Safety School, Baby!

My alma mater gets a nod from the Style Section of the Washington Post, but not of the sort it would want:

But I’m still at a loss about what to do with a situation like Kyle Kashuv’s. And not in some what-is-the-meaning-of-redemption way. But practically speaking: Unless we seal them all in a cave, people who do bad (but not illegal) things are going to continue to be part of our society. What do we think that should look like? What is your personal vision?

The miscreant in question is Kyle Kashuv, a top student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who had the credentials to get into Harvard, but was drummed out because SJWs don't like 2nd Amendment types (Kashuv spoke in favor of the 2nd Amendment, unlike his classmate David Hogg, who is sailing into Harvard with less stellar credentials but a more correct worldview). The SJW spelunking teams dug up some nasty texts he wrote two years ago, where he apparently used the "n" word and maybe said some other uncharitable things that 16-year-old dudes say as they marinate in testosterone. Harvard doesn't want him now, so what to do with him? Post Style Writer/Moral Arbiter Monica Hesse has some suggestions (emphasis in original):

University of Florida? I saw someone suggest that as a possible destination for Kashuv. The argument went that Kashuv shouldn’t be rewarded with the prestige of the Ivy League, but maybe could go off to some less illustrious institution, where he could then continue to work on himself.

I actually saw a fair number of suggestions like this: Not Harvard. Somewhere else. Somewhere less good. The solution seemed reasonable, but it had a tinge of classism, an element of passing the buck. If you don’t believe that Harvard students should have to attend classes with someone who has used racist terminology within the past two years, then why would you subject University of Florida students to that? Or students from Beloit or Colorado State? Would those universities even admit him, or would they follow Harvard’s lead?

Beloit! My alma mater! The quintessential safety school! Beloit, the self-proclaimed "Yale of the Midwest," known up and down the Acela Corridor as a place to park your kid if he's not smart enough to get into Harvard, or was too busy doing bong hits at Pomfret to crack the code at Princeton. But should my fair school be the place where people who are Not Our Kind, Dear have to serve their penance? For her part, Monica Hesse went to Bryn Mawr, a place where one can sniff the glory of the Ivy League from the Philadelphia Main Line. Her school is a member in good standing of the all-female Seven Sisters, so a brute like Kashuv can't even try to go there. Besides which, elite liberal arts schools on the eastern seaboard are right out, including the other proper places in Bryn Mawr's neighborhood; I suspect Haverford would provide no haven and Swarthmore would swat him away, too, so he'll need to go someplace in District 10, where they keep the livestock. Thus, the Beloit dilemma.

Maybe I'm being churlish about this; perhaps Beloiters should be grateful that Hesse doesn't really want to subject my alma mater with an irredeemable type like Kashuv. After all, the Yale of the Midwest needs to maintain its own smelly orthodoxies and a guy who actually likes guns might scare the other matriculants. Hesse is concerned, though -- something has to be done, you see:

What does it look like to make amends? How do we decide what’s redeemable, for example, and then how does a person actually become redeemed? What kind of roles does our society allow for them, and when?

When I read Baker’s essay, I didn’t know what to do with the bad men. I didn’t know where they should go, or what the right societal reentry would be. I didn’t want to talk about the bad men at all, but eventually we’ll need to.

The Baker in question is Katie Baker, whose essay concerns what to do with men who run afoul of #MeToo. No one has suggested Kashuv has a sexual issue, other than obviously being too in love with guns so he must be compensating for something, I guess.

Ultimately, we're back to the same cultural turf where we encountered the Covington Catholic kids, who were bad by definition, even though those doing the defining, including Hesse's employer, were wrong. Nicholas Sandmann is suing Monica Hesse's employer. Kyle Kashuv won't be, most likely. But I have two questions -- first, why on earth would Kyle Kashuv want "societal reentry" in the world Monica Hesse inhabits? And second, who made Hesse and her ilk the arbiters of such things?

Man of the Moment

You really should read the transcript of Attorney General William Barr's interview with Jan Crawford of CBS News. I'm going to point out two examples of why Barr is exactly the guy we need at this moment:

Honey badger

JAN CRAWFORD: You're saying that spying occurred. There's not anything necessarily wrong with that.

WILLIAM BARR: Right.

JAN CRAWFORD: As long as there's a reason for it.

WILLIAM BARR: Whether it's adequately predicated. And look, I think if we -- we are worried about foreign influence in the campaign? We should be because the heart of our system is the peaceful transfer of power through elections and what gives the government legitimacy is that process. And if foreign elements can come in and affect it, that's bad for the republic. But by the same token, it's just as, it's just as dangerous to the continuation of self-government and our republican system, republic that we not allow government power, law enforcement or intelligence power, to play a role in politics, to intrude into politics, and affect elections.

JAN CRAWFORD: So it's just as dangerous- So when we talk about foreign interference versus say a government abuse of power, which is more troubling?

WILLIAM BARR: Well they're both, they're both troubling.

JAN CRAWFORD: Equally?

WILLIAM BARR: In my mind, they are, sure. I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they're there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.

JAN CRAWFORD: And you are concerned that that may have happened in 2016?

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I just think it has to be carefully look at because the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed.

Emphasis mine. Partisanship is one thing, but Barr points out the real danger, which is the certainty of thought that flows from Orange Man Bad. As I've observed the last 3-4 years, the greatest realization I've had to face is discovering that many of the things I believe weren't, ahem, adequately predicated.

The end of the interview is even more important:

JAN CRAWFORD: But when you came into this job, you were kind of, it's like the US Attorney in Connecticut, I mean, you had a good reputation on the right and on the left. You were a man with a good reputation. You are not someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in? And what is your response to it? How do you? What's your response to that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well in a way I did expect it.

JAN CRAWFORD: You did?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, because I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don't care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that's antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life it really doesn't make any difference.

JAN CRAWFORD: You are at the end of your career, or?

WILLIAM BARR: I am at the end of my career. I've you know--

JAN CRAWFORD: Does it, I mean, it's the reputation that you have worked your whole life on though?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, but everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

Emphasis mine. This is a man who doesn't care if he gets dissed in the Washington Post, or doesn't get to hang at the cocktail parties in Georgetown. He understands there is no value in holding the esteem of jackals. He may look like a cross between John Goodman and Roger Ebert, but he is Shane. This is the man of the moment.

UPDATE: if you weren't certain that Barr is the guy we need, consider this: swamp denizen Jonathan Chait is terrified.

Dirty Cop Barr

I saw a little of the circus up on Capitol Hill yesterday, in which various half-witted Democratic senators (redundant, I suppose) tried to turn Attorney General William Barr into an international supervillain. I thought to myself --

• they don't really believe any of their claims, but 
• they need to get the narrative rolling right away, because 
• when Barr starts indicting people, they will then be able to claim he's a Trump stooge, and 
• that Hillary Clinton in particular needed to have that narrative in the air

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson got there first, with a list of useful reminders:

Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.

The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.

Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.

100% true statement. Back to Hanson:

Without Steele's skullduggery, there likely would have been no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court-approved surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page. There might have been no FBI plants inserted into the Trump campaign. There might have been no subsequent leaking to the press of classified documents to prompt a Trump collusion investigation.

Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.

It is. But her luck could be running out soon, despite the 20-screen multiplex of project emanating from Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono, Kamala Harris, et al. Why? Back to Hanson:

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

Thus, she and her patrons must turn William Barr into a dirty cop. The alternative?

Must Protect Precious

I've heard rumors about Amy Klobuchar's non-public deportment for years. And now HuffPo is out with a shot at Saint Amy just as she prepares to run for President:

At least three people have withdrawn from consideration to lead Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s nascent 2020 presidential campaign — and done so in part because of the Minnesota Democrat’s history of mistreating her staff, HuffPost has learned.

Klobuchar, who plans to make an announcement about a potential presidential bid on Sunday in Minneapolis, has spent the past several months positioning herself to run for president. She’s beloved in her state as a smart, funny and personable lawmaker and has gained national attention for her lines of questioning at high-profile hearings.

Beloved is certainly overstating the case, but read on:

But some former Klobuchar staffers, all of whom spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity, describe Klobuchar as habitually demeaning and prone to bursts of cruelty that make it difficult to work in her office for long.

It is common for staff to wake up to multiple emails from Klobuchar characterizing one’s work as “the worst” briefing or press release she’d seen in her decades of public service, according to two former aides and emails seen by HuffPost.

It's always been tough to get anyone in the Minnesota media to say anything untoward about Klobuchar, who has always worn her father's Star Tribune career as a protective shield. But she won't be afforded such courtesies elsewhere. So how will her courtiers here in Minnesota greet this report? Guess, just guess:

But there's a controversy to the controversy, with some observers — including Tim Dickinson of the Rolling Stone — wondering if the reporting of such rumors reflects a sexist double standard:

White Knight

The views of Tim Dickinson are probative, of course. And if "you've never read this story about a male politician," whose responsibility is that? Unless you are involved in the media yourself, you only read what other people write, and what their editors and publishers send to press. The last time this issue came up was in Politico, which ran this handy chart:

Men and women

You see Saint Amy at the top, but you see men on the list as well. It's especially interesting that the two Republicans on the list are women often accused of being RINOs, but that's another post.

Unless you are actively involved in politics, or are rich enough to buy their attention, chances are you don't really know much of anything about the politicians who purport to represent you. You don't know but you've been told how smart, funny, and personable Amy Klobuchar is. We're more likely to learn the truth about who she really is now, because people who aren't in her thrall will now begin to tell the tale.

Imaginary Hazard Day

About 20 years ago now, my old boss and I came up with the idea of Imaginary Hazard Day. It is always "celebrated" on October 26, for no apparent reason other than that was the day we came up with it. Every year, we urge everyone to take all unnecessary precautions.

As it happens, this year Imaginary Hazard day falls a few days after someone (singular or plural, as yet undetermined) sent a series of devices that may (or may not, and likely not) be bombs to some of our favorite portside politicians.

I don't know the whole thing is a legitimate terrorist activity, or a false flag, or something else. I do know this -- if these bombs were really a danger, we'd have never seen one of them. The bomb squads would have detonated all of them to prevent danger, mayhem, whatever. We have seen pictures of the bombs, though, pulled right out of the envelopes in which they arrived:

Blowed up real good

So, if there was a real threat, we do we have this image? Frankly, the device looks more like a Pez dispenser than a bomb. If this were an actual explosive device, it would have been removed immediately from the place it was delivered and no one would have opened the package. So what's really happening? It's a question well worth asking on Imaginary Hazard Day.

The Mitchell Report

No, not the baseball one. The one that Rachel Mitchell, central figure in the Kavanaugh Klash, put together. WaPo has the document, not that any of Christine Blasey Ford's partisans will accept it:

The main observations, although you should absolutely read the whole thing:

Dr. Ford has not offered a consistent account of when the alleged assault happened.
• In a July 6 text to the Washington Post, she said it happened in the “mid 1980s.”
• In her July 30 letter to Senator Feinstein, she said it happened in the “early 80s.”
• Her August 7 statement to the polygrapher said that it happened one “high school
summer in early 80’s,” but she crossed out the word “early” for reasons she did not
explain.
• A September 16 Washington Post article reported that Dr. Ford said it happened in the
“summer of 1982.”
• Similarly, the September 16 article reported that notes from an individual therapy session
in 2013 show her describing the assault as occurring in her “late teens.” But she told the
Post and the Committee that she was 15 when the assault allegedly occurred. She has not
turned over her therapy records for the Committee to review.
• While it is common for victims to be uncertain about dates, Dr. Ford failed to explain
how she was suddenly able to narrow the timeframe to a particular season and particular
year.

She had help, of course. Who helped her? We're not likely to find out until much later. Back to Mitchell:

Dr. Ford has struggled to identify Judge Kavanaugh as the assailant by name.
• No name was given in her 2012 marriage therapy notes.
• No name was given in her 2013 individual therapy notes.
• Dr. Ford’s husband claims to recall that she identified Judge Kavanaugh by name in
2012. At that point, Judge Kavanaugh’s name was widely reported in the press as a
potential Supreme Court nominee if Governor Romney won the presidential election.
• In any event, it took Dr. Ford over thirty years to name her assailant. Delayed disclosure of abuse is common so this is not dispositive.

Dispositive? No. But does it raise questions? Mais oui. More:

• When speaking with her husband, Dr. Ford changed her description of the incident to become less specific.
• Dr. Ford testified that she told her husband about a “sexual assault” before they were married.
• But she told the Washington Post that she informed her husband that she was the victim of “physical abuse” at the beginning of their marriage.
• She testified that, both times, she was referring to the same incident.
• Dr. Ford has no memory of key details of the night in question—details that could help corroborate her account.
• She does not remember who invited her to the party or how she heard about it.
• She does not remember how she got to the party.
• She does not remember in what house the assault allegedly took place or where that house was located with any specificity.

Specificity would doom her account, most likely. Back to Mitchell:

Perhaps most importantly, she does not remember how she got from the party back to her
house.
• Her inability to remember this detail raises significant questions.
• She told the Washington Post that the party took place near the Columbia Country
Club. The Club is more than 7 miles from her childhood home as the crow flies,
and she testified that it was a roughly 20-minute drive from her childhood home.
• She also agreed for the first time in her testimony that she was driven somewhere
that night, either to the party or from the party or both.
• Dr. Ford was able to describe hiding in the bathroom, locking the door, and
subsequently exiting the house. She also described wanting to make sure that she
did not look like she had been attacked.
• But she has no memory of who drove her or when. Nor has anyone come forward
to identify him or herself as the driver.
• Given that this all took place before cell phones, arranging a ride home would not
have been easy. Indeed, she stated that she ran out of the house after coming
downstairs and did not state that she made a phone call from the house before she
did, or that she called anyone else thereafter.

Although Mitchell is circumspect, the answer is clear -- it's a tale that doesn't add up. There's a lot more to read, including the frankly bizarre memory lapses that surround Ford's interactions with the Washington Post and with the Democrats who greased the skids.

More fun than a screen door on a submarine

Keith Ellison gets blown up on the eve of his election:

Rep. Keith Ellison, who is currently running for attorney general of Minnesota, is being accused of domestic violence against his former partner Karen Monahan.

Austin Monahan, Karen Monahan’s son, aired the allegations in a Facebook post Saturday night. According to Austin Monahan, Ellison put his mother through “pure hell.” In the Facebook post, he claims to have seen a video of Ellison dragging Karen Monahan off the bed by her feet while screaming expletives at her. The alleged incident is just one of several, Austin Monahan warned.

That report is from Alpha News, a right-leaning website. The rest of the local media is trying to protect precious, of course. But it might not work. Karen Monahan has been hinting at Ellison's issues for quite a long time now.

Hmmm.

No, it's not going away

We have early voting in Minnesota. It's safe to assume ol' Keith has a lot of early votes in the bank, but will it be enough? Tomorrow should be even more fun. And no, we haven't forgotten about Lori Swanson's problems, either.

Marquette gets its ass kicked

I never attended Marquette University, but it's always had a place in my heart, especially from my childhood memories of Al McGuire's great basketball teams of the 1970s, which was about the only successful sports entity in Wisconsin in those days. I always rooted for those teams. To this day, I still root for Marquette's basketball team, even when they are playing my otherwise beloved Wisconsin Badgers.

Having said that, I'm delighted that Marquette lost yesterday. And they lost a big way:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is ordering Marquette University to give a suspended professor his job back.

"That feels very good. My case has finally been vindicated," John McAdams said Friday, July 6.

It's been nearly four years -- seven semesters -- since John McAdams taught a political science course at Marquette University.

"It's frustrating. I don't like being out of the classroom. I like teaching," McAdams said.

McAdams was suspended in 2014 for a blog post that criticized another instructor who had refused to allow a debate over gay marriage in her classroom.

As a reminder, Marquette is a Catholic university. And as a reminder, in 2014 gay marriage was still very much a topic of conversation and debate -- the Obergfell case did not come down until 2015. Writing for National Review, David French provides a succinct summary of what happened:

The facts of the case are relatively simple. In late 2014, a student approached Professor McAdams and told him that his instructor, a graduate student named Cheryl Abbate, had “listed a number of issues on the board” — including “gay rights” — and then said, “Everybody agrees on this, and there is no need to discuss it.”

After class, the student approached the instructor and attempted to engage her in a discussion about gay marriage. After an initially appropriate exchange, the instructor shut down the discussion, saying that “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments” and “in this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” She then “invited the student to drop the class.”

The student recorded the encounter and played the recording for McAdams. McAdams wrote up the encounter on his blog, the “Marquette Warrior,” named the instructor, and linked to her public personal webpage. As his post gained increasing public attention, Abbate received a series of hateful messages from third parties, including some that threatened violence.

Marquette decided that McAdams had doxxed Abbate. Back to French:

Marquette responded to this incident by rallying behind Abbate and immediately placing McAdams under investigation. It convened a Faculty Hearing Committee (FHC) that featured a member who’d signed a statement condemning McAdams and then laughably claimed that the statement showed no disqualifying bias. After a four-day proceeding, the FHC recommended that the university suspend McAdams for “no less than one and no more than two full semesters.”

The president of the university then suspended McAdams without pay and said that his reinstatement would be contingent upon his signing a letter that — among other things — acknowledged his blog post “was reckless and incompatible with the mission and values of Marquette University.” McAdams refused to sign the letter and thus remained suspended. He filed suit, seeking reinstatement and back pay.

As a matter of law, this is easy. Marquette and McAdams had a contract. Marquette breached the contract and McAdams is entitled to relief. While I would prefer that private universities have latitude in how they run things, a contract is a contract. Back to French:

When a private university makes binding promises to its employees, courts can and must hold the university to its word. In my more than 20 years of battling censorship on college campuses, I’ve seen the same pattern time and again. Elite private universities — often using flowery, aspirational language — promise a marketplace of ideas and then deliver less academic freedom than the community college across town. They use their academic freedom to make a poetic promise, and then claim that same freedom allows them to go back on their word.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected this reasoning, noting that the university could not “excuse its breach of the Contract as an exercise of its academic freedom.” Instead, the analysis was simple: If McAdams’s blog post fit within the scope of protected academic expression, then the university was barred — by the terms of its own faculty handbook — from punishing McAdams for it. The handbook was crystal clear: “In no case, however, shall discretionary cause [for discipline] be interpreted so as to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.”

For its part, Marquette doesn't get it. The university posted a remarkably snotty response on its webpage:

The McAdams vs. Marquette case strikes at the core of who we are as a university. When a professor violates professional responsibility toward one of our students, Marquette must be able to respond with discipline. This is not about academic freedom or freedom of speech – it is about a professor’s unprofessional conduct toward a student teacher that resulted in direct, irreparable harm. John McAdams treated our student in a manner that does not represent our Guiding Values as a Catholic, Jesuit university, and in doing so, violated his contract.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a pile of crap. The only contract that matters in this case is the employment contract Marquette had with McAdams. McAdams did not violate his contract in any way. Marquette knows that, which is why they aren't going to appeal. There's more:

This case has never been about academic freedom or a professor’s political views. Had the professor published the same blog without the student-teacher’s name or contact information, he would not have been disciplined. Marquette has been, and always will be, committed to academic freedom. Marquette welcomes a wide variety of views and perspectives and is a place where vigorous, yet respectful, debate happens every day.

The point of publishing the name of Cheryl Abbate was simple -- to warn people who might take her classes that the academic freedom Marquette claims to revere was not operative in her classroom. People have a right to know that. As for the claim that she received threats after McAdams published his blog post, I would hope that law enforcement would seek out the individuals who made those threats and deal with them appropriately.

At bottom, the problem here is hardly unique to Marquette. Plenty of colleges have decided to set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner by setting up one-sided and frankly ludicrous disciplinary processes. French asks the relevant question:

How many times must universities lose in court before they learn to embrace true academic freedom? Time and again, they’ve lost challenges to their speech codes, speech zones, and restrictive rules that defund conservative and religious organizations. McAdams’s case represents the latest loss to a conservative professor who cried foul. At present, however, the calculation seems to be that universities would rather endure litigation than face the internal consequences of defying the most radical members of their academic communities — the professors, students, and administrators who demand censorship and repression.

Conservative students and professors have precious little internal leverage, so they are forced to appeal to courts to vindicate their rights. 

Or, in the case of the University of Missouri, universities face other consequences:

In an effort to manage a $49 million budget shortfall, the University of Missouri will eliminate 185 positions and lay off 30 staff members.

In addition, the university will reduce travel, eliminate some courses with low enrollment, cut down on sponsorships of some events and convert several printed products into online-only publications, said MU Chancellor Alexander N. Cartwright and Vice Chancellor for Finance Rhonda Gibler in an announcement made public Thursday.

Marquette could turn this around by affirming it is a place where academic freedom is revered and available to all. It does not appear they are ready to do so yet. Al McGuire isn't going to be able to help them.

Follow the money

Always good advice. And in the case of the gun grabbers, the money always leads back to places you'd expect. Let Daniel Greenfield be your guide to the March For Our Lives:

Take Everytown, the noisiest and most dishonest anti-gun group on the scene. The one consistent thing about anti-gun groups is that that they are usually the opposite of what their name says they are.

Everytown for Gun Safety was formed out of two other groups: Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Both are actually front groups for Michael Bloomberg, the lefty billionaire and former boss of the Big Apple, who used New York City resources to host at least one of its websites.

So Everytown is really New York City. 

If they can make it there, they'll make it anywhere. But there's more:

March for Our Lives is on every cable channel, but who runs it? The photogenic teen fronts are out front. But it’s obvious to everyone that a bunch of teens don’t have the resources and skills to coordinate a nationwide movement. Instead it’s the experienced activists who are actually running things.

The March for Our Lives Fund is incorporated as a 501(c)(4). Donations to 501(c)(4) groups are not tax- deductible. And they don’t have to disclose donors. That’s why they’re a great dark money conduit. 

And Greenfield is just getting started. You really need to read the whole thing.

Cleanup Time

Do you believe the federal government acts with integrity? At bottom, that's what's going on. Sharyl Attkisson makes the point:

There are two overarching issues.

First, there’s the alleged improper use of politically-funded opposition research to justify secret warrants to spy on U.S. citizens for political purposes.

Second, if corruption is ultimately identified at high levels in our intel agencies, it would necessitate a re-examination of every case and issue the officials touched over the past decade — or two — under administrations of both parties.

This is why I think the concerns transcend typical party politics.

It touches everybody. It’s potentially monumental.

It's important to understand what happened. Back to Attkisson:

[Sen. Charles] Grassley also pointed out that agencies accused of possible improprieties are the ones controlling the information. It’s the FBI who may have misused the unverified “dossier” opposition research, allegedly presenting it to a secret court as if it were verified intelligence.

“[FBI] Director [James] Comey testified in 2017 that it was ‘salacious and unverified’,” said Grassley. “So, it was a collection of unverified opposition research funded by a political opponent in an election year. Would it be proper for the Obama administration — or any administration — to use something like that to authorize further investigation that intrudes on the privacy of people associated with its political opponents? That should bother civil libertarians of any political stripe.”

It should, but if doesn't. Having other people find out what you've done bothers them, though.

Meantime, the Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It's like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.

This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans. “Don’t be irresponsible and reveal sources and methods,” they plead.

If the sources and methods are as corrupt as the people in charge are, it all needs to be revealed. And it's time to clean things up.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Hey, guess what? Missing documents!

The Justice Department has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump.

But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and retrieve about five months' worth of communications.

Technical reasons. Technically, the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes was a technical problem, too. There's more:

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided [Sen. Ron] Johnson's committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

The explanation for the gap was "misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities."

Of course, Strzok went to work for Robert Mueller. It's mind-boggling, really. But there's more:

In Johnson's letter to Wray, he asks whether the FBI has any records of communications between Strzok and Page during that five-month window and whether the FBI had searched their non-FBI phones for additional messages. He also asks for the "scope and scale" of any other records from the Clinton investigation that have been lost.

This is a crucial question. If all the records are gone, that's bad enough, but if only the Strzok stuff has gone missing, we're talking about a horrific scandal. What's available is bad enough:

One of the messages references a change in language to Comey's statement closing out the email case involving Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent in the 2016 presidential election. While an earlier draft of the statement said Clinton and President Barack Obama had an email exchange while Clinton was "on the territory" of a hostile adversary, the reference to Obama was at first changed to "senior government official" and then omitted entirely in the final version. 

In another exchange, the two express displeasure about the timing of Lynch's announcement that she would defer to the FBI's judgment on the Clinton investigation. That announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix, though both sides said the email investigation was never discussed. 

Strzok said in a July 1 text message that the timing of Lynch's announcement "looks like hell." And Page appears to mockingly refer to Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in the case as a "real profile in courag(e) since she knows no charges will be brought."

These people are the Justice Department. It's a bad joke and the more we learn, the worse it gets.

While we're doing this reckoning. . .

. . . let's really get down to it. Heading to theaters soon:

Remember, Ted Kennedy was the America's conscience. Consider this bit of wisdom from Neal Gabler:

What we loved and admired in him, what we hope for ourselves and our country, is his sense of moral largeness, his unbounded capacity to care, not because he was a saint but because he wasn't. By challenging us as he challenged himself, and reminding us where we fall short, Kennedy shames us, a gift that, one suspects, will linger in the national soul.

A guy who left a woman to drown in an Oldsmobile shames us. I suppose that's right, but not in the way Gabler thinks it does.

Need to know basis

Ann Althouse, making a point that needs to be made:

"Don’t get in the elevator with him, you know, and the whole every female in the press corps knew that, right, don’t get in elevator with him."

"Now people are saying it out loud. And I think that does make a difference."

Said newswoman Cokie Roberts, speaking about John Conyers. The question, of course, is why didn't she or any of the other women in the press corps say it out loud? And what are you still not saying out loud?

That's for Cokie to know and you to find out. If she thinks you should. Or you can take the stairs.

Weekend wrapup

Sort of a lightning round, I guess:

• Apparently saving John Conyers and Al Franken is more important than defeating Roy Moore; that's the best conclusion I can draw from this weekend's latest political machinations. Sexual misconduct of varying degrees brings the ick factor, but it's not good form for Conyers to end his long career with his pants around his ankles. And, apparently, Al Franken does enjoy the droit du seigneur and can get by with the random grope because his followers were able to manufacture enough votes in 2008 to get him over the top, so to speak. The Dems were hoping to steal a seat in Alabama, but if they have to protect their own people from accusations over their sexual conduct, they aren't going to be able to attack Moore's long past predations. It's a tough gig to go full-on Victorian when your entire party is about smashing conventions most of the time.
• I usually leave the football ranting to Benster, but I am amused at the transparent machinations of College Football, Inc., LLC, in trying to keep a lid on the Wisconsin Badgers. The Badgers don't play a particularly marketable style of football but are nonetheless undefeated, a claim no other team in the so-called Power 5 can make. From what I can tell, the only team in the Big Ten that is allowed to be discussed in polite company is Ohio State, who must stop the Badgers to prevent them from gaining a national audience. It would not do for the vaunted Committee to leave the Badgers on the outside if they win the Big Ten Championship, so something must be done. ESPN has invested a lot of coin in the Southeastern Conference, and their prerogatives must be at the forefront. The Big Ten is in bed with Fox, so a representative that isn't Ohio State is a problem. 
• Must protect precious. Must protect precious.
• Time sells itself to a company associated with the Koch Brothers. It will be interesting to see if we see a change in how Time Magazine (yes, they are still in business) operates now.

Know where you are

The thing (anonymously, of course) speaks for itself:

On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

The claims were later shown to be misleading.

The article from the Washington Post (via the Star Tribune) might be misleading as well, but we'll leave that aside for a moment. There's more:

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an e-mail promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

We're assuming a lot of facts that aren't in evidence yet. We don't know if Trump did anything of the sort. We know what we know because of anonymous sources. Let's guess who this one is:

“This was … unnecessary,” said one of the president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.”

Who's the source? Sean Spicer? Reince Preibus? Someone else? Someone who was there? Someone who wasn't? We don't know.

My suspicion? It's not particularly important who is actually doing the leaking. Trump is a big believer in loyalty, but he's not in an environment where loyalty is rewarded. He's not in New York any more. He really can't trust anyone, even in his inner circle. Anything he says can be used against him, and almost certainly will be. He is an outsider and the folks in Washington won't accept anyone who messes with their rice bowls.

The next few weeks will be crucial. Trump has to change how he operates. And if he's got a counterattack planned, he'd better get on with it now.

Don't tug on CNN's cape

So that silly GIF that Trump retweeted? The one that showed Trump body-slamming a guy with a CNN logo superimposed over his head? CNN didn't like it, so they went after the guy who produced it:

The Reddit user who initially claimed credit for President Donald Trump's tweet that showed Trump tackling CNN issued an apology Tuesday for the video and other offensive content he posted -- one day after CNN identified the man behind the account and attempted to make contact with him.

Reddit user "HanA**holeSolo" first shared the GIF last Wednesday of Trump pummeling a wrestler with CNN's logo imposed on his face. CNN could find no earlier instance of the GIF. The GIF was later edited into a video with sound and tweeted by the President on Sunday.

The First Amendment doesn't belong to dudes on Reddit. It belongs only to CNN and its pals in the mainstream media. The apology from the Reddit guy is Nikolai Bukharin-quality stuff:

"First of all, I would like to apologize to the members of the reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that should never have happened," he wrote. "I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist, bigoted, and anti-semitic. I am in no way this kind of person, I love and accept people of all walks of life and have done so for my entire life. I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life, I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the hateful things I said in those posts. I would never support any kind of violence or actions against others simply for what they believe in, their religion, or the lifestyle they choose to have. Nor would I carry out any violence against anyone based upon that or support anyone who did."

CNN then added the following:

The user further apologized for calls for violence against the press in his statement on Reddit.

"The meme was created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation," he wrote. "I had no idea anyone would take it and put sound to it and then have it put up on the President's Twitter feed. It was a prank, nothing more. What the President's feed showed was not the original post that was posted here, but loaded up somewhere else and sound added to it then sent out on Twitter. I thought it was the original post that was made and that is why I took credit for it. I have the highest respect for the journalist community and they put their lives on the line every day with the jobs that they do in reporting the news."

This last part is crap, of course. Most journalism jobs consist of rewriting other people's press releases and reporting on meetings of the Danville Sewer Board. The dashing foreign correspondents are mostly sitting in windowless rooms, banging out the company line on laptops. The most dangerous place the average CNN on-air personality goes is the tailor, and that's only because tailors have sharp objects.

But this incident isn't about exposing malfeasance. It's strictly pour encourager les autres. CNN notes as much in its self-congratulatory dispatch:

CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

And just so this Reddit guy keeps his yap shut, they add the following:

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

They won't destroy the Reddit guy so long as he doesn't squirm too much under the boot on his throat.

How do we put this politely? CNN can screw itself. And I do hope they enjoy the blowback, because if the Reddit dudes feel constrained, there are plenty of other wiseguys on the web who will ensure that the mockery increases exponentially.

Facelifts and pearl clutching

Oh, that Trump. As always, read from the bottom up:

Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door

I have it on good authority that Trump is worse than ever for writing these tweets. Presidents don't say these things, I'm told. Then again, John Adams would have done quite well on Twitter. Consider this less than 140 character putdown of Benjamin Franklin:

"His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency."

Or his summation on Alexander Hamilton, which might have required 2 tweets to complete:

"That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler! His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I'm convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn't find enough whores to absorb!"

The difference, as far as I can tell, between Trump and his predecessors, is that he likes to do the dirty work himself. As a general rule, it's considered bad form to punch down, and yes, it would be better to ignore the likes of Mika Brzezinski, but Trump isn't going to do it.

Again, the salient point comes from the Ace of Spades:

A major schism in the party is over the question of how much pretense we're fighting to keep lying about. A lot of people seem to think that even though we're plainly in a Cold Civil War, and even thought Joe and Mika spend three hours a day ripping Trump, Trump's supposed to pretend we're all (as John McCain says) Good Friends.

I'm not saying Trump scored some tactical victory here. I'm saying, as I usually do- - who gives a wet shit?

How can the flailing old women of the Nominal Right huff themselves up so much to pretend outrage that a guy being attacked by the media everyday decides to occasionally attack them back?

I understand the leftist media's interest in pretending that they're behaving normally and haven't rewritten the professional code of conduct to allow attacks on Trump which would have been near-hanging-offenses on Obama.

But what is the interest of the sissified Nominal Right over defending the media and pretending along with them?

It's the question of the moment, really. Is there any compelling reason to assume that anyone in the MSM is playing it down the middle? John McCain and Mitt Romney always went all Marquess of Queensberry in their presidential ambitions. We know how that turned out.

All the basketball coaches in the Big Ten loved Steve Yoder when he coached the Wisconsin Badgers in the 1980s. They were fulsome in their praise of his coaching skills and the way he ran his program. Of course, they kicked his ass, but it was quite gentlemanly. When Bo Ryan took over the Badgers, he was not very well liked among his peers, but that was because he was beating his opponents.

If your objective is to be dignified and keep your conscience clear, then you can hang out with the pearl clutchers. At this point, my objective is to keep the Left from doing any further damage to this nation. We all have choices to make. Choose wisely.

Update: My good friend and blogging colleague Brad Carlson has a different take.

The Tell

Experienced pokers players look for any behavior that might tip them off about what their opponent is thinking -- a pattern of tapping one's fingers on the table, a repressed smile, whistling. It's called a "tell." The Democrats and their friends are offering up rather a lot of tells at the moment.

First, the war against Devin Nunes. We've discussed the matter before. Now we have 20 Democrats demanding Nunes step down:

Congress must come together in a bipartisan fashion to understand the nature of this attack and the scope of Russian ties to the Trump campaign, transition team, and presidential administration. Chairman Nunes has demonstrated his bias, and the public will no longer accept the results of this probe as legitimate under his leadership. This is about country, not party. It is also a test about the ability of the House, as an institution, to conduct an investigation of the Executive Branch while being independent of that branch. Chairman Nunes’ recent actions make clear he has failed that test. Only his recusal will allow the House to pass that test.

In the lexicon of Democrats, "bipartisan" means they get their way. It's clear why they don't want Nunes to go forward -- he's on to something.

Meanwhile, on the support staff side of the Democrats, we have this stirring statement of principle:

In a monologue on his Monday night program, CNN host Don Lemon said the network and host will not cover the story about Susan Rice uncovering, or 'unmasking,' the names of Trump officials and confidants that were swept up in surveillance.

"So let us be very clear about this," Lemon said. "There is no evidence whatsoever that the Trump team surveilled or spied on -- was spied on illegally. There is no evidence that backs up the president's original claim."

"And on this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, nor will we aid and abet the people who were trying to misinform you the American people by creating a diversion. We're not going to do it," Lemon declared.

Emphasis mine. CNN is not going to touch the story. It's left to others to do so. Writing for National Review, a publication that isn't exactly supportive of Donald Trump, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explains what really went on:

In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.

Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.

Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

It's not in the interest of the Democratic Party to have such actions receive scrutiny. So Nunes must step down, and Don Lemon and his pals at CNN must not discuss the matter, either. As McCarthy rightly points out, political appointees do political things. If you choose to believe that Repubicans are Evil and Democrats are Good, I'm sure it's tough to swallow. It's also why we're seeing so much finger tapping and whistling from our fellow citizens on the port side.

Lightning Round -- 040417

I've got nothing to say, but it's okay/Good morning, good morning, good morning. Well, that's not quite true. Commence:

• It's going to be a nuclear option on the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court, apparently. Fine with me. If the Supreme Court is going to be the blunt instrument used to enforce raw governmental power, as it has been since at least Wickard v. Filburn, the Republicans might as well be forthright about it. 
• You can tell the Democrats are running out of stories to keep their Russia hacking the election meme going, if they are trotting out a Blackwater story. The way you can tell this is insane -- the date of the meeting was apparently January 11. There wasn't any reason to establish a back channel to Putin on Trump's behalf when Trump was going to be president in nine days. And consider the description of what happened: Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian. No formal role, unofficial envoy, unnamed official, unnamed Russian. This isn't a news story, but it's on the front page of the Strib's website. Wouldn't want to talk about Susan Rice, now would you?
• I continue to watch what's going to happen in the case of Jeronimo Yanez, the St. Anthony cop who is going to stand trial in the shooting of Philando Castile. It's all quite close to home for us. St. Anthony is literally just past our back yard. The judge in the case is considering a variety of defense motions today, so stay tuned.
• I hated the basketball game last night. The officiating crew called 27 fouls in the second half. The game was sloppy but not chippy in the least. Swallow the whistles a bit and let 'em play. 

Incentives

The Deep State is on offense now following the successful hit on Michael Flynn. And as usual, the whole thing is straight out of the funhouse, as Eli Lake, an old hand himself, writes for Bloomberg:

It's not even clear that Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Vice President Mike Pence. The New York Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia policy and sanctions. That's neither illegal nor improper.  

Then again, the Russians have problems of their own:

Meanwhile Trump, who some believe is under Putin’s control, is focused on driving down oil and gas prices and pushing NATO to increase defense spending, both of which are hard blows to Russia. Trump is also promoting pro-growth policies which will help fund a military buildup and modernization.

Russia has no prayer of matching this. 

Putin has real problems, with no real solutions.

Trump is confronting Putin with challenges he cannot overcome, which will only grow worse over time.

The idea that Russia is capable of embarking on a new Cold War against the United States is laughable.

Russia is only considered to be a country of the first rank because of its nuclear arsenal. But that arsenal is useless, other than as a deterrent to invasion, or as a way to commit suicide. No one is going to invade Russia any time soon. More importantly, Putin and his cronies are not suicidal. Putin may even be the richest man in the world. Putin and his posse have a nice life, and a lot to lose. They likely want to enjoy the benefits of their despotism in peace, not see their dachas reduced to radioactive ash.

What we're seeing, both from the Russians and from the Deep State, is a group of people who are scared to death and defending their prerogatives. Back to Lake:

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn's breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed.

Trump is getting a message -- stay in your lane. We'll know soon enough if he accepts the message.