Bracing For The Weekend

Is it Saturday yet?

Comments

[narciso]

Great pieces, clarice. Yes idlib will end up like Beirut in 1985, after we had left. There was a,fight between Hezbollah and Fatah, over a district called beijalbaraneh, which was exceedingly bloody, now they were trained by the same forces, force 17.

[lurkersusie]

The McCain funeral – a failed brand re-launch

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/the_mccain_funeral__a_failed_brand_relaunch_comments.html#disqus_thread

[lurkersusie]

Yucking it up at a funeral

https://mobile.twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1036089335379058688/photo/1

[narciso]

Cutting to the chase:

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2018/09/burying-mccain.html?spref=fb&m=1

[cathyf]

Ok, I was totally wrong about the halftime show and NBC Sports came through beautifully! After the game they posted the band as a "clip" associated with the game.

I have to give credit— the video is excellent, edited, with multiple cameras. So different from years where the crew pointed one camera on the field and went on break. There was the time they forgot to turn on the microphone. And the time that the camera got turned straight down and showed a close-up of the turf for 5 minutes. (At least the sound was on...) And the time that they fed the sound from the booth, where the woman on hot mic was talking about her weekend. And the time that the bowl game where the camera on the 50-yard line high up started showing about 2/3 of the field, and as the show progressed it very slowly drifted up so that more and more of the crowd and less and less of the field showed, and then by the end of the show it had passed the stands completely and was pointed at the sky.

Ah, yes, the live stream IS more “exciting” but the recording shows both the band and NBC in a much better light!

http://vplayer.nbcsports.com/p/BxmELC/nbcsports/select/media/Qh9MvSL_1ygT

[Miss Marple (the real one)]

https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-donald-trump-jr-kimberly-guilfoyle-aa68d95d-bc15-49a4-ac27-ec28e33467fd.html

Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle will campaign for midterm elections.

[Jack is Back (Again)!]

Great Pieces, Clarice.

So, it is wrong to politicize the rape and murder of Mollie Tibbets but it is prefectly fine to politicize McCain's funeral with obvious criticism of Trump in the eulogies. Okey doke.

The funeral was an expose of who we keep referring to as the political elite globalist cabal that protect the swamp from being drained. I think the Trump base, and others saw it for what it was, an ideal venue to criticize the POTUS.

[Janet 🚬]

((Yucking it up at a funeral))

Those famous arms have gotten chunky.

The failed brand re-lauch link is good.

[30 years later..]

First to Sarasota, where two local grifters plied their ‘craft:’ Jonathan Curshen, currently serving 20 years in federal prison, and Andy Badolato, currently free as a bird. Curshen is a dual British-U.S. citizen who operated out of Sarasota and Costa Rica, after serving an internship in fraud and financial crime on Vancouver Canada’s wild-and-wooly stock exchange.

Badolato, Steve Bannon’s former chief lieutenant, surfaced in the media after Bannon switched his legal residence in a panic before the 2016 election to Badolato’s beach-front pad on Casey Key in Sarasota, to avoid a vote fraud rap while his candidate was strenuously decrying…vote fraud.

The ‘players’ in RussiaGate’s Sarasota thread
curshen-badolatoAndy Badolato and Jonathan Curshen participated in a number of continuing criminal conspiracies together, along with a colorful cast of co-conspirators whose importance to RussiaGate is growing all the time.

Curshen and Badolato were partners in what’s known as a “hyena pack” engaged in stock fraud and related financial crime. Each was an officer in a number of dummy front companies, supposedly independent of one another, but acting in concert with interlocking ownership.

The crew was led by a wily 30-year veteran of scams and white collar crime, a man whose name was already famous from previous scandals, Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer, long-time CIA ‘fixer’ and Iran Contra middleman.

Khashoggi, who died recently, was at the height of his powers in the early 2000’s, and pulled off an ingenious scam using a company he controlled called GenesisIntermedia to steal $300 million from investors with the help of Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank. The bank later paid a fine of $270 million to the U.S. Government. Khashoggi walked.

Rounding out the hyena pack was Khashoggi’s long-time lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi—an Iran Contra figure in his own right—and an assortment of retired CIA and DIA assets including Glen Kovar, who once claimed that he had invented ‘Smokey the Bear’ while he was ‘sheep-dipped’ as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service whiler really working undercover for the CIA.

[30 years later..]

NEWS
A Prime Minister, a Drug Pilot, an Oligarch, & RussiaGate
BY DANIEL HOPSICKER · PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2018 · UPDATED AUGUST 29, 2018

(WARNING: A long-ass read. But worth it)

russiagateRussiaGate is all about the Mob, says the current meme. Not ‘The’ Mob, or just one Mob, but a gamut of players— Russian, American, British, Israeli, Saudi—belonging to a global criminal network connecting the forces of transnational organized crime across nation-states, time-zones, and continents.

‘Transnational organized crime’ doesn’t have quite the same ring as ‘The Purple Gang’ or ‘Murder Inc.’ But the Obama Administration considered it enough of a threat to national security to issue an unusual 2012 warning.

Evidence of the network can be seen in some strange and unlikely places, like Sarasota, Florida; and some strange and unlikely people as well, like Omarosa Manigaul0t-Newman, whose connection to RussiaGate players was only recently revealed.

First to Sarasota, where two local grifters plied their ‘craft:’ Jonathan Curshen, currently serving 20 years in federal prison, and Andy Badolato, currently free as a bird. Curshen is a dual British-U.S. citizen who operated out of Sarasota and Costa Rica, after serving an internship in fraud and financial crime on Vancouver Canada’s wild-and-wooly stock exchange.

Badolato, Steve Bannon’s former chief lieutenant, surfaced in the media after Bannon switched his legal residence in a panic before the 2016 election to Badolato’s beach-front pad on Casey Key in Sarasota, to avoid a vote fraud rap while his candidate was strenuously decrying…vote fraud.

The ‘players’ in RussiaGate’s Sarasota thread
curshen-badolatoAndy Badolato and Jonathan Curshen participated in a number of continuing criminal conspiracies together, along with a colorful cast of co-conspirators whose importance to RussiaGate is growing all the time.

Curshen and Badolato were partners in what’s known as a “hyena pack” engaged in stock fraud and related financial crime. Each was an officer in a number of dummy front companies, supposedly independent of one another, but acting in concert with interlocking ownership.

The crew was led by a wily 30-year veteran of scams and white collar crime, a man whose name was already famous from previous scandals, Adnan Khashoggi, Saudi arms dealer, long-time CIA ‘fixer’ and Iran Contra middleman.

Khashoggi, who died recently, was at the height of his powers in the early 2000’s, and pulled off an ingenious scam using a company he controlled called GenesisIntermedia to steal $300 million from investors with the help of Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank. The bank later paid a fine of $270 million to the U.S. Government. Khashoggi walked.

Rounding out the hyena pack was Khashoggi’s long-time lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi—an Iran Contra figure in his own right—and an assortment of retired CIA and DIA assets including Glen Kovar, who once claimed that he had invented ‘Smokey the Bear’ while he was ‘sheep-dipped’ as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service whiler really working undercover for the CIA.

Moon rocks & Blue Moon
kovar3Glen Kovar will eventually “settled down” into a career that includes peddling ‘unauthorized’ moon rocks while running up the stock price of a series of dummy companies which masqueraded as ‘national security plays’ in the wake of 9/11.

Kovar, Adnan Khashoggi, Ramy El-Batrawi and Jonathan Curshen all had a hand in a company called SkyWay Communications.

SkyWay provided the men with a cover story: testing an inflight wireless communications invention which didn’t exist as an excuse to buy a pair of DC-9 airliners, one of which will be busted in Mexico’s Yucatan in 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

Curshen and Badolato ran companies which owned, or were in business with, dummy companies that were fronted by a hapless Tampa Mobster named Mike Muzio, currently residing in federal prison until 2020.

BLUEMOON-1His Blue Moon Group, which operated under a number of different names and was into everything from music publishing to internet porn, was owned by Adnan Khashoggi.

Muzio and Blue Moon ran dozens of internet porn sites. Their biggest site was VoyeurDorm.com, where for $19.95 a month you could watch supposed co-eds frolicking in a dorm fitted out with cameras broadcasting their every sigh online.

In 2003-2004, Blue Moon Group shared a house in Howard Beach Queens and did business with a company owned by a Russian hacker named Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky. It represents the first pooling of computer coding resources by Russian and U.S. mobsters for mutual benefit..

[Miss Marple (the real one)]

Jack,

Last night late there were screen caps of Lindsay Graham passing a message to HUMA ABEDIN in the cathedral and Mattis and Kelly spotted it. They let Graham know they had seen it so he went over to talk to them, presumably to explain.

Why in the heck was SHE invited? What did she tell Graham?

Fascinating.

[narciso]

The Boston globe branching out into comedy, yikes,

[Catsmeat]

Thanks, daddy, for re-posting Joy's piece on me--and thanks to y'all for reading it. It has one whacking invention in it--that my house was beautifully clean!

[Ollie North]

But North of course is and always will be best known for his somewhat bizarre wheeling and dealing whereby this military assistant at the National Security Council oversaw arms sales to Ayatollah Khomeini-era Iran — he of “America is the Great Satan” — and used the profits to fund the anti-Sandinista campaign in Nicaragua by the Contras, in defiance of a Congressional ban on such assistance. In subsequent testimony before Congress, North himself termed the deal “a neat idea.”

In fact, the Iran-Contra deal was an outgrowth of secret arms sales of American weapons to Iran by Israel. Iran sought the weapons for its burgeoning struggle against Iraq, and in 1985 Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar and National Security Council consultant Michael Ledeen — the latter working for National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane — came a-calling in Washington. President Reagan himself approved the sales, funneled through Israel — which itself viewed this deal-with-the-presumptive-devil in the same “Godfather”-like terms held by the U.S., in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend — over the objections of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz. Saudi billionaire oil and arms trader Adnan Khashoggi also played a role in financing the effort. All of those involved became household names when the deal became public knowledge (via a report in a Lebanese newspaper) and an investigation was launched by a Joint House-Senate Committee, whose televised hearings were the biggest show out of Washington since Watergate a decade or so earlier. (Some termed the affair “Irangate.”)

There are those, however, who view North as having betrayed Israel with his plan to use the profits to fund the Contras. In order to do so, North removed Israel as the middleman in selling arms to Iran. Israel paid North back by cooperating with the congressional investigation, which resulted in the indictment of 14 administration officials (including Weinberger) and conviction of 11, including North. Of these, all either had their convictions reversed on appeal (mostly due to technicalities) or were pardoned by George H.W. Bush in the waning days of his presidency.

Some also see more than a modicum of irony in having North take the helm of an organization that pledges fealty to the U.S. Constitution, albeit mostly focused on one particular amendment to the founding organizational document of the United States.

“For an organization so concerned with law and order, picking a new leader who admitted that he lied to Congress is a truly remarkable decision,” said Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The gun lobby, continued Gardiner, “will be led by a man whose own concealed carry permit was revoked because he was ‘not of good character.’”.

Read more: https://forward.com/culture/400643/the-secret-jewish-history-of-oliver-north/

[Miss Marple (the real one)]

Catsmeat,

My mother was a English teacher and I can imagine how much that article meant to you.

It was beautifully written and a wonderful tribute. Congratulations!

[DebinGA]

Band performances have always been my favorite part of high school/college football games. T. K. Adams Jr. is head of UGA music's percussion dept. His father was a beloved band director who was refused entry to UGA during the Jim Crow era. I transcribed an interview of the elder Adams with my sister in law. He described eventually getting BA/MA music degrees from a prestigious New England conservatory, paid in full by GA taxpayers via a law mandating payment of all expenses for blacks accepted by any U.S. college. He said he could have gotten a PhD, like his own band director, but didn't feel the need.

[Ollie North]

Next up..

The secret Jewish History of IvankaDonald and their pet.

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

--If I offended you, I apologize, but I want you to know that I saw it as an attack on me. Perhaps I reacted poorly and in heat. I will not back down from any attack on my logic, intelligence, or motivation. --

You never offended me. I wasn't attacking you at all, just trying to note someone elses assessment of the situation didn't seem accurate.

--I don't want a rift between us, so let's just agree that on this one matter we disagree, and go back to our previous friendly relations. Sounds good?--

Concur completely.

[Miss Marple (the real one)]

Sean T at RCP
‏Verified account @SeanTrende

Am I the only one here who remembers what the 2000 Republican primary and 2008 general election campaign against McCain looked like?

Kurt Schlichter replies:

Kurt Schlichter
‏Verified account @KurtSchlichter
17m17 minutes ago

You are the only one in Washington. Drive west of I-95 and people are having none of it.

Watch the walk back of the giddy "We totally slammed Trump!" Watch the shift in tone from yesterday as the media/elite realizes it just Wellstoned itself hard (it's already under way).

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

--The only thing that should follow "Progressive" is "Rock".--

And even that is usually highly dubious most of the time.

[Joy Luck Club]

If there is a God I pray the dots will be interconnected.

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/11/us/mcfarlane-took-cake-and-bible-to-teheran-ex-cia-man-says.html

[Bushel]

Khashoggi is warming his feet by the fire now..but plenty of perps remain.

[Jack is Back (Again)!]

Your Latin Phrase of the Day:

Bis vincit qui se vincit in victoria.

Hail, my legion, sire!

Is he buried, yet?

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

The left is like my schizophrenic son; at some level they know they're nuts but they just can't help themselves. Schizophrenics hallucinate, progs hate.
When you get right down to it, the ubiquitous prog excuse for the universal failure of socialism "it's never really been tried" is an almost perfect paraphrase of Einstein's apocryphal definition of insanity, the only difference is progs think we're evil idiots and enemies of all that is good for not expecting a different result next time, as they do.
They can be fairly cordial and normal in their personal relationships but their ideology turns everyone outside their immediate orbit into evil and/or idiotic monsters.
Our own pathetic, demented troll being an excellent case study.

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

New thread.

[Janet 🚬]

This is really funny - "Imagine trying to explain this picture to someone in 2008"

https://mobile.twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1036232574039937024

One guy responds..
SethSaidit
@SaiditSeth
·
2h
Replying to @JackPosobiec
That guy from The Apprentice that's says "You're fired" is now the president of the USA, everyone has lost their freaking minds, there are dozens of genders for LARPIng weirdos, and we call vaginas "front holes" now.

You're right, it can't be done without sounding crazy.

Hah!

[Catsmeat]

Thanks, MM.

Re the funeral: I think Kurt Schlichter is right about the already-started backlash. We know that every disparaging word was meant for Trump supporters as much as it was meant for him.

[Kevlar Kid]

From the "sweet read" Surber link (h/t hoyden):

Mr Sulu is taking it in the shorts----

74. George Takei.

2016: "George Takei: Trump's Muslim registry is 'prelude to internment'."

2017: "George Takei’s Facebook empire strains under sexual harassment allegations."

[Jack is Back (Again)!]

Catsmeat,

Beautiful story from Joy Castro. I agree that aspiring writers can get a big assist our of those Paris Review interviews. Besides writers, PR also interviews, editors and publishers which are just as helpful.

Frederick's football coach at Canterbury is also the husband of "Head of School" and had the team over to the house last night to watch Alabama v. Louisville. He also had his baseline test yesterday (concussions).

[Jack is Back (Again)!]

...out of....not ...our...

Preview is your friend.

[Jack is Back (Again)!]

From the side bar Memeorandum, validation from the Left on how we feel about the funeral:

Susan B. Glasser / New Yorker:
John McCain's Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet

[art in newport]

I wonder, will history look back at this 'funeral' as the last great event of the old elite class?

That is how Barbara Tuchman regarded the funeral of Edward VII of the UK in 1910. It was attended by every important figure of European aristocracy, with pomp and pageantry never again seen.

[Bela1]

Jack
It's true-Preview can be your friend. But! if using an iPhone with two fat thumbs it isn't much fun! 🙃

[Momto2]

Catsmeat - Loved the Castro piece and what a tribute to your teaching style and ability to see hidden potential!

Thanks for the great Pieces, Clarice! I look forward to your insights every Sunday morning.

[Eye Doctor .]

NEVER FORGET: Dirty Cop Mueller Gave Tony Podesta Immunity to Testify Against Manafort After Committing Same Exact Crime
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/08/never-forget-dirty-cop-mueller-gave-tony-podesta-immunity-to-testify-against-manafort-after-committing-same-exact-crime/