killer, reports The Washington Times.

In April, The Colin Kaepernick Foundation donated $25,000 to Assata’s Daughters, a radical “direct action” organization dedicated to honoring the legacy and spread the teachings of notorious cop-killer Assata Shakur.

Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the violent Black Panther Party. Shakur entered into a gunfight with police on the New Jersey Turnpike in May 1973 which resulted in the death of Officer Werner Foerster. Shakur was found guilty of first-degree murder, in addition to seven other felonies, and was sentenced to life in prison. Assata Shakur managed to escape prison in 1979 and flee to Cuba, where she lives under political asylum.

Of the $25,000 dollars donated to Assata’s Daughters by Kaepernick, $2,500 will be directed towards a program dubbed CopWatch, which encourages volunteers to follow and videotape police. Another $15,000 was directed towards education, to “develop and train young people, ages 4-19, in the Black queer feminist tradition and in the spirit of Assata.”

Immediately after President Trump insulted Kaepernick at the Alabama rally, NFL players, owners, and coaches spoke out. Now, full teams are kneeling for the national anthem, or are waiting in their locker room until after the anthem ends to head onto the field in a show of solidarity.

Kaepernick is a radical ideologue who has donated $25,000 to honor a cop killer. When NFL players emulate him,do they realize they are honoring a cop killer?

Targeting the NFL, targeting the quality of the character of guys in this league for that very protest. I find that very alarming,” said Alex Smith, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback. “We know what went on this week,” chimed in Julius Peppers, a defensive end with the Carolina Panthers. “So, I felt like it was appropriate to stand up with them.”

Smith and Peppers are not alone, and many players expressed that they were personally offended by President Trump’s comments. This is understandable. However, the NFL and the players showing support for Kaepernick’s protests should determine if the radical is really worth supporting. It could spell a media firestorm.

Kaepernick claims that his protests were about police brutality, but since leaving the league, The Colin Kaepernick Foundation has supported numerous radical causes — such as pro-open border advocates, pro-abortion groups, The Women’s March, and cop killers. Are the NFL and their players really prepared to take a stance on these controversial issues, and come out in support of a radical?

Read more…

Saturday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
by George Will 
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Stepping Back From the Crime Scene
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by Michael Swartz:  As is their practice after a shooting with casualties on a mass scale, leftists are blaming the guns for the behavior of a man who obviously lost sight of the commandment, “You shall not murder.” And while we mourn the victims, the mainstream media seems preoccupied with the possibility of multiple shooters and the need to ban “bump stocks.” Many folks have also lost sight of the big picture: Statistically, we’re at far greater risk in a hospital than at a public concert like Sunday night’s Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.

          One statistician, in fact, concluded that the gun control measures being proposed would be rather ineffective in addressing the problem. Leah Libresco, who is described by The Washington Post as “a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site,” came to this realization as part of a large effort by her former employer — something FiveThirtyEight reminded us of this week — to analyze all 33,000 deaths by firearm in a particular year. She makes the case that “bump stocks,” bans on so-called “assault rifles,” and even gun buybacks would do little good when the largest portions of gun deaths involve their usage as “suicide machines” or as a method for young gangbangers to settle scores.
          “But, but,” stammers the Left, “look at how little gun violence there is in Australia — a place where certain types of guns were confiscated under penalty of law two decades ago after their own mass shooting.” While it’s true that no significant mass shootings have since occurred in Australia, a 2016 study by three Australian researchers found the data was inconclusive regarding the effects of the gun buyback: “Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total nonfirearm suicide and homicide deaths of a greater magnitude. Because of this, it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms.”
          Moreover, as Corey Iacono of the Foundation for Economic Education points out, another study that used the adjacent island nation of New Zealand — where there are fewer restrictions on guns — as a control found that both had roughly the same decline in mass shootings. “Gun control advocates have built their entire case about Australian gun control on lazy data analysis, or perhaps no data analysis at all,” argues Iacono. “If anything, Australia proves the complete opposite of what advocates of gun control want.”
          He added, “A national gun confiscation scheme which reduced the civilian firearm stock by an astounding twenty percent and nobody can seem to find any clear evidence it caused a meaningful effect on the firearm murder rate? That’s not only embarrassing, it goes against everything they believe about the nature of the relationship between guns and murder rates.”
          Then, when we consider this longstanding fact that more guns have yielded less crime, leftists’ case really begins to unravel. Not that they’ll stop shouting from the rooftops about it anyway — their newest cause is to repeal the Second Amendment. Our response? Molon labe.
          The leftist viewpoint — shared, apparently, by the New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens — doesn’t come close to meeting the smell test. Stephens’ anti-gun prejudices lead him to use faulty numbers, including counting five years’ worth of murder statistics to give himself a number that finally exceeds the annual toll in auto accidents. Even at this emotion-driven moment, this is all the gun-grabbers have.
          Should we remind them yet again that stridently anti-gun Europe, whose elites would love to see our pesky Second Amendment consigned to the dustbin of history, suffers more mass shootings on a statistical basis than the U.S. does? Europe’s restrictions don’t allow a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with one. As we often point out, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Stephen Paddock reportedly spent about 11 minutes firing at the crowd before a security guard finally made it to his room. Local police were even further behind.
          In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, Congress will certainly feel pressured to “do something,” with the most likely outcome a feel-good ban on bump stocks. Even the NRA doesn’t have a problem considering that, and a Republican lawmaker already has the bill set to go.
          Despite the statistics that have shown a trend toward more security, our government cannot make us perfectly safe — though armed citizens certainly have made us safer. Even if the government took away all the so-called “assault weapons,” deranged individuals bent on causing mass casualties would find a way to do so. One need look no further than the 85 people mowed down last year by a jihadi with a truck in Nice, France.
          Incidents like these are a problem of evil. Instead of debating the repeal of the Second Amendment — which was, after all, placed in the Bill of Rights as a check against a tyrannical government having all the firepower — we should be discussing the lack of self-control that our culture seems to encourage. There are still many laws on the books that extend the command of “you shall not murder,” and perhaps the first order of business should be to restore a much-needed respect for life.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51717

4064036047?profile=original
.
Dobbs, Fitton – Outraged Corrupt GOP 
Handed Reins Of Witch Hunts To Dems
{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs welcomed Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch to his program for a discussion of the insufferable boobs leading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “fishing expedition and witch hunt”... and other traitors operating openly under the GOP label. Dobbs begins with a statement that “Watching Warner and Burr is so painful, because they think they’re fooling someone when they’re carrying out a political action, not one of oversight of the intelligence community, which is their primary charge, as the intelligence community is struggling to defend whatever assets we have left in cyberspace.” Dobbs doesn’t overstate the pathetic display put on by Senators Burr and Warner, which clearly looked like an attempt to offer excuses and buy themselves more time for their witch hunt to continue. Both of the crooked, bumbling jackasses were clearly engaged in a political hit and trying to make it look like a legitimate function of their positions...  https://rickwells.us/dobbs-fitton-intel-control-dems/
.
Shaffer, Furman – 3 Clues Need Close 
Attention In Las Vegas Investigation
{rickwells.us} ~ Tony Shaffer and Mark Furman join Martha MacCallum to discuss the evolution of the case surrounding the massacre in Las Vegas... Shaffer notes there are three clues that Las Vegas Sheriff Lombardo has put out there which he believes we need to pay very close attention to. The radicalization statement of a couple of days ago, a “spontaneous utterance” about this issue, has not been resolved or addressed. He says that secondly, “they’ve announced a global investigation now ongoing for people who may have been involved and helped him.” Shaffer says, “That talks about a network, that means there’s something, either a criminal network or a terror network, but there’s something else there. And third, to the other point of the fact now that they’ve clearly said, there’s evidence, and they know more than they’re saying for obvious reasons.”... https://rickwells.us/shaffer-furman-3-clues-las-vegas/
.
Pulosi Brain Drained – Freezes Up, 
Can’t Babble, Words Just Won’t Come Out
{rickwells.us} ~ We’ve all heard that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and in Nancy Pulosi’s case, that was true even before hers stopped working... It never worked properly, as her leadership position in the communist Democrat Party has shown over time, but the dysfunction is now becoming something she can no longer hide. It’s like a police officer pulling someone over and asking you if they’ve had anything to drink tonight. The response, whether it be a semi-truthful “Yes sir, officer, only a couple of beers” or a lying “No, sir – I’m just a little tired,” the slurring of the words is going to be what answers the question. She can try to pretend she’s maintaining but reality is giving her away... https://rickwells.us/pelosi-brain-drained-freezes-up/
.
Flanked By Top Military Leaders, Trump Comments “Calm Before The Storm”
{rickwells.us} ~ Whether the purpose was to inject uncertainty or fear into the minds of our adversaries from the standpoint of strengthening his negotiating position... an actual statement of imminent military conflict or something else, the words of President Trump were unsettling. At a reception for top military officials, President Trump said to the media and photographers during  a groupphoto, “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Could be the calm before the storm.” A reporter asks him, “From Iran,  on ISIS or what? Another asks, “What storm Mr. President?” as he says, “We have the world’s great military people in this room, I will tell you that. And we’re going to have a great evening. Thank you all for coming, thank you.”... https://rickwells.us/military-trump-calm-storm/
.
Kimmel's Clueless Condemnation
ks6RoNjq0TQPZ3AJZu08ZhOGpeFhgTHsxFohL1MU6oVPNuAKqAkj4AzVZTEMmvZ46E0vvFYKhW9PrE-xCZgD_exX1SQdTndKPtpEPH0kFs37vm2FoCJVnLBy-mk4keM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2017-10-05-429dd0b2_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />
by Thomas Gallatin:  Is Jimmy Kimmel looking to start his own religion with his expressed ability to look into the hearts and minds of people and enter into judgment against them? Or does he merely have his sights set on running for head of the Democratic National Committee? Tuesday evening he followed up his Monday evening emotion-filled rant against Republicans and their support of the Second Amendment. Kimmel decided to climb even higher up that self-righteous ivory tower of his to rain down contempt upon those who dared criticize him for his immediate politicizing of the atrocity in Las Vegas the night before. Kimmel blasted:
          They say it’s inappropriate to be talking about it because it’s too soon. Well, maybe it’s too soon for you because deep down inside you know, in your heart, you know you bear some responsibility for the fact that almost anyone can get any weapon they want. And now you want to cover yourself until the storm of outrage passes and you can go back to your dirty business as usual. But it’s not too soon for us, because we’re Americans, and last time I checked, the First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment.

          Three things. First, no one has stopped or prevented Kimmel from exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, as attested to by the fact that he is still freely speaking on his own TV show about what he’s feel so passionately about, no matter how misguided, illogical and flat out false it may be. No one even called for his free speech rights to be taken away. That’s what his campus leftist fanboys do.
          Second, if it wasn’t for the protections afforded by the Second Amendment he obviously hates so much, he wouldn’t be enjoying that First Amendment. Freedom, Mr. Kimmel, is never free. People fought hard to win that freedom you so flippantly malign.
          Finally, rather than actually focusing on those directly impacted by this atrocity by offering emotional comfort and encouragement, and rather than seeking ways to promote good will and healing and unity, Kimmel instead chose to promote division. He chose to stand on the bodies of the victims in order to condemn his fellow Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with this mad man’s massacre. In his politically correct self-righteous superiority, he judged his fellow citizens, declaring them guilty — for believing in and defending Liberty. Mr. Kimmel, this is why you should have waited to speak, because all you have done is sow greater division.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51691

G3awWDhq0cgsx1oLFdnSVnRhXyexuF4d4rUDu3lfkpM9CEhh9A5FQE1OH4TFrExvY2Q4ahoGJYapHkZh9qWTNzup1a-HaWzeK4jRKG9BkzXE=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj113/kiluan/divider.gif" />
.
Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
by George Will 
{investors.com} ~ On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments tempting it to plunge into an impenetrable political thicket. It will consider a lower court's ruling that, if allowed to stand, will require the judiciary to determine whether and when partisanship in drawing electoral districts — something as old as the Constitution — is unconstitutional. And courts will wrestle repeatedly with cases requiring them to decide how to decide how much partisanship is too much.

It is instructive that the phrase "partisan gerrymandering" — the drawing of district lines by one party to disadvantage the other — is a redundancy. It has been since 1812, when Massachusetts Democratic-Republicans, serving Gov. Elbridge Gerry, created a district resembling a salamander. By then, the practice was old hat for New York, which had been hard at it since 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified.

The practice has recently become hotly disputed. This is partly because Republicans control 66 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and both the legislatures and governorships of 26 states. A challenge to Maryland's redistricting by Democrats is percolating in the judicial system. And it is partly because some members of the political science professoriate, which is as ideologically monochromic as academia generally, are inventing metrics that supposedly provide objective standards for identifying partisanship that is unconstitutionally excessive.

For several decades, federal courts produced redistricting plans for Wisconsin after decennial censuses because the Legislature could not agree on any. In 2010, however, Republicans won control of both houses of the Legislature and the governorship and produced a redistricting plan. In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 state Assembly seats with 48.6% of the statewide vote, and in 2014 they won 63 seats with 52% of the vote. However, under the court-devised plan in the previous decade, in five elections the Republicans won an average of 55.2 seats with an average of 49.1% of the statewide vote. This is partly because under requirements of the Voting Rights Act, Milwaukee's "majority-minority" districts were protected. And it is partly because Democratic voters, in Wisconsin and nationally, are inefficiently distributed, disproportionately concentrated in cities and college towns, such as Milwaukee and Madison. This is why in 2012, Barack Obama carried 27 congressional districts with at least 80% of the vote, whereas Mitt Romney carried only one that lopsidedly.

The 12 plaintiffs against the Republican plan have three problems, each fatal. First, they are contesting the entire statewide plan rather than their individual districts. So, they are asking the court to change its traditional standards for "standing" to sue, which require persons to demonstrate a "particularized injury" — in this case, that the configurations of their individual districts somehow unconstitutionally devalue their votes. The lead plaintiff is a retired University of Wisconsin professor whose Assembly district in Madison has voted Democratic by an average of 67.2% in the last five elections. This does not sadden him. What does — his supposed injury — is that the statewide plan diminishes his chances of enjoying a Democratic majority in the Assembly.

Second, until 31 years ago, the court held that the inevitable political component of redistricting plans is a non-justiciable "political question" properly consigned to the political (elected) branches. In 1986, the court said a political gerrymander could conceivably be justiciable, but it has never discovered what Justice Anthony Kennedy terms "a manageable standard."

Third, the plaintiffs want the court to plunge the judiciary into unending litigation involving dueling professors who will cherry-pick concocted metrics to serve as standards. Tuesday's arguments will illustrate why Wisconsin warns about a "social science hodgepodge." Plaintiffs will argue that an "efficiency gap" (the difference between all the loser's votes and the surplus of votes in excess of those the winner needed for victory divided by the total number of votes cast) that exceeds 7% — a figure plucked from the ether — is presumptively unconstitutional. By this metric, one-third of all legislative redistricting maps in 41 states over 43 years were impermissibly partisan.

Using partisan social science, the plaintiffs are asking the court to find in the Constitution a hitherto unnoticed requirement for proportional representation. Justice Felix Frankfurter perhaps anticipated this.

When in 1962 the court first intervened in states' redistricting practices, it propounded only the simple and neutral principle of "one person, one vote" — districts must be numerically equal. Nevertheless, Frankfurter dissented, having warned in 1946 against even entering "this political thicket." He worried that someday the court might be drawn ever-deeper into the fraught business of fine-tuning political processes. Unless the court is careful, that someday could arrive Tuesday.
 
Read more…

Saturday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
by George Will 
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.
Stepping Back From the Crime Scene
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by Michael Swartz:  As is their practice after a shooting with casualties on a mass scale, leftists are blaming the guns for the behavior of a man who obviously lost sight of the commandment, “You shall not murder.” And while we mourn the victims, the mainstream media seems preoccupied with the possibility of multiple shooters and the need to ban “bump stocks.” Many folks have also lost sight of the big picture: Statistically, we’re at far greater risk in a hospital than at a public concert like Sunday night’s Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.

          One statistician, in fact, concluded that the gun control measures being proposed would be rather ineffective in addressing the problem. Leah Libresco, who is described by The Washington Post as “a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site,” came to this realization as part of a large effort by her former employer — something FiveThirtyEight reminded us of this week — to analyze all 33,000 deaths by firearm in a particular year. She makes the case that “bump stocks,” bans on so-called “assault rifles,” and even gun buybacks would do little good when the largest portions of gun deaths involve their usage as “suicide machines” or as a method for young gangbangers to settle scores.
          “But, but,” stammers the Left, “look at how little gun violence there is in Australia — a place where certain types of guns were confiscated under penalty of law two decades ago after their own mass shooting.” While it’s true that no significant mass shootings have since occurred in Australia, a 2016 study by three Australian researchers found the data was inconclusive regarding the effects of the gun buyback: “Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total nonfirearm suicide and homicide deaths of a greater magnitude. Because of this, it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms.”
          Moreover, as Corey Iacono of the Foundation for Economic Education points out, another study that used the adjacent island nation of New Zealand — where there are fewer restrictions on guns — as a control found that both had roughly the same decline in mass shootings. “Gun control advocates have built their entire case about Australian gun control on lazy data analysis, or perhaps no data analysis at all,” argues Iacono. “If anything, Australia proves the complete opposite of what advocates of gun control want.”
          He added, “A national gun confiscation scheme which reduced the civilian firearm stock by an astounding twenty percent and nobody can seem to find any clear evidence it caused a meaningful effect on the firearm murder rate? That’s not only embarrassing, it goes against everything they believe about the nature of the relationship between guns and murder rates.”
          Then, when we consider this longstanding fact that more guns have yielded less crime, leftists’ case really begins to unravel. Not that they’ll stop shouting from the rooftops about it anyway — their newest cause is to repeal the Second Amendment. Our response? Molon labe.
          The leftist viewpoint — shared, apparently, by the New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens — doesn’t come close to meeting the smell test. Stephens’ anti-gun prejudices lead him to use faulty numbers, including counting five years’ worth of murder statistics to give himself a number that finally exceeds the annual toll in auto accidents. Even at this emotion-driven moment, this is all the gun-grabbers have.
          Should we remind them yet again that stridently anti-gun Europe, whose elites would love to see our pesky Second Amendment consigned to the dustbin of history, suffers more mass shootings on a statistical basis than the U.S. does? Europe’s restrictions don’t allow a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with one. As we often point out, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Stephen Paddock reportedly spent about 11 minutes firing at the crowd before a security guard finally made it to his room. Local police were even further behind.
          In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, Congress will certainly feel pressured to “do something,” with the most likely outcome a feel-good ban on bump stocks. Even the NRA doesn’t have a problem considering that, and a Republican lawmaker already has the bill set to go.
          Despite the statistics that have shown a trend toward more security, our government cannot make us perfectly safe — though armed citizens certainly have made us safer. Even if the government took away all the so-called “assault weapons,” deranged individuals bent on causing mass casualties would find a way to do so. One need look no further than the 85 people mowed down last year by a jihadi with a truck in Nice, France.
          Incidents like these are a problem of evil. Instead of debating the repeal of the Second Amendment — which was, after all, placed in the Bill of Rights as a check against a tyrannical government having all the firepower — we should be discussing the lack of self-control that our culture seems to encourage. There are still many laws on the books that extend the command of “you shall not murder,” and perhaps the first order of business should be to restore a much-needed respect for life.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51717

4064036047?profile=original
.
Dobbs, Fitton – Outraged Corrupt GOP 
Handed Reins Of Witch Hunts To Dems
{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs welcomed Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch to his program for a discussion of the insufferable boobs leading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “fishing expedition and witch hunt”... and other traitors operating openly under the GOP label. Dobbs begins with a statement that “Watching Warner and Burr is so painful, because they think they’re fooling someone when they’re carrying out a political action, not one of oversight of the intelligence community, which is their primary charge, as the intelligence community is struggling to defend whatever assets we have left in cyberspace.” Dobbs doesn’t overstate the pathetic display put on by Senators Burr and Warner, which clearly looked like an attempt to offer excuses and buy themselves more time for their witch hunt to continue. Both of the crooked, bumbling jackasses were clearly engaged in a political hit and trying to make it look like a legitimate function of their positions...  https://rickwells.us/dobbs-fitton-intel-control-dems/
.
Shaffer, Furman – 3 Clues Need Close 
Attention In Las Vegas Investigation
{rickwells.us} ~ Tony Shaffer and Mark Furman join Martha MacCallum to discuss the evolution of the case surrounding the massacre in Las Vegas... Shaffer notes there are three clues that Las Vegas Sheriff Lombardo has put out there which he believes we need to pay very close attention to. The radicalization statement of a couple of days ago, a “spontaneous utterance” about this issue, has not been resolved or addressed. He says that secondly, “they’ve announced a global investigation now ongoing for people who may have been involved and helped him.” Shaffer says, “That talks about a network, that means there’s something, either a criminal network or a terror network, but there’s something else there. And third, to the other point of the fact now that they’ve clearly said, there’s evidence, and they know more than they’re saying for obvious reasons.”... https://rickwells.us/shaffer-furman-3-clues-las-vegas/
.
Pulosi Brain Drained – Freezes Up, 
Can’t Babble, Words Just Won’t Come Out
{rickwells.us} ~ We’ve all heard that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and in Nancy Pulosi’s case, that was true even before hers stopped working... It never worked properly, as her leadership position in the communist Democrat Party has shown over time, but the dysfunction is now becoming something she can no longer hide. It’s like a police officer pulling someone over and asking you if they’ve had anything to drink tonight. The response, whether it be a semi-truthful “Yes sir, officer, only a couple of beers” or a lying “No, sir – I’m just a little tired,” the slurring of the words is going to be what answers the question. She can try to pretend she’s maintaining but reality is giving her away... https://rickwells.us/pelosi-brain-drained-freezes-up/
.
Flanked By Top Military Leaders, Trump Comments “Calm Before The Storm”
{rickwells.us} ~ Whether the purpose was to inject uncertainty or fear into the minds of our adversaries from the standpoint of strengthening his negotiating position... an actual statement of imminent military conflict or something else, the words of President Trump were unsettling. At a reception for top military officials, President Trump said to the media and photographers during  a groupphoto, “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Could be the calm before the storm.” A reporter asks him, “From Iran,  on ISIS or what? Another asks, “What storm Mr. President?” as he says, “We have the world’s great military people in this room, I will tell you that. And we’re going to have a great evening. Thank you all for coming, thank you.”... https://rickwells.us/military-trump-calm-storm/
.
Kimmel's Clueless Condemnation
ks6RoNjq0TQPZ3AJZu08ZhOGpeFhgTHsxFohL1MU6oVPNuAKqAkj4AzVZTEMmvZ46E0vvFYKhW9PrE-xCZgD_exX1SQdTndKPtpEPH0kFs37vm2FoCJVnLBy-mk4keM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2017-10-05-429dd0b2_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />
by Thomas Gallatin:  Is Jimmy Kimmel looking to start his own religion with his expressed ability to look into the hearts and minds of people and enter into judgment against them? Or does he merely have his sights set on running for head of the Democratic National Committee? Tuesday evening he followed up his Monday evening emotion-filled rant against Republicans and their support of the Second Amendment. Kimmel decided to climb even higher up that self-righteous ivory tower of his to rain down contempt upon those who dared criticize him for his immediate politicizing of the atrocity in Las Vegas the night before. Kimmel blasted:
          They say it’s inappropriate to be talking about it because it’s too soon. Well, maybe it’s too soon for you because deep down inside you know, in your heart, you know you bear some responsibility for the fact that almost anyone can get any weapon they want. And now you want to cover yourself until the storm of outrage passes and you can go back to your dirty business as usual. But it’s not too soon for us, because we’re Americans, and last time I checked, the First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment.

          Three things. First, no one has stopped or prevented Kimmel from exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, as attested to by the fact that he is still freely speaking on his own TV show about what he’s feel so passionately about, no matter how misguided, illogical and flat out false it may be. No one even called for his free speech rights to be taken away. That’s what his campus leftist fanboys do.
          Second, if it wasn’t for the protections afforded by the Second Amendment he obviously hates so much, he wouldn’t be enjoying that First Amendment. Freedom, Mr. Kimmel, is never free. People fought hard to win that freedom you so flippantly malign.
          Finally, rather than actually focusing on those directly impacted by this atrocity by offering emotional comfort and encouragement, and rather than seeking ways to promote good will and healing and unity, Kimmel instead chose to promote division. He chose to stand on the bodies of the victims in order to condemn his fellow Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with this mad man’s massacre. In his politically correct self-righteous superiority, he judged his fellow citizens, declaring them guilty — for believing in and defending Liberty. Mr. Kimmel, this is why you should have waited to speak, because all you have done is sow greater division.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51691

G3awWDhq0cgsx1oLFdnSVnRhXyexuF4d4rUDu3lfkpM9CEhh9A5FQE1OH4TFrExvY2Q4ahoGJYapHkZh9qWTNzup1a-HaWzeK4jRKG9BkzXE=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj113/kiluan/divider.gif" />
.
Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
by George Will 
{investors.com} ~ On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments tempting it to plunge into an impenetrable political thicket. It will consider a lower court's ruling that, if allowed to stand, will require the judiciary to determine whether and when partisanship in drawing electoral districts — something as old as the Constitution — is unconstitutional. And courts will wrestle repeatedly with cases requiring them to decide how to decide how much partisanship is too much.

It is instructive that the phrase "partisan gerrymandering" — the drawing of district lines by one party to disadvantage the other — is a redundancy. It has been since 1812, when Massachusetts Democratic-Republicans, serving Gov. Elbridge Gerry, created a district resembling a salamander. By then, the practice was old hat for New York, which had been hard at it since 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified.

The practice has recently become hotly disputed. This is partly because Republicans control 66 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and both the legislatures and governorships of 26 states. A challenge to Maryland's redistricting by Democrats is percolating in the judicial system. And it is partly because some members of the political science professoriate, which is as ideologically monochromic as academia generally, are inventing metrics that supposedly provide objective standards for identifying partisanship that is unconstitutionally excessive.

For several decades, federal courts produced redistricting plans for Wisconsin after decennial censuses because the Legislature could not agree on any. In 2010, however, Republicans won control of both houses of the Legislature and the governorship and produced a redistricting plan. In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 state Assembly seats with 48.6% of the statewide vote, and in 2014 they won 63 seats with 52% of the vote. However, under the court-devised plan in the previous decade, in five elections the Republicans won an average of 55.2 seats with an average of 49.1% of the statewide vote. This is partly because under requirements of the Voting Rights Act, Milwaukee's "majority-minority" districts were protected. And it is partly because Democratic voters, in Wisconsin and nationally, are inefficiently distributed, disproportionately concentrated in cities and college towns, such as Milwaukee and Madison. This is why in 2012, Barack Obama carried 27 congressional districts with at least 80% of the vote, whereas Mitt Romney carried only one that lopsidedly.

The 12 plaintiffs against the Republican plan have three problems, each fatal. First, they are contesting the entire statewide plan rather than their individual districts. So, they are asking the court to change its traditional standards for "standing" to sue, which require persons to demonstrate a "particularized injury" — in this case, that the configurations of their individual districts somehow unconstitutionally devalue their votes. The lead plaintiff is a retired University of Wisconsin professor whose Assembly district in Madison has voted Democratic by an average of 67.2% in the last five elections. This does not sadden him. What does — his supposed injury — is that the statewide plan diminishes his chances of enjoying a Democratic majority in the Assembly.

Second, until 31 years ago, the court held that the inevitable political component of redistricting plans is a non-justiciable "political question" properly consigned to the political (elected) branches. In 1986, the court said a political gerrymander could conceivably be justiciable, but it has never discovered what Justice Anthony Kennedy terms "a manageable standard."

Third, the plaintiffs want the court to plunge the judiciary into unending litigation involving dueling professors who will cherry-pick concocted metrics to serve as standards. Tuesday's arguments will illustrate why Wisconsin warns about a "social science hodgepodge." Plaintiffs will argue that an "efficiency gap" (the difference between all the loser's votes and the surplus of votes in excess of those the winner needed for victory divided by the total number of votes cast) that exceeds 7% — a figure plucked from the ether — is presumptively unconstitutional. By this metric, one-third of all legislative redistricting maps in 41 states over 43 years were impermissibly partisan.

Using partisan social science, the plaintiffs are asking the court to find in the Constitution a hitherto unnoticed requirement for proportional representation. Justice Felix Frankfurter perhaps anticipated this.

When in 1962 the court first intervened in states' redistricting practices, it propounded only the simple and neutral principle of "one person, one vote" — districts must be numerically equal. Nevertheless, Frankfurter dissented, having warned in 1946 against even entering "this political thicket." He worried that someday the court might be drawn ever-deeper into the fraught business of fine-tuning political processes. Unless the court is careful, that someday could arrive Tuesday.
 
Read more…

Saturday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
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by George Will 
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Stepping Back From the Crime Scene
CGCDG6pUMshI_O4moWgOMahv_HUdKmNfWeYZUm2m8JdcXaOJ05_qZ5mnMsFrDciBKp5mCAlnz5AO6isiN9WW-Pa7gwiEWcUA-KFxdNRLfuhwTv_OvlDdsna2UXXHNhU=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Michael Swartz:  As is their practice after a shooting with casualties on a mass scale, leftists are blaming the guns for the behavior of a man who obviously lost sight of the commandment, “You shall not murder.” And while we mourn the victims, the mainstream media seems preoccupied with the possibility of multiple shooters and the need to ban “bump stocks.” Many folks have also lost sight of the big picture: Statistically, we’re at far greater risk in a hospital than at a public concert like Sunday night’s Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.

          One statistician, in fact, concluded that the gun control measures being proposed would be rather ineffective in addressing the problem. Leah Libresco, who is described by The Washington Post as “a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site,” came to this realization as part of a large effort by her former employer — something FiveThirtyEight reminded us of this week — to analyze all 33,000 deaths by firearm in a particular year. She makes the case that “bump stocks,” bans on so-called “assault rifles,” and even gun buybacks would do little good when the largest portions of gun deaths involve their usage as “suicide machines” or as a method for young gangbangers to settle scores.
          “But, but,” stammers the Left, “look at how little gun violence there is in Australia — a place where certain types of guns were confiscated under penalty of law two decades ago after their own mass shooting.” While it’s true that no significant mass shootings have since occurred in Australia, a 2016 study by three Australian researchers found the data was inconclusive regarding the effects of the gun buyback: “Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total nonfirearm suicide and homicide deaths of a greater magnitude. Because of this, it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms.”
          Moreover, as Corey Iacono of the Foundation for Economic Education points out, another study that used the adjacent island nation of New Zealand — where there are fewer restrictions on guns — as a control found that both had roughly the same decline in mass shootings. “Gun control advocates have built their entire case about Australian gun control on lazy data analysis, or perhaps no data analysis at all,” argues Iacono. “If anything, Australia proves the complete opposite of what advocates of gun control want.”
          He added, “A national gun confiscation scheme which reduced the civilian firearm stock by an astounding twenty percent and nobody can seem to find any clear evidence it caused a meaningful effect on the firearm murder rate? That’s not only embarrassing, it goes against everything they believe about the nature of the relationship between guns and murder rates.”
          Then, when we consider this longstanding fact that more guns have yielded less crime, leftists’ case really begins to unravel. Not that they’ll stop shouting from the rooftops about it anyway — their newest cause is to repeal the Second Amendment. Our response? Molon labe.
          The leftist viewpoint — shared, apparently, by the New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens — doesn’t come close to meeting the smell test. Stephens’ anti-gun prejudices lead him to use faulty numbers, including counting five years’ worth of murder statistics to give himself a number that finally exceeds the annual toll in auto accidents. Even at this emotion-driven moment, this is all the gun-grabbers have.
          Should we remind them yet again that stridently anti-gun Europe, whose elites would love to see our pesky Second Amendment consigned to the dustbin of history, suffers more mass shootings on a statistical basis than the U.S. does? Europe’s restrictions don’t allow a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with one. As we often point out, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Stephen Paddock reportedly spent about 11 minutes firing at the crowd before a security guard finally made it to his room. Local police were even further behind.
          In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, Congress will certainly feel pressured to “do something,” with the most likely outcome a feel-good ban on bump stocks. Even the NRA doesn’t have a problem considering that, and a Republican lawmaker already has the bill set to go.
          Despite the statistics that have shown a trend toward more security, our government cannot make us perfectly safe — though armed citizens certainly have made us safer. Even if the government took away all the so-called “assault weapons,” deranged individuals bent on causing mass casualties would find a way to do so. One need look no further than the 85 people mowed down last year by a jihadi with a truck in Nice, France.
          Incidents like these are a problem of evil. Instead of debating the repeal of the Second Amendment — which was, after all, placed in the Bill of Rights as a check against a tyrannical government having all the firepower — we should be discussing the lack of self-control that our culture seems to encourage. There are still many laws on the books that extend the command of “you shall not murder,” and perhaps the first order of business should be to restore a much-needed respect for life.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51717

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Dobbs, Fitton – Outraged Corrupt GOP 
Handed Reins Of Witch Hunts To Dems
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{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs welcomed Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch to his program for a discussion of the insufferable boobs leading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “fishing expedition and witch hunt”... and other traitors operating openly under the GOP label. Dobbs begins with a statement that “Watching Warner and Burr is so painful, because they think they’re fooling someone when they’re carrying out a political action, not one of oversight of the intelligence community, which is their primary charge, as the intelligence community is struggling to defend whatever assets we have left in cyberspace.” Dobbs doesn’t overstate the pathetic display put on by Senators Burr and Warner, which clearly looked like an attempt to offer excuses and buy themselves more time for their witch hunt to continue. Both of the crooked, bumbling jackasses were clearly engaged in a political hit and trying to make it look like a legitimate function of their positions...  https://rickwells.us/dobbs-fitton-intel-control-dems/
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Shaffer, Furman – 3 Clues Need Close 
Attention In Las Vegas Investigation
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{rickwells.us} ~ Tony Shaffer and Mark Furman join Martha MacCallum to discuss the evolution of the case surrounding the massacre in Las Vegas... Shaffer notes there are three clues that Las Vegas Sheriff Lombardo has put out there which he believes we need to pay very close attention to. The radicalization statement of a couple of days ago, a “spontaneous utterance” about this issue, has not been resolved or addressed. He says that secondly, “they’ve announced a global investigation now ongoing for people who may have been involved and helped him.” Shaffer says, “That talks about a network, that means there’s something, either a criminal network or a terror network, but there’s something else there. And third, to the other point of the fact now that they’ve clearly said, there’s evidence, and they know more than they’re saying for obvious reasons.”... https://rickwells.us/shaffer-furman-3-clues-las-vegas/
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Pulosi Brain Drained – Freezes Up, 
Can’t Babble, Words Just Won’t Come Out
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{rickwells.us} ~ We’ve all heard that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and in Nancy Pulosi’s case, that was true even before hers stopped working... It never worked properly, as her leadership position in the communist Democrat Party has shown over time, but the dysfunction is now becoming something she can no longer hide. It’s like a police officer pulling someone over and asking you if they’ve had anything to drink tonight. The response, whether it be a semi-truthful “Yes sir, officer, only a couple of beers” or a lying “No, sir – I’m just a little tired,” the slurring of the words is going to be what answers the question. She can try to pretend she’s maintaining but reality is giving her away... https://rickwells.us/pelosi-brain-drained-freezes-up/
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Flanked By Top Military Leaders, Trump
Comments “Calm Before The Storm”
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{rickwells.us} ~ Whether the purpose was to inject uncertainty or fear into the minds of our adversaries from the standpoint of strengthening his negotiating position... an actual statement of imminent military conflict or something else, the words of President Trump were unsettling. At a reception for top military officials, President Trump said to the media and photographers during  a groupphoto, “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm. Could be the calm before the storm.” A reporter asks him, “From Iran,  on ISIS or what? Another asks, “What storm Mr. President?” as he says, “We have the world’s great military people in this room, I will tell you that. And we’re going to have a great evening. Thank you all for coming, thank you.”... https://rickwells.us/military-trump-calm-storm/
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Kimmel's Clueless Condemnation
ks6RoNjq0TQPZ3AJZu08ZhOGpeFhgTHsxFohL1MU6oVPNuAKqAkj4AzVZTEMmvZ46E0vvFYKhW9PrE-xCZgD_exX1SQdTndKPtpEPH0kFs37vm2FoCJVnLBy-mk4keM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Thomas Gallatin:  Is Jimmy Kimmel looking to start his own religion with his expressed ability to look into the hearts and minds of people and enter into judgment against them? Or does he merely have his sights set on running for head of the Democratic National Committee? Tuesday evening he followed up his Monday evening emotion-filled rant against Republicans and their support of the Second Amendment. Kimmel decided to climb even higher up that self-righteous ivory tower of his to rain down contempt upon those who dared criticize him for his immediate politicizing of the atrocity in Las Vegas the night before. Kimmel blasted:
          They say it’s inappropriate to be talking about it because it’s too soon. Well, maybe it’s too soon for you because deep down inside you know, in your heart, you know you bear some responsibility for the fact that almost anyone can get any weapon they want. And now you want to cover yourself until the storm of outrage passes and you can go back to your dirty business as usual. But it’s not too soon for us, because we’re Americans, and last time I checked, the First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment.

          Three things. First, no one has stopped or prevented Kimmel from exercising his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, as attested to by the fact that he is still freely speaking on his own TV show about what he’s feel so passionately about, no matter how misguided, illogical and flat out false it may be. No one even called for his free speech rights to be taken away. That’s what his campus leftist fanboys do.
          Second, if it wasn’t for the protections afforded by the Second Amendment he obviously hates so much, he wouldn’t be enjoying that First Amendment. Freedom, Mr. Kimmel, is never free. People fought hard to win that freedom you so flippantly malign.
          Finally, rather than actually focusing on those directly impacted by this atrocity by offering emotional comfort and encouragement, and rather than seeking ways to promote good will and healing and unity, Kimmel instead chose to promote division. He chose to stand on the bodies of the victims in order to condemn his fellow Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with this mad man’s massacre. In his politically correct self-righteous superiority, he judged his fellow citizens, declaring them guilty — for believing in and defending Liberty. Mr. Kimmel, this is why you should have waited to speak, because all you have done is sow greater division.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51691

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Will The Supreme Court 
Fall Into A Political Thicket?
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by George Will 
{investors.com} ~ On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments tempting it to plunge into an impenetrable political thicket. It will consider a lower court's ruling that, if allowed to stand, will require the judiciary to determine whether and when partisanship in drawing electoral districts — something as old as the Constitution — is unconstitutional. And courts will wrestle repeatedly with cases requiring them to decide how to decide how much partisanship is too much.

It is instructive that the phrase "partisan gerrymandering" — the drawing of district lines by one party to disadvantage the other — is a redundancy. It has been since 1812, when Massachusetts Democratic-Republicans, serving Gov. Elbridge Gerry, created a district resembling a salamander. By then, the practice was old hat for New York, which had been hard at it since 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified.

The practice has recently become hotly disputed. This is partly because Republicans control 66 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and both the legislatures and governorships of 26 states. A challenge to Maryland's redistricting by Democrats is percolating in the judicial system. And it is partly because some members of the political science professoriate, which is as ideologically monochromic as academia generally, are inventing metrics that supposedly provide objective standards for identifying partisanship that is unconstitutionally excessive.

For several decades, federal courts produced redistricting plans for Wisconsin after decennial censuses because the Legislature could not agree on any. In 2010, however, Republicans won control of both houses of the Legislature and the governorship and produced a redistricting plan. In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 state Assembly seats with 48.6% of the statewide vote, and in 2014 they won 63 seats with 52% of the vote. However, under the court-devised plan in the previous decade, in five elections the Republicans won an average of 55.2 seats with an average of 49.1% of the statewide vote. This is partly because under requirements of the Voting Rights Act, Milwaukee's "majority-minority" districts were protected. And it is partly because Democratic voters, in Wisconsin and nationally, are inefficiently distributed, disproportionately concentrated in cities and college towns, such as Milwaukee and Madison. This is why in 2012, Barack Obama carried 27 congressional districts with at least 80% of the vote, whereas Mitt Romney carried only one that lopsidedly.

The 12 plaintiffs against the Republican plan have three problems, each fatal. First, they are contesting the entire statewide plan rather than their individual districts. So, they are asking the court to change its traditional standards for "standing" to sue, which require persons to demonstrate a "particularized injury" — in this case, that the configurations of their individual districts somehow unconstitutionally devalue their votes. The lead plaintiff is a retired University of Wisconsin professor whose Assembly district in Madison has voted Democratic by an average of 67.2% in the last five elections. This does not sadden him. What does — his supposed injury — is that the statewide plan diminishes his chances of enjoying a Democratic majority in the Assembly.

Second, until 31 years ago, the court held that the inevitable political component of redistricting plans is a non-justiciable "political question" properly consigned to the political (elected) branches. In 1986, the court said a political gerrymander could conceivably be justiciable, but it has never discovered what Justice Anthony Kennedy terms "a manageable standard."

Third, the plaintiffs want the court to plunge the judiciary into unending litigation involving dueling professors who will cherry-pick concocted metrics to serve as standards. Tuesday's arguments will illustrate why Wisconsin warns about a "social science hodgepodge." Plaintiffs will argue that an "efficiency gap" (the difference between all the loser's votes and the surplus of votes in excess of those the winner needed for victory divided by the total number of votes cast) that exceeds 7% — a figure plucked from the ether — is presumptively unconstitutional. By this metric, one-third of all legislative redistricting maps in 41 states over 43 years were impermissibly partisan.

Using partisan social science, the plaintiffs are asking the court to find in the Constitution a hitherto unnoticed requirement for proportional representation. Justice Felix Frankfurter perhaps anticipated this.

When in 1962 the court first intervened in states' redistricting practices, it propounded only the simple and neutral principle of "one person, one vote" — districts must be numerically equal. Nevertheless, Frankfurter dissented, having warned in 1946 against even entering "this political thicket." He worried that someday the court might be drawn ever-deeper into the fraught business of fine-tuning political processes. Unless the court is careful, that someday could arrive Tuesday.
 
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This Is Why We Stand

This Is Why We Stand

 
For every little boy who wants to be just like his soldier dad, even after dad didn't come home...this is why we stand.
For every little girl who's Soldier dad doesn't get to walk her down the aisle...this is why we stand.
For every wife who grieves for her soldier husband...this is why we stand.
For every parent who has to bury their soldier child...this is why we stand.
For every soldier who lost a buddy...this is why we stand.
For every coffin draped with an American flag... this is why we stand.
For every folded American flag that now sits proudly displayed on the mantle...this is why we stand.
For every fallen soldier...this is why we stand.
For every soldier who can no longer stand because he/she had the courage to stand for our freedom...this is why we stand.
We stand not because we have to, not so we can show off, but because we want to.  We stand because we understand the sacrifices that were made, so we could be free.  We stand out of respect for all of those who stood for us.  We stand out of respect for this country.
Yes, you have the right not to stand, you have the right to disrespect the flag and everyone who fought, suffered and died to keep that flag flying.  But just because you have the right, doesn't mean it is right.  You have the right because you live in the shadow of the protection that very banner provides.  That same flag you're stomping on, that same flag you're burning, that same flag you refuse to stand for, is that ONE flag that represents your freedom to do just that.
For every tear that falls...THIS IS WHY WE STAND!
 
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An open letter to the NFL players,



  A letter that explains exactly how the American people feel about these spoiled punks who take a knee, and disrespect all that our great country represents.
 
 
 
An open letter to the NFL players,
 
You graduated high school in 2011.  Your teenage years were a struggle.  You grew up on the wrong side of the tracks..  Your mother was the leader of the family and worked tirelessly to keep a roof over your head and food on your plate.  Academics were a struggle for you and your grades were mediocre at best. The only thing that made you stand out is you weighed 225 lbs and could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds while carrying a football.   Your best friend was just like you, except he didn’t play football.  Instead of going to football practice after school, he went to work at McDonalds for minimum wage.  You were recruited by all the big colleges and spent every weekend of your senior year making visits to universities where coaches and boosters tried to convince you their school was best.  They laid out the red carpet for you. Your best friend worked double shifts at Mickey D’s.  College was not an option for him.  On the day you signed with Big State University, your best friend signed paperwork with his Army recruiter.  You went to summer workouts.  He went to basic training.
You spent the next four years living in the athletic dorm, eating at the training table. You spent your Saturdays on the football field, cheered on by adoring fans.  Tutors attended to your every academic need.  You attended class when you felt like it. Sure, you worked hard.  You lifted weights, ran sprints, studied plays, and soon became one of the top football players in the country.  Your best friend was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. While you were in college, he deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice.  He became a Sergeant and led a squad of 19 year old soldiers who grew up just like he did.  He shed his blood in Afghanistan and watched young American's give their lives, limbs, and innocence for the USA.
You went to the NFL combine and scored off the charts.  You hired an agent and waited for draft day.  You were drafted in the first round and your agent immediately went to work, ensuring that you received the most money possible. You signed for $16 million although you had never played a single down of professional football.  Your best friend re-enlisted in the Army for four more years. As a combat tested sergeant, he will be paid $32,000 per year.
You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South Beach.  He will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with 10 other combat loaded soldiers.  You will sleep at the Ritz.  He will dig a hole in the ground and try to sleep.  You will “make it rain” in the club.  He will pray for rain as the temperature reaches 120 degrees.
On Sunday, you will run into a stadium as tens of thousands of fans cheer and yell your name.  For your best friend, there is little difference between Sunday and any other day of the week.  There are no adoring fans.  There are only people trying to kill him and his soldiers. Every now and then, he and his soldiers leave the front lines and “go to the rear” to rest.  He might be lucky enough to catch an NFL game on TV.  When the National Anthem plays and you take a knee, he will jump to his feet and salute the television.  While you protest the unfairness of life in the United States, he will give thanks to God that he has the honor of defending his great country.
To the players of the NFL:  We are the people who buy your tickets, watch you on TV, and wear your jerseys.  We anxiously wait for Sundays so we can cheer for you and marvel at your athleticism. Although we love to watch you play, we care little about your opinions until you offend us. You have the absolute right to express yourselves, but we have the absolute right to boycott you.  We have tolerated your drug use and DUIs, your domestic violence, and your vulgar displays of wealth.  We should be ashamed for putting our admiration of your physical skills before what is morally right.  But now you have gone too far. You have insulted our flag, our country, our soldiers, our police officers, and our veterans. You are living the American dream, yet you disparage our great country.  I am done with NFL football and encourage all like minded Americans to boycott the NFL as well.
--- SHARE, SHARE, SHARE ---
 
National boycott of the NFL for Sunday November 12th, Veterans Day Weekend. Boycott all football telecast, all fans, all ticket holders, stay away from attending any games, let them play to empty stadiums. Pass this post along to all your friends and family. Honor our military, some of whom come home with the American Flag draped over their coffin.

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Daily reporting and analysis of current events from a biblical and prophetic perspective
 
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Bill Wilson
The "why" and "how" of Las Vegas

NOTE:  When writing about God and Jesus, The Daily Jot means YHVH as God and Yeshua Ha Mashiach as Jesus--the actual original names and the true nature and character of them.
  
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
I read a heart-wrenching story about a Martinsburg, WV woman who was killed during the Las Vegas massacre. She and her husband where shown kissing at the concert beforehand. They had saved up to attend. She died in his arms. There are families and friends of 59 others who were murdered and over 500 wounded or injured who will spend a lifetime trying to figure out the "why" such a thing happened. It is a horror, a senseless horror. Part of the "why" has to be that we live in an evil world and people who give in to evil are controlled by it. This guy, Stephen Paddock, obviously was influenced by satan to do such a brutal and horrendous act.
 
Paddock's brother was quoted as saying that Stephen was not affiliated with any politics or religion. The brother could not even venture a guess why Stephen would plan and execute such an act. There are a lot of theories, even conspiracy theories, populating the internet about Stephen Paddock's affiliations and a great deal of speculation as to why he would seek to kill so many innocent people. But there is one picture that is posted on pamelageller.com that speaks volumes to me if it is not photo-shopped. Pamela Geller traditionally has been a whistle-blower on Islam and is considered by many an excellent source of both facts and commentary, so I don't have reason to believe that the picture is a fake.
 
The picture shows Stephen Paddock and his girlfriend Marilou Danley protesting at an anti-Trump rally in Reno. He is in a pink NASA shirt wearing the pink vagina hat that became the trademark of radical anti-Trump protesters during the inauguration. Geller was able to get a screenshot of Paddock from a video that was posted on youtube. Youtube, however, has removed the video, saying it violated their policy on spam, deceptive practices and scams. I was able to find the footage on several other websites, including a youtube posting that wasn't removed. Notwithstanding, the photos and video appear legitimate after scouring several independent sources. Here is the point I am trying to make:
 
CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny pointed out after President Trump made his remarks of condolence that most of the victims were country music fans and were likely Trump supporters. CBS Executive VP and Counsel Hayley Geftman-Gold said, "I'm not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often Republican gun toters." She was fired for her remarks. The hate rhetoric among the anti-Trump left has been so visceral and nonstop for so long that it is impacting the psyche of weak-minded people who live and die by it, and they are willing to act upon it. It is bad for the country and bad for individuals living here.
 
Remember in June the assassination attempt of Congressional Republicans by Illinois leftist James Hodgkinson, who wounded four and left Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) in critical condition? Hate-filled inflammatory rhetoric by Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, the ex-"president," Keith Ellison, Ashley Judd, Madonna, and so on, has people so stirred up that it was only a matter of time when a nut-case like Hodgkinson took matters into his own hands. I wrote at the time that Hodgkinson was not alone. Now Paddock. Who next? Proverbs 18:21 says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof." The "why" is satan. The "how" are those who act out his ways.
Have a Blessed and Powerful Day!
Bill Wilson

PS. Please use the "Share This Email" link below to pass this on to as many people as you can!    
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People Mag in Hot Water Over Fake Story About Fake Vegas Victim

People magazine has deleted a story about a Las Vegas shooting victim who doesn’t appear to exist.

The magazine ran a story on Wednesday about a terminally ill man, Larry Parra, who they claimed was among the 58 people killed in the mass shooting in Las Vegas last Sunday. The story, was based entirely off the account of one alleged eyewitness, Jason Rogers.

The photos that Rogers provided of “Larry Parra” are actually photos of Rogers’ husband, Mic reported.

Rogers claimed to have been at the Las Vegas concert with Parra, only to have gotten separated shortly before the shooting started.

“I heard the shots, and after I got up from the ground from ducking I went to try and find Larry,” Rogers told People. “I didn’t want to leave him because he is a very dear and close friend.” (Read more from “People Mag in Hot Water Over Fake Story About Fake Vegas Victim” HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/10/people-mag-hot-water-fake-story-fake-vegas-victim/

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Dem Congressman: Bulldoze ‘Every Inch’ of Existing Border Barriers

( The greats Domestic to the AMERICAN PEOPLE IS THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATIC PARTY! NOV. 8TH 2018 IS OUR NEXT ELECTIONS  )

Homeland Security Committee member exposes how liberals really feel about nation's security

by Brendan Kirby | Updated 04 Oct 2017 at 2:16 PM

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee lined up Wednesday to oppose a bill to beef up border security and build a wall on the Mexican border, but a representative from Texas took it a step further.

During a committee meeting to discuss the Border Security for America Act of 2017, Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Texas) expressed his dissatisfaction with the existing fencing that separates the United States and Mexico along parts of the nearly 2,000-mile border.

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“I strongly oppose Trump’s wall,” he said. “In fact, I would take a bulldozer to every inch of existing structure on the U.S.-Mexican border.”

Vela, first elected in 2012 to represent a heavily Latino district that touches the Mexican border, spoke in favor of an amendment to the bill to define the wall. His sarcastic list snatched lines from President Donald Trump’s campaign speeches, including “big and beautiful,” “see through,” “not a fence,” and “has openings.”

The definition also included that it be solar, made of rebar and steel, and paid for by the Mexican government.

Vela said he would vote against his own amendment, offered as an attack on the proposed wall.

“I offer this amendment to provide the members of this committee the clearest picture to date of the conflicting and absurd vision that the president has for his wall,” he said. “A vote for this amendment is a vote for Donald Trump’s vision. A ‘yes’ vote on this amendment is a vote for his big, beautiful wall.”

senate-daca-dreamers-hearing1-360x210.jpgDemocrats Paranoid Trump Will Use DACA Info for RoundupsAdministration officials repeatedly testify at hearing that information-sharing policy has not changed

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the committee, indicated that Vela's stunt would not stop the bill from advancing.

"Let me just say that I appreciate the gentleman's creativity in his amendment and his sense of humor, but I will oppose this amendment," he said.

The bill calls for additional customs agents and U.S. Border Patrol officers, improved technology, and new physical barriers. It also would upgrade the land ports of entry.

Read more…

Saturday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
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Molon Labe, Michael Moore
YTJttVrhjDVMTIJuUSoGRYlWzgwe4KIykKOtEbueFulqsksA5yqvOUJzmO4OF4of_s3wCB8S_dazo_DtbO1409_w-9HVavLoJ2Src7w6tILE6ZpfgDPXiYaMDCFJOQY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2015-12-07-749f5422_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />
by Nate Jackson:  Until leftists are willing to admit that they want to repeal the Second Amendment, there’s little point to their yammering about gun control after the massacre in Las Vegas. So in a way it’s refreshing to see documentarian Michael Moore’s pathetic attempt at relevance in his call for a 28th Amendment to heavily regulate gun ownership and “repeal the ancient and outdated 2nd Amendment.” At least he’s being honest about his intentions. (To be fair, so is The New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens.)

          His proposed amendment reads: “A well regulated State National Guard, being helpful to the safety and security of a State in times of need, along with the strictly regulated right of the people to keep and bear a limited number of non-automatic Arms for sport and hunting, with respect to the primary right of all people to be free from gun violence, this shall not be infringed.” That just spells out more clearly how leftists already misinterpret the Second Amendment.
          Moore’s further ideas include banning all automatic and semiautomatic guns, limiting magazine capacity to six, forcing men to obtain waivers from the significant woman (or man) in their lives in order to purchase guns, requiring “smart” guns that fire only for the registered owner and mandating storage of the few remaining guns in a “licensed gun club or government-regulated storage facility.”
          We’d be outraged if Moore’s proposal wasn’t such a sad joke. Let’s say just for the sake of argument he succeeded in passing his amendment — what then? Confiscation. Otherwise, his new amendment is a dead letter. Why is it that deporting a few million illegal aliens is impossible but confiscating 300 million guns is just within reach? More pointedly, is he proposing to send armed government agents to confiscate all 300 million firearms in America? If so, they would collect the ammo first, if you know what we mean. Is “doing something” to stop the next murder worth a civil war?
          It’s quite ironic that Moore has described President Donald Trump as an “authoritarian” and a “fascist” and yet is apparently calling for Trump’s government to have the power to take away the God-given and constitutional right of the people to defend themselves against tyranny.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51672

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Sarah Sanders Body-Slams Acosta 
On Congress Investigating Media Bias
{rickwells.us} ~ Sarah Huckabee Sanders body-slammed CNN’s Jim Acosta as he attempted to go into one of his twisted rants during the White House press briefing... Acosta asked, “Why did the President tweet this morning that he’d like to see the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate news outlets, in I guess this quest to go after fake news?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” Sanders replied, “Absolutely, the President is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment, with those freedoms, also come responsibilities and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate.”... https://rickwells.us/sarah-sanders-acosta-media/
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Mueller’s Investigators Have Met 
With Dossier Author Christopher Steele
by CHUCK ROSS
{dailycaller.com} ~ Investigators in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller met this summer with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous and uncorroborated Trump dossier... The report, from CNN, indicates that Mueller’s team of investigators are fully vetting the dossier, which Steele compiled after being hired last June by an opposition research firm hired by an ally of liar-Hillary Clinton’s.  According to CNN, the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, took Steele’s dossier more seriously than has been acknowledged in public...Steele wasn't talking to Intelligence but willing to talk to Mueller, why?  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/05/report-muellers-investigators-have-met-with-dossier-author-christopher-steele/?utm_medium=email
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Trump administration scales back   
liar-nObamacare birth control mandate, 
claims end to 'attacks on religious liberty'
by Kimberly Leonard
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Trump administration announced Friday that it will exempt employers from providing insurance coverage for contraception if it conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs... scaling back a rule created under the liar-nObama administration. The interim final rule was an outgrowth of liar-nObamacare, which is written to give discretion to the Department of Health and Human Services to issue rules about what constitutes women's preventive care, meaning that different administrations can reverse or change the rules. The new rules allow any employer to be exempt from the mandate "based on its sincerely held religious beliefs" or on "moral convictions." Employers who decide not to provide coverage do not need to inform the federal government but would need to tell their employees about their decision...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-administration-to-scale-back-obamacares-birth-control-mandate/article/2636733?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/06/17&utm_medium=email
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In Gaza, Hamas levels an ancient 
Canaanite archaeological treasure
by FARES AKRAM
{timesofisrael.com} ~ Palestinian and French archaeologists began excavating Gaza’s earliest archaeological site nearly 20 years ago, unearthing what they believe is a rare 4,500-year-old Bronze Age settlement... But over protests that grew recently, Gaza’s Hamas rulers have systematically destroyed the work since seizing power a decade ago, allowing the flattening of this hill on the southern tip of Gaza City to make way for construction projects, and later military bases. In its newest project, Hamas-supported bulldozers are flattening the last remnants of excavation. “There is a clear destruction of a very important archaeological site,” said Palestinian archaeology and history professor Mouin Sadeq, who led three excavations at the site along with French archaeologist Pierre de Miroschedji after its accidental discovery in 1998. “I don’t know why the destruction of the site was approved.”...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-gaza-hamas-levels-an-ancient-archaeological-treasure/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=65c7ccfffe-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-65c7ccfffe-54638825
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Anti-Pulosi Revolt Building Again In House Dem Caucus
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Secret Mega-Donors To Anti-Trump Resistance Group
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Football Meets ‘Game of Thrones’ in This Ancient Italian Sport
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Even The NRA: Momentum Building Toward Banning Bump Stocks
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The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Nine decades ago this week, the talkies were born: On October 6th 1927, at their marquee picture palace in New York, the Warner Brothers premiered their new film The Jazz Singer. Not a single Warner brother was present. Sam Warner, the most enthusiastic proponent of the new "Vitaphone" sound technology, had died the day before, and his three siblings were en route back to Hollywood to bury him. The four brothers Warner had not been having a good time of it in 1927: They were variously selling stock, ceasing to draw salaries, moving into more modest accommodations and pawning the missus's jewelry. The Jazz Singer would make them into a major studio. So it was, within the space of 24 hours, both a death and a re-birth - as it was for their industry, although very few of its employees foresaw that.

It was an odd movie to gamble an art form on: I doubt you'd get it past the first pitch at a Hollywood studio today. It was born a decade earlier, when a University of Illinois student found himself planning a night on the town:

It became very necessary that I should impress a certain young lady. I had a date with her for a certain evening. I wanted to show her the best time to be had in the town of Champaign, Illinois. I borrowed ten dollars and bought two tickets for the one-night performance of Al Jolson in Robinson Crusoe Jr.

The young swain was a chap called Samson Raphaelson. As to how the date went, he liked the girl, but he loved Jolson. The Broadway headliner was "the World's Greatest Entertainer", according to himself, and Raphaelson was minded to agree:

I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson-his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his song. I still remember the song, 'Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow...' That figure in blackface, kneeling at the end of a runway which projected him into the heart of his audience, flinging out his white-gloved hands, was embracing that audience with a prayer-an evangelical moan-a tortured, imperious call that hurtled through the house...

Samson Raphaelson had grown up on New York's Lower East Side, and he was surely unique that night in Champaign in seeing beyond the white gloves and blackface to recognize in Jolson, who'd spent his boyhood in a shtetl in what's now Lithuania, something from his own early days at the Pike Street synagogue. At the end of "Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow", he turned to the girl and supposedly exclaimed:

My G0D, this isn't a jazz singer. This is a cantor!

I very much doubt he ever said that - as "jazz" was not a word in general currency in 1917, especially not in front of the ladies, and insofar as it was applied to music it was still spelled "jass". But, however expressed, the thought must have occurred - because five years later he wrote a short story for Everybody's Magazine called "The Day of Atonement", about a thinly fictionalized Jolson. Like the real-life singer, "Jack Robin" is a cantor's son who becomes a Broadway star, etc. What transformed it from just the usual roman à  clef stuff was the theme in which Raphaelson framed the drama: the conflict between a young Jew's traditions and the seductions of modernity. The author was by now a successful advertising executive, and his secretary suggested he turn his short story into a play. She sold him on the idea by showing him a script, pointing out how few words there were on each page, and offering to take dictation all weekend. The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway with George Jessel in September 1925, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights nine months later.

George Jessel was signed to star in the movie. But the Warners were having a tough time of it. Their investment in "Vitaphone" sound-on-disc technology was primarily a cost-cutting move: They intended to use it to pre-record the orchestral scores, so that they could dispense with the live musicians who accompanied silent pictures at movie theaters across the land. That would be a huge saving. To be sure, the technology had other potential - for example, the occasional sound effect: it would be pretty spectacular to have, say, a shipwreck or a train smash, and to hear all the noise. But talking? The thought never occurred to the Warner Brothers. Talking was for plays. Nobody went to the pictures to hear talk.

In the fall of 1926, the first two Vitaphone features with orchestra plus sound effects - Don Juan and The Better 'Ole - were hits, and the brothers decided to make The Jazz Singer into a sound-on-disc production. Jessel decided that the new technology demanded a new contract and overplayed his hand, insisting on a significant bonus and failing to appreciate that the brothers were mainly turning to Vitaphone because they were bust. Negotiations with Jessel broke down; they offered the part to Eddie Cantor, who declined; and finally they came to the man who'd inspired the original short story. And it was the participation of Al Jolson that ensured that the most decisive contributions of The Jazz Singer to the course of motion pictures would be neither the symphonic score nor the sound effects, but the singing and talking. That's what killed non-singing, non-talking pictures.

Neither the producer, Daryl Zanuck, nor the director, Alan Crosland, seemed to realize that's what they were doing. The Jazz Singer begins with a markedly somber overture, freighted with tragedy, six minutes of foreboding. Then a card appears:

In every living soul, a spirit cries for expression - perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer.

The camera shows scenes of busy urban streets and the orchestra segues into a symphonic arrangement of "Sidewalks of New York" - so the audience knows which particular urban streets they're looking at. This is all the language of what our age calls "silent pictures", a designation that defines an art form only by the element it's missing: no one calls ballet "silent plays".

In the teeming Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side, Papa Rabinowitz wants his boy to follow in the family tradition and become a cantor. But Mama knows the 13-year-old lad has other ideas. The scenario plays out silently, with dialogue cards, and then we cut to a beer garden, where the kid, billed as "Ragtime Jakie", is taking the stage. In this scene, you sense how little the film-makers understood their own revolution: Ragtime Jakie is singing a song, but it's nothing so scandalous as ragtime - merely "My Gal Sal", the last sentimental hit of Paul Dresser, an Indiana man who wrote the second most successful American pop song of the 19th century "On The Banks of the Wabash Far Away", now the state anthem, if you're minded to take a knee. And, in fact, Ragtime Jakie isn't really "singing" it: Bobby Gordon, who plays the kid, has his singing voice dubbed. So the first sound scene in the first "talkie" is actually a lip-synching scene, and not a terribly good one, although no worse than many today. Still, how odd to inaugurate the "talkie" with a "lippie" or a "dubbie".

By whom was young Master Gordon dubbed? Nobody knows. That's how unimportant it was. The very first voice heard in the first talkie is lost to posterity. Because the scene was meant to be just a freaky novelty: A silent film bursts into song for one goofy rendition of an ancient number by a guy who died bankrupt in 1906. What kind of wave of the future is that?

And immediately afterwards we lapse back into silence. A friend of the cantor witnesses the song, and races home to tell the old man. Dialogue card:

In a saloon, who do you think I saw singing raggy time songs?

The enraged father races over to the beer hall and arrives in the midst of Ragtime Jakie's second number, lip-synched to the same no-name dubber. This time it's "Waiting for the Robert E Lee". Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" on Tucker Carlson last last week, and on Rush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g., my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime). So, even without the ninetieth anniversary of The Jazz Singer, I'd probably be looking for a movie featuring the song The Jolson Story probably, or Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway.

Alas, in the midst of his lip-synching, Ragtime Jakie is yanked off stage by his pa. And we're back to the dialogue cards:

I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him... First he will get a whipping.

After the whipping, the boy runs away from home, and Cantor Rabinowitz goes to the synagogue. And so "Kol Nidre", the traditional declaration in Aramaic that commences the evening service on Yom Kippur, becomes the third song to be sung on the big screen, first with the cantor in shot and then over scenes of the sobbing mother in her empty flat, and of Jakie sneaking back to retrieve a treasured photo of his mother. So, in a certain sense, this is the first musical cutaway - cutting away from the performance to use the song to heighten emotionally the drama taking place elsewhere.

At which point, after 18 minutes, we flash forward and finally see Al Jolson, as the grown-up Jakie. How many years have passed? Well, Jolie was forty when he made The Jazz Singer, and the guy playing his dad, Warner Oland, was a mere eight years older. But you'd have to be missing the point entirely if that's what you take away from this scene. We're in San Francisco, thousands of miles from New York's Lower East Side, and at a modest cabaret "Jack Robin" (as Jakie Rabinowitz now styles himself) is called up from his table and invited to do a song.

He then launches into "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" - and what follows is on an entirely different level, technically speaking, from "My Gal Sal" or "Kol Nidre". Jolson was always a very idiosyncratic performer: he was the first major singer to use the second chorus of a song not as a straight reprise of the first, but as an opportunity for ad-libs and embellishments (as Crosby and Sinatra later would). So here he does what he always does, and somehow the Vitaphone manages to keep up with him through all the sobs, chuckles, talk-singy lines, through every "Awwwwww!" The synchronicity of it all must have thrilled audiences in 1927 as much as any CGI superhero battle scene today.

And then finally, 20 minutes in, "the first talkie" actually lets someone talk. Jolie finishes the number and tells the audience, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain't heard nothin'..." This was his catchphrase, of course - ever since the night, a decade earlier, when he'd had to follow Caruso on stage and, with the ovation for the great tenor still ringing through the rafters, quietened the crowd and cockily assured them, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." Could there be a better first line of heard dialogue for the birth of talking pictures?

That's Jolson. Just Jolson being Jolson. He goes into "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", an exhilaratingly physical performance, complete with spoken interjections - "Ow! Ow!" He whistles the second chorus, and so the first talkie is also the first whistling picture. Georgie Jessel wouldn't have done that. Heading into the final stretch, he instructs the band, "Get hot!" And they almost do, because it's hard to go wrong with "Toot, Toot, Tootsie".

And then the sound of applause, and the customers enthusiastically banging cutlery on plates. It's the equivalent of the moment when the drab dustbowl monochrome of Kansas flames into the rainbow colors of Oz: in just five minutes, Joley's wild, abandoned "jazz" singing has turned "silent pictures" into the raucous cacophony of "talkies".

The dialogue cards and silence return - but just for a bit. Jack Robin gets his big break on Broadway and goes home to see his Mama, with a gift of jewelry:

Diamonds! With stones in it! You didn't do any wrong, did you, Jakie?

His head rears back laughing. Dialogue card:

Mama, you ain't heard nothing yet!

But the line doesn't work as well typed out in white on black. In a mere half-hour of screen time, something has changed, and can't be changed back.

Jolson sits down at the piano and we're back to sound, as he plays and sings Irving Berlin's then new "Blue Skies". As the band was ordered back in San Francisco, he "gets hot", and so does Mama, grooving along and getting into it. And at the end, not minded to return to dialogue cards quite yet, Jolson asks her out loud, "You like that, mama? I'm glad of it. I'd rather please you than anybody I know of."

And so Eugenie Besserer, a career silent-film actress who'd been acting mother roles for two decades, found herself playing straight-man in talking pictures' first two-person dialogue scene. No writer came up with it - neither the scenarist (Alfred Cohn) nor the writer of the caption cards (Jack Jarmuth) penned a word of it. Jolson was famous on Broadway for ignoring the scripts of his shows and going his own way, and he had no plans to change his working methods for Hollywood. So he just ad-libbed his way through the scene, and a slightly befuddled Eugenie Besserer does her best to keep her end up with the occasional mumbled assent.

"We're gonna move up into the Bronx," Joley tells her. "Lot of nice green grass up there, and a whole lot of people you know - the Ginsbergs, the Gutenbergs, the Goldbergs, a whole lot of bergs, I don't know them all." At that world premiere in New York, on October 6th 1927, this scene electrified the crowd above all others. At a stroke, Jolson's patter shattered the formality of silent-screen dialogue, and turned Jack Jarmuth and the other writers of "intertitles" into the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers. While the audience understood what was happening at that moment, only one critic did. Robert E Sherwood, later the author of Waterloo Bridge, Rebecca, The Best Years of Our Lives and much more, brooded on this scene in Life:

There is one moment in The Jazz Singer that is fraught with tremendous significance. Al Jolson, appearing as a Jewish youth, returns to his old home after years of wandering around the Pantages circuit. His strictly orthodox father has disowned him because he chose to sing mammy songs in music halls rather than chants in the synagogue; his mother, however, welcomes the prodigal with open arms. Al sits down at the piano and sings 'Blue Sky' [sic] for his mother. Thanks to the Vitaphone attachment, his marvelous voice rings out from the screen, the sound agreeing perfectly with the movements of his mobile lips, the wriggling of his shoulders, the nervous tapping of his feet. After the song, there is a brief bit of spoken dialogue, and then Al bursts into 'Blue Sky' again. When he is halfway through the chorus, his father enters the room, realizes that his house is being profaned with jazz, and shouts 'Stop!'

At this point the Vitaphone withdraws and The Jazz Singer returns to a routine of pantomime punctuated with sub-titles... I for one suddenly realized that the end of silent drama is in sight.

The Vitaphone did not withdraw for long, and the end of silent drama came very quickly. A quarter-century later, Singin' in the Rain played it for laughs, with Donald O'Connor proposing to turn the unwanted silent flick The Dueling Cavalier into The Dueling Mammy. Yet it was a tragic time for many, as one skill-set - expressive faces - yielded to another - the ability to rattle off rat-a-tat dialogue. Jolie's girl here, May McAvoy, married the treasurer of United Artists and retired. Otto Lederer, playing the family friend who spots Ragtime Jakie in the saloon, made a couple more talkies and then retired. Other than Jolson, only Warner Oland was still on the big screen a decade later: He was a Swede who played a Jew and then parlayed it into a lifetime of Chinese roles, as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Indeed, the screen in Jolson's dressing room here is a curiously Fu Manchu-esque bit of chinoiserie.


After Oland's single word "Stop!" silences "Blue Skies", the unseen orchestra picks up the score with, of all things, Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet - because this is a feud between two houses, the Songs of Israel and the Songs of Jazz. In the words of the cantor: "Leave my house! I never want to see you again - you jazz singer!" Even if it weren't the first talkie, The Jazz Singer would be significant as the protean plot for virtually every biotuner in the years since, in which some rebellious punk insists he has to play his music his way even though the squares don't dig it at all. What raises Raphaelson's script above the run-of-the-mill is his framing it as an immigrant family's struggle between ancient faith and the din of the new. On the one hand:

Would you be the first Rabinowitz in five generations to fail your God?

On the other:

We in the show business have our religion, too - on every day, the show must go on!

In choosing the latter, Jolson's character understands that something is being lost - just as Robert E Sherwood understood that the bright dawn of a new art form was also the end of another. The film's ambivalence about both itself and its story is caught in the dressing-room scene in which Jolson applies his blackface make-up. Blackface lingered in the movies for another couple of decades, but mostly just as visual accessorizing of period numbers from the minstrel days (Judy Garland got up like a high yaller in the above-mentioned Babes on Broadway, for example). But this is about the only blackface moment I can think of where the act of blacking up is the point of the drama. Years earlier, the star had been one half of a vaudevillian double-act called "The Hebrew and the Coon": The Hebrew was the genuine article, the Coon was Al. Nineteenth-century minstrelsy was the dominant race condescending to its subordinate. Jolson makes it something subtler here - a metaphor, a code, a refuge: the confusion of a man caught between two worlds, expressing one race's pain through the form of another, and exchanging one complex duality for an ostensibly simpler one. Telling his girl about "the call of the ages - the cry of my race", the would-be Broadway star resumes making up: He sees his blackface in the glass above the sink, and (in a visual effect) the mirror dissolves to his father in the synagogue.

The Jazz Singer is a serious and sincere film, and certainly not the property you'd greenlight if you wanted merely to show off the new technology and make a gazillion bucks. It has its moments of hack work - "Mother of Mine" is basically "Sonny Boy" sideways - but it also has its integrity: hence, Jolson in cantor's garb singing at the synagogue. The opening date was chosen to capitalize on Yom Kippur, because the Warner Brothers thought it would appeal to New York Jews. That's it. They didn't realize they were blowing up the entire trajectory of Hollywood.

But that's what they did nine decades ago, when Al Jolson ad-libbing and hip-wiggling opened every small-town audience's eyes to all the "velocity", "fluidity" and sheer vitality Samson Raphaelson had seen on stage in Champaign, Illinois a decade earlier. The exit music for the film was "Mammy" - in contrast to all the orchestral brooding in the overture. Those two pieces of music symbolize the journey the film and the industry had taken during the intervening ninety minutes. By contrast, ninety years after Vitaphone, Hollywood seems exhausted, bereft of Vita and just phoning it in.


http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1017/steyn100417.php3
Read more…

Saturday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
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Molon Labe, Michael Moore
YTJttVrhjDVMTIJuUSoGRYlWzgwe4KIykKOtEbueFulqsksA5yqvOUJzmO4OF4of_s3wCB8S_dazo_DtbO1409_w-9HVavLoJ2Src7w6tILE6ZpfgDPXiYaMDCFJOQY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Nate Jackson:  Until leftists are willing to admit that they want to repeal the Second Amendment, there’s little point to their yammering about gun control after the massacre in Las Vegas. So in a way it’s refreshing to see documentarian Michael Moore’s pathetic attempt at relevance in his call for a 28th Amendment to heavily regulate gun ownership and “repeal the ancient and outdated 2nd Amendment.” At least he’s being honest about his intentions. (To be fair, so is The New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens.)

          His proposed amendment reads: “A well regulated State National Guard, being helpful to the safety and security of a State in times of need, along with the strictly regulated right of the people to keep and bear a limited number of non-automatic Arms for sport and hunting, with respect to the primary right of all people to be free from gun violence, this shall not be infringed.” That just spells out more clearly how leftists already misinterpret the Second Amendment.
          Moore’s further ideas include banning all automatic and semiautomatic guns, limiting magazine capacity to six, forcing men to obtain waivers from the significant woman (or man) in their lives in order to purchase guns, requiring “smart” guns that fire only for the registered owner and mandating storage of the few remaining guns in a “licensed gun club or government-regulated storage facility.”
          We’d be outraged if Moore’s proposal wasn’t such a sad joke. Let’s say just for the sake of argument he succeeded in passing his amendment — what then? Confiscation. Otherwise, his new amendment is a dead letter. Why is it that deporting a few million illegal aliens is impossible but confiscating 300 million guns is just within reach? More pointedly, is he proposing to send armed government agents to confiscate all 300 million firearms in America? If so, they would collect the ammo first, if you know what we mean. Is “doing something” to stop the next murder worth a civil war?
          It’s quite ironic that Moore has described President Donald Trump as an “authoritarian” and a “fascist” and yet is apparently calling for Trump’s government to have the power to take away the God-given and constitutional right of the people to defend themselves against tyranny.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51672

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Sarah Sanders Body-Slams Acosta 
On Congress Investigating Media Bias
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{rickwells.us} ~ Sarah Huckabee Sanders body-slammed CNN’s Jim Acosta as he attempted to go into one of his twisted rants during the White House press briefing... Acosta asked, “Why did the President tweet this morning that he’d like to see the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate news outlets, in I guess this quest to go after fake news?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” Sanders replied, “Absolutely, the President is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment, with those freedoms, also come responsibilities and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate.”... https://rickwells.us/sarah-sanders-acosta-media/
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Mueller’s Investigators Have Met 
With Dossier Author Christopher Steele
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by CHUCK ROSS
{dailycaller.com} ~ Investigators in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller met this summer with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous and uncorroborated Trump dossier... The report, from CNN, indicates that Mueller’s team of investigators are fully vetting the dossier, which Steele compiled after being hired last June by an opposition research firm hired by an ally of liar-Hillary Clinton’s.  According to CNN, the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, took Steele’s dossier more seriously than has been acknowledged in public...Steele wasn't talking to Intelligence but willing to talk to Mueller, why?   http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/05/report-muellers-investigators-have-met-with-dossier-author-christopher-steele/?utm_medium=email
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Trump administration scales back   
liar-nObamacare birth control mandate, 
claims end to 'attacks on religious liberty'
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by Kimberly Leonard
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Trump administration announced Friday that it will exempt employers from providing insurance coverage for contraception if it conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs... scaling back a rule created under the liar-nObama administration. The interim final rule was an outgrowth of liar-nObamacare, which is written to give discretion to the Department of Health and Human Services to issue rules about what constitutes women's preventive care, meaning that different administrations can reverse or change the rules. The new rules allow any employer to be exempt from the mandate "based on its sincerely held religious beliefs" or on "moral convictions." Employers who decide not to provide coverage do not need to inform the federal government but would need to tell their employees about their decision...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-administration-to-scale-back-obamacares-birth-control-mandate/article/2636733?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/06/17&utm_medium=email
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In Gaza, Hamas levels an ancient 
Canaanite archaeological treasure
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by FARES AKRAM
{timesofisrael.com} ~ Palestinian and French archaeologists began excavating Gaza’s earliest archaeological site nearly 20 years ago, unearthing what they believe is a rare 4,500-year-old Bronze Age settlement... But over protests that grew recently, Gaza’s Hamas rulers have systematically destroyed the work since seizing power a decade ago, allowing the flattening of this hill on the southern tip of Gaza City to make way for construction projects, and later military bases. In its newest project, Hamas-supported bulldozers are flattening the last remnants of excavation. “There is a clear destruction of a very important archaeological site,” said Palestinian archaeology and history professor Mouin Sadeq, who led three excavations at the site along with French archaeologist Pierre de Miroschedji after its accidental discovery in 1998. “I don’t know why the destruction of the site was approved.”...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-gaza-hamas-levels-an-ancient-archaeological-treasure/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=65c7ccfffe-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-65c7ccfffe-54638825
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bJ-uMonNklIUba3k-3uA9RWVGM01Rlht442p3fze5pmye8SJeIEN0i22r2FsU1mkpjZti1Q7RrgcCwwxDA0pV5fKRMfDSqiEGLCf7yI4uDJa_9YT53XSJ4MpZ3GcrE5S_2qW1CJjcMhQHkzdqkRrLKUhwDRjL8ItGxrEPc8=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href= VIDEOS
 
Anti-Pulosi Revolt Building Again In House Dem Caucus
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Secret Mega-Donors To Anti-Trump Resistance Group
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Football Meets ‘Game of Thrones’ in This Ancient Italian Sport
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Even The NRA: Momentum Building Toward Banning Bump Stocks
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The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
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by Mark Steyn
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Nine decades ago this week, the talkies were born: On October 6th 1927, at their marquee picture palace in New York, the Warner Brothers premiered their new film The Jazz Singer. Not a single Warner brother was present. Sam Warner, the most enthusiastic proponent of the new "Vitaphone" sound technology, had died the day before, and his three siblings were en route back to Hollywood to bury him. The four brothers Warner had not been having a good time of it in 1927: They were variously selling stock, ceasing to draw salaries, moving into more modest accommodations and pawning the missus's jewelry. The Jazz Singer would make them into a major studio. So it was, within the space of 24 hours, both a death and a re-birth - as it was for their industry, although very few of its employees foresaw that.

It was an odd movie to gamble an art form on: I doubt you'd get it past the first pitch at a Hollywood studio today. It was born a decade earlier, when a University of Illinois student found himself planning a night on the town:

It became very necessary that I should impress a certain young lady. I had a date with her for a certain evening. I wanted to show her the best time to be had in the town of Champaign, Illinois. I borrowed ten dollars and bought two tickets for the one-night performance of Al Jolson in Robinson Crusoe Jr.

The young swain was a chap called Samson Raphaelson. As to how the date went, he liked the girl, but he loved Jolson. The Broadway headliner was "the World's Greatest Entertainer", according to himself, and Raphaelson was minded to agree:

I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson-his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his song. I still remember the song, 'Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow...' That figure in blackface, kneeling at the end of a runway which projected him into the heart of his audience, flinging out his white-gloved hands, was embracing that audience with a prayer-an evangelical moan-a tortured, imperious call that hurtled through the house...

Samson Raphaelson had grown up on New York's Lower East Side, and he was surely unique that night in Champaign in seeing beyond the white gloves and blackface to recognize in Jolson, who'd spent his boyhood in a shtetl in what's now Lithuania, something from his own early days at the Pike Street synagogue. At the end of "Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow", he turned to the girl and supposedly exclaimed:

My G0D, this isn't a jazz singer. This is a cantor!

I very much doubt he ever said that - as "jazz" was not a word in general currency in 1917, especially not in front of the ladies, and insofar as it was applied to music it was still spelled "jass". But, however expressed, the thought must have occurred - because five years later he wrote a short story for Everybody's Magazine called "The Day of Atonement", about a thinly fictionalized Jolson. Like the real-life singer, "Jack Robin" is a cantor's son who becomes a Broadway star, etc. What transformed it from just the usual roman à  clef stuff was the theme in which Raphaelson framed the drama: the conflict between a young Jew's traditions and the seductions of modernity. The author was by now a successful advertising executive, and his secretary suggested he turn his short story into a play. She sold him on the idea by showing him a script, pointing out how few words there were on each page, and offering to take dictation all weekend. The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway with George Jessel in September 1925, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights nine months later.

George Jessel was signed to star in the movie. But the Warners were having a tough time of it. Their investment in "Vitaphone" sound-on-disc technology was primarily a cost-cutting move: They intended to use it to pre-record the orchestral scores, so that they could dispense with the live musicians who accompanied silent pictures at movie theaters across the land. That would be a huge saving. To be sure, the technology had other potential - for example, the occasional sound effect: it would be pretty spectacular to have, say, a shipwreck or a train smash, and to hear all the noise. But talking? The thought never occurred to the Warner Brothers. Talking was for plays. Nobody went to the pictures to hear talk.

In the fall of 1926, the first two Vitaphone features with orchestra plus sound effects - Don Juan and The Better 'Ole - were hits, and the brothers decided to make The Jazz Singer into a sound-on-disc production. Jessel decided that the new technology demanded a new contract and overplayed his hand, insisting on a significant bonus and failing to appreciate that the brothers were mainly turning to Vitaphone because they were bust. Negotiations with Jessel broke down; they offered the part to Eddie Cantor, who declined; and finally they came to the man who'd inspired the original short story. And it was the participation of Al Jolson that ensured that the most decisive contributions of The Jazz Singer to the course of motion pictures would be neither the symphonic score nor the sound effects, but the singing and talking. That's what killed non-singing, non-talking pictures.

Neither the producer, Daryl Zanuck, nor the director, Alan Crosland, seemed to realize that's what they were doing. The Jazz Singer begins with a markedly somber overture, freighted with tragedy, six minutes of foreboding. Then a card appears:

In every living soul, a spirit cries for expression - perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer.

The camera shows scenes of busy urban streets and the orchestra segues into a symphonic arrangement of "Sidewalks of New York" - so the audience knows which particular urban streets they're looking at. This is all the language of what our age calls "silent pictures", a designation that defines an art form only by the element it's missing: no one calls ballet "silent plays".

In the teeming Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side, Papa Rabinowitz wants his boy to follow in the family tradition and become a cantor. But Mama knows the 13-year-old lad has other ideas. The scenario plays out silently, with dialogue cards, and then we cut to a beer garden, where the kid, billed as "Ragtime Jakie", is taking the stage. In this scene, you sense how little the film-makers understood their own revolution: Ragtime Jakie is singing a song, but it's nothing so scandalous as ragtime - merely "My Gal Sal", the last sentimental hit of Paul Dresser, an Indiana man who wrote the second most successful American pop song of the 19th century "On The Banks of the Wabash Far Away", now the state anthem, if you're minded to take a knee. And, in fact, Ragtime Jakie isn't really "singing" it: Bobby Gordon, who plays the kid, has his singing voice dubbed. So the first sound scene in the first "talkie" is actually a lip-synching scene, and not a terribly good one, although no worse than many today. Still, how odd to inaugurate the "talkie" with a "lippie" or a "dubbie".

By whom was young Master Gordon dubbed? Nobody knows. That's how unimportant it was. The very first voice heard in the first talkie is lost to posterity. Because the scene was meant to be just a freaky novelty: A silent film bursts into song for one goofy rendition of an ancient number by a guy who died bankrupt in 1906. What kind of wave of the future is that?

And immediately afterwards we lapse back into silence. A friend of the cantor witnesses the song, and races home to tell the old man. Dialogue card:

In a saloon, who do you think I saw singing raggy time songs?

The enraged father races over to the beer hall and arrives in the midst of Ragtime Jakie's second number, lip-synched to the same no-name dubber. This time it's "Waiting for the Robert E Lee". Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" on Tucker Carlson last last week, and on Rush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g., my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime). So, even without the ninetieth anniversary of The Jazz Singer, I'd probably be looking for a movie featuring the song The Jolson Story probably, or Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway.

Alas, in the midst of his lip-synching, Ragtime Jakie is yanked off stage by his pa. And we're back to the dialogue cards:

I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him... First he will get a whipping.

After the whipping, the boy runs away from home, and Cantor Rabinowitz goes to the synagogue. And so "Kol Nidre", the traditional declaration in Aramaic that commences the evening service on Yom Kippur, becomes the third song to be sung on the big screen, first with the cantor in shot and then over scenes of the sobbing mother in her empty flat, and of Jakie sneaking back to retrieve a treasured photo of his mother. So, in a certain sense, this is the first musical cutaway - cutting away from the performance to use the song to heighten emotionally the drama taking place elsewhere.

At which point, after 18 minutes, we flash forward and finally see Al Jolson, as the grown-up Jakie. How many years have passed? Well, Jolie was forty when he made The Jazz Singer, and the guy playing his dad, Warner Oland, was a mere eight years older. But you'd have to be missing the point entirely if that's what you take away from this scene. We're in San Francisco, thousands of miles from New York's Lower East Side, and at a modest cabaret "Jack Robin" (as Jakie Rabinowitz now styles himself) is called up from his table and invited to do a song.

He then launches into "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" - and what follows is on an entirely different level, technically speaking, from "My Gal Sal" or "Kol Nidre". Jolson was always a very idiosyncratic performer: he was the first major singer to use the second chorus of a song not as a straight reprise of the first, but as an opportunity for ad-libs and embellishments (as Crosby and Sinatra later would). So here he does what he always does, and somehow the Vitaphone manages to keep up with him through all the sobs, chuckles, talk-singy lines, through every "Awwwwww!" The synchronicity of it all must have thrilled audiences in 1927 as much as any CGI superhero battle scene today.

And then finally, 20 minutes in, "the first talkie" actually lets someone talk. Jolie finishes the number and tells the audience, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain't heard nothin'..." This was his catchphrase, of course - ever since the night, a decade earlier, when he'd had to follow Caruso on stage and, with the ovation for the great tenor still ringing through the rafters, quietened the crowd and cockily assured them, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." Could there be a better first line of heard dialogue for the birth of talking pictures?

That's Jolson. Just Jolson being Jolson. He goes into "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", an exhilaratingly physical performance, complete with spoken interjections - "Ow! Ow!" He whistles the second chorus, and so the first talkie is also the first whistling picture. Georgie Jessel wouldn't have done that. Heading into the final stretch, he instructs the band, "Get hot!" And they almost do, because it's hard to go wrong with "Toot, Toot, Tootsie".

And then the sound of applause, and the customers enthusiastically banging cutlery on plates. It's the equivalent of the moment when the drab dustbowl monochrome of Kansas flames into the rainbow colors of Oz: in just five minutes, Joley's wild, abandoned "jazz" singing has turned "silent pictures" into the raucous cacophony of "talkies".

The dialogue cards and silence return - but just for a bit. Jack Robin gets his big break on Broadway and goes home to see his Mama, with a gift of jewelry:

Diamonds! With stones in it! You didn't do any wrong, did you, Jakie?

His head rears back laughing. Dialogue card:

Mama, you ain't heard nothing yet!

But the line doesn't work as well typed out in white on black. In a mere half-hour of screen time, something has changed, and can't be changed back.

Jolson sits down at the piano and we're back to sound, as he plays and sings Irving Berlin's then new "Blue Skies". As the band was ordered back in San Francisco, he "gets hot", and so does Mama, grooving along and getting into it. And at the end, not minded to return to dialogue cards quite yet, Jolson asks her out loud, "You like that, mama? I'm glad of it. I'd rather please you than anybody I know of."

And so Eugenie Besserer, a career silent-film actress who'd been acting mother roles for two decades, found herself playing straight-man in talking pictures' first two-person dialogue scene. No writer came up with it - neither the scenarist (Alfred Cohn) nor the writer of the caption cards (Jack Jarmuth) penned a word of it. Jolson was famous on Broadway for ignoring the scripts of his shows and going his own way, and he had no plans to change his working methods for Hollywood. So he just ad-libbed his way through the scene, and a slightly befuddled Eugenie Besserer does her best to keep her end up with the occasional mumbled assent.

"We're gonna move up into the Bronx," Joley tells her. "Lot of nice green grass up there, and a whole lot of people you know - the Ginsbergs, the Gutenbergs, the Goldbergs, a whole lot of bergs, I don't know them all." At that world premiere in New York, on October 6th 1927, this scene electrified the crowd above all others. At a stroke, Jolson's patter shattered the formality of silent-screen dialogue, and turned Jack Jarmuth and the other writers of "intertitles" into the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers. While the audience understood what was happening at that moment, only one critic did. Robert E Sherwood, later the author of Waterloo Bridge, Rebecca, The Best Years of Our Lives and much more, brooded on this scene in Life:

There is one moment in The Jazz Singer that is fraught with tremendous significance. Al Jolson, appearing as a Jewish youth, returns to his old home after years of wandering around the Pantages circuit. His strictly orthodox father has disowned him because he chose to sing mammy songs in music halls rather than chants in the synagogue; his mother, however, welcomes the prodigal with open arms. Al sits down at the piano and sings 'Blue Sky' [sic] for his mother. Thanks to the Vitaphone attachment, his marvelous voice rings out from the screen, the sound agreeing perfectly with the movements of his mobile lips, the wriggling of his shoulders, the nervous tapping of his feet. After the song, there is a brief bit of spoken dialogue, and then Al bursts into 'Blue Sky' again. When he is halfway through the chorus, his father enters the room, realizes that his house is being profaned with jazz, and shouts 'Stop!'

At this point the Vitaphone withdraws and The Jazz Singer returns to a routine of pantomime punctuated with sub-titles... I for one suddenly realized that the end of silent drama is in sight.

The Vitaphone did not withdraw for long, and the end of silent drama came very quickly. A quarter-century later, Singin' in the Rain played it for laughs, with Donald O'Connor proposing to turn the unwanted silent flick The Dueling Cavalier into The Dueling Mammy. Yet it was a tragic time for many, as one skill-set - expressive faces - yielded to another - the ability to rattle off rat-a-tat dialogue. Jolie's girl here, May McAvoy, married the treasurer of United Artists and retired. Otto Lederer, playing the family friend who spots Ragtime Jakie in the saloon, made a couple more talkies and then retired. Other than Jolson, only Warner Oland was still on the big screen a decade later: He was a Swede who played a Jew and then parlayed it into a lifetime of Chinese roles, as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Indeed, the screen in Jolson's dressing room here is a curiously Fu Manchu-esque bit of chinoiserie.


After Oland's single word "Stop!" silences "Blue Skies", the unseen orchestra picks up the score with, of all things, Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet - because this is a feud between two houses, the Songs of Israel and the Songs of Jazz. In the words of the cantor: "Leave my house! I never want to see you again - you jazz singer!" Even if it weren't the first talkie, The Jazz Singer would be significant as the protean plot for virtually every biotuner in the years since, in which some rebellious punk insists he has to play his music his way even though the squares don't dig it at all. What raises Raphaelson's script above the run-of-the-mill is his framing it as an immigrant family's struggle between ancient faith and the din of the new. On the one hand:

Would you be the first Rabinowitz in five generations to fail your God?

On the other:

We in the show business have our religion, too - on every day, the show must go on!

In choosing the latter, Jolson's character understands that something is being lost - just as Robert E Sherwood understood that the bright dawn of a new art form was also the end of another. The film's ambivalence about both itself and its story is caught in the dressing-room scene in which Jolson applies his blackface make-up. Blackface lingered in the movies for another couple of decades, but mostly just as visual accessorizing of period numbers from the minstrel days (Judy Garland got up like a high yaller in the above-mentioned Babes on Broadway, for example). But this is about the only blackface moment I can think of where the act of blacking up is the point of the drama. Years earlier, the star had been one half of a vaudevillian double-act called "The Hebrew and the Coon": The Hebrew was the genuine article, the Coon was Al. Nineteenth-century minstrelsy was the dominant race condescending to its subordinate. Jolson makes it something subtler here - a metaphor, a code, a refuge: the confusion of a man caught between two worlds, expressing one race's pain through the form of another, and exchanging one complex duality for an ostensibly simpler one. Telling his girl about "the call of the ages - the cry of my race", the would-be Broadway star resumes making up: He sees his blackface in the glass above the sink, and (in a visual effect) the mirror dissolves to his father in the synagogue.

The Jazz Singer is a serious and sincere film, and certainly not the property you'd greenlight if you wanted merely to show off the new technology and make a gazillion bucks. It has its moments of hack work - "Mother of Mine" is basically "Sonny Boy" sideways - but it also has its integrity: hence, Jolson in cantor's garb singing at the synagogue. The opening date was chosen to capitalize on Yom Kippur, because the Warner Brothers thought it would appeal to New York Jews. That's it. They didn't realize they were blowing up the entire trajectory of Hollywood.

But that's what they did nine decades ago, when Al Jolson ad-libbing and hip-wiggling opened every small-town audience's eyes to all the "velocity", "fluidity" and sheer vitality Samson Raphaelson had seen on stage in Champaign, Illinois a decade earlier. The exit music for the film was "Mammy" - in contrast to all the orchestral brooding in the overture. Those two pieces of music symbolize the journey the film and the industry had taken during the intervening ninety minutes. By contrast, ninety years after Vitaphone, Hollywood seems exhausted, bereft of Vita and just phoning it in.


http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1017/steyn100417.php3
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Friday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
We Need Fallacy Control Now!
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by Michelle Malkin 
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Violent Crime Rising — The 'Ferguson Effect'
z1jVWv0x9AlgVgXN92Oh10-AdfnPThlgQACf9VmpyLBZ973F8NzJ71bQ1WcS90z6A3SAfccTVDgfJa1Z519895CNPOo2EMvpMbkYPDtQGVbrrKcCyRiNg9BvyXZS34o=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Mark Alexander:  According to Pew Research crime data, the rate of violent crime dropped almost 50% in the decade up to 2015. At the same time, the rate of firearm sales and ownership has steadily increased. Thus, as research by former Yale professor John Lott concludes, “More Guns, Less Crime.”

          Notably, however, the latest FBI crime stats indicate that violent crime in 2015 and 2016 is trending upward, due in large measure to the “Ferguson Effect,” a correlation noted by crime researcher Heather Mac Donald, who authored “Are Cops Racist?”
          After the justified shooting of a Ferguson, Missouri, thug, national and local Demo politicians joined Barack liar-nObama’s war on cops, condemning police for “racial profiling.”
          Mac Donald explains, “Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by.”
          After the Baltimore riots in 2015, Mac Donald wrote about rising crime: “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest — including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month — have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.”
          She continued, “liar-nObama and Attorney General Eric Holder … embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force. … Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound.”
          Of course, now NFL celebrity athletes are taking a knee to protest and promote this fake injustice — a protest started by former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who recently donated funds to honor a cop-killer.
          Professor Walter Williams observes that the issue should be intra-racial homicide — black-on-black murders. But as I have noted previously, that doesn’t fit the Democrats’ race-bait political agenda constituent narrative.
          Attorney General Jeff Sessions previously voiced his concern that the 2015 increase was “the beginning of a trend,” noting, “That is the thing that has concerned me the most.” His concerns are now reality.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/51669

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LV Sheriff Finally Admits It… This Changes Everything
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by BENJAMIN ARIE
{conservativetribune.com} ~ As America struggles to understand this week’s massacre in Las Vegas, there are still more questions than answers... Early on, officials seemed eager to assure people that  Stephen Paddock was a “lone wolf” and there was no further danger to the public. Now, doubt is being cast on that initial story. During a news conference on Wednesday that included the FBI, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Joseph Lombardo admitted something that many have suspected all along: The shooter probably didn’t act alone...  https://conservativetribune.com/vegas-sheriff-finally-admits/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=CTBreaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=2017-10-05
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Good riddance! Pentagon 
banishes left's 'hate' attack dog
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{wnd.com} ~ The Pentagon has officially disassociated itself from one of the left’s most vicious attack organizations, which is known for unleashing damaging and unsubstantiated claims about conservative organizations... as a standard business practice for years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, routinely attacks conservatives, such as its labeling the staunchly American values-based Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel, and the family promoting Family Research Council as “hate” groups because of their religious beliefs. The organization has been linked to domestic terrorism and attempted mass murder.  For years, the Department of Defense used SPLC materials for its training on extremism. Specifically, the DOD’s Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, or DEOMI, conducted training on “hate groups” with SPLC materials, according to Liberty Counsel...  http://www.wnd
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The NFL Players Association Caught 
Funneling Money to George Soros
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by Onan Coca
{constitution.com} ~ This shouldn’t be all that surprising but some interesting informaiton has been uncovered by several media outlets today... the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), the Ford Foundation, the Kellog Foundation, the Services Employees International Union (SEIU), and various other organizations have been discovered funneling money to George Soros and other far-left fundraisers. While the information shouldn’t be shocking as many of these groups have already been known to lean left, it does paint a picture of corporate America hell-bent on seeing our Republic transformed into a socialist oligarchy, run by massively wealthy oligarchs like Soros...Can the FBI or AG do somthing about this? Shut them down.   https://constitution.com/breaking-nfl-players-association-caught-funneling-money-george-soros/
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Palestinian "Reconciliation": Hamas 
Free to Fight but Now Abbas Accountable
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by Bassam Tawil
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA) government is on its way back to managing civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip... Hamas, meanwhile, says it will remain in control of security and will not lay down its weapons or dismantle its security forces and militias. Abbas's new partnership with Hamas -- the product of Egyptian mediation efforts between the two parties -- means that from this moment on, the Palestinian Authority president should now be held responsible for everything that takes place inside the Gaza Strip. Abbas and his PA government should now be held accountable, among other things, for the fate of two Israeli civilians and the remains of IDF soldiers being held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Abbas should also now be held responsible for any rockets that are fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel. Abbas cannot have it both ways. He cannot use the new partnership with Hamas to project himself as the legitimate president of all Palestinians, including those living in the Gaza Strip, but at the same time argue that he does not have "control on the ground." He cannot have his prime minister and government managing the day-to-day affairs of the Gaza Strip while at the same time claim that he cannot do anything about Hamas's security forces and militia...  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11116/palestinian-reconciliation-hamas-free-to-fight
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Undercover video shows Mainstream Media 
and Colleges Ignoring Violence by Antifa
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{patrioticviralnews.com} ~ Is “Antifa” a terrorist organization? That’s the charge that conservative comedian and podcaster Steven Crowder makes in this explosive undercover video shot by both Crowder and his producer Jared... a brave associate, as they infiltrate a Utah chapter of the Leftist anti-fascist group commanded by a transgender leader. In the video, these Antifa members are gearing up for a violent protest against well-known conservative speaker and author Ben Shapiro at the University of Utah. As Crowder shows revealingly, the disconcertingly forward leader of the group casually remarks that he or she? has brought weapons to their meeting and has associates with “AKs” — meaning AK-47 rifles — on the way. Furthermore, he/she puts a knife into Jared’s hands and tells him to keep it on him in case he has to “do what you gotta do!” When Crowder tried to present this secretly-taped footage to the mainstream media, he’s essentially laughed at and turned away! Is this proof that the MSM is irretrievably biased, or what?...  http://patrioticviralnews.com/articles/undercover-video-shows-mainstream-media-and-colleges-ignoring-violence-by-antifa/
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We Need Fallacy Control Now!
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by Michelle Malkin 
 
{truthrevolt.org} ~ Enough is enough. It's epidemic. It's dangerous. And the time has come to demand its end.

In the aftermath of the horrific massacre in Las Vegas, America needs fallacy control. Yes, we must declare war on fallaciousness. Now more than ever, the nation is suffering from an outbreak of illogical thinking. In response to senseless violence, clearheaded citizens deserve a safe space from the 24/7 barrage of rhetorical nonsense. Let's break down the collective cognitive breakdown.

Argumentum ad celebritum. Empty talking points don't become persuasive arguments when uttered by Hollywood stars. But in the bizarre land of the celebrity cult, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel has been suddenly anointed "America's conscience" and "voice of reason."

Kimmel railed "intensely" on TV Monday night against politicians doing "nothing" to stop mass gun violence. Sobbing and emotional, he insisted, "there's a lot of things we can do about it." Yet, Kimmel acknowledged that Mandalay Bay gunman Stephen Paddock had passed multiple, mandated background checks and had no criminal history. Moreover, Paddock bought his guns legally from Nevada and Utah gun shops subject to a thicket of local, state and federal rules -- and reportedly carried 23 of his weapons into a casino/hotel that already operates as a gun-free zone.

Federal studies show that a measly 1 to 3 percent of all guns are purchased at gun shows, but that didn't stop Kimmel from tossing around non sequiturs attacking the "gun show loophole." It's a mythical exemption in federal law for private weapons sales at gun shows or online intended to drum up hysteria about unregulated gun sales. In reality, firearms purchased through federally licensed firearms dealers at gun shops, shows, garage sales or anywhere else are subject to all the usual checks and restrictions. Only a narrow category of same-state transactions between private individuals not engaged in the commercial business of selling firearms family members or collectors, for example are unaffected by those regulations.

There is zero empirical evidence that banning these types of transactions would do anything to prevent gun crimes or mass shootings. But who needs evidence when Jimmy Kimmel is bawling on stage "intensely"? The tears of a clown outweigh the sobriety of facts.

Argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad hashtag. Actor Billy Baldwin unloaded a fallacy two-fer with his assertion that "the overwhelming majority of Dems, Reps & NRA members endorse #GunSafety," so "how can we let the #NRA hold us hostage like this? #NRATerrorists." Claiming that an "overwhelming majority" of people agree with you doesn't make your argument sound. Nor does citing polls showing support for "gun show loopholes" that those surveyed don't fully understand. Nor does attacking the character of your political opponents and hashtag-smearing them as "NRATerrorists" for holding political viewpoints different than your own.

Straw men and red herrings. Grossly oversimplifying support of ineffective or superfluous gun control measures as "#GunSafety" allows celebrities, politicians and activists to prop up their favorite hollow debating tactic: asserting that gun owners, NRA members, and Republicans don't care about gun safety and want more innocent people to die.

Democrat Rep. Ted Lieu illustrated a similar diversionary tactic by waving the red herring of a "gun silencer bill" and demanding that GOP "COWARDS" vote against deregulating such suppressors. liar-Hillary Clinton also demagogued the issue, ghoulishly tweeting: "Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get." Her running mate and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine parroted the propaganda, claiming that Paddock "was only stopped because he didn't have a silencer on his firearm, and the sound drew people to the place where he was ultimately stopped."
  Why liar-Hillary’s Tweet About Silencers/ Las Vegas Shooter Was Stupid
Police, however, took 72 minutes to locate Paddock; it was the sound of hotel fire alarms set off by all the gun smoke that led them to the shooter. But let's not let pesky facts in the way.

Think of the children. Invoking kids to support one's public policy preferences is not an argument. It's a timeworn appeal to emotion. Without it, however, gun control advocates are all out of ammunition.

"We as a society owe it to our children" to pass "common sense" gun control, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton pleaded.

"Thoughts & prayers are NOT enough. Not when more moms & dads will bury kids this week, & more sons & daughters will grow up without parents," Senator Elizabeth dinky-Warren, D-Mass., fumed on Twitter.

And actor Boris Kodjoe tweeted: "My 10 year old asked me how the shooter was able to get his machine gun. I told him that pretty much anyone in the US can. 'But why daddy'?"

Too bad Kodjoe's kid will never know that daddy didn't tell him the truth about fully automatic firearms (aka "machine guns"), which have been effectively banned from private civilian ownership in the U.S. as a result of federal gun legislation dating back to 1934. Nor will the children of the "Think about the children!" brigade be taught the truth about defensive gun use or Second Amendment history and jurisprudence.

We owe our children critical thinking skills and evidence-based public policy, not knee-jerk slogans and tear-jerking treacle.
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