Author Archive: Stephen Green
September 30, 2019
MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME: FBI Says Murder And Violent Crime Both Declined In 2018.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 30, 2019. “The Biden clan gets rich, Klobuchar kills a duck, O’Rourke threatens a kitten and calls Journey punk rock, while Yang channels The Dead Kennedys and the Q3 fundraising deadline looms.”
THE WORDS “DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL DONOR” ANSWER THE QUESTION: Activists wonder why California Democratic political donor Ed Buck wasn’t arrested sooner.
JIM GERAGHTY: Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline.
Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.
The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:
According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.
Both James and Hunter Biden have denied to Politico that James had ever made these comments.
Up until that time, Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president.
From there, things get really complicated.
HE EARNED IT: Al Gore Receives Award for ‘Top Climate Hypocrite.’
PROCUREMENT: Germany Needs a New Fighter Plane: What About a Stealth F-35 or New F-15EX?
It won’t matter what Berlin buys, if anything, until they get serious again about maintenance and training. Neither seems likely.
PRIVACY: Google reportedly under antitrust scrutiny for new internet encryption protocol. “Google’s plans to use a new Internet Protocol has raised concerns among congressional antitrust investigators who worry it could give the company an unfair competitive advantage, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Investigators want to know whether Google will use any data collected through the new protocol for commercial purposes.”
Don’t be silly. Of course they will.
Last week: Google Blocks Privacy Push at the Group That Sets Web Standards.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Baseball Heartbreak Over Impeachment Nonsense Edition. “The baseball playoffs begin this week and, despite my heartbreak after the last two World Series I’m — when I swore I’d give up all hope as a Dodgers fan — I’m back for more. Why? Because it is abundantly clear that getting my sports soul crushed again will still be infinitely more pleasurable than reading another overwrought, hyperbole barf of an impeachment story.”
Heh.
WHEN HE’S RIGHT, HE’S RIGHT: Bill Maher Slams White Guilt.
SAD: Venezuela’s Struggle for Legitimacy Comes to New York. “It’s a do-or-die moment for every Venezuelan.”
The question came at the very end of a press conference dominated by fevered talk of Ukraine, Joe Biden, and impeachment. You’d be forgiven if you missed it entirely. President Donald Trump encouraged reporters assembled for the United Nations General Assembly to ask him about the booming U.S. economy. He didn’t get his wish. Trump called on a woman who identified herself as a Venezuelan journalist: “How are you doing over there?” Trump inquired.
“Our situation is pretty bad,” she responded.
“Yeah. I would say ‘pretty bad,’” the president agreed. “Sad.”
Plus: “It was a stark reminder that the political turmoil over a whistle-blower complaint concerning Trump’s dealings with Ukraine risks leaving a number of his urgent foreign-policy initiatives—very serious unfinished business, such as curbing North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, preventing Iran’s provocations, and striking a trade agreement with China—in limbo.”
This is a nice piece from The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman.
Beijing has the kind of problem with Hong Kong that they can’t fix with bullies and tear gas.
KYLE SMITH: Trump impeachment saga is pointless reboot of 1999 Bill Clinton effort.
If Trump is impeached, he will follow the precedent set by Bill Clinton and ignore calls to resign. Then he’ll follow the second precedent set by Clinton and win in the Senate, which will set up the third precedent, a claim that his tormentors wasted the people’s time and money. Clinton’s approval rating rose by double digits as the process played out and Americans decided he was being needlessly put through a wringer. The lesson we all should have learned is: If you can’t make your impeachment bipartisan, don’t bother.
One doesn’t normally look to The New York Times for pushback to the Resistance, but this week the Paper of Record made an honest attempt to break outside the Acela corridor and ask Americans outside the political class what they think of impeaching the president. What they found was very little interest in impeachment. A recent poll showed 57 percent opposition to impeachment, and the Times’ reporting suggests that figure isn’t going to shift much.
The kindest explanation I have is that the Democrats have been trying to get payback for more than 20 years, finally ran out of patience, and decided to go all in on a weak hand. Voters ought to punish them at the polls next November for it, but we’ll see.
THAT WOULD BE NICE, BUT APPARENTLY THERE’S A CONSTITUENCY FOR THAT KIND OF THING: Trump: ‘Rep. Adam Schiff Must Resign From Congress!’
September 29, 2019
“GET STUFFED” IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE: Biden campaign demands news channels stop booking Giuliani.
HMM: Ukraine Holds More Surprises for Biden. “He’ll face questions about a lot more than what Trump has already brought up.”
Firtash, who got rich playing middleman between Russian and Ukrainian energy companies, has long been fighting extradition to the U.S. from Austria. He’s wanted for allegedly bribing Indian officials more than a decade ago, but he could be valuable in other ways: He was once close to now-deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and therefore might know about the Ukrainian activities of Paul Manafort, Trump’s disgraced former campaign chairman.
Earlier this year, on the verge of being sent to America, Firtash retained a duo of Trump-connected American lawyers and presented a Vienna court with a wealth of documents that he says prove that the extradition request was actually politically motivated. Among those documents is an affidavit from former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who testified that Biden “directly manipulated the political leadership of Ukraine on false pretexts” to prevent Firtash from leaving Austria for Ukraine – where, as a Ukrainian citizen, he couldn’t be extradited.
This is the same Shokin whom Biden has boasted of getting fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. The former prosecutor has since said that Biden — then the U.S. vice president — did it to thwart a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma, a natural gas company where his son Hunter was a well-paid board member. Although the claim is probably false, Trump has picked it up and pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate, sparking a separate scandal about the current U.S. president’s use of his office to dig up dirt on a potential election rival.
Expect the Trump team to try to show that Biden abused his power by coercing Ukrainian authorities into helping him get a prospective Russiagate witness to the U.S. If Firtash works with Trump’s people, he can also provide a steady supply of testimony and documents suggesting that Obama administration officials, including Biden, actively meddled in Ukraine’s domestic politics after 2014. Whether or not they had corrupt motives in doing so is almost irrelevant — conservative conspiracy theorists will take it from there.
It hardly takes a conspiracy theorist to see something fishy in the Bidens’ Ukraine and China connections.
September 27, 2019
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: Xi Jinping Is ‘Not a Dictator.’
Bloomberg defended China’s ruling communist regime citing its handling of pollution and environmental policy, claiming that it is responding to the needs of citizens. The billionaire’s comments come amid months of violent protest in Hong Kong and international outcry about the oppression of Chinese Muslims.
“The Communist Party wants to stay in power in China and they listen to the public,” Bloomberg said. “When the public says ‘I can’t breathe the air,’ Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents, or he’s not going to survive.”
“He’s not a dictator?” Hoover asked. “He doesn’t have a vote, he doesn’t have a democracy. He’s not held accountable by voters. Is the check on him just a revolution?”
“No, he has a constituency to answer to,” Bloomberg responded. “You’re not going to have a revolution. No government survives without the will of the majority of its people.”
The secret police and the Orwellian social credit system and the reeducation camps and whatnot are… the will of the people then?
I HAD BEEN ASSURED THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Nature paper on ocean warming retracted.