THE DEMOCRATS’ #WARONWOMEN CONTINUES: Hunter Biden renting $12,000-per-month Hollywood home while defying child support suit. “Hunter Biden is defying a court order to disclose his financial information as part of a child support fight while renting a $3.8 million designer home in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, for $12,000 per month. . . . While living in the high-end digs, Biden has been fighting a court order to turn over his financial information as part of a paternity suit in Arkansas. On Tuesday, Circuit Judge Holly Meyer ordered Biden to appear in court on Jan. 29 and ‘show cause, if any exists, as to why he should not be held in contempt’ for allegedly failing to submit the information by the court’s deadline earlier this month.”
Archive for 2020
January 22, 2020
THEIR CASE WOULD SEEM MORE PERSUASIVE IF THEY EVER TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING: Byron York: Impeachment, Democrats, and those 90,000 documents.
For weeks, Democrats have been demanding to see new witnesses and documents for the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. Mostly they have emphasized witnesses. But on Tuesday, the first full day of the trial, the Democratic House managers seemed to turn up the call for documents, claiming that President Bill Clinton provided tens of thousands of pages of documents for his impeachment trial in 1999.
“In the Clinton case, the president provided all of the documents — more than 90,000 pages of them — before the trial took place,” the managers said in a statement released Tuesday morning. “[Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s resolution rejects that basic necessity.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed up the managers. “For the Clinton trial, witnesses were deposed and the president provided more than 90,000 documents,” she said Tuesday.
“All of the documents in the Clinton trial were turned over prior to the trial,” said lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff when arguments before the Senate began. “All 90,000 pages of them, so they could be used in the House’s case.”
So a question: Where did the figure of 90,000 pages, or documents, come from? Did Clinton helpfully cooperate with the House Republicans who were trying to remove him from office 20 years ago?
It turns out Schiff, Pelosi, and their colleagues were not telling the whole story. They got the 90,000 figure, apparently, from Clinton’s rebuttal to the Starr report — the report independent counsel Kenneth Starr turned over to Congress on Sept. 9, 1998, after seven months of investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair. In that rebuttal, given to Congress on Sept. 11, Clinton’s lawyers wrote: “During the past four and a half years, the President has … produced more than 90,000 pages of documents and other items” to investigators.
But not to Congress. The Clinton situation was entirely different from the one Schiff and his fellow Democrats face today. Starr was an independent counsel with full law enforcement powers, and his office issued many grand jury subpoenas pushing Clinton, who often resisted fiercely, to turn over the 90,000 documents over the course of four and a half years, covering the Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and Lewinsky investigations.
“If memory serves me correctly, I don’t think he voluntarily gave us anything,” said Sol Weisenberg, a former Starr prosecutor, in a conversation Tuesday.
With Trump, the House has been involved in a different process. Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose not to seek the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Trump-Ukraine matter. (The old independent counsel law under which Starr was appointed expired years ago; a Trump-Ukraine special counsel investigation might have operated along the lines of the Robert Mueller Trump-Russia investigation.) Instead, House Democrats conducted a hurried investigation that did not involve a grand jury or engage in the type of fighting for documents that Starr did.
The whole thing is a politicized sham.
BECAUSE IT’S ALL THEATER FOR THE RUBES, AND SHE’S THEIR TOOL: Greta Hectors Davos: Why Are Elitists Thrilled To Be Lectured By A Child Who Knows Nothing? Our elites are willing to be hectored when it’s all about them adopting policies that cement their control.
OUT: BLACK SWAN. IN: SWAN WITH A REALLY BAD COUGH. China virus outbreak may wallop economy, financial markets.
NAZIS, NAZIS EVERYWHERE: As Stars & Stripes reported in 2018: Writer resigns from New Yorker magazine after Twitter flap over Marine vet’s tattoo.
Talia Lavin, whose tweet about a veteran’s tattoo implied he was a Nazi, has apologized to him and resigned from her position as a fact-checker at the New Yorker magazine.
But in another tweet, Thursday evening, Lavin also lashed out at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying it unfairly targeted her in its own tweet about combat-wounded veteran Justin Gaertner.
“This has been a wild and difficult week,” Lavin said in the tweet. “I owe ICE agent Justin Gaertner a sincere apology for spreading an rumor about his tattoo. However, I do not think it is acceptable for a federal agency to target a private citizen for a good faith, hastily rectified error.”
And the “good faith” continues!
Julio Rosas of Townhall tweets, “Oh look, another person who was *not* at the rally trying to tell everyone else that it wasn’t *really* peaceful. The article also does not mention or acknowledge the hundreds of minorities, who were armed as well, that were there in support of the rally.”
Or as Jim Treacher adds, “If you don’t get the violence you desperately wanted, just pretend you did.”
It’s quite a place the media has arrived in 2020, where the gun-grabbing, abortion-extremist governor with a history of wearing blackface while in his mid-20s in medical school is the good guy, and a racially diverse crowd of pro-Constitution Americans are the crypto-Nazis.
AS WITH LAND-CLEARING POLICIES IN AUSTRALIA AND CALIFORNIA, ENVIRONMENTALISTS DON’T CARE ABOUT REALITY: Repeat after me, ‘Canada is uninhabitable without fossil fuels.’
WITH GOLF AT NOON FOR FREE? Swimmers call for protection of Eden Rock. I think I agree with the Caymanian opposition to the new cruise ship terminal. The island is getting overdeveloped, and there are already swarms of cruise ships. And there’s a pretty good case that the pier’s effect on currents will damage or kill the reef for a half mile in either direction.
THIS WHOLE IMPEACHMENT THING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Trump approval ‘the best of his presidency’: Gallup.
HERE’S WHY CBS WAS RIGHT TO TERMINATE COVERAGE OF THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL AND GO BACK TO SHOWING SOAPS.
Someday, there will be more than three network television channels. There might even be multiple channels devoted to 24 hour coverage of the news. I know this might sound like science fiction, but perhaps, eventually, these additional channels could be delivered through some sort of buried coaxial cable, or even via satellite. (I’d mention sending faxes from the beach, but that’s really wild-eyed crazy-talk.)
FAD GONE BAD MAKES GRAUNIAD MAD: How the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right.
JUST DO IT: Civil War Redux? Some Virginia Counties May Want to Secede to Join West Virginia Over Gun Control.
Where is Glenn’s paper on state secession which is always looking steadily more timely?
AT AMAZON, shop the Valentine’s Day Gift Shop.
HMM: Tesla Slams NHTSA’s Unintended-Acceleration Investigation. Every time this has come up before, it’s been because, in P.J. O’Rourke’s immortal phrase in Parliament of Whores, the silly buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake. I assign his chapter on NHTSA in my Administrative Law class, because it’s a very useful primer on how agencies behave and why.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Debunking Trump’s Impeachment with One Simple Thought Experiment.
Let’s pretend that Joe Biden had a different name. No, better: Let’s pretend that Joe Biden had a different letter after his name. Let’s pretend he’s Joe Biden (R), former Vice President under George W. Bush.
In that case, what would the Democrats be doing differently? Literally everything.
Instead of impeaching Trump, they’d be praising him (although perhaps reluctantly) for his non-partisan willingness to look into Republican malfeasance. Adam Schiff would hold months worth of hearings, looking back into the Bush Administration in ways he’d never dare look back into Obama’s. The Democrat-controlled press would be 24/7 Biden! Biden! Biden! Jerry Nadler would have to go back to, I dunno, eating mayonnaise with an ice cream scoop.
Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.
I have a second column today for PJMedia/Townhall VIP members. Want to know what Hillary Clinton would really say, if she dropped the mask long enough to dish the dirt over a box or two of chardonnay? Here’s your chance: Hillary Clinton: Off the Hook.
And here’s your thrice-weekly reminder that if you’ve been thinking of becoming a VIP member, the VODKAPUNDIT promo code is still good for a nice little discount.
ROGER KIMBALL: Roger Scruton, 1944–2020.
For many years—nay for several decades—Scruton had been treated as a pariah by the confraternity of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals whose follies and misadventures he anatomized with unforgivable clarity and penetration. Senior professors wrote to Roger’s publishers demanding that they cease publishing his books. “I may tell you with dismay,” wrote one guardian of the academic cartel, “that many colleagues here [i.e., in Oxford] feel that the Longman imprint—a respected one—has been tarnished by association with Scruton’s work.” Scruton was denied academic preferment, rendered all but unemployable by the university establishment. He was roundly excoriated by the press on both sides of the Atlantic. And for what?
Part of the reason is suggested by the title of one of his books, recently reissued as Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, a brisk and deliciously mordant act of intellectual fumigation that left the work and reputations of a dozen prominent philosophical mountebanks in smoldering ruins. As Scruton put it in Modern Philosophy (1994), his magnum opus, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” Such impertinence was not to be borne, and the academic establishment did everything it could to ostracize him.
Read the whole thing.
YES. AND FOR THE SAME REASON THE SCORPION STUNG THE FROG. Did Adam Schiff Purposely Mislead America About The Parnas Texts?
THAT’S VERY TRUE: Patients Want To Die At Home, But Home Hospice Care Can Be Tough On Families. Helen’s mother had home hospice, but the burden on her kids was very high.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ student activist distorts Anne Frank’s death to use against Trump and Israel.
A DOWN PAYMENT: Clinton Corruption Update: What’s $1 Million Between Friends?
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Three Skin Warning Signs To Watch Out Indicating You Have Been Bitten By Bed Bugs.
IF ANYTHING CAN TURN VIRGINIA RED AGAIN IN TIME FOR NOVEMBER, THE DEMS HAVE FOUND IT: VA Legislators Pass New Gun Control Day After 2A Rally.
A TRAILER PARK CALLED CAMELOT: Appear in Arkansas court, explain, judge orders Hunter Biden. “Biden must appear Jan. 29 in a Batesville courtroom and explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for violating court orders to provide financial information in his Arkansas paternity case.”