FINLAND PONDERS GROWLER: Finland has received U.S. government approval to buy the U.S. Navy’s EA-18G “Growler” EW (electronic warfare) aircraft. Finland is the second nation to receive a Pentagon “OK” to buy the advanced electronic warfare aircraft. Why? From the post: “Finland has made it clear that it needs some world-class aerial EW to deal with the Russian threat.” Fallout from the Crimea invasion and annexation continues.
Archive for 2019
March 26, 2019
YOU KNOW, A LOT OF IDIOCY COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED IF PEOPLE HAD JUST READ THIS BOOK TWO YEARS AGO: The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.
SOHRAB AMARI: Mueller Madness: The media pundits who got it most wrong. He’s got brackets. I’d forgotten all about Richard Painter.
ON HUGH HEWITT, Senator Tom Cotton blasts media coverage of past two years, tells Hugh Hewitt there must be more scrutiny of 2016 conduct of senior Obama era officials, says the only viable working premise is that sabotage of the Trump transition was attempted by some of these officials. “Well, this really is like a new day in the Trump presidency. For not just the last two years, Hugh, but going back to the campaign, almost three years, the Democrats and the media have been waging an unrelenting campaign we now know that was built on nothing but fiction, but spin and fantasy. As the President said, it was basically a hoax.”
Plus, a call for a special counsel to investigate the behavior of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and State Department during the Obama Administration.
AIRBORNE OPERATION, CENTRAL EUROPE: Paratroopers from the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade drop from a C-17 Globemaster III transport. They’ll land in Slovenia’s Cerklje Drop Zone. They are participating in Exercise Eagle Sokol. Photo was taken March 22, 2019. Great shot of a C-17.
WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND ABUSE? Roiled by Staff Uproar, Civil Rights Group Looks at Intolerance Within.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them: A professor at an elite US school says an influx of unskilled and entitled students is monopolizing faculty time: ‘They will eat you alive.’ “Students who can’t get into elite schools through the front door based on academic merit don’t change once they’re in class. They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. . . . Every unqualified student admitted to an elite university ends up devouring hugely disproportionate amounts of faculty time and resources that rightfully belong to all the students in class. By monopolizing faculty time to help compensate for their lack of necessary academic skills, unqualified students can also derail faculty research that could benefit everyone, outside the university as well as within it. To save themselves and their careers, many of my colleagues have decided that it is no longer worth it to uphold high expectations in the classroom. ‘Lower your standards,’ they advise new colleagues. ‘The fight isn’t worth it, and the administration won’t back you up if you try.'”
At an ‘elite’ university. . . . “The author requested anonymity to protect against administrative repercussions.”
ALL BECAUSE HILLARY COULDN’T ADMIT DEFEAT: Russiagate’s Damage To The Country Will Take Years To Realize. “The media and Democrat Party have dug themselves so deeply in a hole, they must keep on digging. That’s absolutely terrible for this country, as has been this entire endeavor.”
DOUBLING DOWN ON STUPID: Democrats not yet ready to conclude there’s no Russia conspiracy.
It would be sad if they didn’t hold so many powerful positions in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the media.
NONE IS SO BLIND. . . Byron York: On collusion, Mueller sent sign after sign, yet some would not see.
Many Trump opponents were shocked and disappointed by Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Some members of the Resistance and Never Trump communities apparently had a deep emotional commitment to the idea of collusion.
But there was no reason for surprise. For more than a year, Mueller sent sign after sign that he would not allege collusion. Those signs took the form of indictments and plea agreements against key Trump figures that did not allege any conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to fix the 2016 election.
If those key Trump figures — Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and others — were not involved in a Trump-Russia conspiracy, who was? As it turns out, no one.
Yep. He knew what they were trying to do to him from the beginning.
WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: How Michael Avenatti’s flash-in-the-pan celebrity perfectly fit Trump’s Washington.
Chris Cillizza, fanning hard to make this take hot:
Avenatti is the sort of person who, in this climate, can’t and won’t be ignored, even as everyone (maybe including Avenatti himself) knew that none of this would end well. At all.
Avenatti came onto the national radar thanks to Donald Trump. He was hired by porn star Stormy Daniels to represent her in a suit in which she sought to end the confidentiality agreement she signed in the run-up to the 2016 election to keep her allegations that she had an affair with Trump in the mid-2000s quiet. Soon after he was brought on in spring 2017, Avenatti, who had always harbored a flair for and love of television, became a near-constant presence on cable news — making the case, loudly, that he had proof that Trump had coordinated payments to Daniels.
The way I remember it is that CNN gave Trump millions in free air time, hoping to make him the loser nominee. When that failed, CNN made Avenatti a permanent fixture on the network, hoping to bring Trump down.
Now that that’s failed, it’s spin-spin-spin.
NEO: Why did the press do it? The influence of Watergate on Russiagate. “The fact that Russiagate was actually the un-Watergate probably did not even cross their minds. This was the reverse Watergate, the Watergate in which the president was not the perp, and the instruments of intelligence and justice were weaponized against him rather than that he made a blocked attempt to enlist them against his enemies. In the un-Watergate the press, instead of being able to successfully cast itself as the bold uncoverer of the terrible truth about the president, has been revealed to have been mainly in the business of amplifying lies about the president.”
THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS: U.S. calls Russia deployment of planes to Venezuela ‘reckless escalation.’
CONRAD BLACK: U.S. Was Closer To Coup D’Etat Than Ever Before. “The Russian-collusion argument was always an absurd, a practically insane proposition. The fact that it enjoyed the currency it did as long as it did illustrates the cognitive incapacity of the Obama-Clinton majority to accept that they were honestly defeated in 2016. Worse than that, while it was just mad partisanship by most Democrats and most of the political press, the collusion fraud was a crime, of extreme gravity, by its perpetrators.”
There must be consequences sufficient to deter future such efforts, for individuals, for institutions, and for the Democratic Party.
WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: No Collusion. No Exoneration.
Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark, where they’re no long claiming to conserve conservatism:
Obstruction was always the greatest threat to Trump. Mueller’s pointed refusal to exonerate the president from a criminal charge – and an impeachable offense – now shifts the venue to Congress. As Ben Wittes noted, the failure to indict is not a finding of innocence; and Congress need not apply the same standard to “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Department of Justice applied to the prospect of criminal prosecution. Barr’s letter suggests that Mueller’s report lays out “evidence on both sides of the question.” That narrative will make for very interesting reading as Congress begins its own investigations. Many of his efforts to derail the investigation took place in broad daylight, including firing the FBI director and browbeating the attorney general. Did it also include dangling pardons? Implicitly threatening witnesses? What else might be included in the report?
Orange Man still bad, I suppose, even though Team Mueller wasn’t even able to nail him for any process crimes related to the two-year-long investigation. My pet hypothesis is that Mueller refused to exonerate for obstruction, not on any Constitutional grounds, but as a last attempt at sowing further doubt about the legitimacy of the Trump Administration despite his failure to find any collusion.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Duke University Agrees to Pay U.S. $112.5 Million to Settle False Claims Act Allegations Related to Scientific Research Misconduct.
Plus, if you’re working at a university and have knowledge of fraud, take note: “The allegations were originally brought in a lawsuit filed by Joseph Thomas, a former Duke employee, under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which permit private individuals to sue on behalf of the government and share in any recovery. The Act permits the government to intervene in and take over the whistleblower’s suit, or, as in this case, for the whistleblower to pursue the action on the government’s behalf. Mr. Thomas will receive $33,750,000 from the settlement.” Nearly 34 million. Not bad.
ON THE 2020 CAMPAIGN TRAIL, Stacy McCain looks at the Religious Left. “All the same pundits who confidently predicted Trump’s defeat would say it is impossible Ms. Williamson could win the Democrats’ 2020 nomination, and that’s the really spooky thing. We are living in a world where impossible things seem to be happening with remarkable frequency.”
REPUBLICANS POUNCE! Trump begins post-Mueller ‘reset’ by attacking Democrats, media.
Why is “reset” in quotes? Did someone from the White House call for a post-Mueller reset, and now they’re acting hypocritical about it?
No. The “reset” is an imaginary state, a wish of the Left and the Deep State to sweep two years of their own hype, lies, and misdirection under the rug. Or as longtime reader RBJ commented yesterday, “We spent over two years sh!tting on the horrible Drumpf and his deplorable supporters. Now that he’s been cleared these ingrates selfishly don’t want to make nice.”
This is where “He fights!” really pays off, I hope.
ANDREW G. BOSTOM: Systemic Western ‘Islamophobia’ Is Not to Blame for the Christchurch Mosque Attack.
The killer was a self-described “eco-fascist,” which has its roots not in nativism, but in leftwing eco-terror fantasyland.
CRISIS AT THE BORDER: Migrant surge overwhelms El Paso authorities, shelters.