Roundup
(1) Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, famous for the 2014 “Hands up, don’t shoot!” fiction in Ferguson, has been murdered:
Dorian Johnson, 33, was the victim of a shooting at about 8:30 a.m. Sunday at a block of apartments less than a mile from where Brown died, according to Ferguson Police spokesperson Patricia Washington. …
“This appears to be a domestic incident involving a claim of self-defense,” Price Smith said in a statement, adding the case remains under investigation and her office remains in ongoing consultation with Ferguson police about possible future criminal charges.
The police department emphasized that Johnson was not shot by an officer.
“There had been earlier rumors that this was an officer-involved shooting however that information is incorrect.”
No surprise that someone tried to make a big anti-police story about this.
(2) SCOTUS rules that the Trump administration can continue to stop people if the authorities have “reasonable suspicion” they are illegal immigrants (for example, at places like the parking lots of Home Depots, looking for work). The vote was 6-3 with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting.
(3) Megyn Kelly interviews Graham Linehan. What especially interests me is how his old friends failed to stick up for him:
(4) The Department of Defense becomes the Department of War. Or, I should say, again becomes. However, it’s discretionary and secondary:
The Founders chose this name [“Department of War”] to signal our strength and resolve to the world. The name “Department of War,” more than the current “Department of Defense,” ensures peace through strength, as it demonstrates our ability and willingness to fight and win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend. This name sharpens the Department’s focus on our own national interest and our adversaries’ focus on our willingness and availability to wage war to secure what is ours. …
The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title — the Secretary of War — and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.
(5) The slow death of the “Israel is committing genocide” lie.
The SCOTUS is still considering the President’s power to fire the governors of regulatory agencies, i.e. the Humphrey’s Executor issue.
In Constitutional theory, I am sympathetic to the unitary executive POV. A President who can’t fire agency heads is handcuffed in supervising those agencies.
That said, the pragmatist in me also recognizes the problems of the spoils system approach that Humphrey’s Executor blocks. Glenn Reynolds and other not-entirely-recovered libertarians see the spoils system through rose-colored historical glasses.
This is one of those issues that just doesn’t have a perfect solution. In cases like that, an imperfect approach is the best you can do, and political wisdom lies in no faction pushing things to a breaking point. Of course today, the Left and the Establishment (not perfectly the same, but overlapping) have pushed everything to the brink of breaking.
It’s a bit like the arguments that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and that only States can charter banks. You can make the argument (Levin loves to), but in practice something like the Federal Reserve is inevitable, though details can vary widely. Trying to have a single currency without a de facto central bank historically never seems to work well, and a certain amount of insulation from day-to-day politics is desirable in practice, regardless of theory.
Whether the current form of the FR is the best way to do that can be debated, of course. But the FR has also been extensively politicized itself, yet another institution pushed to the breaking point.
The same split between theory and practice shows up in the people who want to abolish the CIA and the FBI, on the grounds that they’re too subverted to repair. am sympathetic to that viewpoint, but I also always ask what they would replace them with, and often the answer is a futile ‘nothing’. Sometimes they’ll add that we got along without all these things in the 19C, ignoring the fact that the country was months wide in 1840 and is less than a day wide today, or that the oceans took months to cross in the 19C and minutes for a missile to cross now.
Theory is fine, but pragmatism is a moral imperative, as Max Weber noted.
And now the Appeals Court in NY upheld the outrageous amount that the woman won against. Any award would be outrageous.
Olympia Dukakis ruled:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a0FcNL7A3o
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Mr. Johnson was a skeevy character who kept company with the likes of Michael Brown, who was a thug with a volcanic temper. It’s rather less surprising he dies violently than it would be in the case of a randomly selected person. Too bad, of course.
You benefit from a system wherein recruitment and promotion in public employment is regulated by sets of examinations. The hiring supervisor may have a short list or a long list from which to choose, but his discretion in hiring is constrained. In regard to confidential positions, you can have a system of plenary discretion among those who have passed an examination to be in a hiring pool. For the few general patronage positions, you can have statutory requirements that a candidate must fulfill – U.S. citizen, clean record, &c. For senior executive positions (federal bureau chief and above), you can enact by law a directory of enhanced statutory requirements. Each amendment passed is time stamped and then enters into effect after a delay; posit you wait six months, remark the incumbent president, and prescribe that the amended requirement takes effect when his successor takes office.
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One thing which might be salutary is to dramatically reduce the number of positions subject to Senate confirmation. Posit that presidential appointments outside the executive branch, cabinet secretaries, the chiefs of stand alone agencies, members of stand-alone boards and commissions, inspectors-general, U.S. Attorneys, U.S. Trustees, the chiefs of subdepartmental bureaux which meet certain criteria, flag rank officers, and ambassadors, must receive Senate approval. Some appointments are subject to vetting by jurisdictional committees, while most are examined by ad hoc committees of five or seven assembled from a random drawing by the respective floor leaders. (You could use that method for flag rank officers, ambassadors, U.S. Attorneys, and the ordinary run of federal judges). Holds would be limited to four business days and could not be placed anonymously. Elaborate procedures would be limited to appellate judges and a few other offices.
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What you do not benefit from is a system where appointees cannot be removed without 24 months of hearings. A letter of dismissal signed by three persons in an employee’s chain of command should suffice to discharge a civilian public employee. You could have an automatic post-termination review in front of a hearing examiner and with the aid of counsel present your case that you were fired for one of six or seven impermissible reasons. If you could establish probable cause, you could have your case heard in front of an arbitrator or a panel of arbitrators. If it was ruled you were according to a preponderance of the evidence, you would be due an indemnity and a chance to apply for other positions in the public service. The matter would then be referred to an ombudsman who might bring charges in front of a hearing examiner against your tormentors with a possible result being their termination and being debarred from the public service for a period of six years.
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The general run of discretionary appointees could be discharged at will by their immediate supervisor or anyone higher in the chain of command unless they were under some sort of hold placed farther up. Confidential employees could be discharged by their supervisor. Discharge by those higher in the chain of command would require their supervisor be discharged in tandem.
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Posit a practice wherein the president could discharge anyone provided he convenes a public hearing, reads out a letter of dismissal with the targets name specified and signs it with those attending the hearing present. The requirement could be waved for discretionary employees.
The signature function of the CIA is to provide human intelligence. See Reuel Marc Gerecht on the operations of the CIA as he knew it when employed there. In his telling, they promote people on the basis of how many sources they develop without evaluating whether the sources tell them anything useful. In his telling, after 40 years, we had very few useful sources in the Soviet apparat. They repeatedly promoted Aldrich Ames. They employed Michael Scheuer. John Brennan had an illustrious career with them. Posit that their analytical function can be performed by bureaux within the Department of State, that technical collection can be performed by a variety of agencies, and that a much smaller and more capable agency might specialize in human intelligence.
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As for the FBI, there is no need for an omnibus investigatory bureau in lieu of special function agencies and no need for federal investigators to be sticking their nose in local cases absent a specific request for their aid from the state police in the jurisdiction in question. We could do well to reduce the word count of the federal penal code, to limit perjury charges and the like to cases in which a subject has made an utterance under oath, to require federal investigators to record interviews, to require a preliminary hearing in front of magistrates before a case can be placed in front of a grand jury, and to place federal policing in separate departments from the department which is responsible for representation of the government in court. We could also strip U.S. Attorneys and their superiors of the franchise to initiate investigations. Investigations are conducted by police service, congressional committees, and other agencies. The U.S. Attorney or the Attorney-General can advise, but they do not conduct such investigations or initiate them.
It has taken too long for that blood libel to recede
The whole hands up lie was where the pendulum began to turn
True Truman dissolved the Oss but it regroup in thd SSU which became the CiA
I distinguish scheur from brennan his knowledge about bin laden made him a little two sympathetic brennan was not as curious
#5.
Just a reminder….
“The complete Hezbollah battle plan to conquer Israel;
“Revealed for the first time, this was the Hezbollah battle plan for the invasion of the Zionist State…”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/396650
(And if anyone thinks they’ve given up, well then….)
+ Bonus:
Everything considered, what’s a little more fraud…?
Really now….
“Thanks to Obamacare, Insurance Fraud Irresistible”—
https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/exchanges-obamacare-subsidies/2025/09/04/id/1225135/
It is not accurate to claim the Department of Defense was ever the Department of War.
Tracking the Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clauses 11, 12, and 13, the first Congress created the Department of the Navy (13) to Maintain a Navy, and the Department of War (11 and 12) which oversaw the raising of Armies to fight Wars. This was the situation in 1947 when the Army Air Forces were separated from the Army land components and the Department of the Air Force and Department of the Army were created. The two preceding organizations were originally the Department of War, and with the Department of the Navy were subordinated to an organization called the National Military Establishment. It was this organization that was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949. So the Department of War was eliminated in 1947 but it became the Departments of the Army and Air Force, not the Department of Defense which was an entirely new organization created in 1947 and got its current name two years later.
Test.
Palestine creates fake starving citizens video with professional filmmakers.
Megyn Kelly platformed the mentally challenged Marjorie Taylor Greene and the execrable and increasingly antisemitic and insane Tucker Qatarlson and never pushed back once against them.
During the Civil War it was called The War Department (run by the backstabbing and Dictatorial Edwin McMasters stanton).
Justice.
Finally.
Still, “justice delayed is justice….” AND how do they get all that time and anxiety—and lost money—back??
“Judge Tosses Case Against 15 Accused ‘False’ Trump Electors From 2020”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/judge-tosses-case-against-15-accused-false-trump-electors-2020