“It’s legally pathetic.” — Law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University School of Law on the Trump indictment on Bret Baier’s “Special Report” program, Thursday (3/31/2023). See the Turley interview below.
Yep, Bragg pulled the trigger. Alvin Bragg’s indictment crusade against Trump is more than legally pathetic. It’s more proof that the United States is descending into a banana republic. The moral distance between us and Putin’s Russia is shrinking.
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s KGB chief and close confidant, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Putin follows the same script, and now we must add Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the Democratic Party’s vigilante posse to the list of the maxim’s adherents. But there’s a big “if”, if what has long been reported on the case is accurate. I’m skeptical of anything new on a case that has been combed and vacuumed by the party’s hitmen in the DOJ and Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr., for at least six years. All of it came to naught . . . until Bragg ascended the throne of vigilante-in-chief in ultra-blue Manhattan.
In a nutshell, the case appears to be the brew of a legally dead accusation (vaguely worded accounting entry) hitched to another murky, hypothetical federal one (an enigmatic federal campaign finance violation) in order to conjure a felony and escape the statute of limitations. Got that? And this from a guy whose campaign pledge was to get Trump. According to ABC News,
“During the campaign, Bragg spoke openly about the DA’s investigations into Trump and cited his experience in the AG’s office as a qualification. He won the election and assumed office in January 2022, becoming the first Black Manhattan DA.”
Alvin Bragg campaigning for the office of Manhattan DA in 2021.
In an electoral cluster hot to hang Trump, Bragg was rewarded with the keys to power. Vendetta justice is chic in Manhattan. Good luck in gathering a fair-minded jury from that snake pit.
By the way, don’t let the 34 counts in the indictment fool you. In Turley’s words, it’s just “count stacking” by multiplying the same charge in each one of multiple evidentiary documents in Bragg’s possession – a favorite ploy to sell the unsaleable.
Funny thing about Bragg, he cares more about the vocabulary on an accounting ledger and federal law outside his jurisdiction than robbery with a deadly weapon within his jurisdiction. He was caught red-handed when the public learned of him issuing an office staff directive shortly after moving into his sinecure. It ordered staff to not prosecute certain crimes while ordering a downgrade of entire classes of assaults and robberies. Playing footsie with the statute books, five classes of armed robberies will be reduced to misdemeanor larceny and third-degree robbery charges – “forcibly steals property” – are to be dropped entirely. He works overtime to hang Trump on phantom charges while the city’s streets and subways become war zones. Let Christopher Herrmann, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, paint the picture for Bragg: “. . . crime is up in New York City, and it’s up quite a bit.” And to think that Bragg is working to release the miscreants back onto the streets. Is this guy out this mind?
If anything, rather than pursue Trump, Bragg should be investigated because he is in open defiance of his oath of office and thus deserving of impeachment. He swore to the following oath upon taking office (see below): “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of ……, according to the best of my ability.” Does “faithfully discharging the duties of the office” cover categorical refusals to prosecute certain categories of crimes? Bragg, with the wave of his hand, has, in effect, repealed entire sections of the New York state penal code. Sounds to me like Bragg is in open rebellion against his oath of office. Prosecutorial discretion doesn’t apply to blanket reductions in charging decisions and refusals to prosecute. Instead, that’s a DA with a Caesar complex itching for removal from office.
I can’t, with a straight face, look upon our role in monitoring the behavior of other countries as if we are a beacon of decency. Look at us: we advance racism under the guise of anti-racism; abortion up to and including infanticide is ballyhooed; our children are robbed of their innocence in curriculums littered in gay porn; child sexual mutilation is a protected activity in some of our states; much of Hollywood’s exports are a moral afront to other cultures; our elections aren’t a model to be emulated as we shotgun ballots hither and yon and have meltdowns counting them; our fiscal incontinence is putting us in the same category with Argentina; education in America for Americans is a scandal; and the world sees a form of justice that is already frighteningly familiar to them. Our moral high ground is collapsing into a sinkhole.
The foregoing indictment of our country, mostly brought to us by the neo-Marxists in our midst, is making us an embarrassment. Bragg’s indictment will in all probability add more shame to our growing ignoble reputation.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Alvin Bragg made tough-on-Trump record central to campaign for DA”, Joseph Clark, The Washington Times, 3/31/2023, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/31/alvin-bragg-made-his-tough-trump-record-central-hi/
* “What to know about the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Jr., who will be prosecuting Trump”, Iban Pereira, ABC News, 3/31/2023, at https://abcnews.go.com/US/manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-jr-prosecuting-trump/story?id=97989545
* “Let’s break down exactly what Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s memo says”, Nicole Gelinas, The New York Post, 1/11/2022, at https://nypost.com/2022/01/11/lets-break-down-exactly-what-manhattan-da-alvin-braggs-memo-says/
* “New York Constitution Article XIII – Public Officers; Section 1 – Oath of office; no other test for public office”, JUSTIA US Law, at https://law.justia.com/constitution/new-york/article-xiii/section-1/
* “The Trump Indictment: Making History in the Worst Possible Way”, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley: Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks, 3/31/2023, at https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/31/the-trump-indictment-making-history-in-the-worst-possible-way/
Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.
Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.
Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.
In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.
In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.
It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.
What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!
To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.
Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.
Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.
Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton
Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.
Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.
Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.
With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/
* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.
* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy
* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton
* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/
* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/
The backstory on Dylan’s “My Back Pages” is a teaching moment for the censorious zealots who happen to dominate the commanding heights of our culture and many of our political institutions. So are the lyrics, if rightly understood.
Here’s what I’ve been able to glean in my research into the song. In the mid-60’s, Dylan was given the Tom Paine Award for social activism by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Before this, he was getting irritated at being pigeonholed as a radical activist. He got drunk, made a speech at the award ceremony, and much of that speech made its way into the lyrics. As one source put it regarding the song, “. . . Dylan intensely criticizes his younger self for his moral arrogance and intellectual naivety. More than anything, he’s mocking his own hypocrisy. His outlook on these subjects, on himself and on the progressive movement he lambasted from the awards ceremony pulpit . . . .” Further, according to this source, “The way Dylan saw it, he was becoming the authoritarian by continuing on his old path.” Sound familiar?
The song’s chorus, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, was a personal admonition for turning into a vain know-it-all. In the following lines, he upbraids himself for his hypocrisy in becoming as narrow-minded and pushy as the other side:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach”
Equality at all costs was every bit the holy grail among the radical Left in Dylan’s time as it is today among the so-called social justice warriors spitting and fulminating in lecture halls against anyone who disagrees. Dylan saw it in the mid-60’s and portrayed it in the following lines:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow”
What we are experiencing today is a rehash of an earlier time; only some people saw their descent into inhumanity and corrected. Others didn’t and won’t. The full lyrics are below.
***********
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I
Proud ‘neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Girl’s faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
***********
Enjoy the all-star version at Dylan’s honorary concert from the 1990’s with Neil Young, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and of course Bob Dylan (below).
RogerG
Source:
* Backstory of “My Back Pages” at https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/my-back-pages#:~:text=Those%20lines%20clearly%20mirror%20the%20chorus%20for%20%22My,More%20than%20anything%2C%20he%27s%20mocking%20his%20own%20hypocrisy.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.
Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.
The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.
And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.
As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.
Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.
The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.
The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.
But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .
* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .
What’s next after a red wave? If it happens – big “if” – It’ll depend on how the results will be interpreted. Will it be viewed as an endorsement of Trumpism or rejection of a radical-Left Democratic Party or both? Regardless, Trump senses a triumphal return to the White House. That’s “what next”. He shared a clip of Meghan Kelly predicting “He [DeSantis] won’t win against Trump.” Trump attached to the clip, “I agree”. See below.
This guy is running, and with his usual uncouth cockiness. What does he offer? His appeal is encapsulated in “He owns the libs”. His in-your-face style is appealing to a certain type of voter, thus a rabid following of 20-25% of the electorate. But this combative charisma repels as much as it attracts. As such, Trumpism as a political personality is not the stuff of decisive victories. Politics is about addition, not subtraction, and Trump brings both at the same time.
Michael Brandon Dougherty (in many ways a Trump admirer) in National Review Online makes the point that Trump is charisma, not policy. I agree. Trump’s term in office was characterized by management chaos and the farming out most policy initiatives to Congress. Trump is no policy wonk. Other than immigration, issues like tax cuts, deregulation (Congressional Review Act repeals of regulations), and judges were at the behest of, and impossible without, Paul Ryan (House) and Mitch McConnel (Senate). Even “energy independence” and immigration he must share with the party leadership since many of the policy aspects of these issues originated in long-established party platforms and previous Republican congressional actions. In many ways, the country benefitted not necessarily from Trump but from not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to block them.
The Trump return is predicated on an overwhelming view within the party that Trump was cheated (“screwed” in popular Trump parlance) in the 2020 election. The claim is only half right. He claims that he won, but no, no one can say that. Once the ballots entered the many registrar offices for counting, no one can say how they were marked, how they got there, nor where they came from. Indeed, the election procedures in place throughout much of the country were the ones most prone to the kind of fraud that is nearly impossible to prove in court. Tracing a ballot to a fraudulent voter is next to impossible once you bypass the controls of in-person voting with the mass-mailing of ballots. That’s the wrong half of Trump’s indictment. Trump and his backers would be on firmer ground to complain of the mass-mailing of ballots, the use of dirty registration rolls, unsupervised drop boxes, ballot harvesting, provisional ballots, same-day registration, anywhere voting, etc. The most unsecure method of voting that put an end to the secret ballot was used in 2020. That’s the right half of the Trump complaint.
So, did he win? No, because he can’t prove it, no one can. A ballot stripped of its envelope is dropped into a sea of undifferentiated ballots. He should have known, screamed to high heaven when the procedures were jerry-rigged, but saved most of his vituperation after he lost. At this point, he looks and sounds like a petulant child. You want to talk about a huge turn-off?
Trump is so yesteryear. His appeal is yesteryear – “I was cheated” and “own the libs” – and he can only offer us what he has already given us: some very good policies, like many good Republicans, and repellant behavior and mismanagement. So much for the “virtue” of having a vaunted businessman behind the Resolute desk. As the 2022 red wave and 2024 elections recede, if Trump gets the nomination and wins, the memory will quickly wane of the Democrats’ embrace of radical-Left revolution, to be replaced by, once again, X-rated presidential antics.
We – meaning Republicans – have options. Our bench is long. Romney milquetoasts are not the order of the day. A compromise with radical-Left revolution is a semi-radical-Left revolution. Socialism and neo-Marxism – agreed, they are similar – is poison no matter the dose. A spine is required. We have many backboned political leaders but without the boorishness. Republicans have a choice to salve an inflated ego or establish a winning coalition for a decade(s). Trump in his second term can only bring more subtraction than addition.
Please watch the clip. Meghan’s prediction is a warning, not a promise.
* “The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?”, Michael Brendon Dougherty, National Review Online, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-coming-fight-over-trumpism-charisma-or-policy/.
FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.
What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.
The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.
The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?
This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?
The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.
For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.
The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.
Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.
In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.
The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.
RogerG
Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf
Randy Weingarten, AFT president, and empty classroomRally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)
What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.
The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.
Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.
The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.
Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.
Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.
Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?
My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.
The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.
The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.
Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?
All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?
We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.
Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.
Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?
Dr. Oz in recent campaign ad
What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.
Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.
Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?
It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.
RogerG
Sources:
* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.
College students in Seattle protest Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
We are suffocating in air saturated in government money like the leaves blasted off the hardwood forests of the Blue Ridge by a hurricane in fall (which I saw in 2018). Waste, oh the waste! Much of it fire-hosed to the colleges in the form of profligate student loans, grants, subsidies, etc. – which is contributing to a national debt of $30.6 trillion and counting. The aftermath is a college bubble like a market one, or the housing bubble of 2008-9.
Over the last ten years, total college enrollment has dropped by 4 million. Why? College was oversold. The realization began to sink in that $120,000 spent (the average price tag) on four years of lefty bromides and degree fields that neither advanced the students’ understanding nor added to their skills is a winning proposition for their future. We are in for a much-deserved market correction.
NBC is alarmed when they reported on the fall off recently (see below). It’s as if a civilizational collapse is imminent because we don’t have enough gender studies majors and people who still can’t put a decent sentence together. The network reports the findings of the left-leaning Hechinger Report which declares that the decline will “diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness”, as if all those graduates were chemistry majors and not the more likely situation of people who sat through interminable hours of woke claptrap and eroding rigor.
Don’t blame changing demographics for the slump. Within the same demographic, from 2016 to 2020, the percentage of high school graduates going to college dropped 7% from 70% to 63%. In many states, it’s worse, much worse. Blame the colleges for cementing the view that they’re a nest of radical vipers, incompetents, and pointless, if not harmful, instruction. NBC must have been flabbergasted to learn that fewer than 1 in 3 adults thought that college was worth the cost. A mortgage-sized debt is hardly a come-on for a public watching statue-topplers, Antifa, BLM, and campus censorship and intimidation on abundant display.
College has given itself a black eye. And, boy, what a shiner it is.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college”, NBC News, Aug. 10, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americans-are-increasingly-dubious-going-college-rcna40935
*The Hechinger Report in “How higher education lost its shine” at https://hechingerreport.org/how-higher-education-lost-its-shine/
Sound towers collapsing in scenes of aimless rage at Woodstock ‘99.
Look around you today and you’ll see all the signs of existential social malfunction. Urban areas are riven with crime, filth, and homelessness. Grids are dysfunctional operating more as fire starters and plagued by blackouts. Energy prices are through the roof. Housing is unaffordable. Massive government overspending abounds in pursuit of utopian unicorns. The language is bastardized by an ideology that seeks to repeal the divine, or evolutionary, plan for the two sexes, making a mockery of anything designated boy/girl. Essential racism in the form of “equity” and doctrines of essential oppression in the rhetorical incantations of “systemic” and “critical theory” are everywhere in the media and schools, infecting young minds as early as kindergarten. The sciences are not immune which raises serious questions about the future efficacy of our medical institutions (see Heather McDonald’s piece below). That’s just for starters.
Where does this lead? Watch Netflix’s “Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99” for a glimpse into our future (see the trailer below). After showing the consequences of the loss of standards and self-restraint, the flick tries to detour what you are viewing into a condemnation of machismo – or the male patriarchy – and greed and endorsement of wokeness and Me Too. Still, the images are there, just strip away the juvenile punditry. Go ahead, watch it.
The trailer:
Woodstock ’99 was a classic attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69 after 30 years of glamorizing that first edition. Some of the organizers and workers at ’99 were patrons of ’69 and describe it as a harmonious and tranquil love-in. It wasn’t. Many of the screw-ups at ’99 was present at ’69. Shortages of food and sanitation, rampant drug use, lack of crowd control, event personnel exchanging privileges for drugs, and the rain and mud that exacerbated the sanitation problems. The only thing missing was the riot of ’99 (see below for an abreviated account of ’69).
Fast forward to ’99. Michael Lange, the organizer of ’69, tried to resuscitate Woodstock with an eye to making money – Surprise! – which ’69 did not. The mellow rock of the Yardbirds was replaced with headliners such as the edgy, high-energy heavy metal of Limp Bizskit, Korn, Kid Rock, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Drugs and nudity in the crowd and on stage were commonplace. One cannot think of a clearer signal of the loss of self-restraint and norms of decency. The visual cues of forbearance were absent.
Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage at Woodstock ‘99.
More troubling is the fact that the crowd that you get is a product of the musical acts that perform. The fan of Limp Bizkit and the Red Hot Chili Peppers is not the fan of Joan Baez and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. An important element of rock by the end of the millennium had slid off into atavistic rage with a fanbase to match – emblematic in the name of the popular group at the time, Rage Against the Machine. Fans were overwhelmingly male, of high physicality, with a cage-fighting personality.
The festival by the third day reminded me of the worst of a Daytona Spring Break. Violence and rampant public fornication, including sexual assault, frequently go together and should not be a surprise in an intoxicated, drug-addled assemblage of 300,000 teens and early twenty-somethings. Add the music and the type of fan that it attracts and the tinder for chaos is present. The blame cannot be solely placed at the feet of greedy vendors. For this crowd, we must add “riot hard” to “party hard”.
When standards of decency and the normal guideposts and expectations of life are erased, life becomes a free-for-all. We are experiencing this happenstance across the board. A walk through downtown San Francisco is a health hazard, as it is in most of our urban centers. One can no longer be sure that the girls’ locker room and bathroom will be filled with only girls of the expected chromosomal makeup, essentially ending girls’ sports. A toxic racial favoritism has been magically turned into a public good. Flights of fancy replace sober deliberation in policy debates when inflation is said to be cured by more inflation. Military readiness is said to be amazingly advanced by racial witch hunts in the ranks, self-flagellation, and identity politics from the Pentagon to West Point to the barracks. We are a mess like those fans at Woodstock ’69 and ’99.
Has there ever been a superpower when at the height of power and influence, it commits suicide? The gun went to the temple with little advanced warning. It was sudden, nearly overnight, taking less than two years. Woodstock ’99 is a warning.
RogerG
Sources:
* “The Corruption of Medicine”, Heather McDonald, City Journal, Summer 2022, at https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine?wallit_nosession=1
* “The Messed Up Things That Happened In Woodstock 1969”, Rock Pasta, at https://rockpasta.com/the-messed-up-things-that-happened-in-woodstock-1969/
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to boost Ohio Republican candidates ahead of their May 3 primary election at the county fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
Based on what I’ve seen of Trump’s public performances, I would not seek his company. Loud, overbearing braggarts are not my cup of tea. That aside, a vendetta, clearly partisan and dripping in class condescension, has accompanied him since the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. If nothing else, the presence of Trump on the stage has exposed a persistent campaign to get Trump and almost any Republican of consequence by the powers-that-be. Now, the raid. How should we view any subsequent prosecution of him?
“Find a room full of Americans without college degrees, one in which partisan Democrats are scarce. In three minutes or less, lay out your best evidence and explain why what Trump has done is clearly and obviously against the law — obvious not just to lawyers, but to everyone. If the room is convinced, then and only then will you know that the case demands you cross the Rubicon.”
Given all that has been done to him by partisan, bureaucratic, and cultural elite interests in the Manhattan-Beltway union, anything less than an obvious and unambiguous case would be seen by at least half the country as a coup. And that includes the current civil suit pursued by the den of Democrat legal militia in New York under the suzerainty of the state’s Democrat AG, Letitia James. At work is more than an insidious institutional Democrat favoritism but a trampling of the equal application of the laws. Nothing galls an observant public more than selective prosecution for political gain.
Batten down the hatches and get prepared for a hurricane.
