A woman carrying two Republic of China passports, four cellphones, a laptop, a hard drive and a thumb drive with malware on it made her way past an initial security checkpoint at Mar-a-Lago when President Trump was in town on March 30, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court.
The woman, identified as Yujing Zhang, said she was there to "go to the pool," when first approached by a Secret Service agent, an affidavit said.
Mr. Priestap told the House Judiciary Committee that he talked to the anti-Trump lovebirds about rumors they were having an affair, but he never asked them if there was truth to the workplace gossip at the bureau.
“[T]hey knew darn well that, if that was going on that potentially makes them vulnerable,” he said, according to the transcript of the closed-door hearing.
In a city weighed down by myriad problems—economic inequality, persistent gun violence in pockets of the city, $28 billion in unfunded pension obligations and endemic political corruption—Lightfoot made the case to voters that she was the outsider that Chicago needs to shake things up.
In their coverage of the so-called Russian collusion case, they abandoned principle, journalistic ethics, and in some cases, rationality
I hate April Fools' Day, AKA Amateur Comedians' Day. Today is the day when a lot of people who aren't funny try to be funny, and I can never wait for it to end. So let's assume that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is joining in today, or else she really is just this dumb:
Psephology is not prophecy, and only a rash man would, at this distance venture a prediction. Still, I will say that if the next two years are anything like the last, Donald Trump will win in a landslide. I don’t know what the NeverTrump fraternity will do. Pretend they are Japanese soldiers stranded on some remote Pacific islands after the bad news of August 1945, I suppose. Part of me hopes they fight on in their little fox holes, sending smoke signals to their ever-diminishing band of followers, reminding one another of how dignified and decent and upstanding they are. Maybe, if they are especially good, Mitt Romney will come to their annual convention and they can tell stories about that noble maverick John McCain who single handedly prevented the evil Trump from putting paid to Obamacare and, by peddling that scurrilous bit of oppo research commissioned and paid for Hillary Clinton, almost managed to scotch the candidacy and then the President of the evil orange man.
Almost. What a sad word. Macbeth was right, they ‘have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,’ and woe unto them because of it. I am looking forward to 2020.
The article’s sub-headline gives away the game: “Besides being the right thing to do, it could reawaken Americans to the necessity of our Constitution’s federalist principles.” Now, the federalist principles stuff is just silly. That federalism is good does not somehow translate into it being a good idea to take a long-term possession with a different culture, relative poverty, and substantial corruption, and make it a state. Economically, it would be a liability, not an asset. Moreover, a good bunch of Puerto Ricans do not want federalism, or any other -ism associated with the US of A. They want independence, and they have shot up the House of Representatives, bombed New York City, and tried to off Harry Truman to make their point. Why again do we want to pay two new Democrat senators to buy ourselves an insurrection?
But the really bad part of the argument is that first part: It’s “the right thing to do.”
No, no it’s not. Stop that. That’s of a kind with the “BUT OUR PRINCIPLES!” ploy we’ve seen so often lately – a good rule of thumb is that anyone who starts babbling about “principles” is trying to shaft you. You will inevitably observe that these often newly-discovered “principles” always apply to decrease your power, your rights and your wealth, yet never, ever, apply to the hustlers who are demanding that you observe them.
Secondly, the case for reparations relies on the intellectually lazy assumption that the problems facing low-income blacks today are a part of the legacy of slavery. For most problems, however, the timelines don’t match up. Black teen unemployment, for instance, was virtually identical to white teen unemployment (in many years it was lower) until the mid-1950s, when, as Thomas Sowell observed in Discrimination and Disparities, successive minimum wage hikes and other macroeconomic forces artificially increased the price of unskilled labor to employers—a burden that fell hardest on black teens. Not only did problems like high youth unemployment and fatherless homes not appear in earnest until a century after the abolition of slavery, but similar patterns of social breakdown have since been observed in other groups that have no recent history of oppression to blame it on, such as the rise of single-parent homes in the white working class.
I’ve heard her point made often this week, that Russiagate true believers obviously hoped for the worst from all this even though it would have been ruinous for their country. True enough. If Mueller could prove that Trump had conspired with Putin to influence the 2016 campaign POTUS’s legitimacy would be shattered, America would be humiliated, the right would be in chaos, and the bottom would fall out of public faith in the integrity of presidential elections (to the extent it hasn’t already). It’d be a catastrophe. And yet it wasn’t joy that had Rachel Maddow’s voice cracking on Monday night after Bill Barr assured the country that the worst fortunately hadn’t come to pass. How come?
When you recognize that conspiracy theories are mini-religions, you see it’s a normal reaction. Look at the people who join doomsday cults that believe the world will end on a predetermined date, then somehow have to cope after that date comes and goes. The world isn’t ending! The greatest news of all, right? But they don’t treat it as great. There’s no rejoicing. They cry, and then they get to work on retconning their beliefs such that they were right all along except for the particular date on which they thought doomsday would arrive. Russiagate truthers will do this too, instinctively. It’s a hard thing to ask someone to embrace a religion, build a worldview around it, and then force them to reckon with it being exposed as false in an instant. How would you feel if your chosen faith were somehow debunked today? People hate to be wrong, especially about the things in which they’re most emotionally invested.
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, one can make the equivalent argument that a probe against Obama officials would be just as much "a good faith attempt to investigate a credible charge" as the Mueller investigation. But one should not deceive oneself into not realizing that the ultimate targets of such a course would be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Such a turnabout would not end the crisis which began in the waning days of the Obama administration, it would only change its direction. And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which "is to prevent a clash between kings" would still be in ruins. Perhaps this is why Karl Rove is urging Trump, having won the round, to move on; for by considering the affair closed, Trump could restore the tradition of comity, which has been damaged.
Or could he? In the current political culture, magnanimity is unlikely to be met with gratitude, unless the words are spat out with irony. Passions are high and neither side appears willing to give an inch. It may take time before an extended hand is not met by a punch. The fever must still run its course. One can only hope the fever breaks before the patient does.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSA), Brazil’s top election court, fined Fernando Haddad (President Jair Bolsonaro’s leftist opponent) for having a contract with Google to manipulate search results during the election.Luiz Edson Fachin, of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), ruled that the PT candidate for the presidency, Fernando Haddad, paid Google to highlight negative content and manipulated searches to point to a website with negative coverage of Bolsonaro.Google wasn’t fined because they claimed that as soon as they were notified by the court of the irregularities they dishonored the contract.This is a common practice by Google in the United States.Google manipulates search results for conservatives and conservative publishers to point to negative articles and hit pieces.So does Google allow people or companies to pay them in order to manipulate search results or only if they are far left/socialist/communist websites?Google claims their search results are driven by some sacred algorithm. Then how is it possible that they offered such a service to Socialists?
The reports related to this finding indicate the shrinkage is “temporary.” Climate change believers are hanging onto this word as vigorously as anti-Trumpers are hanging on to the phase “not exonerated” in the Mueller Report.
Of all the asinine and, at times, almost psychotic misstatements about the bone-crushing victory the president has won, the prize goes, with admirable historical symmetry, to John Dean.
It was Dean who led the destruction of lawyer-client privilege in the Watergate debacle, and with it of much of America’s claim to be a society of laws. Having been the corrupt source of many of the most fatuous illegalities in the amateur obstruction put forward by members of President Richard Nixon’s entourage, John Dean was the first rat down the hawser, denouncing his client, employer, and benefactor with contemptuous disregard for the truth and in the supreme demonstration of the evil of the American plea bargain system.
This perversion of the justice system, more than anything else, has ensured that prosecutors in the United States, win a percentage of their cases about equal to those of North Korea and Cuba. They extort inculpatory evidence against the main target by threatening witnesses and give the denunciators immunity from perjury and a sweetheart sentence.
Dean’s performance exceeds in venality even the antics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, American history’s most successful fiction-writers. (At least Gore Vidal acknowledged he was writing historical novels.) Odious though Woodward and Bernstein are, irritatingly imperishable though they are, as far as I know they didn’t break any laws and didn’t dishonor a learned profession. (Having employed thousands of journalists for decades, I can attest that they aren’t part of a profession and few of them are learned.)
This is not a Babylon Bee story. An article today in the science journal Nature actually expressed outrage and concern about President Trump’s executive order last week tying the grants a university gets to its willingness to protect the free speech of all its students and teachers.
What evil thing did Trump’s order require of these universities? To quote the Nature article itself,
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on 21 March that requires universities to certify that they protect free speech, or risk losing federal research funds.
Public institutions will have to certify that they are following free-speech protections laid out in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and private institutions must promise to follow their stated policies on free speech, a White House official told reporters on 21 March.
The order applies to 12 research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and NASA. It affects only money for research, not financial aid for students.
O the horror! The universities will have to show that they support free speech! What a travesty!
The Nature article then proceeded to find quotes from a number of scientists and organizations who oppose Trump’s action. One even claimed that Trump was not trying to protect free speech, “but the enhancement of conservative voices.”
In other words, to these scientists, there is plenty of free speech in academia. Liberals and leftists are all free to say whatever they want. However, any attempt to allow conservatives right to speak is clearly a biased threat to freedom and must be stopped at all costs. And to threaten their funding because of this? The nerve of that bad orange man!
The intellectual dishonesty exhibited here is mind-boggling. And for it to come from scientists, whose entire field is built on the need for brutal intellectual honesty at all times, is quite appalling.
