So it Was It All Insurance

Posted: May 21, 2020 by datechguy in News/opinion, politics
Tags:

Turns out Flass is smarter than anyone knew. He took notes on every little talk he’d had with Comissioner Loeb. Dates, times…it was all there.

Two weeks and five days in jail and he remembered where he kept those notes.

Batman #407 (Batman Year 1 Part #4

Three years ago Glenn Reynolds floated a Hypothesis: concerning all this insanity in going after Donald Trump

Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction. 

And two years later added

Such outrageous behavior makes one wonder how much more outrageous is the behavior it’s meant to cover for.

Well apparently it was outrageous enough that Susan Rice while apparently not having an autographed get out of jail free card made sure she had the next best thing:

On Jan. 20, 2017, as President Donald Trump was being inaugurated, former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice sent herself a bizarre email detailing the Jan. 5 meeting between her, Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and fired former Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey. In the email, portions of which were not declassified until recently, Rice recorded that Flynn, who at the time was the incoming national security adviser for Trump, was personally discussed and targeted during the meeting with Obama.

Furthermore:

We have known for more than two years that, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration and just minutes before she left the White House for the last time, Susan Rice, then President Obama’s National Security Adviser, wrote a memo to herself about “Russia.” Specifically, she documented the fact, presumably for her later protection should the matter become public, that on January 5, 2017, President Obama had directed her to lie to her incoming counterpart, General Michael Flynn, about the Russia investigation that was then ongoing, in which General Flynn himself was, unbeknownst to him, one of the targets. This deception violated all historic norms, but it was vital if the Obama holdovers (James Comey et al.) were to be able to continue their “Russia investigation,” a bare pretext for unraveling Trump’s presidency, post-inauguration.

Put simply a corrupt Chicago Pol and his corrupt cronies went all in on corruption in order to prevent the election of Donald Trump and when that failed went all in on Russia in order to provide insurance that their previous corruption would not be uncovered.

All of what we have seen for the last three years, every single bit of this has apparently been about protecting the asses of a bunch of Chicago thugs who used the power of the federal government against their political foes and don’t want to be caught.

To me there are only two questions left:

  • How far will they go in terms of illegality in order to prevent the President’s re-election in order to keep the rest of this from coming out? (my guess is pretty damn far)
  • If they fail to stop President Trump from being re-elected who is going to be the Sgt. Flass who remembers where their notes are hidden?

I think the worst it yet to come and it would not surprise me to see some of those potential Sgt. Flass from the previous administration suffer unfortunate “accidents” to keep them quiet under the Remo “Why take a chance?” rule

Unexpectedly of course

Bailout? Guess States Are Missing Those Trump Boom Tax Revenues

Posted: May 20, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

There is quite a bit of irony in watching governors like Newsom say this

Newsom told CNN’s “State of the Union” that a state bailout was not “charity” and that Congress has a “moral and ethical obligation” to help Americans across the country.

Let’s point out three things:

First: The Trump boom.

Until the virus hit the country had been booming tax revenues were pouring into states from the strong economies and for all their anti Trump talk, blue states with their excessive pension plans and spending where the one who stood to gain the most from these extra revenues.

Second: The wasted chance

A lot of states that didn’t vote for Trump took that extra revenue that the Trump boom generated and blew it. Massachusetts for one:

Six months ago if you were a Massachusetts business, you were thinking about how you would use those tax cuts to grow your business, now you are thinking if you have 50 employees you are going to have to make sure you can generate an extra $100,000 next year and $400,000 by 2023 to cover the wage increases for those fifty folks, not to mention the taxes that come along with it.

So while business in other states take advantage of both the Trump boom and the Trump tax cut to expand their production, modernize equipment, bring in new workers, pay bonuses to reward their best workers businesses in Massachusetts are going to have to think twice before taking any steps knowing those low skill workers will add $8000 to the debt side of their ledger each.

It would have been wiser to pay down pensions debts, or let the Tax revenue come in but in fairness to Baker, with Democrat super majority in each house the best he can do is get something in a deal. In a lot of other states with Democrat governors there isn’t a need for a deal it was all in for party time.

Third: Praying for Disaster

For two years we heard Democrats publicly, even hope for a recession because they thought that the strong economy which was good news for the country, was also good news for Trump. Like this:

And this:

Bill Maher said Friday that he is “hoping” for the bottom to fall out of the economy and for the country to enter a recession so we can “get rid of Trump.” He said one way to do that is a “crashing economy.” Maher said he is “sorry” if it hurts people, but rooting for a recession is a prevention measure to losing democracy

and when they couldn’t bring it about themselves they talked it down as best they could:

Attempting to talk the country into an economic recession is perhaps the lowest the Democrats can go in order to gain power.  It illustrates that power, not the good of the country, is their ultimate goal.  It is a sickening turn of events for a political party already in the gutter.

Well the left got their Made in China recession with unemployment spiking and business’ closed via decisions advised by the best and brightest based on computer models that have proved less than accurate. Furthermore as those models have happily proved inaccurate they have kept their states closed promising (and delivering) punitive action against those who did not obey while with their left/media allies have done all they can to demonize states that have reopened or as AJ Branco put it:

So to sum up, after wasting tax revenues from Trump boom, praying for recession, finally getting it in the hopes it will Damage POTUS and doing what they can to keep it rolling in their states despite the loss of the Tax Revenue that the Trump Boom brought NOW they want POTUS to bail them out?

HA!

The golden age of journalism wasn’t so golden

Posted: May 19, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

As it has become increasingly apparent that the media have become political partisans, I started to wonder how neutral the press was during the more than two decades I worked as a reporter.

The more I thought about it, the more I discovered that the media back in the good old days might not have been as overtly political as today, but slanted stories and opinions often made it into the news.

From 1974 to 1995, I worked at the Associated Press, Newsweek, and ABC News in Chicago, Washington, Beirut, Cairo, Rome, and New York. I worked with Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Hugh Downs, and many other well-known journalists. I competed against others, including Thomas Friedman, E.J. Dionne, David Ignatius, and many others.

Here’s what I recall about politics in the news back then. During my time in Washington, I watched as the nation’s press eviscerated Jimmy Carter and his team. Carter came from outside the swamp and didn’t fit into Washington culture. Neither did his top aides.

I don’t think Carter was a particularly good president, but the media took him to task on almost everything he tried. I can count on one hand, however, the number of former colleagues who voted for a Republican in the past 40 years.

Almost every reporter during the Iran hostage crisis thought Ayatollah Khomeini had to be better than the shah. How wrong we were!

In Beirut, almost every journalist backed the Palestinians, including me. Jennings had spent much of his early years in the Middle East and had a distinctly Arab tilt. Ignatius did some good work in the Middle East but has since gone off the rails with his analyses.

In Cairo, many journalists supported the peace efforts of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. I wasn’t one of them, but Sadat had an incredibly positive press in the United States. The opposite was true in many Arab states and Europe. Friedman had no understanding of the assassination of Sadat when he covered the story in 1981.

In Rome, I saw Dionne completely botch the story behind the plot to kill Pope John Paul II.

Just as I arrived in the United States in 1986 to work with ABC’s 20/20, Roone Arledge, a legend in television circles, had killed for the program on the sexual exploits of JFK when he was in the White House. Arledge didn’t want to upset the Kennedy clan and one of his top aides who worked with the family.

At 20/20, it was clear that Walters had a distinctly liberal bent, but she didn’t stand in the way of opposing viewpoints. Downs was just an incredibly decent human being.

Not too long after I arrived at the program, I included an interview with Pat Buchanan. I was accosted by a fellow producer who threatened that she would make sure people wouldn’t work with me if I ever had another conservative on the program.

Although the recollections here are merely anecdotal, they underline the powerful, albeit subtle, ways in which the media set an agenda back in the golden years. The political bias may not have been so apparent and so constant, but it was there. I am the first to admit that my biases probably made their way into my stories.

After I left the mainstream media, I wrote a column for The Washington Times for nearly three years until 2015. My former colleagues berated the conservative tone of the columns, including one who described me as “dumb as a boulder.” I was prevented from sharing my columns on a Facebook page for former ABC employees.

Today, I find that nearly all of my former colleagues have a decidedly liberal or leftist viewpoint.

In fact, a large group of ABC News retirees publicly criticized Trump over his attacks on the press. An Obama organizer and former ABC News producer started the petition. See  https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/25/trump-inciting-violence-nearly-retired-journalists-condemn-presidents-un-american-attacks-press/

I wonder if these points of view crept into their news coverage back in the day. I think they probably did.

The Unexpectedly Chronicles: Trained in Fear & Helplessness

Posted: May 19, 2020 by datechguy in culture
Tags: ,

One of the least surprising things that I’ve seen in the last few weeks has been people so willing to jump on the fear of re-opening bandwagon.

Despite the data, despite what we’ve seen in Florida, Texas and elsewhere there is a solid population that are terrified of the thought of re-opening the country.

Now I’m not talking about those driven by political considerations, (a economy that comes back helps Trump) I’m talking about actual people afraid of what might happen if we do.

Some might be surprised at this development but I’m actually shocked it’s not worse.

For a generation we gave out participation trophies because we were afraid of hurting feelings of those who didn’t win.

You people pushing the idea that grades and tests were bad because it might affect the self esteem of some.

In fact we reached the point where in colleges, places of supposedly higher education we had grief counselors assigned not only over election results that people didn’t like, but also over people who dared utter opinions that differed from the status quo.

And in the last year the use of a pronoun that one didn’t like caused people to crumble

In short we spent twenty years training people not to be able to cope with little things, in fact think of the fairly new word “microaggressions” it’s very name this suggests something small and meaningless, yet for thousands it represents something unbearable.

And now take these people weaned on fear and panic and introduce a virus that can actually kill you.

Do you really expect people who have been weaned on abject panic concerning trifles to be able to cope when faced with the prospect, however small of dying from an actual deadly disease?

So if you find yourself shaking your head over their fear that chunks of the country have over re-opening consider, the surprise isn’t that so many people are gripped with fear, the surprise is that after a quarter century of conditioning more aren’t

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