[AmGreatness] Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court is significant because of her academic pedigree. She is a graduate of and former professor at Notre Dame. Notre Dame, of course, is a fine law school. It is ranked in the top 25 nationally and is held in high esteem by most every Catholic family in America. As we have seen during this week’s confirmation hearing she is whip smart, poised, and learned in the law. But she didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, lately the gatekeepers to a position on the Supreme Court.
Of the current justices, every single one is a graduate of either Harvard or Yale. Among federal law clerks, a significant plurality comes from the top 10 or so law schools, with the most prestigious clerkships having an overrepresentation of Harvard and Yale graduates. This kind of pedigree ends up being a pathway to positions in the Department of Justice, government, elite law firms, and on the bench.
[National Review] In the 21st century, hallmark American and international institutions have lost much of their prestige and respect.
Politics and biases explain the lack of public confidence in organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Academy Awards.
The overseers entrusted with preserving these institutions all caved to short-term political pressures. As a result, they have mostly destroyed what they inherited.The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is the first person without a medical degree to hold that position. Why? No one really knows.
In the critical first days of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, almost every statement issued by Tedros and the WHO about the origins, transmission, prevention, and treatment of the virus was inaccurate. Worse, the announcements predictably reflected the propaganda of the Chinese government.The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in 1987 for two purposes: to ensure that during every presidential campaign, candidates would agree to debate; and to ensure that the debates would be impartial and not favor either major party.
Unfortunately, in 2020, the commission so far has a checkered record on both counts.
Conservatives have argued that the moderators of the first presidential debate and the vice-presidential debate — Chris Wallace of Fox News and Susan Page of USA Today — were systematically asymmetrical in their questioning.
The moderators asked both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to explain prior controversial quotes and then to reply to critics’ accusations. The moderators did not pose the same sort of gotcha-type "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden or vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Although the vice-presidential debate was conducted with proper social distancing, along with screens and testing to protect the candidates, the commission abruptly canceled the second live presidential debate for safety’s sake and insisted it be conducted remotely.
Yet White House doctors have cleared Trump, who recently contracted COVID-19, as both medically able to debate and no longer infectious.
The public perception was that a remote debate would favor the frequently teleprompted Biden, who has been largely ensconced in his home during the last six months, and would be less advantageous to Trump, who thrives on live, ad hoc television.
Susan Page is currently writing a biography of Trump’s chief antagonist, House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). The designated moderator of the now-canceled second president debate, Steve Scully of C-SPAN, once interned for Vice President Joe Biden.The Nobel Peace Prize has been subject to criticism over the years for failing to adequately recognize either diplomatic or humanitarian achievement.
Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization won the prize in 1994, despite conducting lethal terrorist operations. He allegedly gave the final order to execute U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel and two other diplomats in 1973.
In 2009, the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Barack Obama, despite the fact that Obama had only been president for eight months when the prize was announced. Many felt the award was a political statement — aimed at empowering Obama and criticizing the policies of his then-unpopular predecessor, George W. Bush.
Much later, Geir Lundestad, the longtime director of the Nobel Institute, confessed that the prize committee had indeed hoped the award would strengthen Obama’s future agendas and wasn’t really in recognition of anything he had actually done.
"Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake," Lundestad lamented in his memoir. "In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for."
Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project. She has argued that 1619, the year African slaves first arrived on North American soil, and not 1776 marked the real founding of America.
Almost immediately, distinguished American historians cited factual errors and general incoherence in the 1619 Project — especially Hannah-Jones’s claim that the United States was created to promote and protect slavery.
Facing a storm of criticism, Hannah-Jones falsely countered that she had never advanced a revisionist date of American’s "real" founding. Yet even the New York Times — without explanation — erased from its own website Hannah-Jones’s earlier description of 1619 as "our true founding."
The annual Academy Awards were once among the most watched events in America. In 2020, however, Oscar viewership crashed to its lowest level in history, due in large part to backlash against the left-wing politicking, sermonizing, and virtue-signaling of award winners.Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, announced that it will adopt racial, gender, and sexual identity quotas for nominees — refuting the ancient idea of "art for art’s sake"
Such ideology has also infected, and thus tarnished, the Grammy and Emmy awards, and left-wing virtue-signaling has also become part of the NFL and the NBA.
The lesson in all these debacles is that anywhere ideology trumps science, public service, history, art, and entertainment, ruin surely follows
[American Greatness] The FBI-generated indictment of six men on charges of terrorism for planning to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has all the earmarks of what has become that corrupt agency’s standard operating procedure. Their lawyers are sure to claim they were victims of entrapment. If the case comes to trial, I doubt a jury will convict them.
During the eight years I spent supervising the intelligence agencies for the Senate Intelligence Committee, I watched as what had been a clerisy of strait-laced guardians of truth and justice was becoming a bunch of lazy bureaucrats eager to serve the ruling class’ prejudices.
No longer doing the hard and dangerous work of investigating deeply connected criminals and subversives such as the Mafia and well-financed, politically supported subversives, the FBI limited its vision to politically correct "profiles," and started chasing small fry. Easy targets, defended by no one. What’s not to like?
After 9/11, the FBI spent few years going after very petty Islamists while covering its collective eyes to the work of major sources of trouble, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Authority, and Saudi Arabia—each beloved by parts of the ruling class. But before and after this period, these profiles more often than not pointed to the ruling class’ favorite enemy: fellow Americans "excessively concerned with their liberties."
The FBI’s method? Place agents among the target group, stoke their sentiments, and lead them to say or do something that could be characterized as a crime, then arrest them and claim credit for foiling a plot. In intelligence lingo, that is provocation. In legal terms, it’s entrapment. By whatever name, this is the work of cheap, dirty cops.
In the 1950s, the joke was that any meeting of a Communist Party cell in the New York area was likely to consist of two-thirds infiltrators, half from the FBI and the other half from the New York Police Department. But these FBI infiltrators, like those of the Vietnam era in the 1960s and early ’70s, and like those who penetrated organized crime were merely watching. Doing an honest job. They were not provoking or entrapping, not creating something that would never have been there except for their presence.
Fast forward to our time. The contrast between how the FBI behaves with regard to persons connected to the ruling class and those who are not speaks for itself. The 918 Americans who died in mass suicide in Jonestown Guyana in November 1978 were victims of a cult that had been closely associated with the California Democratic Party. Relatives of the people who were being drawn in had complained to the FBI. But the FBI had refused to keep an eye on the movement, and later officially argued that doing so would have infringed on its political and religious liberties.
And yet when the Tea Party movement arose to protest collusion between the Republican and Democratic parties against popular sentiment on a host of political issues, the FBI rushed to infiltrate it.
Having addressed countless meetings of Tea Parties in Northern California from 2010 to 2012, I experienced this infiltration directly. The audiences were respectful, and asked informative questions. When, occasionally, I got a question that seemed to push me to say something inflammatory, I made it a point to find and speak to the individual who had asked it. Invariably, the person fit a profile with which I had become familiar from my years overseeing the FBI: a man in his late 30s, who had recently moved into the community and worked for a big company, often remotely, and whose echoing of the sentiments surrounding him sounded studied. I would then advise him on how to write his report to headquarters. Generally, the man would walk away.
In the Michigan case, it seems the FBI had started by monitoring the men’s social media traffic and, on the basis of "excess concern for liberty" (prithee, what is that?) had obtained warrants for wiretaps and had inserted one or more infiltrators. But up to this time, no crime could be alleged—only what the FBI and its local affiliate considered a bad attitude.
What exactly was the infiltrator’s role in moving the men from mere talk to incipient, allegedly criminal action? That is going to be the essence of the trial. The FBI will produce recordings made by the infiltrator. When was the device turned on, and when off? To what extent do those intermissions and/or additions made to the recording contribute to the impression that this was a real plot hatched autonomously?
The accused will have the government’s and media’s full weights used against them, as would you or I.
The jury will have to decide whether the FBI was protecting society from sociopaths or whether it is itself sociopathic.
#2
Were the stories that three of the six's comments on the internet sounded more like antifa anarchists than like conservatives, true?
If so the FBI is guilty of confusing antifa with right wingers.
Posted by: daniel ||
10/17/2020 1:28 Comments ||
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#3
When the pay plus exorbitant bonuses of bureaucrats are way lucrative, they are more than loyal to those that moved to sweeten their bank accounts (aka Obama admin).
#4
And if you fight them they will shoot your wife while she is unarmed and holding her baby in her arms. All over an entrapment, 5 year old, weapons modification charge. Shortening a shotgun.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
10/17/2020 10:09 Comments ||
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#5
And a bunch of "conservatives" will defend their ability to do so to the death, becuz institutions! and law enforcement!
[Townhall] How is it possible to debate Critical Race Theory yet fail to mention its salient characteristic—that it is exclusively and ethnocidally anti-white?
One Federalist piece, "Critical Race Theory Is A Classic Communist Divide-And-Conquer Tactic," brings it back to communism. Quite how this adds up is unclear, but the author decries a way of thinking that exploits the amorphous "tragedy of racial divisions in America." In essence, some bad people with a communistic manual and mindset aren't interested in healing us.
Really? Did Communism, an equal-opportunity oppressor, revolve around the exclusive blackening of whites?
Western democracies are third way political and economic systems. They are already heavily socialized. Once Western societies go from third way to third world, debate over communism will cease, for Communism will have arrived.
In other words, dissecting and decrying Communism is an ideological luxury, the province of relatively wealthy, stable, developed democracies.
America is indeed racially divided. Blacks, for the most, hate whites for a variety of unjust reasons, not least the incessant, institutionalized, propagandizing by other progressive whites. Deal with this truth! Communism is but an intellectual crutch.
By deferring to communism and ducking anti-white animus, the ever-quaking commentariat cloaks itself in the raiment of respectable argument.
#4
Critical Race Theory is just a tool to divide and confuse the populace into acquiescence. It is not actually believed by the cadres end eminences gris that control them from behind the scenes, they know whiteness is just the current Seven Minute Hate term for those law abiding, hardworking, frugal citizens who were previously castigated for being the middle class, and before that the bourgeoisie. So arguing with its principles point by point is a waste of time.
[CNN] Former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, has told friends that President Donald Trump "is the most flawed person" he's ever known.
"The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it's more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life," the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.
The reporting comes from a new CNN special scheduled to air Sunday night, "The Insiders: A Warning from Former Trump Officials," in which former senior administration officials -- including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Health and Human Services scientist Rick Bright and former Department of Homeland Security general counsel John Mitnick -- explain why they think the President is unfit for office.
Kelly's sentiments about the President's transactional nature and dishonesty have been shared by other former members of the Trump administration who also appear in the special.
Olivia Troye, a former top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, has said the President knew about the impact the coronavirus pandemic would have on the US by mid-February, but that "he didn't want to hear it, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year." Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff who now serves as a CNN contributor, has asserted Trump essentially calls individuals within the federal government who disagree with him "deep state."
#3
You shitheads brought us defeat and disaster in endless overseas wars.
On your watch you allowed China to become a superpower and a global menace to this country.
You supported an insane deal that would build up Iran, you needlessly provoked Russia, and you nearly plunged us into god only knows how many more overseas adventures from the Horn of Africa through Syria to North Africa.
Trump called bullish!t on you incompetents.
Kick and writhe and spit all you want. Your time is over.
#4
Not the first time someone has complained of The Boss being too weaselly in their words.
General George C. Marshall, head of the US Army in WW2 and head of the "Marshall Plan" to repair Europe afterwards, had a 'chilly' relationship with FDR. "Mister President" when FDR wanted to be first-name pals and asked the General to extrapolate oft-hand remarks as policy. Perhaps the General remembered "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?!? (Henry II)" when he demanded distance and firm, explicit instructions. Explicit instruction mean a politician can't say later "I didn't mean that!"
Or Kelly found out that he and Trump just didn't like each other. That he mentions it now is ... childish.
#5
If his 'friends' run to CNN the moment he relates something to them privately perhaps his judgement in 'friends' isn't quite what he imagines it to be.
#6
People keep telling me how dishonest Trump is but they never provide meaningful examples(sure, he's a salesman by nature, and not careful in his words, but find meaningful lies.)
At his level relationships are almost always transactional.
#7
Kelly served under Obama, right? You cannot tell me a Chicago pol didn't base EVERYTHING on "what can you do for me?"
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
10/17/2020 13:06 Comments ||
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#8
Kelly is a moron. All politics is transactional.
If you work in the White House, then you serve the president at his will. Every great or even more than usually effective president we've ever had has known how to coerce, wheedle, charm, dissemble and manipulate others to get what he wants. Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan - all of them masters of transactional politics.
Kelly sounds like a babe in the woods. Thank his Yrump ditched this squalling infant.
#9
To become a general officer requires being a politician. As U Sinatra said, politics is transactional - does Kelly not see it in himself?
(And I am still waiting for an example of significant dishonesty - not saying there isn't one, but don't know of it.)
[Babylon Bee] SEATTLE, WA‐According to a new announcement from showrunners, Amazon's new Lord of the Rings television series will include its first disabled bisexual transgender elf character.
"Tolkien's story is a timeless and beloved epic, but let's face it, it was written by a white Catholic guy. Totally EW!" said Phinnix Glittervaux, a non-binary transgender writer for the show. "With any beloved cultural juggernaut like this, it's important that we hollow out its insides until it's just a shell before filling it with the post-postmodern political messages of our choosing!"
In order to make Tolkien's masterwork "more accessible to modern audiences," Amazon's new show will feature a healthy dose of nihilism, nudity, and themes reflecting the latest woke politics.
"It's time to have an honest conversation about the more problematic aspects of Tolkien's work," said Glittervaux. "Honestly, it's trash. We only hitched our wagon to it because it's a lucrative intellectual property we can cram our political messages into."
In service of these guiding principles, showrunners have proudly introduced Middle Earth's first disabled bisexual transgender elf known as Idrix.
"Idrix is a fascinating character. We will follow her as she navigates the rigid political structures of Middle Earth while facing discrimination, racism, and ableism," said Glittervaux. "To our knowledge, there aren't any other shows out there that explore important themes like this."
When asked for comment, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed he doesn't care about what showrunners do with the thing as long as it makes money. "Also, make sure it has a lot of nudity and killing in it like that Game of Thrones show!" he said.
Fans around the world are praying for Jesus to come back before the show is released. Heh!
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
10/17/2020 00:00 ||
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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.
[American Greatness] 
[Townhall] How is it possible to debate Critical Race Theory yet fail to mention its salient characteristic—that it is exclusively and ethnocidally anti-white?
