Remember they don’t really care about this nonsense, It is to manipulate the media and voter base.

Dem pols who blasted Kavanaugh keep quiet on Harris aide, allegations against Cardenas

“…California Democrats who have strongly supported the #MeToo movement and excoriated Republicans over their handling of decades-old sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh have been notably mum on the resignation last week of a top aide to Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) after news broke he had been sued for “gender harassment.”

Prominent Democrats in the Golden State, along with newly elected Democratic members of the California Congressional delegation, have also remained silent about #MeToo allegations against several other powerful Democrats.

Many of them have also declined to take a position on a lawsuit against Rep. Tony Cardenas (D., Calif.), the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus PAC who has been accused of drugging and molesting a 16-year-old girl in 2007.

The silence on the resignation of the Harris aide and ­Cardenas comes a year after many of the state’s political leaders acknowledged a reckoning when it comes to sexual misconduct in and around Sacramento…”

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China’s aggressive activities in the area has resulted in this.

“…Japan’s military looks to raise spending over the next five years in response to security challenges and to narrow Japan’s trade surplus with the United States by buying U.S. equipment, the Nikkei business daily reported on Saturday.

The Ministry of Defense looks to spend at least 27 trillion yen ($240 billion) between April 2019 and March 2024, with the spending rising an average 1.1 percent per year, exceeding the 0.8 percent average during the five years ending next March, the report said without identifying its sources.

Currently, payments on equipment and personnel expenses account for 80 percent of defense spending, Nikkei said. Under the plan, funds for new equipment purchases will be separated from these expenses, making it easier to buy equipment from the United States, it added.

Japan aims to have cabinet approval for the spending in mid-December, it said. The Ministry of Defence could not be reached immediately for comment.

Purchases of American-made equipment could help Tokyo ease trade friction with Washington as U.S. President Donald Trump pushes Japan to buy more American goods, including military gear, while threatening to impose tariffs on Japanese auto imports to cut a trade deficit with Tokyo…”

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Glenn Reynolds:

THESE PEOPLE ARE PATHETIC: Liberal Media Scream: Together now, networks preach ‘impeachment.’

This week’s Liberal Media Scream features the media jumping on the impeachment bandwagon, with CBS and ABC leading the way, even in their intros.

Displaying identical news judgments, the ABC and CBS evening newscasts on Sunday night offered a matching way to frame the day’s news as both used the very same phrasing for their on-screen teases, with corresponding narration from the anchors: “Impeachable Offenses?”

They were talking impeachment before Trump was even sworn in. His real crime: Beating Hillary, and rubbing the establishment’s noses in how unpopular they are with a lot of Americans. It’s been an extended nervous breakdown ever since.

Steven Green:

CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME: Brexit in turmoil as May pulls vote to seek changes to EU divorce. “British Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday postponed a parliamentary vote on her Brexit deal to seek more concessions but the European Union refused to renegotiate and lawmakers doubted her chances of winning big changes.”

YESTERDAY: European Court of Justice rules UK can unilaterally revoke Article 50 and halt Brexit.

Glenn called it “shenanigans,” but the EU is playing hardball. On the one hand they’re making it impossible for May to get a deal she can sell to Parliament, and on the other they’re giving her an easy way to kill Brexit. I think they’re afraid for the world to see how fragile the EU really is.

Liz Sheld:

“…It’s time for these tech companies to be treated like a utility or a publishing venue since they are making decisions and curating their content, picking and choosing who can use their services. You don’t see the power company debating whether or not to provide electricity to the Breitbart offices or other perceived political adversaries do you?

Emails show Google tried to block Breitbart from advertisers

Well this is just wild, isn’t it?!

Google employees sought to block Breitbart from Google AdSense less than one month after President Donald Trump took office, leaked emails from the company reveal.

Google employees sought to use alleged “hate speech” as a pretense for banning Breitbart from taking part in the advertising program, the emails show.

Barring Breitbart from the advertising program would have a devastating effect on the site’s ad revenue as Google accounts for roughly 37 percent of all digital advertising revenue.

Google has 90%+ of the search engine market. Here is the “judge and jury” in action:

Richard Zippel, a Google publisher quality manager at the time, similarly noted that Breitbart was being watched closely. “When sufficient violations have been found we’ll take action at the site level,” Zippel wrote. It’s unclear whether Zippel is still a Google employee…”

HEISMAN WINNER PROVES IF YOU WORK HARD AND BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, YOU TOO CAN HAVE JOURNALISTS TRY TO RUIN YOUR LIFE BY COMBING THROUGH YOUR OLD TWEETS.

Great article by Victor Davis Hanson. Click over and read the whole thing. Here’s a snippet:

“…What all the later unmaskings of U.S. citizens’ names by Obama officials, all the daily leaking of “bombshell” rumors to warp an election, transition, and presidency, all the lying under oath, all the texting of Page and Strzok, all the machinations of Andrew McCabe and James Comey, all the FBI insertions of informants, all the involvement of the CIA, Justice, and State Department in seeding the rumors and slander, all the collusion of a foreign national spying on a presidential candidate—what it was all about in the end was simple: In 2016, legions of bureaucrats wanted to score points in Hillary Clinton’s foreordained new administration by vying with each other to “insure” her blowout, to brag they had done in the ogre Trump, and to expect not so much impunity as adoration for their illegal but supposedly patriotic service beyond the call of duty. Trump was not just to be defeated but humiliated and destroyed as a lesson.

Then Clinton lost—or rather she blew a sure Electoral College victory.

All at once, the embarrassing comic-book contents of the ridiculous Steele dossier became the scapegoat. Accordingly, those still stunned, dumbfounded,and furious in the media and government immediately once again found the campaign collusionary dossier useful—now not to destroy candidate Trump, but rather to explain the inexplicable, and to ruin the culprit for her defeat and overturn the verdict of the election.

And given the ensuing hysteria, within about seven months the creation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller was the result.

Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele, and Robert Mueller are all joined at the hip…”

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Rand Paul:

“…It’s very troubling what these special prosecutors can do. I tell people this — if a special prosecutor went after your life for the last 40 years, not you in particular but anybody, I think they could dredge up accusations. So I’m absolutely against it and I think it’s a miscarriage of justice and we should not have going after one person. And if we get this way and if we’re going to prosecute people and put in jail for campaign finance violations, we’ve become a banana republic where every president gets prosecuted, and everybody gets thrown in jail when they’re done with office…”

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Related:

Andrew McCarthy

“…A federal judge has raised speculation that Hillary Rodham Clinton and her State Department “colluded” to keep her missing emails secret from the public and courts, an escalation of scrutiny into Obama-era scandal.

Senior District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth in a new memo also called the Clinton email affair “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

In it, he demanded that State and Justice work with Judicial Watch, which has sued in the case, to develop an evidence seeking schedule into whether Clinton sought to avoid the federal Freedom of Information Act by using a private email system in her New York home. . . .

Terming Clinton’s use of her private email system, “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency,” Lamberth wrote in his MEMORANDUM OPINION:

… his [President Barack Obama’s] State and Justice Departments fell far short. So far short that the court questions, even now, whether they are acting in good faith. Did Hillary Clinton use her private email as Secretary of State to thwart this lofty goal [Obama announced standard for transparency]? Was the State Department’s attempt to settle this FOIA case in 2014 an effort to avoid searching – and disclosing the existence of – Clinton’s missing emails? And has State ever adequately searched for records in this case?

***

At best, State’s attempt to pass-off its deficient search as legally adequate during settlement negotiations was negligence born out of incompetence. At worst, career employees in the State and Justice Departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this Court.

Turning his attention to the Department of Justice, Lamberth wrote:

The current Justice Department made things worse. When the government last appeared before the Court, counsel claimed, ‘it is not true to say we misled either Judicial Watch or the Court.’ When accused of ‘doublespeak,’ counsel denied vehemently, feigned offense, and averred complete candor. When asked why State masked the inadequacy of its initial search, counsel claimed that the officials who initially responded to Judicial Watch’s request didn’t realize Clinton’s emails were missing, and that it took them two months to ‘figure [] out what was going on’… Counsel’s responses strain credulity. [citations omitted]

The Court granted discovery because the government’s response to the Judicial Watch Benghazi FOIA request for Clinton emails “smacks of outrageous conduct.”

Citing an email (uncovered as a result of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit) that Hillary Clinton acknowledged that Benghazi was a terrorist attack immediately after it happened, Judge Lamberth asked:

Did State know Clinton deemed the Benghazi attack terrorism hours after it happened, contradicting the Obama Administration’s subsequent claim of a protest-gone-awry?

****

Did the Department merely fear what might be found? Or was State’s bungling just the unfortunate result of bureaucratic redtape and a failure to communicate? To preserve the Department’s integrity, and to reassure the American people their government remains committed to transparency and the rule of law, this suspicion cannot be allowed to fester.”

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Why people hate our media

Andrew Sullivan swerves back and forth between lucid analysis and crackpot nonsense. When he’s on, he’s on though, and this paragraph is very good.

Andrew Sullivan:

“…Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill, that they do, in fact, have ‘an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.’ . . . And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. ‘Social justice’ theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution…”

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US ends its reliance on foreign oil for the first time in 75 years

The U.S. reduction comes from the switch to cleaner fuels made possible by fracking, which environmentalists opposed.

Jon Gabriel:

“…Nineteen nations “believe” in climate change. How are they backing up their statement of faith?

China was praised for signing on to the Paris Climate Agreement and in Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, however, China increased those emissions by 1.7 percent.

India, the fourth largest source for CO2, saw their emissions grow by 4.6 percent in 2017. Luckily for them, they too were praised for signing that “nonbinding communiqué.”

Overall, the European Union raised their CO2 output by 1.5 percent.

France, home of the Paris Agreement, is leading the diplomatic effort to save the planet. They increased their greenhouse gas emissions by 3.6 percent. . . .

If the nations paying lip service to climate change aren’t meeting their goals, imagine how poorly the oil-drilling, coal-mining Americans must be doing. President Donald Trump was pilloried for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and for being only G20 leader who refused to sign the climate change statement in Argentina.

From 2016 to 2017, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.7 percent. Emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 percent since 2016, and nearly 20 percent since 2011. All without signing a piece of paper in Paris or Buenos Aires…”

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As heavy smoke rolls out of the stricken USS West Virginia, a small boat rescues a crew member from the water after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Dec. 7, 1941 during World War II. Two men can be seen on the superstructure, upper center. The mast of the USS Tennessee is beyond the burning West Virginia. (AP Photo)

“…A U.S. judge ordered the Justice and State departments Thursday to reopen an inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state to deliberately evade public records laws, and to answer whether the agencies acted in bad faith by not telling a court for months that they had asked in mid-2014 for missing emails to be returned.

The order risks reopening partisan wounds that have barely healed since Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, but in issuing the order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act required it.

In a narrow but sharply worded 10-page opinion, Lamberth wrote that despite the government’s claimed presumption of transparency, “faced with one of the gravest modern offenses to government openness, [the Obama administration’s] State and Justice departments fell far short” of the law’s requirements in a lawsuit for documents.

Lamberth added that despite President Donald Trump’s repeated campaign attacks against Clinton for not making her emails public, “the current Justice Department made things worse,” by taking the position that agencies are not obliged to search for records not in the government’s possession when a FOIA request is made.

Lamberth wrote he took no pleasure in “questioning the intentions of the nation’s most august” Cabinet departments, but said it was necessary when their response “smacks of outrageous misconduct.”…”

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Professor: Virgin Mary Didn’t Give Consent.

“…The virgin birth story is about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity impregnating a human teen. There is no definition of consent that would include that scenario…”

From: Glenn Reynolds