Archive for 2019

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It Can’t Be Friday Without Florida Man. “In the #MeToo era, it’s just good legal sense to get written consent before smashing a lemon cream cake in someone’s face.”

Indeed.

THEY WERE MORE THAN JUST “ANTISEMITIC,” THEY PROMISED DELIBERATE HARM TO JEWISH PATIENTS: Report: Ohio State Medical Board to Discipline Doctor Over Anti-Semitic Tweets. “Kollab initially claimed in December that Canary Mission, the watchdog group that unearthed her tweets, created a fake account to frame her; Kollab told the board she knew that this claim was false.”

WELL, GOOD: New PM Boris Johnson supports calls for a nuclear renaissance. “I believe passionately that nuclear must be part of our energy mix and she is right to campaign for it and it will help us to meet our carbon targets.”

Johnson is much more serious about carbon emissions than most any American “environmentalist.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW. Starhopper has hopped: Capitalism in space: SpaceX last night successfully completed the first untethered flight of its Starship/Super Heavy prototype dubbed Starhopper. This hop attempted and flew about 65 feet. They hope to do next flight, planned to be about ten times higher, in a week or two, according to a Musk tweet.”

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND: Readers of my old blog back in the paleolithic era of the web will remember I frequently wrote about Tony Blair’s dismantling of the British constitutional settlement. Two of the most radical experiments of the Blair era were regional devolution and the introduction of referenda. Fraser Nelson points out in the Spectator today that Boris Johnson’s way of governing is a child of these innovations:

Boris Johnson is different. He is the creature of two Blair-era inventions: devolution and referendums. The team he is building around him in No. 10 is from City Hall and Vote Leave, where he was able to pioneer a new style of politics and government…

The result of this will be to reject the old rules: that you govern, then at some stage switch to campaign mode. The Boris project is starting in campaign mode, and I doubt it will ever stop. This is one of Donald Trump’s innovations: never stop campaigning. To apply pressure to the insiders, appeal to the outside…

But Brexit or no, I suspect it will be the changes to government that will last. Boris’s team will apply the techniques of modern campaigning and a more modern system of governing to Westminster, pioneered in the labs of Tony Blair’s constitutional reform.

Hosea 8.7 applies.

 

MAYBE THE ATMOSPHERE IN CONGRESS ISN’T SO UNCIVIL AFTER ALL: They don’t call it the “lower chamber” for nothing, but maybe Members of the House of Representatives are more civil than the MSM claims. On the other hand, they don’t make two-day long speeches these days, either

WHO KNOWS MORE ABOUT DECEPTIVE EDITING THAN THE POLITICAL REPORTERS AT THE WASHINGTON POST? Glenn Kessler had to correct a story today using the “deceptively edited” line to defend Ilhan Omar (D-Jihadistan). In so doing, he not only got the source wrong and blamed the wrong publisher (The Daily Caller) but credited it to a person who doesn’t even work for The Daily Caller.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed the deceptive video to the Daily Caller and said it was tweeted by a Daily Caller reporter. Neither statement is correct.

Speaking of “deceptive editing”, the Post among most others have quoted President Trump telling the Jihad Squad to “Go back to where you came from.” You want deceptively edited? Here’s deceptive editing (snipped out part in italics):

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.

If it weren’t for double standards, some of these people would have no standards at all.

HMM: Mueller collapse raises more questions.

The fallout from Wednesday’s disastrous performance by Robert Mueller in the Capitol includes a nearly 450-page report now in question. We don’t know who wrote it. We don’t know who really ran the investigation. We do know that several investigators on Mueller’s team were rabidly anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton.

In fact, the Justice Department’s voluminous Inspector General report featured the political musings of the investigators. The Office of Inspector General, “Discovered text messages and instant messages between some FBI employees on the investigative team, conducted using FBI mobile devices and computers, that expressed statements of hostility toward then candidate Donald Trump and statements of support for then candidate Clinton.”

Members of the team attended Clinton events, donated to her campaign and even legally represented some of her associates.

Mueller himself bragged about his disinterest concerning such matters at the hearing Wednesday. “We strove to hire those individuals that could do the job,” he declared. “I’ve been in this business for almost twenty-five years and in those twenty-five years I have not had occasion once to ask somebody about their political affiliation. It is not done. What I care about is the capability of the individual to do the job and do the job quickly and seriously and with integrity.”

Two years for a report Mueller doesn’t seem to have read (much less written), put together by people whose partisanship was glaring… that’s a triple-fail on a job that was supposed to have been done “quickly and seriously and with integrity.”

And do read the whole thing.