“Since the exposé of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, well, exposing himself took over the news cycle, women have been using the hashtag campaign #MeToo to share their stories.
Like most women, I’ve experienced my share of catcalling, and even a couple of sexually explicit comments and “accidental brush-ups” on the street. If you live in a big city, you know you encounter approximately 1,000 jerks per day behind the wheel, on the escalator, and in the subway. Inconsiderate asses, regrettably, are everywhere. Some of them seem to think that their sexual commentary, as well as the sound of their car horns, needs to be heard.
Depending on the circumstances and my mood, I’ve found these advances anything from hilariously awkward to enraging. Either way, I mostly forgot them at maximum half an hour later, which is the appropriate reaction to minor incidents with unpleasant people.”
———————-
“The #MeToo mob has gone from the serious allegations levelled against powerful men like Bill O’Reilly and Weinstein to women working themselves up into a righteous lather over a stolen kiss to celebrate the end of a bloody war, or a 97-year-old mentally slowing former president making jokes and patting rumps from his wheelchair. As Matt Walsh pointed out in The Daily Wire, let’s hope for their own sake these ladies never visit a nursing home, if George H. W. Bush’s tame antics produced such offense.
But the slide from exposing the truly heinous into the minor leagues of “harassment” is all part of the plan for many on the Left. The Huffington Post writes, “The social media campaign is, of course, intended as a wake-up call for men. If every woman you know has been harassed or assaulted, then every man you know has likely made a woman feel unsafe.” Feel unsafe? In this age of snowflakes, even speaking about traditional gender roles makes some woman somewhere feel unsafe, prompting gutless universities to issue unconstitutionally broad harassment policies that turn on the subjective feelings of the recipient.
Being discomfited for a few moments by some guy’s awkward pass is not the same as a boss dropping trou and telling a subordinate her job depends on how she handles it. Further, sexual harassment in the workplace, while a serious problem with real power dynamics that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, is not the same as sexual assault and rape. In our rush for universal female victimhood, we cheapen the experiences of real victims and create a more hostile environment for their #MeToo stories.
In taking all incidents equally seriously, instead of guarding against future assault, we inoculate the public against outrage and feed backlash. If all men are accused of being Harvey Weinsteins when common sense tells us that truly disgusting behavior is relatively rare, then even Weinstein accusers will be dismissed as hysterics.”
“The Harvey Weinstein scandal may have opened up a whole can of worms for Hollywood, but (to employ another metaphor) that is just the tip of the iceberg. The scandal is due to crack wide open any day now, and it’s not another Weinstein tale.
It’s worse.
By now we’ve all been reminded of actor Corey Feldman’s accusations years ago that Hollywood is home to a lot of pedophiles with massive industry influence. Feldman confirmed his own abuse and said his friend and acting partner Corey Haim had been abused even worse than Feldman himself. Apparently, Haim and other young actors were frequently passed around by older executives and agents, in what Feldman likened to a “pedophile ring” of sorts. Said “The Goonies” actor, “I was surrounded by pedophiles. Literally surrounded. They were everywhere.”
It isn’t a particularly surprising tale. “Different Strokes” actor Todd Bridges descended into drug use and madness after his success as a child actor, largely due to sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of adults he’d been left with during his years of filming. He’s since cleaned up his act but has been very vocal about how vulnerable kids in the industry are to perverts.
However, this isn’t limited to a time gone by. Rumblings are growing louder and louder that one of Hollywood’s biggest producers of children’s entertainment is about to be outed as a major incubator for pedophile executives and their twisted manipulations.
Dan Schneider is a former actor and producer at Nickelodeon. He is responsible for nearly every one of their biggest successes in the last 20 years. Schneider has produced and written the shows that have given us breakout stars like Arianna Grande, Amanda Bynes and Victoria Justice.
Schneider has also been the subject of some very disturbing and consistent rumors for years. One need only search his name on the internet to find pretty damning rumors about him going back years. There are stories of his foot fetishes and how he acts them out on young extras alone in his office. There are stories about his relationships with his underage teenage stars and how they led to spin-off shows for the girls or blacklisting for those who didn’t participate.”
“The moment that a story starts hurting the Democrats the media loses interest in it. This explains the media’s ho-hum coverage of the confirmation that Hillary Clinton paid for the notorious “pee tape” dossier a former British spy compiled in an attempt to blow up Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Even the Washington Post seemed embarrassed by its own scoop, nonchalantly reporting the FBI’s role in this sick farce in a few bland paragraphs deep in the story. The Post’s commentators and editorialists quickly moved into action, dismissing the story as insignificant.
The same pundits who pretended to tremble at dark forces outside the country trying to “tip the election” now say it is perfectly normal and even commendable that Hillary paid a foreign source to smear her opponent.
Is it any wonder that the American people don’t trust the ruling class? This squalid net of political espionage, catching in it everyone from Clinton to Comey to CNN (which hyped the fake dossier), captures the corruption and bad judgment of the ruling class perfectly.
Hoist by their own Russian petard, liberals now seek to change the subject, though the more shameless ones are double-downing on the dossier. A few of them still insist that a report Bob Woodward called “garbage” contains devastating information. How do we know? Well, it hasn’t been “disproven,” they sputter absurdly, as if the burden of proof for a charge as outlandish as paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed Obama once slept on in Moscow should naturally fall on the person accused of it.
Another line of defense is to say that Christopher Steele, the British spy who cobbled the dossier together, is “trustworthy.” How do we know? Well, because the ruling class says so and the FBI paid him too. It was that circular reasoning and entitled hysteria — all the right people said that Steele was trustworthy, all the right people were saying that Trump colluded with the Russians, all the right people deemed Trump a menace to be stopped, and so on — that led the ruling class into this debacle.
That Hillary paid for this dirty dossier explodes once and for all her tale of victimhood and exposes her as the “abnormal” candidate in the race. While Trump barnstormed through the Rust Belt in conventional campaign mode, she was holed up in her headquarters, Nixon-like, waiting for a salacious dossier to arrive that she had paid a foreign agent to cook up.
One can only marvel at the depth of her dishonesty during the book tour, whining about the effect of true information on the race (via WikiLeaks and the release of the Podesta emails) while concealing her purchase of false information.
It is even clearer now why the mainstream media and the ruling class were so upset with BuzzFeed for releasing the dossier. Their anger had nothing to do with the “unverified” quality of it, as the phonies at CNN pretended. Obviously, they weren’t worried about Trump’s reputation. No, what upset them about the release of the dossier was that it made all of their heavy-breathing about it and their pompous references to the anxieties of “the intelligence community” over it look ludicrous and dishonest. All of the power and credibility of that whispering campaign vanished the moment people could see the shoddiness of the dossier.”
“The Trump presidency has been consumed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to uncover collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Mr. Mueller reportedly has secured one or more indictments that he will announce Monday. Some Republicans now seek a new special counsel to investigate if the Clinton Campaign “colluded” with Russians to smear Candidate Trump, along with other aspects of the Clintons’ relationship with Russia and Russian nationals. But one special counsel already is one too many.
During the 1980s and ’90s, American politics was repeatedly distorted, and lives devastated, through the appointment of independent counsels under the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. These constitutionally anomalous prosecutors were given unlimited time and resources to investigate officials, including President Clinton, and scandals, such as Iran-Contra. Once appointed, almost all independent counsels built little Justice Departments of their own and set out to find something—anything—to prosecute. Hardly anyone lamented the expiration of this pernicious law in 1999.
But special counsels, appointed by the attorney general and in theory subject to Justice Department oversight, haven’t proved any better in practice. Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already morphed into an open-ended inquiry. It is examining issues—like Donald Trump’s private business transactions—that are far removed from the Russian question. It also has expanded its focus beyond the original question of collusion with the Russians to whether anyone involved in the Russia investigation has committed some related offense. That is evident from investigators’ efforts to interview White House aides who were not involved in the 2016 campaign, and from leaks suggesting that Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey might have “obstructed” justice.
That claim is frivolous, and it damages America’s constitutional fabric even to consider it. A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey. If a president can be held to account for “obstruction of justice” by ending an investigation or firing a prosecutor or law-enforcement official—an authority the constitution vests in him as chief executive—then one of the presidency’s most formidable powers is transferred from an elected, accountable official to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation has been widely interpreted as partisan from the start. Mr. Trump’s opponents instantaneously started talking of impeachment—never mind that a special counsel, unlike an independent counsel, has no authority to release a report to Congress or the public. Mr. Trump’s supporters count the number of Democratic donors on the special-counsel staff. The Mueller investigation is fostering tremendous bitterness among Trump voters, who see it as an effort by Washington mandarins to nullify their votes.
Mr. Trump can end this madness by immediately issuing a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion with Russia or Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, to anyone involved with Russian acquisition of an American uranium company during the Obama administration, and to anyone for any offense that has been investigated by Mr. Mueller’s office. Political weaponization of criminal law should give way to a politically accountable democratic process. Nefarious Russian activities, including possible interference in U.S. elections, can and should be investigated by Congress.
Partisan bitterness will not evaporate if lawmakers take up the investigation. But at least those conducting the inquiry will be legitimate and politically accountable. And the question of whether Russia intervened in the 2016 election, and of whether it made efforts to influence U.S. policy makers in previous administrations, is first and foremost one of policy and national security, not criminal law.
The president himself would be covered by the blanket pardon we recommend, but the pardon power does not extend to impeachment. If Congress finds evidence that he was somehow involved in collusion with Russia, the House can determine whether to begin impeachment proceedings. Congress also is better equipped, as part of its oversight role, to determine whether and how the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies might have been involved in the whole affair, including possible misuse of surveillance and mishandling of criminal investigations.
There is ample precedent for using the presidential pardon authority to address matters of political importance. Certainly it is what the framers expected. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 69, the pardon power was to “resemble . . . that of the king of Great Britain.” In Federalist 74, he observed that “there are often critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to . . . insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.”
Securing harmony in the body politic was President Washington’s motivation when he offered amnesty to participants in the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, and it was President Lincoln’s motivation when he issued an amnesty during the Civil War for Confederates who would return their allegiance to the Union. Similar reasons motivated President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon, and President Carter when he offered amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders.”
AJ @ 7:20 That is a really interesting idea. People who have been pardoned can’t claim 5th Amendment privilege and can be prosecuted for perjury, so the truth would come out. We could all learn what Russia did and didn’t do and how to better protect US elections from foreign influence in the future. The voters could then express their views in 2018 and 2020. I support the WSJ idea.
“At the Tennyson, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated and found that a secret device was mounted in the hallway of the common area by private investigator Derek Uman from Gainesville. His company, Clear Capture Investigations, specializes in insurance fraud and “infidelity surveillance,” as well as “political and corporate surveillance.”
The building’s video cameras showed Uman moving the device to a new position each day — until it caught the eye of Sen. Oscar Braynon, the outgoing Senate Democratic Leader from Miami Gardens who lives on the floor.
As Braynon was walking to the elevator, he spotted something that had fallen underneath a hall table. He reached for it, and found the camera with a power pack, it’s power light covered over with tape.
Braynon had reason to suspect he was being watched. Two weeks earlier, Sen. Frank Artiles, R-Miami, had resigned after apologizing for a tirade of racially charged remarks to fellow senators. Braynon’s Senate colleagues had told him that the scorned Artiles wanted revenge.
“They told me, that he was putting private investigators on legislative people he thought were at fault for his demise,” said Braynon, whose party lost a bitterly fought race to Artiles in the District 40 Senate seat held by Democrat Dwight Bullard in 2016.
So when Braynon found the covert camera, he turned it over to the concierge in the Tennyson lobby. The building managers were alarmed enough to alert the FDLE, which conducted an investigation. The building is home to dozens of legislators and lobbyists and other public officials.”
“The most significant thing about Monday’s Mueller bonanza is that it reminds us what is wrong with these hysterical wide-ranging special prosecutor investigations that take place in public. Whitewater went on for nearly a decade before it concluded in 2003. Does the fact that Bill Clinton lied about sleeping with Monica Lewinsky prove that he and Hillary and the McDougals broke the law in the course of their real-estate dealings in the late ’70s? If you ask enough people enough questions about enough topics, sooner or later you’re going to catch somebody in a lie. Monday’s revelations don’t in themselves mean anything other than that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department is keeping Mueller on a very long leash.
It needs to be shortened. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the presidential campaign of Donald Trump knowingly colluded with the Russian government in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2016 election, not to see whether any person even loosely connected with the former could be found guilty of any crime, including perjury. The resignation of Tony Podesta from the prominent lobbying group he founded in the wake of Manafort’s indictment suggests that we are getting very far afield indeed.
There are many problems with the Mueller probe, not least its show-boating obsession with keeping its business in the newspapers, but the biggest one is that its parameters were never well defined. What would count as actual collusion? Idle language is thrown around about people having “ties” to Russia or being “Kremlin-connected.” How do you define “Kremlin-connected”? What would be the broad equivalent in the United States from Russia’s perspective? A former congressman? Anyone who does business on K Street having a meeting? Defense contractors? Given the country’s autocratic structure, there are very few living Russian nationals of any wealth or distinction who are not “Kremlin-connected.”
If it’s not going away, the least we could do is broaden the investigation’s scope. Why not appoint another special prosecutor to investigate British meddling in our sacrosanct democratic process? The facts are there in plain sight. A former member of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service collaborated with a presidential campaign in an attempt to alter the outcome of the 2016 election. So did a former member of the British Parliament, who peddled disgusting conspiracy theories on Twitter and even attempted to collude with the Clinton campaign on advertising strategy. The speaker of the British House of Commons attempted to discredit Clinton’s opponent. Should we see whether the Right Hon. John Bercow has ever emailed anyone who has ever in any capacity ever been in contact with anyone in the Obama White House? Hillary Clinton thinks we are in the midst of a “new Cold War.” Are we also in the throes of a rebooted War of 1812?”
“The real lesson of the Russia non-story is that globalization, the great theme of the 2016 election, is more pervasive than any of us wants to acknowledge. No one who works in consulting or lobbying or finance is lacking in ties with Russia. Our press corps is largely made up of enthusiastic children. These 20- and 30-somethings who have never read a book were raised to excel in “critical thinking,” but they are amusingly bad at it. Anyone can write a decontextualized story about a person or a group having “ties” to any malicious foreign power because having “ties” is what it means to exist somewhere in the sinuous continuum of depersonalized financial accretion that is late capitalism.”
“In 2017, everybody is working for somebody, somewhere.”
The Real’s @3:25, I was just reading the other day that NK’s nuclear testing site was in danger of collapsing. Not even a mountain can sustain repeated nuclear explosions.
Quick. Somebody remind me again who it was that colluded with Russia?
You can’t make this stuff up. They’re guilty of everything they’ve accused Trump of. Some serious projection going on here. The Resistance is Russian backed, and in some cases, funded. And Democrats rallied for the Russian cause, which is aimed at disruption, dissent, discord, and anti-American
“Last November, a few days after the election, thousands of people gathered for a rally in New York to protest Donald Trump. The Guardian reported on the scale of the Nov. 12 rally at the time:
More than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.
As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.
Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set off up Fifth Avenue under heavy police escort. A call-and-response developed, protesters chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”…
Denise Mustafa, a video editor holding a sign that read “Adolf Trump”, said: “I want Donald Trump to know democracy is not going to be pushed aside. I want him to know we’re educated about what’s going on. This is a way to vent our anger in a healthy way and to let people know it’s not hopeless.”
It turns out those were also Russia’s streets. The Hill reports that this particular protest was organized on Facebook by a Russian group calling itself BlackMattersUS, which many people mistakenly assumed was some kind of Black Lives Matter offshoot:”
———————-
“This may have been the most popular event organized by the group but it was not the only such rally. In all, the group organized about ten events, including several before the election. The group also spent months doing interviews with well-known activists. ”
———————–
Kim @ 4:41
A person who has nothing in life but the prospect of living eternally with 72 perpetual virgins (yes, after each time) and the stamina of ten men.
I hate. (Yes, I really do) to think of their situation when they discover an eternity of paying for their crimes.
“Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is LORD” But it’s too late now.
Wandering Views 
I didn’t think it needed to be said, but apparently it does.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/30/ladies-havent-raped-someone-catcalled/
“Since the exposé of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, well, exposing himself took over the news cycle, women have been using the hashtag campaign #MeToo to share their stories.
Like most women, I’ve experienced my share of catcalling, and even a couple of sexually explicit comments and “accidental brush-ups” on the street. If you live in a big city, you know you encounter approximately 1,000 jerks per day behind the wheel, on the escalator, and in the subway. Inconsiderate asses, regrettably, are everywhere. Some of them seem to think that their sexual commentary, as well as the sound of their car horns, needs to be heard.
Depending on the circumstances and my mood, I’ve found these advances anything from hilariously awkward to enraging. Either way, I mostly forgot them at maximum half an hour later, which is the appropriate reaction to minor incidents with unpleasant people.”
———————-
“The #MeToo mob has gone from the serious allegations levelled against powerful men like Bill O’Reilly and Weinstein to women working themselves up into a righteous lather over a stolen kiss to celebrate the end of a bloody war, or a 97-year-old mentally slowing former president making jokes and patting rumps from his wheelchair. As Matt Walsh pointed out in The Daily Wire, let’s hope for their own sake these ladies never visit a nursing home, if George H. W. Bush’s tame antics produced such offense.
But the slide from exposing the truly heinous into the minor leagues of “harassment” is all part of the plan for many on the Left. The Huffington Post writes, “The social media campaign is, of course, intended as a wake-up call for men. If every woman you know has been harassed or assaulted, then every man you know has likely made a woman feel unsafe.” Feel unsafe? In this age of snowflakes, even speaking about traditional gender roles makes some woman somewhere feel unsafe, prompting gutless universities to issue unconstitutionally broad harassment policies that turn on the subjective feelings of the recipient.
Being discomfited for a few moments by some guy’s awkward pass is not the same as a boss dropping trou and telling a subordinate her job depends on how she handles it. Further, sexual harassment in the workplace, while a serious problem with real power dynamics that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, is not the same as sexual assault and rape. In our rush for universal female victimhood, we cheapen the experiences of real victims and create a more hostile environment for their #MeToo stories.
In taking all incidents equally seriously, instead of guarding against future assault, we inoculate the public against outrage and feed backlash. If all men are accused of being Harvey Weinsteins when common sense tells us that truly disgusting behavior is relatively rare, then even Weinstein accusers will be dismissed as hysterics.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
Conservative David French is smart and fair when writing about the Mueller investigation:
LikeLike
Save your outrage for when it’s justified. Like here.
https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2017/10/24/next-big-hollywood-sex-scandal-already-breaking…at-nickelodeon/
“The Harvey Weinstein scandal may have opened up a whole can of worms for Hollywood, but (to employ another metaphor) that is just the tip of the iceberg. The scandal is due to crack wide open any day now, and it’s not another Weinstein tale.
It’s worse.
By now we’ve all been reminded of actor Corey Feldman’s accusations years ago that Hollywood is home to a lot of pedophiles with massive industry influence. Feldman confirmed his own abuse and said his friend and acting partner Corey Haim had been abused even worse than Feldman himself. Apparently, Haim and other young actors were frequently passed around by older executives and agents, in what Feldman likened to a “pedophile ring” of sorts. Said “The Goonies” actor, “I was surrounded by pedophiles. Literally surrounded. They were everywhere.”
It isn’t a particularly surprising tale. “Different Strokes” actor Todd Bridges descended into drug use and madness after his success as a child actor, largely due to sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of adults he’d been left with during his years of filming. He’s since cleaned up his act but has been very vocal about how vulnerable kids in the industry are to perverts.
However, this isn’t limited to a time gone by. Rumblings are growing louder and louder that one of Hollywood’s biggest producers of children’s entertainment is about to be outed as a major incubator for pedophile executives and their twisted manipulations.
Dan Schneider is a former actor and producer at Nickelodeon. He is responsible for nearly every one of their biggest successes in the last 20 years. Schneider has produced and written the shows that have given us breakout stars like Arianna Grande, Amanda Bynes and Victoria Justice.
Schneider has also been the subject of some very disturbing and consistent rumors for years. One need only search his name on the internet to find pretty damning rumors about him going back years. There are stories of his foot fetishes and how he acts them out on young extras alone in his office. There are stories about his relationships with his underage teenage stars and how they led to spin-off shows for the girls or blacklisting for those who didn’t participate.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yep.
https://spectator.org/dirty-hillary-hoist-by-her-own-petard/
“The moment that a story starts hurting the Democrats the media loses interest in it. This explains the media’s ho-hum coverage of the confirmation that Hillary Clinton paid for the notorious “pee tape” dossier a former British spy compiled in an attempt to blow up Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Even the Washington Post seemed embarrassed by its own scoop, nonchalantly reporting the FBI’s role in this sick farce in a few bland paragraphs deep in the story. The Post’s commentators and editorialists quickly moved into action, dismissing the story as insignificant.
The same pundits who pretended to tremble at dark forces outside the country trying to “tip the election” now say it is perfectly normal and even commendable that Hillary paid a foreign source to smear her opponent.
Is it any wonder that the American people don’t trust the ruling class? This squalid net of political espionage, catching in it everyone from Clinton to Comey to CNN (which hyped the fake dossier), captures the corruption and bad judgment of the ruling class perfectly.
Hoist by their own Russian petard, liberals now seek to change the subject, though the more shameless ones are double-downing on the dossier. A few of them still insist that a report Bob Woodward called “garbage” contains devastating information. How do we know? Well, it hasn’t been “disproven,” they sputter absurdly, as if the burden of proof for a charge as outlandish as paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed Obama once slept on in Moscow should naturally fall on the person accused of it.
Another line of defense is to say that Christopher Steele, the British spy who cobbled the dossier together, is “trustworthy.” How do we know? Well, because the ruling class says so and the FBI paid him too. It was that circular reasoning and entitled hysteria — all the right people said that Steele was trustworthy, all the right people were saying that Trump colluded with the Russians, all the right people deemed Trump a menace to be stopped, and so on — that led the ruling class into this debacle.
That Hillary paid for this dirty dossier explodes once and for all her tale of victimhood and exposes her as the “abnormal” candidate in the race. While Trump barnstormed through the Rust Belt in conventional campaign mode, she was holed up in her headquarters, Nixon-like, waiting for a salacious dossier to arrive that she had paid a foreign agent to cook up.
One can only marvel at the depth of her dishonesty during the book tour, whining about the effect of true information on the race (via WikiLeaks and the release of the Podesta emails) while concealing her purchase of false information.
It is even clearer now why the mainstream media and the ruling class were so upset with BuzzFeed for releasing the dossier. Their anger had nothing to do with the “unverified” quality of it, as the phonies at CNN pretended. Obviously, they weren’t worried about Trump’s reputation. No, what upset them about the release of the dossier was that it made all of their heavy-breathing about it and their pompous references to the anxieties of “the intelligence community” over it look ludicrous and dishonest. All of the power and credibility of that whispering campaign vanished the moment people could see the shoddiness of the dossier.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
And we can all be thankful we don’t work in the White House.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/upstairs-at-home-with-the-tv-on-trump-fumes-over-russia-indictments/2017/10/30/fd0d0b16-bd87-11e7-8444-a0d4f04b89eb_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmueller-730pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.a5daaaa6f14e
LikeLike
This would work, and tick off everyone from both sides. 🙂
https://www.wsj.com/articles/begging-your-pardon-mr-president-1509302308
“The Trump presidency has been consumed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to uncover collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Mr. Mueller reportedly has secured one or more indictments that he will announce Monday. Some Republicans now seek a new special counsel to investigate if the Clinton Campaign “colluded” with Russians to smear Candidate Trump, along with other aspects of the Clintons’ relationship with Russia and Russian nationals. But one special counsel already is one too many.
During the 1980s and ’90s, American politics was repeatedly distorted, and lives devastated, through the appointment of independent counsels under the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act. These constitutionally anomalous prosecutors were given unlimited time and resources to investigate officials, including President Clinton, and scandals, such as Iran-Contra. Once appointed, almost all independent counsels built little Justice Departments of their own and set out to find something—anything—to prosecute. Hardly anyone lamented the expiration of this pernicious law in 1999.
But special counsels, appointed by the attorney general and in theory subject to Justice Department oversight, haven’t proved any better in practice. Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already morphed into an open-ended inquiry. It is examining issues—like Donald Trump’s private business transactions—that are far removed from the Russian question. It also has expanded its focus beyond the original question of collusion with the Russians to whether anyone involved in the Russia investigation has committed some related offense. That is evident from investigators’ efforts to interview White House aides who were not involved in the 2016 campaign, and from leaks suggesting that Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey might have “obstructed” justice.
That claim is frivolous, and it damages America’s constitutional fabric even to consider it. A president cannot obstruct justice through the exercise of his constitutional and discretionary authority over executive-branch officials like Mr. Comey. If a president can be held to account for “obstruction of justice” by ending an investigation or firing a prosecutor or law-enforcement official—an authority the constitution vests in him as chief executive—then one of the presidency’s most formidable powers is transferred from an elected, accountable official to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and judges.
Mr. Mueller’s investigation has been widely interpreted as partisan from the start. Mr. Trump’s opponents instantaneously started talking of impeachment—never mind that a special counsel, unlike an independent counsel, has no authority to release a report to Congress or the public. Mr. Trump’s supporters count the number of Democratic donors on the special-counsel staff. The Mueller investigation is fostering tremendous bitterness among Trump voters, who see it as an effort by Washington mandarins to nullify their votes.
Mr. Trump can end this madness by immediately issuing a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion with Russia or Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign, to anyone involved with Russian acquisition of an American uranium company during the Obama administration, and to anyone for any offense that has been investigated by Mr. Mueller’s office. Political weaponization of criminal law should give way to a politically accountable democratic process. Nefarious Russian activities, including possible interference in U.S. elections, can and should be investigated by Congress.
Partisan bitterness will not evaporate if lawmakers take up the investigation. But at least those conducting the inquiry will be legitimate and politically accountable. And the question of whether Russia intervened in the 2016 election, and of whether it made efforts to influence U.S. policy makers in previous administrations, is first and foremost one of policy and national security, not criminal law.
The president himself would be covered by the blanket pardon we recommend, but the pardon power does not extend to impeachment. If Congress finds evidence that he was somehow involved in collusion with Russia, the House can determine whether to begin impeachment proceedings. Congress also is better equipped, as part of its oversight role, to determine whether and how the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies might have been involved in the whole affair, including possible misuse of surveillance and mishandling of criminal investigations.
There is ample precedent for using the presidential pardon authority to address matters of political importance. Certainly it is what the framers expected. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 69, the pardon power was to “resemble . . . that of the king of Great Britain.” In Federalist 74, he observed that “there are often critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to . . . insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.”
Securing harmony in the body politic was President Washington’s motivation when he offered amnesty to participants in the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, and it was President Lincoln’s motivation when he issued an amnesty during the Civil War for Confederates who would return their allegiance to the Union. Similar reasons motivated President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon, and President Carter when he offered amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Apparently Kevin Spacey’s pedophilia was so widely known in Hollywood that it was featured as a “joke” on the TV show “Family Guy” 12 years ago:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5032509/Family-Guy-joked-Kevin-Spacey-decade-ago.html
LikeLiked by 1 person
AJ @ 7:20 That is a really interesting idea. People who have been pardoned can’t claim 5th Amendment privilege and can be prosecuted for perjury, so the truth would come out. We could all learn what Russia did and didn’t do and how to better protect US elections from foreign influence in the future. The voters could then express their views in 2018 and 2020. I support the WSJ idea.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What an interesting day! I am agreeing with Trumpers. Trumpers are agreeing with me:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/10/31/john-kelly-says-civil-war-caused-lack-ability-compromise-twitter-has-words/816266001/
LikeLike
Sorry, AJ. It doesn’t look like Papadopoulos is getting a pardon.
LikeLike
Oh boy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/31/collapse-north-korea-nuclear-test-site-leaves-200-dead/
—————————–
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4806082/north-korea-nuclear-base-collapses-killing-200-radioactive-leak-fears-latest-updates/
LikeLike
Opposition research is getting out of hand.
And yet another reason to remain faithful to your spouse.
http://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2017/10/31/someones-spying-on-florida-legislators-tallahassee-is-on-edge/
“At the Tennyson, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated and found that a secret device was mounted in the hallway of the common area by private investigator Derek Uman from Gainesville. His company, Clear Capture Investigations, specializes in insurance fraud and “infidelity surveillance,” as well as “political and corporate surveillance.”
The building’s video cameras showed Uman moving the device to a new position each day — until it caught the eye of Sen. Oscar Braynon, the outgoing Senate Democratic Leader from Miami Gardens who lives on the floor.
As Braynon was walking to the elevator, he spotted something that had fallen underneath a hall table. He reached for it, and found the camera with a power pack, it’s power light covered over with tape.
Braynon had reason to suspect he was being watched. Two weeks earlier, Sen. Frank Artiles, R-Miami, had resigned after apologizing for a tirade of racially charged remarks to fellow senators. Braynon’s Senate colleagues had told him that the scorned Artiles wanted revenge.
“They told me, that he was putting private investigators on legislative people he thought were at fault for his demise,” said Braynon, whose party lost a bitterly fought race to Artiles in the District 40 Senate seat held by Democrat Dwight Bullard in 2016.
So when Braynon found the covert camera, he turned it over to the concierge in the Tennyson lobby. The building managers were alarmed enough to alert the FDLE, which conducted an investigation. The building is home to dozens of legislators and lobbyists and other public officials.”
LikeLike
Some foreign meddling and collusion are more equal than other alleged, nonexistent ones I guess.
http://theweek.com/articles/734070/mueller-running-amok
“The most significant thing about Monday’s Mueller bonanza is that it reminds us what is wrong with these hysterical wide-ranging special prosecutor investigations that take place in public. Whitewater went on for nearly a decade before it concluded in 2003. Does the fact that Bill Clinton lied about sleeping with Monica Lewinsky prove that he and Hillary and the McDougals broke the law in the course of their real-estate dealings in the late ’70s? If you ask enough people enough questions about enough topics, sooner or later you’re going to catch somebody in a lie. Monday’s revelations don’t in themselves mean anything other than that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department is keeping Mueller on a very long leash.
It needs to be shortened. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the presidential campaign of Donald Trump knowingly colluded with the Russian government in the hope of altering the outcome of the 2016 election, not to see whether any person even loosely connected with the former could be found guilty of any crime, including perjury. The resignation of Tony Podesta from the prominent lobbying group he founded in the wake of Manafort’s indictment suggests that we are getting very far afield indeed.
There are many problems with the Mueller probe, not least its show-boating obsession with keeping its business in the newspapers, but the biggest one is that its parameters were never well defined. What would count as actual collusion? Idle language is thrown around about people having “ties” to Russia or being “Kremlin-connected.” How do you define “Kremlin-connected”? What would be the broad equivalent in the United States from Russia’s perspective? A former congressman? Anyone who does business on K Street having a meeting? Defense contractors? Given the country’s autocratic structure, there are very few living Russian nationals of any wealth or distinction who are not “Kremlin-connected.”
If it’s not going away, the least we could do is broaden the investigation’s scope. Why not appoint another special prosecutor to investigate British meddling in our sacrosanct democratic process? The facts are there in plain sight. A former member of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service collaborated with a presidential campaign in an attempt to alter the outcome of the 2016 election. So did a former member of the British Parliament, who peddled disgusting conspiracy theories on Twitter and even attempted to collude with the Clinton campaign on advertising strategy. The speaker of the British House of Commons attempted to discredit Clinton’s opponent. Should we see whether the Right Hon. John Bercow has ever emailed anyone who has ever in any capacity ever been in contact with anyone in the Obama White House? Hillary Clinton thinks we are in the midst of a “new Cold War.” Are we also in the throes of a rebooted War of 1812?”
“The real lesson of the Russia non-story is that globalization, the great theme of the 2016 election, is more pervasive than any of us wants to acknowledge. No one who works in consulting or lobbying or finance is lacking in ties with Russia. Our press corps is largely made up of enthusiastic children. These 20- and 30-somethings who have never read a book were raised to excel in “critical thinking,” but they are amusingly bad at it. Anyone can write a decontextualized story about a person or a group having “ties” to any malicious foreign power because having “ties” is what it means to exist somewhere in the sinuous continuum of depersonalized financial accretion that is late capitalism.”
“In 2017, everybody is working for somebody, somewhere.”
LikeLike
Again
LikeLike
Who does that????
LikeLike
This guy
LikeLike
The Real’s @3:25, I was just reading the other day that NK’s nuclear testing site was in danger of collapsing. Not even a mountain can sustain repeated nuclear explosions.
LikeLike
Quick. Somebody remind me again who it was that colluded with Russia?
You can’t make this stuff up. They’re guilty of everything they’ve accused Trump of. Some serious projection going on here. The Resistance is Russian backed, and in some cases, funded. And Democrats rallied for the Russian cause, which is aimed at disruption, dissent, discord, and anti-American
https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/31/thousands-protested-trump-last-november-rally-organized-russia/
“Last November, a few days after the election, thousands of people gathered for a rally in New York to protest Donald Trump. The Guardian reported on the scale of the Nov. 12 rally at the time:
More than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.
As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.
Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set off up Fifth Avenue under heavy police escort. A call-and-response developed, protesters chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets!”…
Denise Mustafa, a video editor holding a sign that read “Adolf Trump”, said: “I want Donald Trump to know democracy is not going to be pushed aside. I want him to know we’re educated about what’s going on. This is a way to vent our anger in a healthy way and to let people know it’s not hopeless.”
It turns out those were also Russia’s streets. The Hill reports that this particular protest was organized on Facebook by a Russian group calling itself BlackMattersUS, which many people mistakenly assumed was some kind of Black Lives Matter offshoot:”
———————-
“This may have been the most popular event organized by the group but it was not the only such rally. In all, the group organized about ten events, including several before the election. The group also spent months doing interviews with well-known activists. ”
———————–
Anti-Trump activists.
LikeLike
My evening is a success:
1. We have tons of Trick or Treaters; and
2. Mona Charen liked my response to her Tweet.
Now if the Thunder can just beat the Bucks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Go Dodgers
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kim @ 4:41
A person who has nothing in life but the prospect of living eternally with 72 perpetual virgins (yes, after each time) and the stamina of ten men.
I hate. (Yes, I really do) to think of their situation when they discover an eternity of paying for their crimes.
“Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is LORD” But it’s too late now.
LikeLiked by 2 people
And I end my night with a Thunder win and some good economics from William Jennings Bryan, of all people.
LikeLike
Chas, it’s sad and tragic, and it should cause us much grief when it appears people are lost for eternity. 😦
LikeLike
And always behind that I have remember, there but for the grace of God go I.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The Dodgers are rocking it
LikeLike
There must be a Game 7!
LikeLike
Yes ! 🙂 We think. Unless … 9th inning
I love seeing Sandy Koufax there, he was our hero when we were growing up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I saw Koufax in his final year (1966). He pitched a complete game and beat the Braves who had Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, and Felipe Alou.
LikeLiked by 1 person