Jts5665

You may think that you're woke. And you may think you're pro-choice. But I don't know of anything as woke and pro-choice as this particular individual.

Robbie Mook testifies on decision to disseminate (false) claims about a supposed secret link between the Trump campaign and Alpha Bank: "I discussed it with Hillary as well.... She agreed to that."

The post Hillary Approved Russia Collusion Hoax, Former Campaign Manager Testifies first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

DEEP SEVENS: One of The Hot, Dense Blobs Deep Inside Earth Has Been Revealed With New Imaging.

OF COURSE:

HMM: “Defense attorneys seek to identify and investigate 80 suspicious actors and material witnesses, some of whom allegedly ran an entrapment operation against the Oath Keepers on January 6, 2021, and committed crimes including the removal of security fencing, breaching police lines, attacking officers, and inciting crowds to storm into the Capitol. In a motion (pdf) and supplement filed after 11 p.m. on May 5 in federal court in Washington, attorney Brad Geyer listed 80 people, some of whom he said could be government agents or provocateurs. The people are seen on video operating in a coordinated fashion across the Capitol grounds on January 6, the attorney alleged. Geyer’s suggestion of an entrapment scheme will resonate with dozens of January 6 defense attorneys, coming shortly after two men were acquitted of an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). There was a hung jury on charges against two other defendants. The jury in that case was allowed to consider FBI entrapment as a defense.”

UPDATE: Via a friend:

UNDERSTANDING DISPARATE IMPACT THEORY:  It’s important for all of us to understand what a giant morass the Supreme Court pulled us into when it decided (quite wrongly) in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) that Title VII outlawed disparate impact.  Since then, the concept of liability for “disparate impact” has spread to other areas of the law (and to our way of thinking about race and sex issues).  Paul Taylor has done seven-part series on the subject on Substack:

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 1.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 2.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 3.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 4.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 5.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 6.

Paul Taylor:  Disparate Impact Part 7.

It’s definitely worth taking a look.

Speaking in Dallas this afternoon, former President George. W Bush made a significant verbal slip-up while discussing the war in Ukraine. He tried referencing what he described as the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” — but said Iraq, instead of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/tw0VNJzKmE — Michael Williams (@michaeldamianw) May 19, 2022   W has Iraq on the […]

This weekend, I was unable to attend our law school graduation after traveling to Utah to speak to the Federal Bar Association. I have only missed a couple of graduations in almost 30 years of teaching. I soon, however, received emails from students and colleagues that made me somewhat thankful that I was unable to attend.

This year’s commencement speaker was Rep. Susan Wild (D) who represents the 7th District in Pennsylvania and is a distinguished graduate of our law school. Wild chose the commencement address to launch into a personal attack that accused me of being an example of the use of law for “wrongful ends.” She falsely accused me of changing a critical legal point in my testimony in the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings on whether impeachable conduct must be indictable crimes. I felt that a response was warranted.

Rep. Wild surprised many in the political tenor of her remarks, despite her other positive and inspiring points. These commencements are celebrations for our community as a whole, including students and family members who hold opposing views. While a minority to be sure, George Washington does have Republican, libertarian, and conservative members as well as those who subscribe to pro-life positions. As someone who has spoken at such commencements, it is a time when most of us avoid political partisanship and focus on the accomplishments of the students and our shared values.

Rep. Wild had many of the traditional and inspiring elements of a commencement speech. However, she suddenly and surprisingly veered off with an attack on my character, academic integrity, and scholarship. She made no effort to reach out to me before the commencement and clearly made no effort to confirm the underlying allegation. Indeed, she had every reason to expect me to be there (as I often am) and to just sit silently as she attacked my character. If Rep. Wild believes that I have misused my academic position for “wrongful ends,” this was the wrongful means to raise such false allegations, particularly without a modicum of research.

Here is the passage:

“You must be wary of those seeking to use their influence and their expertise to wrongful ends. GW Law, for example, has a tenured professor who is without question well versed in constitutional law but has recently made a name for himself on cable news and social media by undermining his own past well documented scholarship. A law professor who at one time strenuously advocated that a president need not commit an indictable offense to be impeached and in just this past year argued the opposite for a president more to his liking. A president no less who instigated an insurrection and a bloody assault on our democratic process and the rule of law.”

While probably unsurprising for many in our age of rage, the use of a commencement to attack a faculty member was unprecedented at our graduation ceremonies. What was equally astonishing is that a member of Congress would use such an occasion to make a claim that is not only demonstrably untrue but easily confirmed as untrue.

I did indeed testify at both the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. Remarkably, everything else that Rep Wild said in that statement was overtly false.

First, it is not true that my testimony was influenced by my preference of Trump over Clinton. To the contrary, in the Clinton hearing, I testified that I voted for Bill Clinton. In the Trump hearing, I testified that I voted against Donald Trump. None of that had bearing on my constitutional views, but the suggestion that I favored a president “more to [my] liking” is absurd. Indeed, in the Trump hearing, I criticized the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and noted my disagreement with the positions of President Trump.

That brings us to the thrust of Rep. Wild’s accusation that I changed my position on whether impeachment articles must be based on indictable crimes.

I repeatedly stated in both the Clinton and Trump hearings the same position on indictable offenses. I expressly stated that impeachment articles do not have to be based on criminal or indictable acts. I have argued that past Congresses have often looked to the criminal code and cases as a measure of alleged impeachable offenses –  a practice that I support. However, I emphasized that indictable criminal acts are not required by the Constitution.

Since Rep. Wild focuses on how my Trump testimony changed on this issue, I will focus on the Trump hearing to keep this response reasonably short. I will note, however, that Bill Clinton was accused of a criminal act: perjury. Democrats agreed (as did a later federal judge) that Clinton knowingly committed perjury under oath, but Democratic witnesses like Professor Laurence Tribe insisted that impeachment was simply not that broad. I disagreed and still do.

In the Trump impeachment, I will note at the outset that not only did I repeat my position from the Clinton impeachment, but the House managers repeatedly relied on my position to support their articles of impeachment. Indeed, they cited that position in both impeachments, including featuring a statement in the second trial where I maintained that articles of impeachment do not require criminal or indictable acts.

In my written testimony, I repeatedly stated the exact opposite of what Rep. Wild claims. Here are a couple of examples:

“As I have stressed, it is possible to establish a case for impeachment based on a non-criminal allegation of abuse of power. However, although criminality is not required in such a case, clarity is necessary”

“As discussed below, the strongest claim is for a non-criminal abuse of power if a quid pro quo can be established on the record.”

“While all three acts in the impeachment standard refer to criminal acts in modern parlance, it is clear that “high crimes and misdemeanors” can encompass non-criminal conduct. It is also true that Congress has always looked to the criminal code in the fashioning of articles of impeachment.”

I repeatedly made the same point in my oral testimony. For example:

“There’s a reason why every past impeachment has established crimes, and it’s obvious. It’s not that you can’t impeach on a noncrime, you can. In fact, noncrimes have been part of past impeachments, it’s just that they have never gone up alone or primarily as the basis for impeachment. That’s the problem here. If you prove a quid pro quo, you might have an impeachable offense. But to go up only on a noncriminal case would be the first time in history. So why is that the case?”

While emphasizing that past Congresses have relied on the criminal codes and cases as an objective measure of impeachment allegations, I repeatedly and unambiguously maintained that impeachment articles could be based on non-criminal claims.

I disagreed with my fellow witnesses in opposing the proposed articles of impeachments on bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations or obstruction of justice. I argued that these alleged impeachable acts were at odds with controlling definitions of those crimes and that Congress has historically looked to the criminal code and cases for guidance on such allegations.

The committee ultimately rejected articles based on those theories and adopted the only two articles that I noted could be legitimately advanced: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Chairman Jerrold Nadler even ended the hearing by quoting my position on abuse of power. The House managers also relied on my view that such a non-criminal article of impeachment was permissible under the Constitution.

Nevertheless, I opposed impeachment on this record as incomplete and insufficient for submission to the Senate. I argued for the House to wait and complete the record to support such claims. Ironically, this is the very issue with which I had a long disagreement (here and here and here and here) with Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz and my opposing position was featured by the House managers in the second impeachment.

Over the decades, my views on constitutional interpretation have changed with a greater emphasis on textual authority. I am not alone in such natural evolution of views, even on impeachment. However, my views on impeachment have not changed significantly with the exception of retroactive trials. That was not an issue in the Clinton impeachment or prior presidential impeachments before Trump’s second impeachment.

It is, of course, ironic that Rep. Wild would instruct our graduating class on being righteous lawyers by making a demonstrably false allegation against one of their professors. Her attack on use of the law for “wrongful ends” is clearly based on her disagreement with my views. However, rather than simply disagree with those views in a respectful and factual way, she made false public allegations against my character and academic integrity.

I hope that Rep. Wild will now have the integrity to make an equally public apology for her false statements.

Here is the commencement address. The key passage is found around 1:05: https://law.commencement.gwu.edu/

BIDEN SEEKING NEW POWERS FOR WHO: The Biden administration is proposing a series of obscure, bureaucratic amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) charter that would, among other things, give the UN outfit the power to declare a national health emergency in any country regardless if that country’s leaders agree.

That’s the same WHO that ran interference for China in 2020 when the U.S. and other countries were demanding an independent investigation into the source of the COVID-19 Pandemic that originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It’s also the same WHO from which President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. in 2020 and Biden rejoined in 2021.

“CASH FLOW PROBLEM:” Water Tower With Johnny Cash Silhouette Springs Leak In Most Unfortunate Place.

The post Reuters Data Science Director Fired for Discovering BLM Narrative About Cops Is a Lie appeared first on The Bongino Report.

BRING BACK THE GAS LINES: Price Controls?! Democrats look to resurrect a completely discredited economic policy.

Remember this deeply unwell and troubled man from several months ago?

HOW IT STARTED: Defund the police: What it means for Denver and who supports it.

—The Denver Post, June 10th, 2020.

How it’s going: ‘It’s Not Worth It’: HVAC Company Says It Will No Longer Service Customers in Downtown Denver.

A Wheat Ridge-based heating and air conditioning company says it will no longer service businesses in or around downtown Denver due to crime, drug use and danger to its field crews.

“It’s not really worth it to put up with it,” said Tony Cirbo, operations manager for AC Mechanical and Engineering. He said the company works up and down the Front Range with about 100 industrial and commercial clients.

But Cirbo said, after hearing from field crews who were “very nervous” working in parts of downtown, the company made the decision to turn down work requests from downtown Denver. Cirbo said the business decision was also due in part to the fact that the company only had two clients in downtown Denver.

But he said his crews complained about coming across needles, drug paraphernalia, feces and were concerned about theft.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Cirbo said.

—CBS 4 Denver, yesterday.

Who could have predicted in 2020 that defunding the police would create de facto no-go zones for the cops, which would result in spiraling crime rates, and a lack of goods and services in those areas? Other than pretty much everyone who didn’t have the fervid “defund” religious fever.

I CRITICIZED BLM. THEN I WAS FIRED:

Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.

About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.

But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.

This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell.

* * * * * * * *

A decade ago, my experience at Thomson Reuters would have been unthinkable. Most Americans probably think it’s still unthinkable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Most of us don’t understand how deeply compromised our news sources have become. Most of us have no idea that we are suffused with fictions and half-truths that sound sort of believable and are shielded from scrutiny by people whose job is to challenge them. This is true, above all, of my fellow liberals, who assume that only Republicans complain about the mainstream media. But this is not a partisan issue. This is a We The People issue.

In January, I filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination stating that I was fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment. (The MCAD works in conjunction with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) We’ll see whether the state finds that there are grounds for a lawsuit.

However that shakes out will not change the fact that thousands of black Americans are dead, in part because too many people are still unaware of basic facts about policing since their trusted news sources meticulously obscure the truth. The job of journalists is to report the stories that don’t comport with the prevailing or popular narrative. We desperately need them to do that again.

Odd that this sort of leftist religious zealotry would happen at Reuters, who assured us in the wake of 9/11 that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Read the whole thing.

Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere … Continue reading A college that doesn’t exist. An email address that goes dark. Who wrote this paper?

BIDEN’S BULLIES: FBI Whistleblowers Claim Agents Investigated Parents Accused of Threatening School Boards over Mask Policies.

The FBI’s counterterrorism bureau reportedly created an internal “threat tag” in fall 2021 to track alleged threats against school boards following an October 4 directive from Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland released his directive after the National School Boards Association called on the Biden administration on September 29 to investigate parents who allegedly threatened boards over policies on school masks and critical race theory, and to determine whether the parents had violated the Patriot Act or hate crimes laws. (The NSBA subsequently apologized for releasing the letter.)

The FBI labeled “dozens” of investigations with the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS,” Representatives Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Mike Johnson (R., La.) claimed in their new letter on Wednesday, citing FBI whistleblowers. Jordan and Johnson wrote that the new revelations contradicted Garland’s congressional testimony denying that parents were intentionally targeted under counterterrorism procedures.

One investigation allegedly began after the FBI received a tip that a mom had told a local school board, “We are coming for you.” The complaint “alleged that the mom was a threat because she belonged to a ‘right wing mom’s group’ known as ‘Moms for Liberty,’ and because she is a ‘gun owner,’” the congressmen wrote. An FBI agent reportedly interviewed the the mom, who said she was upset about a school mask mandate and wanted to elect new board members.

It sure looks like the FBI is engaged in a conspiracy to deny Americans their civil rights to speak, vote, and run for office.

Missouri panel rules Kimberly Gardner should receive public reprimand for withholding exculpatory evidence, failing to correct false filing.

Donald Henderson, who died in 2016, was a giant in the field of epidemiology and public health. He was also a man whose prophetic warnings from 2006 we chose to ignore in March of 2020. 

Dr. Henderson directed a ten-year international effort from 1967–1977 that successfully eradicated smallpox. Following this, he served as Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health from 1977 to 1990. Toward the end of his career, Henderson worked on national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters.

In 2006, Henderson and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Health Security, where Henderson also maintained an academic appointment, published a landmark paper (embedded below) with the anodyne title, “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” in the journal Biosecurity and Terrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.

This paper reviewed what was known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from a respiratory virus pandemic. This included a review of proposed biosecurity measures, later utilized for the first time during covid, such as “large scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibitions of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks”.

Even assuming a case fatality rate (CFR) of 2.5%, roughly equal to the 1918 Spanish flu but far higher than the CFR for covid, Henderson and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that these mitigation measures would do far more harm than good.

They found the most helpful strategy would be isolating symptomatic individuals (but not those who had merely been exposed) at home or in the hospital, a strategy that had long been part of traditional public health. They also cautioned against reliance on computer modeling to predict the effects of novel interventions, warning that, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures.” Furthermore, “If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically.”

Regarding forced quarantines of large populations, the authors noted, “There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people,” and they concluded, “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.”

Likewise, they found, “Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective.” They argued that social distancing was also impractical and ineffective.

The authors noted that during previous influenza epidemics, large public events were occasionally cancelled; however, they found no evidence “that these actions have had any definitive effect on the severity or duration of an epidemic,” and they argue that “closing theaters, restaurants, malls, large stores, and bars… would have seriously disruptive consequences.” The review presented clear evidence that school closures would prove ineffective and enormously harmful. They likewise found no evidence for the utility of masks outside the hospital setting.

Henderson and his colleagues concluded their review with this overriding principle of good public health: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.” 

Needless to say, we did not heed any of this advice in March of 2020. We instead forged ahead with lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and the rest. When faced with covid, we rejected time-tested principles of public health and embraced instead the untested biosecurity model. We are now living in the aftermath of this choice.

AND THINKING IS INDEED REQUIRED:   Words to think about…

FECAL TRANSPLANT UPDATE: Effects of Aging Have Been Reversed by Putting Young Mouse Poop in Old Mice. “It sounds like something that might have come out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s based on cold, hard, printed research: transplanting fecal microbes from young mice into old mice seems to reverse key signs of aging in the guts, eyes, and brains of the older animals. Further experiments showed that it works the other way too – moving microbes from the poop of aged mice into younger mice caused the younger animals to then show signs of aging, including increased inflammation in the brain and a reduction in a key protein needed for normal vision.”

DEVELOPING:

When the GOP takes power again they need to hit the FBI — and lots of others — right in the budget.

AND YET IF YOU EXPOSED A SIMILAR PUBLIC HEALTH SCANDAL TODAY YOU’D BE ACCUSED OF “SPREADING MISINFORMATION” AND CENSORED: 50 years on, the lessons of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study still reverberate.

I can’t imagine why anyone would distrust the noble public health physicians: “The Tuskegee study was not the only ethically egregious STD study conducted during this troubling period. Between 1946 and 1948, Cutler was also involved in experiments that deliberately infected Guatemalan people with syphilis and gonorrhea and then treated them to test the efficacy of those treatments. This was initially done by having prisoners sleep with infected prostitutes, but the transmission rate wasn’t high enough. So the researchers began artificially inoculating Guatemalan soldiers, psychiatric inmates, and children in orphanages with the disease. (The notebooks contain graphic accounts of pulling back the foreskin of a subject’s penis and forcefully rolling a contaminated swab over the exposed area, among other methods.)”

HARD TO IMAGINE ANY CONSEQUENCES OF THIS STORY, RIGHT?  US intelligence reportedly helped Ukraine kill Russian generals.

I previously wrote about Hillary Clinton’s call on European countries to pass censorship laws to force social media companies like Twitter to regulate speech even after Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter. Now the Parliament has called on Musk to testify and to explain his alarming pledge to restore free speech.

The Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board head, Nina Jankowisz, previously called upon Great Britain to impose state censorship rules. That call has grown since Musk’s purchase. Until now, a unified front of corporate censors was able to maintain an extensive system of censorship with the encouragement of politicians and pundits, including Joe Biden and Democratic members .

The head of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Julian Knight has assured her countrymen that they can stay calm and censor on. She issued a letter for Musk to appear before the committee to answer for his terrifying suggestion of free speech:

“At a time when social media companies face the prospect of tighter regulations around the world, we’re keen to learn more about how Mr Musk will balance his clear commitment to free speech with new obligations to protect Twitter’s users from online harms.”

Like the EU’s censorship plans under the Digital Services Act, the proposed Online Safety Bill would introduce state censorship through the purview of Ofcom (The Office of Communications), the broadcasting regulator in Britain. It would allow the company to fine firms up to ten percent of their global revenue should they violate ill-defined “harm” standards.

If passed, Clinton and others hope that the Europeans can replace corporate censorship with good old-fashioned state censorship. This includes confiscatory fines for anything deemed “grossly offensive.“  The bill would allow countries like Great Britain to impose censorship on the rest of the world.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates  (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech or “malicious communications” remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. Even having “toxic ideologies” is now a crime.

Great Britain would now make censorship one of its greatest exports. To do so, they first have to stomp out advocates for free speech like Musk by threatening to bankrupt his company if it tries to restore free speech to the Internet.

SEE, THEY REALLY WANT FREE SPEECH, JUST NOT YOUR FREE SPEECH:  Today’s blacklisted American: College fires director of its free speech institute for advocating free speech.

SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES: Body found in barrel in Lake Mead may date back to 1980s, more likely to appear as water recedes, Las Vegas police say.

RIGGED: Google’s Spamgate. “A remarkable, and apparently damning study disclosed that during the most recent federal election campaign, Google’s Gmail sent roughly two-thirds of GOP campaign emails to users’ spam inboxes while downgrading less than ten percent of the Dems’ messages.”

Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

NOT A CHINESE SPY? Joe Biden used alias of KGB spy from Tom Clancy novels, emails from Hunter’s laptop show. “Joe Biden wrote to his son Hunter and others close to him using the pseudonym ‘Peter Henderson’ – a fictional Soviet Union-era spy in several Tom Clancy novels who infiltrated the US government, emails show.”

Noam Chomsky, in an interview this week, says "fortunately" there is "one Western statesman of stature" who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it. "His name is Donald J. Trump," Chomsky says. WATCH: pic.twitter.com/z3Cug8kFHS — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2022 […]