Archive for 2019
September 27, 2019
THERE SHOULD BE AT LEAST ONE MORE ZERO ON THESE VERDICTS: Jury awards six figures to accused student for Title IX kangaroo court: Campus official testified the adjudication was not ‘a search for truth.’
THAT’S DIFFERENT, BECAUSE SHUT UP: Trump Ukraine controversy: President’s opponents don’t want to talk about 2016 campaign.
It’s definitely horrible for Biden. The former vice president brought this issue on himself, recounting in 2018 how he told Poroshenko years earlier to fire Shokin or forfeit a promised $1 billion U.S. loan.
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours,’ ” Biden said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. ” ‘If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ ”
This was supposed to make Biden look like a tough customer apparently, but it raised the issue of conflict of interest, not to mention extortion. And they accuse President Trump of shakedown tactics? Please.
Read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Thank God It’s ICE (TGII) Edition. “The base who wanted action on border security will no doubt still turn out for Trump next year. Amid the incessant disruptive noise — this week it’s the Ukrainian impeachment nonsense — the border security issue remains a constant. Should Trump win re-election, the Democrats’ thorough awfulness on the issue will have done a lot to contribute to the effort.”
COMING ASHORE IN ALASKA: A USMC humvee exits a Navy LCAC and meets the mud of Adak Beach, Alaska. The landing (mudding?) took place during Arctic Expeditionary Capabilities Exercise (AECE) 2019. Per the caption the exercise “tests expeditionary logistical capabilities in the Arctic region and prepares joint forces to respond to crises across the Indo-Pacific.”
RELATED: Diplomatically countering threats to Arctic real estate.
SEAN DAVIS: The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower complaint looks just like ‘Steele Dossier 2.0’.
Related: Former CIA official on whistleblower: ‘How could this be an intelligence matter?’
I am very familiar with transcripts of presidential phone calls since I edited and processed dozens of them when I worked for the NSC. I also know a lot about intelligence whistleblowers from my time with the CIA.
My suspicions grew this morning when I saw the declassified whistleblowing complaint. It appears to be written by a law professor and includes legal references and detailed footnotes. It also has an unusual legalistic reference on how this complaint should be classified.
From my experience, such an extremely polished whistleblowing complaint is unheard of. This document looks as if this leaker had outside help, possibly from congressional members or staff. . . .
Also very concerning to me is how the complaint indicates intelligence officers and possibly other federal employees are violating the rules governing presidential phone calls with foreign leaders.
The content and transcripts of these calls are highly restricted. The whistleblower makes clear in his complaint that he did not listen to a call in question, nor did he read the transcript — he was told about the call by others. If true, intelligence officers have grossly violated the rules as well as the trust placed on them to protect this sensitive information.
I refuse to believe that the leaking, timing and presentation of this complaint is coincidence. I don’t think the American people will buy this either.
I’m more worried, however, that this latest instance of blatant politicization of intelligence by Trump haters will do long term damage to the relationship between the intelligence community and US presidents for many years to come.
To be fair, it should. They don’t look professional at all — they look like a bunch of undisciplined political hacks.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Wherever Joe Biden went, son Hunter cashed in.
JOHN SOLOMON: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden’s Ukraine story. “Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.”
More:
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?”
2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws.
More to come…
And here’s a link to the original document.
THE CASE FOR BREXIT with DANIEL HANNAN: Dan Hannan, Member of the European Parliament and author of Why Vote Leave (among other things), is coming to the University of San Diego to discuss Brexit on Monday, October 7th at at 2:00 p.m. If you are in Southern California, this should be a great opportunity. Yours truly will be introducing our honored speaker.
HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOMS KEEP CLOSING: A large part of the reason is that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals with emergency rooms to treat uninsured patients regardless of ability to pay (until they are “stabilized”). Hospitals without emergency rooms don’t have to.
(Alas, EMTALA was a Reagan Era innovation. And the number of emergency rooms has been decreasing ever since. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.)
WITH BIDEN FADING AND WARREN UNPALATABLE TO WALL STREET…
Maybe her pitch will be, “Only Hillary can save the Democrats from the mess Hillary left them in.”
WELL, HER ETHICS RULES ARE ONLY MEANT TO APPLY TO REPUBLICANS: Warren Flustered by Hypothetical Ethics Question on Hunter Biden.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Impeachment Just Another Means For Democrats To Rip The Country Apart.
Earlier this year, former Goldman Sachs adviser and columnist Ron Hart wrote in the Orange County Register about Democrats’ strategy “to fan the fires of racial division in order to win back the White House in 2020.”
While true, much more than 2020 is at stake. Democrats want an us-and-them country, one in which they alone have the raw political power. It’s a long-term strategy that has most prominently appeared in their gun-control efforts. Their objective isn’t to reduce firearm violence but to separate Americans into two groups: backward hicks bitterly clinging to their guns and urbane sophisticates who have evolved beyond that primitive state and therefore have standing to rule the hicks.
By segregating America into two parts — vile, retrograde deplorables who can’t be trusted, and educated, forward-looking progressives — Democrats are setting up a society in which they wouldn’t govern under constitutional limits but rule by political mandate.
Read the whole thing.
CHANGE: First gas station in America to ditch oil for 100% electric vehicle charging opens in Maryland.
The electricity magically manifests itself at the “pumps.”
80 YEARS-WORTH OF CLIMATE APOCALYPSE PREDICTIONS: If you read the Harrisburg (Pa.) Sunday Courier in 1939, you were told “all of the glaciers in Eastern Greenland are rapidly melting.” That’s just one of dozens of such gloomy predictions from decades ago that never came true, according to The Epoch Times, reporting a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis. But don’t worry, they come up with new ones about every decade.
YOU STAY CLASSY, DES MOINES REGISTER: Iowa Newspaper Refuses to Apologize for Trying to Ruin Carson King.
With a stench of arrogance that can only emanate from the news media, Des Moines Register executive editor Carol Hunter published a Thursday night column expressing no apologies for their campaign to ruin viral sensation Carson King “because readers depend on us to tell a complete story” and, as per her past statement, was done for “the public good.”
Hunter also revealed reporter Aaron Calvin was “no longer with the Register” after his ghoulish hatchet job against the cancer fundraiser over tweets King sent in high school, but the damage was done. As if they had let Jay Rosen or Brian Stelter pen this, she demonstrated a holier-than-thou proclamation from on high to us peons below that the paper will do better. Yeah right.
Read the whole thing.
BuzzFeed practically invented cancel culture, dating back to Andrew Kaczynski ginning up the Twitter mob to get Justine Sacco fired over a botched joke in 2013, and in 2017, now with CNN, doxxing a pro-Trump Twitter meme maker on the fourth of July. The firestorm that Sacco faced and other Twitter shame mobs are a topic of Glenn’s new book, incidentally. (BuzzFeed is still at it, of course.)
Yesterday, Robby Soave of Reason, who frequently writes about cancel culture, tweeted, “I just saw the phrase Mutually Assured Cancellation and it was revelatory.” Possibly from this Twitter thread:
Soave also retweeted Republican pollster Logan Dobson, who responded to the Des Moines Register’s link to Hunter’s disastrous column last night, “No, you idiots, you weren’t supposed to fire the reporter for his dumb old tweets, you were supposed to not have him write about other people’s dumb old tweets in the first place You did the stupidest thing at every possible turn.”
IN SECRET THEY PROBABLY WOULD, WHICH SAYS FAR MORE ABOUT THEM THAN IT DOES ABOUT TRUMP: Former Romney Advisor Claims 30 GOP Senators Would Vote for Impeachment — in Secret.
SENDING A MESSAGE: Trump campaign retaliates against 2016 staffer’s kissing claim.
President Trump’s campaign this week filed for arbitration against a 2016 campaign aide who claimed that the president forcibly kissed her without consent and disparaged him before dropping the case after a video of the incident showed that it was a peck on her cheek.
A source familiar with the matter told Secrets that on Monday, the Donald J. Trump for President Inc. campaign filed its claim against Alva Johnson, a 2016 Alabama outreach aide, for violating her confidentiality and nondisparagement agreement that the campaign has required staffers to sign.
The filing with the American Arbitration Association is focused on Johnson’s claims included in a U.S. District Court suit “and corresponding statements to the national news media,” said the source.
The campaign is seeking an unknown “financial restitution” from Johnson.
The claim was obviously bogus, but this is meant to send a signal that you won’t walk away unscathed after playing footsie with the press.
WAR ON JOBS: Fracking Ban Proposed By 2020 Dems Would Kill Millions of Jobs. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) are among eight remaining 2020 candidates who have called for an all-out ban on fracking, despite the fact that the drilling method has put the United States on a path to energy independence. The practice has also led to cleaner energy alternatives and lower carbon emissions, a key goal of climate change activists.”
Honestly the only reason I can see for opposing fracking is if you’re on Putin’s payroll. . .