Monthly Archives: May 2024

Testimony of a Perjurer

Posted on by
Reply

Michael Cohen is on the stand this week in the trial of former President Donald Trump (R), testifying as a prosecution witness.

He is the only person likely to provide direct evidence that Trump himself ordered a coverup of a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

However,

Cohen also has plenty of baggage that could make jurors question his testimony. He is a convicted liar [and a] disbarred lawyer….

It’s hard to see how anything Cohen could say on the stand could be taken seriously without independently corroborating testimony or evidence. But if there were such testimony or evidence, Cohen wouldn’t need to testify in the first place; the prosecution would simply present that independent testimony or evidence.

Vice Presidents Don’t Matter Much

Posted on by
Reply

Karl Rove’s Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed centered on the theme of optimal criteria that a potential Vice Presidential running mate should meet in order to be effective should that person be selected as the ticket’s VP candidate. The subheadline of his piece set the tone:

Running mates don’t matter much, but they should be prepared to fill the top office.

Rove expanded on that, conclusively, toward the end of his piece:

Really though, there’s one criterion that matters: whether Mr Trump’s choice reinforces the voters’ perception that he would be a strong, effective president.

Vice Presidents actually do matter, very much, especially in a closely divided Senate. VP Pence cast a potful of Senate tie-breaking votes, and he was effective in shepherding many aspects of Trump’s agenda through Congress. VP Harris has cast a potful of Senate tie-breaking votes in support of Biden’s agenda.

Part of being a strong, effective President is having a Vice President who can be relied on in that sort of crunch.

To Hell with Bipartisanship

Posted on by
Reply

Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly has made Party’s disdain for us average Americans clear (as if it isn’t already, for some time). He said in an NBC News interview,

that he favors overriding the Senate filibuster to pass national abortion protections.

And

two years ago he [Kelly] argued for passing progressive “voting rights legislation” with 51 votes.

This position jammed my irony meter needle hard against the stop. Progressive voting rights are “rights” of non-citizens to vote in our elections. It’s hard to get more undemocratic than that. Indeed, that’s tautologically completely un-American.

Of course, Party won’t stop there. They’ll always have a Very Good Reason® for carving out Just One More® exception to the filibuster rule.

Just shut up and do things our way. That’s not just Kelly’s purpose—it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s pushing to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster. Outliers like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will soon be gone.

The WSJ thinks the Senate filibuster is on the ballot this fall. The news outlet is correct, but only in a limited way. The filibuster matter has put our free-market economy on the ballot, along with the concept of limited government with limited regulation of our lives.

Our two-party system of governance is on the ballot.

Deliberate Insult?

Posted on by
Reply

Amid the hoo-raw over Hamas claiming to agree to a sham deal for a cease fire and Israel sending tanks into Rafah to secure the Gaza side of the border crossing there despite Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s order not to and his already withholding weapons shipments to Israel, there’s this tidbit:

An Israeli delegation, Hamas officials, mediators from Qatar, and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency arrived in Cairo for discussions on a cease-fire proposal from the militant group. CIA Director William Burns arrived there from Qatar….

Leave aside the WSJ‘s dishonesty in claiming Hamas terrorists are a militant group. Biden sent an underling from an agency that has no authority to conclude any sort of international agreement, nor any sort of agreement between nations and a terrorist network entity. The CIA has no such capacity in its portfolio, not even the Director. Biden has sent his SecState to prior such discussions, and he’s sent his SecDef to prior such discussions. These two do have authority to conclude diplomatic or military agreements. Biden chose, this time though, to send his head spy instead.

So: a calculated insult by Biden aimed at the man for whom he has such blatant and public disdain—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—or just another example of Biden’s oblivious incompetence?

(Aside: one outcome of the IDF’s seizing the Gaza side of the border crossing could be one of making safer and easier the entry into the Gaza Strip of humanitarian aid, done by isolating the terrorists from the entry point. Of course, the press and the Biden administration don’t want to mention that part.)

Deadlines

Posted on by
Reply

Columbia’s management team gave terrorist supporters a deadline to clear their campus “encampment,” and when the campers ignored the deadline, managers issued them a new deadline. When the terrorist supporters seized and occupied a school building, managers gave them a deadline by which to clear out. And then another.

Terrorist supporters seized a Rhode Island School of Design building, and that school’s managers have issued a deadline. As seems typical of school management teams, the design school’s administrators have yet to announce consequences for demonstrators if they do not comply with the 8 am deadline.

And at MIT:

Anti-Israel agitators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took back their campus encampment after it was initially cleared by police.
…
Protesters at MIT were given a Monday afternoon deadline to voluntarily leave or face suspension. Many cleared out of the area, according to the school spokesperson. Dozens of protesters remained at the encampment through the night.
No arrests had been made as of Monday night, according to the MIT spokesperson.

This sort of thing is all too common, and it’s not unique to today’s school disruptions. As far back as Vietnam War college and university protests, disrupters would occupy school buildings, and school managers would issue deadlines to clear out after deadlines to clear out.

In all those cases, it became necessary, ultimately, for campus and local police, augmented in some cases by State police, to go in and forcibly root out the occupiers.

Enough. It’s time—long past time—for school managers to learn what should by now be the obvious lesson. Deadlines are useless except to the occupiers; all the deadlines do is demonstrate the timidity of school managers.

The correct answer to all of these test questions is to send the campus and local police right in immediately after the campers have encamped and the occupiers have occupied, and root them out. And apply suitable corrective action: expelling the students participating, firing professors (tenured or not) participating, and charging those who’ve committed crimes—vandalism, for instance, is rampant among occupiers—with the relevant charges, and then taking them to trial—no settlements, no plea bargains.