Here's how a Hillary harem-boy dances

"There's just too much blatant white supremacy being enabled by this campaign," grumbled eternal second banana Andy Richter in David Weigel's 9/30 Washington Post call-to-harms. ("Can SNL take down Trump? Is it going to try?")

Richter's Career Express never got past the Ed McMahon station. Unable to control his mouth, much less the universe, he seemed quite comfortable tossing around that slimy slur without offering so much as a single supporting example. Such is the arrogance of zealotry.

Richter doubtless knew that he could scurrilously attack designated villain Trump without fearing responsible challenge by sympathetic comrade Weigel.

And Richter was, at once, both wrong and right. 



end

The bold and the biased
News and entertainment figures drop masks in Trump warfare

Entrenched political and cultural establishments are more than willing to engineer any dirty business necessary to frustrate average Americans' approaching election of Donald Trump. 

Failed 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney and House Majority Speaker Paul Ryan have both made public efforts aimed to hack at Trump's appeal. 

Jeb Bush, of the elitist Bush Family Dynasty, has in his own stop-start fumbling manner hectored the Trump-led populist movement. (Said hale movement would result in the toppling of both the Bush and Clinton dynasties; a splendid rallying ambition, considering that this country is not even supposed to have what amount to royal families.)

And it has today been reported (by the routinely and breathlessly anti-Trump Politico) that on the evening of Thursday, 9/29, the United Nations issued an hysterical appeal to some 8 million expatriate Americans to vote in absentia. "At a time when Trump is trying to divide us," the UN urged. "We could all defeat him if we shared this page with EVERYONE!" 

Once that body's improper official interference in a member country's democratic election became public knowledge, the UN took down its offending message -- though, of course, its meddling had already been effected. 

"That tweet did not originate from the UN's News Centre," was the meaninglessness issued mechanically by that center's chief. "We're looking into its provenance," he muttered toward the backs of reporters already drifting away in committed search of an outrageous Trump half sentence uttered sometime in decades past.

Not too many months ago, reports abounded telling of not-so-secret convocations of the wealthy and power-connected. (Not unlike summit meetings of Godfather ruling crime families.)

From those meetings, it was hoped, might arise an effective scheme to strangle the peoples' democratic persuasions. 

(Billionaire Mark Cuban, surely among those jetted-in upper-plateau elitists, still turns up in campaign-related headlines. He seems to have too much time on his hands.) 

Spotlighted news media careerists who in other circumstances would probably pretend at professional ethics cannot jettison propriety quickly enough as they pursue with slathering maws the citizenry's and Trump's voting booth downfalls.

Their cheeks flushed with strange fervor, many mainstream journalists in the ideologically rigid employ of status quo-shielding corporate interests have abandoned ideals of honesty and reportorial rectitude. They demonstrate instead great capacity for audaciously reinventing contrary objective realities to best suit pre-fabricated agendas.

Univision's Jorge Ramos, writing in the 8/23 Time, lectured that for "journalists, politicians, voters...neutrality is not an option." His words are those of a partisan activist, and hardly reflective of ideals once assumed particular to his wordy vocation.

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times media writer, asked, "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?...you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the last half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career...You would move closer than you've ever been to oppositional...Do normal standards apply?"

Of course, traditionally enunciated standards of impartiality and honesty should indeed yet apply to journalism. If Rutenberg seriously questions that, well, he need not ever fear finding a pink slip in his New York Times pay envelope. 


And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough recently posed a press performance question predicated on just such subjective derogating: "How balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational?"

Political bias, per Ramos, Rutenberg, Scarborough, and their yellowed fellows, is not to be criticized as disserving journalistic enterprise - and the public - but instead championed as both serving some higher calling and protecting dumb citizens from independently exercising democratic self-governance.

One last illustration, from a not-at-all unlikely intersection between biased, agenda journalism and biased, agenda television entertainment:

David Weigel's 9/30 Washington Post article, "Can SNL take down Donald Trump? Is it going to try?" assumes Humor In the Service of Progressive Ideology is a moral imperative. 

"For some, Donald Trump isn't funny anymore,"Weigel writes.
"And that has prompted some actors, writers, and producers behind SNL to ask this question: What if he wins? And what if we are blamed?"

To be fair, I acknowledge that it may be unreasonable of me to expect genuine comicalness from Saturday Night Live, a program not consistently funny or of recommendable quality for many years. 

But to enter the creative process yoked by agenda commitment and a vainglorious delusion of outsized significance results in nothing of real worth to anyone. 

And while entertainment efforts advancing social and political sensibilities are numerous and rightly celebrated, their authors have always found optimum effectiveness by including lessons as adjuncts to the main business of amusing, not as those works' primary reasons for existence. 

Regrettably, though, the wise practical counsel of superior creators and journalists who've gone before is lost on current-day, agenda-foisting buffoons. 

They are too busy boasting to one another of their bias to be terribly concerned about improving their craft, or respecting their audiences.



end

Mark does the 'Zuckerberg two step'
maintains double standards based on class, ideology

Many have criticized the Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook practice of stifling posts that conflict with liberal sentiment. (http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/09/28/facebook-removed-100k-comments-month-germany/) 

As contrary to the wonderful notion of viewpoint equality as is that corporate clampdown, though, Facebook is privately owned, and Zuckerberg is free to publicize one message and stomp down another as he wishes. (And the rest of us can then draw conclusions about his character.)

But Zuckerberg's apparent fancy of a double-standard benefiting himself and his ideological fellows is hardly exclusive to political expression.

Zuckerberg has over the years donated lavishly to the Planned Parenthood Foundation. And that's his right. It's his money. 

But particularly noteworthy here is Planned Parenthood's institutional philosophy that a baby isn't really a human with constitutional rights that others must respect until it has exited the hospital.

Remember that ugly idea; by donating to Planned Parenthood, Mark Zuckerberg gave it both approval and sustenance.

After his donations had been made, Zuckerberg choreographed and publicized a party celebrating his wife Priscilla's pregnancy. Hospital photos of their baby, still in Priscilla's womb at that time, adorned the party walls. And the jubilant Zuckerbergs even announced the as-yet-unborn baby's gender and name.

Wait a minute...

Zuckerberg's actions and statements regarding that carried baby conflicted remarkably and resoundingly with Planned Parenthood's line of 'no life recognition til baby's left the hospital.'

And his unapologetic deceit that there exist two standards, one for moneyed and liberal 'royalty' like himself and another for regular Americans like you and I could not be more manifest. Or repugnant.

Why Trump supporters seldom talk to CNN viewers


Trump supporter: "As Obama's secretary of state, Hillary Clinton sold the US out to foreign powers."

CNN viewer: "Trump is an orange, reality-show clown!"

TS: "Hillary maintained a private email server in violation of established State Department rules, ones of which she'd been apprised. And by using it to send and receive classified information, she imperiled America."

CNNv: "Trump probably is not as rich as he claims!"

TS: "Hillary shredded and bleached away 33,000 subpoenaed emails, ones possibly containing private data."

CNNv: "Trump says outrageous things about 'Identity Groups!' "

TS: "Hillary has embraced law-breakers and turned her back on American police."

CNNv: "Trump has short fingers!"

TS: "Hillary's State Department/Clinton Foundation was a criminal, pay-for-play enterprise with documented ties to international anti-US interests."

CNNv: "I heard an obscure Nazi likes Trump! That makes him a white supremacist!"

TS: "As senator, Hillary voted to invade Iraq. And her poor judgement and general incompetence left that entire region an unstable mess and led to the growth of ISIS."

CNNv: "I just know he wears a toupee!"

TS: Bad trade deals Hillary has backed, not to mention her stated support for NAFTA and TPP, have reduced American economic security and sent millions of jobs to foreign lands.

CNNv: "Trump is Hitler!"

TS (shaking head in disgust): "I'm outta here..."

CNNv: "Oh -- can't defend Trump on the issues, huh?!"

Comrade Methuselah ends with Hillary whimper, not principled bang

                              His master's voice


"I'm sick of hearing about your damn emails!" grumbled generally unpleasant Bernie Sanders to Democrat nomination 'opponent' Hillary Clinton, during one debate. And with those eight terrible words, he at once awarded her the nomination and himself eternal ignominy.

Following his weaselly withdrawl, the self-satisfied sell out repaired to his new jet, bound for his new (third) home. He would, to no one's convincing, maintain that his just-purchased, pricey toys had no connection to his flipping off millions of naive, college-aged footsoldiers and taking an enthusiastic dive before the entire world.

But Comrade Methuselah's shamelessness has since again essayed its elephantine dancing across the public stage. 

On Wednesday, 9/28, he appeared before a Hillary campaign audience to grouse raspily against voting third party. And he exhorted millennials to endorse the dollar-grasping frump who'd leashed him.

Given his show-me-the-money choice to sit rather than stand, Sanders was clearly unconcerned by the opinions of those who'd surged to his side. Why in the hell would anyone today be persuaded by his paid-for prattlings?

(Sanders had long indicated his pro-donkey prejudice. Following the 2000 election, he joined with fellow Democrats in shutting out Ralph Nader. That Sanders would be inclined to stiff the independent consumer-rights icon rather than displease the establishment made manifest the counterfeit nature of his claims to principle.)  

"Bernie Sanders could have gone down in the record books as a great, great man," Donald Trump told a 9/28 Iowa rally. "But then, he made that deal. And it's over."

So, go quietly into that good night, Comrade Methuselah. And pull the damned door closed, behind you.

In 1997, Mary J. Blige slurred the late Elvis Presley, falsely declaring that he'd been "racist."

In coming days, Blige's interview of Hillary Clinton will air.

Of course, Hillary Clinton does not necessarily share each of Blige's opinions. But her uncritical association with Blige does merit observation.

And that Blige was so willing to be deceitful, encouraging of racial division, and bold-facedly smearing of the deceased Presley is to her lasting discredit.

With that recent development an inspiration, I'm reprinting a past essay:

To Smear a King:

Crossing swords with the power of myth

by DC Larson

It has become something of a tradition, albeit a regrettable one. As the August anniversary of Elvis Presley's 1977 death approaches, self-righteous hectors villify him as "racist."

It is a false claim, though for some one not requiring that examinable evidence ever be produced. But putting one's hands on contrary testimony is easily done.

The myth-debunking website Snopes.com (on its "Urban Legends Reference Page") details the origin of the counterfeit claim. The site cites Michael T. Bertrand's book "Race, Rock, and Elvis."

Bertrand had found that the April 1957 issue of the white-owned Sepia magazine contained the article, "How Negroes Feel About Elvis." The piece noted that, "colored opinion about the hydromatically-hipped hillbilly from Mississippi runs the gamut from caustic condemnation to ardent admiration." It offered views allegedly collected from both celebrities and "people in the street."

Snopes writes, "Presumably from the 'people in the street' came the infamous and uncredited quotation, "The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records."

Sepia sought input from African-American Minister Milton Perry. "I feel," Perry told the magazine, "that an overwhelming majority of people who know him speak of this boy who practices humility and a love for racial harmony. I learned that he is not too proud or important to speak to anyone and to spend time with his fans of whatever color, wherever and whenever they approach him."

It was not long, though, before the anonymous, 'people in the street' comment was being falsely attributed to the singer, himself. Again, Snopes. "The rumor grew and spread throughout 1957. It mattered not that the story came cloaked in impossible details, such as Elvis supposedly making the statement in Boston (a city he had never visited) or on Edward R. Murrow's Person To Person television program (on which Elvis never appeared)."

Unable to source the rumored comment, the website records, Jet magazine sent reporter Louie Robinson to interview Presley on the "Jailhouse Rock" set. ("The 'Pelvis' Gives His Views On Vicious anti-Negro slur" Jet, August 1, 1957)

"I never said anything like that," Presley told Robinson. "And people who know me know I wouldn't have said that."

A number of fellow musicians, whites and blacks, came to Presley's defense at the time. Notable among them was R&B singer Darlene Love, who had backed Presley with vocal group the Blossoms. "I would never think that Elvis Presley was a racist," Love was later quoted as saying in a 2002 article. "He was born in the South, and he probably grew up with that, but that doesn't mean he stayed that way." ("False Rumor Taints Elvis," Cox News Service, August 16, 2002)

(Other contradictory direct evidence exists on Charly Records's 2006 "The Million Dollar Quartet, 50th Anniversary Special Edition." In 1956, Sun Records alum Elvis joined Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash at the Memphis studio for an impromptu session. Prior to a loose, collective retelling of his then-chart hit, "Don't Be Cruel," Elvis related seeing Billy Ward and the Dominoes's recent cover performance of it. "Much better than that record of mine," Presley concedes. He describes Ward's onstage energy: "He was hittin' it, boy!" Jerry Lee responds, "Oh man, that's classic!" Performers naturally admiring a fellow performer; not a hint of color consciousness to be found.)

Myths, though, are of a seductive quality -- often for cultural reasons other than themselves. This popular legend-based anti-Elvis sentiment persists, with recent illustrations including Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" (1989) and Living Colour's "Elvis Is Dead" (1990).

(To his credit, Public Enemy's Chuck D. later expressed a more complex and nuanced opinion. He told a reporter, "As a musicologist -- and I consider myself one -- there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions. As black people, we all knew that...My whole thing was the one-sidedness -- like, Elvis's status in America made it seem like nobody else counted. My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes..."Chuck D. Speaks on Elvis's Legacy," Associated Press, 8/12/02.)

As noted in an 8/11/07 New York Times op-ed ("How did Elvis get turned into a racist? ") by author Peter Guralnick, singer Mary J. Blige  also cited the scurrilous myth as if it were at all based in fact.

Of course rock'n'roll existed prior to Presley's 1954 recording debut at Sun Records in Memphis. It was in some cases electrifying and wondrous in ways known only to audiences and subsequent vinyl collectors.

But the national stage appearance of Crown Electric Co. truck driver Elvis marked -- not an example of white culture appropriating something blacks had already developed but for which they were denied credit -- but the emergence of the hitherto-unrepresented working class into popular culture visibility.

In early years, Elvis did perform for segregated audiences in the pre-Civil Rights-era South. But for critics highlighting that to be fair, they need to note that segregation of public facilities was then a matter of civil law and not of performers's choosing.

Some might hold that, that being the case, performers had a moral duty to refrain entirely from public performance. But that would have made performing impossible for all musicians, black as well as white. And for many, it's as much a calling as a profession.

A Memphis, Tennessee contemporary of Presley's, Paul Burlison first earned renown as lead guitarist for Johnny Burnette and the Rock'n'Roll Trio. I interviewed him for a 2000 Goldmine article. He shared something of what the situation was like for working musicians in that time and place.

Paul was in a country band in 1951, when he caught the attention of blues man Howlin' Wolf. He began backing Wolf on the latter's radio program, though due to racial codes, Burlison's name could not be cited in group introductions.

"The reason I didn't play in the clubs with him was because of the racial thing back then," Paul told me. He recalled having to enter black clubs through back doors and said of Wolf, "It was the same with him if he came up to where we were playing. We would have liked to have [played clubs together], of course. It just wasn't permitted in those days. Not in Memphis, anyhow."

(Before his death in 2003, Paul's credits included not only rockabilly genre pioneering giants the Rock'n'Roll Trio, but international solo work and a 1990s showcase at the Smithsonian Institution.)

The "Elvis was racist" article-of-faith mantra is an offshoot of the larger fiction holding against evidence that rock'n'roll is exclusively black in origin. But Tennessee rockabilly guitar man Carl Perkins did not sound like venerated shouter Big Joe Turner, nor did the frantic storms of Jerry Lee Lewis recall the risible and urbane stylings of Fats Waller -- though all helped develop the music.

In his invaluable volume, "Unsung Heroes of Rock'n'Roll," veteran music writer Nick Tosches noted that the burgeoning sound which spread across 1950s America began in regional pockets and was of mixed parentage.

"Rock'n'roll was not created solely by blacks or whites," wrote Tosches. Earlier, after dispatching mono-racial rock'n'roll creation arguments, the author observed, "One could make just as strong a case for Jews being the central ethnic group in rock'n'roll's early history; for it was they who produced many of the best songs, cultivated much of the greatest talent, and operated the majority of the pioneering record companies."

Difficult as it would be to construct an exhaustive review of early rock'n'roll without citing Doc Pomus, Mort Schuman, Les Bihari, or Sid Nathan, it is telling that many of today's race-as-creative-qualification theorists might not even be able to identify those men, significant to the style's germination though they were.

Rock'n'roll was more than just music, it acted as a socially-unifying wing of the growing civil rights movement, uniting people on the dance floor just as others would come together in polling places. (Not to paint an overly-rosy portrait. It was not the entire solution. But it did help immeasurably to spur the phenomenon.)

It is flatly anti-creative to argue as some do that an individual or community can "steal" art from another, and that instances of blended creation be discouraged and reviled. That's how art is created. One artist inspires another, an idea is raised up, turned around, and new art is born.

Concepts like ownership, territoriality and separatism are wholly foreign to the phenomenon. (Which is not to argue that these invalid notions are still not useful for some; indeed, Mos Def founds the narrative of his 2002 "Rock and Roll" upon that very sand.)

Too, this involves a fundamental issue, that of reason versus emotion. There is evidence -- which merits intellectual regard and can convert the unsympathetic -- and there is self-righteously uncritical passion. It is the latter that animates the "Elvis was racist" lie.

That untruth is comfortable within a cultural posture that pronounces it acceptable and proper for genuine histories of oppression and appropriation to be universally assigned so as to include any specific instance or individual the speaker might select.

It is a model in which an argument's merit turns not on soundness, on actual provability, but merely on the identity and cause of the arguer; in which unfounded partisan sentiment assumes all the legitimacy of objective fact and demands respect as such.

There is a long and reprehensible history of struggling artists being denied rightful due. And both black and white musicians were so victimized, indicating that the matter is one perhaps more of business predation and of class than racial prejudice.

Critics are correct to point out that elements of white-dominated mass popular culture have at times assumed and reinvented black culture-born idioms, while paying neither due acknowledgment nor recompense. Deserving artists went unnoticed -- and that was criminal.

But such critics expose themselves as intellectually illegitimate and unethical when they seek to superimpose that tragic broad reality upon every specific target that might be tactically magnetic, without benefit of evidence. (And yes, it is ironic that while Presley's 1950's white racist detractors despised his music's multi-racial sensibility, many of his contemporary ones castigate him for the identical reason.)

Elvis was one of many talented men and women whose music helped American popular culture become representative of all the country's people. To ignore that today and instead proffer slanderous myths is an affront not only to his contributions and the prize of racial unity but to the intellectual ideals of honesty and reason.

END

MSNBC IS WITH HER
Kristen Welker, Brian Fallon - Stronger Together

Of some 20 online polls available in the hours after the presidential debate at Hofstra University, Donald Trump carried all, often by remarkable margins. Among these were not only ones he would be expected to do well in, given their audiences (such as Drudge and Gateway Pundit), but also more mainstream venues like Time, the Hill, and CNBC. 

But never mind objective facts -- dishonest partisan hacks have paychecks to earn.

The morning after, Hillary's National Press Secretary Brian Fallon laughed to MSNBC, "Even Breitbart...had a poll showing Hillary Clinton was the winner, last night."

He was no doubt referencing a Breitbart/Gravis "flash poll" conducted immediately following the candidate exchange.

Given that Fallon was familiar with that poll, he knew as he spoke to Andrea Mitchell Presents guest host Kristen Welker that Hillary enjoyed only a 5 point lead over Trump (barely outside the margin of error), and that almost no undecideds selected a candidate as a result of watching the debate. 

The 2% of previously undecided who did settle on a choice picked Trump. No undecideds polled chose Fallon/MSNBC's preferred aspirant, Hillary.

Just as Fallon spoke not of these inconvenient for Hillary details, Welker did not ask after them. (A review of tweets she posted during the Hofstra encounter found numerous ones critical of Trump but none similarly negative of Clinton. Positively flabbergasting.)

That Breitbart/Gravis "flash poll" was soundly put away by an online Breitbart poll also conducted in the post-debate hours.

I had cast a Trump poll vote at Breitbart the evening of the debate. And I'd seen then that Trump was far ahead. I rechecked the Breitbart poll results after hearing Fallon on MSNBC; it had by then grown to Trump 75.72%, Clinton 24.28%.

Now, not too much should be made of Brian Fallon's studied misrepresentation. Dishonesty is what he does. But MSNBC headline regurgitator Welker's abetting his dirtiness neatly illustrates a point Trump had made at Hofstra:

"I think the best person in [Hillary's] campaign is the mainstream media!"

end

(Note: In CNN's post-debate poll -- and only in CNN's poll -- Hillary Clinton won out. Clinton News Network on-camera functionaries brayed straight-facedly of the dubious results the following day. But InfoWars noted that while CNN's poll figure included 41% Democrats, it had only 26% Republican representation. That's called rigging. The network is notoriously an ideologically-choreographed island of misfit make-believers whose silly and slanted claims are discounted by thoughtful observers.)

No getaway car fast enough:
Trump attacker Alicia Machado's vile past follows her

During their 9/27 debate at Hofstra University, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of calling swelled beauty pageant contestant Alicia Machado "Miss Piggy."

Machado, currently in the news as a bouncing Hillary advocate, was tenderly interviewed the next evening by anti-Trump CNN host Anderson Cooper. 

He does not seem especially stupid. (On the other hand, Machado certainly does.) So I assume he was quite aware of the ethical wrongness of his generally sympathetic and deferential treatment of Machado, which included granting her uncritical platform.

She spent most of the interview gazing into space and giving rambling, slow-motion responses to Cooper's leading questions about Trump and his alleged "Miss Piggy" quip of decades ago.

But when Cooper lightly broached the topic of Machado's seamy past, which includes an allegation of her abetting a Venezuelan murder and threatening to kill a judge in that country, she was airily dismissive. 

Everyone has a past, she said. Besides, that was a long time ago.

Had he intended to do a good and fair job, Cooper would at that point have asked his moonstruck guest: 'If the passage of years made your past misdeeds unimportant, why do you argue Trump's old words are today noteworthy?'

Of course, the mousy cable news host asked nothing even approaching that. 

Then too, he might have challenged Machado on another point. She makes much of her fine belief that girls and women should live free from threats of abuse.

But how, then, he could have asked, can you support Hillary Clinton, considering her acceptance of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Qatar, and other countries in which the oppression, abuse, rape, and outright murder of girls and women is accepted and a matter of regular occurrence? 

But slicing through the benighted Machado's howlingly obvious, propagandistic chatter to divine objective truths hardly seemed Cooper's ambition. 

The powdered and manicured fellow is, after all, in the employ of CNN. 


I grabbed an excerpt from Machado's Wikipedia page on 9/27. (It may later be cleansed to her deceptive benefit.) 

Personal life[edit]

In January 1998, Machado was accused in court of aiding in an attempted murder in Venezuela, in a shooting for which her boyfriend at the time was indicted. According to the Associated Press, Machado was accused in court documents in Caracas of driving her boyfriend from the scene of the shooting. She was not indicted due to insufficient evidence, although her boyfriend was indicted and the judge stated that there were no alibi witnesses for Machado.^[3][4] According to Reuters, the judge presiding over the case subsequently accused Machado of threatening to kill him during the proceedings via her friendship with the president of Venezuela, saying: "she [said] she would make sure, using her friendship with the president (Rafael Caldera), that my career as judge is ruined and then she would kill me."^[5]

In 2005, Machado was engaged to baseball star Bobby Abreu. During their engagement she was on the Spanish reality show La Granja, where she was filmed on camera during the show having sex with another member of the show, Spanish driver Fernando Acaso. She was expelled from the show and shortly after the video surfaced Abreu ended their engagement.^[6][7]

On June 25, 2008, Machado gave birth to her daughter, Dinorah Valentina. She issued a statement that the father of Dinorah was her best friend Mexican businessman Rafael Hernandez Linares. Mexican news sources, quoting the Attorney General of Mexico, reported that the real father of her child was Gerardo Alvarez-Vazquez, the Mexican drug lord, of the paramilitary drug-cartel Los Negros.^[8] The christening of her child was subsequently attended by the chief members of the Beltran drug cartel (the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel), including the cartel's “boss of bosses” Arturo Beltrán Leyva, his brother Héctor Beltrán Leyva and the drug-lord Edgar Valdez Villarreal, “La Barbie”.^[9]

On November 24, 2010, BBC Mundo confirmed that Machado had to close her Twitter account after writing a tweet that called for "peace between the Chinas", referring to North and South Korea.^[10] Her gaffe unleashed a rush of insulting posts, prompting her to go offline. "I now have a lot of psychopaths on the account and it's best I start another one, kisses," she signed off, according to Venezuelan media.^[11]

In 2016, she has been a strong supporter of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.^[12]

In May 2016, Machado became a U.S. citizen.^[13] She has spoken out many times against Donald Trump, who, during her year as Miss Universe, had called her "Mrs. Piggy" because she gained weight and "Mrs. Housekeeping" because of her Hispanic background (according to the Clinton campaign).^[14] Trump said she was the ^[15]

Machado was mentioned by Hillary Clinton during the first 2016 presidential debate, on September 26.^[15][16]

Full page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Machado

Milo and Steven and me and a pizza

I'm not remarking on my own ponderous girth when I call myself a big fan of Milo Yiannoupolis and Steven Crowder.

The two have in recent years distinguished themselves as particularly wise and witty commentators. Their piercings of liberal pomposity (especially of campus-crawling SJWs) are both entertaining and, no less importantly, educational. 

Milo and Steven offer perspectives too seldom heard in media. I admire them and recommend their wonderful work. 

An illustration of the effectiveness of Milo's own acerbic, in-pocket observations and increasing influence and popularity -- as well as of liberal social media gate-keepers' clampdown inclinations -- is his recent banning from Twitter for criticizing small-scale talent, feminist comedic actor Leslie Jones. 

I would ask whomever owns Twitter next week: If one can't ridicule the obviously deserving, what the hell?!

And at his site, LouderWithCrowder, Steven presents short documentary films and in-studio streams-of-hip-consciousness that at once point up the pitfalls of the annoyingly politically correct and provide laughs for the intellectually discerning and just plain common sensible.

Another plus, for me, is Milo and Steven's untiring advocacy of the Donald Trump candidacy. I am myself a longtime supporter of Trump and expect to soon see him sitting behind that grand Oval Office desk. Pretty clearly, Yiannoupolis and Crowder are at the cutting edge of a popular movement surging away from liberal victimhood politics and toward a period of no-nonsense American rebirth.

But, about my fatness...

I should first note that I could not be more in agreement with Milo and Steven that "body positivity" mania embracing unhealthy conditions and choices is a clear negative. Its deceitful 'everyone is beautiful' mantra will doubtless prove a funeral dirge for many who will pass from waving slogan-crammed placards to early dirt because of their refusal to accept objective medical realities.

Admittedly, I would not be at all saddened to see Rosie O'Donnell and Lena Dunham belly-flopping into mere unpleasant recollections.

(Here, I remember the song "A Knife and Fork" Rockpile cut for their one, 1980s LP: "Girl, you're gonna let a knife and fork dig your grave / You eat every kind of food, you ain't nothin' but a slave...If you don't change some of your ways / girl, you're gonna shorten all of your days.")

Bookstore shelves are jammed with weight loss guides. I have yet to see even one 'how to get fat' book.

I do, though, sometimes perceive in Milo and Steven's commentaries an unconstructive mocking of fat people who, by sincerely trying to improve themselves, implicitly acknowledge the wrongness of bigness. 

Not everyone is in optimum trim. Staying in an ill state (even defiantly celebrating it as an "identity") can rightly be decried. But pursuing needed self-uplift (no winch jokes) hardly merits the same disdain.

I dig that tactical fat-shaming kinda has to be upsetting to be effective. But also that its not uncommon for larger-than-life ( I said, no winch jokes) personalities to make calculatedly provocative statements for the purpose of drawing spotlight.

But when one opts more loudly for controversialness than constructiveness, ticket-sales may see short-term benefit but practical effectiveness -- to say nothing of reputational distinction -- can suffer irredeemably (to borrow a Hillary slur).

A troubling question now presents itself: By stating my overwhelming ideological consonance with Milo and Steven, despite being four-squarely against their occasional cruelty-as-cleverness broadsides, am I trying to have my pizza and eat it, too?

NYT's Kristof doffs principle for pantsuit

So assiduous and hand-wringingly impassioned has been New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in rightly condemning other nations' barbaric oppression and torture of girls and women that, if you didn't monitor his other persuasions, you would probably assume him to be constant.

True, he has for years shined observational light on horrific sexual abuses, instances of unimaginably wicked physical persecution, and legal and cultural countenancing of backward peoples' wickedness.

But then, he as good as enabled future sick doings by throwing such prominent newsprint influence as he has behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Apparently, Kristof is quite able to back-pocket any concern he might feel about the plights of women and girls abused.

Hillary Clinton, of course, has for decades enjoyed the overflowing patronage of foreign nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, and others. In them, women are routinely oppressed in matters cultural. political, and economic. Rapes, honor killings, beatings, denial of human rights, and odious regulation of females' mundane actions like driving and travel are accepted across those primitive and terrible lands.

And in a particularly nasty moment, Hillary once laughed while recalling to an interviewer that a grown man she'd defended, of whose guilt in the rape of a 12 year-old she felt assured, had deceitfully passed a polygraph. 

Any objections Nicholas Kristof might have to any of these do not preclude his acceptance of the Clinton candidacy. Principles, he seems to feel, are to be restrained within column space and not allowed to interfere with political machinations.

Nor will he ever grow lonely in the wretched rank of abuse enabler. (I don't suppose the easy ever want for company.)

Like Kristof, Hillary's other awkward cheerleaders would in any other circumstance proclaim at top blare volume their own pretended goodness on such matters. 

Included are Senators Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and Kirsten Gilibrand; commentators Lawrence O'Donnell (MSNBC), Megyn Kelly (Fox), and Don Lemon (CNN); and such largely-irrelevant-beyond-their-yards show business sorts as Mark Ruffalo, Rob Reiner, and professional feminism-bannerers Lena Dunham and Beyonce.

Their consciences are apparently equipped with mute buttons.

Kristof has on rare occasion whispered tissue-gentle criticism of Hillary. But considering his more frequent and full-throated shouts of damnation at Trump, those only half count.

He may well number persuasion among his columnist ambitions. If so, he's succeeded in a way surely unintended.

For Nicholas Kristof has persuaded discerning readers that he does not merit their confidence.

When I read that Bruce Springsteen told a Rolling Stone interviewer that he thinks Donald Trump a "moron" who pushes "white nationalism," I considered getting rid of any Springsteen recordings in my collection. 

Then I realized I have no such recordings in my collection. Never have.

Of Hillary-Age Hippies
Venomousness as virtue

                                              (from freedomfightersfoundation.org)

It vomits ugliness for spectator effect, the intellectually scrambled SJW subculture once found exclusively on diapered campuses. But, like the freakish B-movie lab specimen that shatters its jar and assumes monstrous proportions, it increasingly slithers among us.

Twenty-something aggressors throw back their heads and bellow their 'virtue signaling.' 'The louder I shout,' they seem to reason, 'and the more I hurl eternally damning invective at naysayers, the more sterling a person I shall be considered.'

Puerile websites are today acrawl with tender-skulled, bumper-sticker brown shirts. What might have root in actual goodness rages now as entirely gaga spectacle.

Cavorting, raggedy miscreants screech their razored vituperation, slashing and howling as if their ostentatious exclusionary posturing were a medallic affirmation, one before which all others must bend knees, allowing cultural predominance without reasoned objection.

(And do not waste moments pondering the paucity of recommendable character that allows them to chant of diversity while determinedly crushing contrary thought beneath Hot Topic jackboot-heel.)

When callow dyspeptics throw spindly arms around the 'I am the judge of all' role, turning exaggerated and nasty-spirited rhetorical
handsprings for the approval of fellow SJWs, any claims to moral rectitude are without credibility.

Adults know it is more reasonable to mind one's own behavior, perhaps influencing by example. 

But that recognizes the rights of oppositionally-minded others. And it is simply too factually tolerant for squealing, technicolor cretins who furiously heft the tolerance banner without for a moment believing even a bit of its message.

(Two real perils posed by placard-waving SJWs: a clampdown
on free speech protections and the deriding of our traditionally accepted 'innocent until proven guilty' judicial standard. Popular support for these time-honored safeguards must be vigorously enunciated, but practical rejection of them would constitute massive, fundamental action beyond the abilities of trend-grasping squawkers.)

So, by all means, heap critiques on their showy personal foulness. I certainly do. But do not judge too harshly SJWs' ill-considered inclinations. They march in an attitudinal environ some of us may once have known.

Malcolm X sagely cautioned, "Don't be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today." 



end

'The news is what we say it is'
mainstream media embraces bias as virtue


Any overview of mainstream media presidential election coverage that does not at least implicitly acknowledge that body's pronounced bias against Donald Trump should be disregarded by readers pursuing accuracy.

Reporters, in the main, long ago dropped their note pads and took up torches.

This is cowards' warfare in which slurs, misinformation, and scantily-veiled Democrat talking points are hurled from the cover of computer-stuffed offices and milling pool-swarms, and where innocent interviews can be deceitfully resculpted into misrepresentative silhouettes with the schemed flick of a tape editor's wrist.

In his 8/21 New York Post column, Michael Goodwin wrote that, "The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America...The largest broadcast networks - CBS, NBC, and ABC - and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the oval office has no precedent."

Goodwin hardly overstated the problem. Nor was he alone in seeing it.

That same month, Justin Raimondo penned an LA Times essay on that corrupt business. "The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they've lost the ability to assess events rationally."

Inebriated by unmoderated self-righteousness, numerous press voices have in recent days openly advocated reportorial bias as a positive virtue:

Univision's Jorge Ramos, writing in the 8/23 Time, lectured that for "journalists, politicians, voters...neutrality is not an option." 

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times media writer, cast it all as somehow a morality question. "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?,,,you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the last half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career...You would move closer than you've ever been to oppositional...But the question everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don't, what should take their place?"

Rutenberg doesn't entertain the option that non-opinion journalists so firmly wed to extremely partisan perspectives that their reporting may be tainted be transferred to different stories. Nor that anyone "grappling" with doubts about objectivity as a standard should instead pursue a public relations career. 

Political bias, per Rutenberg, is not to be criticized as disserving journalistic enterprise - and the public - but instead championed as moral apotheosis.

(Rutenberg himself notes another instance of a media figure advocating bias. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked a press performance question predicated on subjective derogating: "How balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational?")

The mainstream media's unabashed pro-Hillary parading high-steps outside op-ed pages, where prejudices are expected, and across ideally straight news sections.

A July Harvard study found that coverage of Trump had shifted from majority positive during Republican primaries to majority negative after the general election season was underway, 

And specific examples of media bias in favor of Clinton and against Trump are numerous; notable, glaring instances can be found here http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-raimondo-trump-media-bias-20160802-snap-story.html, here http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/16/cnn-says-trump-bashing-the-media-is-like-saddam-hussein-destroying-democracy/, here http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/liberal-media-promotes-veiled-death-threats-trump/,
and here https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/media-bias-of-the-day-8-5-2016.

Several state and national polls record Trump leading Clinton, sometimes by decisive margins. That would indicate public opinion in favor of his ideas and proposals. 

But the press, undeterred, continues force-pumping artificial oxygen into the sickbed candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Reporters seem to share her smug, condescending dismissal of tens of millions of Americans as "deplorables," not meriting serious regard by their sniffing betters. 

Unsurprisingly, given the media's chin-raised and haughty malpractice, only 32% of the public has a positive view of it, according to a recent Gallup poll. 

An independent press free from even a hint of bias is crucial to maintaining credible democracy. Readers must trust that it will investigate without favor and fully inform the public. Then, having reached conclusions based on consideration of all relevant information, voters are equipped to chart their civil government's course responsibly and to their preference.

That is the ideal. But it is effectively strangled when reporters and editors act as vested partisans, inserting their fancies between story and reader. By the doing, they cast down their proper role as objective observers to take up the gaudy banner of story participants.

(And no, this is not Hunter S.Thompson-styled Gonzo Journalism. Just old-fashioned unethicalness.)

Cable news celebrities and inky proselytizers, having publicly doffed their profession's traditional principles and modeled instead the flimsy fashions of the fanatic, no longer deserve respect as advocates for the public interest. 

The mainstream media's enthusiastic political slant is so strikingly exercised as to be obvious to all with eyes. And it is inconceivable that it will ever again be trusted by fair-minded citizens.

There does have to be a morning after.


end

NBC's Katy Tur will do anything for professional advancement. And by "anything," I mean Keith Olbermann.

Hillary's snoot society vs punch clock America
by DC Larson

Hillary Clinton's recent slurring of millions who support Donald Trump illustrated her contempt for average citizens. Her nose aloft, she dripped scripted scurriliousness on a hospitable home court of mega-dollar donkey donors:

"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables.' Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it."

Clinton's haughty dismissal of many of our nation's voters brought swift and rightful common sense condemnation. But within days, that censure was countered, in some morally coarse quarters, by telling applause.

It became apparent that Hillary was not the only snob on the red  star carpet.

Her scorn of regular Americans was saluted by a spangled and clumsy celebrity kickline whose figurants are, ironically, afforded scented-powder privilege by the very hoi polloi at whom they sneer.

George Takei, Debra Messing, Kerry Washington, Patton Oswalt, Rob Reiner, and Chrissy Teigan are but an unseemly handful from Hillary's snoot society. 

And Clinton's bigotry against the hardworking also found slavering champions in pillowed, air-conditioned inky precincts. The New York Times, Huffington Post, Salon, MSNBC, Washington Post, and CNN all eagerly enlisted.

Their enthusiastic bear-hug of Clinton's chuckling classism underscored their own preferred distance from the masses and our interests.

(An earlier manifestation of Clintonites' elitist inclination was the smug deriding by airy commentators of some voters' lack of formal higher education. As if democracy weren't properly a mechanism for self-determination by all, but instead the harbored electoral gewgaw of lettered cake-eaters.)

Of course, Hillary Clinton and her sniffing, advantage-bubbled fan club are wrong to underhand the racism brickbat at the legions of decent Americans supporting the Trump-Pence ticket. Good people who would never sympathize with despicable bigots, march in their nefarious number, or in any manner grant currency to their wretched cause. 

I know that, because I am one of those Trump supporters. And I resent like hell Clinton's indiscriminate smear.

I've been in an interracial marriage for decades. My wife and I have been confronted with racism in its real-world forms --not the PC hyphenated, "safe space," cultural Marxist imitation so bannered about on cable news panels, diapered campuses, and at Soros-sponsored "shut it down" street circuses.

Over decades of independent study of racist dogma and hate groups both domestic and international, I've learned what the actual, vicious foulness is. 

Both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have denounced David Duke, as I'd hoped they would. And they have renounced any and all support by racists who, hungering after notice, have attempted without invitation to attach themselves to the campaign. 

"I disavowed him [Duke]," Trump told MSNBC's Morning Joe, in March. "I disavowed the KKK. Do you want me to do it for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him, now.

And Pence, during a September 13 CNN interview, reiterated that  disavowal. "Donald Trump and I have denounced David Duke repeatedly. We have said that we do not want his support, and we don't want the support of people who think like him."

Case closed.

("Deplorable," by the way, is actually an apt description of the toil by some in both mainstream media and politics to prop up and publicize otherwise obscure hate groups and
spokesmen, effectively promoting the rot whose infamy they pretend to decry.

Just as I know what genuine racism is, I know what it is not. It sure as hell is not the Trump-supporting legions of police, carpenters, cab drivers, electricians, farmers, emergency personnel, office workers, and so many other common Americans who put in the hours, create the wealth, and pay the taxes.

I know about them, too. I'm a former chief steward (UFCW), who's defended the legitimate rights of working men and women. I know well what shop floors look like, because I spent decades sweating on them.

Clinton's purposeful slurring of regular folks resonated with her inflated-head, champagne-and-limo devotees. They seem of the fanciful notion that we should remain in the ship's belly, manning the oars while they, more clever than we, strut about topside and chart a course beneficent only to themselves.

Her ugly words made manifest the gravity of the upcoming election. And also our duty in it.

This is more than a struggle between two candidates. It is one for political, economic, and cultural predominance between an arrogant upper strata of self-infatuated, imitation aristocrats and the far greater in number, if less connected to power, common people who built America.

We're the grassroots movement that will elect Donald Trump. We're not racists. Not insignificant. And certainly not deplorable.

We're average Americans. Making history.