President Joe Biden will travel to Philadelphia on Thursday to “deliver a primetime speech on the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation,” according to a White House statement Monday.
“Soul of the Nation” is a phrase he has used in the past to describe the fight for democracy in the face of what he’s labeled as “extreme” opponents.
How very healing of him. How very unifying.
One of many many things that puzzles me is how anyone could have thought during the 2020 campaign that Joe Biden was a unifier. He called himself that, but his entire life’s work belied it, as well as his personality.
And here’s a nicely Orwellian and ironic touch:
Biden’s speech Thursday will take place outside Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was debated and approved and, later, the U.S. Constitution was written.
And even more importantly – where were they before, when we really needed them? The damage has been ongoing for at least seven years and almost certainly more. But it affected the 2020 election in particular, as well as the lives of many people on the right who faced and still face legal jeopardy and lengthy imprisonment for actions that would earn a wink if perpetrated by people on the left.
But suddenly, there are a great many FBI whistleblowers coming forward to Republican members of Congress. See this [emphasis mine]:
“These new allegations are appalling, and continue to demonstrate that the FBI‘s culture has gone off the rails,” Rep. Dan Bishop, North Carolina Republican, told The Washington Times. “New FBI whistleblowers are coming forward at a rapid pace, and my Republican colleagues and I on the Judiciary committee will leave no stone unturned.”…
These new whistleblowers from the bureau are in addition to the 14 FBI whistleblowers House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, says he has already talked to.
The new group of insiders accuses FBI management in different field offices of corruption, cover-ups and retaliation against rank-and-file agents who attempted to expose it, The Washington Times has learned…
Mr. Gaetz cited one whistleblower as telling him that he’s coming forward to save the agency from implosion.
“The guy told me that he loves the bureau, that he doesn’t want to see the bureau defunded or destroyed, but that he really feels a need to come forward so that there’s a focus on the things they ought to be doing, not trying to affect political outcomes,” he said.
Here are some ideas I have about the timing:
(1) Previously, would-be whistleblowers were so afraid of retaliation that they waited. While they waited, they communicated and networked with each other in some clandestine way until they felt emboldened by strength in numbers.
(2) The problems within the FBI simply became more and more egregious and more and more people in the FBI encountered them.
(3) In addition public sentiment has been strongly turning against the Bureau.
(4) In particular, the recent talk of defunding or disbanding the FBI has made the whistleblowers come forward in order to save the FBI and perhaps their own jobs.
(5) The idea that the GOP has a decent chance of taking control of Congress in 2022 has helped them to come forward in anticipation of that (then again, why didn’t more of them come forward during Russiagate, when the GOP had control and Trump was president?).
All these explanations seem a bit weak to me. You may have better ideas.
I also believe that the firing – or resignation – of agent Thibault represents a decision by the higher-ups that he will be blamed for the rot that is rampant in the agency. Interestingly, even before the MAL raid but when it was about to occur, Christopher Wray had testified before Congress that Thibault was a problem – and yet the raid went forward shortly afterwards.
House Judiciary Committee Republicans are opening an investigation into Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz over reports suggesting his office’s involvement in examining a cellphone the FBI seized from Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-PA).
A letter sent Monday by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the ranking member, said such a move by the agency’s independent watchdog “creates a serious conflict of interest for the OIG in reviewing the Department’s actions.” Among the demands made of Horowitz were those for relevant documents and communications, as well as explanations for a forensic examination of Perry’s phone and concerns raised about the seizure. Jordan asked the inspector general to produce this material no later than 5 p.m. on Sept. 12.
And although some people are encouraged by the idea that Judge Cannon may appoint a special master to oversee the documents seized in the MAL raid, I think it’s way too little way too late. The FBI had its fishing expedition and – “taint squad” notwithstanding – almost certainly has already combed through everything. So, they seized privileged documents? So sorry – oopsies!
NOTE: So far I don’t see any coverage of these whistleblowers in the MSM. If you can find any, let me know. When I do a search, I just get stories from sources on the right. When I go to the New York Times’ site and search for “whistle blowers,” I get recent stories about the Twitter whistleblowers.
This weekend we discussed “the elites” on this thread, and I mentioned that Thomas Sowell had written an entire book on the highly related subject of Intellectuals and Society. Here’s a short discussion with him about it, during the Obama years:
I’m not sure what Sowell went on to say after that, but I would add that educated people in the Founders’ day had a solid grounding in ancient history, which contained a great many messages about the dangers of tyrannical governments. They also were quite familiar with the Bible. I doubt the same two things can be said of most of our intellectuals or our “elites” today.
Also, I’ve cued up a short excerpt from this interview:
Maybe this is nitpicking, but I’d like to correct one brief thing that Sowell said at 4:35. Bobby Fischer was not happy to play chess and to stay out of larger pronouncements (although as far as I know, Sowell is correct that Fischer made no larger pronouncements about evolution). In later life, after his retirement from chess, Fischer – always eccentric – became even more so, and more talkative. At that point he opined on a lot of things. For example, shortly after 9/11 Fischer had this to say:
Fischer stated that he was happy that the attacks had happened, while expressing his view on United States and Israeli foreign policy, saying, “I applaud the act. Look, nobody gets … that the US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians … for years.” He also said, “The horrible behavior that the US is committing all over the world … This just shows you, that what goes around, comes around, even for the United States.” Fischer also referenced the movie Seven Days in May and said he hoped for a military coup d’état in the US: “[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military—they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”
But these beliefs did not only emerge after 9/11; they were longstanding. Fischer’s mother was ethnically Jewish although not religious, but his father (whom he did not know) was not Jewish and Fischer never considered himself Jewish. He certainly went quite far in the other direction of rabid anti-Semitism:
Fischer made numerous antisemitic statements and professed a general hatred for Jews since at least the early 1960s. Jan Hein Donner wrote that at the time of Bled 1961, “He idolized Hitler and read everything about him that he could lay his hands on. He also championed a brand of anti-semitism that could only be thought up by a mind completely cut off from reality.” Donner took Fischer to a war museum, which “left a great impression, since [Fischer] is not an evil person, and afterwards he was more restrained in his remarks—to me, at least.”
From the 1980s on, Fischer’s comments about Jews were a major theme in his public and private remarks. He openly denied the Holocaust, and called the United States “a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards”…In 1999, he gave a radio call-in interview to a station in Budapest, Hungary, during which he described himself as the “victim of an international Jewish conspiracy”. In another radio interview, Fischer said that it became clear to him in 1977, after reading The Secret World Government by Count Cherep-Spiridovich, that Jewish agencies were targeting him….Fischer, at a press conference upon his return to Reykjavik, Iceland, lashed out at Jeremy Schaap, the son of the late Dick Schaap, a sportswriter who had been a father figure to Fischer when growing up, calling his father a “Jewish snake” for doubting Fischer’s sanity in his later writings.
Sowell is correct, however, that Fischer was not an intellectual, and that he certainly had a very small area of expertise and that when he stepped outside it he was way out of his depth. I wonder, though; would most people consider a chess player an intellectual? Chess tends to be correlated with a certain type of high intelligence, but chess players don’t trade in ideas as their main concern – their brilliance is spatial and strategic/tactical/analytical/intuitive, is it not?
A number of people are disoriented mapping experienced resume services equals a sensible nest egg and this is a good question, so it is imperative that we first catalog a drop of the statistic closings that derived with doers which make the leap and hire a foundational registered resume midwife services.
The search warrant affidavit unsealed on Friday confirms the Department of Justice used a bait-and-switch tactic to justify the FBI’s unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s home. The unredacted portions of the affidavit further expose the Biden administration’s manipulative and tenuous basis for the search and its reliance on inapplicable federal criminal code provisions to justify the targeting of a political enemy.
Yes, but…half of America already knows Trump violated the Espionage Act – ergo, he’s a spy – and was planning to give nuclear secrets to somebody-or-other, anybody, perhaps the highest bidder because he’s all about the money.
Or something like that. I believe this raid had two main purposes, and the first was to plant propaganda in people’s heads, with the fervent cooperation of the MSM. The second was the fishing expedition part, with the goal of finding some technicality on which to criminally indict Trump, or perhaps to cover their own tracks by seizing Russiagate documents (or perhaps both).
More from Cleveland:
While the next nearly eight pages of the search warrant affidavit remained redacted, the disclosures that followed exposed the affidavit’s focus on “classified records” as a sham. “On or about May 6, 2021, NARA made a request for the missing PRA records and continued to make requests until approximately late December 2021 when NARA was informed twelve boxes were found and ready for retrieval at the [Mar-a-Lago],” the affidavit continued, with the abbreviation “PRA” previously noted to stand for the Presidential Records Act.
As I explained previously, to fully comprehend the Biden administration’s weaponizing of the DOJ and FBI, it is necessary to understand the Presidential Records Act, the concept of “presidential records,” and the NARA’s role, and the search warrant affidavit’s references to those concepts confirm that point…
The public (understandably) may wish to sidestep the minutia of the mandates of the Presidential Records Act, but three top-line takeaways prove imperative to understanding the scandal of the Mar-a-Lago search. First, the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute, and violations of that federal law do not constitute a crime. Second, the Presidential Records Act does not reach broad swathes of documents retained by a former president, including “official records of an agency,” “personal records,” and convenience copies of presidential records. And third, the courts have refused to question a former president’s conclusion that a record constitutes a “personal record” and not a “presidential record.”
I believe that Cleveland is correct when she writes that the public (or at least half the public) “may wish to sidestep the minutia of the mandates of the Presidential Records Act.” But it’s not just because it’s boring and technical and picayune, as many statutes are. It’s because the majority of Trump haters don’t care what the law is, as long as the feds finally get the Great Orange Whale.
When [in the affadavit] they refer to what was found in the 15 boxes, they refer to documents with “classification markings.” That leaves open the possibility that they aren’t classified any longer — that they may have been declassified. The affidavit says the documents “appear” to contain National Defense Information, but Sperry asks if they “triaged” the boxes, wouldn’t they know if it did or not?
There’s a line in there about “probable cause to believe evidence of obstruction will be found at the premises.” But as Sperry explains, there’s no heading about that “obstruction” or anything in the unredacted parts that justify this random sentence. The agent behind the affidavit says he believed the storage room and other spaces at Mar-a-Lago weren’t “currently” authorized for storage of classified information. Either they were or they weren’t, didn’t he know? And were they in the past and not now?
Then in the affidavit, there’s a letter dated June 8 mentioned, from the DOJ to Trump’s counsel, telling the Trump team that they have to keep the documents in the storage room until further notice…
So, they seem to think it wasn’t a secure location, but then they tell them to keep the documents there? They don’t take them immediately. They wait two months until the raid on August 8? Why not take them all when they took the original boxes? That seems to blow apart the claim that there was any urgency going on here.
Then of course they knew what was there because they told the Trump team to keep it there. Sperry interprets that as potentially trying to entrap Trump with what the DOJ told them to do.
Whatever ends up happening with this, the narrative is permanently set for a great many people. The same thing happened with the utterly debunked (to use a favorite word of theirs, although they don’t apply it to Russiagate) Russigate story and the infamous Steele dossier.
And then there’s the Hunter Biden laptop and the January 6th “insurrection.” The following clip on those subjects is very recent; it features Bill Maher talking to Rob Reiner and Amy Klobuchar. It’s been viewed and talked about quite a bit in the context of Rob Reiner’s not seeming to know much about the Hunter laptop coverup. But I note a couple of other things about it as well.
Maher starts with a reference to the Sam Harris remarks (I wrote about them in this post) in which Harris basically said that anything was justified in order to stop Trump, and Maher is asking Reiner whether the Hunter laptop coverup by the media was justified. Interesting, though, that Maher doesn’t reference Zuckerberg’s recent remarks that the social media coverup of the laptop story was requested by the partisan FBI. Note also how Reiner counters by changing the subject to January 6th, and that he says that it was a case of “armed violence to try to kill people in the Capitol.” Wrong – and Maher doens’t correct him. The only people who tried to kill anyone were the Capitol police, and they were successful. At the end of the clip, Klobuchar chimes in with the idea that Trump “literally tried to lead an armed insurrection.” Those things have become truths for half of America, and Reiner (who may not know any better) and Klobuchar (who almost certainly does) are perpetuating the myths.
Of course, those of you who hate the Bee Gees and especially the Bee Gees’ falsetto singing mode may find listening to this the opposite of joyful. It’s a fairly obscure song by the Bee Gees I recently discovered, and I just love it. You may say “oh, neo, you are tiresomely indiscriminate about the Bee Gees; you love all their stuff.” But no, I merely like some of it – and even among the many songs I love, there are degrees of love.
This particular song may not have caught on when it was released on their 1976 album “Children of the World,” but it’s so upbeat, so expressive of the bubbly happiness a person can feel when in the grip of the first blush of love, that it never fails to put a smile on my face. That smile becomes especially broad when I hear the keyboard (synth?) that begins at around 0:16, and then Barry’s musical yelp at 0:18-0:23. And I especially like the passage from 1:33 to 1:53. Is the song disco? Is it funk? Who cares? Enjoy:
It was a somewhat bigger hit in 1978 for Melba Moore, who turned it into what I hear as a more strictly disco version with more instrumental parts, a faster tempo, and the same relentlessly happy vibe. I like this one very much, too, although the Bee Gees edge it out slightly for me, in part because that synth bit is lacking here. They each have their substantial charms, though. Do we really have to choose? Let’s just dance:
I can’t think of another song that so perfectly captures the experience of sudden love, meeting someone out of the blue and feeling that energizing rush where all’s right with the world when a minute before things seemed so wrong. I fell in love almost instantaneously with my ex-husband. I was twenty-one years old, and although I’d had quite a few serious relationships up to that time, I knew instantly this was The Real Thing. The course of my very lengthy marriage didn’t run at all smooth, and ultimately we divorced, but both of us knew and know that what we felt was very very real despite its suddenness.
I find the phrase “stepped into my life” so interesting. The unusual thing about it is that word “stepped” – the lyric doesn’t say the more conventional “came in my life.” “Stepped” gives that feeling of “suddenly, suddenly” – at one moment the stage is empty, and then the main actor comes on to applause and happy relief. And the way Barry sings “suddenly, suddenly” is just effervescent.
A lot of people think the Bee Gees’ lyrics are ho-hum, but although I think I understand why they say that, I don’t agree. They’re not deep poets like Leonard Cohen, whom I also love. They’re not Bob Dylan, whose lyrics are more obscure and complex, whom I don’t especially love. I like the Beatles but I don’t love them, and many of their early lyrics are just bubblegum stuff and many of their later ones are rather nonsensical to me. The Bee Gees’ lyrics often seem simple and mundane till you think about them more; sometimes a word such as “stepped” is very telling. “You Stepped Into My Life” is one of their more simple lyrics, except that in a way it’s brilliant. And the music isn’t simple at all, although it’s catchy as all get-out.
…[T]here was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.
In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book related to that topic quite some time ago, entitled Intellectuals and Society.
There’s more on the new Iran Deal here, in particular what the Iranian leaders are saying about their plans for Israel. The article mentions the Biden administration’s weakness several times as one of the factors leading to all of this:
As the Biden administration seems to be moving closer to reaching a new nuclear deal with Iran, the mullahs in Tehran are encouraging their Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist proxies to prepare for waging war on Israel…
The mullahs are not oblivious to the growing voices in the Arab world that complain about the weakness of the US and how the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement towards Iran is undermining the Americans’ credibility and jeopardizing the security and stability of Arab and Islamic countries.
Iran’s mullahs appear to be so confident that the Biden administration has turned its back on its Arab allies in the Middle East that they are issuing direct threats not only against Israel, but also against any Arab country that dares to cooperate with the Israelis.
It may be a minor quibble, but although the article says the Biden administration is weak, that’s not the way I’d describe it. This particular deal is what the administration intends to do, and I’m puzzled by the somewhat constant assertion that this administration is weak, a statement hardly limited to that article. Yes, it’s weak in the traditional sense of not opposing a tyrannical regime such as Iran’s, and failing to project the strength, resolve, and ability to do so successfully. But that presupposes that the Biden administration has that goal and is trying to do those things. I see no indication that is the case.
Nor do I think that the Arab nations who oppose Iran are suffering from the delusion that they can count on the US to help them. That is one of the reasons they have allied somewhat with Israel in the first place – to try to stop Iran, realizing that the US is no longer a reliable player.
Bennett, Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz often spoke of the weaknesses of the Iran nuclear deal, which has been negotiated mostly in Vienna over the past 16 months. They repeatedly said Israel would not be obligated to it, but they made sure not to openly criticize US President Joe Biden.
On Thursday, however, Lapid came very close to crossing that line.
“In our eyes, [the Iran deal] does not meet the standards set by President Biden himself: preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear state,” he said in a briefing to the foreign press.
In other words, if Biden agrees to rejoin the Iran deal as it stands, which all indications point to him doing, then he will be breaking a promise.
No doubt Biden and company are shaking in their shoes at that accusation from the extremely weak Lapid. The change in Lapid probably comes from two factors. The first is that he may actually realize this deal is on course to bring great peril to Israel in the truly – not just metaphorically – “existential” sense. The second is that he can feel Netanyahu’s hot breath on his neck.
I’ve seen a number of articles indicating that some companies are trying to leave extreme wokeness behind. For example, there’s this one about recent developments at Warner’s in that direction.
That doesn’t surprise me much – after all, cutting off so much of your potential audience wouldn’t seem like a good business move, and so a return to a more representative message would seem to make sense. What surprised me was the tremendous swing to wokeness in the first place. One would think it glaringly obvious that this would affect the bottom line negatively, and yet it was commonplace. My question is: why did they do it? It might have been an okay or even a good idea for some sort of niche company, but not for those whose business model was built on broad appeal.
My questions, in no particular order:
(1) Was it a case of competitive virtue signaling gone mad?
(2) Were the people making the decisions untethered from the reality of the need to make money?
(3) Did they think they were so creative and so clever that people would flock to their products anyway?
(4) Did they figure it was worth a little dropoff in business to demonstrate such virtue, but the dropoff was a lot more than they had bargained for?
(5) Was it merely a reflection of the fact that the personnel at such companies had become a woke echo chamber themselves and couldn’t even judge the extremity of what they were doing?
(6) Is this return to the center going to catch on and be real, or is it just a weak and sporadic thing?
