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Archive for 2018
April 24, 2018
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Maybe Mueller Should Be Investigated. “Mueller was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston, the head of its criminal division, the head of the criminal division in Main Justice, and the director of the FBI during the most scandalous miscarriage of justice in the modern history of the FBI. Four innocent people were framed by the FBI to protect mass murdering gangsters who were working as FBI informers while they were killing innocent people. An FBI agent, who is now in prison, was tipping off Whitey Bulger as to who might testify against him so that these individuals could be killed. He also tipped off Bulger, allowing him to escape and remain on the lam for 16 years. What responsibility, if any, did Mueller, who was in key positions of authority and capable of preventing these horrible miscarriages, have in this sordid incident? A former member of the parole board — a liberal Democrat who also served as mayor of Springfield, Mass. — swears he saw a letter from Mueller urging the denial of release for at least one of these wrongfully convicted defendants. When he went back to retrieve the letter, it was not in the file.”
I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT THESE THINGS WERE BAD FOR YOU: Artificial sweeteners linked to obesity, diabetes in study.
FLINT TOWN: NETFLIX CHRONICLES LIBERALISM’S TRAGIC DISASTER. “Flint Town is a real-life companion piece to The Wire. It’s unflinching and apolitical, and required viewing for anyone who wants to talk about the problems of inner-city America.”
Read the whole thing.
WHY POLICE CAMERAS ARE AWESOME: Port Authority official tries to bully a cop. Doesn’t go so well. The extra-delicious part:
“Flashing her commissioner’s gold badge and boasting of her influence during a routine traffic stop involving her daughter, Caren Z. Turner demanded to know why police had pulled the car over and why it was being impounded […] Turner, 60, a Democratic lobbyist who served as the ethics chair of the powerful bi-state agency.”
Ethics chair. Let that sink in.
AT THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY: I talk about apprenticeships back in the old days–when they’d throw runaway apprentices in jail.
AN EXPOSÉ ON BRAVE FIRE FIGHTERS RUSHING INTO BURNING BUILDINGS: With “Inside the Intense, Combative World of Covering the Trump White House,” Variety, which used to reserve its attention strictly for the deliberately fictitious aspects of the entertainment industry, turns its sights on a different group of television “entertainers.” Note this passage, from the bravest firefighter of them all. (Just ask him):
“There is that natural tension that exists between the press and the people we were covering, but it was never like this,” Acosta says. “We were never called ‘fake news.’ We were never called ‘the enemy of the people,’ and that just created a totally different climate and environment that we are all trying to make sense of and trying to figure out: How do we cover the news in that kind of toxic environment?”
Does Jim Acosta actually not know that he works for CNN, whose former chief executive Eason Jordan penned an essay in 2003 for the New York Times titled “The News We Kept To Ourselves,” where he admitted that his network created fake news out of Iraq simply to have the “Live From Baghdad” imprimatur on the Chyron? And that Jordan resigned two years later from the network after it was discovered that he claimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that the US military was deliberately targeting journalists for assassination in Iraq?
More recently, as far as being called “the enemy of the people,” does Acosta not know or care that employees in multiple divisions of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a yen for doxxing anonymous Americans?
Also in that same column, as T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner tweets, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, “The woman who screamed ‘DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR GAFFES HAVE OVERSHADOWED YOUR FOREIGN TRIP???’ at Romney during his visit to a Polish war memorial says she now has to — get this — QUADRUPLE check her work because of the ‘fake news environment.’ These are dark times indeed.”
Heh.™ Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Insta-phrase.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
WILLIAM MCGURN: The Elitists’ Trump Excuse: His critics may be more corrupting to democracy and decency than he is.
The election and its aftermath have been an education in how the smart set responds when the American people refuse the judgment of their self-styled betters. In its most honest form, it is the “Resist!” movement. In the more genteel version, it turns out to mean not just opposing Mr. Trump’s policies, which people can reasonably do, but throwing fairness and principle to the wind so long as it might help bring down the 45th president. Consider:
• In the thick of the 2016 election, the New York Times ran a front-page article in which it advertised that the particular dangers posed by Mr. Trump’s candidacy meant that the long-held norm of journalism—objectivity—might have to give way to a more oppositional approach.
• Good liberals once found the idea of spying on American citizens without just cause unconscionable. But when the target is a former Trump campaign associate, it becomes OK to get a warrant based on an unverified dossier paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
• James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, revised procedures to make it easier for executive branch officials to “unmask” the names of Americans in intelligence reports and share the information among themselves, making leaks all but inevitable. The illegal leak of Mike Flynn’s name in connection with a phone conversation with Russia’s ambassador was one result. But again, it doesn’t matter because he was a Trump transition official.
• When Sally Yates was acting attorney general and President Trump issued an executive order on immigration she objected to, Ms. Yates ordered the entire Justice Department not to obey, despite a finding from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the order was lawful. She was applauded in her insubordination by Andrew Weissmann, then a Justice attorney, who now serves on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. But it’s all for a good cause, right?
• In the middle of a #MeToo moment ostensibly all about more respect for women, the president’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has been derided as everything from a “summer whore” to “a slightly chunky soccer mom.” Though the columnist who wrote the latter has since apologized, the accomplished Mrs. Sanders must wonder what happened to “when they go low, we go high?”
• The pardon power enjoyed by the president is among the most unfettered in the Constitution. But because the president is Mr. Trump, and the pardon for controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has opted for lawlessness: appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the pardon’s legitimacy, in clear violation of the separation of powers.
Meanwhile, week after week, the same people who accuse Mr. Trump of lacking depth and nuance toss off allusions to Hilter, Stalin and a parade of murderous dictators. Channeling Mrs. Clinton, they insist that anyone who would chose Mr. Trump over her—or God forbid, agree to serve in a Trump administration—isn’t just wrong but forever morally tainted.
The people aren’t stupid. The 63 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump—some as an unappealing but better alternative to Mrs. Clinton, but many with gusto—recognize that what is going on here is a concerted effort to overturn the results of a legitimate presidential election. Is it really unreasonable to ask whether this might be as much of a threat to American democracy as anything Mr. Trump has said or done?
Nope. Trump’s election — or, more specifically, the reaction thereto — revealed that we have been ruled by moral and intellectual failures for some time. But what they lack in competence, humility, and integrity, they make up for in self-importance and entitlement.
DON’T FREE MUMIA: Today is the 64th birthday of Mumia Abu-Jamal–convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and cause célèbre of the Left. Mumia’s conviction was in 1982, and he spent decades on death row. Despite a massive “Free Mumia” legal and media campaign by leftwing activists and clueless celebrities, his conviction has always been affirmed. But his sentence wasn’t. Citing procedural irregularities in the penalty phase of the trial, a federal judge vacated the death sentence in 2001. The case took a few more twists and turns, including an order by the Supreme Court to the Third Circuit to reconsider the decision to vacate the death penalty. In 2011, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided too much time has passed to hold a trial on the sentencing issue again. That left Mumia with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
You can say a lot of things about Mumia–like he’s a better journalist than your average convicted murderer or his image sold a lot of t-shirts. But you can’t say he was innocent.
STILL TRUE: “The most significant loss in physical capacity with advancing age is strength.” I really see this dealing with the old people in my family who do, and don’t, hold up well. And leg strength in particular. Shoulders for show, but it’s the leg/hip combo that mostly gets you out of a chair, or a bed. That’s why I intend to squat and deadlift into old age if I possibly can. “Once physical capacity is lost, it’s much harder to recover than it is to merely maintain it, and it’s certainly harder to increase it in your 80s than in your 60s.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Choosing A Good Gun Belt For Concealed Carry.
NOT EVEN BEACH VOLLEYBALL? I Don’t Enjoy Watching Women’s Sports. That Doesn’t Make Me a Misogynist.
CONVENIENT OR CREEPY? Amazon Starts Delivering Goods to the Trunk of Your GM or Volvo.
IN DIAPERS, OR NOT YET BORN, FOR MANY JOURNALISTS TODAY: What the hell? Where were you guys in the ’80s? “Now, I realize that since the end of the Cold War we haven’t talked a lot about how Manhattan is thirty minutes or less away from a Russian SLBM launch 24/7, but back in the Eighties if you were old enough to turn on a television, you certainly knew it. I’m not expecting everyone to have been a war nerd like me who memorized throw weights and CEPs like I did, but surely everyone who was at least a teenager in the Eighties knew that the Russians had missiles that could hit anywhere on the planet and that these missiles could carry multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles, right?”
AT AMAZON, save in Tools and Hardware.
MICHAEL WALSH: Kanye West may just be trolling us all, but he sure has the Left in a total swivet.
That’s good enough for me.
I HAD MISSED THIS. WEIRD THAT IT DIDN’T GET MORE ATTENTION. Trump moves to cancel student loan debt for disabled veterans.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: I tried Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections On My Stretch Marks. She’s a real enthusiast: “Let’s get one thing straight: I love a good PRP treatment. There’s just something about using your own blood in PRP injections to repair and regenerate growth. Take it from someone who has hopped into a dermatologist’s chair for a PRP facial, more commonly known as Kim Kardashian West’s ‘vampire facial,’ a PRP breast-lift (yup), and even a PRP O-Shot (the [ultimate treatment] for the best orgasm of your life). So, you see, after seeing how PRP was able to give me baby soft skin, fuller, perkier boobs, and the ability to come from penetration, when I learned that the magical blood-based treatment has been known to minimize the appearance of stretch marks as well, I figured, why not?”
YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB: Sanders to announce proposal promising jobs to all Americans.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to announce a federal jobs proposal that would guarantee a job with at least a $15-per-hour wage and health benefits to every adult American “who wants or needs one,” The Washington Post reports.
The senator is still in the early stages of crafting the plan, according to the Post, which would provide a job or required training for any American.
Sanders’s office has yet to release the details of the plan’s funding, but previous large-scale projects proposed by the Vermont progressive have involved ending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.
Flashback: The US Tax System Just Keeps On Getting More And More Progressive.
American business is getting better and better at creating jobs, thanks in no small part to last year’s tax cut. They’d do better still if politicians like Bernie Sanders would follow the wise man’s advice to “Get the hell out of my way!”
SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: UK Court Rejects Parents’ Appeal To Save Their Terminally Ill Child. “The hospital in Liverpool has given up on him. They want to pull the plug, but his parents are begging to save him. In fact, they found a way out. Alfie was granted Italian citizenship on Monday, meaning he could be transferred to a hospital in Rome and receive new treatment. The doctors there are more than willing to do so.”
However:
The hospital wasted no time to take him off life support.
“He is needing oxygen but the hospital won’t give him any,” Alfie’s father said. “I don’t know what to do. He’s not suffering. He is losing his color and his fingers are going slowly blue but he is able to sustain his life.”
“He needs to be oxygenated and they won’t oxygenate him,” he added. “All he needs is some oxygen. He is starting to need oxygen and the hospital are refusing to give him that.”
Damn.