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February 2022

Federal Judge James Ho Surprises Georgetown Law with Speech Defending Ilya Shapiro By Nate Hochman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/federal-judge-james-ho-surprises-georgetown-law-with-speech-defending-ilya-shapiro/

Guest speaker scraps original remarks in favor of unequivocal statement on freedom of speech and declares, ‘I stand with Ilya.’

F ederal judge James C. Ho delivered a robust defense of Ilya Shapiro on Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown Law, which recently suspended the respected legal scholar over a poorly worded tweet.

“I stand with Ilya,” Ho declared.

The subject of his address was a surprise to the audience. The judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had been slated to give a lecture titled “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” in an event organized by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. At the outset, according to prepared remarks exclusively obtained by National Review, Ho said he “was scheduled to talk” about originalism, “but I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead.”

Ho continued, “I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro.”

The Dog Days of the Biden Administration Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/02/the-dog-days-of-the-biden-administration/

Tolerance and inclusiveness can be good things in government, but the Biden administration is starting to resemble the court of Caligula. Last month it appointed the gender-fluid engineer Sam Brinton (pronoun “they”) to the Office of Nuclear Energy  (budget $US1.6 billion). His role is deputy assistant secretary, second-in-charge of nuclear waste issues.

Brinton boasts of his after-hours participation in the BDSM “Pup” cult/fetish. He role-plays as handler and sex partner of a novice impersonating a dog, who commonly wears a tail anchored per rectum and is punished for making literal messes on the carpet.

Brinton’s hobby is consensual and doesn’t break any laws, in the US anyway. It can become dangerous – one Australian-born “Pup” (unconnected to Brinton) died in Seattle in 2018 as a result of silicone injections to create an over-size, dog-like scrotum and testicles.

The appointment has not attracted much publicity.  The Democrat-friendly press’s job is to shield Biden from criticism, and anyway the detail is beyond any limit of explicitness. I’m setting it out because it’s necessary here. The fullest accounts are in The Conservative American blog.

In an elaborate description of the pup cult in MetroWeekly, a gay journal five years back, Sam Brinton, then 27, was photographed as handler to a Pup called Nubi, 24, who wore a leather puppy mask.

Creating A George Floyd Scholarship Sends Black Kids The Exact Wrong Message By: Kendall Qualls

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/creating-a-george-floyd-scholarship-sends-black-kids-the-exact-wrong-message/

Kendall Qualls is a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota.

The constant push to virtue signal to the idol of social justice is causing some of our historically trusted institutions of academia, health care, and journalism to lose the public’s trust and is further splintering our nation. Minnesota seems to be in the epicenter of it all.

The Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota recently endowed a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr. It’s the wrong decision and undermines the work of the civil rights movement and what we communicate to black American children across the country.

What happened to George Floyd was a travesty. But it is important we remain disciplined in acknowledging that tragedy. When honoring someone’s life in a scholarship at an institution of higher education, we should honor the sacrifice, achievement, and virtues of a person’s life.

With approximately 50 percent of black students graduating from Minneapolis public schools near the bottom of the country in achievement and approximately 80 percent of black children born in fatherless homes in the twin cities, the University of Minnesota should be lifting up models of character and achievement that convey hope and opportunity, not death and despair.

Liz Cheney, Peggy Noonan trot out the NeverTrump tropes By David Zukerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/liz_cheney_peggy_noonan_trot_out_nevertrump_tropes_in_the_pages_of_the_wall_street_journal.html

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is up to its old tricks, giving aid and succor to the NeverTrump wing of conservatism in its never-ending quest to Get Trump.

On Feb. 11, they gave Republican turncoat Liz Cheney op-ed space, seemingly to intimidate Republicans into abandoning support for former president Donald J. Trump.

Proof of her aim was projected by the title: “The Jan. 6 Committee Won’t Be Intimidated.”  She claimed that “many” Republicans, following “Mr. Trump,” have abandoned “fidelity to the rule of law and the plan of the Constitution.”

She began with this glurge, hearkening as usual to her bloodlines, which is how she got her powerful jobs at State and Congress in the first place.

I keep on my desk a copy of the oath my great-great-grandfather signed when he re-enlisted in the Union Army in 1863. Like the oath given by all those who serve in government and every member of our armed forces, Samuel Fletcher Cheney swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Generations of Americans have sworn that same oath and given their lives to defend the Constitution and our nation.

Thomas Lipscomb: Hidden In Plain Sight The Key To The Kennedy Assassination Is On Public Display In The National Archives Emerald Robinson

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/thomas-lipscomb-hidden-in-plain-sight?fbclid=IwAR3VbolyoXybZeWYUNhIb9PeUNfl9BwbjTtQtZaUnhB9mLmkhpUlLGllwVg

NOTE: The renowned journalist Thomas Lipscomb has just completed a new manuscript (with Jerome Kroth) titled The Oswald Letter and it contains a number of staggering claims based on these federally released documents as well as fresh accounts from new eyewitnesses who have never before been interviewed. This is the third excerpt from The Oswald Letter to appear here on my Substack.

According to the catalog listing of the National Archives in Washington, this is the “Windshield Removed from the Presidential Limousine that Carried President John F. Kennedy During the Assassination.” It is still carrying its FBI evidence tab.

But is it?

The Secret Service had the Presidential limousine shipped from Dallas to the White House garage the night of the assassination. Then they sent it to the Ford Factory at River Rouge in Detroit, where it was built, for refitting.

When a senior manager there, George S. Whitaker, came to work two days after the assassination, he was ordered to immediately report to the glass plant lab. He was let in through locked doors and found two of his men had already removed the limousine windshield.

Are the JFK assassination lies finally coming apart? By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/are_the_jfk_assassination_lies_finally_coming_apart.html

We are closing in on 60 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and in that time, there have been endless independent investigations disputing, or occasionally endorsing, the conclusions of the Warren Commission.  If I were reading instead of writing this blog post, at this point, I would be worrying that yet another boring recitation of arcana from the mountains of evidence was about to be presented to me.

But excerpts from a new book about to be published on the assassination blew my socks off.  It contains what looks like solid evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and that Kennedy was killed by a bullet fired from in front of his limousine, one that entered the car through the windshield.  Lee Harvey Oswald’s purported location in the Texas School Book Depository was to the side of and behind the car, so he could not have fired a bullet that entered the car through the windshield.

I am so old that I watched the assassination of Oswald on live television and heard him say, “I’m just a patsy” right before he died, words that have haunted me ever since.  Those are not the words of an entirely innocent man, who would have said, “I didn’t do it,” or similar words of denial.  No, Oswald’s words suggested knowledge of larger forces that participated and his realization that he had been played.  And a desire to tell his story.  A desire that Jack Ruby thwarted seconds later.

Emerald Robinson has published on Substack a fascinating excerpt from a book manuscript titled The Oswald Letter, written by Thomas Lipscomb with Jerome Koch. 

DRUDGE IS DEAD

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/15/drudge-is-dead/

What exactly has happened to the formerly must-read Drudge Report?

It may seem like yesterday to old Washington hands, but it was actually more than a quarter-century ago that a manager of a gift shop in a television network building in greater Hollywood, a 20-something with a thirst for movie star gossip, signaled the end of the establishment media’s chokehold on the American public. He started an amateurishly formatted website featuring links to important but under-the-radar online articles, to go along with his own mysteriously obtained scoops.

It was, let us never forget, Matt Drudge who broke the Monica Lewinsky story that led to Bill Clinton’s presidential impeachment and Senate trial, only the second in American history. Shortly before Drudge dropped his bomb, in an exquisite self-indictment of media bias and protectiveness of Democrats in power, Newsweek, then a half-century-old journalistic institution whose huge Washington bureau was near the top of a high rise on Pennsylvania Avenue a half block from the White House, killed its exclusive story revealing the sex scandal. It had been the work of Michael Isikoff, a famously aggressive – and left-leaning – veteran Washington reporter.

Yet today, it is the Drudge Report that is Newsweek.

The Drudge Report might quaintly sport the same typeface it used in the early days of the Internet, but on Sunday and then all day and all evening Monday, a story of Lewinskyesque scale rocked the nation’s capital.

In a court submission last week, Special Counsel John Durham alleged, as Fox News put it, “that lawyers from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign … paid to access servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House in order to establish an ‘inference’ and ‘narrative’ to bring to federal government agencies linking then-President Trump to Russia.”

Durham, probably the most straight-shooting, apolitical lawyer in the federal government, now years into an exhaustive probe, revealed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign sought out both the FBI and the CIA in peddling lies that Trump was colluding with Russia, so as to get every news outlet it could to keep that false story at the top of the news during the 2016 campaign, and then, when that failed, to use it to cripple the Trump presidency.

What Biden gets wrong about race He fans the flames of America’s racial torment By Glenn Loury

Glenn Loury is an economist, author, academic, and one of the most perceptive critics of the progressive upsurge in politics and media.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

Exclusive: Systemic Voting Issues In Pennsylvania County Even More Extensive Than Previously Known By: Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/exclusive-systemic-voting-issues-in-pennsylvania-county-even-more-extensive-than-previously-known/

The newest recordings provide some of the frankest discussion on how bad the behind-the-scenes situation was in Pennsylvania’s 2020 election.

The video (and audio) hits just keep on coming from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where a whistleblower secretly taped the aftermath of the chaos from the 2020 presidential election. Two recent recordings exclusively obtained by The Federalist from a source with knowledge of the recordings provide further evidence that systemic problems plague the large Pennsylvania county.

The newest recordings provide some of the frankest discussion on how bad the behind-the-scenes situation was, with one election worker describing a part of the post-election situation as “abominable” and the attempt to do the impossible—reconcile some precincts’ voter sheets—as “a nightmare.”

The whistleblower, Regina Miller, began recording conversations involving Delaware County officials after she became concerned with what she saw as a contract worker assisting election employees. A source familiar with the videos explained that Miller made the recordings as election workers scrambled to find—and in some cases create—documentation in response to a “Right to Know” request that sought copies of the paperwork that would confirm the accuracy of the vote tallies certified for the 2020 election.

Unmasking Trudeau’s lies and trucker truths Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/unmasking-trudeaus-lies-and-trucker-truths/

According to an old Israeli quip, the way to remove 500 Canadians from a swimming pool at closing time is to whisper, “Everybody out of the water, please.”

The implication is both clear and amusing to each group. Israelis are famous for and proud of being disobedient and unruly; Canadians are considered and view themselves as well-mannered and orderly.

But the joke, apparently, is on all concerned, now that the latter’s truckers have entered the picture. These guys aren’t exiting the proverbial premises with a subservient bow. On the contrary, they’re not only conducting a serious protest but leading others in the world to follow suit.

Their shouts to be heard by the government in Ottawa started as a reaction to draconian measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic—or, at least, it’s the excuse used by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his very illiberal Liberal Party to exercise power over the public.

Trudeau is by no means alone in this endeavor. Leaders around the globe, initially flummoxed by COVID-19, have spent the past two years caving to the dire predictions of and warnings by health “authorities,” despite equally gloomy economic and psychological forecasts.

Nor are Canadians the only people who’ve been putting up with restrictions imposed on them by politicians. Indeed, even normally cheeky and rebellious Israelis meekly accepted lockdowns and the like from the outset.
It’s almost funny that a microbe came along and instilled a level of fear that no Hamas or Hezbollah missile had been able to do until that point. And that’s not a joke.
Israelis I know personally who used to pooh-pooh calls to take shelter during rocket attacks—some going so far as to head outside to film Iron Dome interceptions—suddenly were terrified not to wear the best surgical masks on the market and wouldn’t leave home without bottles of hand sanitizer at the ready.
Much of the hysteria waned when vaccines became available. But then a second and third wave arrived, followed by a fourth and a fifth. This had an interesting effect.