drummerboy said:

have right-wing charges of "outside agitators", which they raise like clockwork, EVER been shown to be true? I mean, like, going back to civil rights demonstrations from the 50's?

What do you know? Apparently, outside agitators have been behind the violence at some of these protests.

Jerry Seinfeld's Wife Claims She Helped Bankroll Violent Pro Israel Counter Protesters at UCLA

 Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.

GoSlugs said:

drummerboy said:

have right-wing charges of "outside agitators", which they raise like clockwork, EVER been shown to be true? I mean, like, going back to civil rights demonstrations from the 50's?

What do you know? Apparently, outside agitators have been behind the violence at some of these protests.

Jerry Seinfeld's Wife Claims She Helped Bankroll Violent Pro Israel Counter Protesters at UCLA

 Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.

great. I recently had to hate Seinfeld for his dumb comments about how wokeism is destroying stand-up. Now I get to hate his wife too. Two peas in a pod I guess.

It's such a task exposing the lie machine coming from T**** - mtierney - I know I've asked this before but do you have any issues with the sheer volume of lies?  Here's some recent debunking:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/04/politics/fact-check-trump-time-magazine/index.html

It's often hard finding any truth.  And I know I've asked this a million times.  Could you post a recent T**** speech that makes you happy he's the leader of your party?

I'd happy to put it side by side with any Biden interview.  I'm hoping the one he did recently with Howard Stern gets air time somewhere off of Sirius radio.

This seems more appropriate for "Rose Garden" than "Creatures in the news" - 

People say this hurts Noem’s chances of becoming VP but Trump famously hates dogs and cats so I am not so sure. 

So Noem doubles down on shooting doggies?

Sometimes when you find yourself in a deep hole you ought to stop digging.....

Dog killing plays better before some crowds than others. Noem evidently thinks the story is bragworthy.

TOTR, you frequently post about pets, how can you possibly have nothing to say about Trumps prospective VP?

Is not shooting a dog as bad as shooting a messenger?

From today’s WSJ…

Biden’s Worst Mistake of the Gaza War

He provided Egypt cover as it denied Palestinians their human right to flee the conflict as refugees.

By Elliot Kaufman

May 5, 2024 at 4:52 pm ET

When campus protesters accuse President Biden of facilitating Israel’s destruction of Gaza, he has no good answer. He can quibble, but having abandoned the moral case for the war and condemned Israel for its toll, what can he really say in defense of his policy?

When supporters of Israel accuse Mr. Biden of standing in the way of Hamas’s defeat, he again has no good answer. His goal-line defense of Rafah, Hamas’s southern stronghold where terrorist leaders, four military battalions and many hostages reside, has for months preserved Hamas’s power.

How did the president get here? Mr. Biden isn’t “Genocide Joe” any more than he is “pro-Hamas.” He has been boxed in and brought low by his own mistakes.

I have criticized the president’s treatment of Israel since the early days after Oct. 7, when most Israelis were singing his praises. But Mr. Biden’s greatest error in this war lies elsewhere, in his betrayal of Gazan civilians and cruel disregard for their humanity. This set in motion a cascade of problems that have bedeviled the war ever since.

When you hear that Gazans are “trapped,” you are encountering a Biden policy choice. It didn’t have to be this way. Gaza’s Rafah borders Egypt, a U.S. ally that relies on $1.3 billion in U.S. aid a year. In contravention of international law, Egypt has sealed its border to Gazan refugees next door. Mr. Biden hasn’t lifted a finger to stop it.

On the contrary, the administration embraced Egypt’s position early on and demanded that Israel not “displace” civilians into Egypt. “No forcible displacement” became Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s absurd mantra as Gazans were massing at the border and begging to be allowed out.

Along with the United Nations and the NGO complex, Mr. Biden provided Egypt cover as it denied Gazans their human right to flee war. As the Journal’s editorial board noted, “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”

Egypt’s excuses don’t hold water. Rafah, crammed with civilians, borders Egypt’s empty Sinai Peninsula, a desert of nearly 25,000 square miles. The problem of where civilians can flee is entirely artificial. It has always been possible to fence off a few square miles of Egyptian desert, for a limited time, without unleashing Hamas on faraway Cairo or permanently exiling Palestinians.

Having secured U.S. backing, Egypt even threatened to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel should refugees spill over its border. As one senior Israeli official put it to me, “It isn’t over the killing of Palestinians that Egypt threatened to rip up the peace treaty, but over us asking them to save Palestinian lives.”

The ask was never so great. It could have been for women and children only. Other nations would have paid and aid groups would have outfitted the area. But there is no evidence Mr. Biden even tried, let alone exercised leverage. The war would gone very differently if he had.

When Israel invaded Gaza City in late October, hundreds of thousands of civilians fled south. With a true safe haven available, more would likely have gone, and many of those who did flee would have continued south to Sinai. Instead, these Gazans have been used as Hamas’s human shields in city after city, Khan Younis and now Rafah.

Fewer civilians in the war zone means fewer casualties. Thousands of civilian lives could have been saved, while Hamas fighters could have been eliminated more easily. But like Egypt, the Biden administration seemed to think of ordinary Gazans not as humans to be saved but as bearers of a Palestinian nationalism whose interests had to be preserved and pride salved.

It would have been a defeat for Palestine had Gazans fled the strip, their lives saved. The State Department would have protested. Dearborn, Mich., and the campus left would have been outraged.

Yet they haven’t exactly been appeased by Mr. Biden’s course. Forcing civilians to stay in Gaza has yielded a large casualty count and dragged out the war. Israel has had to delay and slow its operations at every stage, and the large civilian presence has led the Biden administration to pressure Israel into using less firepower and fewer troops. Israel offers daily pauses, neighborhood by neighborhood, fighting the worst kind of urban warfare at great risk to its own forces.

Hamas got what it wanted. The longer the war continued, the more Gazans were killed, the more international pressure mounted on Israel, and the more humanitarian aid became a challenge. Of course it did: All the civilians are still in the war zone, where Hamas can hijack aid trucks and draw Israeli fire. The results have been a resource bonanza for Hamas, suffering for other Gazans, accidental Israeli killings of aid workers, and a breach in U.S.-Israel relations that encouraged Hamas to reject hostage deals and Iran to risk a direct strike on Israel.

Aid could have been distributed freely to civilians in the Sinai, away from the fighting. Hamas would have tried to stop people from fleeing there, but it likely would have been overwhelmed by the flow, especially with Israeli help in key spots.

The clash also could have broken Hamas’s control over the population, affecting the war and the day after. Any Hamas men who hid among the refugees would be in for a rude awakening during an Israeli-run readmission process to follow

Mr. Biden never wanted a long war and is now desperate to end it and stanch the political bleeding. But his own policy error leaves him no good way out.

Supporting an attack on Rafah would, at a political cost, endanger the civilians whom he allows Egypt to trap there, no matter how well Israel plans their evacuation. Opposing an attack, however, has prolonged the war, and imposing a cease-fire would, at greater political cost, ensure Hamas’s victory.

Mr. Biden tries to thread the needle. He admits the goal of a hostage deal is a cease-fire that would lead to the end of the war and a normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia, a deal so spectacular that everyone forgets about Hamas and remembers the Biden foreign policy as a glittering success.

Brilliant, except that Hamas can hear him talking. Announcing that a cease-fire would clear the path to Riyadh has been a great way to kill a hostage deal. For Hamas, stopping Saudi normalization was half the point of Oct. 7.

Mr. Biden repeats his mistake, coercing Israel instead of using U.S. leverage with the Arab ally that holds the cards. Qatar funds Hamas and hosts its leaders. Yet rather than apply pressure, Mr. Biden quietly extended the U.S. military’s stay at Al Udeid air base in Qatar for another decade, CNN reported in January.

Relocating that base could threaten the Qatari monarchy’s survival, but again there is no sign the Biden administration ever played its card, even while Americans languish in captivity. Mr. Biden could have demanded on Oct. 7 that Qatar expel the Hamas leaders—or better, arrest them and hand them over and then start hostage negotiations.

Instead, Mr. Biden has spent months strong-arming Israel into concessions while Qatar and Egypt play the mediator. Unmoved, Hamas rejects each cease-fire offer and demands total victory. The only way Hamas takes a deal is if Mr. Biden guarantees it victory or Israel leaves it no other choice to stave off defeat. But the president stands in the way of Israel’s military and gives Hamas reason to expect to win even without a deal.

Mr. Biden’s errors have made this war longer and bloodier than it had to be, increasing the suffering of Gazan civilians while keeping Israel from realizing its objectives. He has no one to blame for the political costs he bears but himself.

.

So, what’s the story TOTR?  Can the Governor of MAGA Dakota come over and shoot your cat?

If Krazy Kristi Knome does show up, I would watch out.  Given how off kilter she is, she might just miss the cat and shoot the messenger.

GoSlugs said:

So, what’s the story TOTR? Can the Governor of MAGA Dakota come over and shoot your cat?

What do you think — did you draw blood?

DaveSchmidt said:

What do you think — did you draw blood?

I would never kill a dog or a cat.  I suspect you, on the other hand, just might shoot the messenger. You certainly have been accused of it, here on this forum, on multiple occasions. 

ETA: Particularly if the message in question contained grammatical errors.

While recent petty posts reflect disharmony in the MOL ranks, there is this happening in the political world …

TOTR said:

While recent petty posts reflect disharmony in the MOL ranks, there is this happening in the political world …

I certainly don't mean to take aim at the messenger but we all agree that shooting dogs is wrong, a consensus that seems to have evaded your party.

These examples are so rare I feel they're worth highlighting -- some Republicans show that they can put country before Party:

Geoff Duncan, Georgia Republican, says he will vote for Biden (NYT)

Geoff Duncan, a Republican who was lieutenant governor of Georgia when then-President Donald J. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election results there, endorsed President Biden for re-election on Monday.

“I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass,” Mr. Duncan wrote in an opinion piece in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/geoff-duncan-why-im-voting-for-biden-and-other-republicans-should-too/LFLE5YWCBBA6VDGJAJKMNPCDKQ/

An interesting comment on Kristi Noem's brutality, was from Fox News commentator Judge Janine, who said this was the rare issue that united both the left and the right.

I tuned into Fox to see how they would cover it and people across the board were horrified.

Noem made new excuses to Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. She tried to claim that the dog bit people, but Brennan points out that it was not the claim in her book. Brennan read something at the end of the book where Noem warns that Biden had better take care to make sure Commander was not left on the premises when he leaves, or as she put it, "Commander, say hello to Crickett." 

My response to this pitiful hopeful is Kristi Noem meet Sarah Palin.

CBS has the transcript online.

Kristi Noem was a horrible person before the dog story. After it, she's completely disgusting.

GoSlugs said:

TOTR said:

While recent petty posts reflect disharmony in the MOL ranks, there is this happening in the political world …

I certainly don't mean to take aim at the messenger but we all agree that shooting dogs is wrong, a consensus that seems to have evaded your party.

WSJ

Campus Protests: Free Palestine! Free Pizza!

If they’ve lost ‘Saturday Night Live,’ they’ve lost Middle America.

By William McGurn

May 6, 2024

The “Saturday Night Live” cold-open sketch this past weekend was a mock interview with parents of protesting college students. The African-American father whose daughter attends Columbia makes clear that these quad encampments are for rich white kids.

“She ain’t talking about no free this, free that, ’cause I’ll tell you what ain’t free—Columbia. Shoot. Do you know that they got the nerve to want $68,000 a year?”

When you’ve lost “SNL” . . .

Putting aside the trespassing and vandalism, the mini-Gazas that have sprouted up at colleges across America seem like summer camps. The difference is that instead of singing “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands,” the college kiddies opt for someone leading them in chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Add to this a dollop of cultural appropriation. This season’s protest fashion is the keffiyeh, a head covering originally worn by Bedouin tribesmen to protect against the desert sun and sand. In the 1930s it became a symbol of Palestinian identity and was famously worn by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat. As an added plus, it can hide your face from police and administrators trying to identify you. And it can be had for $13.99 on Amazon.

Left-wing students have always loved movements that liberate them from the classroom—especially ones that come with a uniform and ready-made slogans that substitute for serious argument and boost their sense of moral superiority. “I’ve always thought of accessories as the exclamation point of a woman’s outfit,” fashion maestro Michael Kors said. Among today’s protesters that goes for men as well.

In good part it’s a hangover from the self-indulgence of the 1960s. The movement against the war in Vietnam still informs protest culture. Back then radical chic offered any number of options, ranging from long hair that annoyed parents to Chairman Mao hats or Che Guevara berets that conveyed a more revolutionary vibe. More recently, thousands of women wearing bright pink hats converged on Washington the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration to protest his vulgar reference, heard on the “Access Hollywood” tapes, to grabbing women by a part of the anatomy.

As the father of three girls who each went through a Disney princess phase, I understand the appeal of a good costume—especially when wearing it allows you to demand special treatment. Then again, my daughters were 6.
But the adults at colleges and universities have obligations as educators. Their indulgence of the drama created by the student protests has been an abrogation of these duties. Probably the most notorious example was Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik, who at first called in the police to clear encamped students when they ignored university directives to leave.

The day after the cops cleared the encampment, the protesters were back on another part of the lawn. Ms. Shafik then shifted to a pretty-please approach, promising not to call the cops in again. When that too failed, she went with pretty please with sugar on top, which predictably failed as well. The protesters responded like an uncooperative boy at the supermarket screaming at his mom and threatening a very public tantrum if he doesn’t get his way.

In fairness Columbia isn’t unique. Some universities have issued fine statements about the First Amendment and the right to protest. But the students don’t need to be told that what they are doing—setting up encampments, vandalizing property, menacing Jewish students—isn’t speech. They know that.

What the students in their keffiyehs sense is that university administrators aren’t up to the follow-through that would make real their lofty words about speech and signal that those who won’t obey the rules making the life of a university possible will be out. For all the talk of “outside agitators” hijacking peaceful campus protests, the students made no effort to purge from their ranks the Hamas headbands, Hezbollah flags or those threatening to repeat the savageries of Oct. 7.

There was a day when Americans looked at universities as ideals for how to live peacefully in a free society guided by the accumulated wisdom of the past. Now Americans see them as home to the unreasonable and mindlessly destructive.

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he was asked about the student protests at Berkeley. He could have been talking about today.

“All of it began,” an angry Reagan said, “the first time some of you who know better and are old enough to know better let young people think that they had the right to choose the laws they would obey as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest.

When “common” sense is no longer in the room  — there is only anarchy left behind.

Morganna said:

An interesting comment on Kristi Noem's brutality, was from Fox News commentator Judge Janine, who said this was the rare issue that united both the left and the right.

I tuned into Fox to see how they would cover it and people across the board were horrified.

Noem made new excuses to Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. She tried to claim that the dog bit people, but Brennan points out that it was not the claim in her book. Brennan read something at the end of the book where Noem warns that Biden had better take care to make sure Commander was not left on the premises when he leaves, or as she put it, "Commander, say hello to Crickett." 

My response to this pitiful hopeful is Kristi Noem meet Sarah Palin.

CBS has the transcript online.

Just for you, Morgana…..

I have questions about your cartoon today.

Is that a dog or a cat?

Did the dog buy the book or steal it? 

Is the dog going to read it or burn it? 

If the dog does read it, when it gets to the part where Noem claimed she met Kim Jong Un in North Korea, will it still be in the book or did she "Go Back" and remove it? 

Will it be in the audiobook version that Kristi herself recorded (so she totally knew it was in there?)

the cat is buying it so it can gleefully read about the dog getting shot.

kind of sick, I think.

what's wrong with these people?

Another episode of Pete the cat. Maybe she listens to Tucker also.

I heard Knome’s new dog’s name is “Messenger”. 

"College protests against Israel's war in Gaza are dominating headlines. But only a sliver of students are participating or view it as a top issue, according to a new Generation Lab survey shared exclusively with Axios.

"Why it matters: The poll hints that the war — and the accompanying protests — might not hurt President Biden's election prospects among young voters as much as previously thought." Link

Q: Why was the cat surprised to appear in a cartoon of this ilk?

A: No em.

Thanks for this survey, nohero, it highlights the behavior of college students (aided and abetted by “outside agitators”) and  their selfish conduct. That the basis for destruction, disruption and suspensions, and the cancellation of exams and graduation was allegedly about Palestine, Gaza and Israel, yet comes in last in your poll!

The poll’s top ranking issues clearly tell the story of the selfishness and ignorance of these educated morons!