Month: June 2020

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Catherine Herridge practices real journalism

If you believe the quacks in the MSM, it is your own fault. What is the number of this deep state fueled plot to hurt Trump? There have been so many breathless reports and the walls have been closing in for so long, I have forgotten.

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Kim Strassel on the Circuit Court ruling in the Flynn Case

Kimberley A. Strassel:

“…House Judiciary Committee Democrats were back at their “politicized Justice Department” theme this week, calling a disgruntled former lieutenant of special counsel Robert Mueller to accuse the department of giving special treatment to President Trump’s allies. Too bad the testimony came on the very day a federal court confirmed that Mr. Mueller’s team and the Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in misconduct.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did so via an order requiring Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss charges against former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Most of the focus has been on the legal merits of the ruling. Judge Neomi Rao’s compelling opinion rebuked Judge Sullivan for ignoring the department’s call to drop the case and instead setting himself up as both prosecutor and jury. This was a win for the separation of powers, even as it was a step toward justice for Mr. Flynn.

Largely overlooked was the decision’s rebuke of the FBI and the Mueller team. The D.C. Circuit became the first federal court to acknowledge the misconduct that Attorney General William Barr is trying to bring to light. Most of the courts that oversaw Mr. Mueller’s prosecutions were asked to do no more than rubber-stamp a plea deal or sign off on a jury verdict. But Mr. Flynn, backed by tenacious lawyer Sidney Powell, fought the charges—forcing the Justice Department to review its actions, acknowledge its bad acts, and move to dismiss its case. Democrats and the press cast this outcome as evidence of Mr. Barr’s “politicization.” The circuit court begs to differ.

The Justice Department’s credibility was at stake here. Judge Sullivan bought into the same Democratic conspiracy theories, which is why he refused Justice’s motion to dismiss and appointed retired judge John Gleeson to act as shadow prosecutor. He argued the Justice Department wasn’t entitled to the usual “presumption of regularity.” And if the circuit judges thought there was anything to claims that Mr. Barr was playing political favorites, it could have allowed the process to continue.

Instead they bluntly noted that there was no “legitimate basis” to question the department’s behavior. They even slapped Mr. Gleeson for relying on “news stories, tweets and other facts outside the record.” By contrast, Judge Rao’s opinion notes: “The government’s motion includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.” It points out that this includes “evidence of misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It finishes by noting that each government branch must be encouraged to “self correct when it errs.”

The court’s conclusion is obvious. All it had to do was look at the voluminous evidence the Justice Department supplied. Its briefs proved the FBI had improperly pursued Mr. Flynn, keeping open an investigation that produced no evidence, ginning up a “violation” of the seldom-enforced Logan Act, sandbagging Mr. Flynn with an interview that had no “legitimate investigative basis.” It even provided new FBI notes this week suggesting that then-President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were improperly engaged in the investigation. The department’s filings showed that the Mueller team had consistently denied defense attorneys exculpatory information. And it explained the straightforward process by which it had reached its decision to withdraw: Mr. Barr in February appointed veteran U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to review the case, and in May Mr. Jensen concluded dismissal was “the proper and just course.”…”

Original

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

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The Democrats Indulge in a Death Wish

Conrad Black:

“…Joe Biden’s present lead in the polls is a levitation. These are the dangling entrails of the panic that the national political media, which are unofficially conducting the Democratic campaign in the unheroic absence of the putative nominee, have sown about the coronavirus and the impression, desperately promoted, identifying Trump with the recent chaos.

A public opinion climate worn down by lengthy social confinement, arrested economic activity, and high unemployment is especially vulnerable to disgruntlement about its leaders. Given the pandemic, the recession, and the worst rioting in America in over fifty years, Trump has done well to maintain his approval rating in the mid-forties.

All of these elements are evaporating: the increasing incidence of the coronavirus is practically irrelevant since the fatality rate has declined by about 80 percent. Over 90 percent of those who contract the illness have minimal or no symptoms and each such person becomes a barrier to the spread of the virus, as those who have had it and have recovered are much more resistant to it thereafter. This phenomenon is known inelegantly as “herd immunity”: once the virus has gone through society, that society is substantially invulnerable apart from those with diminished immunities.

The increasing incidence of COVID-19 cases has been amplified in the anti-Trump media. The president, who was so reviled for inability to test competitively with other countries in March, has produced a regime in which an incomparable total of about 30 million Americans have now been tested…

and

…A remarkable fact about the continuing chronic disorder is the absence to date of a serious backlash. It seems that the national political media have been partially successful so far in portraying the president as unsympathetic to the victims of police excess and to the discontents of the African-American community generally. They have thus saddled independent opinion with the illusion that the president is responsible for the obscene levels of destructive urban violence and effrontery to the most revered personalities and events in American history.

And the president is only just beginning to draw public attention to his Democratic opponents’ ambiguous response to the mindless hate-filled violence of the mobs that have surged through many of America’s great cities. He is also just beginning to point out the extent to which this urban discontent is based on the incompetence and corruption of the Democratic city political machines that generate most of that party’s votes and to which Joe Biden has been bound hand and foot for nearly 50 years.

The Democrats’ prayerful attempts to retard the economic recovery, swaddled in fear-mongering and humbug about the coronavirus, run up against the popular ambition for restored prosperity. There is immense liquidity in the system, and the only feeble barrier to a sharp economic revival is Democratic media defeatism about the pandemic. It won’t work…

and

…The attorney general, William Barr, has indicated that the Durham investigation into the origins of the monstrous scam of the Russian collusion investigation will be heard from before the end of the summer. There is no reason to believe that Biden himself will be charged, but the allegations against other senior officials of the Obama regime will not enhance the prestige of the Democrats. Biden’s limited verbal agility will be sorely challenged in explaining what he was doing while unprecedented, unconstitutional skullduggery was initiated by senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration, some of which skullduggery he must have been aware.

The Democrats, their confident masquerade as clear winners notwithstanding, have already done a campaign course correction. They have killed Senate debate on police oversight reform—they don’t want the problem resolved; they want police brutality and oppression of African-Americans as election issues, while ignoring mob violence and the physical, fiscal, and public relations assault Democratic and BLM spokespeople have launched against the police. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explicitly has blamed the death of George Floyd on Trump, without elaboration. The president has his limitations but this is malignant lunacy…

and

…Despite the tumult and the controversy, aggravated by this president’s peculiar abrasiveness, he appears to have taken difficult executive decisions promptly and successfully and has guided the country through very serious challenges unfazed by the threat posed to his tenure of office.

The Democrats have descended to depths of mudslinging, demagogy, and indulgence of racial violence and national self-hate never before plumbed in a U.S. presidential election. They are afflicted by a death wish, and in the national interest and for their own sake, that wish must be granted by the voters…”

Original

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Clarice Feldman on Black Lives Matter or what she calls White Leftist Matters

Clarice Feldman:

“…Blue state riots continue, further harming the poor, who have been the least able to maneuver around the lengthy social confinement mandated by their governors and mayors. To the extent that people are led by the media misreporting to think this is the justified response of a black underclass, think again.  BLM really is better named White Leftist Matters (WLM), a movement largely by young, middle and upper-class whites to increase their own political power.

Two American Thinker posts (here and here) show how whites have taken over the Black Lives Matter movement. A startling statistic is that only one in six protesters is black. On Friday, an article from Marin and two videos vividly illustrated the white takeover.

In uber-leftist Mill Valley, California, a local newspaper’s photos from a Black Lives Matter march reveal almost no blacks.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is the case. Having knocked over the “sifting and winnowing” process upon which higher education once prided itself, to socialized terror against thoughtcrime, these hubristic credentialed morons assume they can do this everywhere. In Minneapolis, apart from wreaking havoc on the poorest, often black, citizens, they’ve now persuaded the city’s council to defund the police. Watching the disasters unfolding in Seattle’s “autonomous district” under the indulgent eye of the city’s mayor might have given them a clue, but apparently not.

It doesn’t seem they are winning black hearts and minds with this, except for those given a new opportunity to loot and engage in aggressive crime under cover of the “protests.” Black residents and business owners have regularly criticized them for the damage done to their lives and property. This week, two more underreported examples of black disengagement with the WLM operations warmed my heart. In Seattle, a black man whose building houses many senior residents, deprived of their caretakers by the lockdown in front of their home, furiously ripped down the barricades and  free feeding stations, exploding with anger at this outrageous deprivation of the rights of those who live and work there.

We’re all sick of this nonsense…”

Original

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Washington Post does its best to uphold the tradition of bias and fake news

This is the post headline:  Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.

The story includes these graphs:

The conclusion from the Post is that Trump is wrong. Do you think that is the right conclusion?

Journalism and media continue to self-destruct in their increasingly shrill and wild attacks on the president. Democrats overwhelmingly run the cities with the worst problems – problems of all kinds. Democrats in most cases occupy positions up and down the leadership chain. Democrats have been in power in many of these cities for decades.

If you are fooled by the MSM it is your own fault. The data is easily available to anybody.

Doug Santo