The “soft coup”: killing a king

The New Neo Posted on by

In the very olden days of the monarchy, kings often used to kill their opponents before they got killed by those opponents. It was a pretty brutal world.

Wretchard (Richard Fermandez) uses that as a metaphor to talk about the present:

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, one can make the equivalent argument that a probe against Obama officials would be just as much “a good faith attempt to investigate a credible charge” as the Mueller investigation. But one should not deceive oneself into not realizing that the ultimate targets of such a course would be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Such a turnabout would not end the crisis which began in the waning days of the Obama administration, it would only change its direction. And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which “is to prevent a clash between kings” would still be in ruins. Perhaps this is why Karl Rove is urging Trump, having won the round, to move on; for by considering the affair closed, Trump could restore the tradition of comity, which has been damaged.

Or could he? In the current political culture, magnanimity is unlikely to be met with gratitude, unless the words are spat out with irony. Passions are high and neither side appears willing to give an inch. It may take time before an extended hand is not met by a punch. The fever must still run its course. One can only hope the fever breaks before the patient does.

Good points and interesting points as well. But the problem is that this situation is not really some sort of tit-for-tat, any more than the police trying to find a cop-killer is tit-for-tat.

Of course, if in fact Trump had been an agent of Russia, that couldn’t be left to stand. The problem was that it was not only an absurd notion but there was no evidence for it that could pass the smell test, and so those wanting the investigation to go forward had to fake evidence, leak it, and lie about it to make the allegations seem at all credible.

So this really was an effort first to discredit Trump the candidate and then, when that didn’t work well enough, an attempted coup on Trump the president. If it was that—and I think it’s clear that it was—Trump can’t just let bygones be bygones. The precedent would be awful. The perpetrators of what amounts to a several years long attempt at a frameup have to be made to think they will be caught and cannot get away with it.

And yet, as Richard Fernandez says in his post that I quoted at the outset, an investigation of the investigators could help to destroy the peaceful transition process that America has seemingly enjoyed till 2016. But it was the previous administration that actually destroyed it, and we can’t pretend that didn’t happen.

I wrote all of the above before reading this article by Roger Kimball. An excerpt from it:

I think my friend Karl Rove is a very smart man. But I dissent categorically from his judgment a couple of days ago that the president ought not to “obsess” over the “origins” of the investigation because that was not an effective strategy to win over swing voters. Rove said Trump should let bygones be bygones and “move on.”

On the contrary, the president, to the unalloyed delighted of the crowd, made it clear last night that “moving on” was not part of his agenda. Or, to put it more accurately, move on he would, but not without making sure that those who weaponized the intelligence resources of the United States against him (and, more to the point, against them) were called to account. This is not a matter of vengeance. It is a matter of preserving the central core of our democratic republic, which turns on the integrity of our elections.

As I have said on many occasions, the whole Russia-collusion narrative represents the biggest political scandal in our history. Why? Because a cabal of officials in the Obama Administration, aided at every turn by a hysterical media, decided that the candidacy and then the election of Donald Trump was not to their taste. They used every expedient to challenge his campaign and then to attack his presidency. Senior officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Department of State decided that they had a “higher loyalty” than their loyalty to the Constitution. The people may have spoken on November 8, 2016. But they made the wrong choice. Therefore it was incumbent upon people like James Comey to correct the mistake. They would lie under oath and leak classified material to the press to damage President and people close to him. Perhaps most stunning, they would employ a legal instrument designed to be used against suspected foreign terrorists and repurpose it to open a conduit into Donald Trump’s campaign and then into his administration.

The whole Russia-collusion fantasy, of which the Mueller investigation was only the desperate centerpiece, has cost the taxpayers untold millions ($30-$40 million for the Mueller investigation alone), it has destroyed the lives and careers of several people whose only “crime” was to have been in the orbit of Donald Trump, and it has gravely damaged public faith in the impartiality of our intelligence and security institutions to say nothing of what public faith remained about the media. It is imperative that people like John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey are made to understand—and that the public can see that they have been made to understand—that the heads of the FBI or the CIA or the Office of National Intelligence do not have a veto over who gets to be the president of the United States.

The Resistance tried to kill the king. They may not like the king—you may not like the king, either—but that’s not the point. The effort cannot be allowed to stand, and it must be driven home to the American people what actually happened and what the dangers are. And we certainly can’t count on the MSM to do that, since they were in on the conspiracy.

That’s not tinfoil hat territory. That’s just the way it was and the way it is.

[NOTE: I’m starting to experiment with using tags for post content as well as the usual categories.]

The European car police

The New Neo Posted on by

These car police will be inside your car:

…[P]oliticians…want to limit your car’s engine power to make sure you don’t break the speed limit while robots determine whether you’re fit to drive in the first place. At least that’s the proposed plan in Europe starting in May, 2022.

Backed by Members of the European Parliament, the European Transport and Safety Council says its new mandatory systems “will reduce collisions by 30 percent and save 25,000 lives within 15 years of being introduced.” And so just days after Volvo announced it will introduce driver-facing cameras and limit all its cars to 112 mph, the EU followed up with its own Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) system. Which includes:

—GPS and/or traffic sign recognition to determine the speed limit of the road, with your car adjusting its engine power accordingly. Granted, the ETSC says that initially, the system will switch off once you floor the gas, mostly “to aid public acceptance at introduction.”
—Data loggers. When, where, how fast. And the data available to whom?
—Advanced autonomous emergency braking and lane keep assist.
—Reversing cameras.
—Camera-based driver fatigue detection.
—Alcohol interlock installation facilitation. A breathalyzer?
—Emergency stop signal.

As EVO points out, pressing the pedal to floor won’t get rid of your new nannies. The ETSC says that “if the driver continues to drive above the speed limit for several seconds, the system should sound a warning for a few seconds and display a visual warning until the vehicle is operating at or below the speed limit again.” Beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep-beep!

Some of these features I have no problem with, such as camera-based driver fatigue detection (I believe that’s a beep that goes off if your car drifts unduly or if your head drops an unusual amount). Others seem more like the step-by-step injection of more and more control by an ever-escalating nanny state bent on curbing your freedom in order to protect you.

Now, I’ve never felt the need to drive at a speed beyond 112 mph or anywhere even remotely near that figure. But I am made very uneasy by a car that won’t let me because of legislation that degrees cars have systems such as the one described. And there is no reason to believe it will remain at the 112 level, or that more and more of these government-imposed won’t curbs be placed upon anything that smacks of liberty.

The bottom line for all of this is the question of how much risk we want to assume and who we want to be in control of that. I’ve learned over the years that people differ very much in the degree of their desire for liberty and the value they place on it. In general, Americans have long placed a higher value on liberty than Europeans do, but I fear that is changing.

A few more things about Smollett

The New Neo Posted on by

There are many reasons prosecutors might drop a case (or decline to go to trial), but as the Illinois prosecutors’ statement made clear, the Smollett case does not partake of the usual reasons and it was not handled in the usual way.

The case was not weak. The perp was not even forced to accept or admit any kind of guilt whatsoever. There was no probation. The community service was a joke. None of the ordinary procedures for settling rather than prosecuting were followed.

We can speculate on the reasons for this, but the leading one is that due to pressure the fix (not the Foxx) was in. One thing that seems crystal clear is that there was nothing weak about the case. Even Kim Foxx admitted as much [emphasis added]:

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx on Wednesday defended her office’s decision to drop all charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett but said prosecutors had enough evidence to convict the actor of faking a hate-crime attack on himself.

Foxx began a string of interviews with local media, as Smollett’s lawyers took to the airwaves to declare Smollett’s innocence following an unusual, hastily called hearing Tuesday at which prosecutors dropped 16 felony counts tied to the alleged hoax attack.

Foxx said that the deal, which essentially wipes Smollett’s record clear, was not a sign that the prosecution case was weak or that Smollett was innocent, and said similar low-level felony defendants are cut the same breaks.

“The notion that this somehow exonerates him or that the prosecutors somehow believed he was innocent is very frustrating to [my] idea of alternative prosecution,” a hoarse-voiced Foxx said late Wednesday in an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “But I understand that [Smollett’s lawyers] have a client, and they have a spin.”

Foxx, who recused herself from the case just over a week before Smollett was charged because of conversations she’d had with a relative of the actor, pointed to the $10,000 bond that Smollett turned over to the city of Chicago, a sum equivalent to the maximum fine for the disorderly conduct charges he faced. The prosecutor, who took office in 2016 after campaigning on a reform platform, said she believed the evidence against Smollett would have convinced a judge or jury to find him guilty.

“I believe based on the information that was presented before the grand jury, based on what I’ve seen, the office had a strong case … that would have convinced a trier of fact,” she said.

But the way it was handled allows the shameless self-promotor Jussie Smollett to proclaim his innocence and to make further accusations against the Chicago police.

Then there’s the question—and it’s a more general one that isn’t just about the Smollett case—of using the testimony of one (or more) of the alleged perpetrators against another of the alleged perpetrators, and/or the use of jailhouse snitches. Those practices are commonplace and always somewhat suspect, but that’s what a trial is about. In general, my rule of thumb is that if the snitch’s statement are unsupported by any other evidence they are far more suspect than if they are. Criminal law would be paralyzed if such statements were not allowed, but a judge or jury looks at the entire picture, including the corroborating evidence.

In the Smollett case, there was plenty of it. There was also the absurdity of Smollet’s original fact situation as he described it, as well as his shifting story.

I haven’t seen any polls on what percentage of the public believes Smollett and what percentage thinks he’s guilty, but my sense is that very few people believe he’s innocent at this point.

Illinois prosecutors are mighty angry about the disposition of the Smollett case

The New Neo Posted on by

The Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association has some words for Kim Foxx, her office, and you:

The Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association serves as the voice for nearly 1,000 front line prosecutors across the State who work tirelessly towards the pursuit of justice. The events of the past few days regarding the Cook County State’s Attorney’s handling of the Jussie Smollett case is not condoned by the IPBA, nor is it representative of the honest ethical work prosecutors provide to the citizens of the State of Illinois on a daily basis.

The manner in which this case was dismissed was abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike do not recognize the arrangement Mr. Smollett received. Even more problematic, the State’s Attorney and her representatives have fundamentally misled the public on the law and circumstances surrounding the dismissal.

When an elected State’s Attorney recuses herself from a prosecution, Illinois law provides that the court shall appoint a special prosecutor. See 55 ILCS 5/3-9008(a-15). Typically, the special prosecutor is a neighboring State’s Attorney, the Attorney General, or the State Appellate Prosecutor. Here, the State’s Attorney kept the case within her office and thus never actually recused herself as a matter of law.

Additionally, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office falsely informed the public that the uncontested sealing of the criminal court case was “mandatory” under Illinois law. This statement is not accurate…

The appearance of impropriety here is compounded by the fact that this case was not on the regularly scheduled court call, the public had no reasonable notice or opportunity to view these proceedings, and the dismissal was done abruptly at what has been called an “emergency” hearing…

Lastly, the State’s Attorney has claimed this arrangement is “available to all defendants” and “not a new or unusual practice.” There has even been an implication it was done in accordance with a statutory diversion program. These statements are plainly misleading and inaccurate. This action was highly unusual, not a statutory diversion program, and not in accordance with well accepted practices of State’s Attorney initiated diversionary programs….

They must think that the prosecution’s actions regarding Smollet make them all look crooked. It seems that the Smollett case has made everyone mad except Smollet himself, his family, and the spokespeople at “Empire.”

[Hat tip: commenter Bryan Lovely.]

Welcome to the EU: you can check out but you can never leave

The New Neo Posted on by

Some interesting background on the history of Brexit:

It was at 6:22 a.m. on June 24, 2016 — 59 minutes before the official tally was unveiled — that the European Council sent its first “lines to take” to the national governments that make up the EU.

The United Kingdom was leaving the European Union and Brussels was determined to seize control of the process.

In the short five-paragraph document written by Council President Donald Tusk’s chief of staff, Piotr Serafin, and circulated among EU ambassadors, the bloc’s remaining 27 national governments were urged to speak with one voice and to insist that the U.K. leave through the Article 50 process set down in EU law.

This meant settling the divorce first and the future relationship second, once the U.K. had left. “In the future we hope to have the U.K. as a close partner of the EU,” the document read. “First we need to agree the arrangements for the withdrawal.”

This was crucial. It ran counter to declarations by the U.K.’s victorious Vote Leave campaign not to be bound by the formal exit procedure. If the U.K. agreed to the terms of its departure before its future relationship was settled, the Brexit campaigners had argued, it would deprive itself of much of its leverage.

Joining the EU is a dangerous proposition. Brussels and the member states as a whole take control to a certain extent, and each individual country (and its people) loses autonomy. Divorce becomes very very difficult, and that is by design.

It reminds me of the lyrics to “Hotel California,” in particular the last verse:

Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said: “We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

On the media and Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

I ordinarily get my news by reading. That’s not just a result of the internet or of my political change; it’s something that’s always been true of me. I’ve always found TV news to be too shallow, and I prefer reading in general anyway.

What’s even more curious was that I have always had a certain dyslexia for news personalities. Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were practically the only TV newspeople I could have identified in my youth, and I couldn’t have told you what network any of them were on. And that was back in the days when it was quite a simple thing to do, because there were really only three choices: ABC, NBC, and CBS. But that tells you how little I cared about network news.

These days, with the proliferation of stations as well as the swelling of coverage hours to fit an all-news-all-the-time cycle, it’s even more complicated and difficult to know all the personalities, but I don’t make much of an effort.

All that of that is a lead-in to the fact that, during the Trump administration and the years of Russiagate coverage, I haven’t watched much TV news at all. Therefore I saw only a smidgen of the constant barrage of over-the-top accusations on stations such as MSNBC (Rachel Maddow in particular) or CNN.

Oh, I read quite a bit about the sensationalist TV news coverage itself, and sometimes I watched a small video clip. But I certainly had no desire to follow the TV news in real time because the little I did see made me cringe. I left it to others for the most part to cover the TV coverage.

It turns out that it was even worse—even more vicious and unremitting and mendacious—than I’d thought, and I’d already thought it contained plenty of all those ingredients.

And it also turns out that the coverage by some of these stations is one of the main reasons that viewers have been so completely gobsmacked by the findings of the Mueller report. Again, that’s something I expected to happen, but the extent and depth of it has somewhat surprised me.

It was fun for the MSM while it lasted. And it swelled their ratings to a phenomenal extent. They are now trying pivot to other related aspects of Trump’s supposed perfidy, and are refusing (as far as I can tell) to acknowledge any wrongdoing or error on their part that isn’t somehow Trump’s and/or the Republicans’ fault. I wonder if the newspeople even can admit error to themselves. I doubt it.

If you’ve read my change story you’re aware that a great deal of it was fueled by my late-in-the-game perception that the MSM had been lying to me for a long long time. Once a person realizes that, there’s usually no turning back. The trust is broken and that’s that, and the person is open to reading (or viewing) other things and other news sources with a critical and skeptical eye and evaluating each story on its own merits.

I wonder whether the MSM ever thought their coverage ultimately ran the risk of losing them viewers. I also wonder whether they believed their own tales that the Mueller report was bound to find that Trump had colluded with Russia. Ordinarily I think they’re well aware of when they are lying, but in this particular instance my guess is that a lot of them actually believed these particular lies. Wishful thinking played some part in it, and of course the collusion story drove ratings. But I think the press, or at least some significant percentage of people in the press, believed their informants who, after all, were supposedly privy to inside information on this matter.

Adam Schiff, for example, was lying through his teeth, brazenly and with a straight face and with full knowledge of the falsehood of what he was saying because there was nothing in the briefings that backs up his stories. I am sure there were other people like Schiff feeding the press scoops; he was just the most visible and vocal one of them dishing the dirt. And no doubt there were “authorities” in the FBI or the DOJ or people with close connections to those institutions who were also blabbing to the press and feeding them outright lies in order to sway the public.

If so, then many people in the press might be feeling somewhat duped and betrayed as well. Of course, they won’t let it stop them from going on and on and on this way. But over time it may make it harder for them to trust their sources and report with conviction on what they’re being told.

[ADDENDUM: Ace points out that, even now, no one in the MSM seems to be calling Schiff a liar. That does indicate that most of them probably knew he was lying all along, which certainly would not surprise me although I’m not totally sure it’s the case. It’s possible, for example, that they can’t accuse Schiff of lying now, even though they didn’t know it at the time, because (a) it would make them look like fools and dupes, and (b) it would help the right too much.

This is the old “knaves vs. fools” question, and as usual, you can’t go wrong if you answer “both.”]

The woman who can’t feel pain or experience anxiety

The New Neo Posted on by

Many many decades ago I read about the rare people who don’t feel pain, and learned that it’s a dangerous condition. They tend to hurt themselves and not be aware of it, so they can be in a lot of trouble and not know it. It seems that pain has a very clear function, although sometimes it can keep giving us the signal long after the danger is passed, and lead to the horror of chronic pain.

Here’s an article about a woman who at 71 has never felt pain in her entire life. The genetic mutation she has that causes this is a newly-discovered one, and doctors are studying it to learn if there’s anything about it they can apply to the rest of us who feel pain. One of the most curious aspects of her particular situation is that, although she does injure herself quite a bit (I first wrote “hurt herself” rather than “injure herself,” but then I changed it because the word “hurt” didn’t seem quite right), she heals pretty quickly and ordinarily without scars. Another is that she has literally never felt anxious, and doctors believe this might be physiologically caused.

It would seem to be a wonderful thing to not be able to feel pain. But many years ago, when I was quite young, I read that lepers used to sometimes lose digits in their extremities not because the disease made their fingers or toes fall off, but because they lost sensation there and didn’t know they were injuring themselves. Just now I wondered whether this was some myth I’d heard, or whether it was actually the case, and I found this:

Leprosy attacks the nerves in the cooler parts of the body, particularly those that relate to the hands, feet and face. The result is a loss of sensation in these areas meaning a person is at much greater risk of injury as they cannot feel pain. A stone in a shoe may go unnoticed or a burn while cooking with the resulting injury and infection sometimes severe enough to cause the bone to ‘shorten’. The feet of a leprosy-affected person are prone to ulcers and, if not treated properly, can lead to amputation.

Pain may not seem like a friend, not by a longshot. But to a certain degree it is necessary and protective.

I imagine something similar is true for anxiety, which tells us to be wary of potential danger and to try to avoid it—although, like pain, anxiety can sometimes get out of hand.

“There is no Pravda in Izvestiya”: the left probably thought that controlling the media was a victory

The New Neo Posted on by

The left has been in near-total control of the MSM for quite some time now. No doubt they thought that was a victory, and it certainly has given them some victories that I don’t think would have otherwise occurred if there had been an equal number of voices on the right in the MSM.

But the media can get control of the entire shebang, and if it isn’t competent at its propaganda—if it doesn’t pick and choose but is too flagrant in its willingness to lie for the good of the Party, if its lies are too easy to see as lies—then the entire enterprise can actually sabotage the Cause and result in the public’s distrusting it.

And then the public’s perception of the media can turn into something resembling the general perception of Pravda, widely considered by the Soviet public during the days of the USSR as being a ludicrous and mendacious government mouthpiece:

The miserable former citizens of the old Soviet Union had an expression – “There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda” – which, roughly translated, reads “There is no Truth in News and there is no News in Truth.” Pravda was the news organization of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Izvestiya was the news organization of the Soviet government. Pravda is “Truth” in Russian and Izvestiya is “News.”

Of course, during the days when the Soviets had an especially ruthless and iron grip, it almost didn’t matter what the people thought. In a way, the more ludicrous Pravda was, the more it showed the people how little power they had to change anything, and represented their leaders’ laughing in their faces.

But—at least so far—Americans still retain relative amount of liberty. That may not last, but at present it could make a big big difference.

Years ago we thought that maybe the blogosphere would make a big enough difference, too. I think it has helped, but not nearly enough. And Twitter and Facebook have been dominated by the left, which has the goal of censoring the right, and they have also facilitated the leftist desire to organize mobs of SJWs to attack those people simpatico to them who are just not extreme enough to suit their fancy.

What’s happened to social media in the political sense is an example of Robert Conquest’s second law in action:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

And what’s happening to the press right now can be seen as an example of his third law:

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

[ADDENDUM: I just saw this piece by Lee Smith in Tablet, entitled “System Fail: The Mueller Report is an unmitigated disaster for the American press and the ‘expert’ class that it promotes.” Here’s an excerpt:

The media criticism of the media’s performance covering Russiagate is misleadingly anodyne—OK, sure the press did a bad job, but to be fair there really was a lot of suspicious stuff going on and now let’s all get back to doing our important work. But two years of false and misleading Russiagate coverage was not a mistake, or a symptom of lax fact-checking.

Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation.

The campaign was waged not in hidden corners of the internet, but rather by the country’s most prestigious news organizations—including, but not only, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. The farce that has passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible.

My impulse is to say “you mean were credible.” And yet that would be a cheap shot by me. I personally know many many many intelligent people who still (at least until this moment) read one or both of those papers and/or watch one or both of those networks every day or close to it, and believe what they say (and will not under any circumstances watch or read sources on the right, ever). You might say that those people have closed minds. But they would say that they don’t want to waste time filling their heads with lies. Which of course is ironic, but the dilemma is that if a person doesn’t read the other side, the leftist mouthpieces can retain quite a bit of their luster.

Which probably is one of many reasons why the MSM cannot admit the magnitude of what it did with Russiagate. Its only hope is to spin, spin, spin and to hope its readers buy its spin on what happened, rather than blame the press.

But I’m wondering if the MSM’s Russiagate hype represents a bridge too far, even for loyal readers of the MSM. Smith certainly seems to think so, because he also writes that for the MSM, “Russiagate is an extinction level event.” Time will tell, I suppose.]

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Kim Foxx’s recusal from the Smollett case: not a recusal-recusal

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh my:

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx did not “formally” recuse herself from the Jussie Smollett case — she only did so “colloquially,” prosecutors said on Wednesday.

“Colloquially”? As in, “Not really; just pretending”?

More:

“Out of an abundance of caution, the decision to recuse herself was made to address potential questions of impartiality based upon familiarity with potential witnesses in the case,” Foxx’s spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said on Feb. 20.

Top aide Robert Foley released a separate statement, saying Foxx “had conversations with a family member of Jussie Smollett about the incident and their concerns and facilitated a connection to the Chicago Police Department, who were investigating the incident.”

But Ellis clarified that Foxx’s recusal “was a colloquial use of the term rather than in its legal sense.”

“Instead, in an abundance of caution, Fox informally separated herself from the decision-making over the case and left it to her Assistants, as happens in 99.9% of all cases handled by the Office,” Ellis said.

The why did she mention it at all?

I think I have the answer: she mentioned it in order to give the false appearance of a real recusal when none had occurred. After all, no one expects the State’s Attorney to use a legal word such as “recusal” in some sort of colloquial sense; everyone would think she meant it in its technical legal sense. I’m not sure what conversational circles Foxx and Ellis hang around in, but let’s just say the word “recusal” doesn’t usually come up in any colloquial sense at, say, my monthly book group, when we’re eating dinner and shooting the breeze.

“Hey, I think I’ll recuse myself from dessert”? Nah, doesn’t happen.

I very much doubt that Foxx thought any of these machinations of hers would ever be revealed. Which in a way is odd, because she must have known or certainly should have known that the decision to let Smollett off, as well as the fact that she didn’t even give the mayor or police superintendent a heads-up beforehand, would cause widespread anger, dismay, and outrage, and that it could blow back right at her. And it’s not as though she’s been a stranger to controversy, either, so there’s no excuse for such naivete.

[NOTE: The pressures brought to bear on Foxx to drop this may have been very powerful. Here’s the tale being told; I don’t know how much of it is true, but it sounds plausible. After reading quite a bit about Foxx, including an interview I quoted at length yesterday, I think Foxx is certainly ultra-liberal and inclined to drop charges in minor cases, but she’s no fool and surely she knew this was no minor case. So as I said, I think pressure is the answer.]

[NOTE II: The title of this post is a reference to this statement by Whoopi Goldberg.]

Attkisson does the heavy lifting

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a list that Sharyl Attkisson has compiled of press falsehoods related to Trump.

It’s impressive—I mean on Attkisson’s part. A lot of work was involved in that.

But in a way it’s impressive on the press’s part, too (hmmm—is that a semi-pun? “impressive; press”?)—impressive in the sense that their errors (accidental and/or deliberate) represent a remarkable demonstration of extreme carelessness and/or monumental deceptiveness.

To keto or not to keto?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already expressed my own experience with very low-carb diets, many times. Simply put: I can’t stand them and I lose very little weight on them, and what’s more they make me feel ill. If you say to me “but oh, you can eat all the bacon you want!” I respond by pointing out that I already eat all the bacon I want, and it’s about four servings a year.

If that.

But people swear by low-carb and in particular keto diets. I do believe that for some reason the diet works for some people. Fine, have fun. But for the rest of us it’s a sort of torment, and an unrewarding one at that.

So here’s an article about research on the diet. It seems pretty spot-on to me.

My summary version is this: diet is a very individual thing, and different people respond differently to the same diet. And for most people with a tendency to gain weight, losing it long-term (or even short-term, for some) is very very difficult, no matter what they do.

Bon appetit!

The Chicago Way and the Kim Foxx Way

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most interesting things about the dropping of the Smollett prosecution as well as the absurd reasons the prosecutors have given for doing so is that their explanations probably aren’t good enough to convince any child past the age of 10. In other words, the prosecutors not even trying to make us think they’re telling the truth. They either are too lazy to come up with a better story to explain themselves, too stupid, too non-creative—or they want us to know they don’t care what we think, they want us to see that they can do whatever they want to do and don’t really have to explain to the public in a way that’s believable, because power is power and power does what power wants.

Any tyrannical one-party regime tends to get that way, because nothing stops them from doing so. Democrats have been in power in Chicago for practically forever, and the city’s been corrupt for as long as I can remember, too, and even earlier.

Chicago corruption doesn’t usually get such national attention, but the Smollett case was and still is a big national story, and so all of America is listening and watching. And most of America doesn’t like what it hears and sees, and that includes quite a few people who usually support whatever Democrats do.

The spectacle of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson calling out the prosecutors in scathing terms was initially a surprising one for people who don’t follow the ups and downs of Chicago politics (and that would include me), but it is just part of a more longstanding feud in that city between prosecutors on the one side and police and the mayor on the other.

Here’s a glowing background interview with Kim Foxx, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, from a group called the Center for Court Innovation. Foxx’s policies as head prosecutor for Chicago seem to have played a big role in the Smollett debacle, and this will give you some idea of what went on prior to that [emphasis added]. Everything that is in quotes except the lead paragraph are statements made by Foxx in response to the interviewer’s questions:

Foxx’s surprise victory in 2016 [she defeated the incumbent Democrat in the primary, which just about guaranteed her victory in the general] helped to ignite the movement to elect prosecutors promising something other than more “tough on crime” policies—a movement that has now racked up some notable victories…

As you talk about reform, it is the ability for me to do some things that, probably the law says I have to do one thing, I get to exercise my discretion to do another. My choice and what charges to bring, or conversely not to bring…

It’s a loaded concept that could be either used for good or evil. I don’t know what the balance looks like other than to start with: I think people should show what they’re doing so that we can start asking the question of should you or should you not be doing that? Should you or should you not be allowed to do that?

…I think it’s important to start with my biography of where I come from, even more so like the racial demographic of being the first African American woman in this position, and we know that people of color, women of color are vastly underrepresented in elected prosecutor’s offices, so it’s really significant. But I do think of equal important significance is the fact that I come from a community that is very similar to me and the folks in Chicago who experienced high incidents of crime and violence in their neighborhoods…

I see so many people who go into law enforcement and prosecution with this hero complex, this, “I want to save the day.” The designation of who wears the white hats versus who wears the black hats. That often makes my stomach churn because it is this belief that you are coming to save someone. Even in the worst of times in the projects, when I lived there, it was a community rich in love and support. Everything that was happening there, there was still this fabric. We didn’t need people to save us, we needed people to support us and that, I think, is a big distinction for people who have a healthy distance from communities like that…

That’s what we’re trying to do: engage our attorneys with narratives, not just of mine, but of people who’ve been impacted by the system. Getting our people out of courtrooms into the community to sit, to listen, and really do some self-reflection on: what do we really factor when we talk about this work? Are you really factoring what’s in the best interest of the community or what you think is a punishment fit for a crime?

Let me pause for a moment here and add that the only “community” for which the disposition of the Smollet case seems to have been in its best interests would be a rather small one: the community of “Empire,” actors, and Jussie Smollett and family. And I’m not even sure about the latter; I think it might have been better for him to have paid his dues in some way and moved on.

This certainly didn’t help the black community as a whole, whose valid reports of hate crimes against them are not going to be given more credence now. It doesn’t help the left, some of whom seem almost embarrassed by it as this point, although embarrassment is not too common for them. It doesn’t help to heal any racial divides. And I doubt it will dissuade people from making false accusations in the future. It seems to be about patronage and corruption, and probably is, and that can’t possibly be good for any community, including that community of one named Kim Foxx.

More from the interview:

…My election was really about talking about the criminal justice system in a way that we hadn’t talked about it before. Largely prosecutors’ races, and races in Cook County, the messaging was largely for people who lived in neighborhoods not impacted by violence. The target audience were some of our suburban communities who had deep fears about violence in the city of Chicago and wanted to make sure that violence was contained, that their communities were safe, that’s who the targeting was for.

This was a race that I wanted to make sure that we were targeting people who were actually impacted by violence, actually who lived in those neighborhoods, who had people who were both perpetrators and victims in their families, in their same bodies, and saying to them, “This system should be fair to you.”

We have 86 percent of the people who were in our jail in 2016 when I ran, were black and brown. Most of them had a sense that the justice system only viewed them as an instrument and not as a person. So I ran the race talking to those communities, talking about the fact that I had more in common with the people who come through our justice system than the people who work in the office, and saying that you should expect more. I think for me turning the page was that this was an office that had to be inclusive of the entire county; that we had to recognize that the disparities that existed were unacceptable and that we had to be intentional about doing something about it.

…I think you have to be honest. The relationship between our office and the community was broken because we weren’t honest with the people that we worked with. The justice system in Chicago long before Laquan McDonald, had been broken, and the relationship had been broken. I think that the conversation in the last four years since his death has certainly been elevated, but this is a city that has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars related to cases of police misconduct. This is a city that actually teaches a curriculum in Chicago public schools about police torture as a result of litigation that had been ongoing related to the torture of black men on the south side by Chicago police.

…I have a really good working relationship with the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, Eddie Johnson…I’ve never been anti-law enforcement, I am law enforcement. I am anti-bad law enforcement. That is dangerous to our communities.

…People are saying, “Well, you’re soft on crime.” Let me show you what we’re doing. I think when you do that, it dispels what people want to say about you, because I think people wanted to have a narrative about what it meant for a black woman to have this job, a black woman from the projects to have this job—”I heard she’s going to let everybody black out of jail.”

Again, I’ll pause to reflect that the fact that Smollett was let off certainly does nothing to disabuse people of that notion in the last sentence of that quote. It’s interesting, though, that is this case, criticism of the decision seems to focus less on the color angle and more on the idea that Smollett was released because of connections, money, and the privileges associated with all those things.

There’s much much more in the article; it’s a really long interview. The bulk of it is about violent crime in Chicago and how to treat perpetrators accused of violence (mostly poor and black perpetrators), and of course the Smollett case most definitely does not fall into that particular box. The general message is of a kinder, gentler prosecutor attitude, and that somehow this will help everyone.

It’s hardly worked out that way. What has happened with the Smollett case is that now just about everyone holds the Chicago prosecutor’s office in contempt. And as for transparency, this case is the opposite of transparency as far as the actions of the prosecution are concerned.

Here’s the way most people probably react:

After Foxx had to recuse herself from the case for playing Obama Celebrity Friends, Joseph Magats, the first assistant state’s attorney, took over.

“The fact that (Smollett) feels we have exonerated him, we have not,” Magats told the Tribune. “I can’t make it any clearer.”

You can’t make it any clearer? Well, I can’t make this any clearer.

Smollett is a star. Your boss jammed herself up some way we don’t know about. But she jammed herself. And so, you cut him a deal.

You made the deal to expunge him. You let him work off “community service” with a couple of days doing odd jobs at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. I hoped he sold a few Jesse Jackson action figures. But then Rainbow/PUSH said it had no idea his volunteer work had anything to do with the criminal case.

Foxx hasn’t helped herself any with statements such as this:

“I think that there is a lot of confusion,” Foxx said at WBEZ, adding that there was a “slim” chance Smollett would have received jail time in the case. “There’s some people who were never going to be satisfied unless Mr. Smollett spent many nights in prison.”

Nope, Ms. Foxx. Oh, probably there are “some people” who felt that way. But most people whose comments I’ve read or heard never really expected that to happen, although they would have liked it. They expected a deal of some sort that kept him out of prison. But that deal was expected to contain some rather conventional elements such as admission of wrongdoing, probation, that sort of thing. Maybe even a substantial fine instead of a wrist slap that amounts to almost nothing to a person with an income such as Smollett’s.

Leaving Foxx behind there’s plenty more, and you’ve probably read some of it. But since this post is already getting interminable, I’ll just give you two links:

The FBI may be investigating another aspect of the Smollett case, the hoax letter.

Who’s Tina Tchen and why did she intervene on behalf of Smollett?