[Hot Air] U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Marra said Thursday that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by failing to notify victims before signing off on the arrangement, under which federal prosecutors promised not to prosecute Epstein in federal court if he pleaded guilty to a pair of prostitution-related offenses in a Florida state court.
"Petitioners and the other victims should have been notified of the Government’s intention to take that course of action before it bound itself under the NPA," or nonprosecution agreement, Marra wrote.
Marra criticized federal prosecutors for not only hiding the agreement from the victims but also misleading them about the state of the case.
"Particularly problematic was the Government’s decision to conceal the existence of the NPA and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility," the judge wrote.
There’s a current political angle to this story which is that the man who made this disastrous agreement with Epstein’s attorneys is Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. So maybe there’s a reason some on the left are suddenly interested in this after years of not caring. But as I’ve said before: Who cares? What matters here is that there’s no way to justify this garbage agreement except as a gift to a billionaire who paid dozens of teen girls for sexual massages (and more in some cases). At the time the agreement was made, there were already more than 50 victims and it was clear more could be found in time some of them just 14-years-old. From the Miami Herald, here’s the slap on the wrist that Epstein’s dream team of lawyers worked out with Acosta:
[The Federalist] Gone are the Clark Kent glasses as former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe casts himself the hero in a "60 Minutes" interview. CBS pitched McCabe fawning softball after softball to build up its protagonist in the Trump-Russia mythology.
But McCabe’s self-congratulatory arrogance resulted in several careless statements that cement his place as a key villain in the greatest law enforcement scandal in the history of the United States. Let’s walk through the interview to examine what we learned.
1. Conveniently Selective Memory
Take a look at these parts of the interview with CBS New correspondent Scott Pelley, from the transcript.
PELLEY: You seem to have a very clear memory of your conversations with the president. Why so?
MCCABE: I made memorandums to myself to make sure that I preserved my contemporaneous recollections of those interactions.
PELLEY: How did he [Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein] bring up the idea of the 25th amendment to you?
MCCABE: Honestly, I don’t remember. He, it was just another kinda topic that he jumped to in the midst of a wide-ranging conversation.
PELLEY: Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president.
MCCABE: That’s correct. Counting votes or possible votes.
PELLEY: Did he assign specific votes to specific people?
MCCABE: No, not that I recall.
So the former acting director of the FBI claims to have heard the deputy attorney general propose deposing the president with a cabinet vote pursuant to the 25th Amendment of the Constitution and he doesn’t recall how the conversation came up or whether the deputy attorney general named any specific cabinet members who might vote to overturn the 2016 election. Il est gros mytho. That’s French for, "I’m skeptical." Five more follow.
#1
MCCABE: I made memorandums to myself to make sure that I preserved my contemporaneous recollections of those interactions.
But he fails to recall the most important detail of the 25th amendment discussion. I think Pelley is reading the questions McCabe gave him for the interview.
#3
How did this sleaze ball get into law enforcement? The guy is a disgrace. HRC and Slick and "The One" did taint a lot of people. The country ended up being run by a criminal empire the likes of which Al Capone would envy.
[Daily Caller] Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein, along with other Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, plotted a political assassination of President Trump. Listen closely so you can hear the mainstream media’s crickets.
Former FBI acting Director McCabe confessed on 60 Minutes and elsewhere that he and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein discussed ousting the president in May 2017, even going so far as contemplating Rosenstein’s wearing a wire to capture the words of the president regarding his reason for firing Comey. Their weapon for ousting the duly elected president: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
The limited media comments expose a dreadful ignorance of the law. A collective ho-hum was the response to McCabe’s claim that Trump’s firing Comey triggered the investigation. Some commentators, such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, even claim to have a law degree. They must have skipped constitutional law class. The president has Article II authority to fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason or for no reason. Whatever President Trump stated regarding his firing of Comey ‐ and he has provided numerous reasons ‐ has no legal significance whatsoever.
Worse, the media seem unable to comprehend the plain meaning of the 25th Amendment, which has three purposes. First, to designate who succeeds the president in case of death or resignation, which is clearly not at issue here. The second, to provide the process of succession when the president "transmits" in writing to the House and Senate that he "is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," is also irrelevant.
#2
It's a matter of "they don't care" and more a matter of they were on board.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/22/2019 7:28 Comments ||
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#3
If a majority of Trump's own Cabinet appointees felt he was not capable of performing his duties and voted to relieve him of them is that a coup? Or a legitimate use of the 25th? These people would presumably be on his side AND far more aware of his functionality than we. Few agreed he was incapable. If I was Trump I would call those in for a discussion, and likely ask for their resignations, but that's all.
[CNBC] At 95, Charlie Munger is best known for his steady role as the right-hand man of investing legend Warren Buffett.
As the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Munger is worth $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.
In addition to the his role alongside Buffett, Munger is chairman of the publisher the Daily Journal Corp. and is on the board of the big-box retailer Costco.
Munger has had, by almost any standard, a wildly successful life ‐ and a long one, at that. He's nearly a centenarian.
Last week, at The Daily Journal annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, Munger was asked to reflect on that journey.
"There were a lot of questions today ‐ people trying to figure out what the secret to life is, to a long and happy life," CNBC's Becky Quick said to Munger when they talked at the end of February.
The secret is "easy, because it's so simple," Munger told Quick.
Munger went on to rattle off a list of his best advice, each lesson succinctly delivered in bite-size form.
#1
We just celebrated my mother’s 93rd birthday. She would agree with all of it — her table in the retirement home dining room is always full of laughter.
[Babylon Bee] RICHMOND, VA‐Virginia Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief, as the Jussie Smollett hoax has taken the media’s eye off of their political trainwreck, sources confirmed today.
Both Governor Ralph Northam and the state's attorney general had drawn ire for racist photographs and blackface, while Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax has been facing a number of sexual assault scandals. The governor had also caused controversy with statements that appeared to support infanticide.
But then, "a miracle happened": actor Jussie Smollett received a threatening letter from Trump supporters ‐ a letter that he apparently helped author. When his fake letter didn’t bring about the desired media attention, he upped the ante by staging an attack on himself. Since he was unable to find any real Trump supporters that fit into his "white, bigoted, and violent" narrative, Smollett allegedly paid two African-American men to dress in MAGA hats and pretend to assault him at 2 a.m. during a historic cold front in Chicago.
Investigators were immediately suspicious, mainly because no Trump supporters have actually heard of Jussie Smollett, much less do they watch his show, Empire. Police also said it was highly unlikely that any Trump supporters would be in Chicago in the first place. Fortunately for the politicians caught in various scandals, the resulting fallout from this hoax has drawn the public’s attention away from the Virginia Democrats as they seek to salvage their hold on high political office.
In a joint statement released by Northam, Fairfax, and Herring, the three men said, "We offer our most sincere thanks and praise to Mr. Smollett for allowing our careers to remain intact and for giving Democrats continued control of Virginia’s highest positions of public trust. We owe you big time, Jussie!"
[Unz Review] "Training." It sounds so innocuous. It also sounds like something expected of a military. All professional soldiers undergo some sort of basic training. Think: calisthenics, negotiating obstacle courses, and marksmanship. Soldiers require instruction, otherwise they’re little more than rabble.
Sometimes soldiers from one country even train the troops of another, imparting skills from the basic to the complex. The U.S. military calls this, among other things, "building partner capacity." Sometimes a foreigner steps in and whips sorry soldiers into shape, as former Prussian army officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben did with George Washington’s Continental Army. And sometimes the foreigners, like the modern heirs to the army that Steuben trained, can’t even seem to successfully teach their wards, like Iraqis or Afghans, jumping jacks or pushups. (Nor does anyone seem to ask why Americans are teaching jumping jacks or pushups to such trainees in the first place.) And then we wonder why one of those proxy armies folded in the face of a tiny terror force in Iraq in 2014 or why, after almost two decades of assistance, another is taking unsustainable losses, as is the case in Afghanistan now.
Each year, through a vast constellation of global training exercises, operations, facilities, and schools, the United States trains around 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel. From 2003 to 2010, for example, the U.S. carried out this training regime at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries and on every continent but Antarctica. Most of it goes on behind closed doors, far from public view. And almost all of it escapes independent scrutiny. Is the training effective? Does it achieve the desired results? Is it worth the cost? Does it conform to U.S. laws? It’s often difficult to glean basic information about what types of training are taking place, let alone the results.
#1
From 2003 to 2010, for example, the U.S. carried out this training regime at no fewer than 471 locations in 120 countries and on every continent but Antarctica.
What happens in Antarctica stays in Antarctica. We do not discuss it with outsiders.
[Unz Review] In 2018, Lara Logan left her perch as foreign correspondent for CBS’s "highest-rated, most profitable and best-known program, ’60 Minutes.’"
She is currently doing the rounds, assuaging "conservative" media’s appetite for celebrity. The latter have a Uriah-Heep like propensity to fawn over swamp-based, defecting, big-name media celebs.
It’s as though Logan is job hunting, on a blond-ambition tour‐for she certainly has no news to impart other than a few banal catchphrases. Logan has "revealed," first to Breitbart podcaster Mike Ritland, that‐OMG! ‐the media are "mostly liberal."
Yes, Logan has been pontificating about the tritest of truths: the media are liberal.
Ever in search of defecting celebrities around whom to create buzz, the pack dogs of "conservative" media picked up Logan’s scent and gave chase. Mission accomplished.
In a lovey-dovey, public tête-à-tête, Fox News’ Sean Hannity hinted to his higherups at Fox that they should hire Logan. One wishes they’d do this self-congratulatory cable-news porn behind closed doors. Like we don’t already suffer an abundance of Fake News, No-News and salacious news.
#1
Lara Logan is a "liberal" who've seen the light. Such people are very rare nowadays - most liberals won't give their beliefs no matter what: notice all the quasi-humans who've been attacked by Muslims (or "African-Americans" in USA) and publicly apologize for having "improper thoughts" in the aftermath.
#3
"Seen the light" on one issue (third worlders are not noble because they are poor) does not mean much.
After Sept 11 there were a lot of folks that seemed conservative but had only one issue on mind and eventually most of them tired of that issue and embraced the left again. Little Green footballs comes to mind.
[YouTube] In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on modern warfare, offers a groundbreaking look ahead at what may happen after the war in Afghanistan ends. It is a book about future conflicts and future cities, about the challenges and opportunities that four powerful megatrends are creating across the planet. And it is about what national governments, cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human society-including, but not limited to, conflict, crime and violence-are rapidly changing.
About the Author: Dr. David Kilcullen is the Chief Executive Officer of Caerus Associates. He founded Caerus around a simple idea: that responding to the needs of local communities can have mutually beneficial effects for governments, businesses and populations. Before founding Caerus, Dave served 24 years as a soldier, diplomat and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments.
#1
He is bad ass and I seriously recommend this to help you all re-focus on how we will be (or finding ways to not have to fight) the wars of the future.
It is worth your time.
[Huffpoo] South of mainland Japan lies Okinawa, a group of islands known as the "land of the immortals." Residents here have among the longest life spans and the islands have the highest rates of centenarians in the world. Two-thirds of those who reached 100 were still living independently at the age of 97, according to one study. Okinawans have also been found to have low rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
As researchers try to understand the reasons for the unusually long and healthy lives of these island residents, they have become convinced that their diet is a key component.
The traditional local diet ― rich in vegetables, soy products and seafood ― was highlighted by scientists from the Eat-Lancet Commission in January as one that closely resembled their "planetary health diet": guidelines for a diet that works well for human health and for reducing the environmental impact of our food choices.
Widely used foods in Okinawa include sweet potatoes, green leafy or yellow root vegetables, tofu, bitter melon and modest amounts of seafood, lean meat, fruit and tea. A typical meal might be miso soup, vegetable stir-fry with a side dish of seaweed and an accompaniment of freshly brewed jasmine tea.
Overall, it is a low-calorie, high-carbohydrate ― mainly due to the sweet potatoes ― moderate-protein and nutrient-rich diet, with sparse amounts of meat, refined grains, sugar and dairy. And one that has made Okinawans typically shorter and leaner, with one study finding that the ratio of protein to carbohydrates in the Okinawan diet (1:10) is nearly identical to the ratios in diets found to optimize life span.
Holobionts are assemblages of different species that form ecological units. Lynn Margulis proposed that any physical association between individuals of different species for significant portions of their life history is a symbiosis. All participants in the symbiosis are bionts, and therefore the resulting assemblage was first coined a holobiont by Lynn Margulis in 1991 in the book Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. Holo is derived from the Ancient Greek word ὅλος (hólos) for “whole”. The entire assemblage of genomes in the holobiont is termed a hologenome.
#8
"Overall, it is a low-calorie, high-carbohydrate ― mainly due to the sweet potatoes ― moderate-protein and nutrient-rich diet, with sparse amounts of meat, refined grains, sugar and dairy."
Utter crap. This is based on an old study performed right after WWII. Prior to the war Okinawa ate more pork per capita than anywhere else in the world, but the war killed off the pig population. Just a few years after the war the pig population had been restored and Okinawan were eating pork again. This data is from the very brief post war period when there simply wasn't any pork to be had.
h/t Instapundit
[Forbes] Why is it that, from the U.S. and Canada to Spain and France, it is progressives and socialists who say they care deeply about the climate, not conservative climate skeptics, who are seeking to shut down nuclear plants?
After all, the two greatest successes when it comes to nuclear energy are Sweden and France, two nations held up by democratic socialists for decades as models of the kind of societies they want.
It is only nuclear energy, not solar and wind, that has radically and rapidly decarbonized energy supplies while increasing wages and growing societal wealth.
And it is only nuclear that has, by powering high-speed trains everywhere from France to Japan to China, decarbonized transportation, which is the source of about one-third of the emissions humankind creates.
For many people the answer is obvious: ignorance. Few people know that nuclear is the safest source of electricity. Or that low levels of radiation are harmless. Or that nuclear waste is the best kind of waste.
To a large extent, I agree with this view. In order to address widespread fear and ignorance, my colleagues and I have created The Complete Case for nuclear, which summarizes the best-available science.
But ignorance can’t be the whole story. After all, the leaders of the anti-nuclear movement are public intellectuals ‐ Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein. They are highly-educated, do extensive research, and publish in fact-checked publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times.
Is the problem that progressives unconsciously associate nuclear energy with nuclear bombs? Without a doubt that’s a big part of it. Psychologists have since the seventies documented how people displace anxieties about the bomb onto nuclear plants.
But anti-nuclear Millennials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, grew up more in fear of climate change than the bomb.
And few things have proven worse for the climate than shutting down nuclear plants.
THE UNCONSCIOUS APPEAL OF RENEWABLES
Ordinary people tell pollsters they want renewables for the same reason they buy products labeled "natural": they are in the grip of an unconscious appeal-to-nature fallacy.
The appeal-to-nature fallacy is the mistaken belief that the world can be divided into "natural" and "unnatural" things, and that the former are better, safer, or cleaner than the latter.
In reality, solar farms require hundreds of times more land, an order of magnitude more mining for materials, and create hundreds of times more waste, than do nuclear plants.
And wind farms kill hundreds of thousands of threatened and endangered birds, may make the hoary bat go extinct, and kill more people than nuclear plants.
But because of our positive feelings toward sunlight, water and wind, which we view as more natural than uranium, many people unconsciously assume renewables are better for the environment.
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.
[Hot Air] U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Marra said Thursday that prosecutors violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by failing to notify victims before signing off on the arrangement, under which federal prosecutors promised not to prosecute Epstein in federal court if he pleaded guilty to a pair of prostitution-related offenses in a Florida state court.
[CNBC] At 95, Charlie Munger is best known for his steady role as the right-hand man of investing legend Warren Buffett.
