Archive for 2020
May 6, 2020
GOOD: Iran pulling out of Syria as Israel pummels its forces there. “Amid increased reports of IDF strikes on Tehran-linked bases, security officials say Israel wants to make clear to Damascus that Iran is a burden, not an ally.”
HE’S JUST PUTTING IN WORDS WHAT EVERY DEMOCRAT IS THINKING: Politico Co-Founder Martin Tolchin: ‘I Don’t Want an Investigation’ Into Tara Reade Allegation, ‘I Want a Coronation of Joe Biden.’
Martin Tolchin, a veteran journalist who worked for the New York Times before departing to help found The Hill and Politico, rejected an investigation into Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against 2020 Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden, Monday, in case it results in Biden being found guilty and losing the election.
In a letter to the New York Times, which was written in response to an editorial board article titled, “Investigate Tara Reade’s Allegations,” Tolchin wrote, “I totally disagree with this editorial.”
“I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden,” he declared. “Would he make a great president? Unlikely. Would he make a good president? Good enough. Would he make a better president than the present occupant? Absolutely.”
“I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance,” Tolchin added, concluding, “Suppose an investigation reveals damaging information concerning his relationship with Tara Reade or something else, and Mr. Biden loses the nomination to Senator Bernie Sanders or someone else with a minimal chance of defeating Mr. Trump. Should we really risk the possibility?”
I don’t want justice — I want a win. That could be the party slogan these days.
NEWS FROM MY SCHOOL: Dean Emeritus to Resume Interim Leadership of College of Law. “Dean Emeritus Doug Blaze, who is also the Art Stolnitz and Elvin E. Overton Distinguished Professor, has agreed to serve as dean of the College of Law on an interim basis beginning July 1.”
Our search failed — partly due to shakeups caused by the pandemic — but Doug was a great dean and I’ll be happy to have him as interim dean.
HE’S BEING REHABILITATED TO TAKE AN ANTI-TRUMP STAND: Former CDC director Tom Frieden pleads guilty in sex abuse case, gets no jail time.
He’d fit right in in a Biden Administration.
SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE: Turns out the former senior senator from Delaware voted against creating Senate office to investigate staff complaints of sexual harassment. Biden was in the Senate for decades, so don’t be surprised to learn of all kinds of votes that in the cruel hindsight of a presidential campaign will prove embarrassing.
PHOTOGRAPHY IS NOT A CRIME: Video vigilante said he was ‘rude,’ but not breaking the law recording at MGH.
A video vigilante charged with trespassing at Massachusetts General Hospital said he agrees he may have been “rude,” but he doesn’t want to be tossed in jail where fears of coronavirus are running rampant.
John L. McCullough told the Herald Tuesday evening he is a First Amendment crusader who takes videos of police and posts them to YouTube. That’s what got him a June 2 arraignment date.
“I understand how people may feel, but that doesn’t mean I should be locked up,” McCullough said, adding he posts his work to “The Resistance” channel on the video platform.
“Did I break the law? No. I may have been rude,” he added. “I understand people may feel jittery, but where peoples’ feelings start my rights don’t stop.”
McCullough, 41, was charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace and threats to do bodily harm after police say he refused to stop recording Sunday evening, as the Herald reported.
He’s accused of recording video at MGH of a ramp where “hundreds of nurses, doctors, physician assistants, and other medical staff arriving and leaving the hospital after a 12 hour shift during the COVID-19 Pandemic” could be seen leaving, according to a police report. . . .
McCullough said “20 other cameras” were probably rolling at the same time as he was — alluding to security cameras in the area.
Yes, but those are approved by Authority. Plus:
Cambridge civil-rights attorney Harvey Silverglate said McCullough will probably have his case tossed, even if what he was doing is seen as crass.
“There’s no amendment in the Constitution called the humanity amendment,” said Silverglate. “It’s a free country and you have a right to be a jerk.”
But taking video outside a hospital during a pandemic and as people try to social distance — and first responders, including the police, face all-too-real health risks — is “pretty distasteful,” Silverglate added.
Still, he added the judge will “have to throw it out.” He added it’s “punishement itself” to go to court in this climate.
McCullough, records state, does not have an attorney yet. He did say he’s ready to plead his case.
“Don’t be brainwashed,” he added, “and it shouldn’t be a problem when a black man has a camera.”
The First Circuit has held that taking photos and video in public is a right that is sufficiently “clearly established” that those who violated it can’t claim qualified immunity.
“LAW PROFESSOR DEFENDS STAND YOUR GROUND LAWS”: Yes, I guess that’s what I did in the most recent report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK: Doctors Without Patients: ‘Our Waiting Rooms Are Like Ghost Towns.’ “As visits plummet because of the coronavirus, small physician practices are struggling to survive.”
AT AMAZON, Face Mask, Pack of 50.
LOCKDOWN IS OVER. SOMEONE TELL THE GOVERNMENT:
These approaches are the horns of America’s corona-dilemma. Every society has reacted to COVID-19 according to its principles or, if no principles were to hand, its habits. It has been America’s misfortune that its principles and habits are ill-suited to managing an epidemic. The federal system, by functioning as it should, prevented the kind of nationwide shutdown that worked in smaller countries like Austria. The real civic religion of America, business at all costs, can accept the redirection of the economy by the Defense Production Act, but it cannot tolerate the suspension of all economic activity. Yet a powerful counter-impulse — averse to risk, trusting of authority, and hence likely to seek out niches in the economy which are immune to booms and busts — prefers to shelter in place.
It is tempting to identify the risk-takers as pro-business Republicans and the risk-reducers as big-state Democrats. Perhaps this is true among the ideologically committed. I suspect, though, that the split over risk is closer to a consensus position. Americans want to do whatever they feel like doing: what else are natural rights for? They also expect to do it in safety and, in ever-increasing numbers, that the state will compensate them for the consequences of their recklessness.
While the media are busy bashing the red states and their governors for not waiting until 2025 to end the lockdown, something tells me there aren’t a whole lot of copies of Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal to be found on the bookshelves of the people who crowded en masse into New York’s Christopher Street Park over the weekend.
AUSTIN BAY PEELS CHINESE AGENT OF INFLUENCE BEN RHODES LIKE A GRAPE:
Yes, call it the Wuhan pandemic. Damn Obama administration toady Ben Rhodes, who, hair on fire, condemns the moniker as racist. Rhodes is a Beltway clerk with heavy political baggage.
Ebola virus? The Ebola is a river in the Congo. Old Lyme (Lyme disease) is in Connecticut. Rhodes spews CCP narrative warfare tropes. That’s not slander; that’s fact. The disease plaguing us originated in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan. It’s an origin, not an ethnic slur.
Rhodes gives us as an instructive example of a CCP narrative warfare scheme designed to sow doubt and discord. COVID-19 is an anodyne, antiseptic and distanced name — narrative warfare camouflage, or a distraction to buy time and avoid consequences. Wuhan identifies the perpetrator. The CCP knows anti-Chinese communist sentiment is at its highest level since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
And it knows it can count on allies in America to protect it.
FLASHBACK: An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden.
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.
Joe Biden is Joe Biden.
BUT HE’S ESPECIALLY HAPPY IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT: There’s no timetable to reopen from N.J. coronavirus lockdowns, ‘whether you like that or not,’ Gov. Murphy says. You know, Trump’s wrecking a whole generation of Democratic governors who might otherwise have been presidential or vice-presidential timber, simply by letting them run things as they see fit.
LEFTY BIRDS OF A FEATHER: POLITICO Peddles Red China Propaganda To Own Trump – Twitter ROASTS Them For It.
How much different in practice is Communist China’s state-controlled media from America’s “free” media?
AN ARMY OF KARENS: Social Distancing Informants Have Their Eyes on You.
Largely confined to their homes and worried about the spread of the coronavirus and its risks to their own health or that of loved ones, a segment of the United States has turned informant, calling the police, public health authorities and the employers of people they believe are violating social-distancing decrees or stay-at-home orders.
Across the country, these complaints have led to shutdowns of dog groomers and massage establishments as well as citations and police scoldings to restaurant and bar owners whose patrons are lingering too close to one another. . . .
Some people are resorting to anonymous acts of public shaming. The tone is nasty at times.
In Manhattan’s East Village, profanity-laden posters have been tacked to telephone poles chastising people for not wearing face masks. In Long Beach, Wash., a popular weekend getaway for Seattleites that had been closed, a flyer left on car windshields said, “Your vacation is not worth our lives.” On Twitter, the hashtag #FloridaMorons was used to shame citizens by posting photos of crowded beaches after they recently reopened.
In Wisconsin, after a local TV news outlet published a story saying that Dr. Murdock had been suspended, people cheered in messages on a private Facebook group backing stay-at-home orders
KSDK, a local NBC affiliate, reported in late April that a man named Jared Totsch received a copy of these tipsters’ records and shared them on Facebook. When a KDSK reporter reached out to him to point to him that these tipsters are now worried about retaliation, Totsch responded that was partly the point.
“I’d call it poetic justice, instant Karma, a dose of their own medicine,” he responded. “What goes around, comes around. They are now experiencing the same pain that they themselves helped to inflict on those they filed complaints against.”
A friend on Facebook comments: “We are in unchartered terrritory in dealing with this pandemic — but that’s precisely why we need epistemic humility not technocratic certitude. This is the time to listen to many different points of views not shout them down by going into one’s high dudgeon.”
Yes.
AUTHORITARIAN BUT UNPRINCIPLED — NOW THERE’S A SURPRISE: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Does 180-Degree Flip On Sexual Assault Allegations In Pursuit Of VP Nomination.
AND IT HASN’T PEAKED YET: Beijing Believes Anti-CCP Sentiment at Highest Since Tiananmen Square: Report.