A good Sunday morning read about Kathleen Kane, the now ex-Attorney General from Pennsylvania who is about to be sentenced for perjury. The article gets into the importance of swearing an oath to tell the truth, and why perjury is punished so harshly.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/21/2016 00:00 ||
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#2
...The real point here is this question from TFA:
"How could a state's top law enforcement official be so dumb?"
The real answer in this case gets missed, though it must be said that the author did a great job on the article. The fact - ugly and inescapable - is that Ms Kane is, was, and will always be a Democrat politician first, a power seeker/holder second, and a lawyer sworn to uphold the law last. Reviewing this case leaves no way to escape the conclusion that she felt her first duties were to the Party and herself, not necessarily in that order depending on the situation.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/21/2016 6:30 Comments ||
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[WAPO] THE DIRECTOR of the FBI, James B. Comey, did the right thing in announcing the results of the bureau's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email in early July. Realizing that the case was hyper-sensitive in the middle of a presidential campaign, Mr. Comey spoke up when ordinarily he would have simply forwarded his recommendation to prosecutors. "Spoke up" in an election year did he? "Right Thing" was it? I thought justice was supposed to be blind.
He said the investigation determined that she was "extremely careless" in using a home-brew server while secretary of state, but that Ms. Clinton's actions did not warrant prosecution. It was important for the apolitical FBI director to say one way or the other whether there was criminal behavior so voters could make up their own minds. That would be...formerly 'apolitical' FBI director.
But now Mr. Comey has taken a misstep. The FBI has provided to Congress portions of the investigative files from the year-long probe. Although it is not known precisely which portions, some of the materials include interviews conducted by the FBI. On Capitol Hill, the FBI has deposited the material in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room with restricted access. Responding affirmatively to a Congressional request is a.... 'misstep?'
According to the Associated Press, the documents were transmitted to Congress with written warnings not to leak them. "These materials are nonpublic and contain classified and other sensitive material," FBI Acting Assistant Director Jason Herring wrote. "For that reason, these materials may not be further disseminated or disclosed, in part or in full, without obtaining the FBI's concurrence." Access to the documents is restricted to members of the judiciary, intelligence and government affairs committees. The above caveat applies to ANY classified document. The doctrine of 'Need to Know' also applies.
Republicans in Congress are unlikely to heed the warnings. Are these members of the GOP, who have enthusiastically exploited the Benghazi and email stories for partisan advantage, whose convention delegates chanted "lock her up," really going to read the FBI files and stay mum? The temptation here for mischief -- partial leaks -- is enormous. Is it just the Pubs in Congress who cannot be trusted? Thank you WAPO editorial board for this enlightening revelation. 'Mischievous Republicans'... quite rich I'd say.
It is extremely rare for the FBI to turn over to Congress internal case files from a criminal investigation that did not lead to a prosecution. In some cases in the past -- counterintelligence probes, for example -- the FBI has orally briefed Congress or, in the case of nominations, brought the raw interview notes to senators to read but not keep. 'Rare' yes, possibly, but the elected Congress of the American people requested to see these documents.
In this case, it seems a bad precedent to put the Clinton investigative materials before Congress. Will lawmakers demand more such sensitive documents in the future? If informants know their cooperation with the FBI might eventually be shared with members of Congress, will it have a chilling effect? 'Chilling effect'....Chilling to law breakers and criminals possibly.
At this point, the best course of action, and the most transparent, would be to put the documents through a suitable declassification process and then release them for all to see. But it shouldn't have come to that. Correct, 'it shouldn't have come to that.' The documents SHOULD have been readily available through the normal archiving process as dictated BY LAW !
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/21/2016 10:38 Comments ||
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#4
Thinking Comey may have a plan.
Yes, the Comey plan is scheduled for activation directly following the final massive wave of FBI protest retirements and resignations. Please stand-by for further developments.
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.
He’s at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" -- to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren."
Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe.
For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn’t so far off anymore.
He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.
"Dangerous climate change is going to be happening by then," he says. "Very, very soon."
Rieder wears a tweedy jacket and tennis shoes, and he limps because of a motorcycle accident. He’s a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his arguments against having children are moral.
Americans and other rich nations produce the most carbon emissions per capita, he says. Yet people in the world’s poorest nations are most likely to suffer severe climate impacts, "and that seems unfair," he says.
Ahh yes... Fairness. The old fallback of all progressives.
#3
Professor Rieder is behind the times. Leftists have been having small or no families for many years based partly on their own 'what if' projections (remember "The Population Bomb"), partly on the fact that they don't like kids, partly because of delaying marriage until the late 30s and other reasons.
Big families come from Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Amish, immigrant Muslims, Evangelicals and a few others.
Posted by: lord garth ||
08/21/2016 10:17 Comments ||
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[American Thinker] There's a strange story out of India in the Daily Mail about a man who divorced his wife to marry his mother-in-law and now regrets his decision and is trying to undo it.
In a way this reminds me of conservatives whose preferred candidates lost the nomination and now as Never Trumpers are making the election of Hillary more possible. It's a variation of the song "You Can't Always get What You Want", but instead of the next line being "but you can sometimes get what you need", it reads, "but you can get what you don't want or need". In this case, Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt politician in U.S. history, a decision impossible of reversal or even to hold in check once done.
If you are torn about the Republican voters' choice of nominee, but still unhappy about the notion of Hillary, America's nightmare mother-in-law, winning (and certain that the independent candidates are no better and, in any event, without a chance) here are some writers whose views may help you overcome your reluctance to cast the vote for Trump.
Excerpt below:
Ok since the media will not tell anyone about this I will at least tell my friends and make this public so y'all can share and tell yours as well because I think it needs to be said.
[snip]
Donald Trump visited Louisiana today. He brought with him a truck loaded with food, supplies, and toys that he personally passed out. He also donated money to a flood relief charity. He went and walked flooded houses in a community. He didn't ask for state police or military security, I imagine he may have had his personal security with him but hey he pays them so not my business. He didn't ask for any road to be closed to bring him in or an escort to his destination, matter of fact he didn't inform the government of his visit at all. He didn't care if the government knew he was coming, he just came and brought needing people needed supplies. And the news covered it about 15 seconds and then used it as a hit piece to plug Obama's visit that will happen. It was just wrong on many levels. No matter [i]f you agree with Trump political are not what he done today was honorable and good, and he did it without making a big deal of himself. I hope more people of his statu[r]e will do the same in the same way, without all the hype of announcing their visit with intent of a public photo op.
Yes, I too caught a glimpse of Franklin Graham in the media piece of Trump's visit to the flooded areas.
Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.
The frenzy to bury Trump is not limited to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House. They are working hand-in-hand with what was considered the cream of the nation’s news organizations.
The shameful display of naked partisanship by the elite media is unlike anything seen in modern America.
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
Indeed, no foreign enemy, no terror group, no native criminal gang, suffers the daily beating that Trump does. The mad mullahs of Iran, who call America the Great Satan and vow to wipe Israel off the map, are treated gently by comparison.
By torching its remaining credibility in service of Clinton, the mainstream media’s reputations will likely never recover, nor will the standards. No future producer, editor, reporter or anchor can be expected to meet a test of fairness when that standard has been trashed in such willful and blatant fashion.
Liberal bias in journalism is often baked into the cake. The traditional ethos of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable leads to demands that government solve every problem. Favoring big government, then, becomes routine among most journalists, especially young ones.
I know because I was one of them. I started at the Times while the Vietnam War and civil-rights movement raged, and was full of certainty about right and wrong.
My editors were, too, though in a different way. Our boss of bosses, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, knew his reporters leaned left, so he leaned right to “keep the paper straight.”
That meant the Times, except for the opinion pages, was scrubbed free of reporters’ political views, an edict that was enforced by giving the opinion and news operations separate editors. The church-and-state structure was one reason the Times was considered the flagship of journalism.
Those days are gone. The Times now is so out of the closet as a Clinton shill that it is giving itself permission to violate any semblance of evenhandedness in its news pages as well as its opinion pages.
A recent article by its media reporter, Jim Rutenberg, whom I know and like, began this way: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
Whoa, Nellie. The clear assumption is that many reporters see Trump that way, and it is noteworthy that no similar question is raised about Clinton, whose scandals are deserving only of “scrutiny.” Rutenberg approvingly cites a leftist journalist who calls one candidate “normal” and the other “abnormal.”
Clinton is hardly “normal” to the 68 percent of Americans who find her dishonest and untrustworthy, though apparently not a single one of those people writes for the Times. Statistically, that makes the Times “abnormal.”
Also, you don’t need to be a detective to hear echoes in that first paragraph of Clinton speeches and ads, including those featured prominently on the Times’ Web site. In effect, the paper has seamlessly adopted Clinton’s view as its own, then tries to justify its coverage.
It’s an impossible task, and Rutenberg fails because he must. Any reporter who agrees with Clinton about Trump has no business covering either candidate.
It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.
It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.
The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.
Now its only standard is a double standard, one that it proudly confesses. Shame would be more appropriate.
#2
It's interesting that they splash all this ink on a guy they say has Absolutely No Chance of winning. I think part of it is that Trump gives them an excuse to avoid covering more ticklish issues, such as Champ's retirement-in-place, Ukraine, the South China Sea, Aleppo, etc.
Another part of it is that Champ has weaponized the executive order. They can't allow Trump to have that weapon. Which is a problem of their own creation.
And if Trump somehow wins, there will be a re-discovery of the Constitution by mugs who have been talking up a storm about how the Constitution is very old and extra-Constitutional actions are really OK. If Trump's in, we'll see full page-spreads about separation of powers, the bill of rights, the Gladstone quote about the Constitution being the most wonderful document ever, etc.
Posted by: Matt ||
08/21/2016 10:50 Comments ||
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#3
What kinda Karma puts Clintons in the White House but gets the Alpha Snopes Kingfish blown away in his own capital?
#4
The Times, of course, is not alone in becoming unhinged over Trump, but that’s also the point. It used to be unique because of its adherence to fairness.
When was this?
Also, while the press is collapsing, that's not the same thing as saying its influence is fading; even many on the right fall into the "we must maintain 'respectability' as defined by the MSM" trap.
And Facebook and Twitter are certainly picking up the gatekeeper slack.
#5
I have had a great travel year, which has led me to spending week long stints in Tokyo, Dubai and Bangkok...Every English newspaper I picked up without fail included 2-3 articles negative to Trump and usually one article soft pedaling the Beast. The disparagement, IMHO, is actually a global effort.
[Gateway Pundit] It was only a matter of time. Although this was ignored by the liberal media Hillary Clinton appeared to have suffered a seizure after her DNC Convention speech in Philadelphia - It was not the first time Hillary displayed seizure-like symptoms.
With all of the reports and articles on Hillary Clinton's declining health Briviact seizure treatment drug ads are popping up on Hillary Clinton online articles.
Briviact is used with other medicines to treat partial-onset seizures in people 16 years of age and older with epilepsy.
Briviact is targeting Hillary Clinton online articles.
Here is a Briviact ad [graphic] on a Gateway Pundit mobile article today:
#1
Maybe the reason she has so few appearances has nothing to do with her health, but is because she has learned that when she shows up and opens her mouth she loses support.
Mike Flynn's support for Donald Trump is obviously having the desired effect. A "seething Jim Clapper?" Bravo! Keep it up, General. Louder please, and with increased enthusiasm.
#1
"...Flynn, 56, who was one of the most respected military intelligence officers of his generation but who has spurned the decorum traditionally expected of retired U.S. flag officers...." What utter horseflesh. The WaPo has extolled flag officers who support Democrats, but today it saves its vitriol for those who support Trump.
#2
I enjoy reading the WAPO and other rags of this sort. It helps me determine who the real patriots are and how effective they have become against the communists.
[Dhaka Tribune] Pakistain’s current political system does absolutely nothing to hold those at the top accountable
Pakistain is a parliamentary democracy modelled on the UK, its former colonial ruler, with a ceremonial head of state and an all-powerful parliament.
But this arrangement is not serving the country well at the moment.
Like in the UK, the institutional inertia of the parliamentary system ensures that power is retained by the political insiders of the major parties.
In some context, this is a good thing. For example, in the UK, this system has enabled a smooth transition of power after the Brexit vote from the former prime minister, David Cameron ... has stated that he is certainly a big Thatcher fan, but I don't know whether that makes me a Thatcherite, which means he's not. Since he is not deeply ideological he lacks core principles and is easily led. He has been described as certainly not a Pitt, Elder or Younger, but he does wear a nice suit so maybe he's Beau Brummel ... , to his successor, Theresa May.
At a time of great political upheaval, this system allowed for a swift change of leadership toward someone who is regarded as competent and "a safe pair of hands," someone who is generally trusted to be boring but effective, and someone who would not have otherwise been likely to win the leadership.
And so, the country can now focus its attention on the actual Brexit negotiations, which will determine its future for decades.
But the same institutional inertia which keeps power solidly confined to just top political operators is much less positive if those at the top of political parties, who control the government and most areas of the state, are chronically corrupt.
The parliamentary system has given Pakistain a good deal of political stability, after so many decades of on-again-off-again military takeovers.
But this stability has also come at the price of putting most of those at the top of the political class beyond effective accountability.
This system has made it more difficult for the military to remove the civilian government from power, but it has made it even more difficult for the people to challenge and hold to account the incumbent government.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/21/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
They already have a military general commanding their Army to act as the power behind the throne. Make him President.
[Daily Caller] In an op-ed for the military blog Task & Purpose, former Marine Lt. Col. Kate Germano blamed the problem of high female attrition in the service on recruiters bringing in weak women and refusing to provide real mentorship.
Germano was responding to a recent Associated Press article that discussed the Marine Corps’ efforts to meet its goals of 10 percent women in the force. Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller has given the service an order to recruit more women.
"I’ve told them that 10 percent is where we want to go and they’re working on it," Neller said. "Go recruit more women. Find them. They’re out there."
To accomplish that effort, the service is vastly trying to shift its advertising efforts to remove the idea the Marine Corps is a "good ol’ boys club," but for Germano, this change in advertising is only half of the game.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
David Cameron
[Daily Caller] In an op-ed for the military blog Task & Purpose, former Marine Lt. Col. Kate Germano blamed the problem of high female attrition in the service on recruiters bringing in weak women and refusing to provide real mentorship.
