OH YES HE DID: Nebraska Democrat Party Official FIRED After Being Caught On Tape Wishing Scalise was Dead
Posted: June 23, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Health and Social Issues, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Al Franken, Alexandria, American Civil Liberties Union, Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Jane Kleeb, Nebraska, Omaha, Omaha World-Herald, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Phil Montag, Republican Party (United States), Virginia 1 Comment
“This motherf—er, his whole job is like to get people, convince Republicans to f—ing kick people off f—ing healthcare. I’m glad he got shot.”
Josh Delk reports: An official appointed by the Nebraska Democratic Party was ousted by the state party chairwoman on Thursday after the discovery of a recording in which he allegedly celebrated the shooting of a U.S. House Republican.
In the recording, posted without context on an advocacy site, the official, Phil Montag, is referring to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) when he says, “This motherf—er, his whole job is like to get people, convince Republicans to f—ing kick people off f—ing healthcare. I’m glad he got shot.”
[ALSO SEE – Caught On Tape: Democrat Official Says He’s Glad Steve Scalise Got Shot]
Montag did not deny that the voice in the recording is his but said he believed it had been edited to take his words out of context.
Nebraska Democratic Chairwoman Jane Kleeb fired Montag, voluntary co-chairman of the party’s technology committee, as soon as she heard the incriminating recording. Kleeb told the Omaha World-Herald that her report to the police about the conversation was out of concern that it represented a possible death threat.
“This is the first I am hearing of this,” Kleeb said by email to the paper. “As soon as I heard it, I sent it to the [party] officers and then sent an email to Phil Montag, informing him I am removing him from his appointed position as co-chair of the Technology Committee.”
Read the rest of this entry »
BREAKING: James T. Hodgkinson Carried Handwritten ‘Political Assassination List’
Posted: June 16, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Alexandria, Assassination, Donald Trump, James T. Hodgkinson, Member of Congress, Mo Brooks, Party leaders of the United States House of Representatives, Republican Party (United States), Steve Scalise, United States Capitol Police, United States House of Representatives 1 Comment
Peter Hasson reports: James T. Hodgkinson, the shooter who opened fire on dozens of Republican congressmen and staffers at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday, had a list of Republican names in his pocket that was recovered by the FBI, The Daily Caller has learned.
“The list was written out on notepad paper and found in the shooter’s pocket, according to multiple sources with intimate knowledge of the situation.”
The news that the shooter had a list of names suggests the shooting was not a random outburst, but instead appears to be a premeditated political assassination.
The list was written out on notepad paper and found in the shooter’s pocket, according to multiple sources with intimate knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the investigation. The list of names included Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, South Carolina Rep. Jeff Duncan and Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, TheDC has confirmed.
The FBI has contacted at least one of the three congressmen to inform them of their inclusion on the list.
None of the three offices would offer comments on the record when asked about the names on the list. Brooks and Franks’ office further directed all inquiries to the Capitol police, who declined to comment. The FBI’s Washington field office, which is handling the investigation, also provided no comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
[Read the exclusive story here, at The Daily Caller]
All three representatives are members of the House Freedom Caucus, which contains the lower chamber’s most conservative members. Both Duncan and Brooks attended Wednesday’s baseball practice.
U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) talks to reporters after a gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress during a baseball practice near Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S., June 14, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Duncan said he spoke with Hodgkinson briefly before the shooting, when the would-be assassin asked him in the parking lot if the players on the field were Republicans or Democrats. Read the rest of this entry »
OH YES HE DID: Politico Reporter Trots Out Bogus Steve Scalise ‘Racial Issues’ Following Shooting
Posted: June 14, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Alexandria, Donald Trump, Member of Congress, Mo Brooks, Party leaders of the United States House of Representatives, President of the United States, Republican Party (United States), Smear, Steve Scalise, The Washington Post, United States Capitol Police, Virginia Leave a comment
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., did not deliver a speech to a white supremacist group. Instead, he attended a separate, fiscal policy event in the same hotel. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Becket Adams writes: Remember when Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was the victim of a bogus news cycle alleging he once played footsie with white supremacists?
We do.
That debunked story from 2014 was resurrected very briefly Wednesday morning not long after it was reported that Scalise, who serves now as the House majority whip, and others were shot in Alexandria, Va., as they practiced for the upcoming congressional baseball game.
News of the shooting dominated headlines and newsrooms all morning as members of Congress halted everything to comment and grieve on the matter.
Here’s how Politico’s John Bresnahan described one particular moment in Congress: “Members surrounding [House Speaker Paul Ryan] on the floor, including [Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La.], who helped Scalise out when he had problems over racial issues.”
Ah, no. The supposed issue to which Bresnahan referred is not what it sounds like. That is, he made it sound a lot worse than it really is.
For the unfamiliar, “racial issues” is an irresponsibly vague reference to a moment in 2014 when Scalise was accused of having once delivered an address as an “honored guest” to a conference of white supremacists.
The rumor originated with a blogger named Lamar White, whose main source was a comment thread at a neo-Nazi website, and it soon spread to major newsrooms, including The Washington Post and Politico. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Barone: Looking for Fascism in America? Look Left, on Campus
Posted: March 7, 2017 Filed under: Education, History, Terrorism, Think Tank | Tags: Alexandria, American Conservative Union, Berkeley, Breitbart News, Broad Institute, Campus, CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, Liberal Fascism, Marxism, Milo Yiannopoulos, Radical Left, University, University of California, Violence, Virginia, Weimar Republic, White House Leave a comment
Michael Barone
writes: Something like that is happening now — but the violence is coming from leftists, not Trumpists. Take the University of California, Berkeley, [long pause] please. That’s where a speech to the Young Republicans by rightist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was shut down by a screaming mob on February 1, as this eyewitness account from Power Line’s Steven Hayward records. Not only was the speech shut down, but gangs of ski-masked and bandana-wearing protesters roamed the streets just off campus with sledgehammers, smashing ATM machines. In one instance, Hayward reports, a 62-year-old Republican who voted for Hillary Clinton held up a sign reading “1st Amendment Protects All Speech” and, on the obverse side, “Even Milo’s” was punched in the nose and dropped to the ground.
Where were the police? Not in a position to help—by design. In this “lethal, horror situation,” said University of 
California Berkeley campus police chief Margo Bennett, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint.”
[Order Jonah Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” from Amazon]
They made just one arrest. As for City of Berkeley police, according to the San Francisco Chronicle they came equipped with riot gear, but “as the violence escalated, officers pulled back.” Police on a balcony ordered rioters to disperse, but made no move to stop them, supposedly to prevent injury to “innocent protesters and bystanders.” City police made no arrests. “Our primary objective with the resources we had was the protection of life.” Read the rest of this entry »
R.I.P. Jake Brewer: Cyclist, White House Staffer, Husband of Mary Katharine Ham, Dies on Charity Ride After Collision with Car
Posted: September 20, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Health and Social Issues, White House | Tags: Alexandria, Barack Obama, Bicycle, Cancer, Chief technology officer, Double-yellow line, Jake Brewer, Mary Katharine Ham, Office of Science and Technology Policy, The Ride to Conquer Cancer, The Washington Post, White House 1 Comment
Our heart goes out to the family of Jake Brewer, this is very sad news…
Martin Weil reports: A White House staff member was killed Saturday in Howard County while taking part in a bicycle ride to raise money to combat cancer.
Police said Jacob Thomas Brewer, 34, of Alexandria, died in the Mount Airy area about 3:40 p.m. when his bicycle went out of control at a sharp curve on Old Frederick Road. It crossed the double yellow line and collided with an oncoming vehicle, police said.
The Web site for the Ride to Conquer Cancer reported “a fatal accident involving” a participant in the two-day, 150-mile ride, which began Saturday in the District. The Web site had warned that roads would be open to traffic….(more)
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey writes:
It is with great shock and sadness that we offer our condolences and prayers to the family of Jake Brewer, the husband of Mary Katharine Ham, and the father of Georgia and a child on the way, as well as his colleagues and friends at the White House and Change.org. Jake died as a result of an accident while participating in the Ride to Conquer Cancer bicycle rally and fundraiser. He gave his life while trying to help others, a quality that Jake’s friends say is defining about him. Jake passed away yesterday at 34 years of age.
Mary Katharine published this statement on Instagram, along with a picture of their growing family:
Nothing we can add would be adequate to the profound loss and sorrow which Mary Katharine, their families and their friends are suffering at the moment. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of them, and we’d ask our readers to join us….(more here)
Please contribute to the @jakebrewer memorial education fund, to help provide for his two beautiful children: https://t.co/Wc5bibd6SI
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) September 20, 2015
At TheHill, Timothy Cama has this:
“Simply put, Jake was one of the best,” Obama said in a Sunday statement.
“Armed with a brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back, Jake devoted his life to empowering people and making government work better for them. He worked to give citizens a louder voice in our society. He engaged our striving immigrants. He pushed for more transparency in our democracy. And he sought to expand opportunity for all.”
Obama said he was “heartbroken” by Brewer’s death….(read more)
(continued from the Washington Post)…Brewer’s mother said he was in the fundraising ride because of a close friend who was a cancer patient. He “lived life large and tended to live life for other people,” Lori Brewer Collins said. Read the rest of this entry »
Minimum Wage Effect? January to June Job Losses for Seattle Area Restaurants (-1,300) Largest Since Great Recession
Posted: August 10, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Think Tank | Tags: Alexandria, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Consumer Price Index, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Great Recession, Inflation, Minimum wage, San Francisco, Seattle, Sticky (economics), United States, Virginia, Wage Leave a comment
Seattle minimum wage hike is getting off to a pretty bad start.
In June of last year, the Seattle city council passed a $15 minimum wage law to be phased in over time, with the first increase to $11 an hour starting on April 1, 2015. What effect will the eventual 58% increase in labor costs have on small businesses, including area restaurants? It’s too soon to tell for sure, but there is already some evidence that the recent minimum wage hike to $11 an hour, along with the pending increase of an additional $4 an hour by 2017 for some businesses, has started having a negative effect on restaurant jobs in the Seattle area. The chart above shows that the Emerald City MSA started experiencing a decline in restaurant employment around the first of the year (when the state minimum wage increased to $9.47 per hour, the highest state minimum wage in the country), and the 1,300 job loss between January and June is the largest decline over that period since 2009 during the Great Recession (data here). The loss of 1,000 restaurant jobs in May following the minimum wage increase in April was the largest one month job decline since a 1,300 drop in January 2009, again during the Great Recession. In contrast to the January-June loss of restaurant jobs in the Seattle area: a) restaurant employment nationally increased by 130,700 jobs (and by 1.2%) during that same period (data here), b) overall employment in the Seattle MSA increased 1.2% and by 21,800 jobs (data here) and c) non-Seattle MSA restaurant employment in Washington increased 3.2% and by 2,800 jobs (data here). Read the rest of this entry »
Claude Monet Born Today in 1840
Posted: November 22, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History | Tags: Alexandria, Artist, Brush, Claude Monet, Giverny, John Wronn, Painting, Photography, Water Lilies, Water Lilies (1919) 1 Comment
Claude Monet, born today in 1840, painted Water Lilies in the last decade of his life.
Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1914-26. Photograph by John Wronn
The Collection | Claude Monet. Water Lilies. 1914-26
Can Beauty Help Us To Become Better People?
Posted: February 16, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Reading Room | Tags: Alexandria, Apollo, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Musée Condé, Schiller 1 Comment
A kind of beauty; the port at Alexandria, Egypt, 1998. Photo by Stuart Franklin/Magnum
True beauty pleases the eye and the mind – but can it help us to become better people?
John Armstrong writes: The only popular thought about beauty today, the one that has the widest currency in the world, is the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. It’s a kindly notion. It seeks to make peace between people who have very different tastes. People are delighted by wildly variant things and that’s how it should be, the thinking goes – so don’t get worked up trying to figure out which things are beautiful.
Yet the success of this generous approach keeps attention away from deeper, more important questions. Whether it is a Baroque Cathedral, the face of a child, or the coast of Sweden seen from a plane window, we have all had the mysterious experience of finding something beautiful. But what is actually going on when we find these things beautiful?
[On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (English and German Edition) at Amazon]
In 1795, the German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller published a book with a fearsome title – On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. It has never become well-known, which is a pity, because it contains some of our most useful insights into the nature and value of beauty. Schiller’s starting point is an analysis of the human condition. He wants to understand our delight in what we find beautiful. Instead of asking which things are beautiful, Schiller is curious about what is going on in us when we respond with this distinctive, intimate thrill and enthusiasm that leads us to say ‘that’s beautiful’. Different things might provoke this response in different people. But why do we have it at all?
Portrait of Madame Devaucay by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1807. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo by Getty
Marxist Historian Eric Hobsbawm’s Estate: Unsurprisingly, He Managed to Accumulate Massive Personal Wealth
Posted: January 11, 2014 Filed under: Global, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Alexandria, Eric Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm, London, Marxism, Ralph Miliband, Royal Free Hospital, University of Warwick 1 Comment
The inevitably impoverished consequences of Marxism are for the little people. The dirty little secret of Marxists is that they like accumulating private wealth just like any other rational person. Sometimes, quite a lot of it.
- Hobsbawm, who died in October 2012, was one of Britain’s most eminent historians, but was widely criticised for his defence of communist regimes
- Accused of being apologist for the totalitarian evils of Soviet communism
- According to Brighton probate office records, he left assets of £1,835,341
Leading Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm left more than £1.8million in his will, it has been revealed
John Stevens writes: Leading Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm left more than £1.8million in his will, it has been revealed.
Hobsbawm, who died aged 95 in October 2012, was one of Britain’s most eminent historians, but he was widely criticised for his defence of communist regimes.
He was accused of being an apologist for the totalitarian evils of Soviet communism and labelled a ‘useful idiot’.
According to records held at the Brighton probate office, Hobsbawm – who joined the Communist Party at 14 and once described himself as an ‘unrepentant communist’ – left an estate with assets totalling £1,835,341.
The bulk is to be held in trust, with the income going to his second wife Marlene. The couple were married for 50 years.
Hobsbawm left the capital of the trust to the University of Warwick and his two children from his second marriage – digital entrepreneur Andy, 50, and PR guru Julia.
