NOT BUYING THIS STUDY EITHER: Marijuana users less likely to gain weight despite munchies, says Michigan State study.
Archive for 2019
April 19, 2019
Exit quote: “It’s the Pesach graphic you get when all the Jews leave your party.”
THE TRANSGENDER BATHROOM CONTROVERSY CONTINUES TO ROIL: In February of 2017, the Trump Administration (at the behest of Jeff Sessions) withdrew the Obama-Era guidance that required federally-funded schools to allow anatomical boys who psychologically identify as girls to use the girls’ bathrooms, showers and locker rooms (and vice versa). Sessions was right about the law (as I believe I explain here pretty thoroughly).
But people are still arguing about that issue. And even if the Supreme Court ultimately determines that Sessions was right, that only leaves each school district the discretion to choose a policy for itself. Here are links to some of the little and not-so-little battles being fought just in the last few weeks.
BYRON YORK: Mueller, Trump, and ‘two years of bullshit.’
At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.
Everything else in the Trump-Russia affair flowed from that one question. Paul Manafort’s shady finances would not have come under investigation were it not for that question. Carter Page would not have been wiretapped were it not for that question. Michael Flynn would not have been interviewed by the FBI were it not for that question. Zillions of hours on cable TV would not have been expended on Trump-Russia were it not for that question. And in the largest sense, there would have been no Mueller investigation were it not for that question.
And now Mueller has determined there was no collusion. Not that there was no criminal collusion. Or no prove-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt collusion. Just no collusion. Mueller’s report says it over and over and over again.
Hot take: Putin must have gotten to Mueller, too.
I can has CNN gig?
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes: What’s in the special counsel’s findings is almost as revealing as what’s left out.
President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out. What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in Trump World on something Russia- or obstruction-of-justice-related. And how—even with all its overweening power and aggressive tactics—it still struck out.
Volume I of the Mueller report, which deals with collusion, spends tens of thousands of words describing trivial interactions between Trump officials and various Russians. While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke.
Yet jump to the section where the Mueller team lists its “prosecution and declination” decisions with regards the Russia question. And try not to picture Mueller “pit bull” prosecutor Andrew Weissmann collapsed under mountains of federal statutes after his two-year hunt to find one that applied. . . .
As for obstruction—Volume II—Attorney General Bill Barr noted Thursday that he disagreed with “some of the special counsel’s legal theories.” Maybe he had in mind Mr. Mueller’s proposition that he was entitled to pursue obstruction questions, even though that was not part of his initial mandate from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Or maybe it was Mr. Mueller’s long description of what a prosecution of the sitting president might look like—even though he acknowledged its legal impossibility. Or it could be Mr. Mueller’s theory that while “fairness” dictates that someone accused of crimes get a “speedy and public trial” to “clear his name,” Mr. Trump deserves no such courtesy with regard to the 200 pages of accusations Mr. Mueller lodges against him.
That was Mr. Mueller’s James Comey moment. Remember the July 2016 press conference in which the FBI director berated Hillary Clinton even as he didn’t bring charges? It was a firing offense. Here’s Mr. Mueller engaging in the same practice—only on a more inappropriate scale. At least this time the attorney general tried to clean up the mess by declaring he would not bring obstruction charges. Mr. Barr noted Thursday that we do not engage in grand-jury proceedings and probes with the purpose of generating innuendo.
Mr. Mueller may not care. His report suggests the actual goal of the obstruction volume is impeachment: “We concluded that Congress has the authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority.”
Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?
The report instead mostly reads as a lengthy defense of the FBI.
Good luck with that. I suspect accountability is on the way there.
ANDREW MCCARTHY: Mueller completely dropped the ball with obstruction punt.
There is evidence that cuts sharply against obstruction. The president could have shut down the investigation at any time, but he didn’t. He could have asserted executive privilege to deny the special counsel access to key White House witnesses, such as McGahn. To the contrary, numerous witnesses were made available voluntarily (there was no need to try to subpoena them to the grand jury), and well over a million documents were disclosed, including voluminous notes of meetings between the president and his White House counsel.
Most important, the special counsel found that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that the president’s frustration wasn’t over fear of guilt — the typical motivation for obstruction — but that the investigation was undermining his ability to govern the country. The existence of such a motive is a strong counter to evidence of a corrupt intent, critical because corrupt intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in an obstruction case.
In his report, Mueller didn’t resolve the issue. If he had been satisfied that there was no obstruction crime, he said, he would have so found. He claimed he wasn’t satisfied. Yet he was also not convinced that there was sufficient proof to charge. Therefore, he made no decision, leaving it to Attorney General William Barr to find that there was no obstruction.
This is unbecoming behavior for a prosecutor and an outrageous shifting of the burden of proof.
That was the whole point: In absence of any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, to hang an albatross of uncertainty around Trump’s neck. More than anything it’s an indication of just how desperate the Mueller team was to do something, anything to harm the Administration. The media’s willingness to go along with this obvious charade is just more proof that they’re no longer watchdogs against government overreach, but mere cogs in the Democrat-Media Complex.
EXCEPT FOR THE MUELLER-TRUTHERS, WHO WILL CONTINUE TO STEW IN THEIR OWN JUICES: Release of Mueller report finally sets Trump — and America — free.
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES: Joe Biden Is Running For President, Will Announce Next Week.
LEAVING THE BEACH: A USMC amphibious assault vehicle slams into the surf as it leaves a beach in Hawaii. (Good action photo and one I missed. It’s been on StrategyPage for a week.)
VENEZUELA’S SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT STARVES ITS CITIZENS: The Soviet Union did it. Socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro and his government follow suit. It’s my latest Creators Syndicate column.
RELATED: China’s Venezuela venture.
PREPARING FOR ESCORT MISSION: A Bundeswehr Wiesel Armored Weapon Carrier prepares to escort a convoy during a NATO military exercise at Hohenfels, Germany.
JOHN SOLOMON: Ten post-Mueller questions that could turn the tables on Russia collusion investigators.
The process of meting out accountability has begun.
Horowitz, my sources tell me, has interviewed between 50 and 100 witnesses in his exhaustive probe. Graham and his predecessor as Judiciary chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), laid out the most important investigative issues they saw in a letter last year. This month, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DOJ identifying eight potential criminal referrals. His committee last year also released a memo on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that may have occurred during the Russia probe.
And President Trump reportedly is readying an order to declassify five key buckets of documents on alleged FBI abuses.
My sources agree these 10 questions are the most important to be answered in the forthcoming probes.
Click on over.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: The Hill: Time For Democrats To Accept Reality.
GOOD: Christina Hoff Sommers critiques rabid feminism, calls on students to embrace empirical data. But they’ve been trained to place their feelings above mere objective facts.
OH, CANADA: F-35 or Not: This Country Needs 88 New Fighter Jets Before Its Air Force Falls Apart.
Canada for the third time in a decade is trying to replace its aging F/A-18A/B Hornet fighter jets. With every year the acquisition effort drags on, the condition of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s fast-jet fleet grows direr.
Saab, Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all are in the running, respectively offering the Gripen, Eurofighter, F/A-18E/F and F-35A. The manufacturers will have until the end of 2019 to submit bids, CBC News reported. But the RCAF hardly can wait.
The RCAF acquired 138 F/A-18A/Bs from McDonnell Douglas starting in 1982. In early 2019, 85 of the original Hornets, all more than 30 years old, comprise Canada’s entire fighter fleet. The Canadian Hornets are unreliable and lack modern systems.
Criminal neglect.
ABE GREENWALD: The Mueller report just left egg on Democrats’ faces.
THERE WASN’T A ‘TRIAL,’ THERE WERE HEARINGS WHERE IT BECAME CLEAR HE’D DONE NOTHING WRONG: Wellesley trumpets Anita Hill commencement speech ‘given…the Kavanaugh trial.’ But, as with Hill’s BS about Clarence Thomas, the left will pretend that Kavanaugh was found guilty of sexual assault.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “The only thing appearing more on my timeline than mentions of the Mueller Report is Democrats asking for money.”
STACY MCCAIN: “ORANGE MAN BAD!” “Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.”