McConnell and budget betrayal

The New Neo Posted on by

The topic of the budget is a perennial cause of frustration, anger, depression, and general angst for any conservative. The current one is most definitely no exception, and McConnell’s capitulation only adds to the depth of the feeling of betrayal. I’ve avoided the topic till now for the simple reason that I detest it and have no solution. But there’s only so long it can be avoided.

Mollie Hemingway says it well:

A large coalition of conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute, publicly opposed ramming through more Ukraine support during the lame-duck session before Republicans take over control of the House on Jan. 3, 2023. Strong pluralities and majorities of Republicans have told pollsters they want decreases, not increases, in foreign spending and global military involvement.

Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim…

Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.

The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.

It’s easy to blame McConnell, and although I think it’s correct to blame him, I think it’s a lot more than that. The budget is a juggernaut that has grown and grown and grown over the years and seems to have taken on a life of its own. It’s easy to say McConnell has to go, but someone powerful like that tends to become entrenched as well, and few are eager to take on the role. Like so many of our other fossilized “leaders,” McConnell is old – eighty years old, to be exact. And yet he shows no signs of being ready to retire.

To me, he’s a symptom rather than a cause. He’s a symptom of the older group of GOPe Republicans who still cling to power, particularly in the Senate, which is an institution that’s inherently slower to change than some others. If you look around the right side of the blogosphere, you can see plenty of commenters saying the equivalent of “That’s it; I’m done! I’m not voting for Republicans anymore!” – which of course merely makes things worse. The answer is voting for more conservatives. Although there are more of those in office than there used to be, unless and until they reach a critical mass in each body of Congress, we will get more of this sort of thing.

For what it’s worth, I also offer a link to this post from Scott Johnson at Powerline, where he attempts to explain the reasoning behind McConnell’s support for the bill. Here’s an excerpt:

On a comparative basis, Republicans believe this is actually one of the cleaner omnibus bills of its kind in the Senate. Because Democrats wanted it more than Republicans did, they had to give in on spending and policy riders. Most Republican senators feared that wouldn’t be the case in 60 days insofar as a sizable number of Republican representatives have never voted for any spending bill and one wouldn’t expect them to start now. Thus, Kevin McCarthy would have been forced to go to Democrats for votes and they would have demanded ransom in the form of higher domestic spending or more liberal policy riders.

That was the dynamic in 2015, even though Boehner had just been ejected over this kind of thing: Ryan had to give away the store to get Democrat votes. And the disarray over McCarthy’s election itself did nothing to assuage those concerns. Accordingly, even though counterintuitive with a new GOP House majority arriving, the thinking is that this bill is more to the right (or less bad) than a bill would have been in 60 days.

Who knows? I don’t even pretend to understand all the Byzantine machinations behind these things, but I know I don’t like them. Government is messy, nasty, and often corrupt – and seemingly getting more corrupt in this country by the day.

Word has come out that House Republicans are staging a protest of sorts:

More than a dozen House Republicans are demanding their Senate colleagues oppose a wasteful omnibus spending package that would fund the federal government for next year — or risk facing legislative gridlock once the party takes control of the House in January.

In a letter sent to Senate Republicans on Monday, 13 GOP representatives called on the upper chamber to reject the proposed omnibus spending bill, noting that the American people didn’t elect Republicans “to continue the status quo in Washington,” but to “put aside the absurd spending and empowerment of Biden bureaucrats.”

Thirteen doesn’t seem like a whole lot to me, unless they speak for the whole. The letter’s signatories are “Chip Roy of Texas, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Matt Gaetz and Byron Donalds of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia, and Andrew Clyde of Georgia, as well as Rep.-elects Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, and Eli Crane of Arizona.”

A GOP civil war will warm the cockles of Democrats’ hearts, of course.

[NOTE: Here’s an interesting article that blames the trend to huge unwieldy budgets on LBJ. I think that’s way too simplistic, although it’s true that he gave it a big boost. I think it’s been a long slow process of which he was certainly a part.]

Just in case…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I’ll mention that I’ve been having some trouble today getting the blog to load. Right now it seems like it might be fixed. Let me know if you’ve been having any difficulty along those lines.

UPDATE 1:40:

It seems to have healed. Hope so.

Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post is based on Twitter files #7, which can be found at this link. I suggest you read it, as well as this, which discusses the fact that Twitter was paid by the FBI for its services.]

First, some personal notes.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke shortly before the 2020 election, I initially experienced a brief sense of relief. It had been a tense year, to be sure: COVID, then the Floyd riots, and with the election looming I had a gut feeling that the cognitively challenged, mendacious, corrupt, newly-minted leftist Joe Biden was going to win. Now, with this laptop story, maybe enough people were going to learn about more of the family corruption, and perhaps it would change the outcome.

As I said, that was a brief respite. I’m not even sure it lasted more than a day before it become clear how the press, the Democrats, social media, and the Bidens were going to deal with it. They were going to say it was bogus and shouldn’t be paid any attention to, and social media even blacked out the paths to talk about it on their sites. Those famous 50+ ex-intelligence agents put out a statement saying it was fake – or had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information [in other words, disinformation] operation” when they hadn’t even examined it. Calling on echoes of their own disinformation operation – Russiagate – they cleverly skirted the facts that proved the obvious authenticity of the laptop and what it contained.

Biden was elected, by hook or by crook or by both, and then attention turned to the challenges to the authenticity of the votes, and of course January 6th. And there everything would have stayed, if it hadn’t been for Elon Musk buying Twitter and giving us the Twitter files.

Shortly after the laptop story broke, I had recognized that the multimedia suppression of the laptop was clearly coordinated. But I thought it was done through communication rather like the JournoList group of long ago – in other words, reporters in the MSM talking and writing to each other about how they should all handle it, and social media officials doing the same and talking to reporters as well about the best approach, and all of them also taking their leads from candidates and officialslike Biden and Democrat members of Congress, as well as leftist pundits and old pols like Hillary Clinton. They were all on the same page because they formulated their talking points with each other in various combinations and groups, and word got out quickly on what the best approaches would be. Social media was a very important part of the strategy, of course, because control through that avenue made it more and more difficult to amplify (to use a social media term) the news of what the laptop really was and why it might be important and also authentic.

What did I imagine the role of FBI had been in all of this? I knew early on that they’d had possession of the laptop since December of 2019; this is what I wrote about that on October 29, 2020:

Well, we already knew the FBI was given the Hunter laptop in December of 2019, didn’t we? That was the word from the computer repairman in Delaware.

And now the following has been reported by James Rosen:

“A Justice Department official confirmed to journalist James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting Group that in 2019 the FBI “opened up a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money laundering and remains open and active today.”…

So, what was the FBI doing with the laptop in the meantime? Perhaps Toobining themselves?

Whatever they were doing, they kept mighty mum about it, as President Trump was impeached by the Democrats for daring to suggest that the Ukrainians look into the Biden corruption allegations, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.

Perhaps the laptop was being saved as an insurance policy for Kamala.

So yes, I was very suspicious of the fact that the FBI had possession of the laptop for something like ten or eleven months prior to the story breaking, and hadn’t said a word about it. But no, I don’t recall thinking that the FBI was actually heavily involved in coordinating the social media response.

However, through Twitter files disclosures, we now learn that the FBI had been priming Twitter for this for a long time, setting the censors up to expect some sort of Russian (or other) disinformation operation very much like the Hunter laptop story, and to feel it was Twitter’s responsibility to block it. In this, the FBI was capitalizing on its own Russiagate disinformation scam, which had planted the idea that Hillary Clinton had lost the 2016 election to the nefarious Donald Trump because of some sort of Russian disinformation shenanigans. The FBI was now stirring up and capitalizing on the fear that it might happen again, and that “Russian interference and disinformation” could cause Trump to defeat Joe Biden this time. The people at Twitter certainly wouldn’t want that to happen because of their own failure to block the story whenever it did emerge.

But still, the files indicate that some of the Twitter people offered a surprising (surprising at least to me) amount of sales resistance to the FBI about that issue. I already discussed some of it in this recent post. Here are a few more examples:

In August of 2020, the FBI made the Twitter folks feel special – and as though they were getting top secret information – by getting temporary security clearances for some of them. Exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff:

It worked pretty well; Roth got the picture:

And then in September of 2020, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer received the laptop hard drive. Because the FBI was spying on Giuliani, we can assume the agents got word and became even more alarmed that the Hunter laptop story was going to break prior to the election. Interestingly enough, it was also in September of 2020 that the FBI staged a remarkable simulation to plant seeds ever more firmly in the minds of the Twitter censors about what to expect, how to evaluate it, and what they would need to do when the supposedly fake story dropped.

Please take a careful look at the specificity of what they did, and note that – according to tweet #31, “Attendees included Meta/FB’s [Facebook’s] head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes @wapo and others.” This wasn’t just for Twitter; it involved other social media outlets plus the major players of the MSM. This was obviously a very important meeting, and the roleplay production involved none other than hypothetical information dropping that would be about Hunter Biden. What a coincidence – not:

(You can also find some descriptions and discussions of the whole thing here.)

And yet when the laptop story finally broke in October, the FBI still had to scramble and hammer home to Twitter censors what they needed to do. James Baker and others were involved, and it is described in tweets that are in the latter part of file #7. I suggest you read them yourself, lest this post become even more unwieldy. Suffice to say it was a full court press effort, and it succeeded.

The people in the FBI are not dumb, and they’re acutely aware of psychology and how to influence perceptions. And I repeat that we would know nothing of all this had Elon Musk not decided to buy Twitter. No wonder he perceives himself to be in danger – because it makes perfect sense that he would be.

Why did the FBI and all the rest of the intelligence agencies want to make sure Trump didn’t win in 2020? The answer seems obvious: he wasn’t on their side and he represented a threat to them and the rest of the “swamp.” But I think there’s even more than that. It has to do with the drive toward power for power’s sake. The whole story made me think of the character O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No, unlike O’Brien, the FBI didn’t torture anyone involved; at least, I don’t think so. I’m speaking of the fact that O’Brien isn’t just a straightforward true believer in the government he’s working for; he’s a cynic who is a brilliant manipulator of poor Winston Smith, who sometimes even finds him friendly and kind and somewhat avuncular. O’Brien doesn’t bother to mess around and tell Winston about some sort of idealism. He speaks only of power:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Do I think the FBI agents spoke to Yoel Roth and the others this way? Of course not. Do they allow themselves to think that way? I doubt it. But I believe that somewhere inside, that impulse to sheer power is part of their motivation for what they do.

Separation of powers, anyone?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]

Alan Dershowitz opines on the Jan 6 committee’s recommendation that the DOJ indict Trump:

“In my view, it’s clearly unconstitutional,” Dershowitz said on Monday’s edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “Article One limits the power of Congress through legislative actions. This is not a legislative action — naming a specific individual and referring them to the Justice Department. It’s not legislative and it tramples on the authority of the executive branch.”

“The 14th Amendment provides one specific time when Congress may in fact, act against an individual,” he later continued. “That is if the person was engaged in an insurrection or rebellion, like in the Civil War, and they didn’t act under that provision.”

Dershowitz said that he believes that the Justice Department will accept these referrals and will most likely ignore them.

Also, does it matter that Trump’s actions in question were committed while he was still nominally president? And that he was impeached for them by the House one week before leaving office, but the Senate did not vote in favor of removing him from office? Isn’t that the limit of Congress’s powers against an ex-president for acts committed while president?

At any rate, Dershowitz isn’t saying that Trump won’t be indicted. He points out that the DOJ is continuing with its own investigation and has a lot more power than Congress to do this. It’s my recollection that the DOJ is focusing on the materials seized in the MAL raid. Perhaps because the charges can involve acts committed after Trump left the presidency?

Another separation of powers issue is this one, about which we’ve just learned. This time the offender was the DOJ vis a vis members of Congress:

In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.

The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017.

The subpoenas were delivered during a critical time frame in the committee’s effort to expose the Donald Trump-Russia collusion investigation as having been driven by an uncorroborated political opposition dossier funded by Hillary Clinton. Nunes’ committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.

So while Nunes et al were trying to get records from the DOJ, the DOJ was using its power to spy on them without their knowledge. How is it that we have finally learned this? Here’s the reason:

The DOJ subpoenas came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken, consistent with the Big Tech company’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.

So that’s Google’s policy of giving notice five years later. It’s not the DOJ’s policy, which is probably to never give notice unless someone is indicted and tried for something relevant in the material accessed by the agency though Google or any other similar source.

One of the people whose communications were monitored was Kash Patel, who now says that:

…the DOJ’s subpoenas were an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight and raised serious concerns about the separation of executive and legislative branch powers guaranteed in the Constitution…

“Because a co-equal branch of government, we as congressional investigators and Devin Nunes, his staff on House Intel were conducting constitutional demanded oversight of the fraudulent acts at the FBI and DOJ which we now know happened.”

This should be big news but of course most people probably won’t ever know or care.

Here’s the summary by Nunes:

“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes told Just the News. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”

Of the two legislative branches, only the House is held by Republicans, and they face the dilemma of having to decide how much investigating to do instead of trying to pass legislation. Of course, any legislation they would pass wouold probably not get past the Democrats in the Senate anyway.

[NOTE: I’m not sure where to put this next bit, but I’ll just put it here even though it isn’t on the topic. Guess what judge had originally ordered Title 42 stopped? Why, our old friend federal judge Emmet “Ahab” Sullivan, that’s who.]

Note on Twitter files #7

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m planning to deal with Twitter files #7 at some length in a post tomorrow. But for today, I’ll just link to it again, and add this observation:

With the Steele dossier, the FBI and DOJ and MSM and social media and Democrats pretended that Russian lies (“disinformation”) were truth. With Twitter and Hunter’s laptop, they all pretended that truth was Russian disinformation.

Russian disinformation is so versatile.

SCOTUS orders temporary halt to the halt of Title 42

The New Neo Posted on by

For now, anyway:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked an order that would lift Title 42, the pandemic-era health policy that has been used to deter migrants more than 2.5 million times.

The order Monday by Chief Justice John Roberts comes as cities along the U.S.-Mexico border have been scrambling to prepare for an expected influx of migrants in anticipation of Title 42’s end…

The immigration restrictions, often referred to as Title 42, were put in place under then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 and have prevented hundreds of thousands of migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. in recent years. But as they’re set to expire, thousands more migrants are packed in shelters on Mexico’s border with the U.S.

The finger remains in the dike.

The January 6th committee…

The New Neo Posted on by

…does exactly what it was always going to do: recommend that the DOJ indict Donald Trump.

The hypocrisy of the following statement is stunning, but not surprising. We’ve become used to it:

“Faith in our system is the foundation of American democracy. If the faith is broken, so is our democracy,” said select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). “Donald Trump broke that faith. He lost the 2020 election and knew it, but he chose to try to stay in office through a multi-part scheme.”

“This can never happen again,” Thompson added.

They’re determined to fix things so that no Republican can ever win again.

This is interesting in terms of the question of whether the DOJ will take the even more stunning move of actually following through on the indictment, or whether this is just more theater. Personally, I don’t think they’ve decided yet what they will do, and will keep their options open for the time when an indictment might best benefit the left:

Charging decisions rest entirely with DOJ prosecutors, not Congress, but panel members have increasingly stressed the impact their transmission to the department could have on public opinion — viewing it as part of building a historical record around the attack.

I don’t think this sort of thing changes anyone’s opinion, either.

The FBI got a mite pushy with Twitter, and even Yoel Roth became alarmed

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a Twitter files supplemental from Matt Taibbi. The gist of it is that the FBI started telling Twitter to find nefarious election-influencing foreign actors and had trouble taking “there really aren’t many at all” for an answer. Roth was asked to answer what looked to him like interrogatories, the answers of which could be used against him and/or Twitter. It’s a bit cinematic, like the moment in a movie when one of the protagonists realizes those friendly guys from the government or the police aren’t really his friends after all.

Here’s the NY Post on the subject:

San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan pressured former Twitter trust and safety chief Yoel Roth in July 2020 for more information about how they prevented bad actors from using the platform, according to screengrabs of email correspondence posted by Taibbi.

Chan was not satisfied with Twitter’s indication that it “had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform,” the emails show…

Roth, in return, commented on the persistence of the agency, stating that he was “perplexed” by the probing inquiry.

Roth added that he was not “particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the [Intelligence Community]) demanding written answers.

And perhaps this is the most propitious moment to remark on the wonderfulness of the FBI agent’s name, truth being stranger than fiction: Elvis Chan.

Newsweek’s angle on the Twitter files appears to be: Republicans POUNCE!

There’s also a newer Twitter files installment, this time by Shellenberger and dealing with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. It’ll take me a while to deal with that, perhaps later today or tomorrow, but I’ve included the link so you can find it easily and read it.

And in addition, Elon Musk put a poll up at Twitter yesterday asking whether he should step down as head of Twitter and the answer was “yes.” But I’m with the writer “bonchie” at RedState on this: I believe that Musk knew that would be the result and was planning on doing this anyway. It wouldn’t make sense for the hands-on running of Twitter to become his full-time job. Time will tell, though.

Random thoughts for today

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) It’s very gloomy out there today. I’m talking about the weather, by the way. Hope it’s nicer in your neck of the woods.

(2) Have you ever wanted to write a board book for your children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews, with photos as well as text? I did, and I’m very pleased with the results. I used this website. They’re efficient, turn out a quality product, and do it in a timely fashion without charging an enormous amount of money. It’s too late now to order for Christmas, but books are good any time of year.

(3) Don’t forget to use the Amazon portal at this blog for other holiday gifts or any time of year, if you shop through Amazon.

(4) I’ve gotten most of my gifts mailed already. That’s earlier than I usually do it, being somewhat of a procrastinator. “Somewhat” may be an understatement, actually.

(5) Why not get into that holiday spirit, kitschy variety?

Have a great weekend!