“A Starbucks ad in India featuring a trans actress that promotes inclusivity has ignited a brewing firestorm against the coffee giant for going “full Bud Light.” The two-minute video shows a supportive mother and wary father meeting their daughter, played by transgender Indian actress Siya, at a Starbucks. The father has not seen his child since her name was Arpit, before her transition.
The father is visibly struggling with accepting his daughter when he gets up to order coffee. The barista then announces the drinks are ready for “Arpita,” a more feminine spin on the daughter’s pre-transition name and an indication that the father is working towards acceptance. “For me, you are still my kid. Only a letter has been added to your name,” he says to his daughter….”
Sorry, but rather than sitting down for an overpriced cup of unremarkable coffee, we’d be aiding our son in seeking the psychiatric treatment he so desperately needs.
Here’s Sky News Australia‘s thoughts on the subject:
Arpit…Arpita; more like Armpita.
In a related item, The Daily Signal is reporting a pending…
“A recently amended California bill would add “affirming” the sexual transition of a child to the state’s standard for parental responsibility and child welfare—making any parent who doesn’t affirm transgenderism for their child guilty of abuse under California state law. AB 957 passed California’s State Assembly on May 3, but a co-sponsor amended it after hours in California’s State Senate on June 6. Assembly Member Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City, wrote the bill and introduced it on Feb. 14. State Sen. Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco, co-sponsored it. Wilson’s child identifies as transgender.
Originally, AB 957 required courts to consider whether a child’s parents were “gender-affirming” in custody cases. Wiener’s amendment completely rewrites California’s standard of child care. AB 957 post-amendment “would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child,” altering the definition and application of the entire California Family Code. California courts would be given complete authority under Section 3011 of California’s Family Code to remove a child from his or her parents’ home if parents disapprove of LGBTQ+ ideology.
By changing the definition of what constitutes the “health, safety, and welfare of [a] child,” schools, churches, hospitals, and other organizations interacting with children would be required to affirm “gender transitions” in minors by default—or risk charges of child abuse. AB 957 could also expand which organizations provide “evidence” of gender “nonaffirmation” to California’s courts.
Because of the addition of “gender affirmation” to the qualifications of California’s standards for “health, safety, and welfare,” California’s courts would now be able to accept reports of gender “abuse” from progressive activist organizations—as long as they claim to provide “services to victims of sexual assault or domestic violence.” In essence, a boy could report his parents to his local school’s Gay-Straight Alliance club or other LGBTQ+ organization, who could then report the boy’s parents for child abuse.
Incredibly, the bill provides no definition whatsoever of what would qualify as “nonaffirming” to a child’s gender…”
This from the same political party who can’t provide the definition of a woman.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, after reading the document in its entirety, the Editors at NRO have concluded…
Just as paranoiacs sometimes have enemies, people obsessively pursued for alleged violations of the law by their political opponents sometimes commit criminal offenses.
At many junctures, most recently with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s flimsy charges, we’ve had occasions to point out how Donald Trump’s adversaries have twisted the law in a politically motivated effort to nail the former president. And we certainly do not welcome the precedent of a federal prosecutor, who ultimately reports to the president. That said, it is impossible to read the indictment against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and not be appalled at the way he handled classified documents as an ex-president, and responded to the attempt by federal authorities to reclaim them.
When he moved out of the White House, Trump moved many boxes of materials to Mar-a-Lago. Many contained nothing more than mementos such as newspaper clippings, photos, cards, and various notes and letters. But included along with these run-of-the-mill items were hundreds of documents marked classified. These documents, according to the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida, included “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
Once Trump was no longer president, he had no right to these materials. He stored them recklessly — not in a secured space that had been approved to handle classified documents, but, farcically, in places including his bedroom, a bathroom, and a ballroom. This was within his Mar-a-Lago Club that has hosted events for tens of thousands of people within the roughly year and a half that the documents were in his possession.
Trump brushed off months of demands from the National Archives and Records Administration to return the missing records before relenting in January 2022, but only providing a portion of what was in his possession — roughly 15 boxes, which included 197 documents that were marked as classified. After a grand-jury subpoena demanded all classified documents, Trump’s lawyers then turned over 38 more documents marked classified. But when the FBI carried out a controversial search warrant later that summer and seized more boxes, they found 102 additional documents with classified markings.
The indictment offers evidence that Trump misled investigators about his possession of the documents and took actions to conceal them. But most damning is the transcript of a conversation during which Trump showed one of the documents to a reporter. Speaking of a theoretical attack plan, Trump produced a document and said, “It is like, highly confidential.” He also said, “See as president I could have declassified it” but admitted, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The audio of this conversation makes it a lot more difficult for Trump to chalk everything up to an innocent case of some classified documents getting mixed up with other personal items from his presidency. It also directly contradictssome of the laughable public defenses that were made by Trump and his team last summer, including the idea that there was a “standing order” that whatever documents he brought to Mar-a-Lago to work on were automatically declassified. It’s clear from the conversation that he not only knew he was in possession of secret documents that were never declassified, but knowingly shared them with people who lacked the security clearance to see them.
Equally damning, particularly for someone who was and would like again to be the nation’s chief executive, responsible for the enforcement of the laws, is the evidence that Trump not only deceived the investigators and the grand jury, but his own lawyers — knowing and intending that they would consequently obstruct the investigation. If the allegations in the indictment are true, Trump tried to nudge his lawyers into concealing or destroying incriminating evidence. Unable to bend them in that direction, he and an aide hid boxes of documents from them, causing them falsely to tell the grand jury, under oath, that the classified documents they delivered to the FBI in June 2022 were the only ones remaining in his possession. They weren’t lying; according to prosecutors, they were passing along what he told them. It is worth noting, moreover, that the substantiation of this allegation is likely to come from testimony of the lawyers themselves— not from people out to get the former president, but people who tried, futilely, to help him.
We understand why many conservatives are unwilling to view the charges against Trump in a vacuum given that the Justice Department let Hillary Clinton off the hook for her reckless handling of government secrets and the resulting cover-up, that President Biden is unlikely to pay a price for his own mishandling of classified documents, and that Democrats and their allies have pursued a yearslong campaign to get Trump. All of those are legitimate considerations, and the contrast with how James Comey and Co. handled the Hillary case is particularly galling. But it doesn’t change the fact the country wouldn’t be in this uncharted territory if Trump hadn’t taken documents he had no right to, and simply complied when asked to give them back.
Here’s Jonathan Turley’s take:
TRUMP’S INDICTMENT FOR MISHANDLING CLASSIFIED DOCS ‘A DIFFERENT BALL GAME’ THAN BRAGG PROSECUTION.@JonathanTurley: “The Alvin Bragg prosecution is a political prosecution, it is what Trump says it is, it is a weaponization of the criminal justice system, in my view. This is a… pic.twitter.com/5eN7XzAceg
— America’s Newsroom (@AmericaNewsroom) June 9, 2023
That being said, Jack Smith’s statement announcing Trump’s indictment was damningly disingenuous, if not downright dishonest:
As we often do, we’ll leave the last word on the subject to Andy McCarthy, and his reasoning…
On May 23, 2022, Donald Trump, formerly the president of the United States and thus the nation’s chief executive responsible for executing and upholding its laws, sat down with two lawyers he had retained to help him handle a grand-jury subpoena. The subpoena, which is a legally enforceable court order, not a suggestion, required that he surrender to the grand jury (via the FBI) intelligence files that he had illegally retained at Mar-a-Lago, his resort club and estate in Palm Beach. Trump was bent on defying the order. He would willfully refuse the command of the subpoena and the directive of government officials.
Already, you can see a problem here. Trump and his two lawyers understood that the point of the meeting was to decide how to handle the subpoena. But, it turns out, not everyone was on the same page about what handle meant. Trump turned the conversation to a favorite obsession, Hillary Clinton. Specifically, he spoke of a lawyer who had represented her when she was in a similar pickle: the recipient of a subpoena (hers was from Congress) demanding that she turn over emails from her home-brew, nongovernment, nonsecure server system. Humiliating emails she had no intention of surrendering.
According to Trump, then, she got herself a lawyer who would help her, you know, handlethe subpoena. To the former president, this was the very model of legal acumen. Referring to this exemplary lawyer, Trump advised his two attorneys:
He was great, he did a great job. You know what? He said, he said that it — that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments. And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get into any trouble because he said he was the one who deleted them.
Get it? It doesn’t require a lot of translation. But just in case anyone missed the point, the indictment recounts that the former president of the United States “related that story more than once that day.”
Now, since we’re hearing a lot, and we’re going to hear a lot more, about selective prosecution, about the sense that the “boxes hoax” is the “biggest witch hunt of all time,” understand this: The evidence of this soliloquy — wherein it was Trump-splained that a “great job” by a lawyer entails making incriminating evidence disappear and taking the fall for it so the client escapes jeopardy — does not come from Donald Trump’s enemies. These are not the people who want to take him out. This is not Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, congressional Democrats, or the “fake news” media. It’s not even RINO Republicans or that (apparently) fiercest of political combatants, “Ada” Hutchinson.
No, the evidence comes from Trump’s lawyers. The people who were trying to minimize his criminal exposure and push back against his destructive tendencies. The people who were trying to help him. One of these lawyers, Evan Corcoran, kept trying to help Trump even after he knew he’d been had. For his trouble in representing a former president, Corcoran was subpoenaed and forced by a federal judge and an appellate court to testify. He fought them all the way, struggling to preserve Trump’s attorney-client privilege even though, apparently unbeknownst to Corcoran at the time, Trump had blithely negated the privilege by using Corcoran to provide false information, under oath, in response to a subpoena.
It’s the Trump pattern: Good people try to help wrestle his demons, he gets his kicks out of making unsavory acts of loyalty the price of prestigious jobs, they finally realize the price is too high — usually too late for their own good — and he trashes them as they make their quietus. Rinse and repeat.
Corcoran was not trying to hurt Trump, even though Trump had thought nothing of putting the lawyer’s livelihood at risk. Corcoran provided the lurid testimony reflected in the indictment — including Trump’s suggestions that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he did not have documents marked classified, and that he “pluck” out of a package of documents responsive to the subpoena “anything really bad in there” — because the law required him to, not because he wanted to.
Is the former president being unfairly singled out for prosecution by special counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count indictment? I think so . . . but not for the reasons Trump and his devotees posit. The problem is not that Democrats, who are leveraging the government’s law-enforcement power for partisan advantage, are going after him, even though Democrats and Beltway big shots — Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, David Petraeus, and (soon) Joe Biden — get a pass. The problem is that Clinton, Berger, Petraeus, and (soon) Biden get a pass.
It’s not that Trump is owed a pass. It’s that every official who is entrusted with access to the nation’s secrets, and who then betrays that trust by willful law violations and cover-ups, should be prosecuted. Every . . . single . . . one. And none of them has any business near power. The lesson of the Hillary Clinton precedent is that Joe Biden should be investigated and prosecuted. That’s how the scales of justice are evened out. The fix for a two-tiered justice system is NOT equal INjustice under the law.
As for Trump, say what you want about Democrats being out to destroy him. I know all about that — wrote a book about it, in fact. But if Trump ends up being destroyed in this case, it will be based on the accounts of people who had his best interests at heart.
I don’t believe that Trump’s lawyers, who were trying to help him, would testify — as they have very reluctantly testified — that he tried to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice, unless he really did try to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice.
If you tell me I need to look the other way on that because Hillary Clinton got a pass, I respectfully suggest that you’ve lost your way.
At the risk of offending some readers, here’s the juice: Note well McCarthy’s words, “The fix for a two-tiered justice system is NOT equal INjustice under the law” (emphasis added). Just because Hillary escaped justice, at least in this world, it doesn’t make The Donald any less guilty. And as we mentioned previously, Trump’s crimes required enormous amounts of ego and hubris…not to mention a titch of stupidity…as he had to know, having been under the microscope for years, he’d face far greater scrutiny than any ex-President in history.
Yet he not only took classified materials in the first place, he then returned less than all of them while lying about any remaining in his possession, after which he bragged about one of them to a reporter with neither clearance nor need to know while the conversation was being recorded.
Sorry, folks, but this man isn’t fit to serve a second term as President, assuming he was for his first, particularly as there are far-more qualified and eminently-more electable alternatives in the Republican field. Furthermore, we’re just tired of everything and anything about him. He kept Hillary out of the White House, and for that we thank him. Now, it’s time to move on.
Speaking of moving on, here’s another sextet of special selections certain to sate the curiosity of inquiring Conservative minds:
(2). Since we’re on the subject of fiction, Best of the Web recounts the continuing unreality of Bidenomics, noting Joe’s claims stand in stark contrast to his own government’s statistics.
Here’s a second shot of the juice, courtesy of The Federalist‘s senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland via Speed: Whenever Joe says, “I’m not joking”, he’s lying; Whenever he says, “I’m joking”, he’s telling the truth.
(3). Early Sunday morning, Syracuse police responding to reports of shots fired (do Baltimore cops even respond to such reports any more?!?) found a total of 13 people shot, stabbed or struck by vehicles at a “mass gathering“. The report includes no description whatsoever of the victims, perps or any other parties involved, which tells you…they’re all victims of White supremacy and systemic racism.
(5). What other than unbridled hatred and intolerance explains behavior which is so common on The Left, yet so rare, if not unknown, on The Right?!?
The car behind me in the @Dunkin‘ drivethru saw the Trump2024 sticker on my back window and “warned” the team at Dunkin that I am a Trump supporter. He then called me xenophobic and told me I’ll be deported. Why are democrats so openly hateful and racist? pic.twitter.com/0ZrG7rGU77
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Mark Foster…
…Mark Hannon…
…Balls Cotton…
…Andy Meyers…
…and the lovely Shannon:
As regards that last one, in its zeal to indulge and affirm the conduct of the mentally ill, the Biden clown car…
…clearly violated Section §7. (e) of the U.S. Flag Code, which unambiguously dictates, “The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.” Can it really be no one advising this demented, old deviant understands the proprieties surrounding the display of Old Glory, or do they simply not care?!?
Finally, in a departure from our usual M.O., we’ll it a wrap with a forward from Carl “The Great One” Polizzi, a 1941 poem which inspired us to pursue the golden wings of a Naval Aviator, High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Watch as Josh Hawley rips this useless harpy up one side and down the other!
Tales of The Darkside
The fabulist “facts” surrounding the Nationals abject surrender to the infinitesimal percentage of the population backing Pride Month.
On the Lighter Side
We thought the “In the Navy” clip featured in the Friday edition well worth watching in its entirety.
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