AUTOMATING TRUCKERS’ JOBS SOUNDS EASIER WHEN YOU DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT TRUCKERS ACTUALLY DO.
Archive for 2018
February 5, 2018
ANALYSIS: TRUE. SJWs Destroy Everything.
THEY HATE US. THEY REALLY HATE US. Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Almost Every Talk Show Host Is Liberal’ Because ‘It Requires a Certain Level of Intelligence.’
JONATHAN TURLEY: Comey takes page from Trump by turning to Twitter to attack enemies.
Many of us supported the appointment of a special counsel after Trump fired Comey in the midst of Comey’s Russian investigation. Soon after his departure, however, Comey began to take actions that seriously undermined his own position, and his value as a witness to special counsel Robert Mueller. Indeed, the special counsel would now be taking a considerable risk by calling Comey on the stand in any prosecution of the president, but Comey could well end up on the witness list for the defense.
In leaving the FBI, Comey improperly removed memos from the Russian investigation that he wrote concerning meetings with Trump. These memos were clearly FBI material, and some were deemed later to be classified. He had neither the authority to take the memos nor any review that confirmed that they were not classified. Comey then sent some of the memos to a friend to disclose the information to the media. Four of the seven memos that Comey removed are now believed to be classified. He reportedly gave four memos to his friend to leak to the media. Thus, at least one was likely classified.
It was a tragically ironic moment. This was the man who was tasked with finding leakers and became a leaker himself the minute it served his purposes. Moreover, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had called for Comey to be fired for his conduct during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private servers for official and classified information. Comey had denounced Clinton’s handling of such material as “extremely careless.” Now, he was sending official and possibly classified material to a friend with the specific purpose of leaking the contents to the media.
Read the whole thing.
TONI AIRAKSINEN: Title IX ‘crushing insult’ to victims, prof argues. “Professor Nicholas Wolfinger recently argued that while Title IX may have an appropriate place on campus, he believes the system was compromised by the Obama administration’s 2011 Dear Colleague Letter. As a result, Wolfinger believes that an overhaul of the system is needed so that ‘rape and potty mouth aren’t handled under the same rubric.'”
and LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Battle of the Memos, Constitutional Crises and Much, Much More. “We were told the release of the memo would spark a constitutional crisis. I agree: it is evident the Democrats and the administrative state are not interested in participating in the American checks and balances system.”
To say the least.
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Think California politics is on the far-left fringe? Just wait for the next elections.
JULIETTE OCHIENG: Who Runs Things?
DAVID HARSANYI: FISA Abuse Memo Proves The Need For An Independent Investigation.
I’m not a fan of special investigators, as they’re often imbued with wide-ranging powers they don’t deserve, but there are a number of reasons both sides could support such a move. In the long run, a narrow, independent inquiry into the FBI and potential FISA abuse might even marginally de-politicize the fiasco, by either ferreting out abuse or clearing the FBI’s leadership. As it stands, there’s no way the institution can regain trust with about half the country.
Perhaps it’ll turn out that everything the FBI did was legal and by-the-book. Right now, though, to millions of Americans, it looks a lot like one political party paid for opposition research, then handed that unverified and often sensationalistic “evidence” to an allied administration, which then used it to attain a warrant so it could continue to spy on political opponents (knowing full well it would capture others in the campaign).
If you’re rich enough to cook up a “dossier” and powerful enough to know the right people, you too can have the government spy for you.
It’s good to be the King — or at least, the wannabe-Queen.
THAT’S WHY THEY IGNORED IT: Eddie Scarry: Trump won on immigration at the State of the Union, even as the media ignored it.
Anyone hear about the two pairs of black parents who were invited to the State of the Union by President Trump in order to show the country how tragic our immigration system is?
I didn’t think so. Their appearance — and it was heartbreaking to see them grieve while Trump told the story of how their daughters were killed by illegal immigrant gang members — was almost entirely dismissed by the press. . . .
The two had been walking together when several members of MS-13, a gang largely made up of illegal immigrants from the slums of Central America, jumped them while wielding machetes and baseball bats. The girls, who had grown up friends since childhood, were slashed, brutalized, and bludgeoned to death, reportedly over an altercation that started on social media.
The machete is MS-13’s “weapon of choice” and is “used to mutilate and dismember victims during attacks that sometimes are recorded,” according to the Long Island newspaper Newsday.
Suffolk County Police Commissioner Tim Sini described the gruesome attacks as “depraved” and said the perpetrators would have had to have had “no regard for human life.”
So ravaged is Suffolk County by MS-13 that it received half a million dollars in a federal grant last October just to combat the gang violence.
But after Trump’s address, NBC “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd immediately complained that he “didn’t lead with a conciliatory tone on immigration.” (Presumably Trump’s guests, Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens, were more upset that the illegals who killed their daughters “didn’t lead with a conciliatory tone” when they took machetes to their bodies.)
The New York Times editorial board said Trump had “injected only poison and confusion” into the immigration debate.
Flush with originality, the Washington Post also said Trump “injected more ethno-nationalist venom into a debate he already has done much to poison” and that he “chose in the most inflammatory way possible to associate immigrants with a horrific crime committed by a vicious gang.”
As Scarry notes, an actual look at the speech doesn’t reveal any actual poison. Plus:
It’s only worth noting that Cuevas, Mickens and their parents are black because of the media’s unrelenting accusation that any immigration policy outside of “complete open borders” is racist.
Trump spent the better part of the last month being called a racist because he suggested limiting immigration from “shithole countries.” Here at his State of the Union were four black parents who saw their children taken away because of illegal immigrant criminals.
That interests virtually no one in the national media?
Of course not, because that would be a win for Trump. And he always wins when the debate is over immigration.
That’s why they want to shut the debate down with bogus claims of racism.
DON’T BE EVIL: There’s A Newfound Hatred Of Silicon Valley.
“Unexpectedly.” Or as J. Christian Adams wrote last month, Employee Lawsuit Reveals Google As Intolerant Race Cult.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They were warned, years ago. But no dice.
FLASHBACK: Chris Cillizza Called Trump ‘Bonkers’ For Saying Clinton And FBI Were Behind Dossier.
Cillizza chastised Trump and his cadre of followers in October of last year for suggesting and supporting the idea that Democrats and elements inside the FBI were involved in funding the dossier. He called them conspiracy theorists at the time.
“He is suggesting that a dossier prepared by a former member of British intelligence has not only been totally discredited … but that it might have been funded by some combination of Russia, the Democratic Party and, wait for it, the FBI!” Cillizza wrote in a missive at the time.
“You can love Donald Trump and still believe that the idea that the Russians, the Democrats and the FBI co-funded a dossier designed to discredit Trump’s 2016 campaign is totally bonkers,” said Cillizza, a former writer with The Washington Post who fashions himself a type of advocacy journalist.
He added: “But, there is no plausible scenario by which what Trump suggested this morning — a wide-scale conspiracy involving three separate actors across federal agencies and continents — actually happened.”
Well, Cillizza says a lot of things, almost always to boost Democrats and/or belittle Republicans.
MORE GRAND JURORS SHOULD EXERCISE SUPERVISION: Tucson grand jurors rebel against drug prosecutions. “The 269th Pima County Grand Jury could not be controlled like that. That 16-member grand jury met from July to October last year, one of two county grand juries meeting twice a week in Tucson at the time. But this one was led by a criminal-defense attorney and populated by freethinkers who took to heart their role as ‘conscience of the community.’ They went so far as to decline to indict people even though there was enough evidence to show probable cause, foreman Natman Schaye and others told me. That, in essence, is grand-jury nullification — not carrying out the law because, in the jury’s opinion, it is unjust.”
IRA STOLL: The Other FBI Scandal.
So long as Congress and the Trump White House are taking a look at FBI shenanigans, let them not forget the case of Supervisory Special Agent David Chaves.
He is the one whose interactions with reporters for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times were described by federal prosecutors in a January 2017 court filing as “unquestionable misconduct by an agent of the Government…improper and inexcusable.” The federal judge presiding over the insider trading case affected by the illegal leaks of grand jury information, P. Kevin Castel, was so worked up about the issue that he ordered the Justice Department to provide updates every three months on the status of the leak investigation.
The latest of those updates appears here, with enough redaction to make it resemble a late Rothko painting. . . .
Chaves, like McCabe, has now apparently retired, according to his page at the speaker’s bureau that represents him.
The insider trading leaks and the conduct surrounding the Clinton email investigation and Trump Russia influence investigation may appear different, but there are actually plenty of similarities. In all three cases, law enforcement skated close to the warning of Robert Jackson in his classic 1940 speech “The Federal Prosecutor”: “It is in this realm — in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.”
In all three cases, there were real life consequences. Hillary Clinton and her supporters blame Comey’s public statements, with some justification, for affecting the outcome of the election. The Russia investigation has mired Trump’s aides in a morass of legal fees and perjury-trap interviews, regardless of their underlying culpability. And the insider trading investigations took years out of the lives of money managers like Michael Steinberg and David Ganek, who were never ultimately found to be guilty of any crimes or, in Ganek’s case, even charged.
In both the insider trading cases and the Russia investigation, wiretaps were used and perhaps abused. A federal judge in Connecticut found that FBI agents listened to 180 phone calls between hedge fund manager Craig Drimal and his wife Arlene. The judge described the agents’ conduct as “disgraceful,” “egregious,” and “voyeuristic.”
But remember, if you dare to criticize the FBI you’re provoking a constitutional crisis or something.
WOW: With Cairo’s Approval, Israeli Planes Bombing ISIS Targets in Egypt.
I almost lead with “UNTHINKABLE” or “IMPOSSIBLE” except that it actually happened.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Nunes memo raises question: Did FBI violate Woods Procedures?
REMEMBER, IT’S UNPATRIOTIC TO CRITICIZE THE FBI NOW: As F.B.I. Took a Year to Pursue the Nassar Case, Dozens Say They Were Molested. “The New York Times has identified at least 40 girls and women who say that Dr. Nassar molested them between July 2015, when he first fell under F.B.I. scrutiny, and September 2016, when he was exposed by an Indianapolis Star investigation. Some are among the youngest of the now-convicted predator’s many accusers — 265, and counting.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY FROM THE EDITOR OF THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW:
Narrative has become a maligned word of late, but we find ourselves today in a news environment where the narratives are established, and the days’ Trump coverage seems largely in service of reinforcing (for the left) or debunking (the right) that narrative. We say this, the president says that, we’re at an impasse. Donald Trump called developing nations a shithole, unless he didn’t, but he probably did. What do we learn? Probably that he’s a racist who lies, both of which we already knew. But that doesn’t stop us from repeating the exercise day after day; maybe this will be the thing that finally does him in.
According to his bio, “Kyle Pope is the Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.”
As Ann Althouse wrote last month, “‘Shithole’ is a perfectly good rude, slangy word. It has a great history, and it’s vivid and effective. It is not a racial term, and shame on the people who are making it racist. I wonder if these people ever think of the pain and damage they are causing by proclaiming and insisting upon a connection between dark skin and excrement. They’re revealing what’s in their head, and they don’t mind burdening dark-skinned people with the knowledge that they are being thought about like that.”
James Taranto tweets, “A lot of the complaints about Trump’s departures from norms seem to me to be justifications for the critics’ own departures from norms.” “Do any members of ‘the political press corps’ dispute this characterization of their attitudes,” Taranto asks in a follow-up tweet linking to the CJR piece.
CIVIL RIGHTS IN ACTION: Pistol-Packing Passer-By Aids Utah Policeman Being Assaulted.
CHANGE: As Polls Shift, Dem Hopes for Control, Impeachment Fade. Don’t get cocky, kid. Polls that change can change back.
IS THIS THE MOST PIVOTAL FEDERAL JUDGE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF? FISA Court Judge James Boasberg is why Osama bin Laden’s death photos have never been seen outside the Pentagon. He’s also the reason 14,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails were made public.
But those decisions may pale by comparison with Boasberg’s decision Friday to keep you from reading any of the seven memos former FBI Director James Comey wrote to himself (and partially leaked to a buddy at Columbia Law School) on his conversations with President Trump.