You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Hillary Clinton’ tag.
It was with sadness that I read of Jackie Mason’s death at the weekend.
Still, he had a good innings. He was 93 years old.
The Daily Mail had an excellent obituary of one of the world’s most consistently funny comics. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Life before comedy
I did not know that he was born in Wisconsin:
Mason was born in 1928 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as Yacov Moshe Maza to immigrant parents from Belarus.
In the early 1930s, the family moved to New York’s Lower East Side. All the male relatives were rabbis and young Yacov was expected to follow in their footsteps:
‘It was unheard-of to think of anything else,’ Mason said. ‘But I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this, because this is not my calling.’
However, there was no way out for many years. Mason earned a degree in English and Sociology at City College of New York then completed rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University, after which he became a practising rabbi.
He served several congregations, including those in Weldon, North Carolina, and Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
Sometime in the 1950s, he began working summers in the Catskills, a mountain range in New York State, known for its resorts which attracted Jewish clientele. It is known as the Borscht Belt.
He wrote his own material, put comedy sets together and accustomed himself to being on stage.
Comedy career
It was only in 1959, after his father died, that the rabbi pursued a stand-up career full time and changed his name to Jackie Mason.
However, he did not leave his theological training behind. In 1988, he described his style of comedy to the New York Times:
‘My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you,’
‘He’s not better than you, he’s just another guy,’ he added. ‘I see life with love — I’m your brother up there — but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.’
From the Catskills, he branched out into the big time, playing clubs in Miami and New York in 1960 after two television appearances on the iconic Steve Allen Show.
I am old enough to remember that Jackie Mason was on television a lot in the early 1960s.
In 1964, he appeared on another iconic programme, The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on Sunday nights. I remember my mother got very worked up about what happened in one of his appearances, as she was a huge Ed Sullivan fan. We never missed a show. After this appearance she turned against Jackie Mason:
… after a terrible misunderstanding in 1964 between Sullivan and Mason involving a perceived obscene middle finger gesture, Jackie’s career hit a major slump.
Sullivan canceled Mason’s six-show contract, refusing to pay him for the performance.
Mason eventually filed a lawsuit, and won.
Mason’s career did not recover until the late 1970s:
… it would take him many years to find his momentum once again, with his comeback punctuated by well-received performances in 1979’s Steve Martin film The Jerk, and Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I two years later.
‘People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,’ Mr. Mason told Look. ‘It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.’
My mother would definitely have agreed with the ‘sick maniac’ description, unfounded though it was.
He hired a new manager Jyll Rosenfeld, whom he later married. She convinced him that there was an appetite for Borscht Belt humour beyond the Catskills. He launched a long-running show on Broadway in 1986:
Mason decided to bring his one-man comic shows The World According to Me!, to the Broadway stage in 1986.
The hit show ran for two years, and earned him a special Tony Award in 1987, followed by an Emmy for writing when HBO aired a version of the show.
From there, the legendary comedian put close to a dozen other one-man shows on Broadway, with the last being The Ultimate Jew in 2008.
Here is one of his performances from 1986:
Mason also enjoyed an on-screen appearance in Caddyshack II in 1988 and a voice-over as Rabbi Krustofsky in an early episode of The Simpsons in 1992, for which he won a second Primetime Emmy Award, for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
In the aforementioned New York Times interview from 1988, he was philosophical in the way only a rabbi can be:
‘I’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years, but it’s like I was born last Thursday,’ Mr. Mason told The New York Times in 1988.
‘They see me as today’s comedian. Thank God I stunk for such a long time and was invisible, so I could be discovered.’
London appearances
For several years, Jackie Mason used to come to London once a year for a stand-up show that was often televised.
I was in stitches.
Guido Fawkes tweeted Mason’s 2002 appearance, which was or was close to being his last over here:
Here’s the video, which is just over 90 minutes long:
The next video is his 1999 performance at the London Palladium. It is just under 40 minutes long:
However, in 1992, Mason did a half-hour set at Oxford University, where he ribbed the students for their total lack of sartorial elegance and fondness of political correctness. He also made fun of the Jewish lifestyle which encompasses self-denial of Jewishness as well as certain material aspirations. The University asked him to do the set for free, something at which he also cavilled, in a humorous way:
This is his description of the video:
This is a clip from a lecture I gave at Oxford University back in 1992. They gave me an award and a fellowship in the Oxford Union Society. The first American comedian to receive such an honor. That’s how they got me to work for nothing. Enjoy!
Here’s the second part, which was a Q&A session:
He talked about his years as a rabbi where people didn’t want the sermon and hoped for a few jokes. He said that Oxford students were very polite and he hadn’t heard one four-letter word yet: ‘I’m waiting, I’m waiting’.
Near the end, he said that England is the most polite society in the Western world with all the ubiquitous apologies one hears. The only exception, he noted, is in Parliament, where the raucous tone reminded him of a ‘sanitarium’.
Politics and talk radio
In 1998, Mason’s biography was published and he began a career in talk radio:
he published an autobiography, ‘Jackie, Oy!’ (written with Ken Gross), and discovered a new venture as an opinionated political commentator on talk radio.
Twenty years later, he issued a series of vlogs against then-candidate Barack Obama. I watched most of them. This one discusses the first presidential debate in September 2008:
His description of the Obama v McCain debate reads as follows:
Here are my thoughts on the first presidential debate. Although neither candidate had a clear victory Friday night, the media is saying Obama won because he didn’t lose. He looked poised and presidential. Well he did look poised as he made no sense! And if looking Presidential is telling bold lies, the Hail to the Chief!
In 2016, Mason was an unabashed Trump supporter:
He was among the few well-known entertainers to support former President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
In October 2016, he appeared on Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, which airs in New York City and Philadelphia. Mason contrasted Trump’s words about women to Bill Clinton’s actual violence against his victims.
Breitbart had the story, reporting that Mason said:
What Trump ever did to women is that he called them a name because she gained too much weight so he said she got too fat and he called her a pig. Imagine if the worst thing Bill Clinton ever did was call a girl a name. He called them names after he raped them.
When he got through with them, Juanita Broaddrick wound up with a cut lip. And he had advised her to please go see a doctor. He was very compassionate about sending them to doctors. But he wasn’t too concerned about beating them up in the first place. He was so busy punching them around that nobody knows if he made love to them or he just wanted to beat them up a little bit.
As for Hillary, he said:
He was really a violent, insane character. Now his wife, she had a job. Her job was to make sure that these women were never heard about it. Every time somebody threatened to talk about it she immediately went to work on destroying them. First he punched them around. Then it was her job to wipe them out altogether.
… And she’s calling Trump a person who can’t be trusted because of the way he treats women? This is like somebody who crossed a red light being compared to a murderer.
After Trump’s election, Mason turned his attention towards the RINOs, especially the then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan:
In March 2017, Breitbart reported:
In this week’s exclusive clip for Breitbart News, Jackie weighs in on the GOP’s failed healthcare bill, explaining that Republicans in Washington were focused on “repealing and replacing” the wrong thing.
“When they were talking about ‘repeal and replace,’ they were stupid,” Jackie says. “They were talking about healthcare, they should have been talking about [House Speaker Paul] Ryan. If Ryan was repealed and replaced we would have had no problem today.”
Jackie — who was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in Ryan’s home state — says he finds it odd that a Speaker of the House who is supposed to be some kind of “genius” can’t count correctly.
“You know what Ryan should do if he wanted to save this whole country? Get another job,” he says. “Find out something that you actually know. If there’s nothing like that, sit in the House and don’t bother anybody. Mind your own business, you’ll save the country.”
My deepest sympathies go to his widow and former manager Jyll Rosenfeld and his daughter Sheba Mason, from a former union with Ginger Reiter in the 1970s and 1980s.
For more Jackie Mason shows and interviews, visit TheUltimateJew channel on YouTube.
Before I get to Joe Biden’s behaviour around the opposite sex, I have an update on Tony Bobulinski’s interview with Tucker Carlson.
I featured half of it in yesterday’s post, but here is the full interview:
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway tweeted a summary of it. I’ll begin with her commentary where I left off:
On last night’s show, Tucker said that he asked one of his staff members to send some Hunter Biden-related documents to him in Los Angeles, where he has been filming. The staff member, based in New York, sent them through a well-known, reputable courier service. Unfortunately, an empty package reached Carlson. (I hope they have a copy in New York.)
En route, the package was opened and contents removed. The company interviewed every possible person who could have handled it. They also searched a van and plane, but nothing showed up. The company is not only deeply apologetic, but also deeply disturbed that this could have happened:
I agree. Someone is watching.
Here’s Tucker’s full show from Wednesday, October 28. I’m not sure how long it will be up, so watch it while you can. The last five minutes are about how to pronounce Kamala, as in Harris. Some say KAM-a-la, others say KAHM-a-la. The vice presidential candidate herself pronounces it halfway between the two.
Now on to the main topic.
Gropin’ Joe
During his vice presidency, Joe Biden swore in US Senators. Watch Biden caress Senator Christopher Coons’s daughter Maggie:
That video went viral:
Maybe he’s just a tactile person? It looks as if Hillary wants him to get off. Outside of Maggie Coons, the rest are likely to be married women. Even if they weren’t, it looks highly inappropriate — and weird:
The woman on the left in the photo collage above is a reporter, Amie Parnes:
Four years ago, the lefty media buzzed with anti-Trump groping stories, but the real groper was Biden. A Daily Mail article from October 18, 2016, has more on Biden, including photos.
The article features a photo of Stephanie Carter, the wife of the then-defense secretary Ash Carter. She and Biden were standing behind the podium as Ash Carter was speaking! Biden had his hands firmly on her shoulders and looked as if he were kissing her hair. (Also see The Daily Caller‘s take.)
Carter was not bothered:
‘Oh, I laughed. I laughed. I laughed,’ Carter said after the fact. He told the ‘Today’ show, ‘They know each other extremely well, and we’re great friends with the Bidens.’
Returning to Maggie Coons above, the article says:
Biden placed his hands on the shoulder of Coons’ daughter and whispered in Maggie Coons’ ear during the ceremony, attracting enough chatter in DC that Senator Coons got asked about it during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
‘I have to ask, ’cause a lot of people have been speculating about it, does she think the vice president is creepy?’ host Chris Wallace asked point-blank.
‘No, Chris,’ Coons responded. ‘She doesn’t think the vice president is creepy.’
Senator Coons also vouched for what Biden said at the time. ”I could hear him. He was leaning forward and whispering some encouragement to her about how when he was sworn in his own daughter Ashley was 13 and she felt awkward and uncomfortable.’
Biden feels at liberty to touch women, regardless of age. There is another photo of him caressing an older lady’s chin with this accompanying caption:
Biden has also been known to flash his charm on mature women during swearing in ceremonies, including chatting up Sen. John Barrasso’s mom.
The article carried this short video compilation of Biden’s ‘greatest hits’, as it were. Hillary features in this too, in another scene at an airport. She’s patting his arm rather insistently — as in ‘get off’ — while smiling:
Here’s the Hillary sequence all on its own:
Here is the full swearing in of Sen. Kelly Ayotte. This one has audio. He asks Kelly Ayotte’s daughter how old she is. After the swearing in, he can’t keep his hands off her. I don’t particularly agree with the title of this video — others do — but Biden shouldn’t be touching children like that:
In 2018, Biden campaigned for Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and the gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers. He said Tony had met his future wife when both of them were in kindergarten:
The Daily Caller has the story (emphases mine):
“By the way, running for governor is a team sport! No way out,” Biden said. “He met Kathy in kindergarten. In kindergarten. She was too young to resist. She should’ve known better but she did it anyway.”
Biden did not explain what he meant by the joke, instead planting a kiss on Kathy’s forehead. The audience laughed and smiled along with Biden’s joke.
Here is a strange photo, dating from Joe’s earlier days as US Senator for Delaware:
Obama
He and Obama had a somewhat unusual friendship.
On June 28, 2016, People reported that Obama made a friendship bracelet for his vice president:
“That stuff’s hard,” Obama concluded in the video for BuzzFeed, which has partnered with a nonprofit, nonpartisan app called TurboVote to help make the voter registration process smooth sailing. “But you know what isn’t? Registering to vote. I hope you all understand that you have the power to shape our country’s course. Don’t take that for granted.”
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting with my vice president,” Obama added, proudly holding up a friendship bracelet with the name “Joe” on it.
Biden returned the favour on Obama’s birthday that year:
This next tweet is just a bit of fun:
Republicans react differently
Not everyone has been as understanding of Joe Biden’s behaviour as establishment Democrats are.
In the next video, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions bats Biden’s hand away from his granddaughter. Before that, however, Biden rests his hand on a teen’s waist and is tempted to reach further:
Secret Service agents’ stories
In 2014, veteran journalist Ronald Kessler wrote a book about Secret Service agents’ experiences, The First Family Detail.
On August 1 that year, a few days before its release, US News & World Report received an advance copy. Regarding Joe Biden, their article says:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
In addition to the alleged skinny-dipping, agents are reportedly irritated by frequent last-minute trips to Delaware.
A Biden spokeswoman would not address the claims on the record. A spokesperson for the Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf thought that criticising skinny dipping was out of date:
… let me tell you that virtually no one in the Washington, D.C., political press is scandalized by skinny dipping. But every time it emerges that someone in public life has swam naked, there is widespread, disingenuous playacting on the question. You’d suddenly think that Maude Flanders was managing the newsroom. While I have no idea if the reporting in the new book on the Secret Service is credible, outlets treating it as credible enough to report have been distracted by skinny-dipping from what is indisputably more important news.
He forgets that the press corps weren’t there; female Secret Service agents were the ones guarding him. They had every right to be offended.
In 2017, Gateway Pundit reported that Secret Service agents were relieved that Biden was no longer vice president because his behaviour towards women was so raunchy.
A former Secret Service agent described it as ‘Weinstein-level stuff’, it was so bad (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that, “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.
“He would mess with every single woman or teen. It was horrible,” the agent said.
According to the source, a Secret Service agent once got suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him. The situation got so heated, the source told Cassandra Fairbanks, that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President.
Additionally, the agent claims that Biden would walk around the VP residence naked at night. “I mean, stark naked… Weinstein level stuff,” he added.
He said that the men on duty would frequently stand in front of female agents and Navy women that were present “like a damn guardian.” On some occasions, they would make up reasons to get the women away from where he was.
The agent said he was specifically concerned about women in the Navy.
“They weren’t allowed to disobey him at all, but we’d take them away under pretend auspices,” the agent stated.
The official Vice Presidential residence is the Queen Anne style house at One Observatory Circle in Washington, DC, which is located on the northeast grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The property is maintained and cared for by the service branch.
As for skinny dipping at his home in Delaware:
Our source confirmed this sentiment, adding that “it was especially an issue at his Delaware house that he would go to every weekend.”
“He would only get naked when Jill was absent,” he added.
Biden has also long been criticized for his contact with women and girls in photos and videos, and was even referred to as “Creepy Uncle Joe Biden” by the Washington Post.
The agent said that this type of thing did not go on when Republicans were in charge:
The agent also worked under the Bush administration, and added that Vice President Dick Cheney “never grabbed any butts or breasts.”
Lucy Flores, 2014 Democrat candidate
In 2019, Lucy Flores, recounted her encounter with Biden while she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada in 2014. She wrote a first-person article for The Cut: ‘An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden’. (Breitbart‘s John Nolte wrote about this story shortly after her article appeared.)
Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
… when my campaign heard from Vice-President Joe Biden’s office that he was looking to help me and other Democrats in the state, I was grateful and flattered. His team offered to bring him to a campaign rally in an effort to help boost voter turnout. We set the date for November 1, just three days before election day …
I found my way to the holding room for the speakers, where everyone was chatting, taking photos, and getting ready to speak to the hundreds of voters in the audience. Just before the speeches, we were ushered to the side of the stage where we were lined up by order of introduction. As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience …
Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.
She then wrote about some of the material I have posted above, which has been making the rounds for the past four years, and more:
Time passed and pictures started to surface of Vice-President Biden getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls. Biden nuzzling the neck of the Defense secretary’s wife; Biden kissing a senator’s wife on the lips; Biden whispering in women’s ears; Biden snuggling female constituents. I saw obvious discomfort in the women’s faces, and Biden, I’m sure, never thought twice about how it made them feel. I knew I couldn’t say anything publicly about what those pictures surfaced for me; my anger and my resentment grew.
Had I never seen those pictures, I may have been able to give Biden the benefit of the doubt. Had there not been multiple articles written over the years about the exact same thing — calling his creepy behavior an “open secret” — perhaps it would feel less offensive. And yet despite the steady stream of pictures and the occasional article, Biden retained his title of America’s Favorite Uncle. On occasion that title was downgraded to America’s Creepy Uncle but that in and of itself implied a certain level of acceptance. After all, how many families just tolerate or keep their young children away from the creepy uncle without ever acknowledging that there should be zero tolerance for a man who persistently invades others’ personal space and makes people feel uneasy and gross? In this case, it shows a lack of empathy for the women and young girls whose space he is invading, and ignores the power imbalance that exists between Biden and the women he chooses to get cozy with.
A male friend told Flores not to say anything about her encounter:
When I spoke to a male friend who is also a political operative in Biden’s orbit — the first man who had heard the story outside of my staff and close friends years ago — he did what no one else had and made me question myself and wonder if I was doing the right thing. He reminded me that Biden has significant resources and argued points that made me question my memory, even though I’ve replayed that scene in my mind a thousand times. He reminded me that my credibility would be attacked and that I should be prepared for the type of “back and forth” that could occur. (When reached by New York Magazine, a representative for Vice-President Joe Biden declined to comment.)
I’m not suggesting that Biden broke any laws, but the transgressions that society deems minor (or doesn’t even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end. That imbalance of power and attention is the whole point — and the whole problem.
In the end, Lucy Flores did speak up and out:
Trump’s winning campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted:
No one can dispute this:
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take Joe’s groping seriously.
You can find more photos and GIFs of Joe Biden in action here.
Democratic primary campaign videos
He was still at it on the campaign trail before winning the nomination this year.
These are incidents from 2019:
Gateway Pundit wrote about another:
Their article says, in part:
No video has been posted yet, but it fits a pattern seen on numerous videos of Biden making sexual comments to pre-teen and adolescent girls about staying away from boys, or keeping boys away or not dating until they are thirty. That is in addition to the numerous videotaped incidents of Biden groping young girls.
Here’s one where he held onto a woman’s hands:
Poor woman:
This is the last set of videos from 2019. The one with the kids is from Wilmington, Delaware:
He told them the story of Cornpop:
This video from Texas is where he can’t remember ‘God’:
Hillary Clinton told People magazine that year that we have to ‘get over it’. Joe’s gropes are no biggie.
Lucy Flores nailed it: Joe Biden he thinks he’s so powerful that he can get away with anything. And does.
The 2020 Republican National Convention is the best television I’ve ever watched outside of certain food show competitions.
I have so many tweets to share that I have linked to several in addition to posting them below.
Changes had to be made to the format because of coronavirus restrictions. At the weekend, I had doubts as to how interesting it would be. I am pleased to say that I was wrong.
There were no comperes (MCs) introducing each speaker at the Andrew W Mellon Auditorium, just speakers walking out in a dignified manner on the stage and addressing Americans at home with powerful messages, some of which were very personal.
There were no music acts outside of the outstanding renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner on Days 1 and 3 as well as a closing act on Day 4. Good.
I thought I’d miss the crowd of delegates and other attendees, but it was enough to see the former at the roll call on Day 1.
The Andrew W Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, is magnificent. I’d not seen it before, but it made the perfect setting for the dozens of speakers who told their personal stories.
And the flags that served as the backdrop in the auditorium were beautiful, made from the finest fabric. They added greatly to an already spectacular atmosphere.
I watched proceedings on C-SPAN, which has a video for each day. Below that are lists of individual speakers and their videos. This enables the viewer to watch either in full or in part. There are also tabs at the top of the page for each individual day’s videos.
Because of the time difference, I haven’t been able to watch Day 4 in its entirety but have covered it here for the sake of completion.
Highlights follow.
That said, every speech was excellent.
Background
The Democratic National Convention was held last week in Joe Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, as well as other locations, because of coronavirus restrictions.
BBC Parliament broadcast the last day of the convention on Sunday, August 23. I watched it while doing other things.
Wow. I have never seen a more boring and a more stilted political convention. It sounded as if everything had been scripted at the last minute and no one had time to rehearse their lines. Even a Teleprompter could not help. Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame presented. Her scripted jokes fell flat and her delivery was dreadful. Mike Bloomberg’s speech also had jokes in it; his delivery was equally dire.
The theme, as one would expect from Democrats, was, once again, Change. I thought that eight years of Obama was supposed to be the ‘change Americans can believe in’. Apparently not. Democrats say that President Trump built on his predecessor’s success. Okay. In that case, we don’t need further change, right?
Not exactly.
Joe Biden said in his acceptance speech that he wants to ‘change’ America ‘for decades to come’. Hmm. Interesting.
He wants to raise taxes of all Americans to the tune of $3 trillion. That’s a lot of change right there.
He wants every American to wear a mask until October ‘at least’ to curb coronavirus. Imagine if this guy gets in. What a disaster. I have a lot of Biden material to share with you. That will come in the latter stages of the presidential campaign, all being well.
Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, said that the ongoing protests, which have been running for nearly 100 days now, ‘are not going to stop, nor should they’. What? Even if she and Biden win the election? She must know they will lose in November:
This is what the protesters want. As I said in 2016, they want a revolution. They’re Bolsheviks:
Hillary says that Joe Biden should not concede the election, even if he loses. She, too, must think he doesn’t have a chance, even though it’s only August.
Note Hillary’s appearance. It seems to change. Weird. I’ve included a tweet with other photos of her:
Joe Biden did not get the usual post-convention bounce in the polls, which is telling:
Day 1 — Monday, August 24
Every day opened with a convocation prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, including the words ‘under God’, which the Democrats omitted last week.
This is the only day where there is a morning session. It was held in Charlotte, North Carolina. Only delegates and party officials were in attendance. Ronna Romney McDaniel (Mitt’s niece) presided, as Chair of the Republican National Committee. She did an excellent job.
It was a sea change from the 2016 convention, which was riven on the morning of the first day by never-Trumpers who did not want him nominated.
This year, every state’s delegates unanimously voted for President Trump’s renomination.
Ronna McDaniel proceeded with the roll call, as voted for by the delegates, but stopped after Minnesota, concluding with remarks from former governor Scott Walker for Wisconsin. She formally announced the nomination of President Trump, who then gave a speech:
He spoke for 52 minutes, during which time he expressed his deep concern about postal votes. He is right to be concerned. It has produced fraudulent results in the past. There is no reason to think it won’t happen again this year.
He is also mostly right in saying that this is the most important election in American history. I might just modify that to ‘since 1860’, when coincidentally, the first Republican — Abraham Lincoln — was elected:
That evening, speeches began from the unbelievably stately Andrew W Mellon Auditorium in Washington.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan delivered his opening prayer from New York City with the Statue of Liberty in the background:
Cancer survivor Natalie Harp talked about the film It’s a Wonderful Life where James Stewart’s character George Bailey did so much good by saving Bedford Falls from becoming Pottersville. She said Pottersville would have been what would have happened to the US under Hillary. There are similarities between George Bailey and Donald Trump. I have often thought about that over the past four years and was delighted that she brought it up:
Maximo Alvarez, the founder and president of Sunshine Gasoline Distributors in Florida, warned that Americans must not allow their country to move towards communism. He said that his father emigrated from Spain to Cuba, then from Cuba to the United States. His father told him that America was the last possible refuge for people who love freedom. If America is destroyed, there is no other place to go:
Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina closed the evening with a measured speech on race relations and the current protests. He said that he was elected to represent a majority-white district where, he said, paraphrasing Dr Martin Luther King, voters judged him on his character, not the colour of his skin. He eloquently dismantled all the Democrats’ radical arguments:
The Federalist‘s Sean Davis, a Trump supporter, tweeted:
Democrats rang C-SPAN afterwards to give their views.
Rick from Lorain, Ohio, said he was switching from the Democrats to Republicans, because the Republicans focussed on God whereas the Democrats left God out of their convention:
More Democrats rang in during the subsequent days to say they had switched parties.
C-SPAN’s ratings for the RNC were much higher than for the DNC. The New York Post has more on the story.
Day 2 — Tuesday, August 25
The theme of Day 2 was Land of Opportunity.
The Revd Norma Urrabazo gave a stirring opening prayer:
Myron Lizer, Navajo Nation Vice President, was the first to speak. He spoke from Shiprock, New Mexico. He said that President Trump has done more than previous administrations to listen to and act on the needs of Native Americans:
Next was the story of the president’s pardon of Jon Ponder, who founded an organisation, Hope for Prisoners, with rehabilitation programmes for former prisoners:
It’s an amazing story. Ponder, a committed Christian, is best friends with the FBI agent who arrested him.
Cris Peterson, a dairy farmer from Wisconsin, explained how fewer government regulations and more help to farmers enabled her family’s Four Cubs Farm to purchase state of the art milking equipment. Fascinating video:
The Democrat mayor of Eveleth, Minnesota, said he is supporting President Trump this year. He says that the Democrats have become too radical and that their ecological policies would ruin the prosperity of his town:
Nick Sandmann, who was accosted in 2019 at the Lincoln Memorial, spoke of that day and how he refuses to be cancelled. His lawyer Lin Wood won a huge payout for him against the Washington Post. Nick plans to go on to law school after finishing university:
Some of the stories came from President Lincoln’s boyhood home in Spencer County, Indiana. Mike Pence narrated this sequence:
There was a naturalisation ceremony, filmed earlier, which President Trump attended:
There were many more outstanding speeches, including those from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump.
The evening ended with a long speech at the White House from Melania Trump, who was dressed in quasi-military designer attire:
These are the YouTube ratings for Day 2:
Day 3 — Wednesday, August 26
The theme of Day 3 was Land of Heroes and included people from various walks of life, from the military to first responders to lorry drivers keeping goods on the move during the coronavirus pandemic.
This rabbi’s prayer was perfect, as was his delivery:
A disabled veteran movingly recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
Governor Kristi Noem from South Dakota was the first to speak. She spoke of her state’s success during the pandemic — no lockdown and very low case/death figures:
Noem rightly criticised the unchecked lawlessness going on in Democrat-run American cities:
MSNBC was none too happy, but it’s the truth:
President Trump’s newish press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, a young wife and mother, told her moving story of breast cancer and subsequent breast reconstruction. She also spoke of the admiration she has for Trump’s pro-life stance:
Madison Cawthorne is a disabled man (injured in a car accident) who is running for US Congress in North Carolina. He gave a spirited speech about America’s Founding Fathers, especially James Madison:
When he finished his speech, two friends came on stage to help him stand up. At 6’3″, he said he misses being able to stand up and see over the crowd.
A PBS journalist was unimpressed by his standing up. WHY? Look at the idiotic reasoning:
My favourite speech of the week came from Sister Deirdre Byrne, MD, of the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts, a medically-oriented religious order for women.
Sister Deirdre entered the order in 2002. Prior to that, she had a career as a physician and is a retired US Army Colonel!
She spoke of her admiration of President Trump’s love of the unborn. She said that a Biden presidency would put an end to the safeguards of the unborn. The Biden-Harris ticket approves of abortion at the point of birth, essentially, infanticide:
Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, spoke.
Eric passed make-up brushes to her as she was getting ready:
In her speech, she said that one mustn’t believe all one reads in the media and that this applied very much to the Trump family. She wasn’t sure what her future in-laws would be like when Eric first introduced them to her. She said that she was given a very warm welcome from the start. She says she admires their values of hard work and determination, with which she was also raised:
Clarence Henderson told about his experiences as a young man growing up in the segregated South. He recited the pro-voting and pro-civil rights amendments, all of which Republicans were responsible for passing, not Democrats. Well worth a listen. This man knows of what he speaks:
Former Acting Director of Intelligence Richard Grenell spoke. I hope his words lead to something big:
President Trump watched from the sidelines:
Mike Pence rounded off the evening with a long speech from Fort McHenry in Baltimore. The Star-Spangled Banner tells the story of the battle between America and the British in 1814 which took place there:
Well said:
Afterwards, ex-Democrat Helen from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, rang C-SPAN to say that she had switched parties and that she loved Melania Trump’s speech. She also deeply admires President Trump and will be voting for him this year:
Carol from Charleston, South Carolina, called to say that she finds Melania Trump ‘classy’ and ‘so intelligent’. Carol said she was a Hillary voter four years ago but has been surprised by what President Trump has accomplished since his election. She says she will ‘trust’ Melania and will vote for Trump:
Here are the ratings:
Day 4 — Thursday, August 27
Earlier in the day, NASA announced that the first black, female astronaut is scheduled to be on next year’s mission to the International Space Station:
C-SPAN posted their Day 4 video on YouTube:
The theme was A Land of Greatness.
The final night is, of course, the biggest one of the convention. Although President Trump spoke at length on Day 1 after receiving a unanimous vote from the delegates, Day 4 was when he gave what is considered his formal — and second (final) — acceptance speech.
These proceedings are about an hour longer than those from the previous days.
The Revd Franklin Graham (Billy’s son) gave a heartfelt prayer, asking for help for those affected by tropical storm Laura, for healing with regard to the protests, for protection of the Trumps and the Pences as well as continued guidance:
A young brother and sister from a military family recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Beautiful.
Ja’Ron Smith, Deputy Assistant to the President, spoke of his working class upbringing, his parents’ American values and of President Trump. He said that, growing up, he believed all the anti-Republican clichés. As he got to know more Republicans, he changed his mind. He never dreamt that he would be working for a president. He says that no one has done more for black interests than President Trump:
The people interviewed below head up their respective housing associations in New York City. They do not like Mayor Bill de Blasio’s policy of putting illegal immigrants into public housing before native New Yorkers, some of whom have been on waiting lists for ten years. They greatly appreciate what Dr Ben Carson has been doing as head of HUD (Housing and Urban Development), which has helped identify and fix anomalies in public housing:
Alice Johnson spoke of her gratitude for President Trump’s First Step Act from 2018, which has to do with prison reform. That year, Trump commuted Johnson’s life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drugs offence and granted her a full pardon today (Friday):
Ivanka Trump spoke of her father’s commitment to the American people:
President Trump spoke of the greatness of America and her people …
… while emphasising that the United States has clear internal enemies:
I fully agree with this:
The programme of events ended with a magnificent fireworks display, which was much better than the Democrats’ in Wilmington the Thursday before:
Unfortunately, as the guests left the White House, protesters awaited them:
Congressman Brian Mast, below, who is black, even got harassed by protesters. He politely answered their questions. They did not like his answers about pursuing ‘due process’ where necessary:
I can’t help but admire a husband who carries his wife’s shoes!
On the downside, when that couple reached their hotel, The Willard, the doors were locked. Even an employee outside couldn’t help them. They had to walk all the way around to the parking garage entrance and get in from there. All the while, they were harassed by protesters, who addressed the man as ‘Mr Anger’. The couple remained resolute and silent, with neutral expressions on their faces. I bet those were two of the longest minutes in their lives.
But that was nothing compared to the treatment that Brandon Straka, the ex-Democrat who founded the #WalkAway movement, received. Terrible.
Remember, the group attacking him is for gay rights. Maybe that doesn’t matter when a gay supports President Trump:
At least the police were nearby for Senator Rand Paul (Ron’s son) and his wife:
This morning (Friday), Rand Paul told Fox News what a traumatic several minutes that was for him and his wife, even with the police. He said the mob kept on growing. He also said that they had picked the wrong man, because he was one of the senators who supported the abolition of no-knock police raids, one of which was responsible for the death of Brionna Taylor. He said ‘the irony of that was lost’ on the protesters:
Meanwhile, this is what Joe Biden thought of the president’s speech:
I am not sure what planet Joe is on to say that, but it might not matter too much because he’s collapsed in the polls:
If you hear the media once again say that the Republicans’ message was ‘dark’, as they did in 2016, don’t believe them for a moment.
This was the finest convention I’ve ever seen, even better than 2016’s.
Kudos to everyone who organised it and who spoke. A lot of hard work went into those four days, spread across four locations as well as some people’s homes.
I’ve never seen such a professional production with so much sincerity and hope.
In 2016, President Trump made promises. From his election to now, he has fulfilled those promises. Promises made. Promises kept.
Onwards and upwards! MAGA 2020!
Since November 2016, all we have heard about is President Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians which supposedly tipped the election in his favour.
Riiiight.
To date, no evidence has come to light.
On the other hand, we have Trump’s 2016 opponent, white as snow as presented in the media.
Will her crimes ever be investigated?
I pray that someone somewhere in the United States in a position of authority is investigating her.
I pray that, one morning when we all wake up, we will be pleasantly surprised to find the relevant authorities bringing Hillary Clinton to justice.
Last week, I wrote ‘Senate Intelligence Committee: “no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia”‘.
On Sunday, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe appeared for a half-hour on CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview with Scott Pelley.
McCabe is currently doing a book tour to promote The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.
On March 16, 2018, President Trump tweeted:
Two weeks earlier, Fox News reported that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, was expected to (emphases mine):
criticize former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for approving a leak of information about the Hillary Clinton investigation to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times reported late Thursday.
According to the Times, which cited four people familiar with the investigation into the department’s handling of the Clinton probe, McCabe will be censured for disclosing the investigation’s existence to the Journal.
The Journal report in question, which was published Oct. 30, 2016, recounts a conversation in which McCabe sparred with a senior Justice Department official over an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Journal — which cited sources including “one person close to Mr. McCabe” — said McCabe insisted that the FBI should move forward with its investigation, while the Justice Department official expressed concern about its potential effect on the presidential election.
McCabe, a frequent target of President Donald Trump’s ire, left his position as FBI deputy director in January and is scheduled to retire later this month. He had served for several months as acting director following Trump’s firing last May of FBI Director James Comey.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department, the FBI and the inspector general had no immediate comment on the report Thursday evening …
Trump verbally attacked McCabe during the campaign and again as president because McCabe’s wife, during a failed state Senate run, had accepted campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally.
David J Harris Jr and Real Clear Politics have more detail, dating from January 2018.
On March 14, a Fox producer for DoJ news tweeted:
On March 15, the Washington Examiner reported that McCabe was ‘still holding on to his retirement’:
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is holding onto his pension just days before he is set to officially retire.
McCabe was at the Justice Department to meet with Scott Schools, the most senior career attorney in the department, as well as other officials, for a majority of the afternoon Thursday, to make a case why he should be allowed to retire and not be fired.
Schools reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who in turn reports to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The decision to fire McCabe before Sunday, and thus strip McCabe of his full pension and benefits, is in Sessions’ hands.
The_Donald featured a fiery thread in response:
Then, the next day:
CBS News, in reporting McCabe’s meeting the previous Friday pointed out:
If McCabe is fired, it is believed his only avenue of appeal would be to file a lawsuit to try to reclaim his pension.
Twitter exploded.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) was indignant:
So was the former CIA director, directing his ire at President Trump:
Later that day, McCabe issued a lengthy statement (click on image to see it in full, also available at CNN):
His statement elicited this response:
.@JakeBGibson McCabe, you disgraced the oath you swore. You harmed the nation by your deceit. You took 1/2 million dollars for your wife’s campaign from Hillary’s guy, McAuliffe, the #FBI said you should be FIRED. You deserve it. #Cockroach
McCabe’s lawyer also issued a statement. (Apparently, his lawyer — a former Inspector General for the DoJ — supported the current Inspector General’s report until McCabe was implicated by it.)
The DoJ disagreed with McCabe and his lawyer:
I hope that FBI Director Christopher Wray received all of McCabe’s documentation about the 2016 election.
There were also newsy snippets:
On March 17, The Hill, among other media outlets, noted that McCabe’s weekend statement seemed to contradict James Comey’s testimony from May 2017 about relaying sensitive information to the media.
News emerged that McCabe wrote memoranda of his conversations with President Trump and gave those to Robert Mueller. CBS reported that details of James Comey’s firing were included.
Fox News correspondent Adam Housely said that McCabe’s dismissal was a morale boost to FBI agents.
On March 18, TownHall posted an editorial, ‘The Coming Collusion Bloodbath’. Nearly one year on, we could be at that point:
That Comey, McCabe, and others have practiced an obvious double standard in the email case of Hillary Clinton where ample evidence caused 106 of the case agents and attorneys working on the case to believe indictment would occur, and simultaneously going to such extraordinary measures through the assistance of essentially Hillary’s campaign operation to attempt to thwart the outcome of the election is more than enough reason to go after them on a criminal basis alone.
That McCabe reportedly lied to the low key Inspector General, while attempting to send General Michael Flynn to prison for lying to the same FBI is of highest hypocrisy.
Before McCabe was fired, Reddit had censored discussions about his ‘corruption issues’. Now that he was gone, they could be discussed freely once more.
Attention then turned to the McCabe’s connections with Hillary Clinton. A New York radio host tweeted:
The following 2017 video resurfaced. It shows that McCabe had (still has?) a home in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons live (start at 5:00 in):
On April 13, Inspector General Horowitz issued his report:
Fox News explained:
The report, handed over to Congress on Friday and obtained by Fox News, looked at a leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation.
The report says that McCabe authorized the leak and then misled investigators about it, leaking in a way that did not fall under a “public interest” exception.
“[W]e concluded that McCabe’s decision to confirm the existence of the CF investigation through an anonymously sourced quote, recounting the content of a phone call with a senior department official in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of department leadership, was clearly not within the public interest exception,” the report says …
Sessions said that McCabe “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor − including under oath − on multiple occasions.”
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent said that, according to the IG’s report, firing McCabe was the right thing to do. He says that whether you are a Marine or a special agent of the FBI, the same rules apply:
In May, FBI agents wanted to be subpoenaed in order to testify against Comey and McCabe:
Questions arose in Congress. The Gateway Pundit reported that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wanted answers about the FBI’s treatment of General Flynn.
Early in June:
Allegations arose about McCabe’s involvement in the 302s (FBI reports) regarding General Flynn:
On September 6, the Washington Post reported that a grand jury had been investigating McCabe ‘for months’:
… an indication the probe into whether he misled officials exploring his role in a controversial media disclosure has intensified, two people familiar with the matter said.
The grand jury has summoned more than one witness, the people said, and the case is ongoing. The people declined to identify those who had been called to testify.
The presence of the grand jury shows prosecutors are treating the matter seriously, locking in the accounts of witnesses who might later have to testify at a trial. But such panels are sometimes used only as investigative tools, and it remains unclear if McCabe will ultimately be charged.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., which has been handling the probe, declined to comment.
Michael Bromwich, a lawyer for McCabe, said in a statement after this report was published online that he had been confident McCabe would not be charged, absent “inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration.”
“Unfortunately, such pressure has continued, with the President targeting Mr. McCabe in numerous additional tweets,” Bromwich said. The lawyer also raised questions about the timing of the news report on the grand jury.
ZeroHedge had more (emphases in the original):
Specifically, McCabe was fired for lying about authorizing an F.B.I. spokesman and attorney to tell Devlin Barrett of the Wall St. Journal – just days before the 2016 election, that the FBI had not put the brakes on a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation, at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton proxy pal, Terry McAuliffe.
In order to deal with his legal woes, McCabe set up a GoFundMe “legal defense fund” which stopped accepting donations, after support for the fired bureaucrat took in over half a million dollars – roughly $100,000 more than his wife’s campaign took from McAuliffe as McCabe’s office was investigating Clinton and her infamous charities.
On September 17, Trump tweeted about the two FBI employees who were part of the group working against his presidency:
On September 18, the Gateway Pundit reported on the press release for McCabe’s upcoming book, The Threat, mentioned above. The press release quoted McCabe as saying (emphases mine):
I wrote this book because the president’s attacks on me symbolize his destructive effect on the country as a whole. He is undermining America’s safety and security, and eroding public confidence in its institutions. His attacks on the most crucial institutions of government, and on the professionals who serve within them, should make every American stand up and take notice.
On September 21 came the first mention of reports that Rod Rosenstein offered to wear or joked about ‘wearing a wire’ for a meeting with Trump:
A few weeks earlier, President Trump had intended to declassify various unredacted documents. By September 22, he had backtracked. The DoJ advised him that declassification could harm the Mueller probe. In addition, US allies warned against declassification for security reasons. Trump instructed IG Horowitz to review them instead. Had Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein any influence on Trump on this subject? Declassification would have been a huge risk for Rosenstein — and McCabe.
On September 27, the then-House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California) said that he planned to release testimony from 70 or more witnesses who were interviewed in the HSPCI’s own Trump-Russia probe. The Daily Caller reported:
Nunes said that between 70 and 80 percent of the transcripts do not contain classified information. The remaining transcripts would have to be reviewed by the office of the director of national intelligence. Nunes said that review process “would only take a matter of days.”
Nunes and other House Republicans have also led a push to get President Donald Trump to declassify and release documents related to the FBI and Justice Department’s collusion investigation.
It also transpired that McCabe and Rosenstein were feuding via the media. McCabe represented the faction that wanted to end Trump’s presidency. Rosenstein represented the people currently at the DoJ and FBI.
Rosenstein was using the Washington Post to get his story out. McCabe was using the New York Times.
One example of this was when the Rosenstein-wear-a-wire story appeared in The New York Times:
On October 9, The Hill‘s John Solomon reported that Rosenstein was desperate to downplay the story. However, released testimony from former FBI lawyer James Baker indicated that this was no joke:
Baker’s story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of the administration to remove the president from power.
Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the window around the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss’s firing with a secret recording operation?
I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be engineered.
This wasn’t a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.
And that makes the FBI’s involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political — even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.
Also:
Keep in mind, this is the same FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page — his lover and the top lawyer to McCabe — about using their official powers to “stop” Trump in the election and having an “insurance policy” against the GOP nominee. That insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — a Trump hater himself — that was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through their mutual law firm.
“You walk away from the Baker interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time frame saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a force to stop Trump’s election before it happened and then maybe reversing it after the election was over,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation.
The following day, the Washington Post published an article outlining the tension between McCabe and Rosenstein. The FBI higher-ups did not like that Rosenstein had recommended in writing that President Trump fire James Comey. DoJ officials did not like that the FBI, McCabe in particular, opened an investigation on Trump immediately after Comey’s departure. WaPo reported that the two quarrelled shortly after Robert Mueller was appointed — in front of him.
Rosenstein, incidentally, had allegedly already made his ‘wear a wire’ comment.
The subject of the meeting in question was whether Rosenstein or McCabe should recuse themselves from involvement in the Mueller probe:
Rosenstein wanted McCabe out of the Russia probe, and McCabe felt differently, arguing that it was the deputy attorney general, not the head of the FBI, who should step away from the case.
Although neither recused himself:
The McCabe-Rosenstein relationship has only worsened with time …
The Rosenstein-McCabe relationship has come under renewed scrutiny as lawmakers have demanded answers about memos written by McCabe and his then-senior counsel, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, about the discussions on May 16, 2017, in which McCabe wrote that Rosenstein suggested recording the president and discussed the 25th Amendment.
Rosenstein was due to meet that week with The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees about the DoJ, but the meeting never happened.
On October 11, the Washington Examiner reported that the FBI was delaying publication of McCabe’s book, The Threat. It would not appear until February 2019:
McCabe was fired by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in March, less than 48 hours before his retirement day because of “allegations of misconduct” found by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. McCabe, has disputed the IG report, and is now the subject of a grand jury inquiry.
According to the FBI’s employment agreement, all disclosure of information must be reviewed and adhere to the FBI’s “Prepublication Review Policy Guide,” made official in 2015.
Although there is more to cover on McCabe, this is a good point at which to bring us to the present day.
On Monday, February 18, 2019, President Trump pulled no punches:
Is this the first time President Trump has tweeted the letters ‘t-r-e-a-s-o-n’?
Here’s ‘treason’ again:
Trump was on fire:
We can only hope that the tables start turning soon.
Perhaps the new attorney general, Bill Barr, will set things in motion.
Last week, Jeff Sessions resigned as attorney general.
He left the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday, November 7, 2018.
Asking Sessions to resign was President Trump’s first action after the mid-terms on November 6.
Finally!
Now, maybe, justice can be done!
The acting attorney general (AG) was formerly Sessions’s chief of staff. His name is Matt Whitaker.
Trump was clever and did not promote Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, to the post. Because Sessions had recused himself, Rosey had been overseeing the Mueller probe. Now that Whitaker has been given the responsibility of overseeing Mueller, the Left — Democrats and the media — have said that the United States is experiencing a ‘constitutional crisis’.
Fox News’s Howard Kurtz explains why (emphases mine):
Whitaker is a former prosecutor, as well as a conservative activist, but he is obscure. He is a Trump loyalist, once described as the president’s “eyes and ears” at DOJ.
What’s more, as a CNN contributor and at other times, he has trashed the Mueller investigation that he will now be overseeing. He’s suggesting that Justice could curtail the special counsel’s probe by cutting his funding.
“The truth is there was no collusion with the Russians and the Trump campaign,” Whitaker once said. As for the left, “the last thing they want right now is for the truth to come out, and for the fact that there’s not a single piece of evidence that demonstrates that the Trump campaign had any illegal or any improper relationships with the Russians. It’s that simple.”
So Whitaker has, to put it mildly, a rather dim view of the investigation. And his associates are telling reporters he has no intention of recusing himself. Of course not — that’s why Trump wants him.
So it’s a big deal that oversight of the Russia probe is moving from Rosenstein, who likes the job Mueller is doing, to a man who’s been so critical of the investigation. And criticism from House Democrats who’ll soon be in a position to scrutinize these matters is fueling the story.
Rumour has it that Robert Mueller might be wrapping up his investigation soon, possibly next week. If true, whether that is related to Sessions’s resignation is unclear.
As acting AG, Whitaker can stay in that position for up to 210 days. Whitaker was appointed to his former chief of staff role in 2017, therefore, he requires no Senate confirmation.
Whitaker quickly protected his Twitter account, which was all about sports, although you can see a photo of him lifting weights. He’s no pencil-necked geek. He’s a big man with a shaved head (similar to Mr Clean). One of Whitaker’s tweets featured a similar photo with the caption:
What I do in my free time. #powerclean #CrossFit…
VA Online News has an interesting article about Whitaker and how he got the AAG job. The article purports that White House aides thought Rod Rosenstein’s resignation was imminent, so they went about finding a replacement:
Convinced that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, was ready to resign after the revelation that he suggested President Trump was unfit for the job, senior White House aides got to work last weekend installing a replacement.
Whitaker received a phone call on Saturday, November 3:
Matthew G. Whitaker, the chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, would become the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, his White House counterpart, John F. Kelly, told him over the phone on Saturday morning, according to two people briefed on the call. To the White House, he was an obvious choice: a confident former college football player and United States attorney whom Mr. Kelly has privately described as the West Wing’s “eyes and ears” in a department the president has long considered at war with him.
By Monday, Rosenstein had decided to stay at the DoJ for the time being, therefore, Whitaker could not be moved into his slot.
Interestingly, had Whitaker become DAG, replacing Rosenstein, he would not have been able to supervise the Mueller probe:
thanks to complex department rules, Mr. Whitaker would not assume control of the inquiry if he ever replaces Mr. Rosenstein.
Some think that Whitaker could become the permanent AG if he performs well as AAG. Even if he doesn’t, there are other roles open to him:
Administration officials have also mentioned Mr. Whitaker as a possible successor to Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel who plans to leave in the fall.
Justice Department and White House spokespeople declined to comment. The back-and-forth between the White House and Justice Department were described by more than a half-dozen administration officials and others briefed on the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
President Trump is said to have an easy rapport with Whitaker, who disapproves of Mueller potentially probing the Trump family finances.
In 2016, he was critical of Hillary Clinton’s server situation:
A reasonable prosecutor may ask, if on numerous occasions, an unknown State Department employee had taken top secret information from a secured system, emailed that information on a Gmail account, and stored the information on a personal server for years, would that individual be prosecuted? I believe they would.
Eighteen US AGs have demanded that Whitaker recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe. On Friday, November 9, Fox News reported:
More than a dozen U.S. state attorneys general signed a document Thursday calling for Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, a role he assumed following his temporary appointment following the resignation of Jeff Sessions …
As part of Whitaker’s new role as the head official at the Justice Department, he will oversee the Russia probe and the agency’s other federal investigations, including the New York prosecutors’ look into the finances of Trump and his former aides.
In an op-ed Whitaker wrote last year, he argued that “any investigation into President Trump’s finances or the finances of his family would require Mueller to return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority under Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.”
“It is time for Rosenstein … to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation to the four corners of the order appointing him special counsel,” Whitaker wrote. “If he doesn’t, then Mueller’s investigation will eventually start to look like a political fishing expedition. This would not only be out of character for a respected figure like Mueller, but also could be damaging to the President of the United States and his family — and by extension, to the country.”
And separately, in July 2017, Whitaker told CNN, “I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
Whitaker is adamant about refusing to recuse.
The Left — Democrats and the media — are in a right tizz at the moment.
Whitaker’s DoJ could look at all types of left-wing scandals from the past several years.
He could get a lot done in 210 days, especially as he has the little-known but brilliant Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 32, working at the DoJ. Cohen-Watnick formerly worked for HR McMaster, who fired him from the National Security Council. Trump fired McMaster earlier this year.
Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner think highly of Cohen-Watnick, who has an intelligence background. In April 2018, Trump personally told the DoJ he wanted Cohen-Watnick to work with Jeff Sessions. That did not sit well with the Left, either, because it was rumoured he had shown Rep. Devin Nunes classified documents relating to Nunes’s FISA investigation of the 2016 election.
With Whitaker and Cohen-Watnick working together, who knows what the near future might hold? We could well see some sunlight disinfecting the Swamp.
A lot of great interviews have been taking place in the run up to the mid-terms.
By way of introduction to the interview Rush Limbaugh gave Sean Hannity, let us consider this. The photo is of Air Force One in Missoula, Montana, where President Trump gave a rally on Thursday, October 18:
At that rally, Trump once again had much to say. Breitbart has a short report with highlights (emphases mine):
“The choice could not be more clear: Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Montana …
The president highlighted the Democrat effort to personally destroy Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the Senate confirmation battle.
Trump said the protesters against Kavanaugh were “paid by Soros” and used professional signs in their rallies at the Supreme Court …
Trump said that Democrats would try to raise taxes, impose socialism, destroy health care and the Second Amendment, and support open borders.
“Democrats have become the party of crime,” Trump said. “They would rather devastate America’s communities than defend America’s borders.”
Rush covered these topics in his interview with Sean Hannity that same day. This is one interview where Hannity does not interrupt his guest. This is probably because a) Hannity used to guest host for Rush and b) the interview was held in Rush’s office in Florida. Enjoy:
Rush is celebrating his 30th anniversary on national radio. He said it was more than he ever dreamt of.
He then went on to discuss the behaviour of the Democrats and the Left, which he said has no legitimacy in American society. By that, he meant that decent Americans do not want to be intimidated by violence to change their votes or their way of life. That’s not how America works.
He said he was puzzled that the Democrats think they can use violence to not only make Americans recant their support of Donald Trump but make Trump himself change.
He said that America is very fortunate that Hillary did not win the election in 2016, because she would have continued the decline that Obama started. He said that the United States would have experienced fewer jobs, a failing economy, poor foreign relations and more.
Rush was a bit late to the Trump party, even if he said here that he knew Trump would be the Republican candidate as soon as he saw him on the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015.
Rush also said that too many Americans still watch too much mainstream media news. I couldn’t agree more. It would be nice if Fox News gave him a weekend show of his own.
He also criticised the media for not engaging positively with Trump supporters, i.e. finding out why the president’s policies are important to them and to traditional American values.
I realise that a lot of people don’t care for Rush, but this is an excellent interview.
I would also recommend this video to readers who do not live in the United States and who still give credence to the Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Obama.
Occasionally, I read James Howard Kunstler’s website, particularly his erudite blog posts.
Lately, he has been casting his gimlet eye on the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) proceedings with regard to Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Some of his readers are deeply disappointed with Kunstler’s take, as he is a Democrat — and so are they. Not all of what he has been writing is in support of his political party.
On September 28, he posted an article, ‘The Fog of Bad Faith’ (pardon the language in the URLs), which clearly states what Democrats really want by stymieing and stalling a vote on Kavanaugh as the next SCOTUS justice (emphases mine):
The issues in the bigger picture concern a Democratic Party driven by immense bad faith to any means that justify the defeat of this Supreme Court nominee for reasons that everyone over nine-years-old understands: the fear that a majority conservative court will overturn Rowe v. Wade — despite Judge Kavanaugh’s statement many times that it is “settled law.” What one senses beyond that, though, is the malign spirit of the party’s last candidate for president in the 2016 election and a desperate crusade to continue litigating that outcome until the magic moment when a “blue tide” of midterm election victories seals the ultimate victory over the detested alien in the White House.
Finally, a Dem sympathiser finally had the guts to say it.
The Dems are still licking their wounds over Hillary, nearly two years later, and they’re driven mad by the possibility that federal abortion law could be overturned. The latter, as Kunstler — and Kavanaugh — have stated, is unlikely.
On October 1, Kunstler went further with ‘Imaginary Monsters and the Use of Chaos’, which describes what is really happening with the SCOTUS nomination. This essay also upset his readers. He makes several good points, which should sound alarm bells in all sensible people.
First, there’s the absence of lucid thinking about the Kavanaugh nomination. An absence of objectivity and calm could have a deleterious impact on American society:
The Kavanaugh hearing underscored another eerie condition in contemporary USA life that offers clues about the combined social, economic, and political collapse that I call the long emergency: the destruction of all remaining categorical boundaries for understanding behavior: truth and untruth, innocent and guilty, childhood and adulthood, public and private. The destination of all this confusion is a society that can’t process any quarrel coherently, leaving everyone unsatisfied and adrift, and no actual problems resolved.
Secondly, once again, the Dems are sowing chaos, just as the Spanish Inquisition sowed fear centuries ago:
One element of the story is clear, though. The Democratic party, in the absence of real monsters to slay, has become the party devoted to sowing chaos, mainly by inventing new, imaginary monsters using the machinery of politics, the way the Catholic Church manufactured monsters of heresy during the Spanish Inquisition in its attempt to regulate “belief.”
Thirdly, when combined, hysteria and coercion result in totalitarianism:
The spirit of the kangaroo court has since graduated into business and politics where it has proven especially useful for settling scores and advancing careers and agendas dishonestly. Coercion has replaced persuasion. Coercion is at the heart of totalitarian politics. Do what you’re told, or else. Believe what we say, or else. (Or else lose your reputation, your livelihood, your friends….) This plays neatly into the dynamics of human mob psychology. When the totalitarians set up for business, few individuals dare to depart from the party line. It’s the perfect medium for cultivating mendacious ideologies.
The Democrats want a totalitarian state.
I disagree with Kunstler’s conclusions about an economic and social collapse — his ‘long emergency’, about which he has written for years — because that will not happen under President Trump.
However, a long emergency is exactly what will happen if Democrats win the House and Senate in November. Should that happen, all bets are off.
James Howard Kunstler is so close to walking away from the Democrat Party, but by his continued rejection of Trump and Make America Great Again policies, so far away from seeing the Democrats for what they really are.
The haze is lifting around him, but he continues to cling to the long emergency, which he was predicting 15 or so years ago. It still hasn’t happened.
Time to put the long emergency to bed, Jim, and embrace MAGA.
The man who carried the ‘nuclear football’ for Bill Clinton calls for justice:
Hmm:
To which someone replied:
He already has (news to me), but how many have heard of Buzz Patterson?
He’s a Trump supporter:
He had this to say about the Clintons’ behaviour at Aretha Franklin’s funeral on Saturday, September 1, 2018:
Ugh.
This sounds interesting:
Why is Buzz Patterson so little known?
I hope he gets more publicity.
Churchmouse Campanologist 