Month: May 2022

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Charles Lipson on the stench emanating from the Sussman verdict

The stench from the Sussmann verdict

“…Democracies cannot survive without public trust. Citizens must be confident that their elected officials represent their interests, at least in broad terms, and are not corrupt, self-dealing con men. They must believe the courts dispense justice fairly and equally, that there’s not one set of rules for insiders and another for everyone else. They understand that complex societies require bureaucracies and that bureaucracies are inherently non-democratic, but they want the bureaucracies’ rules and procedures to be subject to laws, passed by elected officials, overseen by them, and applied evenly. For transparency, they depend on newspapers and television and, in recent years, on websites and social media.

These essential elements of stable democracy are encompassed by two words: “trust” and “fairness.” For democracies to thrive, citizens must trust the four core elements of their government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and the bureaucracies which pass and implement most of the day-to-day rules. A crucial element of that trust is the belief that each individual gets a fair shake. That means he won’t be arrested or fined because of the color of his skin or his religion. If he has to go to court, it means he’ll get a fair trial, with an even-handed judge and a jury of his peers. He won’t be pilloried by a biased judge who doesn’t like his politics. His case will be decided by a jury that weighs the evidence without prejudice. The public also has a right to see that trials are handled fairly, without bias.

Every one of those basic tenets was violated in Michael Sussmann’s trial for lying to the FBI. We know now that a Washington, DC jury has found him not guilty, though it is still unclear whether they believed he didn’t lie, or the government didn’t prove it, or it didn’t matter to a politically biased FBI, which was determined to investigate anything connected to Donald Trump. We also know something more: the whole case is drenched in the sulfurous smell of the Washington Swamp…”

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Seth Barrett Tillman asks some common sense questions about the Supreme Court leak investigation

Query for CNN’s Joan Biskupic

“…re: Joan Biskupic, ‘Supreme Court leak investigation heats up as clerks are asked for phone records in unprecedented move,’ CNN (May 31, 2022, 12:37 GMT)

Should you not inquire (and report) if the investigators are also investigating non-law-clerk Supreme Court personnel in a similar fashion?*

Should you not inquire (and report) if the investigators are also investigating all nine Supreme Court Justices in a similar fashion? You might ask each individual Justice if he or she authorized the leak, or if he or she knows the identity of the leaker. It is up to you to ask.

See also: Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘Courthouse Security Checks,’ New Reform Club (Aug. 7, 2016, 7:33 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2016/08/my-personal-brexit-courthouse-security.html>;

Seth

PS: To be sure, I do not think we can rule out the possibility that the leak was from someone other than a law clerk–and, perhaps, by a person who is not Supreme Court staff at all. Furthermore, I do not think we can rule out the possibility that the leak (whoever did it) was authorized by a Justice.

Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘Query for CNN’s Joan Biskupic,’ New Reform Club (May 31, 2022, 11:30 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2022/05/query-for-cnns-joan-biskupic.html>;

Biskupic wrote: “It is not known if court officials are asking employees who are part of the permanent staff, beyond the one-year law clerks, for their phone records.” Seth’s response: You might know if you ask…”

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The wacky left has captured our education system and destroyed it

Banning “Incendiary Speech and Rhetoric”: Boston University Faces New Free Speech Controversies and Calls for Selective Censorship

“…There was an interesting contrast this week in the attitude toward free speech values at Boston University with two controversies involving figures at opposing ends of the political spectrum. In one case, a professor defended looting and other crimes as forms of racial justice. In the other case, a speaker was hosted to speak about conservative values deemed anti-LGBTQ. One of the speakers was the subject of a student government resolution declaring him to be a danger to students and rejecting free speech rights for him to be heard by others on campus.  Can you guess which one?

The two controversies would seem to reaffirm the value of free speech across the political spectrum. While we can disagree with one or both of these speakers, we should be able to agree that a university is a place for a diversity of positions and viewpoints. That is not exactly how it is viewed by many on the Boston University campus…”

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I could not improve upon Victor Davis Hanson’s summary of Biden’s bungling incompetence relating to Russia and Ukraine. Click over for a good read.

What Now, Ukraine?

“…The Western alliance had clearly lost any power of deterrence by February 24, 2022. The catastrophic rout and flight from Afghanistan and utter abandonment of an embassy, and billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry to the Taliban, suggested to the Russians that the current U.S. military had adopted different objectives from its once feared past. It appeared to some in Moscow that the Pentagon was starting to resemble former Soviet armies, where ideology trumped military preparedness and lethality.

Biden enhanced that impression in so many ways.

He slow-walked initial shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine.

He asked Putin to tell his hackers to be more selective in their attacks on U.S. targets and begged him to pump more oil as the United States cut its own production.

Biden sort of, kind of suggested that an American response would hinge on the size of the supposedly inevitable Russian invasion. And when the invasion began, he immediately pulled out U.S. diplomatic personnel and offered Ukrainian President Zelenskyy a ride out of his own country.

He lifted sanctions on the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And in perhaps the stupidest foreign policy move of his administration, Biden sought to suspend the EastMed natural gas pipeline project into Europe, organized jointly by U.S. allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel. Apparently, he felt that Europe did not need more natural gas or that Cyprus, Greece, and Israel were enemies not friends, or that high natural gas prices in Europe would incentivize more windmills and solar panels.

Biden was a key player as vice president in the disastrous Obama Administration “reset” and “hot mic” appeasement of Russia. All that led to the 2014 invasions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to the dismantlement of U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe, and the Hunter Biden syndicate’s interference in corrupt Ukrainian politics to leverage millions of dollars into Biden family coffers…”

Doug Santo