Short and sweet. And wrong. At Tuesday’s morning session of the hearing to confirm/reject Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:
Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA): Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?
Brown Jackson: Senator, the supreme court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.
Notice that. A court says so. Not our Constitution—the second of our Bill of Rights—says so.
This should be disqualifying.
As the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping considers shipping money, arms, “nonperishable foods,” any other material to support Russia President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of and atrocities on Ukraine and that nation’s women and children, and hospitals and schools, and innocents sheltering in bomb shelters against the barbarians’ rockets, missiles, and bombs, the video below is what Xi will be actively approving, not merely tacitly condoning.
As Union of South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa actually blames NATO for Putin’s naked aggression, and refuses to blame Russia for its barbaric behavior, the video below illustrates the nature of Putin’s invader barbarians that Ramaphosa actively approves.
Heads up. The video is behind Aplhabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s YouTube warning that the video is too harsh for Americans to see without being warned first. Which is, itself, an indication of the barbarism of which Xi and Ramaphosa approve.
Here is the video.
Governments that support such behavior are themselves ill-matched for the civilized world, and interaction with them should be done rarely and with great caution.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are touting the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin from the nomination to the Federal Reserve Board’s Vice Chairman position, laying that defeat off to this:
But Ms Raskin’s most significant opponent was her oft-expressed view that the Fed and other regulators should deny credit to companies that produce or heavily consume fossil fuels.
It’s good that this one failed, but it’s just an early skirmish.
The problem is broader than this. It’s dangerous to our republican democracy that anyone would be nominated to the Fed or to any Executive Branch position who would willingly abuse that position’s authority to discriminate against any government-disapproved American enterprise.
Michael Sussmann, the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer (among other roles) moved in court to strike portions of Special Council John Durham’s indictment of him, including in particular, the indictment’s “Factual Background” section. Sussman claimed that the section had “prejudicial” information and “false allegations” and so would taint the jury pool from which his jurors would be drawn. DC District Judge Christopher Cooper waved the BS flag at Sussman’s move.
I’m not going to strike anything from the record. Whatever effect the filing has had has already passed.
That’s correct. More important, though, are these factors. One is that, of course the indictment contains “prejudicial” information: grand juries are, by design, one-sided affairs intended solely to determine whether there’s enough material to warrant a formal charge and a trial. That’s why the evidence presented to a grand jury is sealed until trial; only the fact of the indictment and the nature of the government’s case can be made public before that trial—and never made public at all if, with or without indictment, the government decides not to proceed to trial.
The other factor, regarding the “false allegations” claim, is a so what one. The accuracy of the allegations, along with the accuracy and believability of any facts or other evidence underlying the allegations, are for juries to determine at trial, not for judges to deny jury access to via prosecutorial presentation.
Or not. In his Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Tunku Varadarajan cited the historian Robert Service as saying that two immense strategic blunders caused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The first supposed blunder is illustrative of how far our…intellectuals…have deviated from reason and morality.
The first [immense strategic blunder] came on November 10, when the US and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
No.
It’s never a blunder, large or small, to do a right thing, and acknowledging a sovereign nation’s right to pursue its own friendly, peaceful, or defensive ends always is a right thing. Beyond that, the right time to do a right thing always is right away.
If there was an immense strategic blunder, it was President Joe Biden’s (D) thinking he could virtue-signal with petty ink on a piece of paper and not actually have to back up those words with concrete support for Ukraine.
Full stop.