Month: December 2018

Inching Closer to the Mark

WSJ reports that now some businesses are refusing to take cash money in America and in the U.K.:


Sam Schreiber was mid-shampoo at a Drybar blow-dry salon in Los Angeles when someone from the front desk approached her stylist with an emergency: a woman was trying to pay for her blow-out with cash.
“There was this beat of silence,” says Ms. Schreiber, 33 years old. “She literally brought $40.”

More and more businesses like Drybar don’t want your money—the paper kind at least. It’s making things awkward for those who come ill prepared. After all, you can’t give back a hairdo, an already dressed salad or the two beers you already drank.


The salad chain Sweetgreen has stopped accepting cash in nearly all its locations. Most Dig Inns—which serve locally sourced, healthy fast food—won’t take your bills either. Starbucks went cashless at a Seattle location in January, and at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes. The practice of not accepting cash has become popular enough to catch the attention of American lawmakers.


Ms. Schreiber was tempted to wait and see how the Drybar employees would handle the situation with the customer, who had no credit or debit card with her; instead, she intervened from the shampoo bowl. “I said, ‘I can just pay for her and she can give me cash or Venmo me,’ ” she says.
A few moments later, one of the employees came back to hand her the $40 and expressed thanks on behalf of the stranger. The staff also offered her a second mimosa, which are free to customers. “I kind of wanted to be, like, I should get a free updo or something,” she says. “I basically was…the bank for them.” Drybar declined to comment.

Hmmm… Now where have I heard this before?

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
(Revelation 13:11-18 KJV)

It’s happening, slowly but surely.

Update: Here it is in graphic form:

click here to read about this

Saturday Morning Music Club – Special Memorial Edition – Bre Payton

https://vimeo.com/user58283976/httpsvimeocomjimihendrixangel
Bre Payton

The Federalist:


Bre Payton, our beloved staff writer for The Federalist, passed away on Friday in San Diego, California following a sudden illness.

Bre was born in California on June 8, 1992, to George and Cindy Payton.

She received her high school diploma from the Western Christian High School Private Satellite Program. She graduated from Patrick Henry College in 2015 with a degree in journalism.


Bre joined The Federalist in April of 2015. In the space of just a few years, she became a rising star on cable news, regularly featured as political commentator on Fox News Channel, Fox Business Channel, and OANN.


Bre brightened the lives of everyone around her. She was joyful, hard-working, and compassionate, and she leaves behind friends and colleagues for whom she brought nothing but sweetness and light.

Though we are heartbroken and devastated by Bre’s death, we are comforted in the knowledge that she was a woman who lived a life marked by deep Christian faith, trusting in her Savior, Jesus Christ – in the God who promises the way our story ends is that “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.”

Bre is survived by her parents, George and Cindy; siblings James, Jack, Christina, and Cheekie; and boyfriend Ryan Colby. Her family would appreciate privacy and your prayers as they grieve this loss.

Details about funeral arrangements will be shared once they are known.

Donate to the Bre Payton Scholarship Fund 

Others: Fox News, The Daily Caller and Patterico’s Pontifications, CaringBridge: Bre’s Story, sandiegouniontribune.com, Breitbart, The Daily Caller and twitchy.com, more at Mediagazer », Townhall, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, The Gateway Pundit and Mediaite, 
The Federalist

Quote of the day


Trump won by bringing wary nationalists and populists into a conservative party. But the tail cannot wag the dog. Trump’s coalition is big enough to govern as long as he agrees to preserve the four legs of the conservative stool: babies, guns, tax cuts, and a muscular foreign policy.

Republicans, of course, cannot win without populists. Trump understood that before anyone in the party hierarchy. But Trump cannot win without conservative Republicans — and the last month casts doubt on whether Trump understands that.

Coalition politics always requires sail-trimming by all coalition partners. Many Republicans who flocked to former President George W. Bush’s call to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” in the wake of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal have swallowed hard and accepted Trump for the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices and the defeat of Democrats.

Now they wonder when Trump will trim his own sails for them.

The bargain has always been that he’d cut taxes and surround himself with traditional Republican foreign policy experts. The departure of Gen. Jim Mattis from the administration is not just a vacancy in the Cabinet. Coupled with United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s exit, this has Republicans, even those who have steadfastly stuck with the president, worried that there is a vacancy in the coalition bargain.

Trump has lost Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who bit his tongue for years, even as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., spilled his spleen with frustrations over the president’s lack of discipline.

Trump has also been publicly rebuked by Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, perhaps the most populist and Trumpian member of the Senate but a foreign policy hawk nonetheless. An alienated Cotton and an angry McConnell, on top of the normal array of less steely handwringers, are not the building blocks of a strong coalition.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama ran and won on a coalition that was made up of New Deal Democrats and the ascending coalition of young people, minorities, single women, and others. In 2012, he decided to shed the New Deal coalition and focus primarily on the coalition of the ascendant. He won but with less votes than he did in 2008, and it should be noted that his party, the Democrats, suffered deeply up and down the ballot under his new coalition.

The conservative populist coalition that Trump tapped into in 2016 was there long before he came along. Their impact was felt in elections they did vote in, like the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, and also in the ones they didn’t vote in, like the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, when Republican candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney did not inspire the populist portion and they stayed home.

Trump did not create this conservative/populist coalition. His presidency is the result of it. The past few weeks show he’s either forgotten that or he believes that doesn’t matter anymore.

US to withdraw from Syria and pull troops from Afghanistan

This was a bit of a surprise and I’ve got mixed feelings about it.

But, first, the story from the New York Times:


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered the military to start withdrawing roughly 7,000 troops from Afghanistan in the coming months, two defense officials said Thursday, an abrupt shift in the 17-year-old war there and a decision that stunned Afghan officials, who said they had not been briefed on the plans.


President Trump made the decision to pull the troops — about half the number the United States has in Afghanistan now — at the same time he decided to pull American forces out of Syria, one official said.


The announcement came hours after Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, said that he would resign from his position at the end of February after disagreeing with the president over his approach to policy in the Middle East.


The whirlwind of troop withdrawals and the resignation of Mr. Mattis leave a murky picture for what is next in the United States’ longest war, and they come as Afghanistan has been troubled by spasms of violence afflicting the capital, Kabul, and other important areas. The United States has also been conducting talks with representatives of the Taliban, in what officials have described as discussions that could lead to formal talks to end the conflict.

Senior Afghan officials and Western diplomats in Kabul woke up to the shock of the news on Friday morning, and many of them braced for chaos ahead. Several Afghan officials, often in the loop on security planning and decision-making, said they had received no indication in recent days that the Americans would pull troops out. The fear that Mr. Trump might take impulsive actions, however, often loomed in the background of discussions with the United States, they said.

They saw the abrupt decision as a further sign that voices from the ground were lacking in the debate over the war and that with Mr. Mattis’s resignation, Afghanistan had lost one of the last influential voices in Washington who channeled the reality of the conflict into the White House’s deliberations.

The reduction of American forces in Afghanistan, one American official said, is an effort to make Afghan forces more reliant on their own troops and not Western support.

But some fear the move could only imperil the Afghan troops, who have struggled in the field against the Taliban and have suffered high casualty rates, even with the current level of American support.

Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a Pentagon spokeswoman, declined to comment on the plan to remove troops from Afghanistan.

The president long campaigned on bringing troops home, but in 2017, at the request of Mr. Mattis, he begrudgingly pledged an additional 4,000 troops to the Afghan campaign to try to hasten an end to the conflict.
Though Pentagon officials have said the influx of forces — coupled with a more aggressive air campaign — was helping the war effort, Afghan forces continued to take nearly unsustainable levels of casualties and lose ground to the Taliban.


The renewed American effort in 2017 was the first step in ensuring Afghan forces could become more independent without a set timeline for a withdrawal. But with plans to quickly reduce the number of American troops in the country, it is unclear if the Afghans can hold their own against an increasingly aggressive Taliban.

You can read the rest over at the NYT. We are also pulling out of Syria as well; and Turkey says they will take over that conflict.

Via Reuters:

ISTANBUL/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Turkey will take over the fight against Islamic State militants in Syria as the United States withdraws its troops, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday, in the latest upheaval wrought by Washington’s abrupt policy shift.

The surprise announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump this week that he would withdraw roughly 2,000 troops has felled a pillar of American policy in the Middle East. Critics say Trump’s decision will make it harder to find a diplomatic solution to Syria’s seven-year-old conflict.


For Turkey, the step removes a source of friction with the United States. Erdogan has long castigated his NATO ally over its support for Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters against Islamic State. Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist group and an offshoot of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), fighting for Kurdish autonomy across the border on Turkish soil.

In a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said Turkey would mobilize to fight remaining Islamic State forces in Syria and temporarily delay plans to attack Kurdish fighters in the northeast of the country – shifts both precipitated by the American decision to withdraw.

The news was less welcome for other U.S. allies. Both France and Germany warned that the U.S. change of course risked damaging the campaign against Islamic State, the jihadists who seized big swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014-15 but have now been beaten back to a sliver of Syrian territory.

Likewise, the U.S.-backed militia spearheaded by the YPG said a Turkish attack would force it to divert fighters from the battle against Islamic State to protect its territory.

Islamic State launched an attack in Syria’s southeast against the U.S.-backed SDF militia, employing car bombs and dozens of militants.
“We will be working on our operational plans to eliminate ISIS elements, which are said to remain intact in Syria, in line with our conversation with President Trump,” Erdogan said, referring to Islamic State.

The Turkish president had announced plans last week to start an operation east of the Euphrates River in northern Syria to oust the YPG from the area that it largely controls. This week, he said the campaign could come at any moment. But on Friday, he cited the talk with Trump as a reason to wait.

“Our phone call with President Trump, along with contacts between our diplomats and security officials and statements by the United States, have led us to wait a little longer,” he said.

“We have postponed our military operation against the east of the Euphrates river until we see on the ground the result of America’s decision to withdraw from Syria.”

The Turkish president said, however, that this was not an “open-ended waiting period”.

Turkey has repeatedly voiced frustration over what it says is the slow implementation of a deal with Washington to pull YPG fighters out of Manbij, a town in mainly Arab territory west of the Euphrates in northern Syria.

Now, the neocon right is not happy about this. You can read that here, here and here.

Now here is my personal opinion on this subject. If ISIL or ISIS or Dash, as it is called; is truly defeated in Syria; then great, we are doing the right thing. If we are wrong about that, and ISIS regroups and starts again, we’ll regret we left that Country. As far as Afghanistan goes, we should have left that Country the day that Osama Bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan. The fact that we have been there, this long, is a terrible thing. Now, I would hate to see the Taliban come back there. But, we have no business being the policeman of the World.

The truth is, is that the Taliban were in power there years before; and we did nothing, until 2001 when the United States was hit by the terrorists. As far as Mathis is concerned, screw him. The President of the United States is the commander and chief of the military and what he says goes and if this guy did not like it. He should have quit long ago.

Many people will say that this was an olive branch to the left and also to many in Trump’s base. But, as far as I am concerned, this is something that should have happened a long time ago. We finally have a President that has a realistic sense of foreign policy.

The Weekly Standard RIP

It seems that the Neoconservative Weekly Standard has shut down. There are many opinions about this.

David Brooks over at NYT Says:


I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.


I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type.


This week, Anschutz and McKibbin murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned. They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance.


John Podhoretz, one of the magazine’s founders, reports that they actively prevented potential buyers from coming in to take it over and keep it alive. They apparently wanted to hurt the employees and harvest the subscription list so they could make money off it. And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.

Thanks for the swing at Christianity, you piece of crap Jew. 😮 😡

However, Ace over at Ace of Spades HQ says something different:


There’s a lot of whining by NeverTrumpers that this is terrible because we need dissenting voices in media, and the closing of the Weekly Standard means that we must all “kneel” to one rich arrogant man’s ego.


Well, you know who might agree with that? Lee Smith, who was fired — purged — from The Weekly Standard last October immediately having offered them an article exposing FusionGPS, the firm that Bill Kristol hired to try to take out Trump and Cruz, for those who like to forget that last name.


I know a lot of NeverTrumpers pretend they were Cruz supporters but funny, when I was supporting Cruz, I didn’t see them anywhere near me. They were taking snarky shots at Cruz and seemed to be rather enamored of Ruuuuubioooo.


Anyway, Lee Smith offered a rich (well, at least he lives richly off other people’s money) arrogant man whose ego cannot bear to hear any dissenting voices a story about the company he paid (or rather, used his donors’ money to pay) for dirt on Trump and Cruz, and was canned.


I have repeatedly brought this up and I have not seen a single NeverTrumper, or one of the people eulogizing this magazine which supposedly fostered a spirit of contrarianism and dissent, so much as mention it, let alone condemn it.


So to all of those Weekly Standard people upset about losing your jobs — Lee Smith lost his job last Christmas (he was fired in October, but generously paid through Christmas), and none of you said a goddamn thing.


If you want some advice on how to recover from an unexpected firing, write me and I’ll give you his email; he went through all this (and is still going through some of this) himself. Maybe he can help.
So spare me. As usual, you’re all in favor of deplatforming and scalphunting, so long as it’s people you don’t like being deplatformed and scalphunted.


Another claim being made is that there were buyers but mean old Clarity Media put an end to that.


The grossly fat John Podhoretz, for example, wrote “There were buyers. Potential buyers.” But he claimed that the search party for buyers was told to stand down in September.


So that Clarity Media could strip The Weekly Standard for the few assets it had which were actually valuable, like its subscriber list.
Dealing with this one at a time:


Obviously, potential buyers are not actual buyers. Or we’d just say “buyers.” So once again, we have a cuck claiming that there were “buyers” but then when you ask, “so why was it not bought?,” they start talking about potential buyers.


Well, Kurt Schlichter is a potential buyer. So are commenters here, who talked about putting together an IndieGoGo buyout fund.


But none of this is serious, is it?


Furthermore, Hayes and his search party were permitted to seek buyers for months, and found none. Further beyond that, whether or not they stop actively looking, People have known that TWS was buyable since the search began. They could have made offers at any time.


They didn’t. Because there are no buyers. Just… potential buyers.
Lastly, this shit about Clarity wanting to shut down an unprofitable, money-losing biilionaire’s vanity project and recover something valuable from it:


When you decide to rely upon the kindness and generosity of a billionaire donor, and are not actually profitable — when your “business model” is to be a charity forever — well, sorry, but that means you have an Audience of One. If Phil Anchultz thought that his Vanity Project was no longer boosting his vanity, because, let’s say, it was a moribund, low-influence afterthought, well, you lost your audience of one.


You were being kept afloat to make his estimation of himself larger; if you produced dreck, and precious little of it to boot, that’s on you.


Next, and finally: This idea that if the rest of the magazine is failing and valueless, but one aspect of it has value (the subscriber list), then it is immoral and terrible to “strip” the company for its “assets:”


Isn’t this part of the cycle of creative destruction of capitalism you defend and claim is central to conservative identitarianism? Wasn’t the candidate you loved in 2012, Mitt Romney, a practitioner of just this sort of wring-inefficiencies-out-of-the-market-by-breaking-down-nonperforming-companies-and-selling-their-useful-parts capitalism?


You’re not very good capitalists if you suddenly start whining “Oh no, capitalistic profit-seeking and inefficiency-eliminating hurts when it happens to you! No fair, no fair! Make the bad men stop!”


You guys can’t talk like Gordon Gecko when it’s someone else getting a pink slip but then whine like Michael Moore when it’s you.


There are bad guys here — but they’re not Clarity Media, who kept this sinking ship afloat with bales of money for a long time.

Ouch.

Now, I am not really crying about the fact that the Weekly Standard is going belly up. They were decidedly Neoconservative, and I found them to be mildly annoying at their least and vomit provoking at their worst. 

However, I would remiss, as someone who very highly disagrees with Neoconservative foreign policy and as someone who came onto the blogging scene, as a left of center type blogger in 2006; just as the Iraq War was turning into a meat grinder —- that it was The Weekly Standard that promoted the idea of going into Iraq, it was The Weekly Standard that propagated the Bush Administrations bald faced LIE, err, um, I mean, bad intelligence report that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

So, No, I will not weep for the demise of the Weekly Standard. However, I will use it as an example of what happens when political ideologies fall out of favor with the American People and with the Republican Party.  That is the ideology of the neoconservatives.  Which is basically big Government conservatism and fight for Israel to the death of the Nation.

It is a political ideology that is on it’s deathbed and I am quite happy for it! 😀


Could President Trump be Indicted?

This could be very interesting. 

The New York Times Reports:


WASHINGTON — The latest revelations by prosecutors investigating President Trump and his team draw a portrait of a candidate who personally directed an illegal scheme to manipulate the 2016 election and whose advisers had more contact with Russia than Mr. Trump has ever acknowledged.


In the narrative that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and New York prosecutors are building, Mr. Trump continued to secretly seek to do business in Russia deep into his presidential campaign even as Russian agents made more efforts to influence him. At the same time, in this account he ordered hush payments to two women to suppress stories of impropriety in violation of campaign finance law.


The prosecutors made clear in a sentencing memo filed on Friday that they viewed efforts by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to squelch the stories as nothing less than a perversion of a democratic election — and by extension they effectively accused the president of defrauding voters, questioning the legitimacy of his victory.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump dismissed the filings, and his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, minimized the importance of any potential campaign finance violations. Democrats, however, said they could lead to impeachment.

In the memo in the case of Mr. Cohen, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York depicted Mr. Trump, identified only as “Individual-1,” as an accomplice in the hush payments. While Mr. Trump was not charged, the reference echoed Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator by a grand jury investigating the cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic headquarters.


“While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows,” the prosecutors wrote.

“He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with Individual-1,” they continued. “In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”

If this does go down or happen; you know that the democrats will go for impeachment. There is more…

video:

Here is Andrew McCarthy’s take in what is discussed above in the video:

Via Fox News:


The major takeaway from the 40-page sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors Friday for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, is this: The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.


It has been obvious for some time that President Trump is the principal subject of the investigation still being conducted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.


Cohen earlier pleaded guilty to multiple counts of business and tax fraud, violating campaign finance law, and making false statements to Congress regarding unsuccessful efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Yes, Cohen has stated he did the hands-on work in orchestrating hush-money payments to two women who claim to have had sexual liaisons with Trump many years ago (liaisons Trump denies).


But when Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.


Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars.


Moreover, campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions. To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before – most notably in 2014 against Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump later pardoned.

McCarthy also points out:

In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Instead, the matter was quietly disposed of by a $375,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission.

Now, this is where it gets very interesting, there are some who say that Trump cannot be indicted as President. See here:

Via the AP:


WASHINGTON (AP) — For the first time, prosecutors have tied President Donald Trump to a federal crime, accusing him of directing illegal hush-money payments to women during his presidential campaign in 2016.
The Justice Department stopped short of accusing Trump of directly committing a crime. Instead, they said in a court filing Friday night that Trump told his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to make illegal payments to buy the silence of two women — porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who claimed to have had affairs with Trump and threatened his White House bid. Trump has denied having an affair.


Cohen has pleaded guilty to several charges, including campaign finance violations, and is awaiting sentencing.


Although Trump hasn’t been charged with any crimes, the question of whether a president can even be prosecuted while in office is a matter of legal dispute.

The AP also answers some very good questions:


CAN A SITTING PRESIDENT BE INDICTED?


Legal experts are divided on that question. The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether the president can be indicted or whether the president can be subpoenaed for testimony.


The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice and guidance to executive branch agencies, has maintained that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Two Justice Department reports, one in 1973 and one in 2000, came to the same conclusion.


Those reports essentially concluded that the president’s responsibilities are so important that an indictment would pose too many risks for the government to function properly.


Trump’s lawyers have said that special counsel Robert Mueller plans to adhere to that guidance, though Mueller’s office has never independently confirmed that. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has also said that a president cannot be indicted.


___
COULD TRUMP BE INDICTED ONCE HE LEAVES OFFICE?


There would presumably be no bar against charging a president after he leaves the White House.


Legal scholars have said that based on the Justice Department’s guidance, it would appear that Trump could be charged for wrongdoing during the campaign or as president once he leaves office, but likely not before that.
Blackman said the statute of limitations for a campaign finance law violation — like the one Cohen pleaded guilty to — would be five years. The payments to Daniels and McDougal were made in 2016, meaning the statute of limitations would run out in 2021.
___
COULD TRUMP PARDON HIMSELF?


Trump has already shown he’s not afraid to use his pardon power, particularly for those he has viewed as unfair victims of partisanship. He’s pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was convicted of criminal contempt for disobeying a judge’s order, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a Bush administration official convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a leak case.


Courts have never had to answer the question of whether the president can pardon himself. In June, Giuliani told NBC’s “Meet the Pres” that while Trump “probably does” have the power, “pardoning himself would be unthinkable and probably lead to immediate impeachment.”

Now, personally, at this point, I believe that President Donald Trump should resign from office. He has tainted the American people’s trust and has tainted the office of the President of the United States and should leave office. This is coming from someone who voted for this man and believed that he could do things much better than Hillary. Needless to say, I am very disappointed that I believed this man and voted for him.

Others: JustOneMinute, ThinkProgress, Raw Story, Breitbart, Joe.My.God., Mediaite and Power Line, Axios, Bangor Daily News, Hullabaloo and Breitbart,Law & Crime and Power Line

Former President George H.W. Bush RIP

The video:

The Story via Washington Post:

George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd, was a steadfast force on the international stage for decades, from his stint as an envoy to Beijing to his eight years as vice president and his one term as commander in chief from 1989 to 1993.

The last veteran of World War II to serve as president, he was a consummate public servant and a statesman who helped guide the nation and the world out of a four-decade Cold War that had carried the threat of nuclear annihilation.

His death, at 94 on Nov. 30, also marked the passing of an era.

Jeet Heer at the New Republic, remembers it as I do:

President George Herbert Walker Bush June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018 Rest in Peace

He was a Republican through and through, but towards the end of his life lived to see his party evolve away from his politics. Bush embodied, almost to the point of caricature, the older tradition of upper-class New England Republicanism. He came to this tradition by pedigree. He was born in Connecticut in 1924, the son of a Wall Street banker turned senator.

Almost everything in Bush’s impressive resume bespoke an allegiance to the country club establishment that once governed the Republican Party: Andover Prep School, distinguished naval service, Yale, membership of the elite Skull and Bones secret society, ambassadorship to the United Nations, a term as envoy to China, a brief stint as head of the CIA. This is the career trajectory of an internationalist Republican, one committed to maintaining America’s role as the cornerstone of the global order.

Bush tried to navigate, often uneasily, between the moderate Republican tradition he was reared in and the rising conservative wing of the party. He was, in truth, no liberal. His supposed moderation was mainly a question of style. But that style counted for something. Unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush didn’t speak the lingo of movement conservatism, even when he advocated for conservative politics.

As The Washington Post notes, “During the 1980 primaries, Mr. Bush positioned himself as a moderate, pragmatic alternative to Reagan, and he derided as ‘voodoo economics’ the former California governor’s vow to simultaneously cut taxes, boost defense spending and balance the budget.”

This stance made Bush widely distrusted by conservatives even when Reagan picked him to be the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in 1980. To overcome his reputation for being squishy (the infamous “wimp factor”), Bush went overboard in the 1988 election, running rancid racist ads featuring Willie Horton and making demagogic appeals to issues like flag burning. This won him the election, but it was a hollow victory. Conservatives deserted him after he broke his promise of “no new taxes” while liberals never learned to trust him. After the severe 1991 recession, he became deeply unpopular, an emblem of an out-of-touch chief executive. His failure to win re-election was inevitable.

His lasting legacy as a president will be in foreign policy. His calmness in responding to the collapse of communism, first in Eastern Europe and finally in the Soviet Union, insured an orderly end to the Cold War. In answering Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with an international coalition, Bush created, for better or worse, the model for continued American interventionism in the post-Cold War era. Bush’s decision not to overthrow Saddam Hussein also set the preconditions for future conflict. In a very real sense, we’re still living in the aftermath of Bush’s actions, which created a tangled inheritance for his son George W. Bush and subsequent presidents.

The pardons Bush granted in the Iran-Contra case (notably to Casper Weinberger and Robert McFarlane) were disgraceful. They helped cement a tradition of elite impunity which undermines the rule of law. Donald Trump’s habit of granting deeply partisan pardons (Joe Arpaio, Scooter Libby, Dinesh D’Souza) fall in that tradition. If there is a constitutional crisis in the Trump era, the roots can be traced back to Bush’s presidency.

Bush’s politics were a constant effort to find a balance between the demands of right-wing Republicans and the larger world. He died at a moment when his style of politics was completely out of fashion in his own party. President Donald Trump — boorish, anti-intellectual, ignorant of policy, contemptuous of alliances, stridently partisan — is in many ways the antithesis of George H.W. Bush.

Because of the moment of his death, Bush’s passing seems like more than the demise of one man. It truly is the end of a political tradition.

Amen. May the man rest in peace, he has earned it.