LINDSEY 2.0: Graham says Senate should vote on Sanders prisoner voting idea.
Maybe it would be smarter to leave Bernie alone for a while, and concentrate on Biden.
Archive for 2019
April 26, 2019
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Colleges Are Ripping Off a Generation of Ill-Prepared Students.
OH: Baltimore mayor not lucid enough to decide whether to resign.
The embattled Democrat was at her house during an FBI and IRS raid on the property earlier Thursday and met with a doctor there, said her attorney Steve Silverman.
An earlier report from local outlet WJZ quoted sources saying Pugh had skipped town. But her lawyer — whose office was also raided by the feds — said he met with her for an hour at her Ashburton house, according to The Baltimore Sun.
“She understands the predicament of the city… she just needs to be physically and mentally sound and lucid enough to make decisions,” Silverman said.
“She is generally aware that there is a consensus that she should resign. For people to make material decisions in their life, they have to be at a certain level of stability,” he added.
Not lucid enough to resign, but lucid enough to serve — that’s a new one.
THIS SEEMS RIGHT: AOC’s Party Will Rebuff JOE’s Caress.
WHAT DID PRESIDENT OBAMA KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost.
“John Brennan isn’t going to need one lawyer. He’s going to need five,” he said specifically of Brennan while speaking on “The Ingraham Angle” with guest host Mike Huckabee.
Why? Because of the role he’d allegedly played in crafting the viral Russian collusion narrative. In January of 2017, Brennan and Comey briefed President Donald Trump about the Steele dossier. This briefing was then used as a pretext by the media to publish the dossier in full.
It’s long been theorized that the duo had purposefully broached the debunked dossier with Trump so as to provide the mediate with an allegedly “legitimate” reason to disseminate the salacious document to the public and thus create the still-alive narrative of collusion.
More punching back please, more than twice as hard.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Get Ready for a Paradigm Shift on Russia, Climate Change, Everything You Think You Know…
I tried to find a good excerpt for you, but it’s just impossible — you’ll have to read the whole thing.
VLAD THE IMPLODER: Vlad the Impaler was the historical figure behind the Dracula legend. Alas, Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet imperial dreams are imploding. The StrategyPage podcast discusses why — and includes praise for U.S. fracking.
Here’s some useful background to Vlad’s implosion.
Leon Aron is a scholar and has an op-ed in The LA Times that does a good job summarizing Putin’s neo-Soviet imperialism. In another article linked at RealClearDefense Paul Goble notes the Russian Navy really isn’t capable of supporting Putin’s grand imperial plans.
After Goble quotes a Russian naval expert who says the Russian fleet is in “horrific” condition, he adds a telling sentence: “The Kremlin, for its part, is doing what it can to suggest otherwise via an intense propaganda campaign.” This tidbit follows a few paragraphs later:
But that is not the only problem the Russian navy faces, Timokhin continues. “It is a lie” that there has not been enough money for the fleet. Rather some of it has been drained off by corruption and much of the rest lost because of the absence of a strategic plan and structures capable of adhering to one, rigid plan. He also blames sanctions and unnamed “foreign agents” for undercutting the Russian fleet (Topwar.ru, April 5).
And just why are the sanctions in place? Oh yeah, Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine.
The Russian Navy’s misery is a topic StrategyPage has covered for the last two decades. StrateyPage’s latest Russia update discusses other military woes, to include poor morale. It’s a post rich with insights. Here are a couple:
Russia has other problems with its actual military capabilities. Government efforts to project the image of a modern, professional and constantly improving armed forces is proving more difficult to sustain…Russian development and manufacturing efforts are still crippled by shortages of cash and talent. Arms exports are hurt by this, especially with competitors like China continuing to produce Russian designs more efficiently (more effective, reliable and less costly in the long run). New gear that does get produced in significant numbers is usually for export customers who have the cash for procurement that the Russian military still lacks.
This poverty of money and talent is very visible with the Russian military efforts in Ukraine (Donbas) and Syria. Both are being carried out on the cheap and with as much discretion as possible because these operations are unpopular with the Russian people. They see Russian money and Russian lives being wasted on expensive political games that do the average Russian no good at all. Thus government efforts to mask just how much these operations cost in terms of resources and casualties. Hiding the spending is easier than concealing the number of dead.
Read the entire post.
VERY RELATED AND READABLE: Chapter 4, Cocktails from Hell.
RELATED BUT WONKY: A new RAND study discusses ways to “extend” Russia — make the Kremlin pay for meddling. It’s long but despite the wonk a decent reference.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Senior Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Reportedly Defects to the U.S.‘
General Nasiri was said to have fled with hundreds of classified documents, which could be of great value to the United States, to which Nasiri is said to have defected.
Nasiri could provide valuable information about IRGC deployments in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Latin America, notably in Venezuela. Even though Secretary of State Pompeo has proclaimed that we will not wage military attacks against the Islamic Republic, Nasiri’s military expertise might enable us to move against secret Iranian bases, capture Iranian agents, and stage limited operations.
I’d like to know a lot more about Nasiri’s relationship with U.S. intelligence. Was this a sudden walk-in? Or had he been supplying us with Iranian secrets for some time? Was his defection planned in advance, or an emergency decision? I have often been told that Western intelligence services have excellent sources at very high levels of the Khamenei regime. Is Nasiri one of them?
Much more at the link.
BOOM NOT DOOM: The strong economic growth Glenn notes below is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the government shutdown only lowered growth by 0.3 percentage points (so much for all the cries of doom), and secondly there appears to be a lingering seasonality to the Q1 figures that the BEA hasn’t properly accounted for yet, suggesting that real growth could have been almost a full percentage point higher. Finally, inflation isn’t a worry at all. Here’s the upbeat CEA summary.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT EDITION: Men ‘don’t deserve opinions,’ tweeted new director of gender relations.
CONRAD BLACK: Day of Reckoning Is Now Dawning For Democrats.
What is occurring now is an unprecedented and almost unbelievable episode of political theatrics. The Democrats are pretending that their fraudulent attempt at what amounted to a coup d’état against the election of an administration of the other party still possesses the legitimacy to be continued and taken seriously after it has been largely unmasked by its own chosen investigators for what it was.
At the same time, the machinery of dispassionate justice is already turning towards the identification and eventual punishment of the Democrats for subverting the justice and intelligence apparatus of the former administration in order to influence the results of the election of the succeeding president and vice president of the United States.
It is an elemental rule of nature that the longer and the more febrile the efforts of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the Democratic party generally, abetted by their media echo chamber, to delay the exposure of their wrongdoing, the more complete and overwhelming the defeat and discreditation of the entire effort to destroy the Trump administration will be.
Read the whole thing.
SELF-INFLICTED WOUND: California Gas Prices Hit Average of $4, Highest in the State Since 2014.
FINALLY, SOMETHING THAT MIGHT LEAD TO A CAREER: UCLA is now teaching students how to pole dance.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: DoJ’s Hottest ‘It’ Couple Back in the News. “I’m talking about Strzok & Page, of course! Fox News is reporting that some of the infamous texts between the anti-Trump duo are getting a fresh look. As more information comes to light about the Trump investigations, the timing and content of the couple’s text messages become even more significant.”
SOCIAL SECURITY’S CRISIS: It’s The Fertility, Stupid.
EXCERPTS: Mark Levin Interviews President Trump.
ALLIED AIRDROP OVER ITALY: Paratroopers from Britain and Italy jump with the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade at Juliet Drop Zone, Pordenone, Italy. Photo taken April 16, 2019. (link fixed)
AN IDEA SO GOOD IT HAS TO BE MANDATED: National Trend to Mandate Renewable Energy as Major Power Source is Ill-Conceived and Foolish.
“Ever since Al Gore and his gang of climate scammers came on the scene in the 1990s, we have been fed a steady diet of lies and false predictions. We were told that the oceans would rise as the polar caps melted and that cities and states bordering the Pacific and Atlantic would be underwater. We were told that the corpses of polar bears who had drowned would be washing up by the thousands on the coast of Alaska. We were told that the human race was doomed by rising temperatures.
What’s most remarkable about the hoax is that there was a deadline announced. The apocalypse was to take place within a decade. Now, two decades later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is giving us until 2030 to shape up or we’re all goners.
Even someone as cynical as I am would never have imagined that the con men and women would still be able to pass off this nonsense as gospel after all this time. The old line about whether you’re going to believe me or your lying eyes seems to sum up the situation pretty well.
People want to believe it, because “saving the world” can make anyone feel important. And politicians love it because of ample opportunities for graft, corruption, cronyism, and vote-buying.
SUZANNE VENKER: Gender Equality and Family Breakdown.