Patterico's Pontifications

7/18/2016

Melania Trump Plagiarizes Michelle Obama 2008 Speech

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:22 pm



Everything you need to know is in this tweet.

The quoted language is indeed from a Michelle Obama 2008 speech. Here is the CNN transcript.

Just click the YouTube link in the tweet, and read along as Melania steals, oh, about 80% of the Michelle Obama speech.

It’s a con. The only question here is whether she was in on the con.

UPDATE:

UPDATE x2: “I wrote it with a little help as possible.”

Chaos on GOP Convention Floor as Rules Are Steamrolled to Protect Trump

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:04 pm



Allahpundit has the full rundown here.

Here’s the short version: Fuck the rules, we want no embarrassment for Trump.

Here’s the longer version, which is a summary of Allahpundit’s post. It’s the first draft of history, so some details may not survive the test of time. But the basic narrative seems clear in broad strokes: the GOP is acting like the ruling party in a banana republic.

Anti-Trumpers tried to push through a rule in the Rules Committee clarifying that delegates are free to vote their conscience. This failed, and the committee reported out rules that say delegates are not free to vote their conscience.

But the rules proposed by the Rules Committee take effect only when all delegates vote on them and pass them. This typically is an affirmation by universal acclaim in a voice vote. As Allahpundit says: “Normally that’s done quickly and painlessly via a voice vote — unless a petition signed by a majority of delegates from seven states insists on a full roll call vote, which could take hours.” They had a majority from nine states — plenty enough to force a roll call vote.

But the petition has to be delivered to the secretary, who ran around trying not to be found, even hiding behind a curtain with armed guards protecting her from the offending petition. Meanwhile, there have been reports of pro-Trump delegates threatening the lives of anti-Trump delegates.

Finally, the chaos we see in this video happened, when the petition, which appeared to be in regular order, was ignored. And a voice vote was called for:

The people screaming “No!” and “Stop!” are trying to get the rules enforced. They are being ignored by people hellbent on avoiding any embarrassment for Trump.

The voice vote “passed.” What is the State Story on why the petition was ignored? Supposedly three of the nine states pulled out. Allahpundit says: “Which three state delegations were bullied by Trump’s rigged-system GOP into dropping their support for the petition? In true Soviet fashion, the chair didn’t say.”

I have never been so glad to be out of this party. It is now completely run by fascists who don’t give a second thought to actually following rules, if those rules get in the way of what they want to do.

Fourth Officer Acquittal in Baltimore

Filed under: General — JVW @ 11:14 am



[guest post by JVW]

Judge Barry Williams as found Baltimore Police Lieutenant Brian Rice not guilty of all charges filed against him stemming from the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. From the Baltimore Sun: “Williams cleared Rice, 42, of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office in a downtown Baltimore courtroom on Monday morning. The judge had dismissed a second-degree assault charge at the trial’s midpoint, and prosecutors dropped a second misconduct charge at the start.”

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby is now zero-for-four in prosecutions against the officers who were present during Gray’s arrest, transportation to jail, and tragic death. The lone defendant who faced a jury trial, Officer William Porter, had his case declared a mistrial last December when the jury could not reach a decision. The other three defendants, Rice, Officer Edward Nero, and Officer Caesar Goodwin, all opted for bench trials in front of Judge Williams and all three have now been acquitted.

Mosby was not present in the courtroom for the verdict, and at this point common sense should suggest to her that it will be a waste of taxpayers’ resources to continue with the trials against Officer Garrett Miller, scheduled to begin next week, and Sergeant Alicia White, scheduled to begin in mid-October.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to add that further posts on the Freddie Gray situation can be found here.

– JVW

Ted Cruz: “I am quite confident there will never be a plane on the face of the earth with my name on it”

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:33 am



As the Great Con Man Show starts tonight, the man who will take center stage Wednesday night, Ted Cruz, has given a long interview to Politico (cached link; no links for bullies). It contains hints of what Cruz will say:

Cruz wouldn’t talk specifically about what he plans to say — it’s sure to include a healthy portion of attacks on Hillary Clinton — but he made it clear that his goals extend well beyond getting Trump elected.

“Most wars are not won in a single battle,” said Cruz, who is still paying campaign staff to plan and to create a detailed post-mortem of the 2016 primaries (one thing he’s looking at, I’m told: whether his “New York values” quip about Trump was a blunder). [I can solve that for you, Ted. It was. — Ed.[

“What I’m looking forward to is changing the course this country is on. I don’t know if that happens in this election cycle or not,” he added.

There is also some fun stuff about his (quite valid) complaints about Fox News shilling for the Con Man:

“Four weeks before we dropped out, we were winning the race,” Cruz told me. “Eighty percent of [Marco Rubio’s] supporters came to us and the party was unifying behind us. … In the 30 days before Indiana primary, Trump got $500 million in free media, 90 percent was positive. What the media said on every station is, ‘Trump is unbeatable, he can’t be beaten’ — while he’s losing.”

It’s no secret that Cruz’s team and his allies have a beef with Fox News for what they believe to be pro-Trump bias (one person in Cruz’s orbit said he’s so disgusted with Fox he hasn’t watched the network since he dropped out in May). But he sees a more insidious hidden hand behind the media’s Trump obsession: liberal news executives who elevated Trump in the primary because they think he’s the only candidate Hillary Clinton can actually beat in a general election.

“I think many of the mainstream media players are liberal Democrats,” Cruz explained. “They intend to vote for Hillary. They believed Donald was the easiest candidate for Hillary to beat. And I think many of them wanted him to win the nomination. I don’t think it was innocent decision-making behind this.”

He also thinks Bernie Sanders got the same shaft from a news media that declared him prematurely dead. “I think Hillary’s nomination and I think Donald Trump’s nomination, I think the media played decisive roles in both of them,” said Cruz, a media-accessible guy who has often run against media elites, as I pointed out to him. “We saw media as decision makers in primaries in a way we have never seen before.”

. . . .

His goal: to spend 60 cents out of every dollar he raised on “voter contact” — either through volunteer door-knocking, email marketing, on-the-cheap candidate events (he flew Southwest for most of the campaign, quipping, “I am quite confident there will never be a plane on the face of the earth with my name on it”) and paid advertising. The penny pinching took on greater urgency when Cruz saw how much time CNN and Fox were devoting to live feeds of Trump’s empty podium and his plane idling on the tarmac. “Trump received $3 billion in free media. There is no precedent for that in the history of politics,” he told me.

With all the talk about what a weak candidate Trump is, it doesn’t sound like Ted Cruz is fully aboard the Trump Train, at least not yet. Which is good . . . because the day he climbs aboard is the day I get off the Cruz Train.

In the meantime, enjoy Scott Baio!!!

Baton Rouge Shooter a Nation of Islam Member Who Ranted About “Crackers” and Alton Sterling

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:18 am



Surprise, surprise:

A Youtube account operated by Gavin Eugene Long and discovered by The Daily Caller reveals key insight into what might have motivated the 29-year-old black man who killed three Baton Rouge police officers Sunday morning.

Videos on Long’s account show that he was a former Nation of Islam member. He also ranted against “crackers” and made references to Alton Sterling, the black man killed by police in Baton Rouge on July 5.

It’s “very hard to untangle the motivations” that propelled this guy to shoot and kill police officers.

We may never know his true motivation.

Read more:


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