Want power to the people? Then you want capitalism.
Category Archives: History
Socialism
Well, it certainly resulted in the brutal premature deaths of many tens of millions of people in the last century. But maybe they weren’t doing it quite right. We’ll just have to keep trying until they get it right. For the children.
The Cohen Plea
OK, so Mark Levin thinks this is legal BS, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
So, if this “crime” is not a crime, why is he copping a plea? Why would his legal team agree to it (assuming they’re competent, not necessarily a good assumption when it comes to Lanny Davis).
My guess is that they have him on a lot more serious stuff, so he was advised to accept this plea down in return for testimony against the president. The prosecutors knew they could never get an actual conviction for this “crime” with a jury, but now that he’s plead, they’ll claim, “See, he wouldn’t have copped a plea if he wasn’t guilty of this ‘crime,’ and the president did it, too!”
Thus providing additional impeachment fodder should the country be nuts enough to put Democrats back in power.
But funny thing, I recall a mid-term election in which the opposing party not only talked about impeachment, but actually did it, and took a beating at the polls. If I were Republicans, I’d be running non-stop campaign ads of loony, low-IQ Maxine screaming “Impeach, impeach, impeach!”
[Afternoon update]
Thoughts on this and Manafort from Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Hemingway, via Instapundit.
[Update a while later]
From an email list:
Lanny Davis, long time Clinton lawyer and fixer, approaches Michael Cohen. He says, “You hate Trump, me and my clients hate Trump, let’s work together. You are facing 30+ years and happen to be one of the least sympathetic defendants of all the people in Trump’s orbit. I’ll work with the prosecutors, who would much rather get something on Trump than on you, to get you only 3-5 years. All you have to do is plead guilty to something that is a little shaky, but implicates Trump. Do you think you could possibly find it within your moral wheelhouse to agree to such a deal?”
Sounds about right to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
Steve Bannon: “November is a referendum on impeachment.”
The Pre-Trump World
Was it normal, or abnormal?
One off the polling practices I find annoying is the “right track, wrong track” question, because it can be very misleading in its implications. It doesn’t provide any information as to what the respondent thinks what “track” we should be on. I have never in my adult life felt that the country was on the “right track,” and if polled I would always say it was wrong. And of course, if I said that whenn Republicans were in power, Democrats would infer that it meant that I wanted them to win, which would be stupid, because what I wanted continually was a more libertarian, constitutional government.
Anyway, I have to confess that, despite my dislike of Trump, I do feel, for the first time, that with all the regulatory rollback, and constitutionalist judicial appointees, we’re at least, finally, on the right track. But we still have along way to go down the rails. My fear is that if the Democrats get back in power, we’ll be off the rails entirely.
The First Amendment
…and the lesson of Robespierre:
Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.
This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.
Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.
The Fate Of The ISS
Matt Fitzgibbons says it’s like the ancient Roman roads. I’m not sure the analogy works very well, but I do think that it would be wasteful to deorbit it. When he says it’s “only” three or four billion a year, I don’t think he appreciates how much more we’ll be able to do for much less in the near future, But I also think in the next decade we’ll have the ability to move it higher, and preserve it as a museum.
Peter Strzok
…got his start in the FBI’s dirty Boston Office.
Mueller is guilty of framing people and withholding exculpatory evidence in the past. Why should we think he’s not doing the same thing now?
Saturday-morning update]
Lee Smith has a pretty comprehensive description of everything that was going on.
[Saturday-evening update]
Related: Watch Kimberly Strassell dismantle the WaPo “fact checker” on Bruce Ohr.
As an aside, Twitter threads have become a way of routing around the limitations of first the 140, then 280-character limit of the medium, to turn them effectively into blog posts, at which one can jump in at any time.
Space Force And Space Corps
Since it’s been so much in the news lately, I thought it would be useful to link to Coyote’s case for it from a year ago. I disagree with his recommendations about withdrawing from the OST, but he explains why a separate service is necessary.
Democratic Socialism,
…is totalitarian slavery.
Yup.
Jordan Peterson And The Left
They hate him because he’s figured out how to route around their corruption and opposition to western civilization.