Archive for 2019
May 4, 2019
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LINDSEY GRAHAM CALLS ROBERT MUELLER’S BLUFF:
In response to questions by Senator Blumenthal, the Attorney General testified in essence that you told him in a phone call that you did not challenge the accuracy of the Attorney General’s summary of your report’s principal conclusions, but rather you wanted more of the report, particularly the executive summaries concerning obstruction of justice, to be released promptly. In particular, Attorney General Barr testified that you believed media coverage of your investigation was unfair without the public release of those summaries.
Please inform the Committee if you would like to provide testimony regarding any misrepresentation by the Attorney General of the substance of that phone call.
Still digging Lindsey 2.0.
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ANDREW MCCARTHY: THE BIG LIE THAT BARR LIED.
I originally thought this was too stupid to write about. But stupid is like the plague inside the Beltway — one person catches it and next thing you know there’s an outbreak at MSNBC and the speaker of the House is showing symptoms while her delirious minions tote ceramic chickens around Capitol Hill.
So I give you: the Bill Barr perjury allegation. . . .
If I were a cynic, I’d think people were trying to get out in front of some embarrassing revelations on the horizon. I might even be tempted to speculate that progressives were trotting out their “Destroy Ken Starr” template for Barr deployment (which, I suppose, means that 20 years from now we’ll be reading about what a straight-arrow Barr was compared to whomever Democrats are savaging at that point).
The claim that Barr gave false testimony is frivolous. That is why, at least initially, Democrats and their media echo chamber soft-pedaled it — with such dishonorable exceptions as Mazie Horono, the Hawaii Democrat who, somehow, is a United States senator. It’s tough to make the perjury argument without any false or even inaccurate statements.
Well, I think it’s about the distraction from upcoming scandals. The attacks on Barr are in the nature of a spoiling attack, because the Democrats have a pretty good idea of what’s coming down the pike. In fact, everything they’ve done since election night is in that nature, really. Which gives you an idea of how bad it is.
What’s behind conservative support for Cheney and Barr is their lack of embarrassment. Most Washingtonians, no matter their party, find it important to be held in esteem by the city’s tastemakers, who are overwhelmingly liberal. Not these two. The classic Cheney moment was his 2004 exchange with Pat Leahy on the Senate floor. Cheney complained that Leahy had called him a war profiteer. Leahy responded that Cheney had said he was a bad Catholic. So Cheney ended the conversation by telling Leahy to perform a physically impossible four-letter act. “You’d be surprised at how many people liked that,” Cheney recollected in a 2010 interview. “It’s sort of the best thing I ever did.” He’s selling himself short.
Republican fans of Barr circulated clips of his Senate appearance Wednesday even as media coverage of his testimony was uniformly negative. No Democrats are held in less esteem by conservatives than the ones on the Judiciary Committee. They will never live down their treatment of Brett Kavanaugh. Trump supporters nodded in agreement when Barr said the controversy over his March 24 description of the Mueller report is “mind-bendingly bizarre.” They chuckled when he said Mueller’s March 27 letter to him was “a bit snitty and I think it was probably written by one of his staff members.” They guffawed when Barr described the verb “spying” as “a good English word.” They cheered when Richard Blumenthal asked for notes Barr had taken of his phone conversation with Mueller and Barr told him no. “Why should you have them?”
Heh. Read the whole thing.™
Deficits are bad, but given the huge revenues we’re seeing, that’s more of a spending problem. Sadly, neither party wants to address that.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Mark Penn: Trump is not a dictator, Nadler is. Our political system is being weaponized against itself.
Legislative oversight is not a specifically enumerated power in the Constitution — it’s a limited power implied from the “necessary and proper” clause and subject to privileges, separation of powers, and the need for a legitimate legislative purpose. It’s not an open-ended power but bounded by the checks and balances of our constitution.
The Mueller report should have closed down investigations of the president, not opened them up. It unambiguously cleared the president of any conspiracy or collusion with the Russians, ending two or more years of undermining the president and his family with unfair and unjust criminal investigations. There is nothing more distracting for an administration than to be under independent counsel investigation and I should know, I was there in 1998 when President Clinton was impeached.
Instead, Nadler‘ s response has been to begin a coordinated plan with other Democratic committee chairs to subpoena every tax, business and other records of the president, his family, and his businesses and associates.
Now that kind of inquisition is exactly what dictators do, especially when they are trying to use their power to destroy their political opponents.
There is not a smidgen of bipartisanship in any of his actions and so the precedent it sets could be the most destructive congressional behavior since Joe McCarthy discovered he could use and abuse the investigative process for political gain.
By comparison, McCarthy was a piker.
May 3, 2019
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BIGOTRY: Google Employees Cheer Firing of Black Woman. Google appears to be heavily staffed by mentally disturbed persons. I don’t think it should be trusted with the future.
OPEN THREAD: The weekend starts now.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS — AND IT WAS DESIGNED TO. Persecution of Christians is modern-day ‘genocide’ says report as Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt blames failure to confront the oppression of world’s most targeted faith group on ‘political correctness.’
FROM MILO YIANNOPOULOS: How to Be Poor.
WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION: MSNBC Celebrates Kids Skipping School For The Climate.
MSNBC touted a group of kids who are skipping school every Friday to protest inaction on climate change in a broadcast Friday.
“In over 500 cities and 75 countries, these students are skipping school and taking to the streets,” host Stephanie Ruhle reported.
After struggling to comprehend a quote the movement is based on, Guthrie gave up and looped in a reporter on the ground. “Help me understand this. What is going on here?” she asked.
“Friday for Future is this idea of students skipping school on Friday to essentially say, ‘Look, why do I need to go to school if I don’t know the future based on the state of the planet?’” Savannah Sellers said. “That’s what these students have been doing for a long time. They have been skipping school.”
Sellers then interviewed three of the young girls at the protest, who spoke passionately about the “sacrifice” they are making for the sake of the planet.
“I’ve been skipping school for 11 weeks now,” 12-year-old Ella said. “And it is a sacrifice that we have to make because we are missing important things, but we realize that if we don’t skip this school, we might not have a future. So we need to.”
Great moments in parenting. I assume many or most of their parents are young enough to have missed the 1970s. Trust me on this: Every day back then, the networks’ evening news shows, filled with segments on crises after crises from global cooling, to overpopulation, to air pollution, in addition to sundry topics like plane hijacks and inflation, basically looked like this 1975 illustration from Crazy magazine, Marvel’s ‘70s-era competitor to Mad.
As Kathy Shaidle wrote a few years ago in a post titled, “Scared America: 8 Crises and Collective Panics of the 1970s,” “That 1975 illustration EXACTLY depicts the inside of my head when I was a kid. Exactly.”
FLASHBACK: 60 Minutes Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack.
As Patrick Poole noted, “The attackers rolled up in a car loaded with guns and ammunition to the ‘Draw Mohammad’ cartoon contest event in Garland, Texas,” four years ago today.
TRUMP’S ECONOMY PROVES DEMOCRATS ARE PRESENTLY ON ANOTHER PLANET:
Consider the latest unemployment data released Friday. Alongside an increase in productivity of 3.6%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the unemployment rate fell to 3.6% over the first quarter 2019. That’s the lowest rate since we first landed on the moon. And that 3.6% matching speaks to an economy that is growing, dynamic, and moral. Consider that the data also shows Hispanic unemployment is now at just 4.2%. Aside from static year-on-year changes in (still very low) unemployment for blacks, and a 0.2% year-on-year increase in unemployment for teenagers, the economy is boosting employment for every listed demographic subset.
Yet Democrats say that Trump’s economy is somehow immoral. When they aren’t trying to assign credit for it to Obama, they claim that it punishes the middle class and the poor. And so, rather than doubling down on the economic fortune we now find, Democrats are pledging to shred Trump’s corporate tax reforms, escalate regulation, and increase state control in the economy.
This is insane.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes may presently be in another galaxy:
As Sean Davis adds, “Fresh off of peddling the Trump-Russia hoax for two years, an MSNBC anchor is now suggesting the economy sucked under Obama not because of his job-killing policies, but because all businesses in the country conspired to tank the economy to spite Obama.”
And yet, the New York Times assured me just last year that “An Economic Upturn Begun Under Obama Is Now Trump’s to Tout.”
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LEGAL “ETHICS” NOT LOOKING SO GOOD: In Ethics Seminar, Lawyers Say They’d Report A Client For Legally Owning A Gun.
I have to admit, I was flabbergasted, for several reasons. First, I live in Mississippi, which is among the reddest of the red states. Second, the attorneys—let me call them gun-phobic—were proposing to violate the attorney-client privilege, which establishes one of the most sacrosanct confidential relationships. (American Bar Association “Rule of Professional Conduct” 1.6). As with most things, there are exceptions. They generally pertain to a client who is about to commit a criminal act or engage in fraudulent behavior.
The lawyers who proposed to call the police cited ABA Rule 1.6 (b)(1). It states “[a] lawyer may reveal information relating to the representation of a client to the extent the lawyer reasonably believes necessary: … to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm.”
I have no problem with the rule, if there is reliable evidence to believe a client is about to kill or injure someone. The question is whether there is sufficient reliable evidence to justify firing a client and reporting him to the police—a serious decision with significant consequences.
Evidence is facts, not conjecture, speculation, or supposition. The only fact addressed by attorneys who advocated reporting the client to police was the lawfully issued gun permits. It did not matter that he lawfully owned a firearm, or had a firearm permit, including an enhanced carry permit. He had met significant background and training criteria. He does not have anything in his background that would prevent him from owning a firearm or possessing a permit, including a history of criminal activity, violence, or mental illness.
Gun-phobic attorneys focused on the fact the client owned a gun and had firearm permits. In their opinion, that was enough to label him as reasonably certain to cause death or serious bodily harm and report him to the police.
No one claimed there was anything legally improper about being upset with a former employer. Hiring a lawyer to file a lawsuit is a pretty good indicator of being upset. It is what you would expect from a law-abiding citizen, not a dangerous person. The gun-phobic attorneys acknowledged, in response to a question by the instructor, that displaying non-threatening signs in a public area is lawful, and is likely protected by the First Amendment.
It seems that nearly every American institution has been rotted away by leftist politics. So don’t defer to them as if they’re something special. They’re just lefty operatives with professional credentials, apparently.
HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW KIDS? That Time Bernie Sanders Interviewed Some Punk-Rock Kids in a Mall.
Bernie Sanders had his own TV program from 1986 to 1988, back when the socialist senator was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The show was called Bernie Speaks, it aired on public access TV, and Politico just had the full run digitized. As Sanders makes his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, those digitized episodes have now been posted on the cable access channel’s website, where anyone with an internet connection can explore them.
“Over the past few weeks, I watched them all,” Holly Otterbein writes in Politico. “The production values are so low that they’re sometimes hard to hear and see, which makes them feel more valuable, like an archive of lost secrets.” The show’s topics, she reports, “include Plato, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, the ‘immorality’ of the war in Nicaragua, the ‘stupid’ property tax, the effects of the looming nuclear apocalypse on children, Burlington’s waterfront, Burlington’s trash dump, Burlington’s snowplow operation, the ‘incredible increase’ in crime, the close-fisted state Legislature, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the reasons that punk rockers wear black.”
Right around the same time that he took a ten day “honeymoon” in the Soviet Union:
As he stood on Soviet soil, Sanders, then 46 years old, criticized the cost of housing and health care in the United States, while lauding the lower prices — but not the quality — of that available in the Soviet Union. Then, at a banquet attended by about 100 people, Sanders blasted the way the United States had intervened in other countries, stunning one of those who had accompanied him.
“I got really upset and walked out,” said David F. Kelley, who had helped arrange the trip and was the only Republican in Sanders’s entourage. “When you are a critic of your country, you can say anything you want on home soil. At that point, the Cold War wasn’t over, the arms race wasn’t over, and I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”
Sanders had visited Nicaragua in 1985 and hailed the revolution led by Daniel Ortega, which President Ronald Reagan opposed. “I was impressed,” Sanders said then of Ortega, while allowing that “I will be attacked by every editorial writer for being a dumb dope.” At the same time, Sanders voiced admiration for the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, whom Reagan and many others in both parties routinely denounced.
Sanders, in turn, said Americans dismissed socialist and communist regimes because they didn’t understand the poverty faced by many in Third World countries. “The American people, many of us, are intellectually lazy,” Sanders said in a 1985 interview with a Burlington television station.
As Jim Geraghty adds, “You can tell a lot about a man by what he chooses to praise and what he chooses to criticize.”
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES; KILL ALL THE GROUNDHOGS: De Blasio expected to announce 2020 presidential run next week: sources.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Nobody Knows the Hood Like Joe Biden.
You might think Joe Biden is a racist, just because he has a long history of saying racist things and even voted to posthumously restore Robert E. Lee’s American citizenship. You might think his words and actions indicate who he really is. You couldn’t be more wrong. As it turns out, Joe Biden is down with the hood. And not the Klan hood!
Joseph Simonson, Washington Examiner:
Joe Biden Wednesday bragged about time he spent in the “hood,” a place where he said he found “women of color” he helped train to do computer coding…
“Through a program we had through community colleges [in Detroit], we can teach people how to code,” Biden said. “We went out, literally into the hood, and they found, turns out, 54 [people], they happened to be all women, the vast majority were women of color, no more than a high school degree, aged 25-54, and a third of them only had GEDs.”
At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:
Here’s a fun one that I hadn’t heard before from all the way back in 1975, though, retrieved from the mists of time by the Examiner:
“I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he told the Washington Post in 1975. “Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th, and — I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.”
Some intrepid reporter in Delaware should try to track down “Mousey” and “Chops” and “the boys at 13th” and see how they’re feeling about a President Biden. Who knows? Maybe they’ll stumble across T-Bone in the process.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees in Biden’s story, though. The chatterati is snickering over his use of the term “the hood” but the story he’s telling is about not taking the abilities of blue-collar people in the Rust Belt, black or white, for granted. They went to work, learned to code, and helped bring Detroit back to life.
Forget Joe’s experiences “in the hood,” I’m so old, I remember when saying “learn to code” was an instant banning on Twitter.
8 YEARS OF DEMOCRATIC RULE COULD PROBABLY FIX THAT: Most of Europe Is a Lot Poorer than Most of the United States. “Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the poorest one-third of US states on a per-capita GDP basis, and the UK, France, Japan and New Zealand would all rank among America’s very poorest states, below No. 47 West Virginia, and not too far above No. 50 Mississippi. Countries like Italy, S. Korea, Spain, Portugal and Greece would each rank below Mississippi as the poorest states in the country.”
My own state of Tennessee is richer than Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Belgium, etc. Even richer than Japan. And it’s not an especially rich state.