WHISTLEBLOWER REQUIREMENTS RECENTLY AMENDED TO ALLOW HEARSAY: “I will never be so comfortable with a president that I don’t think he or she should be held accountable for wrongdoing. Political lynching via hearsay is a bit Soviet for my tastes, however.”
(Bumped.)
SARAH HOYT: The Hatred of Good.
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K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Reaction to Post’s Maspeth HS exposé shows the ‘worthless diploma’ fraud never went away.
HARSH, BUT FAIR.
FLASHBACK: Scandals At State: How Clinton, Kerry Used Office To Enrich Their Families. Remember, it’s not a crime for them to do that stuff, it’s just a crime to want to investigate it.
WHY IS IT UNSURPRISING THAT BERNIE SANDERS ENDORSES SOMETHING LIKE A BERLIN WALL: Wealth registries and exit taxes.
Not scary or intrusive at all: presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has called for enacting a “national wealth registry,” the better to enforce future schemes of taxation, confiscation, and restraints on expatriation [Brittany De Lea, Fox Business; related, Chris Edwards, Cato; Emily Ekins on opinion poll] And the steep “exit tax” that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sanders propose to slap on wealthy individuals who depart the U.S., of up to 40 and 60 percent respectively, did not sound better in the original German.
Harsh, but fair.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Michael Bloomberg: China Is Not A Dictatorship. “Michael Bloomberg told Firing Line host Margaret Hoover that Chinese president Xi Jinping is ‘not a dictator’ and insisted the Chinese Communist Party listens to its constituents. The comments come in the wake of the former New York mayor’s announcement of an economic forum in Beijing this November.”
Perhaps what Mayor Mike means is that “There is no Communist domination of East Asia, and there never will be under a Bloomberg administration…”
THREAD: “Here is something seriously strange. The Disclosure of Urgent Concern Form located earlier today at DNI is only two days old according to its pdf properties… Sue Gordon of CIA resigned from DNI on August 8 after being passed over by Trump for promotion. (Ratcliff withdrew on Aug 2 after being sabotaged). CIA operative ‘WB’ letter to Schiff and Burr was on August 12.”
Read the whole thing.
QUALIFIED IMMUNITY SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: Federal Officials Should Be Accountable for Their Wrongdoing.
Federal officials’ special status results not from federal statutes but from common law; it is the nation’s judges who have, over time, made it harder for victims of government wrongdoing to hold the government accountable, rather than easier. Judges have fashioned sweeping doctrines of immunity that insulate federal and state officials from facing any liability. Under these doctrines, victims of government wrongdoing cannot recover damages from government officials unless they can point to some prior case that has found the government conduct unlawful.
Judicial activism at its worst — no statute has done this, just judges making policy that they like. Oh, they also found judges are absolutely immune from suit.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Puberty blocking drugs used on “trans kids” have killed more than 6,000 people.
UPDATE: NBC disputes this story: A viral fake news story linked trans health care to ‘thousands’ of deaths. “The problem is: the ‘thousands’ of people who die while taking these drugs are likely the terminally ill cancer patients who receive hormone blockers to fight hormone-sensitive cancers, like prostate cancer, according to experts.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: String of San Francisco restaurants closing their doors.
THIS IS CRAZY — WHO KEEPS GERMS AS PETS? OH, WAIT. . . Researchers find genetic link in rare reaction to pet germ.
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RESCUE AT SEA: Cruise ship saves 3 men stranded on life raft in daring rescue. “Three men stranded on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the French territory of New Caledonia were rescued by a cruise ship that responded to a distress call. The men — two Australians and one Briton — had been sailing in a yacht and were forced to abandon ship Thursday after the vessel started taking on water.”
JONATHAN TURLEY: You Want Impeachment? Find A Quid To Go With The Pro Quo.
HMM: Why put off retiring if you don’t have to? 5 reasons to retire as early as you can. I like my job; I’m not saying I’ll never retire, but I don’t really want to retire early.
ROD DREHER ON BAD BEER + BAD JOURNALISM:
Why did the newspaper do this? Why hold this poor guy up for community contempt over two things he tweeted when he was a 16-year-old? It’s wrong, and readers were right to drag the paper.
But get this: amid the controversy, the paper discovered that Aaron Calvin, the reporter who outed King as a teenage HATER, had himself tweeted offensive things when he was a teenager. According to the Washington Post:
Between 2010 and 2013, Calvin published tweets that used a racist slur for black people, made light of abusing women, used the word “gay” as a pejorative and mocked the legalization of same-sex marriage by saying he was “totally going to marry a horse.” The Register’s statement on Twitter was soon flooded with images of the reporter’s offensive comments.
By late Tuesday night, Calvin began deleting old tweets, and then locked his account early Wednesday morning after posting an apology.
And then the paper fired him! Which is just wrong. They shouldn’t have exposed the idiotic tweets of a 16 year old who, eight years later, was remorseful, and which had absolutely nothing to do with the good works that brought him fame. And they should not have fired the reporter. It is possible that the reporter went to his editors with the information he found, and they made the call to include the information in the newspaper, under his byline. It sounds like Carol Hunter and her team are scapegoating Aaron Calvin.
As Dreher writes, “I’m just so very, very happy that Twitter and other forms of social media did not exist when I was in high school.” Sadly, it did by the time Calvin was a journalist. QED:
WELL, THAT WAS CERTAINLY CONVENIENT. Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing. “The internal properties of the newly revised ‘Disclosure of Urgent Concern’ form, which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Swappable Flying Batteries Keep Drones Aloft Almost Forever.
FAST TIMES AT SULZBERGER HIGH: Sarah Jeong leaves the New York Times editorial board.
“Sarah decided to leave the editorial board in August,” Kate Kingsbury, a deputy editorial page editor told CNN Friday. “But we’re glad to still have her journalism and insights around technology in our pages through her work as a contributor.”
She’ll now be a “contracted contributor for NYT Opinion” according to CNN.
The new role will permit her to “go back to reporting and writing long features while still being involved with NYT Opinion section on tech issues,” she told CNN.
As long as it frees up more time for her to write racist tweets and insult Times journalists, it sounds like a win-win for all.
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FRED HOYLE SMILES: Life’s building blocks may have formed in interstellar clouds.
ISN’T IT WEIRD, THOUGH, THE COINCIDENCE?
Related: What did Schumer mean when he threatened Trump about the CIA’s ways to get back at him?
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