[Babylon Bee] CHICAGO, IL‐All charges against Jussie Smollett for faking a hate crime against himself have been dropped after the Empire actor and well-respected employer of Nigerians used the "I have a lot of money" defense in court.
Smollett's legal team argued that while his alleged crimes were bad, on the other hand, he has a lot of money. The legal strategy is known as the "Chicago Special" to locals. It's a standard procedure used in Cook County.
"Yes, Mr. Smollett's behavior does seem to warrant punishment," his attorney said in a special hearing before a judge. "But you also have to consider the fact that he's rich. Furthermore, he has money. And also, did I mention that he is absolutely loaded with cold, hard cash?"
"This concludes my arguments," she said.
The attorney then pulled out a bag of money and tossed it in the general direction of Chicago's finest judges and prosecutors, who made a mad dive for the cash while Smollett walked out a free man.
"We investigated the Jussie case and all we could find was these bags of cash," a prosecutor on the case said, shrugging. "That's enough exonerating evidence for us."
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/27/2019 9:52 Comments ||
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#5
"Affluenza powder..I'd bet my life on it."
Posted by: Prince Humperdinck ||
03/27/2019 10:29 Comments ||
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#6
White Black Privilege has arrived.
Posted by: Neville Dark Lord of the Wee Folk7365 ||
03/27/2019 11:40 Comments ||
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#7
The tinfoil hat version is that the whole thing was scripted by people who obviously don't want the exposure (cough), hence the quick under the rug sweep.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 12:42 Comments ||
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#8
I'll take #7's 'tinfoil hat version for $600. Alex
[AmericanThinker] Exactly 233 years ago this week, two of America’s founding fathers documented their first exposure to Islamic jihad in a letter to Congress; like many Americans today, they too were shocked at what they learned.
Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or "Barbary," had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States’ hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise
One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting. Continues.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
03/27/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
And thus the US Navy was created to defeat the Barbary Pirates.
#4
Which is why Jefferson had a copy of the koran. "Tom what the hell is going on with these muslims"?
Sadly 233 years later we refuse to condemn a murderous death cult founded by a pedophile caravan robber. The story of his child sex trades and slaughter in Medina should have been enough.
#5
The Revolutionary War Navy was before the US Government was official and the colonies were not occupied by British forces, of which George Washington would become the first US President, and who would then form the official US Navy as described below www.History.Navy.Mil.
Naval History and Heritage Command
Some three months before President Washington signed the Naval Act of 1794 into law ─ the act authorizing the construction of the Navy’s first six frigates ─ Congress passed a resolution to establish with haste a national navy that could protect U.S. commercial vessels from attacks by Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and nearby Atlantic waters.
The resolution passed narrowly ─ 46 to 44 ─ and resulted in the creation of a nine-man committee to study issues of naval buildup, especially cost and size. On 6 February 1794, the committee recommended four 44-gun ships and two 20-gun ships.
Congressional debate on whether to act on the committee’s recommendation lasted until 10 March and built on years of indecision and ambivalence on the issue of a national navy. While everyone agreed that the British were behind the Barbary attacks and were otherwise imperiling United States trade in the West Indies and elsewhere, there were sharp differences of opinion on whether the establishment of a navy might help or hurt Americans’ chances of maintaining neutrality in this most dangerous moment...
Posted by: Neville Dark Lord of the Wee Folk7365 ||
03/27/2019 10:18 Comments ||
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#6
They were men of the Enlightenment, and sadly, the Enlightenment has no idea how to permanently deal with Dark Age savagery.
So we have temporary expediences and "shock and awe" and then we get bored and frustrated and hope the problem goes away or can be sufficiently mitigated to be forgotten or ignored.
And then it starts all over again.
Something tells me that Locke and Hume and Voltaire and Montesquieu ain't gonna be the answer,
[The Register] 0.4 to 10% of corporate wage slaves could be up for the chop.
Oracle has laid off about 40 people in its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) group in Seattle ‐ and on Friday began notifying about 250 workers at its Redwood City facility and about 100 at its Santa Clara location, both in California, that they will be let go in May.
These US-based layoffs are part of a broad round of job cuts around the globe this month, said to range from 500 to 14,000 at the database giant. The biz employs about 140,000 worldwide.
The Register spoke with an individual affected by the layoff who confirmed that about 40 people in Oracle's cloud group have been let go. The insider, who asked not to be named, recounted being summoned to an office last week with other team members, and being told to leave that afternoon.
The dismissal includes people who now face concerns over whether they can remain in the US because they're no longer employed and are here in the States on work visas. Some will have very little time to find work before having to leave the US.
It's official
Oracle on Thursday filed paperwork with California's Employment Development Department signaling its intent to terminate employees at its Redwood City and Santa Clara sites.
#1
The "rule of three" in economics states that in any given industry there are three major players and then all the rest. In cloud, the three are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Of course that could change, in theory. In practice, not very likely.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 7:09 Comments ||
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#3
I should have added, the "rule of three" posits a free market framework. When was that ever true of the auto industry in this country?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 8:19 Comments ||
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#4
And comparing Oracle to AMC or Studebaker in the market under discussion is a bit generous.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 8:21 Comments ||
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#5
What hammered the Detroit Big Three was the '73 oil embargo. American's discovered the Japanese cars which not only gave great gas mileage, but were engineered for reliability (cause the domestic market couldn't afford to replace theirs every three years), quality assemblage (it worked right on delivery), and a very short invoice sticker that didn't nickel and dime you for every part of the vehicle. It took a long time for the final bite in 2008, but the writing was on the wall and corporate choose to ignore the very real need for reform rather than show.
An example of the black swan effect. Complacency creates the environment.
#6
Interestingly, the cloud providers work very hard at reliability, energy efficiency and of course features, so their black swan will have to come from another direction. Government interference in terms of privacy is a good candidate...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 8:59 Comments ||
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#7
Here's the part that surprised me:
Oracle on Thursday filed paperwork with California's Employment Development Department signaling its intent to terminate employees at its Redwood City and Santa Clara sites.
Then again, it's CA - maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's a requirement for publicly traded companies but it's the first I've heard of a requirement like this.
#8
My experience with Oracle database software was always good and that's how they got to be a software giant. But many of their other products were rushed to market half-baked and it showed. If they rushed their cloud to market that way I could understand customers running back to Google. Personally, I'd rather buy the disk space and have it running at a facility that is under my control than letting the likes of folks at Google, Oracle or any of the rest of them manage it for me. Can't trust them.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2019 10:57 Comments ||
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#9
A lot of people will always hate Oracle for buying and then killing Sun (not totally fair, I think they only killed it after they couldn't make a profit with it) and for how they have handled Java (part of the Sun acquisition) Lots of otherwise scientific minded people get really upset over these corporate soap operas...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 12:25 Comments ||
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#10
SUN was dead before Oracle bought it.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2019 13:33 Comments ||
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#11
If IBM f*cks up Red Hat the same way, there will be angry geeks in the corridors between the cubicles for sure...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/27/2019 14:58 Comments ||
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#12
Oracle DB, great, especially if you dont mind typing.
#13
I worked for Sun when Oracle bought them. They were not exactly dead but had been on life support for nearly a decade. Hard to sell big Iron Unix Servers when folks can buy a dozen Linux machines for a fraction of the price. Also hard, after the dot-com bust, to compete against your own systems that are only a year or two old being resold.
[DAWN] THE Christchurch tragedy represents the union of two bully boy tendencies ‐ white supremacy and Islamophobia ...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do... . White supremacy says that whites are superior to other races and hence must dominate them. It targets Moslems, but also blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews. Islamophobia represents prejudice and hate against Moslems in Western and Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish societies.
Both are old views. White supremacy was the official view in the West for centuries and spawned great evils like colonialism, slavery, genocide and Nazism. It was gradually displaced to the fringes over the last century. But only the overt use of force against other races has declined. Non-violent racial dominance via socioeconomic policies continues, eg in the US under conservatives. So there is class-based economic exploitation at work via the unfair division of profits between capital and labour. Then there is social discrimination at and beyond work against weaker races and ethnicities of all classes. The two combine to privilege rich whites.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2019 00:00 ||
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[7 views]
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[YNETNEWS] A year has passed since the start of March of Return campaign and Gazoo's rulers have nothing to show for it, leading them to make desperate decisions because now it's a matter of political survival
It must have been inevitable. Monday’s pre-dawn rocket fire on central Israel occurred just hours before Hamas, one of the armed feet of the Moslem Brüderbung millipede, leader in Gazoo, Yahya Sinwar, was to deliver a speech, marking a year since the start of the March of Return demonstrations. Although the campaign’s goals were always a little less grandiose than actually returning to pre-Israel Paleostine, they were no less ambitious - trying to lift the blockade on Gazoo.
A year has passed and Sinwar doesn’t really have anything to say, neither to the ordinary residents of the Strip nor to the loyal Hamas supporters who have demonstrated tirelessly week after week over the past year along the security fence. The economic situation has not improved and the millions in Qatar
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2019 00:00 ||
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[6 views]
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[NationalReview] The most telling revelation in Attorney General William Barr’s letter about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated final report is that Mueller has punted on the main question he pursued for nearly two years of investigation: Did President Trump commit an obstruction offense?
The Barr letter gingerly states that, after making a "thorough factual investigation" into alleged instances of obstruction, Mueller "ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment." Since making a prosecutorial judgment was Mueller’s job, that means he defaulted. What did we need him for?
In the memo, Barr argued that the obstruction theory Mueller’s staff appeared to be pursuing was constitutionally infirm and practically unworkable. Based on statutory law, the Constitution, court precedent, and longstanding Justice Department guidelines, Barr posited that an indictment of a president for obstruction could properly be based only on plainly corrupt acts ‐ not constitutionally ordained exercises of presidential prerogative ‐ that involve tampering with evidence and witnesses.
In the end, then, Mueller had a choice to make: Either (a) accept that Barr’s interpretation of obstruction law was correct, or (b) recommend an indictment based on the more expansive interpretation of obstruction that his staff seems to have been pursuing and dare Barr to reverse him. [insert weasel graphic here]
The special counsel couldn’t bring himself to decide. In effect, he accepted Barr’s construction of the law, but he declined to admit that he was doing so. After all, if Barr was right all along, what were the last 22 months about?
"While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." That’s a political statement, not a prosecutorial statement.
Prosecutors never "exonerate" people. It is for others to say whether a person has been exonerated. All prosecutors can say is whether there is enough evidence to charge or there is not. If there is not, then you don’t file charges, period. To cite the obvious example, you didn’t hear Mueller say, "I am exonerating President Trump on the collusion claims." He simply found insufficient evidence to establish a crime under the governing legal standards, so he declined to file charges and left it to the commentariat to sort out what it all means.
On obstruction, however, Mueller declined to apply the law to the facts. That was the only job he was hired to do. Whether he thinks the Justice Department’s decision not to charge the president is an exoneration or something less is no more relevant than what you or I think about it.
What a waste.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/27/2019 04:02 ||
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#1
...Pardon me, but if no crime was committed (i.e.; collusion) what the hell could he have obstructed?
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/27/2019 4:38 Comments ||
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#2
Agreed Mike. No law exists that gags the President while giving others license to lie. He fights back, using their own tools, and the pathetic snowflakes can’t handle the blowback.
#6
..technically, impeachment removes the protection of office. Obean is no longer in office and no longer enjoys legal protection. What protects him is the old 'tradition' of not prosecuting former executives as Rome showed that it tended to cause leaders resisting becoming former (Caesar, Rubicon, and all that).
#7
If Mueller had the evidence he should have prosecuted. Otherwise, he should STFU...er, admit that he couldn't find anything. But I suppose after two years and $35 million he felt the need to say something, however petty and ridiculous it might be.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2019 11:03 Comments ||
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#8
I'll always wonder though, how many politicians could undergo such scrutiny and come away from it unscathed?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2019 11:12 Comments ||
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#9
Scrutiny 3 times: House, Senate, and Special Counsel.
THREE Times. I'd like to see Clinton Foundation and the Obama Justice Dept and DCI offices subjected to that same treatment. Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, Lerner, and maybe even Clinton and Obama, in irons.
#10
Obean is no longer in office and no longer enjoys legal protection. What protects him is the old 'tradition' of not prosecuting former executives as Rome showed that it tended to cause leaders resisting becoming former (Caesar, Rubicon, and all that).
But if it was Obama who crossed the Rubicon, refused to step down peacefully and graciously, attempted to rig an election and when that failed attempted to undermine his successor's administration, he has waived his claim to the traditional protection.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2019 13:41 Comments ||
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#11
...If the water drowns him then he is innocent? "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
There is no way that anyone could prove that they had never been guilty of a "hypothetical crime". Mueller himself could not "absolutely prove" that he had never, as an example, been a sexual predator "...at some undisclosed time and in some undisclosed manner".
Mueller should be disbarred for a basic failure to understand the concept of "Presumption of Innocence" in legal matters.
#13
There is really no historic precedent to draw upon for what happened in the Obean administration. It would seem like treason is a matter to be considered. We have impeached presidents but never convicted them. This is new ground being plowed. Lindsey Graham is saying this should handled by a special counsel. I guess it is a question of optics. It should be a matter of justice. As Trump said, this should never happen again. Agreed there. Justice should be done.
[National Review] It followed the Soviet style: ’Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’
Had Hillary Clinton just won the 2016 election, there would have been neither a Mueller investigation nor much talk of Russian collusion.
A losing Donald Trump would have slunk off to left-wing and Never-Trump ridicule and condemnation ‐ and no investigation about collusion. On the other hand ...
Of course, a President Hillary Clinton herself may well have faced some Russian blackmail attempts. Kremlin fixers would have likely threatened to go public that their planted lies to Christopher Steele were gobbled up by President Clinton’s own private Fusion GPS hit team. In essence, the Russians would have claimed that they had fueled the dossier that wounded the Trump campaign ‐ and expected some sort of quid pro quo, perhaps in Uranium One fashion.
Obama-administration bureaucrats ‐ Attorney General Loretta Lynch, subordinate attorneys general such as Bruce Ohr and Rod Rosenstein, FBI grandees such as James Baker, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, intelligence kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, and national-security officials turned intelligence sleuths such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power ‐ would all have been competing on the basis of service beyond the call of duty for top jobs in the Clinton administration.
Among their swamp talking points would have been rival obsequious claims to have squashed Trump. Clinton-administration transition officials would have had to parcel out patronage by judging the relative help of people who had seeded Hillary’s Steele dossier around the government and the media, or fooled a FISA court to monitor Carter Page and thereby generated leaks that the Trump campaign was "under investigation," or obstructed the Clinton email investigation, or placed an informant in Trump’s campaign, or unmasked the contents of surveilled conversations and leaked them to the press.
Translated, that means the hysteria that helped prompt the Mueller investigation was in part whipped up by those who had knowingly acted unethically or illegally during and also after the 2016 campaign. These Obama officials bet on the sure-thing but wrong horse and suddenly, after Nov. 8, 2016, feared that they were soon to be subject to lots of criminal exposure.
Assume that both the ruse of "collusion" and James Comey’s leaking gambit to prompt a special counsel’s investigation were thus the preemptive defenses of an assortment of crimes by Obama-era officials, such as lying to federal officials, conspiracy to obstruct justice, illegally leaking confidential or classified documents to the media, deceiving a FISA court, and myriad conflicts of interest. In other words, there were never any evidentiary reasons to appoint a special counsel other than to divert attention away from an array of wrongdoing. After 22 months, that fact finally became clear even to a largely partisan group of attorneys, once eager to become folk heroes by aborting the Trump presidency.
Let us hope both that Attorney General Barr can now turn to the real illegal behavior of an entire array of Obama-administration officials, and that the public at last can have access to unredacted documents that record their frenzied and illegal efforts. Oh, DO read the whole thing! Take the time to look up a few obscure references. Classic Victor Davis Hanson!
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/27/2019 03:41 ||
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#1
Mueller's investigation delaying tactic and harassment and cover-up operation. FIFY
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.
[Babylon Bee] CHICAGO, IL‐All charges against Jussie Smollett for faking a hate crime against himself have been dropped after the Empire actor and well-respected employer of Nigerians used the "I have a lot of money" defense in court.
Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or "Barbary," had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States’ hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:
[The Register] 0.4 to 10% of corporate wage slaves could be up for the chop.
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
[YNETNEWS] A year has passed since the start of March of Return campaign and 
[NationalReview] The most telling revelation in Attorney General William Barr’s letter about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s much-anticipated final report is that Mueller has punted on the main question he pursued for nearly two years of investigation: Did President Trump commit an obstruction offense?
In the end, then, Mueller had a choice to make: Either (a) accept that Barr’s interpretation of obstruction law was correct, or (b) recommend an indictment based on the more expansive interpretation of obstruction that his staff seems to have been pursuing and dare Barr to reverse him. 
Translated, that means the hysteria that helped prompt the Mueller investigation was in part whipped up by those who had knowingly acted unethically or illegally during and also after the 2016 campaign. These Obama officials bet on the sure-thing but wrong horse and suddenly, after Nov. 8, 2016, feared that they were soon to be subject to lots of criminal exposure.
