CONFESSIONS OF A RIGHT WING FILM CRITIC: Or, how I learned how to stop worrying and embrace my inner Andrew Breitbart.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION FOR JOE BIDEN: “Mr. Vice President, do you favor a policy of deliberately giving members of some racial groups an earlier spot in line than others when it comes to administering a vaccine for the coronavirus?”

COLLUSION IS EVERYWHERE IN ACADEMIA: A Case Western Reserve University professor has been arrested over his alleged ties to China. The professor is just the latest in a growing list of U.S. college faculty to face these types of charges.

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ROGER KIMBALL: John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election.

You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

How about that indeed?

IRISH DEMOCRACY:

UPDATE: Americans stopped the economy, not politicians. And we will restart it.

In the case of the lockdowns, it is important to realize that people were out in front of closing down the economy. The evidence is pretty clear that we began withdrawing well before governments at all levels turned practice into legal decrees. Schools, restaurants, gyms, and houses of worship began to close or move to virtual before they were mandated to do so. Cell phone data indicate that people began to practice social distancing and forms of quarantine before governments acted.

We stopped the economy, not the politicians. And we will restart it.

That restart will happen when people believe that engaging in various forms of economic activity is sufficiently safe. Those beliefs will be a combination of their assessment of the virus and their confidence in what firms are doing to make going to stores, restaurants, and the like hospitable and safe.

Looks like it’s happening.

I’D SAY IT’S GOING TO BE MUSK/CRENSHAW 2024, BUT I DON’T THINK ELON IS ELIGIBLE: Elon Musk: Politicians ‘who stole our liberty’ should be ‘tarred, feathered & thrown out of town!’

“DIABETO:” Washington Post Magazine gives Stacey Abrams the whole Beyoncé glamour treatment in its photo shoot.

Remember when Beto O’Rourke was the rising young hope for the Democratic Party as it looked forward to 2020? He made the cover of Vanity Fair with a photoshoot by celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz standing next to a pickup truck like a dork, but most people just wondered why his dog looked so sad in every picture.

That was nothing, though, compared to what the Washington Post Magazine has done with possible vice presidential contender Stacey Abrams. We all know what Abrams looks like … she’s doing a media blitz even though she claims she’s not rallying to be picked by Joe Biden. But we’ve never seen her like this, with the fog machine and all.

The distance between the image that Democrats and their operatives in the media imagine themselves to be and reality is planetary, as this juxtaposition by Jim Treacher highlights:

If anything, the copy in the article makes the above photo look like the height of objectivity:

More at Hot Air from John Sexton: “Asked if she was prepared to be president on Day 1 if needed, amid a pandemic no less, she answered with an unequivocal ‘yes.’”

HMM: Coronavirus in Boston: 10% of Bostonians have COVID-19 antibodies.

A RARE MOMENT OF SANITY IN WASHINGTON STATE: Gov. Jay Inslee retracts requirement that diners provide contact info when restaurants reopen.

THE SEVEN HORSEMEN of the Apocalypse. We’re up to seven now? Well, inflation.

RIP: Phyllis George, pioneer sports broadcaster and former Miss America, dead at age 70.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES I WASN’T EXPECTING FOR $500, ALEX: Biden campaign doesn’t consider Latinos ‘part of their path to victory,’ political operatives say.

ED LINKED THIS THE OTHER DAY, BUT I WANT TO BREAK OUT SOME BITS FROM MATT TAIBBI’S Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties. First:

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus.

Dems never minded the U.S. being like Belarus, so long a they were in charge, or felt like they were.

Plus:

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism.

I’ve written a lot about the Democrats’ record on civil liberties issues in the past. Working on I Can’t Breathe, a book about the Eric Garner case, I was stunned to learn the central role Mario Cuomo played in the mass incarceration problem, while Democrats also often embraced hyper-intrusive “stop and frisk” or “broken windows” enforcement strategies, usually by touting terms like “community policing” that sounded nice to white voters. Democrats strongly supported the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and Barack Obama continued or expanded Bush-Cheney programs like drone assassination, rendition, and warrantless surveillance, while also using the Espionage Act to bully reporters and whistleblowers. . . .

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

Yes, for some values of “our.”

YES, IT’S THE BEE. HOWEVER, MR. PRESIDENT, I’LL POINT OUT I CAN PUT ON A GOOD IMPRESSION AND I HAVE AN ACCENT THAT WILL FREAK OUT THE PRESS:  Trump Appoints Angry Honey Badger As New Press Secretary.

And also that my training is very similar to that of journalists, and the one thing one gets from being forced to shut up and pretend in groups of Marxists is a gut-deep hatred of the philosophy and an ability to see through it, as though it were made of glass.

TRUST THE EXPERTS: The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Trusting: Britain has gotten a hard lesson about blind trust in scientific authorities.

I’m a virologist, and modelling complex processes is part of my day-to-day work. It’s not uncommon to see long and complex code for predicting the movement of an infection in a population, but tools exist to structure and document code properly. The Imperial College effort suggests an incumbency effect: with their outstanding reputations, the college and Ferguson possessed an authority based solely on their own authority. The code on which they based their predictions would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

Ferguson and Imperial College’s refusal of all requests to examine taxpayer-funded code that supported one of the most significant peacetime decisions in British history is entirely contrary to the principles of open science—especially in the Internet age. The Web has created an unprecedented scientific commons, a marketplace of ideas in which Ferguson’s arguments sound only a little better than “the dog ate my homework.” Worst of all, however, Ferguson and Imperial College, through both their work and their haughtiness about it, have put the public at risk.

Garbage in, garbage out. Applies to data, code, and people.

CORRUPTION ON SUCH A SCALE CALLS ALL OF MODERNITY INTO QUESTION, STAGGERS THE MIND, AND MAKES US WONDER WHAT THE PRESS WAS DOING. OTHER THAN SEEKING TO CURRY FAVOR WITH THE KLEPTOKRATS AND STATISTS:  The bigger picture on Obamagate.

WHEN THE CLOWN CAR CRASHES WITH A DUMPSTER AND THE WHOLE THING GOES UP IN FLAMES:   Adventures in Social Media – Mil-Vet Version.

YOU KNOW, THE PROBLEM IS THESE DAYS WE SEEM TO BE LIVING IN A NOVEL. BUT NO NOVELIST COULD GET AWAY WITH  THE LEVEL OF STUPIDITY REALITY PRESENTS US WITH EVERY DAY:  Rush Limbaugh Went There.

DUH!  Imperial College model used to justify UK and U.S. lockdowns deemed ‘buggy mess’ & ‘total unreliable’ by experts.

SANITY? IN THE GLORIOUS BEAR FLAG PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC? DON’T LET NOISOME FIND OUT:  Fresno Co. Sheriff Won’t Enforce CA Lockdown Order, Too Busy Rearresting Released Criminals.