Category: Politics

The other day, US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan tried to influence support for a measure that would allow the Organization of American States to intervene in the crisis consuming Venezuela which has cost the lives of 74 Venezuelans in the past few months, according to AFP. The representative of the Maduro government responded to the assemblage and the US proposal;

“The ‘contact group’ you’re proposing is completely useless and unnecessary,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez fumed at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Cancun, Mexico.

“The only way you could impose it would be to send in your Marines — who would meet with a crushing response from Venezuela if they dared make such a misstep.”

I don’t think that Americans would be receptive to such a proposal to send troops to Venezuela, Marines or otherwise. The response from Ms. Rodriguez is just whistling past the graveyard. The Maduro government is perfectly happy to let more Venezuelans die either from murder or starvation to maintain their grip on Venezuela and to force Communism down the throats of the people there and line their own pockets. An American military response would just be playing to hopes that he can blame the crisis there on American imperialism.

US Missile Defense Agency in conjunction with the Japan Ministry of Defense conducted a developmental test of a new Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IIA missile off the coast of Hawaii.

At approximately 7:20 p.m., Hawaii Standard Time, 21 June, a medium-range ballistic target missile was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii. USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) detected and tracked the target with its on-board AN/SPY-1 radar using the Aegis Baseline 9.C2 weapon system. Upon acquiring and tracking the target, the ship launched an SM-3 Block IIA guided missile. Unfortunately, the missile did not intercept the target as planned.

Program officials will conduct an extensive analysis of the test data. Until that review is complete, no additional details will be forthcoming.

This is the fourth live fire test of the system and the second intercept test. The first intercept test in February was successful.

The SM-3 Block IIA is being developed cooperatively by the U.S. and Japan to defeat medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missile threats. Currently in the developmental test phase, the SM-3 Block IIA is being designed to operate as part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system.

Disappointing, but this is why we test. A very wise old tester once told me that failure is always an option, as long as you learn from it.

Fox News is reporting on Hanna Böhman, a Canadian former model and motorcycle sales rep found a different calling, joining Kurdish women fighting ISIS in Syria.

She  joined the YPJ – the female brigade of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units – after sneaking into Syria in and receiving rudimentary instruction on the care and feeding of the AK-47 before being thrust onto the front lines.

“I just felt like I had to do something greater with my life,” Böhman told Fox News. “I spent my life not doing what I wanted to do, but what I was expected to do. I wanted something different.”

“It was inspiring to fight alongside other women,” she said.

She served in two positions with the YPJ, first as overwatch guarding against suicide bombers, and then as her unit’s sniper.

“My first gun — an AK-47 — was 40 years old,” said Böhman, who recounted a near-death gun battle with two ISIS snipers in the northern Syrian border town of Til Abyad.

“I’m so much taller than most of the Kurdish girls and I was always getting shot at by snipers,” said Böhman, who is 5 feet 8 inches tall. “On this one day, the bullet was so close I actually felt it part my hair.”

“We’re being the change we want to see in the world,” she said. “It sounds cliché, but it’s true.”

 

 

 

 

The Democrats pulled out all the stops and threw in everything including the kitchen sink. I’ll wager those clichés will be repeated incessantly all across America tomorrow to describe the huge effort the Democrats made to win the most expensive congressional district election in history. And they lost. How sweet it is that citizens of Georgia refused to sell their birthright, their vote for their congressional representative, to a bunch of liberal, airhead, Hollywood fat cats who, like the Democrat National Committee, believe everything’s for sale at the right price.

Well, in the case of Georgia Congressional District Six where the Dems ran a sophisticated, metrosexual, political operative, John Ossoff, who didn’t even live in his district and refused to move back to it so that he could vote in the election where he was the candidate, (How truly elitist Democrat is that?) it didn’t work “I deign to represent you in Congress but that doesn’t mean I must live among you.” His opponent was a former Georgia Secretary of State, Karen Handel, a down to earth, solid campaigner who didn’t flinch in the face of all the largess flowing in to her opponent from those super-rich elites out on the Left Coast. The reported numbers vary but most reports say that Ossoff received close to 70% of his donations from a single state: California.

Georgia voters told ‘em where to put it…and it’s not in Congress.

Author’s note: Though I do not live in Georgia, I contributed to Handel’s campaign and wrote a piece here at American Thinker urging readers to do the same. Those who did can bask in the sweet satisfaction that we ordinary folks can stand up to the billionaire bullies on the left who believe that all of America is for sale. MAGA!

Crossposted at American Thinker

One thing you can be assured of here at TAH is that when Jonn or I or any other author posts a piece critical of liberals and their Democrat party, especially when it deals with a particularly despicable action on their part, there will quickly follow a comment by one or more of our resident liberal trolling apologists saying in effect, “Yes, well, while that may be despicable, you have to admit that both sides do it.” That moral equivalence counter-punch is a favored weapon of the Left, like calling you a racist, a jab designed to shut your mouth and close off further discussion which they know they can’t win fairly. With most of us it fails because it lacks the weight of truth behind it, although sadly there are a few here who will meekly agree with Lars or Joe that “Yes, you’re right—both sides do it.”

Well, if that’s true, it is true only in the broadest, most general sense and ignores two critical factors: frequency and intensity. Sure, there’s always going to be some hothead conservatives out there who get fed up and throw some punches, but unlike the Left’s viciousness, ours tends to be spontaneous and disorganized. When some more daring challenger here at TAH does bring those two realities up to counter our resident trolls, the immediate response is, “Show me some proof, show me some Google links,” which as we all know is a daunting, time consuming task that no one really wants to take the time to do just to prove some liberal twit like Lars is wrong.

Well the folks over at Daily Caller, obviously fed up with getting the same crap from liberal provocateurs, have begun the compilation of such a list. A quick read shows that it is far from complete so I am going to ask Jonn to post it as part of this piece so that TAH readers can in their comments make additions and help to flesh it out. I will then recompose the list in chronological style and when complete ask Jonn to repost it in full. Future events can then be added to the comments section of that second posting. Periodically I will update the list to include those new events taken from comments. From the point of first posting forward, anytime one of our liberal trolls throws out that lame moral equivalence argument, we will have evidence to point to and say, “Put up or shut up. Show us a list of equal conservative misbehaviors and criminality.

Herewith the list from Daily Caller with some minor modification:

July 2016: A Hillary Clinton supporter lights a flag on fire and attacks a Trump supporter in Pittsburgh.

Protesters jumped on cars, stole hats, fought with and threw eggs at Trump supporters outside a Trump rally in downtown San Jose. Trump supporters sued San Jose over the violence.

August 2016: Anti-Trump protesters attacked pushed, spit on and verbally harassed attendees forced to walk a “gauntlet” as they left a Trump fundraiser in Minneapolis, Minn., and beat an elderly man. Protesters also attacked Trump’s motorcade.

A Tennessee man was assaulted at a garage sale for being a Trump supporter.

A Trump supporter in New Jersey was attacked with a crowbar on the street.

September 2016: Protesters in El Cajon, Calif., chased and beat up a Trump supporter.

October 2016: A GOP office in North Carolina was firebombed and spray painted with “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else.”

November 2016: A high school student was attacked after she wrote that she supported Trump on social media. The perpetrator ripped her glasses off and punched her in the face.

The president of Cornell University’s College Republicans was assaulted the night after Trump won the election.

Students protesting Trump punched and kicked a Maryland high school student wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

A high school student was arrested in Florida after he punched a classmate for carrying a Trump sign at school.

A group of black men in Chicago attacked a white man while raging against Trump.

Maryland high school students punched a student who was demonstrating in support of Trump, and then kicked him repeatedly while he was on the ground.

“You support Trump. You hate Mexicans,” a California high school student yelled at a Trump supporter, before viciously beating the girl.

An anti-bullying ambassador was arrested for shoving a 74-year-old man to the ground in a fight outside Trump tower where people upset over his win had gathered. The woman tied to Black Lives Matter caused the man to hit his head on the sidewalk.

A Texas elementary school student was beaten by his classmates for voting for Trump in a mock election.

Two men punched and kicked a Connecticut man who was standing with an American flag and a Trump sign.

December 2016: A Trump supporter was beaten and dragged by a car.

January 2017: A Trump supporter was knocked unconscious after airport protesters repeatedly beat him on the head.

A Trump supporter was attacked after putting out a fire started by anti-Trump protesters.

When Trump protesters encountered a driver with a pro-Trump flag on his car, they surrounded the vehicle, ripped off and began burning the flag, and pounded the car. They also punctured on the tires.

February 2017: California GOP Rep. Tom McClintock had to be escorted to his car after a town hall because of angry protesters. The tires of at least four vehicles were slashed.

Protestors knocked a 71-year-old female staffer for California GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher unconscious during a protest outside the representative’s office.

Milo Yiannopoulos’ speech at the University of California-Berkeley was cancelled after rioters set the campus on fire and threw rocks through windows. Milo tweeted that one of his supporters wearing a Trump hat was thrown to the ground and kicked.

March 2017: Masked protesters at Middlebury College rushed AEI scholar and political scientist Charles Murray and professor Allison Stranger, pushing and shoving Murray and grabbing Stranger by her hair and twisting her neck as they were leaving a campus building. A stranger suffered a concussion. Protesters then surrounded the car they got into, rocking it back and forth and jumping on the hood.

April 2017: -A parade in Portland, OR, was canceled after threats of violence were made against a Republican organization.

Fears of violent protests shut down Ann Coulter’s UC Berkeley speech. Campus police had gathered intel on protesters who were planning to commit violence.

May 2017: Republican Rep. Tom Garrett, his family and his dog were targeted by a series of repeated death threats deemed credible by authorities.

FBI agents arrested a person for threatening to shoot Republican Rep. Martha McSally over her support for Trump.

Police in Tennessee charged a woman for allegedly trying to run Republican Rep. David Kustoff off the road.

Police in North Dakota ejected a man after he became physical with Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer at a town hall.

A former professor was arrested after police said they identified him on video beating Trump supporters with a U-shaped bike lock, leaving three people with “significant injuries.”

June 2017:

James Hodgkinson opened fire with a 7.62 mm rifle on a congressional GOP baseball practice, injuring five, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.

Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney received an email threat that read, “One down, 216 to go,” shortly after the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball practice.

A man driving a white Malibu reportedly fired several shots at a man driving a truck displaying a “Make America Great Again” flag in Indiana.

Just a few days before the shooting of a Republican congressman and several others, the Washington Post published an article reviewing last year’s shooting in Orlando by a Muslim male in which 49 American citizens died. Would you believe that other than his name there was no mention of the shooter being Muslim or his motive being Islamic? That despite this headline a year ago. Rather, WAPO’s emphasis a year later was on the gay aspects of the shooting, coloring the event in rainbow shades with only one thing left starkly white, the shooter. Not that WAPO said such a thing; oh no, they’d never do that, not now at least. But just wait a few years and see if WAPO, as well as the rest of the liberal media, hasn’t filed away for posterity the Orlando shooting as a white terrorist hate crime against gay people.
Now the liberal media is tap dancing all over the place to minimize the undeniable reality that this latest shooter is a full-on liberal Democrat, a card-carrying, poster-waving loyalist, and sadly, the ultimate product of their violence-tinged resistance operation against the Trump presidential victory which they refuse to accept.

Okay, I’ll grant the liberal media the easy part: the guy is unquestionably white, but how are they going to twist history to move this ultra-liberal, would-be, assassin/mass-killer into the white terrorism column? In future discussions of violence in America, you can be sure the MSM will trot out the numbers regarding white violence and today’s leftist perp will be among them, as will the Muslim killer in Orlando. At that oft-quoted, little backwater, super-left, white racist-exposing outfit down there somewhere in Alabama or Georgia, whose organizational engines are fueled on high octane liberal feelings of self-righteousness, these guys will be very helpful poster boys for demonstrating the huge presence of white supremacy. They may even get their own dots on that infamous map of right wing lunatics.

Think they can’t and won’t do it? Then you simply do not understand the degree of liberal duplicity that exists in our media and their readiness to employ it. Think I’m exaggerating? Then ignore my warning–after all, the most you can lose is your basic freedoms, such as your ability to speak critically of your government and its policies–perhaps, your ability to speak out at all.

The Washington Post editorial board, typically, cries crocodile tears about gun control in the wake of the coverage about last week’s assault on a group of Republican baseball players in Alexandria, Virginia. Also, typically, they call for more gun control;

There are no simple or easy solutions to the complex issue of violence in the United States. There is no one piece of legislation that would prevent every madman who is intent on hurting others from getting a gun. But America is insanely unique in its refusal to address the glut of firearms, including weapons of war for which there is little legitimate use, and their easy availability to people who should not have a weapon.

Actually, there is a simple solution that would prevent a large number of people who shouldn’t have guns from getting their grubby paws on guns – prosecutors can start enforcing the laws that are already in place. This Hodgkinson fellow who shot at various Republicans, had a number of contacts with the police that should have prevented him from owning a gun, but there was nothing on the NICS system because no one followed through.

It’s not just gun laws that prosecutors ignore, Jared Loughner, the fellow who shot Gabby Giffords among others, had several run-ins with the law, but because he wasn’t prosecuted, he was able to buy a gun.

Lance Whipple, one of our phonies, has been arrested at least twice for illegally possessing a concealed weapon – he was sentenced to two days (time served) in jail and court costs the last time. I’m sure he didn’t learn his lesson. I have to think that this happens every day somewhere in this country. We’ve all seen serious charges traded away in exchange for lenient sentences. Gun charges seem to be the first on the auction block. Like David Gregory’s charges.

Bruce Pendlay, another phony who tried to frame us for attempted murder was sentenced to paying court costs ($158) and he had to write a letter of apology to the VFW. The charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm were traded away because the prosecutor didn’t want to have to prove that he was a felon in court.

Jason Scaletta was another phony who was also a felon with a firearm. He wasn’t prosecuted on the firearms charge, but fraud charges put him away for ten years.

There are plenty of gun control laws on the books, but prosecutors don’t use them, so why should we write more laws they won’t enforce? Laws that only the law-abiding will obey.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.