…a few bona fide comments that somehow got put in the trash by the spam filter. If any of your comments start disappearing, let me know and I can liberate them.
The FBI dismissed Steele as a source but kept using him anyway
Byron York has been one of the reporters who has repeatedly taken on the difficult task of delving into the details of the Russia-Trump-collusion investigation by the FBI. What he finds usually isn’t pretty.
And this is no exception:
Because he had broken his agreement with the FBI, bureau procedure did not allow agents to keep using Steele as a source. But they did so anyway — by devising a system in which Steele spoke regularly with Bruce Ohr, a top Obama Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to search for dirt on Donald Trump in Russia. Ohr then passed on Steele’s information to the FBI.
In a highly unusual arrangement, Ohr, who was the fourth-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, acted as an intermediary for a terminated source for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe. His task was to deliver to the FBI what Steele told him, which effectively meant the bureau kept Steele as a source.
Agents made a record of each time Ohr gave the bureau information from Steele. Those records are in the form of so-called 302 reports, in which the FBI agents write up notes of interviews during an investigation.
There are a dozen 302 reports on FBI post-election interviews of Ohr…
Congressional investigators have read the Ohr-Steele 302s. But the FBI has kept them under tight control, insisting they remain classified and limiting access to a few lawmakers and staff. Congress is not allowed to physically possess copies of any of the documents.
York quotes the House Intelligence Committee memo on another especially salient point connected with this:
…[I]n September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files — but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.
This would be shocking if we retained any ability to be shocked by the duplicitous machinations of the FBI in this matter.
The thing that strikes me as I read that—and it’s not the first time I’ve had the thought—is that, if the Democrats take control of the House in 2018 as often predicted, this investigation will cease. Of course, at least half the country isn’t paying attention anyway, or is paying some attention but doesn’t care, or thinks what the FBI did is just great because Trump has to be taken out one way or another, even if we have to “cut a great road through the law to get after the devil”—the devil known as Donald Trump.
The vindication of Clarence Thomas
Justice Clarence Thomas has long been a figure of ridicule and contempt, even hatred, from the left. Had he been a liberal, he almost certainly would have been their champion and hero: black, and raised in abject poverty with an extraordinary story that would ordinarily touch the heart. However, he’s not a liberal; not at all.
But it turns out that, jurisprudentially speaking, Thomas may have the last laugh:
Liberals have always dismissed Thomas as simply Scalia’s wingman, though no one who actually read with any care their separate opinions, concurrences, and dissents would think so. But the great thing about being a liberal is that you can just go with a cliche and skip the careful thinking part.
But now that the whole scene is in flux with the arrival of Justice Gorsuch—who, like Justice Thomas, believes that the natural law tradition in legal history stretching back to Roman times still has today what social scientists call “normative” value—the left is taking stock of things, and realizing that they are in a heap of trouble…
…Ian Millhiser, who writes about legal affairs for the Center for American Progress. He, too, thinks Thomas defines the center of gravity for conservative jurisprudence, calling Thomas “the most important legal thinker in America.”
The left still despises Thomas. But now they fear he was actually the vanguard of a way of thinking that could become far more dominant in American judicial thought. From that Millhiser article:
But if you’re asking how effectively Thomas helped sway Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy to his own views, you are asking the wrong question. In a series of opinions joined by no other justice, Thomas waged a quiet war of ideas against twentieth century liberalism — and he won the hearts of a legion of conservative law students. Many of those former students are now old enough to be judges.
As of this writing, fully 20 percent of the judges Donald Trump appointed to the federal appellate bench are former Thomas clerks. Thomas lost the war for the present, but he is the future of legal conservatism. And he may soon be America’s future.
The author of those words is not at all pleased at the prospect.
Acosta plays ball
[BUMPED UP]
You may have noticed that so far I’ve skipped all the brouhaha about Jim Acosta of CNN and his anger at being heckled by some Trump supporters, and then having a testy exchange with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
It’s one of those things that makes me weary, and besides everybody else is covering it. For example, here’s Ace on the first incident and here’s Bre Payton in the Federalist on the second. You can find excerpts from Sanders’ reply here.
That’s from the right side of the fence, and of course the left has a different take on it (see the Times, for example, where the coverage was actually surprisingly restrained compared to this sort of thing).
You can watch the video if you’re so inclined. Personally, I think Huckabee Sanders got the better of Acosta:
There there’s this by Andrew Klavan [hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”], about some fallout from the incidents:
“Jim Acosta has the sadz. The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted “CNN sucks,” which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.
Acosta didn’t like it. He reported, “Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore.”
But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don’t happen to be a coastal elite. It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman’s magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.
I was going to write in response to AesopFan: “I guess Acosta’s never been to a Red Sox/Yankee game.” Heckling, screaming, par for the course; an old American tradition, not a new one.
But then I thought I’d check out “Jim Acosta and baseball”—because who knows? Maybe Acosta’s a big Yankees fan or something like that.
So I found this tweet of Acosta’s from last May, which he posted to illustrate the American cultural assimilation of an immigrant, Acosta’s father, who came here from Cuba many years ago:
This is my Cuban father. He came to the USA as a refugee at the age of 11. He “assimilated” quite well. He even enjoyed our National Pastime – baseball. This is us seeing the Cuban team playing the Orioles in Baltimore. pic.twitter.com/EuP64e1MiO
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) May 11, 2018
There are some very funny responses, such as this one:
I appreciate the sentiment, but an old Cuban guy getting into baseball is like the worst example of "assimilation" you could've picked, lol. https://t.co/NfkOGX9Sru
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) May 11, 2018
And this:
My grandfather also seamlessly transitioned from yelling at Dominican baseball teams on a grainy television to yelling at the Mets on a grainy television.
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) May 11, 2018
Even I am well aware of the Cuban passion for baseball. It certainly does not take “assimilation” to the US for a Cuban guy to become a fan! It may even be the case that Cubans are bigger baseball fans than Americans, on the whole. In fact, Fidel Castro was a big big baseball fan, although he was not a good enough player to have been scouted in his youth as a pitcher; that rumor is false.
So what on earth is Acosta talking about? Is he completely ignorant about the history of baseball in Cuba? Or does he think we are? [emphasis mine]:
Baseball is one of the most popular sports in Cuba. It was popularized in Cuba by Nemesio Guillot, who founded the first major baseball club in the country. It became the most played sport in the country in the 1870s, before the period of American intervention.
Despite its American origin, baseball is strongly associated with Cuban nationalism, as it effectively replaced colonial Spanish sports such as bullfighting.
Toxic Sarah Jeong revisited
I originally had perceived Sarah Jeong’s anti-white tweets as really bad jokes. But jokes they were. And I stand by that, although I think that if the Times and other MSM outlets and SJWs have a zero tolerance for racist remarks, they should be consistent and extend that zero tolerance to Jeong.
But much more information has now emerged about other tweets of Jeong’s, and anti-white jokes are the least of her offenses. And the rest of it wasn’t even intended to be a joke of any sort. She’s tweeted really over-the-top hateful stuff (see this and this for more details and quotes).
My question at this point is this: How could the NY Times not have seen that extreme stuff of Jeong’s? It’s really toxic, and it doesn’t appear that she ever erased those tweets, either.
Does the paper not do any research on their young and trendy hires? Or did they see Jeong’s vile and bile-filled tweets and not care? Or do they approve of them?
Do you say “ummm…” too much?
When I did the Sanity Squad podcasts, I couldn’t help noticing how often I said “ummm…” while trying to frame my thoughts and articulate them. Too often for my taste, although some of the feedback I got from listeners was that it wasn’t all that much. It seemed like a lot to me, though.
It’s a common thing. But I wanted to eliminate it. Sometimes I was successful and the number of “ummms” declined precipitously, but sometimes they came out in droves. I never could quite figure out why the waxing and waning. Tension had something to do with it, but not everything to do with it.
This article gives you advice on how to reduce the ummmies. Worth trying, anyway, if your own “ummms” bother you.
Old tech stuff and new tech stuff
There are a few glitches on the blog that I hope will be ironed out in the next few days. You may or may not have noticed them (some are very minor, fortunately).
One involves the strange disappearance of that checkbox in the comments, where you could check it if you wanted your name and email information to be saved so you didn’t have to fill them out each time you commented. If you had already checked it before its odd disappearance, the information may be saved (mine is, for example, at least on my computer). But apparently—at least for some people—that box is gone.
Let me know what’s going on for you, and on what browser and what device if there are differences.
It seems that, even without the checkbox, if you start typing in the lines where the name and email address go, there’s a drop-down menu that gives you the options you need. That’s not too bad. But still, it would be better if it just auto-filled.
Then to top it all off, I got a notice on WordPress today that pretty soon they will be changing to an entirely new interface for blog post writing. Great (NOT!!). Change like that is usually bad, in my experience—and I’ve had a lot of experience. Forced change is even worse (do you hear me, Yahoo Mail? YouTube?). I keep trying to retain the so-called “classic” versions of things, but sometimes (often, actually) the sites keep slyly switching me to the new one, and I have to hunt and hunt for the magic location of the magic button that will get me back to the old.
Sometimes the old is completely eliminated. But sometimes they just try to drive you crazy looking for it. They are versatile little foxes.
WordPress swears that there is a plugin that will override their new system (the new one’s called “Gutenberg”; they must think it’s quite revolutionary) and restore “classic.” We’ll see. I hope.
In the meantime, reviews of Gutenberg have filled me with dread. Horrible, horrible!
About changing that apple photo and the blog URL
[BUMPED UP]
Yesterday I mentioned that “at some point I may change my apple photo, too.”
A number of people responded with some version of “No!” “Don’t ditch the apple!” “It’s your brand!”
But I said I may change the apple photo. In other words, I may change the photo but it will remain an apple photo. I’m not planning to change the apple photo into a non-apple photo.
I know it’s my brand. I just thought I’d update it.
Sort of like the change of blog name. When I first announced that I was changing the URL and site of the blog, I explained my reasons, which basically boil down to two. The first is that the design of the old blog was outdated. It wasn’t good on smartphones; no one was reading blogs on phones yet when I had set up neoneocon. It had a design so Byzantine and cloaked that I could not change anything on it, and so it was practically frozen in time in terms of its basic structure and even many of its details. The theme (that’s the basic design) had long been abandoned by its creator, who seemed to have gone incommunicado. I feared that at any moment the blog could stop functioning, and I wanted to make a change before that happened.
The second reason was that the URL didn’t really fit anymore. I originally chose “neoneocon” (in 2004) because it was sort of catchy and sort of funny, and I didn’t expect to be a serious long-term blogger anyway. My political change was quite new, and I was using the term “neocon” mostly in its original sense of “a new conservative.” I was a really new new conservative—thus, a neo-neocon.
That was nearly a decade and a half ago.
I also chose the term “neocon” to mean I favored the spread of liberal democracy with protection of human rights.” Not “one vote, one person, one time” democracy. Not by military means, unless there was a compelling other defensive reason to go to war. I explained all of this in post after post (in the category “neocons” on the right sidebar), but people continued to misunderstand, and as the years went on “neocon” became more and more entrenched as a word for “whatever we hate” on both sides.
So the combination of all of that, but mostly the fact that I was now an old conservative (without being a paleocon) rather than a new conservative, made me think I really needed to make a switch. I wanted to keep the “neo,” because that’s how I’m known. I tried to buy “neoneo.com” and “neosquared.com” and a host of other URLs that seemed good to me, but they were not available, and so I settled on this one, and I think it makes sense because I am the new neo and this is the new neo site.
So why change the photo? Well, it’s really outdated, too. That picture that was up in the right corner, and down below if you were looking at a cellphone, was taken in September of 2006. It’s a selfie (although that word didn’t exist then, as far as I know) taken with a crummy camera that I had set on a shelf, and with a timer. It was blurry to begin with, and then I zoomed in on it to get the closeup and the blurriness became even more apparent. But it was the best I had and I rather liked it.
To be blunt about it, I was also a lot younger then. You do the math; it’s easy. As time went by it started to bug me that it was such an ancient photo and just didn’t seem to express where I’m at right now anymore than “neoneocon” expressed it. About two years ago, for example, I had stopped dyeing my hair its original near-black. Now it’s silver—hey, they say that’s very trendy, you know. I actually rather like it, but it sure doesn’t look the same as the blog photo, nor do I.
And cameras are hi-def now, just in time to keep up with the aging process.
So I set out to recreate the pose of the photo with the apple. Did you ever try to copy the angle at which you held something in an old photo, the expression on your face (in a closeup yet, after the passage of twelve years), the sweater you were wearing?
Trump hits 50% approval in Rasmussen poll
It’s not the first time, but it’s the first time in a while (see this chart). For most of the year he’s been moving around in the high 40s, after many months in the low-to-mid 40s during much of the last half of 2017.
It’s not the highest he’s ever been, though. For the first week of Trump’s presidency, his approval was in the high 50s. Then, for the month of Feburary, 2017, it dropped to the low-to-mid 50s. But in March of 2017 it dropped below 50 and stayed in the low-to-mid 40s for the rest of the year, even dropping as low as 39 in early August of 2017, a year ago. It stayed in the low 40s until 2018, when it graduated to mid 40s. It’s been hovering in that mid-to-high 40s range ever since, with occasional forays into 50 territory.
What does it all mean? There are those who completely discount polls; I’m not one of those people, although I am very skeptical of polls. But I think they do tend to reflect general trends over time, and the trends here are pretty clear.
How this will translate to the 2018 mid-terms—and if it will translate to them at all—is anyone’s guess.
I’m not about to spend hours and hours of tracking what each of these ups and downs reflect, but my guess is the economy is a biggee. But there’s also a role for the waxing and waning in the intensity of the Russian collusion coverage. For example, what was happening in August of 2017 in the MSM, when Trump’s approval was in the 39 cellar? A full bore press on the Donald Trump Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer, that’s what.
If you think the MSM doesn’t affect public opinion, I beg to differ with you. A lot of people are highly influenced by it, whether they say they distrust the MSM or not.
The NY Times hires woman with history of anti-white racist tweets, but…
Take a look at her tweets. They certainly seem racist, if taken at face value.
But you may accuse me of being naive, but on reading Sarah Jeong’s old tweets, it occurs to me that she was joking.
For example, what can “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being fit to live only underground like groveling goblins” be but a joke?
Let’s hope it’s a joke. To me it certainly sounds like a joke. As do the rest of them.
The problem is that the boundaries for what people say on Twitter and elsewhere that’s considered acceptable in terms of racist comments about white people and other unprotected groups have moved so far from anything I would define as okay that it has become extremely difficult to tell when someone is joking and when a person is serious. It’s the old “this is not the Onion thing.”
I saw a couple of articles today about Sarah Jeong and no one else but me seemed to be saying, “Hey, maybe this is a joke. This seems like a joke.” An unfunny joke, but there’s so much unfunny humor these days that I come to expect that.
Then I decided to check by Googling “was Sarah Jeong joking?” and I get this statement from the Times:
We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done covering the internet and technology at a range of respected publications. Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her accusers. She now sees that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it. We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history. She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
I happen to believe that this is true (even if the Times says so; a stopped clock and all that). I believe it’s true because that was my immediate impression on reading the tweets—they were so over-the-top as to be a somewhat obvious piece of mockery of the racism of others. So I’m inclined to cut Jeong some slack.
The problem is this: in recent years the MSM and cable news and the Democratic Party and society as a whole have given more serious sentiments of anti-white racism a platform, seemingly with approval as long as the racism is expressed by a member of a non-white minority group (although Jeong, being Asian, is a member of a group that has itself been treated like a group that can be discriminated against, at least in college admissions).
Another problem is that, if someone were being “funny” in a way similar to Jeong, with over-the-top fake supposedly humorous/sarcastic racist remarks about other racial groups defined as oppressed, it would not matter that the person was joking. That person would be persona non grata at any media outlet in the MSM, and would not be given a chance to “understand that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times”; that person would be out on his or her ear, pronto.
[ADDENDUM: Please see this and my reply here. Jeong is really bad news.
I now have a new post up on the subject of Jeong.]
My favicon is now in place
[ADDENDUM 6 PM: I’m seeing the small green apple icon on my cellphone and on my computer in the heading above the URL line when I’m actually at the blog site. But it’s not in my computer bookmarks. In bookmarks at Firefox, I see a little grid like a tic-tac-toe board instead of the image of the green apple. What do you see?]
I didn’t even know what a “favicon” was until I realized I looked up something like “how to set little image for your WordPress site.” FAVICON, folks!
And I think I accomplished it. I just made a thenewneo setting on my cell phone home page, and it had a nice little green apple in the middle of the shortcut image.
This is what it takes—it may not seem like much to you, but to the somewhat-tech-challenged like me it’s a big accomplishment. First you have to find a nice image that is free and that allows commercial use. Not so easy. Of course, if I had to pay for it I would, but why not find a free one? Then it turns out that, even though the image I selected was shown against a transparent background, when I downloaded it I saw a black background instead.
So I had to change that to transparent. That took a while—I’ll mercifully spare you the details—but I think it’s done. Let me know if you’re not seeing it properly.
Sorry for all this inside-baseball stuff.
The redirect eagle has landed!
[BUMPED UP]
Well, well, well.
The exact time was a surprise to me, too, but the redirect occurred this morning, and now anyone going to neoneocon.com will end up here.
Huzzah!
Let me know if there’s any problem for you connected with that. This blog design is still a work in progress, but it’s mostly done.
You can use the old URL or this new one. But I suggest the new one.
You may have noticed that none of the posts from the last week or two are here. I will be manually transferring them over when I get a chance [UPDATE: I have now completed this task], but the comments for them will remain on neoneocon, which you won’t have access to now. Sorry. I think the loss of a couple of weeks of comments is a small price to pay. All the older comments from neoneocon are right here, though.
At some point I may change my apple photo, too. Right now I’m just adjusting to the new surroundings. Welcome! Pull up a chair and get comfortable.