CHRISTIAN TOTO: How Andrew Breitbart Inspired ‘Gosnell’ Movie Project.
The picture was directed by Nick Searcy, cowritten by Andrew Klavan, Phelim McAleer, and Ann McElhinney, and stars Dean Cain and Earl Billings. It’s due out in October.
Archive for 2018
July 12, 2018
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Thieves plunder headstones as Venezuela’s crisis turns grave.
Grief flooded back for Ivonne de Gutierrez when she brought flowers to her son’s grave at a cemetery in Venezuela’s capital, only to find that the grave markers of several relatives were gone.
The pieces cast with bronze letters and religious symbols that identified the graves of a nephew and two aunts had disappeared since her visit a week earlier.
“Almost all of them have been taken,” Gutierrez said, standing among the vandalized graves at Cemetery of the East, one of Caracas’ most cherished final resting places.
While thieves have been targeting the capital’s necropolises for years, robbing unsuspecting mourners or ransacking tombs for metal objects and even human bones used in occult ceremonies, the crime wave has worsened as the country has been consumed by economic and political crisis.
Eventually, even socialist regimes run out of corpses to pick at.
Watkins had a three-year affair with Wolfe, a married Senate aide who served on that committee. Although she implausibly claims she didn’t use him as a source, she admits he shared information with her. He also sent her an email talking about how he liked to help her out in her career by sharing information. When Watkins and her lover broke up last year, she began dating another Senate staffer on the same committee.
It is wrong to have a romantic relationship with a married man you are not married to. In no world is it considered ethical to have an intimate relationship with someone you cover, because it doesn’t just make you appear to be biased, it makes you biased. It’s particularly wrong to have a relationship that is undisclosed to readers.
Honesty about the relationship to the source can harm the overall effect of the story. “This dude who’s cheating on his wife with me said…” just doesn’t have the same authority as “according to a senior intelligence official,” after all. Still, it should be disclosed. As one New York Times story about Watkins noted, an editor at one of her previous publications named Sam Stein was married to an Obama administration official, a fact he disclosed in his stories. In some cases, Watkins partially disclosed her relationship to her editors, a disclosure that should have been taken far more seriously than it was in every case.
Watkins’ stories based on anonymous leaks dealt with the Russia collusion narrative that has been rather uncritically pushed by the media. Sleeping with sources also reinforces negative stereotypes about reporters, a stereotype that particularly harms female journalists. Critics frequently suggest that anti-Trump media and anti-Trump members of the intelligence community are in bed together. It wasn’t meant to be taken literally.
Actually, you could explain a lot of journalism and politics by charting who in DC is sleeping with who.
QUESTION ASKED: Did FBI get bamboozled by multiple versions of Trump dossier?
John Solomon:
We know from public testimony that dossier author and former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele shared his findings with the FBI in summer and fall 2016 before he was terminated as a confidential source for inappropriate media contacts.
And we learned that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) provided a copy to the FBI after the November 2016 election — out of a sense of duty, his office says.
Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.
Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.
That revelation is in an email that disgraced FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote to FBI executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
“Our internal system is blocking the site,” Strzok wrote of the document posted on BuzzFeed. “I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what McCain had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)”
The significance of Strzok’s email is obvious to investigators who reviewed it in recent days. The FBI is supposed to be immune to manipulation by circular information flows, especially with sensitive investigations such as evaluating whether a foreign power tampered with an American election.
Yet, in this case, the generally same information kept walking through the FBI’s door for months — recycled each time by a new character with ties to Hillary Clinton or hatred for Trump — until someone decided they had to act.
Read the whole thing.
Although perhaps the more pertinent question is: Did the FBI want to get bamboozled by multiple versions of Trump dossier?
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Next B-52 Bomb Upgrade May Be a Tough Message for China.
While specific munitions haven’t been advertised, the goal is to quadruple the bomb size. Officials want pylons “capable of carrying multiple weapons in the 5,000-lb to 20,000-pound weight class,” according to the RFI. The current common pylon maximum is for 5,000-pound munitions.
The external pylon “was designed in 1959 and has been in service since the 1960s. When it was introduced, there wasn’t a requirement nor did anyone foresee a need to carry weapons heavier than 5000 lbs,” the RFI states.
Now that’s changed, the official said.
I find it difficult to believe that nobody in the Air Force or at Boeing at the time never imagined a need for bigger bombs for our biggest bomber.
IF I WERE ESTONIA’S SPECIAL FORCES, I’d be training special-ops teams to go sabotage the oil pipelines and refineries. ‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
IS CONGRESS ABOUT TO GET TOUGH (FINALLY!)? House Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) sounded supremely confident last night on Fox News, declaring, according to LifeZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst, that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page “will be held in contempt” if she doesn’t show up today or Friday to answer questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Meadows’ assertion prompted a crucially important reminder from liberal Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz that a congressional finding of contempt would be forwarded to the Department of Justice for enforcement. But DOJ under President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, has all but refused to enforce congressional subpoenas related to high-profile oversight investigations (Think Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS Targeting, FBI Hillary Email and Russia Collusion).
So, Dershowitz notes, “But if the Justice Department doesn’t do it, Congress is an independent branch of government. It can hold somebody in contempt. It can literally order the person to go into the basement jail cell, and then that person would have to go to court to seek a writ of habeas corpus.” Yes, Congress could have jailed then-Attorney General Eric Holder, then-IRS executive Lois Lerner and now Lisa Page for refusing to cooperate.
In fact, as I have repeatedly reported since Fast and Furious, jailing non-cooperative individuals is part of the inherent contempt power of Congress. It’s one of five tough tools the Founders gave Congress in making it the first and most powerful branch of the federal government. And it’s long past time for those tools to be used, at least if Congress wants its subpoenas to be obeyed.
SPENGLER: Germany lines up with China in trade war.
Houston, we’ve got a problem. Forget about Harley-Davidson. Some of the world’s most powerful industrial firms have just given China a gigantic vote of confidence.
BMW will expand its joint venture with Brilliance Auto to produce 519,000 vehicles a year. It also set up a joint venture with produce an electric version of the Mini together with Great Wall Auto. And it agreed to buy $4.7 billion worth of batteries from Chinese producer CATL, which just announced a new plant in southern Germany. Volkswagen earlier this year announced that it would invest $18 billion in China by 2022 and construct six plants to build electric vehicles. Oh, and BMW will move some of its SUV production out of its South Carolina plant in response to auto tariffs.
Daimler will start to test self-driving cars in Beijing. China’s new cities are designed to accommodate self-driving cars, unlike older American cities. Chemical giant BASF will spend $10 billion on a second giant facility in China. And Siemens will develop gas turbines together with China’s State Power Investment Co.
None of this is good news for the United States.
Read the whole thing.
WOULD A PUTIN PUPPET WANT TO WAKE THEM UP? Trump Just Gave NATO A Wake-Up Call — Will Europe Pick Up?
The European Union has used hefty U.S. defense spending and its willingness to send American troops into harm’s way to protect Europe. It is in effect a kind of social welfare subsidy: We spend money on arms, they build ever-more generous welfare states.
And then, from the safety of their left-leaning think tanks, universities and EU bureaucracies, they complain about American “militarism,” “imperialism,” and “aggression.”
It’s getting tiresome, but it bears repeating. NATO’s 28 members are required by the treaty that established the mutual defense organization to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.
In 2016, President Obama’s final year in office, the U.S. spent 3.6% of its GDP on defense, Greece 2.4%, the U.K. 2.2%, Estonia 2.16% and Poland 2%. Everyone else was below 2%. Everyone.
And note that those that are pulling their weight are among Europe’s poorest nations. The others should be ashamed, but shame is in short supply in Europe these days.
As with the American left, the combination of sanctimony and cheesiness is infuriating.
GOOD. THEN DO CAIR. Congress Renews Push to Designate Muslim Brotherhood as Terror Group.
July 11, 2018
LED BY SUPERLAWYER KURT SCHLICHTER: Our long national nightmare is over: Ben Shapiro’s legal team cleans Clock Boy’s clock in appeals court.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Strange Career of “White Privilege.” “Rich whites invent minority pedigrees to gain advantage while they condemn poor and working-class rural whites as racist.”
Related: Remi Adekoya: The Fear of White Power. “In this way, the entire onus of responsibility for keeping diverse countries like Britain and America as unprejudiced as possible is placed squarely on the shoulders of the white majority. My sole role as a black person is to offer moral judgments on how well (or rather how badly) white people are getting on with this. Because I am a member of a ‘marginalized group,’ my personal responsibility in facilitating a prejudice-free Britain is just about nil. See the comfortable moral high ground I’ve placed myself in? Of course, if I were a random white citizen I could not imagine finding this moral equation fair at all, but then why would any emancipated black mind care about the subjective feelings of white people who have so much power?”
SO, UNUSUALLY, ROD ROSENSTEIN HAS REQUESTED HELP FROM U.S. ATTORNEYS’ OFFICES in handling Judge Kavanaugh’s background paperwork. I’m not sure what this means, but my first thought is that he doesn’t trust people in DOJ headquarters to handle it.
OPEN THREAD: If you want it.
I’M VERY DISAPPOINTED IN PHILIP ZIMMERMAN, WHO’S QUOTED IN THIS ARTICLE distinguishing his Pretty Good Privacy encryption program from Cody Wilson’s 3D-gun-printing program:
Zimmermann takes issue with the analogy—on ethical if not legal grounds. This time, he points out, the First Amendment–protected data that was legally treated as a weapon actually is a weapon. “Encryption is a defense technology with humanitarian uses,” Zimmermann says. “Guns are only used for killing.”
That’s objectively false, of course: Guns are used for lots of things. None of my guns has ever been used for killing. And it’s also perilously close to — by which I mean functionally indistinguishable from — the kinds of things people said about PGP: “Only criminals and terrorists need encryption.”
Very disappointing indeed. (Bumped).
CLAIRE BERLINSKI: “Modern Europe – liberal, democratic Europe – is the United States’ creation. This story was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, so too has the knowledge ceased to be passed down casually, within families.”
The biggest thing to understand about the Trump administration is that it involves the renegotiation of the post-WWII institutional arrangements.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Wyoming profs protest ‘Cowboys’ slogan. This is stupid and offensive.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE (CONT’D): Woman Cries Rape After Man Refuses To Drive Her Home. “An upstate New York woman has been charged with false reporting of a crime after police say she claimed she was raped. In reality, she was angry at the man because he wouldn’t give her a ride home. Jessica Gallagher, 27, met a man on a dating app and told police that he abducted, blindfolded, and raped her. Police say she later admitted that she made up the false rape claim because the man refused to drive her home.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: Bull 1, China Shop 0. “Trump is right about this. Germany stupidly closed nuclear and coal power plants in favor of huge investments in “green” energy. Those investments, predictably, have failed to do anything other than drive the price of electricity unacceptably high. Germany is now backing away from its ‘green’ policies in favor of natural gas. Where does it get most of its natural gas? From Russia. The specific focus of Trump’s criticism is the proposed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would take gas from Russia to Germany. That pipeline has been controversial for a while. . . . I think the answer is that German post-war guilt is now indistinguishable from lazy softness. Russia is playing a hard game, annexing Crimea, putting constant pressure on Ukraine, making preparations to invade the Baltics. Putin’s regime is trying to restore the Russian empire, and it is questionable whether Europeans west of Poland have the will to resist. Trump is obviously, and rightly, trying to stiffen their spines.”
JOHN HAWKINS COLLATES THE 30 BEST THOMAS SOWELL QUOTES.
Read the whole thing.