Archive for 2020
January 22, 2020
JON CALDARA: Denver Post Fired Me Because of Political Correctness.
(I sympathize. I got hammered for this once too. I got death threats even. Still, I am pretty sure I am right on the law.)
SHE’S BEEN MARRIED TO BILL FOR HOW LONG? Hillary Clinton Pleads Ignorance About Harvey Weinstein Despite Multiple Warnings. “‘How could we have known?’ Clinton asked, despite multiple women saying they warned the campaign.”
MAZIE HIRONO REDEFINES “CONSPIRACY THEORY”: Dem Senator Says It’s a ‘Conspiracy Theory’ to Say Dems Were Out to Get Trump From Beginning.
No, “conspiracy theory” doesn’t mean “inconvenient”.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Spare Us the Wrath of the Commie Beta Bernie Bros. “Marty here wants to get armed and learn how to shoot so he can go subjugate those of us who are already armed and know how to shoot. As strategies go, this one is a little lacking and lagging behind.”
SAYS IT ALL ABOUT SENATE, IMPEACHMENT, HOUSE DEMOCRATS:
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Social Justice Revisionism Comes for Washington and Lee.
ERIC CIARAMELLA IS NOT A “WHISTLEBLOWER,” HE’S AN OPERATIVE: RealClearInvestigations: Whistleblower Was Overheard in ’17 Discussing With Ally How to Remove Trump.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: The FBI Scandal.
Donald Trump published the most consequential tweet of his presidency on March 4, 2017. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process,” the chief executive pondered. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
The response from Trump’s opposition was outrage. The Washington Post fact checker gave it four Pinocchios. The director of the FBI, James Comey, rebuked Trump and said such a thing had never happened. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, assured NBC’s Meet the Press that no warrants had been issued in 2016 to surveil members of the Trump campaign.
In a narrow sense, the pushback against Trump’s tweet was correct; Trump himself was never personally the target of an FBI wiretap. In any case, the president doesn’t order such a thing; the FBI applies for a warrant to eavesdrop on Americans from a secret court. No such warrant was issued to bug the president’s offices.
But the furious denials were misleading. To paraphrase a cliché from 2016, Trump’s tweet should have been taken seriously, not literally. Obama did not tap Trump’s phones. But his FBI did spy on Trump’s campaign. That fact is no longer in dispute. The question is whether the FBI was justified in treating the Trump campaign itself as a suspect in this crime against the 2016 election.
I’d quibble with a couple of points — for example, it does appear FBI was monitoring phones in Trump’s campaign HQ and transition team, which sure sound like “Trump’s phones” to me — but it’s a good review.
OH: Biden Says Only Felons Should Be Deported And He Doesn’t ‘Count Drunk Driving as a Felony.’
“You aren’t allowed to be here.”
“What’s the penalty for that?”
“You get to stay here.”
Economists call this a perverse incentive, but Democrats just call it policy.
AS IN CALIFORNIA, ABANDONING TRADITIONAL LAND-CLEARING POLICIES IN FAVOR OF IDEOLOGICAL APPROACHES WAS A DISASTER: Australia’s eco-fundamentalism turns to ashes.
ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY?: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Judicial Conference is thinking of prohibiting judges from being members of the Federalist Society. It’s too political—or so the Judicial Conference believes.
If the Judicial Conference does ban judges from being members of the Federalist Society, it will need to do the same for the ABA. Unlike the Federalist Society, which takes no stand on any legal or political issue, the ABA weighs in on countless issues, always taking the leftward leaning side of things. The ABA files amicus curiae briefs before the Supreme Court, again with a consistent slant to the left. The long march through the institutions infiltrated the ABA long ago.
Similarly, membership in “affinity bar associations” like the National Hispanic Bar Association and the National Bar Association (which is for African American lawyers), and the National Association of Women Lawyers will need to be prohibited. Those left-leaning organizations routinely take stands on controversial issues and file amicus briefs. The Federalist Society never does and never will.
I can’t tell you how proud I am to be a member of the Federalist Society. It’s true that its members are overwhelmingly conservative or libertarian. But to say that it is not monolithic understates it. Lawyers actually engage in civil debate at the Federalist Society. It always attempts to present all sides of legal and public policy debates at its functions (including different strands of conservatism and libertarianism as well as left-of-center views). That does not happen at law schools these days. There is far less ideological diversity on campuses than you routinely find at the Federal Society’s Annual Lawyers Conference.
Two personal anecdotes are worth mentioning here.
- In 1996, I co-chaired the Yes on Proposition 209 Campaign here in California. That measure, which passed with a strong majority, prohibited the State of California (including its universities) from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group based or race, color, sex or ethnicity in the operation of public education, public employment or public contacting. Needless to say, the Left hated it.
At the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in January of 1997, a panel with OVER TWENTY speakers was presented. All of them opposed Proposition 209. Despite being both a law professor present at the conference and the second ranking person in the 209 campaign, I was not invited to speak. (That’s okay. I’m not exactly Cicero, so maybe the AALS didn’t think I was a good enough speaker.) But there were at least three other law professors who had worked on the campaign who were also ignored
Meanwhile, the Federalist Society put on its own Proposition 209 panel at a nearby hotel to which all law professors were invited. If I remember correctly, the panel had five speakers. Three of them opposed Proposition 209 and two supported it (including me). Yet the Federalist Society is the organization that that Judicial Conference thinks is too political.
- A few years later, I was on a panel at the Federalist Society’s Annual Lawyers’ Convention. The topic was again affirmative action. The staff had worked to get speakers on both sides of the issue. But for some reason the left-of-center speaker did not show up. Much to the Federalist Society’s embarrassment, all it had was an empty chair. To remedy the problem, after I and the other panelists had given our prepared remarks, I stood up again and argued the other side of the issue the best I could. (I’m a lawyer. That’s what lawyers are supposed to be able to do.) The crowd appreciated it. I was later told that I was persuasive to at least one person in the audience.
The Judicial Conference tries to sound evenhanded by putting the American Constitutional Society in the same category as the Federalist Society. I should point out that the American Constitutional Society is (so far) a pale imitation of what the Left imagines the Federalist Society to be. It has far fewer active members and (weirdly) is far more political than the Federalist Society. But membership in the ACS shouldn’t be prohibited either—not unless membership in organizations like the ABA are prohibited too.
The Judicial Conference can argue that it isn’t preventing judges from being members of the Federalist Society prior to becoming judges. Nor is it preventing judges from attending Federalist Society events. But invariably a prohibition on membership will be taken as a sign that the Federalist Society is something bad … something that lawyers with a judicial temperament will avoid. The truth is more like the opposite. Lawyers who are interested in hearing all sides of an issue gravitate towards the Federalist Society, not away from it. The Judicial Conference should be pleased that to have judges who are members.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): For perspective, what’s going on here is that the left expects the right to dominate the judiciary in the near future, and on its way out wants to change the “ethical” rules to block the right from behaving the way the left did when it had hegemony. A standard move and, of course, utterly unprincipled.
THIS IS FAR FROM THE WORST PROBLEM WE COULD HAVE: US Cyber Command was not prepared to handle the amount of data it hacked from ISIS. “Operation Glowing Symphony was a success, but Cyber Command operators were not prepared for the amount of data they found in hacked ISIS accounts and servers.”
AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: Increasingly Secular Nation Replaces Outdated Religious Ideas With End Times Prophecies, Moral Judgments.
THE PARTY LINE: No Slam ‘Debunk’: Analyzing the Dems’ Repetitive Impeach Text.
HOWIE CARR: Trump’s Only Crime Is Being Trump.
Forget the two “counts” against President Trump in the Senate trial that begins today, the reality is he is charged with only one crime.
He is accused of being Donald J. Trump.
For that high crime, the Democrats say, he must be removed from office.
The Democrat “House managers” are going to get 24 hours over the next two days to lay out their opening arguments, but how are they going to fill that time, considering that they’re not even accusing him of committing any crimes?
Certainly no actual felonies — you know, Bill Clinton stuff like obstruction of justice, perjury and subornlng perjury.
They just accuse him of being … Donald J. Trump.
For that they need 24 hours?
How are Schiff, Nadler, et al., going to fill those hours? Are they going to talk about how he puts ketchup on steaks? And then orders two scoops of ice cream for dessert?
Considering all the airtime they have to fill, maybe the Democrats can include a Greatest Hits compilation of all the other fake-news fantasies they’ve entertained over the last three years for getting rid of Trump:
Jill Stein’s recount (before Hillary was accused of being a Russian asset), faithless electors, emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, Hillary’s fake dossier, the Russian hoax, firing crooked James Comey, senile Bob Mueller and his 19 angry Democrats, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti (pre-indictments), Stormy Daniels, Brett Kavanaugh frame-up, tax returns, loans guaranteed by Russian oligarchs … .
And now, the Ukraine hoax.
What are the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Trump? Record high numbers of Americans working, the stock market at record highs. Favorable trade deals, ISIS destroyed, millions off welfare and food stamps.
They never feared Trump failing. They feared his success, and that’s unforgivable.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Why Are Bernie Bros So Violent? “I am starting to get the feeling that James Hodgkinson wasn’t a one-off. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been conducting an undercover investigation of the Bernie Sanders campaign.”