Jordan versus Schenck: you don’t see this kind of Perry Mason stuff very often

The New Neo Posted on by

First, some background on who Schenk is and why he was testifying in Congress yesterday:

Schenck was supposed to testify over his allegations that Justice Alito leaked court opinions in regard to the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. case. The reverend claimed he’d gotten information about the majority opinion on the case after Alito had dinner with mutual friends of Schenck’s. Alito denied this leak, yet the New York Times reported on a letter Schenck had sent to Chief Justice Roberts earlier this year making the claim that he had.

The idea, of course, was to discredit Justice Alito. Schenck was the Democrats’ star witness.

Now, the video. Watch Schenck’s demeanor especially starting at 1:53:

And of course, the leftist MSM acts like this scene didn’t happen or minimizes it. Here’s NPR with a long article that even mentions Jim Jordan questioning Schenck, but only says this about what transpired:

Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, including ranking member Jim Jordan of Ohio, expressed skepticism about Schenck’s story, which Jordan described as “8-year-old second-hand hearsay.”

Jordan noted that both the donor, Gayle Wright, and Justice Alito have denied being involved in leaking the information, and questioned Schenck’s motives for coming forward with the story.

No special reason to doubt Schenck’s truth-telling capacity, right? It’s just Jordan’s skepticism.

Then there’s Reuters, which doesn’t even mention Jordan nor any reason to doubt Schenck’s story.

The NY Times has previously covered Schenck’s accusation against Alito many times in the past, but as of this moment the paper appears to have skipped reporting on Schenck’s testimony yesterday. At least, I can’t find anything in a quick search.

The WaPo actually does cover the exchange – very briefly, and with nothing indicating how very explosive and embarrassing it was for Schenck. Here’s the passage, which shows you how to minimize without lying:

Jordan sought to undermine Schenck’s credibility as a witness Thursday by getting him to admit that some details in a book Schenck wrote about his work connected to the court were inaccurate. “You got the key detail wrong and now you remember an additional detail,” Jordan said after displaying a poster with text from Schenck’s book. “We’re supposed to take your word over Justice Alito’s word, over Gayle Wright’s word?”

According to the article, Jordan merely “sought” to undermine Schenck’s credibility – he didn’t actually undermine it, or at least the WaPo has no opinion whatsoever to offer on that. The article says that Jordan got Schenck to admit that “some details in a book Schenck wrote were inaccurate,” but actually the admission concerned a story Schenck made up of the whole cloth, a complete fabrication complete with other details. The WaPo makes it sound as though it was a something minor such as Schenck getting the date wrong, or describing what he was wearing as blue instead of gray. The reader could easily read the article and continue to think that Schenck was basically telling the truth and Jordan just a nitpicking meanie.

That’s how the MSM works. But still, Jordan’s questioning and Schenck’s answers were a sight to behold. Unfortunately, most of the MSM’s readers will never behold it.

Sinema becomes an Independent

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the announcement:

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is changing her party affiliation to independent, delivering a jolt to Democrats’ narrow majority and Washington along with it.

In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate. “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she said.

So how is it that her defection delivers a “jolt” to the Democrats? Answer: it doesn’t.

She says:

“I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure,” Sinema said, adding that some of the exact mechanics of how her switch affects the chamber is “a question for Chuck Schumer … I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent.”

It’s a labeling issue.

Notice that Sinema made this announcement after the Georgia runoff. I think that was a tactical move because she didn’t want Republicans to get more energized to vote for Walker. She denies it, although she said she was “delighted” by Warnock’s win.

Here’s another reason she may have done this:

Even before her party switch, she faced rumblings of a primary challenge in 2024 from Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). Becoming an independent will avoid a head-to-head primary against Gallego or another progressive, should she seek reelection.

Sinema is definitely one of the better Democrats, but she’s a Democrat as long as she caucuses with them. What would really mean something is if Manchin became a Republican. But I see only a .000001% chance that he will.

Open thread 12/9/22

The New Neo Posted on by

But why no mention of Mary Queen of Scots’ height? She was reportedly about six feet tall and Elizabeth I was at most 5’4″, so Mary would have towered over her had they actually met.

[BUMPED UP: SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW POSTS] It’s getting close to the holidays, so please use the neo Amazon portal for your Amazon purchases

The New Neo Posted on by

Please use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases if you prefer – as they used to say of the yellow pages long ago, before the internet took over – to let your fingers do the walking. Two things Amazon provides: convenience and variety.

Just click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar on desktops/laptops or down at the bottom of the page for phones (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.

Thanks in advance!

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The mystery of woke capitalism. I first really noticed the enormous extent of corporate leftism during the lockdowns, and then I noticed it even more after the Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter.

(2) There’s a lot of angst on the right about these amnesty bill talks between Tillis and Sinema. “Another terrible betrayal!” is the cry. At the moment, though, I think it’s all just theater. I don’t think there’s time to pass it nor do I think there’s the stomach to pass it in terms of Republican senators allowing it to not be subject to the filibuster. But conservative voters have PTSD – and rightly so – on this issue.

(3) But..but…I thought election fraud has never happened.

(4) Jordan Peterson certainly can pack a lot of thoughts into a fairly short statement. This segment that I’ve cued up is 33 seconds long. Have a listen:

(5) In Iran, Khamenei’s sister speaks out against him. I have no idea what influence if any she has, but the article says she has a very long history of criticizing the theocratic government of Iran. She is calling “on the widely-feared Revolutionary Guards to lay down their weapons,” and that highlights one truth of which all tyrants are aware: their power to enforce their iron rule rests on the willingness of rank-and-file police and/or military to enforce their policies. Once the enforcers refuse to do that, the jig is up.

(6) Musk has indicated that Twitter may have put its thumb on the scale in Brazil’s recent elections too.

The Biden prisoner exchange deal

The New Neo Posted on by

The non-art of this prisoner exchange deal:

Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was held for months in Russian prisons on drug charges, was released Thursday in a one-for-one prisoner swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, bringing an end to an ordeal that sparked intensive high-level negotiations between the U.S. and the Kremlin to secure her freedom…

To secure Griner’s release, the president ordered Bout to be freed and returned to Russia. Mr. Biden signed the commutation order cutting short Bout’s 25-year federal prison sentence.

Notably, the Griner-for-Bout exchange leaves retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan imprisoned in Russia. Whelan has been in Russian custody for nearly four years. He was convicted on espionage charges that the U.S. has called false.

Griner’s charges were not false, although her sentence was ridiculously long compared to her offense. Her ordeal has lasted months, whereas Whelan has been incarcerated almost four years on false charges. And of course, Griner is a black lesbian professional basketball player whereas Whelan is a white man and former Marine.

Biden and officials mentioned Whelan this way:

“We’ve not forgotten about Paul Whelan,” Mr. Biden said Thursday, adding “we will never give up” on securing his release. U.S. officials told reporters that it became clear in talks with the Russians that the prospect of securing the release of both Griner and Whelan in exchange for Bout was a nonstarter, with one saying the U.S. had was “a choice between bringing home one particular American — Brittney Griner — or bringing home none.”

That is written so poorly it’s impossible to tell what it means – although maybe that’s the point. It seems Biden is saying Russia wouldn’t release both and so they had to settle for one. And another official seems to be indicating that the Russians took Whelan off the table in the negotiations, and perhaps that’s even true although it’s hard to trust anything this administration says. This article indicates the same – that the Russians have refused to negotiate for Whelan’s release, perhaps because he’s held on (false) espionage charges rather than drug charges as Griner was.

So, if that’s the way it actually went, instead of holding out the Biden administration gave in and did what Russia is purported to have wanted and gave up Bout in order to get Griner and not Whelan. And Bout is another kettle of fish entirely:

Bout, who was most recently held at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency in Thailand following a sting operation in 2008. He was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and began his 25-year sentence a decade ago.

Whelan’s family mentioned that this is the second time Whelan has been passed over in a deal. I wonder who the Russians are saving him for.

ADDENDUM: More on Bout here:

Part of his 2012 conviction in a New York federal court was for attempting to buy and sell antiaircraft missiles to terrorist organizations for use against passenger jets…

“He was finally brought to justice in an American court,” successful prosecuting attorney Preet Bharara said at the time, “for agreeing to provide a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans.”

He was convicted ten years ago, and Russia has been trying all that time to get him released. Seems like they just succeeded. Perhaps Griner was convicted for that very purpose – to serve as bait for this big fish. I think that’s exactly what happened, and it was irresistible to the Biden crew.

How the FBI got the Hunter laptop story suppressed while attempting to preserve plausible deniability for itself

The New Neo Posted on by

You can’t call the FBI dumb. It was clever – very very clever.

The story is somewhat complex, but Miranda Devine of the NY Post has done good reporting on this from the start. I highly recommend reading her latest in its entirety. Some excerpts:

The extraordinary revelation for the first time lays bare how the FBI was involved in pre-bunking the story of the laptop, which had been in the bureau’s possession for almost a year.

“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” said Roth in a Dec. 21, 2020, declaration to the Federal Election Commission.

“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

“Pre-bunking.” That’s a useful term.

More:

The FBI also warned Facebook to be on “high alert” for a “dump” of “Russian propaganda” before the 2020 election, in terms specific enough that it “fit the pattern” of The Post’s story, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan in August.

Facebook also censored The Post ahead of Twitter’s throttling of the story in October, pending “fact checks” that never appear to have been done.

The FBI agent who organized those weekly meetings with Big Tech was Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, whose postgraduate thesis claimed that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help former President Donald Trump…

It looks very much as if the FBI pre-bunked a story it knew was coming about Hunter Biden. But how would it know The Post was going to publish the story in October 2020?

Well, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud, under the pretext of an investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations, a probe which conveniently was dropped this year.

The covert surveillance warrant on Giuliani gave the FBI access to emails in August 2020 from Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac disclosing information damaging to Joe Biden from the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his store in April 2019.

The FBI also had access to my [that is, Miranda Devine’s] messages with Giuliani in October discussing when The Post would publish the story.

The FBI knew exactly what it was doing. I bet that the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had dropped off his computer regrets ever giving it to the FBI. Fortunately, he kept copies of its hard drive, and that’s the only reason the story ever saw the light of day.

For more on the same tale, please see this by Byron York.

What a den of partisan corruption the FBI is. The saddest thing about it is that half of the country either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or applauds all of this.

NOTE: Oh, and then there’s James Baker’s involvement in “vetting” the Twitter email release. Another must-read.

Divided party, united party

The New Neo Posted on by

The divided party is the GOP and the united party is the Democrats.

Oh, I know the Democrats aren’t really united. Not completely – just nearly completely. In recent decades and especially since Obama became president, they have purged their moderate wing and become almost wholly leftist. And the ones who aren’t leftists vote with the leftists anyway in an impressive demonstration of iron party discipline – except for, on very rare occasions, senators Manchin and Sinema.

It’s not only the huge number of leftists in the party that have allowed them to control their members so well. It’s the fact that once leftists reached critical mass they elected Congressional leaders who were determined to take the party further in that direction. And of course it helps to have the MSM, the press, and education and so many other cultural institutions on their side. There is also a Democrat voting public that accepted all of this – or was ignorant of how leftist some of their representatives were because they hid it in moderate rhetoric while voting leftist.

The GOP is very different. The party has been split for ages, and though there are more conservatives now than there were earlier, they are not a majority much less a powerful critical mass. That’s one of the reasons why someone like McConnell – not a conservative – keeps becoming Leader. No conservative challenger has a strong enough voting bloc to mount anything like enough votes against him.

Those who complain of a uniparty are not quite correct, in my opinion. The Democrats are a uniparty unto themselves. The Republicans have a GOPe wing that is large, however, that sometimes holds firm against the Democrats but too often is willing to betray the conservative GOP base and even the moderate GOP base and go along with Democrats. I’d call that wing a sometime uniparty. But there is a sizeable and stalwartly conservative wing that has not been “purged” and is not part of a uniparty. These two Republican wings have a lot of trouble working together.

Until the conservative wing of the GOP reaches its own critical mass it won’t be able to dethrone the McConnells of the political world. And if the conservative wing broke off to form a third-party at this point, it would have even less power than now because there’s just not enough of them or enough general support. That’s the dilemma.

More post-Georgia-runoff musings

The New Neo Posted on by

Fewer people on the right and left voted in the Georgia runoff than in the general – why? Yes, I know that’s pretty much always true of runoffs, but this was no ordinary runoff. Are people more interested in their state elections, for posts such as governor and state legislators, than in the direction the federal government goes for the next two years? Or have many people on the right in Georgia just not been paying attention? I know the turnout yesterday (and in early voting) was large for a runoff – but still, winning depends on turnout, and a little more for the right might have done the trick.

Or is it because they think the Senate is lost anyway? Do they not realize numbers matter even then? Or did the continued “leadership” of GOPe leader McConnell turn them off? Did depression after the 2022 general turn them off? Or is it possible they actually listened to Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan who bragged about not voting for Walker or Warnock?

Or all of the above?

I’ve seen people commenting in sites around the conservative blogosphere angrily and morosely saying that Georgia is now a blue state. Untrue. It is decidedly purple – or, rather, it’s layered, with a purple outer (federal) layer and a red inner (state) core:

The Republican Party controls the [Georgia] offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.

What’s more, Georgia has 14 members of the US House, and in the 2022 election nine of the winners were Republicans and five were Democrats, for a gain of one GOP seat over the 2020 reults.

And yet Warnock won, and Georgia’s other senator (Osoff) is a Democrat as well. Georgia is not the only state like that – for example, New Hampshire has a similar but even more dichotomous pattern with – in New Hampshire’s case – two senators and two US House members who are Democrats, and all state entities controlled by Republicans. Why? Do the residents of these states think that Congress members are too distant to matter, compared to state officeholders? They should think again. Do voters in those states think that the state officials affect their pocketbooks more directly, and so they elect more fiscally responsible Republicans at that level and save the virtue-signaling voting for their national candidates?

I wrote prior to the November 2022 election that I thought New Hampshire’s incumbent Hassan was vulnerable but that Bolduc was a fairly extreme candidate who was not a good fit for the state, with little ability to appeal to more moderate voters there. However, no better candidate had presented him or herself in New Hampshire and so although Bolduc won the primary in a state that is not especially Trump-friendly, he lost the general. The situation with Warnock and Walker in Georgia was different in its details, but similar in its result – Warnock was somewhat vulnerable there, but Walker was not the person to do capitalize on that.

Remember Pearl Harbor

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a previous post.]

Today is the eighty-first anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its very ancient last legs and nearly gone. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this a few years ago while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long-ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

Back on the 75th anniversary there were still quite a few WWII veterans alive:

The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have data on veterans of individual battles, and an alumni association for the battle disbanded in 2011, at the 70th anniversary, when it believed just 8,000 of the 84,000 uniformed Americans on Oahu during the attack remained alive. Since 2011, roughly half of veterans of World War II who were alive then have died, according to VA projections, leaving fewer than 700,000 alive today. Roughly 400 American WWII veterans die each day.

Obviously the number of Pearl Harbor veterans alive was small then and has only gotten smaller since that was written—as it will every year until the number is zero. And then, we will still remember? In fact, do most of us remember Pearl Harbor even now?

I’m not really sure what our younger generation today remembers, or wishes to remember – or through what strange leftist prism it will be taught to remember that day if it’s taught at all.

Here’s a post I published fourteen years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated.

Here’s just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, because we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

“Righteous might.”

Here’s the speech itself:

The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. That draft read “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. He also changed “simultaneously and deliberately attacked” to “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”

Wise choices by FDR.

Open thread 12/7/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to do some of this but definitely not all of it. I notice that this dancer has long toes and a long toe box. I have short toes and had a short toe box. Each situation presents its challenges.