Daily Digest |  |
- Tangled up in red
- Advantage Putin?
- Thoughts from the ammo line
- Podcast: Everything You Know About Watergate Is Wrong, Part 1
- Abolish the Supreme Court?
| Posted: 01 Jul 2022 05:59 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Miranda Devine revisits and restates the evidence of Biden family corruption implicating President Biden in her New York Post column “Hunter and Joe Biden's links go deeper by the day.” Today she focuses on what I call Biden’s China syndrome. Devine cites the 2018 New York Times story “A Chinese Tycoon Sought Power and Influence. Washington Responded.” The Times story sports the bylines of four — count ’em — Times reporters, yet for some reason or other the Times hasn’t followed up in light of the voicemail message left by Papa Biden on Hunter Biden’s cellphone. The message was extracted by the Daily Mail from Hunter’s infamous laptop. Josh Boswell reported it in the Daily Mail’s June 27 story. The Daily Mail has more here. They want to keep the story alive. The corruption has become open and obvious — it becomes more open and obvious every day — yet silence governs. Beyond that, I have nothing to add to Devine’s excellent column. Please check it out here.    |
| Posted: 01 Jul 2022 05:36 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) I missed the news that Western leaders leaders “jok[ed] about” Putin at the G7 summit this week, as the AP puts it in its story today. I think “mocked” would probably be more accurate. They mocked Putin’s public displays of manliness:
Even having to spot the competition 10 or 20 years, I’d take Putin in a throwdown with BoJo or Trudeau, that’s for sure. He may also have the last laugh. When it comes to amour propre, however, I’d guess we have an eight-way tie. Putin is a little short of ammo in the humor department though. The AP quotes Putin:
I don’t want to see Putin above or below the waist either, but I’m scoring this particular round for Putin.  |
| Posted: 01 Jul 2022 03:14 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Ammo Grrrll calls this one SOWING AND REAPING, OH MY! She writes: It's been all over the Internet for a couple of weeks now. A couple of mentions on Power Line as well by the fellas. I just wanted to add a few points from my valuable personal experience. Although this Administration has been an unqualified disaster from January 21 on, The Left cannot quite do all the dastardly things it has in mind. That, it turns out, is not because they don't have nefarious plans for us. It is because their dozens of woke organizations are filled with lazy, fragile activists who spend all their time on internal squabbles, fiefdom fights, Victim Entitlement Olympics and the equitable division of spoils. Not to mention regular "Hate Whitey and Whiteness" mandatory workshops, HR harassment investigations, pronoun obsession and, if government employees are any example, regular perusal of porn sites. Nothing gets done. The Play-Doh and Kleenex budget alone must be enormous. Is there any Schadenfreude more delightful? Far be it from me to interrupt when The Enemy is paralyzed with Woke Fever. But, I will give you just this one little hint, Commie comrades, since it will be dismissed out of hand: For the love of God, don't hire ACTIVISTS. I can tell you from long, sad experience in the anti-war movement, that most politically motivated "workers" are lazy, useless slugs who are only fit to disrupt OTHER people's enterprises. What you most certainly do NOT want for employees are certifiable lunatics pretending to be "community organizers" who could not "organize" their way out of a wet paper bag. These are losers who are invested in shrieking about daily "microaggressions," or humorless harridans with Karen Karenina in HR on Speed-dial in case some clueless shlub compliments them on their outfit, looks at them for over five seconds, or tells a blonde joke. We won't even discuss the horror of mis-gendering someone. Or the sexual assault of asking someone to go out for a cup of coffee. As we have confirmed over the last few weeks, many are also diehard racists despite years of Diversity Training. It is clear from their relentless attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas that they save the majority of their all around generic hatred for humanity for black and brown people who dare to step foot off the Democrat plantation. "How can we virtuous people SAVE you louts if you can get off your knees and save yourselves?" could be their mantra. To accomplish anything, you need people who come from a culture that honors work and expects results – Mormons, other Christians, ex-military, small town people, small business owners, farmers, old-school geezers working part-time in retirement, entrepreneurs, Conservatives, and Central American immigrants! Sadly, most of the energetic actual workers mentioned above will not be down with the company mission statements. A real Catch-22, eh? The SJW drones can't or won't work and the worker bees don't cotton to the SJW drivel. The very definition of "irony." (Which, by the way, is NOT the opposite of "wrinkly.") When I got out of college (not to be confused with "graduating") in Chicago in the late ’60’s, there was near-full employment. "NOW HIRING" signs were hanging from every factory and page after page of "Want Ads" appeared in the Chicago papers. "Work" was what you did every single weekday and weekends if necessary, coming in on time, leaving at or after closing time and for that you got paid enough to make it to the next week. That was the bargain. If you wanted "fulfillment" you formed a loving relationship, or wrote poetry, participated in a glee club or community theatre, or joined a church or synagogue. If you wanted "love," you got married or bought a dog. (If you preferred "indifference," you got a bad boyfriend or a cat. Haha. I kid cats. Both Joe and I have been Cat People since childhood.) Work was never expected to provide fun or fulfillment. If you whined about anything work-related, some co-worker was bound to say, "See, Susan, that's why they call it 'work.’" Sure, SOME people got fulfillment as a side benefit – wonderful teachers, dedicated doctors and nurses, rabbis and ministers, hair-dressers who made young ladies look extra-good for the Prom – but it was not a part of the contract. At least it wasn't in the secretarial pools and night-shift typeshops I worked in before going self-employed. The notion that your workplace was duty-bound to take extraordinary measures to "retain" you was laughable in the extreme. Haha. I'm so old that I remember when it was up to YOU to keep your job! I had a friend once who didn't come into her clerical job at the University of Minnesota for about 10 working days without even calling in with a lame excuse. (my "go-to" lame excuse was always something vaguely "female" which usually stopped further interrogation in its tracks, since back then the overwhelming majority of bosses were male). Imagine my friend's surprise when she DID finally go in and found another lady at her desk which already had pictures of the lady's family on it. She realized she not only no longer worked there, but her chances of getting a recommendation for a future job were slim and none. Several years later she did land a great job as a management trainee with General Motors as one of the first female Affirmative Action hires. Sadly, at one of the management trainee retreats, she got drunk and engaged in a food fight which was termed by HR to be "inappropriate behavior." And yet she was retained and "counseled" rather than fired because by that time she was in a protected category where normal rules do not apply and Reality dares not intrude. Today just being a woman (whatever THAT is…) would not save her unless she was not a Lighter Shade of Pale OR had once NOT been a woman (whatever THAT is)… It was about that time that the only sin in PC World was being judgmental. I said, "Bertha June (not her real name), that wasn't 'inappropriate'; that was stupid and wrong. See, that wussy word would imply that there would BE a time – just not that particular instance — in which a 30-year-old adult female throwing banquet food at a work-related event would be considered 'appropriate.' And there IS no such time." Oddly, our relationship degenerated badly after that. Some people are beyond helping with timely advice. Let's hope that the America haters and civilization wreckers are just as resistant to advice. Keep getting nothing done, kids. You're on the right track. In fact, I'd suggest if you are asked to do anything that even resembles work that you go on strike! A work stoppage, and just for good measure, a sex strike as well. Activists in the Red States are asking for "time off to mourn" their recent inability to kill their babies when their labor pains are 3 minutes apart. Grieving time is also a good idea. Take all the way to November.  |
| Podcast: Everything You Know About Watergate Is Wrong, Part 1 Posted: 30 Jun 2022 06:30 PM PDT (Steven Hayward) Writing about the Watergate scandal in the 1980s, political scientist John Marini said "The passage of time has not resulted in greater clarity concerning what it is we should have learned from the event, perhaps because we still lack an authoritative account of it."
As an assistant to Nixon's in-house lawyer Fred Buzhardt, Shepard transcribed many of the crucial Nixon tapes that were central to his downfall. But in the years since, Shepard has diligently reviewed the entire case with a fine-toothed comb, noting anomalies and errors in what might be called the "Standard Account" of Watergate. Above all, Shepard has pried loose numerous internal Department of Justice and National Archive files that have been closed ever since Watergate—the key document being released through a FOIA proceeding just in 2018. His work ought to revise everyone's understanding of Watergate, but as we know the liberal narrative is dug in deep.
This is the first of two parts. Part 2 will be out early next week. Curious listeners can access the original documents and much else at Shepard's website. (And yes, my voice is indeed raspy, as I have at last caught COVID. Really—we deranged the whole world for this? I’ve had much worse cases of bronchitis.) You know what to do now—listen here, or go bug our hosts at Ricochet.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 30 Jun 2022 05:55 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) Liberals are gnashing their teeth over today’s decision by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the Court found that Congress has not delegated to the EPA power to reduce CO2 emissions by rearranging the country’s electricity producing system. The case, and the Left’s reaction to it, have several interesting features. First, the Court has erected a barrier, at least in this instance, against the seemingly inexorable expansion of the administrative state. For the last century, Congress has steadily abandoned its Article 1 responsibilities by creating administrative agencies and delegating broad powers to them. Liberals have cheered this process since it inevitably has resulted in a steady expansion of unaccountable government power, so that, as I have written before, the government we live under is not the one that is described in our Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion links together several cases in which the Court has found that Congress did not intend to hide a radical expansion of regulatory authority in an obscure and seemingly innocuous statutory provision. Roberts groups these cases, including West Virginia, under the rubric of the “major questions doctrine”:
This represents, I think, plain common sense, but in the context of the administrative state a modicum of common sense is overdue. We can hope that West Virginia signals a broader willingness to rein in the excesses of delegation of powers, and return our government to the branches that are accountable to voters. Second, liberal attacks on the decision are not coming, as far as I have seen, from people who have read it. Roberts’ opinion is well-reasoned and persuasive. The idea that 42 U. S. C. §7411(d) authorizes and directs the EPA to reorganize America’s energy system, closing coal plants and mandating wind and solar facilities, is absurd on any fair reading. In that context, liberals’ reactions to today’s decision are revealing. Liberals view the actual words of statutes (like the words of the Constitution, see Roe v. Wade) as irrelevant. The one imperative is federal government power. If we have a supposed crisis–global warming!–the government must deal with it in the manner demanded by the Left, regardless of whether there is any statutory or constitutional authority for such action, and regardless of whether the people’s representatives have voted for it. This view is antithetical to both democracy and the rule of law, but it dominates today’s Democratic Party. Finally, this is one more instance where liberal reaction is utterly unhinged. Exhibit A is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the low-IQ but sort-of-cute representative from New York. She proposed that we abolish the Supreme Court:
But here is the real point: she says a carveout isn’t enough, so “we need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.” Reform means packing the court with newly-appointed liberal justices, which cooler heads have not proposed. It would be massively unpopular, would cement the GOP sweep in 2022, and would be undone by the next Republican president (likely in 2025) who inevitably would pack the Court further. But the dim-witted AOC is oblivious to these details. “[D]o[ing] away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet” means–evidently–abolishing the Supreme Court. This, of course, would require a constitutional amendment that would have to eliminate the entire Article III federal judiciary. To put it politely, that is an insane suggestion, and not one that any leftist would have advocated until approximately last week. Is this a serious proposal from the Democratic Party’s most popular (but perhaps least serious) member? Presumably not. And, while no one expects New York’s best-known former bartender to be an expert on climate science, if we assume the Climatistas’ most dire calculations are correct, the Democrats’ proposed “Clean Power Plan” would have little or no measurable impact on the Earth’s climate. “The planet” is not at issue in today’s case. So in multiple ways, today’s decision and reactions to it are signs of the times. STEVE adds: This looks like pure white supremacy to me. Is it a coincidence that the very day the first Black woman joins the Court there are people calling for the Supreme Court to be abolished? Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Power Line’s oldest friend:
Chaser—apparently ABC News never heard of Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas:
Naturally the Babylon Bee is all over this:
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Having reached the 50th anniversary of the most famous "burglary" in history, we may be coming closer to have a complete understanding of Watergate through the original work of 
In a series of books, most recently 
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