Image hosting

I don't put a lot of pictures up on this blog but I do put up some. I usually host the images on Imgur.com, the number one image host at the moment. An encouraging feature of their service is that in early 2015 they announced that all images will be kept forever and only removed if deletion is requested.

Someone must have requested that some of my images be deleted and Imgur has obliged, putting up an ugly and offensive replacement image instead of the original.  I keep pretty good records, however so I have replaced the lost images with backup copies hosted on another server.  I have so far noticed only about half a dozen affected images, however, so I would be obliged if people would let me know if they come across any other offensive images that I have not so far noticed.

We conservative bloggers are definitely under attack.  There was nothing egregious in any of the deleted images.  One was just a table of statistics.  Facebook has also banned all posts that link to my Greenie Watch blog. Questioning global warming is the unforgiveable sin. All my graphs and tables of statistics were in vain. There are a lot of things that the Left don't want to know about.

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Bruised Trudeau to call Canada election

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, admired abroad for his progressive policies but damaged by scandals at home, will kick off a six-week re-election campaign- on Thursday with opinion polls suggesting his hold on power will be weakened.

Mr Trudeau, who swept to office- in November 2015 promising "sunny ways" and stressing the importance of gender equal-ity, gay rights and the environment, faces an electorate more focused on the economy and -affordability when it votes on October 21.

The 47-year-old married father- of three, whose classic good looks are often splashed across the global media, may have history on his side. Not since 1935 has a Canadian prime minister who won a majority in his first term been booted from office in the next election.

But Mr Trudeau may not win enough seats to govern by himself, after a series of missteps that called into question his leadership while cutting into his once sky-high popularity. That would leave him and his Liberal Party weakened, relying on opposition MPs to push through legislation.

A Nanos Research poll released- on Tuesday showed the Liberals at 34.6 per cent and the main opposition Conservatives, led by Andrew Scheer, at 30.7 per cent. That margin would not be enough to guarantee a majority in the House of Commons.

Senior Liberals say they are quietly confident of victory and predict Mr Trudeau will campaign more effectively than Mr Scheer, 40, who is fighting his first election as Conservative leader. But Canadian campaigns can produce major surprises. The Liberals trailed in third place when the 2015 election was called but steadily improved to pull off an outright victory.

"This is not a `Throw the bums out' election. This is a `Punish the bums' election," said analys-t Nik Nanos.

Mr Trudeau's challenge is that he is running on his record rather than the uplifting message of hope and change that helped the Liberals attract record- numbers of green, youth and indigenous voters in 2015.

Since then, Mr Trudeau has broken campaign promises by scrapping plans to introduce voter reform and allowing budget- deficits to mushroom. He angered environmentalists by buying an oil pipeline to ensure crude exports could increase.

The worst moment of his tenure- came in February, when former justice minister Jody Wilson--Raybould accused the Prime Minister and top officials of inappropriately pressuring her to ensure that construction firm SNC-Lavalin Group avoid a trial on corruption charges. Last month, a top watchdog ruled Mr Trudeau and his team had -indeed breached ethics rules.

Mr Scheer's popularity had surged after the SNC-Lavalin affair-, but he appears to be struggling in Ontario, the most populous of Canada's 10 provinces, where a conservative premier is pushing through unpopular spending cuts.

SOURCE 

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Supreme Court allows Trump to deny asylum to almost all migrants at the Mexican border after he pledged to crackdown on immigration

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a request by President Donald Trump's administration to fully enforce a new rule that would curtail asylum applications by immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, a key element of his hardline immigration policies.

The court said the rule, which requires most immigrants who want asylum to first seek safe haven in a third country through which they traveled on their way to the United States, could go into effect as litigation challenging its legality continues.

Among the nine judges on the court, liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

The court's ruling handed a victory to Trump at a time when much of his immigration agenda had been struck down by lower courts. BIG United States Supreme Court WIN for the Border on Asylum!' Trump said on Twitter.

The rule would bar almost all immigrants from applying for asylum at the southern border. It represents the latest effort by Trump's administration to crack down on immigration, a signature issue during his presidency and 2020 re-election bid.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others who challenged the administration's policy in federal court said it violates U.S. immigration law and accused the administration of failing to follow the correct legal process in issuing the rule, which was unveiled on July 15.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said that the government's rule may be in significant tension with the asylum statute.

'It is especially concerning, moreover, that the rule the government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere - without affording the public a chance to weigh in.'

Eight days after the rule went into effect in July, California-based U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar issued a nationwide injunction blocking it.

Then began a back-and-forth between Tigar and the 9th Circuit, which scaled back the injunction so that the Trump rule was blocked in the border states of California and Arizona while in effect in Texas and New Mexico.

Tigar ruled to restore the nationwide ban on Monday, but the 9th Circuit scaled it back again on Tuesday night.

They were both trumped by Supreme Court, which will allow the asylum restriction to remain in place until the underlying legality of the rule is determined at trial.

'This is just a temporary step, and we're hopeful we'll prevail at the end of the day,' ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said. 'The lives of thousands of families are at stake.'

The Republican president's administration issued the rule in an attempt to reduce the surging number of asylum claims primarily by Central American migrants who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in large numbers during his presidency.

The rule would block nearly all families and individuals from countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala from entering the United States as asylum seekers after crossing through Mexico. The rule would keep asylum protections for Mexican citizens.

The rule drew legal challenges including from a coalition of groups represented by the ACLU. They accused the administration of pursuing an 'asylum ban' and jeopardizing the safety and security of migrants fleeing persecution and seeking safety in the United States.

In the administration's request to fully enforce the rule, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the Supreme Court to issue a stay blocking the injunction while litigation over the issue proceeds because the judge's order interferes with the government's authority to establish immigration policy.

The administration said the rule screens out asylum claims that are unlikely to succeed and 'deters aliens without a genuine need for asylum from making the arduous and potentially dangerous journey from Central America to the United States.'

The Supreme Court in December rebuffed a bid by the administration to implement a separate policy prohibiting asylum for people crossing the U.S.-Mexican border outside of an official port of entry, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joining the four liberal justices in denying the request

SOURCE 

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Polite Persuasion is Wasted on the Shrieking Left

Comment from Australia

Like Jordan Peterson's reputation, Lionel Shriver's conservative credentials were burnished by leftist idiocy. In Peterson's case it was his interview on the UK's Channel 4 by Cathy Newman. In Shriver's case it was Yassmin Abdel-Magied walking out of the Brisbane Writers' Festival in 2016 in protest at Shriver's views on identity politics and cultural appropriation.

Neither Peterson nor Shriver are my kind of conservatives and, to be fair, I am sure they would not claim to be or would want to be. That's fine. What I would like to say is that conservative warriors are now needed more than ever. Much less useful are prominent notables on the conservative side who come over all reasonable in the face of those intent on our destruction.

Peterson lost his standing with me when he suggested that Brett Kavanagh should first win his confirmation to the Supreme Court but then immediately resign to clear his name. That was a ridiculous suggestion, to put it extremely mildly. Clearly Peterson has no idea about the enemy we face.

I caught Shriver on Q&A last week. True, I could only stand five minutes or so before turning it off. Any longer spent watching Q&A is injurious to my peace of mind. Nevertheless, I saw enough to sense that Shriver was trying hard to appear "reasonable" to other panellists and to the usual green-leftist ABC audience. Hint for Shriver: Prostration is pointless. They'll always despise you. Look to, say, Michelle Malkin for a role model.

Did I get a false impression of Shriver's demeanour? I think not. The following evening I attended the Bonython Lecture in Sydney, where she explained that her engagement, front and backstage, with other Q&A panellists was civil; and, furthermore, she made a point of extolling the need for civility generally in political debate.

I want to be clear. Come the witching hour I believe I will find myself on the same side of the barricades as Peterson and Shriver. After all, where else could we be? But I would like to think that we can avoid arriving at the witching hour. And we won't if our side is populated by those falling over themselves to be civil.

Civility is paramount among people of sound mind and goodwill. Those of the new progressive Left don't qualify. They need to be fought, not reasoned with. Reasoning with a poisonous serpent is useless. You have to chop its head off. And, being religiously minded, I choose the metaphor of a serpent advisedly.

Go to the US to see the progressive Left at its most transparent. It's here in Australia, in the UK and in Europe in full-enough measure, but only in America has it the chutzpah to stand in the spotlight. Anyone who caught any of CNN's seven-hour town-hall meeting on the "climate crisis" with the top ten Democrat presidential candidates would know what I mean. They have no shame.

They tell blatant lies, like Hurricane Dorian is a product of climate change, which are easily exposed. Yet they will simply go on repeating them. It is lying in the name of saving the planet. Taqiya for Gaia. The destruction of America's economy, and, with it, Western civilisation, is collateral damage apparently. Or is that all part of the plan? It surely must be.

Run down the list (in no particular order and without attempting to be exhaustive): the `green new deal', pulling down border security, providing free health insurance to illegal immigrants, publicly funding abortion up till the moment of birth, slashing military spending, funding more and more `free stuff' through greatly increased taxation (and, no doubt, through untrammelled money printing as per leftist modern monetary theory[i]), persecuting those with the temerity to practice Christian beliefs, marginalising the traditional family, insidiously siding with Palestinians over Israel, and hiking minimum wages to add to the rampant unemployment which will follow, as night follows day, from the other ruinous environmental and economic policies.

Quite simply America as we know it would cease to exist. It would be crippled. America stands between Western civilisation and the Islamic and the Chinese-communist barbarians. We would fall as other civilisations have fallen. At some point the Islamists and Chinese would turn on each other. But, by that time, we would be vassal states watching the big boys duke it out. I will go back to my start.

I am generally polite and civil, even after a few drinks. But I ask this question. How civil is it proper to be to those who espouse policies which, if ever enacted, would put our grandchildren's lives at risk?

SOURCE 

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Obsession: Broadcast coverage of Trump 11 times greater than Democratic hopefuls
And there's mostly no such thing as bad publicity

Trump-bashing has become a tradition in broadcast news, with anchors, correspondents and pundits supplying near non-stop negative coverage of President Trump and his administration. The coverage has been, on average, 90% negative according to a series of studies by the Media Research Center.

These days, the Democratic presidential hopefuls are paying a price for this obsession. Networks' "fixation on Trump" is leaving comparatively little airtime for his would-be presidential challengers, the conservative press watch dog says in a new analysis released Monday.

"From June 1 through August 31, analysts found the networks devoted 838 minutes of airtime - nearly 14 hours - to coverage of President Trump personally, the vast majority of which was negative," writes Rich Noyes, who led the study.

"The airtime devoted to Trump was eleven times greater than that spent on the leading Democratic candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden (just under 74 minutes), and vastly more than the networks gave California Senator Kamala Harris (30 minutes), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (15 minutes) or Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (just under 14 minutes)," Mr. Noyes said.

"Overall, 21 Democratic candidates (including some who have since departed the race) shared 187 minutes of evening news airtime this summer, less than one-fourth of that of Trump alone," he continued.

"On the GOP side, former Congressman Joe Walsh received a scant 35 seconds of coverage after he announced his candidacy in late August, while the campaign of former Massachusetts Governor William Weld has yet to be acknowledged by any of the three evening newscasts."

The coverage, Mr. Noyes explains, is not meant to help Mr. Trump, with the content dwelling on "alleged scandals and racism" for the most part.

"The media mania over Trump is more intense than that of four summers ago, but the pattern is similar. After Trump joined the race in mid-June 2015, he immediately dominated network news coverage with 232 minutes of airtime, twice that of the leading Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and six times more than his nearest Republican challenger, Jeb Bush," Mr. Noyes said.

SOURCE 

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One America News Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Rachel Maddow, MSNBC And Other Entities

One America News Network, a right-leaning cable news outlet, on Monday filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow, Comcast Corporation, NBC Universal Media and MSNBC Cable in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

According to the lawsuit, Comcast refused to carry OANN as part of their cable programming package because the conservative network frequently rebuked MSNBC's liberal politics. The lawsuit also claims that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said OANN is "really literally is paid Russian propaganda." Her comments came after OANN's President, Charles Herring, sent a letter to Comcast objecting to their refusal to carry the conservative network. Herring referred to their refusal to carry OANN as "anti-competitive censorship."

OANN argues the defendants knew their statements about the conservative network were false but were made as a means of damaging OANN's business and reputation. Specifically, OANN states the comments were made in retaliation for calling out Comcast's refusal to carry the conservative cable network in its programming packages.

"One America is wholly owned, operated and financed by the Herring family in San Diego," said Skip Miller, a partner at Miller Barondess, who is representing OANN. "They are as American as apple pie. They are not paid by Russia and have nothing to do with the Russian government. This is a false and malicious libel, and they're going to answer for it in a court of law."

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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