Tag Archives: responsibilities

Withholding Evidence

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Ex-Vice President Joe Biden (D) appears to have confessed to it.

Biden said a Congressional “gang of twelve” met with Obama White House officials on the matter and laid out what they knew.

Biden’s and Obama’s reaction?

“The president and I sat there and said ‘what the hell are we going to do?'” Biden said. “You go out there and unilaterally say ‘this is what’s happening,’ you’re going to be accused of…trying to tip the election.

So they sat on the information—us uninformed voters are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with this sort of information, the Progressive-Democrat says.

The former Delaware senator said he and Obama were concerned that describing alleged Russian involvement to a higher extent “could be used as a weapon against” nominee Hillary Clinton.

Biden added,

The die had been cast here. This was all about the political play[.]

There it is, straight from the Progressive-Democrat’s mouth.  Party politics was more important than pursuing a possible Russian interference, more important even than letting us voters know about the potential.  The withholding is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s own attempt to “tip” the election.

All for the sole reasons of protecting his BFF’s (ex-President Barack Obama (D)) reputation and of protecting their Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Remember this duplicity in the fall.

It’s Somebody Else’s Fault

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Recall the 50,000 “missing” FBI text messages between FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok that just by coincidence happen to have been exchanged in the most critical period of interest to Congressional investigations.

It turns out that not only has the FBI “lost” these emails, they tried to cover it up [emphasis added].

[A] pair of Republican senators [Senators Ron Johnson (R, WI) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA)] pressed the Justice Department’s watchdog [Inspector General Michael Horowitz] to explain why he did not inform them last month that the FBI “failed to preserve” five months of text messages between Strzok and Page.

It gets better: the FBI now is claiming that

the Samsung 5 mobile phones it provided to employees “did not capture or store text messages due to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

Right.  That must be it.  On the other hand, there’s still that beachfront property north of Santa Fe….

No, this smacks of evidence tampering to me.  Especially since what those emails might have shed some light on concerned things exposed by the emails that have been turned over, things like FBI agents’ “secret society” and the “secret meetings off-site” that they were holding, and the “back up plan” and “insurance” that Strzok and Page in particular seem to have been hatching.

Or, it really is all Samsung’s fault; their bug must have been produced while writing software in the distracting environment north of Santa Fe.

A Tool

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Facebook’s management is beginning to realize the impact Facebook can have on our national society and on the politics of our society.  Product Manager Samidh Chakrabarti:

If there’s one fundamental truth about social media’s impact on democracy it’s that it amplifies human intent—both good and bad[.]

But in their hubris that same management is presuming to dictate to us how we will be allowed to use it.

[W]e have a moral duty to understand how these technologies are being used and what can be done to make communities like Facebook as representative, civil, and trustworthy as possible.

No.  Facebook technology is like any other tool, neither good nor bad in itself, but useful or destructive in from the way it’s used.  Like any large power tool, it certainly can be dangerous—but it’s on us to use it correctly and safely.

It’s certainly not on producers of technology, including of tools like Facebook (or Twitter, come to that, or Instragram, or Snapchat, or…), to take it on themselves to censor what they provide or omit.  That’s the responsibility of us as individuals.  Facebook’s management team has a responsibility to publish a serious, honest owner’s manual—just like Black & Decker has a responsibility to publish a serious, honest owner’s manual for its chainsaws.  But Black & Decker only has a responsibility vis-à-vis its saws to make them effective and safe.  Facebook management has the same responsibility—neither more nor less—to do the same with the tool known as Facebook.

It’s time they stopped condescending.  It’s time they stopped presuming to manage our outcomes for us.

Hypocrisy

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…is alive and well in the National Football League.  The NFL invited American Veterans, a major veterans support organization, to submit an ad for the Super Bowl advertising suite.  So AMVET did.

It turns out the NFL just wanted to look good in the public shower; it wasn’t at all serious.  Having received AMVET’s submission, they chose to reject it.  The ad committed the heinous crime of asking folks to stand for the national anthem.  The NFL’s excuse?  The Super Bowl is

designed for fans to commemorate and celebrate the game, players, teams, and the Super Bowl…

it’s not a place for political statements.  But NFL allows football players to insult our veterans and attack our national anthem, including planned kneelings at the upcoming Super Bowl.  That’s not a political statement, though.

Consider this carefully as you decide whether you want to watch what used to be a great game.  Consider, also, whether you want to drop a dime, next year, on the NFL, given its support for its players’ attacks on our national anthem and their insults to generations of our veterans.

An Exam

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President Donald Trump had his annual physical earlier this week, and at his request, a mental acuity exam was administered to him as well.  The White House doctor, Navy Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who performed the exams was the same White House physician for George Bush the Younger and for Barack Obama.  The results were presented by Jackson at a Tuesday presser, and at Trump’s insistence, Jackson stayed to answer, completely—no doctor patient confidentiality—every question the NLMSM (my term; Trump has a different term for that subset of the nation’s press) might ask.

In short, Trump has high cholesterol and needs to take his cholesterol meds, and he’s overweight.  Trump also got a perfect score on the mental acuity exam.

In long, the press spent an hour quizzing Jackson about the exam’s results.  An hour to get the results of an exam.

That hour demonstrates the NLMSM’s desperation to find something—anything—with which to smear the President.  It’ll be interesting to see if the NLMSM will let go of this particular bit of dishonesty.

Nope.  Jackson hadn’t even left the briefing room when MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow put out this.

You know what? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and raise the possibility that this statement was not written by the White House physician. […]

I’m not basing my skepticism on the authorship of this statement on the “Trumpiness” of the statement itself. The reason I think this might not have actually been written by the White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson, is because that is not how your spell Ronny Jackson.

This is the offending tweet that formed the stuff of Maddow’s fevered nightmare:

Jackson’s misspelled first name proves—proves!—that the whole thing is a stinking lie and Trump, according to the NLMSM, really is crazier than a hoot owl.

And a Newsweek headline, via Yahoo!:

Trump at Risk for a Heart Attack With Dangerous Weight and Skyrocketing Cholesterol