To the glee of his conservative base and to the consternation of his progressive opponents, President Trump has nominated Amy Coney Barrett for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. My own preference, which was shared by others, such as Peggy Noonan, was to delay a vote on the nominee until after the election. But the course of events has moved rapidly in the other direction, and a no-holds-barred nomination fight is now upon us.
In earlier times, Judge Barrett’s consistent level of high performance would have led to confirmation by acclamation under the now-disregarded practice of evaluating a judge’s legal understanding and technical competence, independent of her political orientation. But these are not normal times. Indeed, the current fight resembles the appointment of John Marshall, our greatest chief justice, to the Supreme Court by President John Adams on March 3, 1801, the day before Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president.
It’s forgotten today, but movie audiences of the Thirties were already entertained by the futuristic, soon-to-come possibilities of seeing distant news events as they actually happened. And they already knew it would be misused. Television news would be faked, in comedies to illicitly run up a TV company’s stock price, or in drama, to maliciously broadcast fictional “truth” to panic the public into avoiding the act of voting during a crucial election. They saw all this coming more than eighty years ago, theaters full of people who hadn’t yet seen so much as one TV screen in their entire lives.
Just about everyone born in the twentieth century still knows what newsreels are, or were, a long time ago: ten minutes of narrated news clips shown in theaters, part of a weekly program of novelties shown in between the movies, including coming attractions and a color cartoon. Mussolini, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler were each, in their way, masters of the newsreel cameras. It’s the main way the world outside their countries came to know them, and the reason we know their images so well today. Newsreels existed even in silent days, but it was sound that gave them influence and power, above all the sound of the spoken voice. Their 1930-‘55 newsgathering traditions, even the film crews, and camera equipment were passed on to the new field of TV news.
The FBI and DOJ are still infested with enemies of the Republic and the Constitution they falsely swore to defend. Little more than a month before a momentous general election, with early voting already underway in many states, the FBI and DOJ are busy looking away and throwing up smoke about foreign interference and voter suppression, a DNC talking point to cover real fraud. The FBI and DOJ know the true enemy of free and fair elections has always been within, not external. They have assiduously avoided the basics of busting upvoting fraud. We know this for a fact because Project Veritas had no problem getting a Democrat operation, complete with a carload of paid for ballots, a party operative, and voters saying on video they were paid to hand over their ballot.
Project Veritas documented federal election fraud in Ilhan Omar’s district. We can help across the nation, putting pressure on the Feds now. If you or a friend are in or around senior communities, low-income communities, or college communities, keep an eye out and alert others to do the same with their smartphones.
John Yoo is a professor at the University of California–Berkeley School of Law and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Richard Epstein is a professor of law at NYU, a professor of law emeritus at the University of Chicago, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. In this wide-ranging discussion, recorded the day after Amy Coney Barrett accepted President Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the professors discuss Barrett’s qualifications and why it was correct and proper to nominate her now—five weeks before an election. They also provide, based on her writings on stare decisis (the legal principle of determining points in litigation according to precedent), insight on how Barrett may rule on some issues sure to be put to in front of the court in the near future, including abortion. Finally, Epstein and Yoo remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom they both knew personally, and discuss her career, both as a jurist and as an activist.
President Trump takes all the latitude given his predecessors, by Congress and the Supreme Court, and uses it to fulfill his campaign promises. This week, a minor beer distributorship heiress used the name of the man she married, and then funded in national politics, to make her endorsement of Joe Biden seem significant. It was fitting that she and the national media thought they would help Biden or hurt Trump’s reelection by invoking the name of a Republican, whose last public act was to publicly, proudly break his and his party’s promises to repeal Obamacare. President Trump struck back against the failure of both major parties’ politicians to fulfill promises about healthcare access and affordability. He has just published a very lengthy executive order on the subject that catalogs the failures of the past and points in a new direction. You should at least skim it before the first debate on September 29.
The executive order is a fairly detailed summary of President Trump’s case for past governments’ failure and present and future improvement for Americans. Here is a quick summary of the order, the highlights, or talking points you might expect in public debate and reporting:
Judge Amy Coney Barrett is her own woman, not the next Scalia/Alito/Thomas. She has thought her way through court business since law school, laying out her concerns and reasoning in plain print. While court opinions and law review articles can be a bit daunting, she writes clearly enough for the lay reader to understand.
Instead of accepting the pre-spun sound bytes and clipped quotes, we should look to the available complete video and writings of Amy Coney Barrett. I salute Heavy for having provided quotes with links to sources back in 2018, when ACB was under consideration to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy. A quick search on YouTube and Barrett’s Notre Dame Law School faculty page yielded a helpful set of videos and writings, outside of court opinions, with Courageous ACB in her own words.*
The US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has very belatedly released its report on Hunter Biden and, by implication, Joe Biden. This matters because it shows how Joe Biden and his people operate when it comes to family business. The report is available directly at “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.”
This family is deeply compromised, for real, by its greed, entangled with Putin’s and Xi’s agents. Then again, that has been a “dog bites man” story for the Democrats since at least Teddy Kennedy. To whet your appetite, here is the table of contents:
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was the grandson of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. His namesake was a confidant of President Theodore Roosevelt, and the bête noire of Roosevelt successor Woodrow Wilson. His grandson became at least as prominent a Republican politician during the mid-twentieth century.
“The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and the Making of the Cold War,” by Luke A. Nichter, is a fresh biography of Lodge’s life.
I love this woman, in a chaste sort of way. This is 21 minutes and 13 seconds of awesomeness with a devastating knock-out close this Wednesday. The way she routinely submits or knocks out America’s Pravda cadre is a thing of wonderment. As a bonus, how about the highlights from Tuesday’s big-time wrestling event?
Welcome to wartime comedy! Zena Hitz and I bring you the two small-town 4f blues movies Preston Sturges made–first the Marine revolution in Oak Grove, CA, or how democracy comes to a quaint old place. This is an Eddie Bracken comedy, the most hangdog comedian after Buster Keaton, and so even when he gets the parade, the girl, his mother’s happy, whole town loves him, and he’s about to be acclaimed mayor, he’s still miserable. It’s as funny as Hollywood ever got. Enjoy! It’s also the one time Sturges wrote songs, and they’re quite funny, too.
President Trump just went from ordering the federal government not to peddle woke lies to leveraging existing law and policy to force all federal contractors to toe the same line. This means no more defense contractors putting their white male employees through reeducation sessions. For a moment, I was worried when I saw the title. Then I started reading and remembered why I voted for Donald J. Trump four years ago, and why I will be working to re-elect him this year. Read and enjoy, emphasis added.
Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping
LAW & JUSTICE Issued on: September 22, 2020
President Trump took under eight minutes to state the United States position to world leaders and domestic and international audiences. He started with the reason the United Nations was formed 75 years ago, the end of the second world war in a half century. President Trump used military imagery to tie the UN’s purpose to the current global pandemic. Then he dropped the hammer on China. President Trump called on the UN to deal with real problems and pointed to real US leadership under his administration. He pointed to the remarkable peace deals resulting from his administration rejecting the tired old institutionalized expert formulas. He once again pointed to the obligation of every government to care first for its own citizens, and then to make agreements in the mutual interest of each nation’s people, not according to elite theories and interests.
President accused China and the World Health Organization of letting the virus out and lying at all the important points. when it could have been contained or its effect on populations limited. President Trump then detailed China’s offenses against the rest of the world as the leading polluter of the oceans and atmosphere. No one can doubt that the Chinese Communist Party dearly wants Joe Biden, Chuck and Nancy in charge of America next January, and is fully supportive of the Democrats’ subversive strategy of denying the legitimacy of any Republican victory.
In the last two days of a three-day gun workshop, I haven’t killed anyone yet. Of course, the instructor made sure we took special precautions. But as some of you know, I posted about my dilemma of trying to decide if I should conceal carry. I have discovered through this entire experience that my own thinking was unclear about what concealed carry would mean to and for me, and this workshop has expanded my understanding of concealed carry, its benefits and limitations, and what it would mean for me as a citizen of the United States to carry a gun on my person.
I realized early on that this was a very personal and individual decision. I am a small, senior woman. For a person looking for a victim in a situation where he or she may have a few choices, I could be a primary target. Since there is nothing I can do to change any of those factors (unless someone invents the Fountain of Youth), it was sensible for me to consider those conditions.
The COVID pandemic is a dream come true for trial lawyers. Although many Americans have already suffered severe economic harm, the plaintiffs’ lawyers see near-guaranteed rewards arriving soon from high numbers of deaths, changing protocols developed in a climate of medical uncertainty and bought politicians committed to preserving their right to file baseless suits.
Healthcare workers have done their best to stem this pandemic under stressful conditions. But in a profession usually guided by meticulously researched, double-blind studies, doctors have been forced into unknown territory.
It ain’t because there is no work available. Let’s get that right out in front of everything else. All the world is screaming out for labor; look around you. Every Walgreens and McDonald’s is looking to pick up some extra help. If I were a video game character and I were playing through life as myself I would be picking up extra shifts in between job applications. I’d have a job in a week; a good job, one that my mother would be proud to tell her friends about. I’d still pick up shifts at McDonald’s; more money is better than less money, and there’s nothing wrong with those jobs.
Video game characters don’t get tired, not like real people do. I’d have an even better job a month after that. Not honestly mind you; I wouldn’t have given full value to that first employer, not enough to cover the costs of hiring and training me. Video game NPCs don’t fill out government paperwork. And they take it pretty well when you do things that’d seem skeezy to real people. But I’m not a video game character and I’m not moving up in the world.
Senate Republicans should fill the Supreme Court vacancy and vote on fixing the Court permanently. Both major parties agree there is a real problem with the Supreme Court, making membership in the court a subject of the most extreme political tactics. The Republicans must keep their decades-old campaign promise to correct the leftward march of the federal courts. At the same time they should give both Democrats and Republicans real hope of limiting the courts’ potential excesses.
I suggest something like the following:
The coalition now aligned against Trump shares something. Many, if not most, profit from human misery. At the same time they are isolated from the effects of human misery themselves. This is doubly true for the most vocal among them.
They are rarely individuals who produce things. They are not those who raise crops, fish, ranch, extract minerals, work in factories, or engage in construction. In large numbers those folks support Trump. Those who oppose Trump are not the men and women who repair machinery or maintain our infrastructure, haul goods, collect the trash, or clean our streets. Again, the folks with dirty jobs largely support Trump.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – George S. Patton
Criminal law is not designed to respond to every sorrow and grief.