Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco), House Minority Leader
Reprehensible behavior:
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The results of the soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania 18th congressional district election signals a rising tide for the Democrats in November, but not because of any great love for their lefty ideas.
Conor Lamb (D), winning candidate in the 18th congressional district race.
Their (Dems) fortunes rose in direct proportion to the repulsiveness and churlishness of a president with a “R” after his name. Trump is the accelerant for this state of affairs, not love for SDS-type values. (SDS: the 60’s Students for Democratic Society – Tom Hayden’s, et al, group for bringing socialism to America).
This is an election year that will pivot on the choice between reprehensible ideas (Democrats) vs. reprehensible behavior (Trump). Trump has soiled the “R” label. It’s a sad situation when people react to deplorable conduct by turning to people with deplorable ideas.
Time to recycle the wisdom of the historian Robert Blake: ““The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.” We might see it play out in November, and maybe two years later.
Robert Blake, historian, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Say good-bye to your tax cut and guns; say hello to incessant impeachment dramas and the Californication of the federal government.
This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.
The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.
Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?
The following is a reply to a report in the Washington Examiner for 1/17/2018, “Jeff Flake: Congress needs to denounce Trump’s lies or we will walk ‘a very dangerous path'”, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeff-flake-congress-needs-to-denounce-trumps-lies-or-we-will-walk-a-very-dangerous-path/article/2646169
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Senator Jeff Flake (r, Ariz.) in the well of the Senate.
Clearly Jeff Flake (R, Ariz.) has animus for Trump and Trump has animus for anyone who crosses swords with him. In that sense, they’re two peas in a pod. But the promiscuous use of the word “lie” is devaluing the term and causing endless and needless hyperventilation. Jeff isn’t clarifying anything, nor is he on the side of the angels. He has joined the alt-right, the Resistance, Trump, much of the professoriate, the college snow flakes, the Dem’s base/leadership, and almost anyone with access to the internet and facility for explosive hyperbole. Please, everyone, including Mr. Flake, take a breath.
First, let’s clear up this willful misuse of the word “lie” by accessing the dictionary. Here’s a classical definition for Mr. Flake and his comrades-in-arms: “an intentionally false statement”. Can a person be simply mistaken without the guilt of “lying”? Can a person be blinded by their own favoritism to believe an untruth to be a truth? Can a person just jump to a false conclusion without lying? Yes, of course. It happens all the time, particularly in Mr. Flake’s chosen profession, politician.
Anyway, an abundant power to divine the mind of a person is required to fulfill the “intentional” part of the definition. Ancient Greeks would read a flock of birds to access the will of the gods.
Etruscan wall painting from Tomba degli Auguri (c. 530 BC) showing two augurs practicing ornithomancy – divination through an examination of the actions of birds.
What do today’s politicians and activists use to see the unseen? I have no answer other than their own unchecked mendacity for their real or imagined opponents. Thus, any weakness of the mind can be contorted into the worst possible violations of the moral code.
Has Mr. Flake joined the ranks of the cranks and crazies? You know, the people occupying the Area 51 zone of the political space. If so, he’ll get more than he bargained for. He’ll get no restrained judges or a government with limits. He’ll end up like the czarist critic of 1917 finding himself in the company of the Bolshevik goons.
Bolshevik goons on patrol in Leningrad looking for policemen to brutalize, October 1917.Protestors run through the street before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States Friday — capping his improbable journey to the White House and beginning a four-year term that promises to shake up Washington and the world. / AFP / ZACH GIBSON (Photo credit should read ZACH GIBSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Special counsel Robert Mueller on Capitol Hill in June of 2017.
The following is response to an article, “Who Watches the Watchmen?”, by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 11/29/2017, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454133/russia-investigation-robert-mueller-special-counsel-needs-oversight-prevent-abuse?fb_comment_id=1688957164469800_1689590284406488&comment_id=1689590284406488#f1fadcf5c799748
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VDH, you raise an important point. Who polices the police? In this case, who polices Robert Mueller? I would like to add one more question: Why have we become so enamored of unaccountable government agents? From Congress delegating its legislative authority to the EPA, FCC, CFPB, to “special counsels”, we have witnessed a profound erosion of popular sovereignty. We don’t control our own government.
And once unleashed, these suzerains scurry about looking into every knook and cranny for human flaws. Some might even prove to be illegal. We’ve got so many laws and regulations that its hard not to break a couple of dozen as we make our way to the morning shower.
Welcome to the reign of “experts”, progessivism’s promise. I call it a low grade nightmare.
Most Oakland Raiders sit during the national anthem on Sunday Night Football, 9/24/17.
The NFL player protests, Black Lives Matter, the “blue” cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 movie “Boomerang!” came to mind during the sit-ins by half-million-dollar-per-year protesters Sunday, September 24.
The first three on the list are animated by a faulty postulate: American law enforcement is riddled with racism. It’s the “cause without a cause”. In this case, “cause” being a premise without some relation to facts .
The slander has its biggest and loudest following in urban and academic centers, the so-called “blue” precincts. It has spread beyond the street and campus into professional sports – who, by the way, are centered in “blue” America – and earning the ire of a huge part of the fan base in “red” America and President Trump.
As for the movie, “Boomerang!”, it reminded us that “justice” is the ultimate goal of all legal proceedings, and hopefully resistant to mobs inflamed by falsehoods (more about the movie later). Real justice is an inconvenience for those in a hurry to hang a few cops. Now, professional athletes are getting sucked into the sordid enterprise.
So, in the end, we have the NFL tarnishing its reputation, players heightening their profiles as political firebrands, fans registering disgust, and all because of a demonstrably false proposition. Don’t expect justice here … but reckon a humbling decline in the once-vaunted NFL.
It’s a lesson for all high profile sports: Don’t insult your fans!
A good chunk of sports fans might have a very different take on issues like policing the streets of many of our wannabe Kabuls and Baghdads. Your average fan sitting in font of his big screen TV on Sunday afternoon probably doesn’t see the world like your typical Sociology professor or average campus SJW (social justice warrior), and for good reason. The alleged racism in police departments, so readily accepted in faculty lounges and by impressionable college sophomores, isn’t supported by the facts.
First, crime, like wildfires, isn’t evenly distributed. Local circumstances produce divergent results, without ever getting into the racism of the “man”. Certain areas of the country have a fecundity for crime as areas of thick forests produce a fire season. An infamous example is LA’s “death valley”, South Vermont Ave. Read the captions. (1)
Since 2007, 61 people have been killed on a two-mile stretch on or near South Vermont Avenue between Manchester Avenue and Imperial Highway. The area is the border of the Westmont and Vermont Vista neighborhoods.L. Christopher Caver Jr., 38, shows a scar on his stomach, a result of a 2012 shooting when he was hit seven times inside his car. He has lived in the Westmont area of South L.A. for more than a decade.People hang out in front of a pawn shop along Vermont Avenue and 83rd Street in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.A woman and child walk down an alley between 93rd and 94th streets in Westmont. The 1.8-square-mile area has seen 100 homicides in the last seven years.A German shepherd stands sentry in the front yard of a home in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.“I’m just fed up in this area,” said Aaron Eden, 38, about crime in his neighborhood. His house has been broken into twice, the Westmont resident said.
Some self-styled crusaders of justice cite deceiving statistics to hold up the edifice of rampant racism. Weaknesses in their assertions abound. For instance, their comparisons of crime to population over a broad space hide a serious problem in certain sectors. The overall crime number in a specific locale may register no concern since the good numbers coming out of some neighborhoods depress the frightening stats emerging from others. Examine the maps for New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee. (2)
Source: City of New York crime mapSource: Chicago TribuneSource: Milwaukee Police Department
The theme throughout is the same: the highest crime rates occur in the locations with the highest concentrations of poverty. These areas correspond with the greatest assemblage of ethnic and racial minorities. The higher the incidence of crime, the greater the opportunity for run-ins with police for people of a particular hue who predominate in these places. We have a crime problem within certain sectors of our population, not a police problem.
Such subtleties might not course through the mind of an athlete whose life has been spent focusing on other things. The field is wide open for pop-culture grandees or media-savvy racialists to set the tone for the ill-informed.
Some may sound reasonable like Killer Mike above, but they still repeat a now well-worn mantra of a generalized campaign of racial injustice. Rapper T.I. pontificates, “Police brutality is really just a tentacle to a larger problem — the racial divide and the systemic racism that goes on from the highest of highs to the lowest of the low of society in America.” (3)
And of course we have Al Sharpton, the race hustlers’ version of the legal profession’s ambulance chaser. Here he is whipping up the congregation after the 2014 Ferguson shooting.
For many quick to have their biases confirmed, facts on the ground can be inconvenient. As it turned out, the deceased in Ferguson was no saint (see below). So much so, Pres. Obama’s Justice department, always on the hunt for the ghost of Bull Connor or Jim Crow, couldn’t gin up a case against the officer. No facts, no case – to borrow a much abused cadence.
After Ferguson, a movement was born: Black Lives Matter. Out of the garbage can, also, is resurrected the old conjoining of “cops” and “pigs”.
Like a teen girl watching the Emmies, the fashion is picked up by the impressionable tuning in. Thus is born Colin Kaepernick as self-anointed conscience of the NFL.
Kaepernick’s infamous socks as worn during an August 2016 practice.Former Green Beret Nate Boyer, second from right, stands next to a kneeling Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem on Thursday Night Football, 2016. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)
The case of Colin Kaepernick is interestingly instructive. Having shown no prior desire to publicly pontificate as a SJW, all of a sudden he’s kneeling during the national anthem and brandishing cops-as-pigs socks. More than a few have speculated on the influence of his fiance/girlfriend, Nessa Diab.
Nessa Diab and Colin Kaepernick on the way to the gym, September 2017.
Most recently, she spouted off on Ray Lewis’s suggestion that Kaepernick keep his opinions private as Kaepernick was being considered by owner Steve Bisciotti for a position on the roster. She implicitly referred to Lewis as a “house negro” to Bisciotti’s slaveholder on Twitter.
Nessa’s tweet: Bisciotti/Lewis above, deCaprio/Samuel J. Jackson from “Django Unchained” below.
She’s quite the pollinating bee fluttering from the blue-dot worlds of celebrity, MTV, San Francisco, and a DJ gig at the HOT97 in New York City. She seems to have a thing for 49er players after dating Aldon Smith. She’s also fully immersed in the lingo of the left. Here she is commenting on the shooting death of Alton Sterling:
Imagine the victim #AltonSterling as your brother, father, son, cousin, friend, co-worker. You didn’t have to know him personally to feel this horrific pain. This is a MAN who wrongfully got murdered!!! Don’t let this “system” now criminalize Alton Sterling to help justify these coward actions by the police. They will try and they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all time high in this country.
This kind of stuff isn’t hard to find in her social media posts.
Celebrities like Nessa Diab arrive at the 2015 MTV Movie Awards held at Nokia Theatre LA Live in Los Angeles, California on April 12, 2015.
As a Muslim and familiar with Saudi Arabia, she should be aware that her chic glam would attract the attention of the Mutaween, the kingdom’s religious police, if she traipsed around in Riyadh’s nightlife in her figure-hugging and revealing sartorial beauty.
Women in Burkas, in Mina near the Saudi holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2011.
Bringing a Bible into the country is a crime; women can’t get driver’s licenses; and the public dress code for women centers on the burka. It’d certainly be hard for her to display her natural endowments robed like above.
You’d think that she would have greater appreciation for life in the good ol’ USA. Instead, she treats a multiracial country of 330 million experiencing the rare police shooting as if it is a hotbed of racial bigotry. She ignores the nature of life in dar al-islam (lit. territory of Islam). The lack of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of the ignorant. But nonetheless, she appears to be an influence on poor Colin.
A little digging by Colin and Nessa would undermine their jihad. Blacks are not shot or otherwise accosted by police in a broadly unjust fashion. If anything, they are disproportionately represented in the incidence of crime, particularly of the violent kind. And their victims are disproportionately black. (6) Yes, black lives matter, and, for their lives to matter, police need to seize their assailants … who happen to be disproportionately black. No wonder the high number of police confrontations with blacks, overwhelmingy male.
Yet, in the recent high-profile police shooting cases, few have resulted in convictions of the officers. Some hustlers use the fact as conclusive evidence of something airily called “systemic” racism. In other words, these pantomimes of racial justice want convictions no matter what. If so, why bother with a trial if media buzz is enough to condemn?
Prosecutor Henry Harvey (r), played by Dana Andrews, and murder suspect John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) in “Boomerang!” from 1947.
The matter was brought into clearer focus while watching the movie “Boomerang!”. It’s the story of a prosecutor who refused to pursue charges against a murder suspect after being subjected to intense political pressure. The DA couldn’t remove from his mind the legal profession’s standards of ethical conduct for prosecutors. Put succinctly, “The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.” (7) Is it asking too much to demand a similar sobriety in the celebrity world and the media-incited mobs?
Pres. Trump at campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange, September 22, 2017.
Well, into the frenzy jumps Pres. Trump. Echoing the thoughts of many, speaking at a campaign rally for US Sen. Luther Strange, he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, `Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out. He’s fired! He’s fired!“ (8) Leaving aside the language, the sentiment has currency among many – if not most – veterans and a sizable swath of the country’s population, mostly in “red” America. Undoubtedly, the comment angered some of the marginally inclined in the locker room. So, we experienced the NFL’s own “black Sunday” on September 24. Here’s a sample.
Buffalo Bills take a knee, September 24.Jacksonville Jaguars take a knee, September 24.Indianapolis Cols take a knee, September 24.Some of the Chargers resort to the old black power salute.Several New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
It happened throughout the NFL on that day. And it drew criticism from fans.
In a debate on MSNBC between Brian Mitchell and Hugh Hewitt, Hewitt raises the scepter of the NFL losing touch with its fan base. As for Mitchell, he accepts the received wisdom of a pervasive racism. Take a look.
Some like Brian Mitchell see the players’ actions with all the integrity of The Grand Remonstrance of 1641. In 1641, the English Parliament presented to King Charles I a list of grievances, The Grand Remonstrance, which His Highness quickly dismissed. The result was over 40 years of civil war and social disruption. The players’ protest could do the same by inaugurating a civil war between the league and its fans. I don’t think the league will come out of it any better than Charles I. He lost his head.
The execution of Charles I, 1649.
The full effect of the protests will take awhile to gestate. The players have certainly displayed their right to free speech, and some fans are exhibiting the same right. Free speech for everyone, including the right to express that speech in the abandonment of the NFL. Many prescient owners and players can envision dollars whisking out of their wallets like so many autumn leaves on a windy day.
Could the NFL players’ racialized outcry have the same fallout as the 1994 baseball players’ strike on Major League Baseball? A person could argue that Major League Baseball hasn’t fully recovered from it. What waits in the offing for the NFL? Much depends on the NFL’s response to players using the national anthem as a forum to present their social and political discontents.
Entire Cowboys’ team kneels before the national anthem on Monday Night Football, September 25.
Sensing the trouble, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys knelt with the players and then everybody stood for the anthem. A compromise, but why kneel? What’s the reason for the kneeling? Is it to show solidarity for a broad charge of racism for which there is no valid proof? What’s the point?
The whole thing rests on a premise without much of a foundation. Indeed, it’s cause without a cause. To be clearer, it’s a political movement without much justification. Thus, any compromise gives credence to a sham.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County’s ‘death alley’”, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, Los Angeles Times, 1/19/2014, photos by Genaro Molina, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/
“The Debate Over Crime Rates is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality’: Focusing on the neighborhood level is the best way to understand violence in America. Here are six charts that prove it.”, Daniel Kay Hertz, The Trace, 7/25/2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/
“T.I. speaks out on police brutality”, Deena Zuru, CNN, 8/14/2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/ti-us-or-else-movie-police-brutality/index.html
“CLASSY: Kaepernick’s Girlfriend Compares NFL Owners to Slaveholders, Ray Lewis to ‘House Negroes'”, Eliot Hamilton, The DailyWire, 8/3/2017, http://www.dailywire.com/news/19319/classy-kaepernicks-girlfriend-compares-nfl-owners-elliott-hamilton#
“The lies of Black Lives Matter”, Kelly Riddell, The Washington Times, 7/18/2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-lives-matter/
“Criminal Justice Standards; Prosecution Function, Part I, General Standards”, https://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#1.2
“Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Kneel During Anthem”, Daniel Politi, Slate, 9/23/2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/23/trump_calls_on_nfl_owners_to_fire_players_who_kneel_during_anthem.html
Sonam Sheth, politics and national security reporter at Business Insider, from her Twitter page.
While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”. What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment. The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso. Journalism isn’t journalism any longer. It’s fevered imaginations run wild.
To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile. It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious – mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization. This will be brief.
Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper. While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York. Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance. Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:
“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”
“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack! While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism? Hmmmm.
Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider. I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations. They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape. It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.
Salvador Dali
Now to the article. The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”. A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.
The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.
First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”. “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee. It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black assailant.
Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan. In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so. Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade. Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.
Illegal immigrants sit in a group after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. (Associated Press).
For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same. It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States. But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.
From the pardon, she builds the edifice. In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”. The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”. Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons. If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich. There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.
President Bill Clinton and Denise Rich attend a funraiser for ‘The G & P Charitable Foundation for Cancer Research’ in October 1998, in New York City. (DIANA WALKER/LIAISON)
As for Sheth’s insinuation of “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime? You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide. For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC. For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn. Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so. She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.
I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late. Certainly they felt “pressure”. Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied? Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.
Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results. There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now. But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now. I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.
Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality. First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer. In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government. He can inquire into any investigation under his purview. It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election. Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).
Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute. If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system. He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around. It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.
Sheth’s story is a mess. It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism. It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper. As per the old cliché, there’s no there there. For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system. The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”, Sonam Sheth, Business Insider, 8/27/17, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-decision-pardon-joe-arpaio-160000939.html
Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
“Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318
Politically-inspired murder has spasmodically erupted throughout history, especially from the late 19th century to the present. Lately, it appears to be a more frequent guest to our political struggles. Intemperate discourse is all-too-common. Ramped up rhetoric, fueled by claims of vague and impersonal harms, has found expression in thuggishness, and even murder. Welcome to Charlottesville on August 12.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of the modern era. “The propaganda of the deed” (meaning: violent action as the catalyst for revolution) was all the fashion in anarcho-socialist circles at the turn of the 19th into 20th centuries. Assassinations, bombings, and robberies were the preferred means of activism of a violent element in Europe and the U.S. The mayhem was one of the prime motives for the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920’s.
The assassination of Pres. McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in New York, 1901. He would be executed in the electric chair later in the year.Luigi Galleani, anarcho-socialist shortly before his deportation in 1919. He was a loud and frequent exponent of the “propaganda of the deed”. Carlo Budda, brother of terrorist bombmaker Mario Budda, once said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw”.The Wall Street bombing of 1920, killing 30 people, was carried out by Galleani’s followers.
Individual and group violence has continued apace. Some of it spontaneous; some of it premeditated; and some of it less fatal, as in mere bullying and assault-and-battery. College campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge have become noted for the Antifa goons patrolling the corridors of higher learning.
More recently, taking it to new heights, was James Hodgkinson in his hunt for Republicans on June 14. On Saturday, August 12, James Alex Fields, Jr., plowed his car into crowd of counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19.
James Alex Fields, Jr., and his damaged car.
Are we approaching the Vietnam War era’s daily mortality counts? On the one side we have the wickedness of the tiki-torch carrying white thugs. Aggrieved by the alleged oppression of whites, they are on hair trigger for violence. On the other, we have the ready-made insta-mob of the consortium of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, et al. The scene is starting to resemble post-WWI Weimar Germany with its street battles of left and right gangs.
Berlin street fight scene between Nazis and communists in the early 1930’s.
It’s sad that both sides seem to be taking their cue from ISIS in Raqqa. The left had their Raqqa moment in June. The right’s imitation waited till August. The similarities are striking. Like ISIS defending their caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq, Hodgkinson preferred gunfire. Fields adopted the Nice and London method of political expression by simply smashing people with a vehicle.
It’s also sad that we have a president that can’t rise above any personal slight, no matter how slight, during these moments of sorrow. His combative nature muddies any attempt to have us rise to the “better angels of our nature”.
Mr. President, drop the twitter feed!
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a ‘tragic, tragic weekend.'”, Joe Heim, Washington Post, 8/14/2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.6ee9f78a1d31
The following is a response to an article by Charles Krauthammer, “The Cover-up in Search of a Crime”, in National Review Online, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445005/flynn-phone-call-coverup-searching-crime
Vice President Mike Pence with National Security Adviser Mike Flynn
This story is much richer than the matter of a subordinate misleading the Vice President. Be careful, though, the deeper story may not follow the path to a collusion with Russia during the election. The scent may lead to Obama. Andrew McCarthy was astute to mention it.
Obama’s people got a FISA-approved wiretap on Russian operatives prior to the election and in the waning days of Obama’s term after DNC and Podesta’s emails became public. This has “politics” written all over it. Then, the always present partisan operatives, entrenched in the upper reaches of the agencies, still clinging to power during the transition, leaked the edited results to an Obama-pliant press.
Yes, this whole affair may be a cover-up in search of a crime. It may also be an intense version of the long twilight struggle that is politics in modern America.
Betsy DeVos has run into a particularly energized buzzsaw. Why? Of all the possible flash-points, the Education Department isn’t considered one of the plumb appointments in a president’s cabinet. Could Roxanne Bland’s witticism be the answer? Could be, but wisecracks may be more wit than wisdom. Yet, in the case of DeVos, it’s a starting point.
DeVos, Trump, Pence
Yesterday, 2/1/2017, it was announced that two Republican senators would oppose the DeVos nomination – Maine’s Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
Susan CollinsLisa Murkowski
What accounts for the defection into the arms of all 11 Democrats on the Senate’s Heath, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee? These two Republicans have an unusually cozy relationship with the two monolithic teacher unions in the country, the NEA and AFT.
To begin with, the DeVos resume’ isn’t one to warm the heart of the NEA’s Lily Garcia or Randi Weingarten of the AFT. These unions represent government employees – government employed teachers – not students, their parents, or education in general. The word “choice” is sacrosanct in regards to abortion in these precincts, but watch the needle fly off the chart when it’s connected to “school”.
Lily GarciaRandi Weingarten
The hive flies into action with the mere mention of “school choice”.
DeVos’s claim to fame is vouchers and charter schools, the things that’ll give options to mom and dad but panic attacks to the union leadership. In 1993, along with her husband, she gave contributions to Michigan lawmakers to pass the state’s charter school law. In 2000, they pushed the Michigan Voucher Initiative but failed. Smarting from the loss, they were instrumental in forming the American Federation for Children, a PAC to support school choice candidates. It’s success is admirable with a 121-60 winning record.
But then Trump nominated her to head the Education Department – considered by the unions as part of their fiefdom – and they went into spasms.
Randi Weingarten announced, “The president-elect, in his selection of Betsy DeVos, has chosen the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.”
Protests were engineered in the usual haunts, like this one in Oakland.
Protesters applaud at a noon rally at the The Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2017. Nearly 1,000 people denounced the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education after a Senate committee advanced her nomination. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The union reaction wasn’t limited to ginning up the membership. They have allies in the Senate, on both sides of the aisle. We expect the Democrats to be in lock step for the obvious reasons. The stinky money trail, though, becomes more conspicuous when we follow it into the Republican caucus.
It turns out that both Collins and Murkowski have been on the “take” with the unions for at least the last few elections cycles. In 2002 and ’08, Collins received contributions from the NEA along with a “straight A” grade. The same for Murkowski, only more. She got $23,500 in ’02 and ’08; in 2016, an additional $10,000. Surprise, surprise, they both were blessed with endorsement for 2010 and 2016.
At first, the public hears of two Republicans breaking ranks. A person might be forgiven for thinking it to be a matter of principle over blind loyalty. Think again.
I wonder what the voters of red-state Alaska will think once they learn that one of their Senators is in the corral of one of the worst partisans of “blue” America.
“Bay Area teachers band together to oppose DeVos, Trump’s ed secretary nominee”, East bay Times, 1/31/17, http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/01/31/bay-area-teachers-band-together-to-oppose-devos-trumps-ed-secretary-nominee/
The Constitution deposits all “executive” authority in the president – not “legislative”, nor “judicial”, just “executive”. Sally, “execute” means to carry out and enforce the law. You, as an appointee, are an agent of the president. Your job is to assist the president, not be the president.
The man that put you in your position is no longer president. He’s a private citizen with a golf bag. Join him on the links.
Sally, your “conscience” is really a bunch of opinions. The guy with your opinions isn’t around. Another guy with different opinions was elected. For peace of mind, please, go join the howler monkeys in the lefty firmament. You’ll be happier … and so will the rest of us.
