Category: Current Events

Judge Emmet Sullivan Just Got Busted by the Court of Appeals

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The Clown Prince of Injustice Judge Emmet Sullivan just got served with an order from the DC Court of Appeals to show why he hasn’t honored the Federal Government’s petition to vacate the prosecution of General Flynn.

DC Circuit Panel Orders Judge Sullivan To Respond Within 10 Days…

By some wonderful miracle two of the three judges on the panel are Republican appointees and it looks like old Emmet is headed for a spanking.  The order says he has to explain himself by June 1st.  Well ten days is a long time but I guess the General has been waiting three years already so it won’t be much of a stretch.

Could Ukraine Be Allowed to Give Creepy Uncle Joe the Perp Walk?

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A Ukrainian judge ordered that Joe Biden’s name be explicitly listed as the perpetrator  of a crime against the fired former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Victor Shokin.  I guess Biden bragging that he coerced President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin to avoid losing loan guarantees from Washington was too much for the current government to stomach.  Biden got Shokin fired because he was looking into kickbacks that Hunter Biden was getting from the energy company Burisma.

Ukraine judge orders Joe Biden be listed as alleged perpetrator of crime in prosecutor’s firing

Do you think the Ukraine could print out a wanted poster with Joe’s skeletal mug grinning from behind bars?  Maybe they could have him dressed in one of those old timey striped prison suits.  Could the Justice Department expedite the extradition to allow the Democrats time to select a different candidate for November?  Curious Americans would like to know.

 

The Merry-Go-Round Spins On

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One thing that eventually gets drummed into you by sad experience is that there’s no such thing as happily ever after.  And that’s because no matter how well things are going, whenever chance conspires against us there are those who will capitalize on the opportunity and confuse the weak minded and tempt the weak willed to drag the country through more hell.  And the only things that will get you through the crisis are steady nerves, dogged determination and enough brains to think your way out of the trap.

I would characterize our present situation as exactly that.  The election and the COVID-19 epidemic are a perfect storm that will require remarkable skills to navigate successfully.  Add to this the investigations into Flynn and the other Russia-gate abuses and you have a high stakes pressure cooker, the outcome of which, absolutely no one can predict.  Look at all the possible consequences of these actions.  With respect to the investigations under Barr the outcomes range from zero to infinity.  At the zero end Durham decides that although laws were broken, the actions were in good faith and the only corrective actions should be stepped up internal oversight of sensitive operations.  At infinity we have prison terms for everyone from Lisa Page to Barack Obama.  That’s quite a range of outcomes.  Then look at the election.  So many lives have been disrupted by this emergency that trying to compensate everyone for the harm done by the shutdown is well-nigh impossible.  But the President has to make a good faith effort to do just that.  He must convince these people that his administration is the best hope for restoring the devastated middle class and that the Democrats will use this catastrophe to establish the welfare state they’ve always wanted.  And I think he will do just that and get re-elected handily.

But here is the point of this whole post.  Even if President Trump is able to achieve all the objectives on his plate.  If he gains the confidence of the voting public and gains re-election, if he restores the economy to growth and saves the small businessmen, if Barr uncovers the smoking gun and sends the Coup to prison for a couple of decades, if the Republicans capture the House, hold the Senate and add one more solid conservative vote to the Supreme Court, if the Justice Department sues the Tech Giants into restoring free speech to the Right, if all these things happen we are still exactly one disaster away from losing everything to the Left.

What we have to remember is that we’re always fighting a defensive war.  The Left has already won all the battles in the culture and we’re just curled up in a defensive crouch waiting for the next blow to fall.  The only way we will ever change the balance of power is to go on the offense and attack something of theirs.  What it will require is coordination between the Federal and State governments to pick a target and inflict a defeat on the Left that will be so unpleasant that it will elicit an overreaction that will provide the opportunity for a reinforcing defeat.  Now what this target will be is open for debate.  My thought is it should be in a deep red state that has a blue city located in it.  It could be a sanctuary city and the target could be illegal alien employment by big businesses.  A partnership between ICE and the state government could arrange for a mass arrest of illegal aliens at a large company and the Federal government could use the evidence to punish the corporation so ruthlessly that the rest of the companies panic and get their houses in order.  Once the jobs disappear the Federal government steps in and comes up with some moderate and humane way to get the illegals to go home to their lands.

Once the operation against illegal aliens in the workplace begins all the Blue States will erupt into rage and all kinds of protests will occur.  If some jurisdiction in one of the Blue States overreacts and gives the Federal government an excuse to punish them that will be the second defeat that I see as reinforcing the Left’s despair.

But it doesn’t have to be immigration.  Suppose Texas legislates against gay marriage and the Supreme Court upholds it.  Think of the insanity that would break out.  All the Blue States would then vote to unrecognize the normal marriages of citizens in Texas.  They would break off all economic trade with Texas and do any number of other stupid things for which they would suffer.  And once the Supreme Court fails to find a constitutional right for gay marriage then almost immediately about twenty states will make laws against it too.  And that would be wonderful.  We would have a de facto division of the United States into two zones.  We could call them the Normal States and Queer States.  And that would be just the start.  Abortion laws, obscenity laws, sodomy laws and other social issues would be fodder for further differences between the two camps.  And the beauty of it is no one in the Blue States is being forced to do anything they don’t want to.  The upshot should be to make the Blue States bluer and the Red States redder.  Now that’s diversity even I can stand behind.

18MAY2020 – OCF Update

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Good morning folks.  As we rapidly approach summer I have had the chance to confirm certain things I believed.  The shutdown was a terrible idea foisted upon us by incompetents.  The at-risk population was the elderly and especially the chronically ill.  We have crippled our economy and possibly permanently decimated the small businesses of our independent middle class with nothing to show for it.  Very soon the Democrats will attempt to blame President Trump for doing the things they were shouting for him to do and not doing the things they forbade him to do.  So be it.  It’s his task to expose them as the liars they are.  It’s ours to support him.

One thing this whole sad spectacle has exposed is that there are way too many overweight and out of shape Americans.  Part of that is the result of an elderly baby boomer bulge in the population and the higher life expectancy today.  But our sedentary life style is extremely unhealthy.  And even a chronically lazy man such as myself will now endeavor to mend my ways.  At this point dying of the corona virus would be just too much insult to injury.

So now the part of the COVID-19 story that will interest me will be how President Trump revitalizes the areas of the country that might vote for him.  Of course he’ll want all areas to rebound but the Northeast is going out of its way to cripple its own economy by stretching out the lockdown.  He should preferentially help areas where his voters live.  And the rust belt states that got him elected should get special attention.  Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  Add in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and maybe New Mexico and you’ve covered the areas where the President wants to add to supporters.

The Northeast has no electoral votes for him.  They should have the same opportunities to recover as the rest of the country but the President should direct those voters to the governors who shut their businesses down and continue to block efforts to restore life to their economies.  If they expect to escape the consequences of terrible judgement they might want to rethink their allegiance to the Left.

Surprisingly, the DOJ investigations seem to be active.  Maybe I was wrong about Barr.  Time will tell.  As far as Biden’s campaign, I think the Left can’t decide if it’s time to pull the plug by supporting Tara Reade’s story.  They are holding onto it as an insurance policy to switch candidates at the last minute.  We’ll know the moment has arrived when the networks and the newspapers suddenly discover her story’s credibility.

Looks like we’ll have a busy time ahead.  As always feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments sections.  Hard as it is to believe, there may be opinions other than my own that could be heard.

Reality Reasserts Itself

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Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix.

You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back, victorious over your ignorant confident scorn.

― Horace

Bill DeBlasio and Andrew Cuomo can pontificate all they’d like about the dangers of the COVID-19 virus and threaten dire consequences for those who break the social distancing rules but summer weather is coming to New York City and a modern paraphrase of old Horace is that, for the young, the Law of the 3B’s (Beaches, Bikinis and Booze) trumps all others.  See the linked scenes of decidedly out of shape New Yorkers frolicking on the beaches of Jersey and Manhattanites gathering on the streets to drink beer and socialize regardless of proximity and decidedly sans masks.

If the idiots in Gracey Mansion and the Albany State House want to do something useful, what they should be thinking about is how to meaningfully protect the truly at risk, namely, the grandparents of those young people who will succumb to the virus if exposed.  Over the course of the long hot summer it would be a good idea to provide the elderly currently living in households that include people who aren’t maintaining quarantine an option to temporarily remove themselves to a group environment where strict quarantine is being practiced.  Considering how many assisted living residents have died during this epidemic it should be possible for the state to charter the empty rooms for people who are afraid they’re at risk due to proximity to the young and healthy who will carry the virus without even knowing it.

The problem is DeBlasio and Cuomo are broke.  They haven’t the cash (or brains) needed to implement a plan to actually help the situation.  All they’re capable of is grandstanding, threatening and emoting in front of the camera.  And now that policing social distancing has been racialized by the usual suspects the NYPD will stop bothering about it.  When the majority of the non-elderly discover that they won’t die from going to the local bar it won’t take long before most of city life falls back into the normal pattern.  And once that happens the percentage of people with COVID-19 antibodies will reach the herd resistance threshold pretty quickly.

I’m guessing that the northeastern states won’t do anything really constructive for the elderly.  They actually have a vested interest in maintaining the COVID-19 scamdemic as long as possible.  But New York City has successfully killed off the majority of the vulnerable elderly already (see graph below).

But now that a number of states are ending the shutdown we should know in just a few weeks whether the dire warnings from the Left are accurate or overblown.  That means by early June we’ll know where we stand.  Maybe I’ll have to eat my words and acknowledge that the Faucis and Birxes were right, that the COVID-19 virus is the apocalypse and we’ll all have to become wards of the welfare state forever.  But somehow I don’t think that’s the case.  I predict by July I’ll be hosting the photog clan to a barbecue and poolside party.  I better go add some chlorine to the pool.

Cleanup Day On My Computer Bookmarks

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Today was a big day.  I was able to assure myself that the shape of the daily death curve is unmistakably trending down.  Undoubtedly they’ll keep adding the normal dead to the total but even that hasn’t made a difference.  So in honor of the occasion I deleted my links to the corona virus web pages for Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University.  Good riddance!

Now the only COVID-19 info I care about is getting the economy back on track and our manufacturing capacity out of the Land of the COVID virus.

14MAY2020 – Boosting My Morale

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I remember how much fun it was to watch the compilation videos of the 2016 election and the reactions of the Left.  To hear them go from arrogant assurance to nervous uncertainty to shocked disbelief and finally crash land into wallowing misery was a comedic masterpiece on par with the best of Seinfeld or Monty Python.  The loopiness of the lefties both famous and unknown was marvelous.  Their gob-smacked stuttering shock was music to my ears.  In every way it was poetic justice.

And I’ve missed that experience.  It’s a great tonic to see your enemies driven before you in panic and derision.  At the very least, it’ll be six months until the election and even the debates, if they happen, are months away.  So, what’s a deplorable to do?

YouTube may be the Great Satan but it is the lazy man’s answer to any audio-visual search that could exist.  So, I searched under President Trump and Acosta and I found all kinds of comic gold.  It really is remarkable just how much abuse Jim Acosta has absorbed in the last three years.  President Trump has called him a hack, a liar, a purveyor of fake news, an employee for a fake news network.  The only thing he hasn’t done is make fun of his mother.  And then I saw some videos purporting to show the President attacking female reporters unfairly.  More gold.  For them his favorite line is calling their questions nasty.  One compilation claimed that the President especially attacked women of color.  And of course, that was the focus of that video.  But it’s great to see the President doling out equal derision and scorn to all fake news purveyors regardless of race, color or sex.  In fact, I like to think that the President would be proud to give the same messages of scorn to a tall muscular man in a sun dress as he does to a petite Chinese woman or a plain old doofus like Jim Acosta.  His message is one of egalitarianism.  No matter who you are and what you look like all it takes to qualify as a purveyor of fake news is a bedrock lack of honesty and an IQ of about 85.  In a way the White House Press Corps has become a sort of Ellis Island or mixing pot of dishonest talking heads.  Probably the biggest distinguishing characteristic is just how rude any particular reporter is willing to be to the President of the United States.  In this competition women have without a doubt taken the lead.  And this is another area where women’s rights could advance.  I have always harbored the hope that one day in the middle of one of Acosta’s rude outbursts against the President that he would instruct the Secret Service to drag Acosta out by the arms and legs and hurl him out the door.  If they tossed him just right, I always thought that he might bounce a couple of times like when you skip a flat stone over the surface of a lake.  The move could be nick-named the “Acosta.”  What would be great is if someday a woman could be acosta-ed just like a man without any sexism about how women aren’t just as capable of two or even three bounces on that polished White House floor.  That is my dream.  That a reporter not be judged by the choice of its pronouns but rather on the basis of its aero dynamicity and bounce elasticity.  Kinda chokes you up, don’t it?  I can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing somewhere in the background.

13MAY2020 – OCF Update

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Looking around it looks like we’ll be hearing about the same issues for the foreseeable future:

  • The Blue and Red States will be touting their opposing strategies for weathering the COVID-19 epidemic. Currently the Blue States have selected as their strategy of inflating the death toll to include anyone who dies in their states.  Along with this they are dragging their feet on re-opening their businesses.  The Red States are moving ahead with normalizing life in their states.  Interestingly they are not seeing large numbers of deaths like we see in New York and New Jersey.  And even with the death toll inflation in the Blue States it appears they haven’t been able to hide the fact that the epidemic is receding.  I’ll predict that in a couple of more weeks even the blue States will be anxious to declare victory and start opening up their businesses and try to salvage their economies.
  • The Flynn prosecution will spawn a controversy with the Right touting the DOJ investigation into the illegal basis of the Russia-gate prosecutions and the Left condemning Barr and Durham as partisan hacks motivated by allegiance to the Trump administration. With Durham releasing information about the scope of the conspiracy this may quickly turn into the most interesting story of the summer and fall.  If the DOJ decides not to prosecute the conspirators but instead expose and embarrass them through publication of their dishonest actions it could have the effect of vindicating President Trump and vilifying Obama and his whole administration.  And that would be very bad for a Biden candidacy.
  • The Trump and Biden campaigns will spar ceaselessly over any and all issues. What you will hear endlessly is that Joe Biden is ahead by some number of points, between 5% and 10%.  It’ll never be explained how someone as universally disdained by even the Democrat voters as Biden could manage to remain perpetually popular and ahead but that is their story and they’ll be sticking to it.
  • Currently the Tara Reade story will be a lightning rod allowing the Republicans to brand anyone who condemned Justice Kavanaugh on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford but disbelieves Reade about Biden as hypocrites. If Reade begins to gain traction with women voters, I think we’ll finally see the Democrat party either convince Biden to step aside or begin the process of selecting an alternate candidate.  And that will be a difficult process.  Bernie Sanders will be bypassed again and that is bound to alienate his many staunch supporters.  If Bernie is left waiting at the altar again the Bernie Bros will stay home in droves, or even worse, a bunch of them will vote for Trump.
  • Nancy Pelosi has assembled a three trillion-dollar bill that would allow the bankrupt Blue States to stick the federal government with the cost of the public sector union pension funds. The Senate Leader Mitchell McConnell isn’t interested in funding this.  But President Trump may be interested in additional relief for small businesses that have been crushed by the long shutdown.  He may try to broker a deal between the House and Senate.  I know that the President also favors some kind of public works projects.  This will be a large story in the fall.
  • The China story will be a continuing saga for the Trump re-election campaign. The President has indicated that he holds China responsible for the outbreak and the subsequent damage to the American economy.  It remains to be seen if this translates into a specific policy or policies.  You could imagine some kind of incentive for American companies that relocate industrial capacity from China to the United States.

As you can see these are interesting times but currently all of these issues will be moving forward in fits and starts.  Right now, none of them has a blockbuster event occurring so there will be a lot of opinion stories producing a lot of smoke and heat but little light.  I’ll try to restrain myself from piping in on every little ripple in the pond.  What I’m hoping to see is something from Durham.  As I’ve said, I don’t think we’ll get anything too spectacular.  But I would like to see something before summer.  Failing that I’d like to see the President formulate an economic rescue plan for small businesses that is more comprehensive and fairer than the halfway measures we’ve seen so far.

So, there’s my update.  Stay tuned for whatever is breaking next.

Hey, Could Bill Barr Really be Going After These Rats?

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You know there’s nothing more comforting for someone who’s been burned before than the cynical pose.  You can sit back and make fun of all the suckers and mugs who really believe that the game isn’t fixed.  Well, as I declared just a week ago or so I don’t think Bill Barr intends to prosecute any of the Deep State Cabalists that attacked the Trump presidency, not even the low-level losers like Strzok and Page.  So much time has gone by that I concluded he was just marking time and running out the clock in order to appear to be investigating the offense but really just protecting the status quo.

But it’s a funny thing.  The small progress that has resulted in the charges against General Flynn being tossed out of court has stirred up a hornet’s nest of outrage from all corner of the Swamp.  Even the capo di tutti capi of the Swamp, Barry Obama resurfaced to complain that freeing an innocent man was an unheard-of innovation that never could have happened in his day.  And his minions rallied more than 2,000 of the swamp creatures to sign off on a letter condemning Barr for daring to recognize an illegal FBI prosecution of Flynn and urging the judge to refuse to dismiss the case.  And the media has been flooded with articles about the flurry of activity by the Justice Department:

  • Declassified Evidence Undercuts Clapper’s Testimony to Congress
  • Durham Moving “Full-Throttle”
  • Trump Implies Obama Link on Flynn, Labels Controversy “Obamagate”
  • Ex-DOJ, FBI Officials Call on Barr to Resign for Dropping Flynn Charges
  • Clinton Camp Knew About Plan to Have Steele Brief Media on Dossier
  • Search for Answers in FBI’s Mishandling of Flynn Case
  • 13 Unanswered Questions About Dismissal of Flynn Case
  • Why Did Obama Tell the FBI to Hide Its Activities?

Could I be wrong about Barr?  Is there still hope he’ll get something done?  I’ll have to admit that the prospect of seeing the Cabal languishing in some super-max prison is so exciting that it almost makes me faint but I fear disappointment so much that I would do anything rather than go off that cliff again.  Let’s look over the prospects.  It’s possible that Barr will allow for the investigation to free the wrongly accused and even expose the Obama minions who persecuted them to censure in a report that details the false prosecutions.  He could do that without actually indicting a single soul.  This would be a kind of “trial in the papers” exercise.  And if done during the election cycle it could have a good effect on President Trump’s numbers.  That’s sort of what I was saying last week.  This is the weakest of the positive outcomes Barr could be working toward.

The next higher outcome is the scapegoat.  That is where DOJ latches onto a stooge like Strzok and blames the whole mess on him.  He’s painted as a rogue agent who exceeded his authority and in an excess of zeal committed crimes that no one else recognized.  And Strzok will be allowed to cop a plea where he’ll get a slap on the wrist and the whole thing will be buried in some bureaucratic teachable moment exercise.  This is also a not unlikely outcome.  Strzok probably won’t even lose his pension and he can write a book about what a hero he was for zealously guarding the country against Russians.

Beyond this are the really unlikely outcomes.  Even the lesser cases involve the indictment of characters like McCabe, Comey, Clapper and Brennan.  These men all lied under oath.  There are documents attesting to their complicity in illegal activities.  Dragging all of this out in public would reveal to the public a partisan and disloyal intelligence community working against a duly elected President of the United States and routinely using tactics that would seem more at home in the soviet KGB.  This exercise would have the maximum effect on the public and would reinforce the opinion that the Democrats, the Deep State and the Media conspired to lie to the American public about the whole Russia-gate scam.  Potentially such an investigation and the indictments could go up as high as Obama.  There is no limit to just how much dirt could be unearthed if rats like Comey think they might be going to prison and needed to turn state’s evidence.

And this latter outcome is the one I find so unlikely at this point.  The damage to the FBI and the CIA would be massive.  After they see how corrupt these agencies are the public may be willing to see them weakened or even eliminated.  But somebody like Barr is almost a father figure to the Department of Justice.  Helping to chloroform the FBI might seem like murdering his own kids.  And for that reason, I don’t think he’ll ever unleash a full investigation that puts the blame where it really belongs, at the top.  At best he’ll target Strzok or possibly McCabe.  But no higher.

Let’s assume I’m right.  But if Barr really does decide to expose the crooked prosecution of President Trump’s men it will still be enough justification for a far-reaching purge of the Justice Department and the other intelligence agencies and that will be a very useful change for the next four years.

So where does this leave me?  Well, really back where we started from.  I still don’t know that Barr is going to do much of anything.  Could all the noise we’re hearing just be a bunch of nothing?  Yes.  For all I know this is just the smokescreen that is supposed to convince us that something will happen.  I still think that’s the likeliest outcome.

But I do have to admit that Barr’s lieutenants have unearthed a lot of evidence to show that all of the usual suspects did an awful lot of lying around the time of the incoming administration.  That alone is a valuable result.  It shows that the Russia-gate scam was just that and the Cabal knew it all along.  Surely that makes Barr a little more useful than I gave him credit for last week.  Bill Barr, I guess I underestimated you at least a little bit.  We’ll soon see just how much.