Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Model Kelly Klein Walks Streets of London Wearing Body Paint (VIDEO)

That is crazy!

At London's Daily Mail, "It's a bit nippy outside! Model struts down a busy high street in a painted top... but will anyone notice her bare chest? Body paint artist Sarah Ashleigh spent two hours painting the fake top on model; Beauty Kelly Klein then walked past dozens of people in Kensington, London."

Also at FHM, "Model Kelly Klein Walking Through the Streets of London in Just Body Paint is an Attention Grabber."

Yeah, that'll grab your attention alright, lol.

Unindicted Council on American-Islamic Relations Furious After President Trumps Bans Muslim Immigration

Ha!

This is too good, at Pamela's:

Trump May Lift Ban on C.I.A. 'Black Site' Prisons

Wow!

This is major!

At the New York Times, "Trump Poised to Lift Ban on C.I.A. ‘Black Site’ Prisons":

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping executive order that would clear the way for the C.I.A. to reopen overseas “black site” prisons, like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects before former President Barack Obama shut them down.

President Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” and obtained by The New York Times, would also undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Mr. Obama put in place in response to policies of the George W. Bush administration.

If Mr. Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Mr. Obama’s directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in American custody. That would be another step toward reopening secret prisons outside of the normal wartime rules established by the Geneva Conventions, although statutory obstacles would remain.

Mr. Obama tried to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and refused to send new detainees there, but the draft order directs the Pentagon to continue using the site “for the detention and trial of newly captured” detainees — including not just more people suspected of being members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, like the 41 remaining detainees, but also Islamic State detainees. It does not address legal problems that might raise.

The draft order does not direct any immediate reopening of C.I.A. prisons or revival of torture tactics, which are now banned by statute. But it sets up high-level policy reviews to make further recommendations in both areas to Mr. Trump, who vowed during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”

Elisa Massimino, the director of Human Rights First, denounced the draft order as “flirting with a return to the ‘enhanced interrogation program’ and the environment that gave rise to it.” She noted that numerous retired military leaders have rejected torture as “illegal, immoral and damaging to national security,” and she said that many of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees had seemed to share that view in their confirmation testimony.

“It would be surprising and extremely troubling if the national security cabinet officials were to acquiesce in an order like that after the assurances that they gave in their confirmation hearings,” she said.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to an email inquiring about the draft order, including when Mr. Trump may intend to sign it. But the order was accompanied by a one-page statement that criticized the Obama administration for having “refrained from exercising certain authorities” about detainees it said were critical to defending the country from “radical Islamism.”

Specifically, the draft order would revoke two executive orders about detainees that Mr. Obama issued in January 2009, shortly after his inauguration. One was Mr. Obama’s directive to close the Guantánamo prison and the other was his directive to end C.I.A. prisons, grant Red Cross access to all detainees and limit interrogators to the Army Field Manual techniques.

In their place, Mr. Trump’s draft order would resurrect a 2007 executive order issued by President Bush. It responded to a 2006 Supreme Court ruling about the Geneva Conventions that had put C.I.A. interrogators at risk of prosecution for war crimes, leading to a temporary halt of the agency’s “enhanced” interrogations program.

Mr. Bush’s 2007 order enabled the agency to resume a form of the program by specifically listing what sorts of prisoner abuses counted as war crimes. That made it safe for interrogators to use other tactics, like extended sleep deprivation, that were not on the list. Mr. Obama revoked that order as part of his 2009 overhaul of detention legal policy...
Keep reading.

America's Second Civil War

From Dennis Prager (I love Dennis Prager), at RealClearPolitics (via Stephen Green, at Instapundit):
It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents' offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America's Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech "hate speech." To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot...
Keep reading.

It's TNAC, "The New American Civil War," which I've been arguing for a while now.

President Trump's Executive Actions Bring Progressives Back to Earth

This is great.

At Roll Call:

President Donald Trump’s opponents spent inauguration weekend invigorated by their show of strength in Washington and around the country, but Trump brought them back down to earth Monday and Tuesday with a couple flicks of his pen on executive actions that struck against much of what they hold dear.

Trump signed executive actions Tuesday forcing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to go forward. Years of progressive organizing against Keystone on the grounds of environmental and climate concerns succeeded in getting former President Barack Obama to cancel it in 2015.

A ferocious direct action campaign by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe attempted to physically block the pipeline from being built on their land. In addition to concerns about the climate and the use of fossil fuels generally, activists aimed to prevent their water from being made unusable by oil spills. The Army Corps of Engineers refused permission to extend the pipeline in December, giving activists hope that the fight was won.

Now those victories appear to have been temporary...


Twitter Celebrates Diverse Oscar Nominations After 2 Years of #OscarsSoWhite

At the New York Observer.

Whatever.

I actually want to see "La La Land," but I'm afraid I'll be called racist for patronizing the all-white leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (the movie garnered 14 nomination, tying a record, which I'm sure is racist too).


Ted Cruz Owns Deadspin

Heh, this is pretty good.

At Red State:


Tuesday, January 24, 2017

White House Press Room Seating Chart

The Associated Press always gets front and center, although this year the organization was dissed on getting the first question, a first.

At Politico, "The White House press room seating chart."


Amber Lee's Partly Cloudy Forecast

Looks like we'll be getting a break from the rains. We're more than double the average rain totals this season, which is awesome for tackling the drought.

Here's the lovely Ms. Amber:



#PresidentTrump Expected to Sign Order Banning Migrants from the Middle East

Well, it's a limited, temporary order.

But's it's exactly what he said he'd do during the campaign. Word is he'll sign an order to start building the wall with Mexico tomorrow as well.

Red meat, baby. Red meat.

All those protests, and the progressive marchers will be seething this week, as their most cherished policy priorities get smashed like a cheap piece of pottery.


Rebecca Traister: The Women's March Was an 'Earth Shaking Triumph'

Leftists seem to have abandoned any talk about moderating their message, about reaching out to working class white voters, especially blue-collar men.

Rebecca Traister's freakin' hardcore, man. I read her piece on abortion rights a couple of weeks ago and it as like manifesto for infant genocide.

In any case, here's her latest, "The Future of the Left Is Female: Women’s rights are human rights, and women leaders are progressive leaders:

A lot of people predicted that women were going to change America’s political history in January of 2017. But pretty much no one anticipated that they’d be doing it as leaders of the resistance. On Saturday, millions of women and men — organized largely by young women of color — staged the largest one-day demonstration in political history, a show of international solidarity that let the world know that women will be heading up the opposition to Donald Trump and the white patriarchal order he represents. Women — and again, especially women of color, always progressivism’s most reliable and least recognized warriors, the women who did the most to stop the rise of Trump — were the ones taking progressive politics into the future.

The Women’s March, dreamed up by a couple of women with no organizing experience in the feverish, grief-addled hours after Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, and then organized by an expanded team in the span of about ten weeks, was an earth-shaking triumph.

According to early reports, it drew somewhere north of 680,000 to Washington, D.C., 750,000 to Los Angeles, 400,000 to New York City, 250,000 to Chicago, 100,000 each to Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, the Twin Cities, and Portland Oregon; and crowds of thousands to smaller cities, including 11,000 to Ann Arbor, 5,000 to Lexington, Kentucky, 8,000 to Honolulu, and 20,000 to Houston. There were 2,000 protesters in Anchorage, Alaska, and 1,000 in Jackson, Mississippi. Demonstrations took place on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

This mass turnout in support of liberty, sorority, and equality was conceived by women, led by women, and staged in the name of women. It also drew millions of men. It was a forceful pushback to the notion that because a woman just lost the American presidency, women should not be leading the politics of the left. Women, everyone saw on Saturday, are already leading the left, reframing what has historically been understood as the women’s movement as the face and body and energy of what is now the Resistance.

Plenty of factors made this effort so successful, but perhaps the biggest was the shock and horror that jolted portions of a long-complacent population awake after the election of Donald Trump. As it turns out, sometimes, It Takes a Villain. We’ve got one now; he lives in the White House, has the nuclear codes, and spent Saturday defending the size of his, er, inauguration crowds. In his first weeks in office, he might very well nominate an anti-choice Supreme Court nominee, begin deportations, repeal health-care reform, start the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, and defund Planned Parenthood. He has already reinstated the Global Gag Rule.

Yes, Trump exposed himself as a villain long before the election, and for many on the day of the march, the question was: Where was this energy before November 8? Clearly, the vast majority of Saturday’s crowd had been Hillary Clinton supporters, at the very least in the general election if not in the primary. But it is also true that some of the apathy, some of the complacency, that many critics took as a reflection of Clinton’s “flawed” candidacy stemmed instead from the sense that Americans didn’t really need to panic or take to the streets on her behalf because she was going to win. She was going to win, the assumption went, because of course we are evolved enough that this guy could never get elected president and thus we were free to focus on the imperfections of the woman who was going to be the president.

Through this lens, those who had been out there before the election, wearing T-shirts, holding signs, and talking passionately about the sexism Clinton was facing or racist backlash toward Obama or the high stakes of this election for women and people of color were silly bed-wetters, Hill-bots, embarrassing in their fixations on “identity politics.” Those yelling about sexism were playing some dated “woman card”; those trying to explain how gender and race and class intersect were jargon-happy hysterics. There was a confidence that the country’s problems with women had been largely redressed, or at least were no longer so entrenched that we would have to put in extra work on behalf of the first one to be running for the White House. But that confidence was baseless, ahistorical. The country has a yuge problem with women, and Donald Trump is the cartoonish embodiment of that problem.

If a time traveler had been able to jump just 24 hours backward, from the night of November 8 to the night of November 7, to warn us what was about to happen, Election Day turnout would have looked a lot more like the march turnout, not just in numbers but in energy and purpose and passion. But since reverse time travel remains largely a right-wing goal, we got Donald Trump. Of course, we also got 4 million or more people to the streets on Saturday and a sense of the potential for the women’s movement to be both much larger and much broader than it’s ever been before...

Secret Service Agent Kerry O'Grady Won't 'Take a Bullet' for President Trump

It's not the biggest story of the day, but I definitely had to shake my head.

One joins the Secret Service to protect presidents regardless of party or politics. That's the essence of the job (and required by law). Or so it would seem.

First seen at Ms. EBL's, and also the Washington Examiner below:


The Twitter Presidency

I've been in arguing about the coming Twitter presidency, in my classes, during my last couple of semesters. So this is interesting.

At USA Today:


Should We Bring Back 'Big Stick' Dipomacy?

Professor Eliot Cohen's out with a new book, at Amazon, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

And here's his op-ed at LAT from last week, "Should the U.S. still carry a ‘big stick’?":
To the extent that President-elect Donald Trump has articulated a coherent view of foreign affairs, it appears to be that the United States needs to reject most policies of the post-1945 period. NATO is a bad bargain; nuclear proliferation is a good thing; Russian President Vladimir Putin is an admirable fellow; great deals that advantage only us should replace free trade.

In his unique way, Trump is forcing a question that probably should have been up for debate 25 years ago: Should the United States stay a global power that maintains world order — including by force of arms, what Theodore Roosevelt famously called “the big stick”?

Curiously, the death of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not immediately occasion that debate. In the 1990s, keeping a global leadership role for the United States looked cheap — other nations, after all, paid for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In that conflict and America’s succeeding interventions in the former Yugoslavia, costs and casualties were low. Then in the early 2000s, Americans were understandably absorbed by the consequences of 9/11 and the ensuing wars and terror attacks. Now, for better or worse, the debate is upon us.

It is worth keeping some history in mind as we decide whether to reject the posture that the United States has maintained abroad for more than half a century.

*****

President Obama hoped to end the wars he had inherited in 2008. Instead, he launched America’s third war in Iraq, ramped up our deployments in Afghanistan, expanded by an order of magnitude our campaign of counter-terrorist assassination and ordered an air campaign against the Libyan government. He deployed warships near China’s man-made islands and began redeploying American forces to a frightened Eastern Europe. Reality, not ideology, overcame his principled reluctance to exerting American power.

The choice between global engagement and America First is bogus. As in the last century, our choice is whether to lead wisely, firmly and usually peacefully while we can, or to send men and women into harm’s way belatedly and bloodily when we must. Let us hope that the new president comes to understand that we need the “big stick” not “to make America great again,” but to keep a peace that is precious, fragile and worth protecting.
RTWT.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Donald Trump's Jacksonian Foreign Policy

Commenter S.D. (Bob) Plissken took issue with my entry last week on Tony Smith's America's Mission (and liberal internationalism):
Nope.

Let the other countries around the world find their own way to democracy. It's not our job. Our job is #MAGA. Straight up.
That's a common view. I've heard it a lot as a professor, usually from white working-class students, and sometimes ethnic minorities who want more spending on domestic social programs.

Well, at any rate, old S.D. (Bob) just might enjoy Walter Russell Mead's essay from inauguration day, at Foreign Affairs, "The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order":

The distinctively American populism Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of the country’s first populist president, Andrew Jackson. For Jacksonians—who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive base—the United States is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment of a universal mission. Rather, it is the nation-state of the American people, and its chief business lies at home. Jacksonians see American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens. The role of the U.S. government, Jacksonians believe, is to fulfill the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home—and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that makes the country unique.

Jacksonian populism is only intermittently concerned with foreign policy, and indeed it is only intermittently engaged with politics more generally. It took a particular combination of forces and trends to mobilize it this election cycle, and most of those were domestically focused. In seeking to explain the Jacksonian surge, commentators have looked to factors such as wage stagnation, the loss of good jobs for unskilled workers, the hollowing out of civic life, a rise in drug use—conditions many associate with life in blighted inner cities that have spread across much of the country. But this is a partial and incomplete view. Identity and culture have historically played a major role in American politics, and 2016 was no exception. Jacksonian America felt itself to be under siege, with its values under attack and its future under threat. Trump—flawed as many Jacksonians themselves believed him to be—seemed the only candidate willing to help fight for its survival.

For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong, by their lights. Many Americans with cosmopolitan sympathies see their main ethical imperative as working for the betterment of humanity in general. Jacksonians locate their moral community closer to home, in fellow citizens who share a common national bond. If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic, Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous—people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.

Jacksonian distrust of elite patriotism has been increased by the country’s selective embrace of identity politics in recent decades. The contemporary American scene is filled with civic, political, and academic movements celebrating various ethnic, racial, gender, and religious identities. Elites have gradually welcomed demands for cultural recognition by African Americans, Hispanics, women, the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, Muslim Americans. Yet the situation is more complex for most Jacksonians, who don’t see themselves as fitting neatly into any of those categories...
RTWT.

Record Rainfall Swamps Southern California (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Widespread flooding, mudslides, evacuations as biggest storm in years batters California":


The third in a series of powerful winter storms unleashed a deluge in Southern California on Sunday, flooding numerous roads and freeways, setting new rainfall records and stranding some in dangerously rising waters.

Forecasters had predicted this storm would be the strongest and several years, and it didn't disappoint. While earlier storms produced periods of heavy showers, this one delivered several hours of sustained pounding rain, with damaging results.

Coastal areas of Los Angeles County were among the hardest hit, with Long Beach Airport setting a new all-time rainfall record, 3.87 inches. The intense rain was too much for local roads. Sunday afternoon, both the 110 Freeway in Carson and the 710 Freeway in Long Beach were shutdown due to extreme flooding that left cars stranded like islands in a lake.

In Long Beach and surrounding communities, dozens of intersections were flooded and some residents reported their parked cars were damaged as the rainwater kept rising. Across the region, several people were rescued from their cars and thousands lost power.

Brett Albright, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in San Diego, said the storm dumped as much as four inches of rain in some places.

“Today was very intense,” said Albright. “It’s not a normal event. It was definitely a culmination of the perfect circumstances: We had a very intense atmospheric river with a lot of moisture and an area of lift in the atmosphere right over coastal Los Angeles and Orange counties. It forced all of that moisture out.”

“It’s not often we see higher rainfall totals on the coast than in the mountains,” he said.

Southern California has been mired by a 5-year-drought. But this storm is part of a larger shift toward wetter conditions that began last fall. Since October 1, downtown L.A. has received more than 13 inches of rain -- 216% of normal rainfall for this period, which the National Weather Service said was 6.26 inches.

Officials said much of the Southland remains in drought, although recent storms are helping...
Keep reading.

More here, "Storm slams Southern California: Expect more flooding and thunderstorms."

Heh, the Left's Swearing-In' Ceremony

From Ben Garrison:


Leftist Unity Pledge

Communists love the Trump administration.

It gives them a new lease on life. Shoot, leftists should've been cheering the results on November 8th.


Is it Okay to Punch a Nazi?

Well, it's okay if you're a leftists. It's totally cool.

Frankly, I imagine some conservatives or populists are fine with it as well. I hate to defend someone caught on video raising his hand in at "Heil Hitler' salute, but it is what it is. I wouldn't punch him (unless he punched me first.)

See Popehat, "On Punching Nazis."

And at the New York Times, "Attack on Alt-Right Leader Has Internet Asking: Is It O.K. to Punch a Nazi?"

Spencer gets punched at the video.


Sunday, January 22, 2017

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."

Branco Cartoons photo Relay-600-LI_zps9uefckzu.jpg

Also, at Theo Spark's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Photo Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Short Fuse."