John Bolton is exactly what Trump’s Iranian policy needs.
It was feckless of the Bush administration to allow them to wage war on us in Iraq with no consequences. And of course, the Obama administration viewed them as allies.
The Great Migration Into Space
Thoughts on Musk and Bezos from Peter Diamandis.
More thoughts, on science fiction versus science fact, from The Economist‘s Oliver Morton.
Mitt Romney
…is the new John McCain.
What make him think that anyone needed a new John McCain? Hasn’t he noticed that it took someone other than him or John McCain to defeat the Democrats? Or maybe neither of them really cared about defeating the Democrats?
[Update a while later]
Justin Amash has proven to be quite a disappointment to this libertarian.
One more thing, J-Am, where are your libertarian principles regarding illegal surveillance on American citizens? On Illegal FISA warrants, national security letters, human intelligence assets being placed around a political campaign by the unelected political bureaucracy? The jack-booted fedgov strong-arming people to plead to process crimes? U cool with that bro, because TRUMP?
I’d like to see someone confront him along those lines.
Canadian Universities
Ottawa is imposing “social justice” on all of them.
The Steele Dossier
The “verified” document that wasn’t.
Someone’s (more than one someone) got a lot of ‘splaining to do.
[Update Monday morning]
How the FBI broke its own rules:
In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.
Well, to be fair, it was politically convenient to do the same thing with Steele.
[Update a while later]
Spy versus spy versus spy: How Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are turning on each other.
I hope they all rot in jail.
[Late-morning update]
Trey Gowdy says that there is a potential game changer if certain transcripts are released.
And thoughts on a tale of two coups:
The fact that the losers in this election appear to have attempted to undermine the winners is an extremely bad precedent because it leads to the winners deciding to take it out on the losers next time around and that in turn leads to people not relinquishing power short of being turfed out with violence – see Venezuela and any number of Latin American, Central Asian and African dictatorships. In fact allowing the losers to come up with one way after another to try and delegitimise an election they lost is bad on its own because the ability to “throw the bums out” is a key feature of democracy. If voters can’t trust that their votes will be respected they are likely to resort to other methods of expressing their displeasure with the current set of rulers and that is something that these rulers may come to regret. The good news is that the New AG seems to be doing his job and turning over any number of stones that various parties would have preferred remained unexamined.
Let’s hope.
Etruscan
What did it sound like?
I’m always a little skeptical that they can be sure of things like this.
Light Blogging
My desktop computer is FUBAR. I can’t boot it. Getting it fixed is my highest current priority.
[Friday-afternoon update]
It seems to be a hardware problem. I built a clean install of Fedora 30, and the machine froze in the middle of the first software update. I’m running a memory test on it now, but I suspect it’s a motherboard issue. Which of course means CPU and memory replacement as well, unless I can find a used motherboard, because they don’t make AMD FM3 boards any more.
Any recommendations?
[Saturday-morning update]
Sorry, hadn’t realized that site wasn’t taking comments. It should work now.
[Saturday-afternoon update]
OK, it was WP-Spamfree plugin. Try it now.
News You Can Use
How to read a legal opinion. Should be must reading not just for lawyers, or journalists, but high-school students.
The Democrats
…start to perceive the debacle they face:
<blockquote>All Americans, even the president’s most strenuous supporters, should be comforted that the majority of Democrats can still think and count. It is a party infested with lunatics, but not controlled by them. This is in the same reassuring category as the Mueller investigation’s conclusion that no one in the United States colluded with Russians to influence the result of the 2016 election.
Beneath the initial success of the Biden campaign, the Democrats are sharply divided between those who are still trying to place their bets on the presidential unsuitability of the incumbent, those who seek a radical démarche to the left and over the political cliff, and those trying to get back to essentially the old slightly-left-of-center coalition of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson.
President Clinton, and even, with a stretch, Mrs. Clinton, were also in that tradition, but the ominous approaching clouds of investigative curiosity about the Clinton Foundation and the malodorous ethics of the 2016 Clinton campaign have caused the Clintons’ party to stampede from under them.
Even Barack Obama, who was cozily settling into a good 30 years as a respected ex-president, is already in the crosshairs of the investigation, conducted against the Clinton campaign, of illegal espionage on the Trump campaign through fraudulently obtained FISA warrants and planted agents and sting operations. The rabidly Trumpophobic texting between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveals that “the White House” was closely monitoring the investigation of the Trump campaign, which raises the question of the involvement of the former president in illegal surveillance.
Mr. Obama’s name is still bandied about with respect by most of the Democratic candidates, especially Mr. Biden (“Barack and I . . .”), and he is still better esteemed by most Americans than the other ex-presidents. But apart from the admirable and necessary shattering of the bar of color, his entire legacy has been discredited: the mad obsession with unproved climate alarmism, the foolhardy Iranian nuclear treaty, and the Obamacare shambles.</blockquote>
Trump should win handily.
[Sunday-morning update]
Link was wrong, fixed now. In response to a comment about Trump’s approval, it may be that the polls are wrong because people are afraid to be honest with the Woke Warriors.
As an example, there was another surprise, in Australia, which should give Biden pause.
And maybe there is starting to be a pattern to these wrong polls.
WordPress Issue
The latest upgrade has resulted in an editing function that displays post titles in all caps, regardless of the case I typed (the do appear upper/lower on the blog itself). It’s extremely annoying, because I don’t know if I typed it correctly, and can’t tell until I preview or publish. I have no idea why they did this. I may look into the code to see if I can fix it, but I shouldn’t have to.
[Update Tuesday morning]
Doesn’t seem to be a browser issue. Seeing the same behavior in Chrome and Vivaldi.
[Wednesday update]
Great, now blockquotes aren’t displaying properly.