Ever since David Cameron announced a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in February 2016, the British people have been issued the direst imaginable warnings. Before the referendum, the then–chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, among others, predicted an immediate recession in the U.K. if the voters were unwise enough to disregard his instructions and vote to leave the EU. But we did disregard his instructions, as we did those of the prime minister and the heads of all the other major parties. We disregarded everybody, in fact, who warned us that our future would be darker, poorer, more ignorant, and more insular. In June 2016 we voted to leave the EU.
For a variety of reasons that arose after that decision (not least the ineptitude of Theresa May’s government and her minority rule after the 2017 election), the scare stories stepped up. The warned-of recession was claimed to have merely been deferred. And the financial threats were the least of it. The media and politicians on the Remain side upped the volume on all their dire warnings. Disappointment and rage about losing the referendum were transferred into a number of vitriolic behaviors, but most prominent amongst them was the claim of increased insularity.
Media, including a new, strange propaganda paper called the New European, offered the British public “farewell tours” to the Continent. Such publications strongly suggested that once Britain left the EU, we Brits would be unable to visit again. We would return to where we were before we entered the Common Market in 1975. And as centuries of literature and history attest, until 1975 nobody from Britain ever went to the Continent. In fact, prior to 1975 we had been a strange, hobbit-like people, famously incurious about abroad and choosing never to visit the place.
It's astonishing to behold, more than 2 years after the fact, just how devastating Hillary's 2016 defeat was for the Democratic center. The fire has spread to the hangar, reached the money fuel lines and is licking at the bomb magazine doors.
Anti-Barr polemics dwell on the parade of horribles that might come from his tenure at Justice, without pausing to consider that a norm-busting violation of the rules targeting a politically inconvenient individual already occurred — it was the abusive FISA surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page.
The supposed institutionalists and civil libertarians who are piling on Barr are more outraged that the attorney general wants to get to the bottom of this abuse — and related 2016 investigatory overreach — than by the abuse itself.
It’s no wonder that Barr has a poorly disguised contempt for his critics, many of whom are so inflamed by their opposition to Trump that they’ve lost any sense of standards. In a peppery speech to a Federalist Society conference last year that is now one of the counts against him, Barr rightly warned that “it is the Left that is engaged in a systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.”
The government’s conduct in this case has been so outrageous—and evidence of it suppressed—that FBI Director Wray immediately adopted new policies to foreclose it. No one had anticipated the leadership of the FBI and DOJ would “spy” on a presidential campaign and breach the trust of a presidential nominee and purposefully circumvent DOJ and White House protocols to interview the new administration’s National Security Advisor without counsel.
Moreover, it seems impossible for Special Assistant United States Attorney Van Grack to view these issues with even a hint of objectivity. The defense’s motions and the IG Report evince Mr. Van Grack’s plain suppression of evidence that is undeniably exculpatory to Mr. Flynn under any objective standard and a series of his retaliatory actions against Mr. Flynn. ECF No. 133. Mr.Van Grack has suppressed evidence from the formation of the “Special Counsel Investigation” and likely even prior to it—for the very purpose of putting Mr. Flynn in the unjust position he now occupies while protecting the prosecutors, his team, and the cadre of malfeasant FBI agents from the discovery of their negligence, crimes, and wrongs. There is a veritable litany of government misconduct here that is “outrageous” or “grossly shocking” and mandates dismissal of this prosecution.
***** and I went to the WW2 museum in New Orleans. Brand new, big, still expanding, expensive and boring.
The Germans and Japanese were bad; Roosevelt was good; it was all very sad.
Nothing about the Hitler Stalin pact. Nothing about the role the CP played to keep us neutral, until Uncle Joe got attacked.
And Roosevelt’s concentration camps? The American people did it, not Roosevelt’s executive order (funny how that works).
It was shallow, not much to look at (the captions and film shorts looked like they were written for Sesame Street), and relentlessly politically correct.
I usually think I will spend an hour or two in a museum, and end up spending the whole day; this time, we payed parking for the whole day, and left after two hours.
Not recommended.
But, we had dinner in the Neon Pig restaurant in Tupelo. Best hamburger in the world!