OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: NASA rejects Blue Origin’s offer of a cheaper upper stage for the SLS rocket. “Each launch of the SLS rocket may cost on the order of $2 billion.”
Archive for 2019
November 6, 2019
SIDNEY POWELL IS THE DEEP STATE’S WORST ENEMY: There is a long list of candidates for the honor but watch this interview last night of Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell by Fox Late Night’s Shannon Bream and it should be clear why Powell deserves the top spot.
BRIAN STELTER’S HOT TAKE ON ABC/EPSTEIN STORY IS EVERYTHING WRONG WITH JOURNALISM AND MEDIA ‘FIREFIGHTERS’ TODAY: “Tuesday’s video clip caused widespread outrage, particularly on the right, with many commentators using it to stoke hatred of the media writ large,” Stelter wrote in his newsletter last night.
Just to review: ABC News’ public face is George Stephanopoulos, the former communications director for Bill Clinton. In 2015, Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which the Sunlight Foundation has described as a “slush fund for the Clintons.” Which Jeffrey Epstein claimed he co-founded in a 2007 letter “written by high-powered lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt.” Court documents “obtained by Fox News in 2016 showed that Clinton took at least 26 trips flying aboard Epstein’s private jet, known as the ‘Lolita Express,’ and apparently ditched his Secret Service detail on some of the excursions.” The New York Times reported in July that “A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise. In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida prison, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal.”
Yesterday, after O’Keefe’s video dropped, featuring ABC’s Amy Robach complaining that management spiked her 2016 story on Epstein and Clinton, David Harsanyi wrote “ABC’s Excuse for Failing to Report on Jeffrey Epstein Makes Absolutely No Sense.” Three years ago, “Bill Clinton’s wife was in the midst of her presidential run. One imagines that a story detailing her husband’s vacations to a pedophile’s island retreat might have been newsworthy. By the way, has Robach wrapped up that reporting on Clinton, yet?”
So of course, “CNN’s self-styled media firefighter Brian Stelter” goes with the “Republicans pounce!” angle.
CHANGE: Trump Officially Pulls Out of ‘Disastrous’ Paris Agreement.
The only way this story could be better is if Trump had also announced the formation of, say, “The Winners’ Agreement,” whose membership is limited to countries that actually lived up to their Paris Agreement commitments.
MATT MARGOLIS: No, Sondland’s Revised Testimony Doesn’t Prove There Was a Quid Pro Quo.
What about Sondland’s testimony? According to his testimony, when he asked Trump what he wanted from Ukraine, Trump said, “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I want Zelensky to do the right thing… to do what he ran on.”
Also released today were transcripts of the testimony of Ambassador Kurt Volker, special envoy to Ukraine. According to his testimony, there was “no linkage” between a White House meeting with Trump and Zelenksy and any promises to hold any investigations.
I think Spengler hit it closer to the mark last week: “For the record, I don’t care whether there was quid pro quo with Ukraine or not. If President Trump used military aid as a bargaining chip to persuade the government of Ukraine to investigate foreign subversion of our political system, he was doing his job as commander-in-chief to protect this country from its external enemies.”
Although the word “external” was probably unnecessary.
OH, PLEASE. STATE AND THE ENTIRE INTEL COMMUNITY HAVE BEEN IN REVOLT SINCE TRUMP WON: As scandals mount, Pompeo faces ‘a revolt’ at the State Department.
FIRED UP FOR 2020: WATCH: Liberal college students can’t name one Democratic accomplishment.
SO MUCH COMMUNISM IN ONE HEADLINE: 1 million ‘cannibal’ ants found trapped in Soviet-era bunker used to store nuclear weapons.
ONLY THE MOST ELITE LEFTIST WHITES CAN WEAR BLACKFACE: Black conservative removed from meeting over Justin Trudeau blackface costume. See also Ralph Northam.
AT AMAZON, Deal of the Day, Wise Company Emergency Food Supply, Entree Variety, 25-Year Shelf Life, 60 Servings.
CHURNING WAKE: The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford conducts high-speed turns in the Atlantic Ocean. Photo taken October 29. The Ford is conducting sea trials. The ship –first in its class of new carriers– has experienced a several problems with its advanced systems. Its EMALS (Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System) catapult issues have received the most media criticism. As the linked post notes, there are other problems as well.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Inside the Mainstream Media’s Sexual Predator Protection Racket.
The mainstream media (news and entertainment) in this country have spent the past three years caterwauling about President Trump’s treatment of them. They bristle at the merest suggestion that they have been derelict in their duty.
In their telling of the story, they are brave souls, the lone purveyors of truth, and the only things standing between ORANGE MAN BAD and the utter demise of the Republic.
In reality it turns out that they’re just a bunch of depraved sexual predator and pervert protectors.
To be fair, they won’t go to such great length to protect Republican predators and perverts.
THE FORT HOOD TERROR ATTACK AS BITTER HISTORY:
Former Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan made Fort Hood a domestic battlefield. He killed 13 people and wounded over 30 more before a policeman wounded him. Fourteen dead is arguably a more accurate toll, since the unborn child of a pregnant victim died when she died. This is a forensic fact.
What spurred Hasan’s treason? From the get-go, non-benighted humans identified Islamic jihadi ideology as the psycho-political insanity guiding his crime. Hasan had known contact with terrorist recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki. But the FBI did not investigate the warnings signaling Hasan’s Islamic conversion. An official who recommended the FBI investigate was told an interview was “politically sensitive.”
Really? Sensitive to whom?
Answer: the boss of the FBI, then-President Barack Obama.
Read the entire essay.
SHARE AND ENJOY: Here is your daily reminder that there is a standing US-Ukraine mutual legal assistance treaty in effect that justifies investigating 2016-era criminal activities in Ukraine (i.e., Crowdstrike). Read the treaty for yourself here.
BYRON YORK: TRUMP’S NOT ACTING GUILTY:
In short, Trump appears to be making no effort to conceal what he said to Zelensky, be it about his belief that other countries should bear more of the burden of foreign aid or what he wanted Ukraine to investigate about the 2016 election and about former Vice President Joe Biden and son, Hunter Biden.
So what to make of a situation in which one side says the call is a smoking gun, while the other screams “READ THE TRANSCRIPT”?
“Look at the circumstantial evidence surrounding this,” former independent counsel Kenneth Starr said in a recent interview. “[Did Trump say,] ‘Bring him in, bring him in here, and I want to talk to him privately?'”
No. Instead, Starr explained, Trump chose a phone call, rather than a one-on-one meeting, to make his points with Zelensky. Remember when the president was accused of being secretive in a one-on-one conversation with Vladimir Putin with no one other than translators within earshot? This wasn’t that.
“There were 17 people on the phone, including the secretary of state,” Starr continued. “The president was so, shall I say, open and transparent about it that that goes to his intent. There’s no corrupt bargain, or an attempt to achieve a corrupt bargain, as I see it.”
Yeah, that’s because it’s all bullshit, like the “Russian collusion” narrative whose place it took.
READ’EM AND WEEP, LIBS: Institute for Family Studies demonstrates that multiple research studies find conservatives are consistently, measurably happier than non-conservatives. And it gets even better (or worse, depending on your POV), according to Glenn Stanton.
GAIL AT STANFORD: I’ll be at Stanford Law School this evening advancing the argument that the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 is in part unconstitutional. Yes, of course, you’re invited.
IT’S BIG DEMOCRATIC DONOR TERRY BEAN: LGBT leader paid sex abuse victim not to testify, Oregon authorities say.
DAVID HARSANYI: ABC’s Excuse for Failing to Report on Jeffrey Epstein Makes Absolutely No Sense.
Robach now claims, through a network statement, that she was caught “in a private moment” of frustration over the lack of progress on a story. “I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn’t air because I could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations.”
Sorry, but Robach’s response to the firestorm doesn’t square with her initial comments, in which she states that “Roberts had pictures, she had everything . . . it was unbelievable what we had. [Bill] Clinton, we had everything.”
“Everything” sure sounds like sufficient corroborating evidence. Even if employing the most scrupulous journalistic standards, a giant news organization wouldn’t need three years to substantiate — or dismiss — a story with pictures, dates and a credible witness.
We certainly know that ABC didn’t need “everything” — or much of anything, for that matter – when it was running scores of pieces online and on television, highlighting every risible accusation against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Switch the parties involved and they’d switch the outcomes.