Ron Johnson's unfortunate peddling of delusion at a Senate hearing

 This is a tale of a number of  people and organizations that started out doing important work in this world, only to deteriorate into crackpot espousers of overheated sensationalisms.

It starts with Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson's participation in a Senate hearing yesterday:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read a report blaming “agent provocateurs” and people who “obviously didn’t fit in” for the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 — concluding that they “probably planned this.”

The senator read experts from a report by J Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center of Security Policy, entitled I Saw Provocateurs At The Capitol Riot On Jan. 6 and published by The Federalist. 

“At about 11:30, I walked from near Union Station … and noticed a small number of Capitol Police dressed in full riot gear, with shin guards and shoulder guards,” he read, adding that he then saw a “positive and festive” crowd leaving Trump’s “Save America” to walk down Constitution Avenue.

Johnson went on to read that Waller had noticed four types of people that “stood out” in the MAGA crowd, adding that they “obviously didn’t fit in” with the families in attendance or with those in “pro-police shirts”

“Although the crowd represented a broad cross-section of Americans, mostly working-class by their appearance and manner of speech, some people stood out,” he read. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”

He went on to describe the four groups he noticed stood out: “Plainclothes militants, agents provocateurs, fake Trump protesters, and then disciplined, uniformed column of attackers.”

“I think these are the people that probably planned this,” Johnson said.

Johnson continued to read the report, which noted that D.C. Metropolitan Police seemed to be acting normally on that day, but also claimed there was no law enforcement at the Capitol.

“Several marchers expressed surprise,” Johnson read, adding, “The openness seemed like a courtesy gesture from Congress, which controls security.”

The claim that Antifa or outside provocateurs were responsible for the riot has been repeatedly fact-checked, especially after The Washington Times published a report that falsely claimed a facial recognition firm said Antifa infiltrated and posed as pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol.

Senator Johnson at one time had his head on straight, but that's all over now:

Johnson, who came to the Senate by upsetting the chronically underfunded Russ Feingold in 2010 and then beating him again in a 2016 rematch, used to come across as boring and unoriginal. Not any more, notes veteran Wisconsin journalist Bruce Murphy:

It’s remarkable to see the transformation of Johnson, who ran as a businessman concerned about the federal deficit and was consumed by the issue in his early years. He has gradually transformed into a collector of crackpot theories and conspiracies and one of the strangest senators serving today. 

And The Federalist's descent from a venue solidly in the mainstream of conservatism into a Trumpist organ has been saddening to watch. Even long-timers who once did great work such as Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway have imbibed the Kool-Aid. 

J. Michael Waller, the author of the Federalist piece cited by Johnson, was an invaluable source for the details about the Marxist-Leninist nature of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front and El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front throughout the 1980s, when Central America was the staging ground of one of the last proxy conflicts of the Cold War. 

Looking back on his style of presentation, I can now see that his intended audience was people who were ate up with geo-strategic concerns. I certainly fit that bill at the time. As I've recounted before, an appearance by a guy from the local "peace fellowship" at the Unitarian fellowship I was attending who'd recently returned from a "fact-finding" mission to the region was the catalyst for my conversion experience by which I became a conservative. This peace-fellowship guy was feeding the congregation a lot of hooey about Reagan foreign policy supporting bad guys and I'd been reading some books that set the record straight, starting with New York Times reporter Shirley Christian's Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, and including monographs Waller had written for the Council for Inter-American Security. I was pretty well versed on the players and the roots of the situation, guys like Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge tracts like the 72-Hour Document and Communist front organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. 

But Waller's one of those guys who remained overheated about the world-stage stakes even after the Cold War was over, and had so much invested in his career as a deep diver that he felt compelled to keep at it. 

The Federalist piece, and Johnson's reading from it, are an embarrassment. It's all speculation. People seeming to fall into four categories. The first category being "jovial." Unsubstantiated inference about leftist groups being at the core of the violence. 

The whole thing is a case study in how agendas can cloud people's views of actual reality. There are so many people still striving to fit facts into a Trumpist narrative that they flush their reputations down the toilet.

The most unfortunate thing about that is that each time it happens, it makes it that much more difficult for remaining conservatives to articulate our worldview convincingly. The public's view that anyone right of center is a crank gets reinforced.

Thanks for nothin', Ron.

 

 

A couple of situations over which the nation erupted in chaos over incomplete information

 A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post at Precipice entitled "The Whole Truth."  A couple of instances have come along since then that reinforce the point I was making, namely, that

[w]hen we do know the whole picture, though, we’re not only remiss but deceptive if we don’t put all the facts on the table. 

One is some new information about George Floyd that I included, as a link, in my Thursday Roundup, immediately below this post, here at LITD. That information has to do with how the Hennepin County chief medical officer views the role of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd's death. 

Yesterday, at Knowledge Is Good, former state and federal prosecutor George Parry filled in the timeline by which the prosecutors there became privy to the toxicology report showing that Floyd was OD-ing at the time of his run-in with police. Upshot: That document didn't come to light until after charges had been filed against Chauvin et al:

These charges were based on the autopsy performed by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office and a private “re-autopsy” performed at the request of the Floyd family’s attorney. Based on those procedures, the medical examiner issued a revised autopsy report stating that Floyd had died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression.” In short, Floyd’s death was allegedly caused by the manner in which the police had restrained him.

But the police defendants were charged before the medical examiner had received the report of Floyd’s toxicology screen by NMS Labs of Horsham, Pennsylvania.

Then, on May 31, 2020, NMS Labs forwarded Floyd’s toxicology report to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners’ Office.

And that’s when the proverbial fecal matter hit the fan.

At 7:30 p.m. on May 31, 2020, prosecutors “met” online with Dr. Andrew Baker, Chief Medical Examiner of Hennepin County, to discuss Floyd’s toxicology report. Take a look at this recently released June 1, 2020, memorandum by Assistant County Attorney Amy Sweasy of that discussion.

So there they were, staring at the just-received and damning toxicology report that blew to smithereens the whole prosecution theory that the police had killed Floyd. To their undoubted dismay, Dr. Baker, the chief medical examiner, had to concede that at 11 ng/mL, Floyd had “a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.” He also conceded that the fentanyl overdose “can cause pulmonary edema,” a frothy fluid build-up in the lungs that was evidenced by the finding at autopsy that Floyd’s lungs weighed two to three times normal weight.

This is consistent with Officer Kueng’s observation at the scene that Floyd was foaming at the mouth and, as found at autopsy, that his lungs were “diffusely congested and edematous.”

In other words, like a drowned man, Floyd’s lungs were filled with fluid. And that was the obvious and inescapable reason why Floyd kept shouting over and over again that he couldn’t breathe even when he was upright and mobile.

The memorandum ends with Dr. Baker’s devastating conclusion that “if Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he [Dr. Baker] would conclude that it was an overdose death.”

Translation: this toxicology report drives a stake through the heart of our murder case. How do we justify criminally charging these police officers and explain away our colossal screw-up?

It is quite telling that this explosively exculpatory June 1 memorandum was not released by the prosecution until August 25, 2020. All of which prompts these questions:

First, why did the prosecution wait three months to release this memorandum?

Second, if the prosecution had released this information in a timely fashion, would that have helped to quell the anti-police outrage that has fueled the nationwide orgy of rioting and looting?

Third, in light of Floyd’s toxicology results and the medical examiner’s assessment that Floyd’s fentanyl overdose caused him to essentially drown in his own bodily fluid, why haven’t the charges against all of the police defendants been dropped?

Think about it. This nation has been subjected to three months of its cities being torched and looted in response to an inaccurate narrative. 

And now, more details are emerging about the Jacob Blake situation:

the police dispatcher said a woman had called police saying “her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises.” 

That certainly made it sound more like what I alluded to initially. If there was a warrant out for Blake for domestic abuse, sexual assault, etc. then it would make sense if a restraining order was in place. Now, most of these details are being confirmed. The New York Post reported last night that the woman in question was a repeat victim of Blake’s and she was the one who called the police to the scene after Blake pushed his way into her home and sexually assaulted her again. Before you click through and read the rest of that article, I will warn you in advance that the details of the assault are offered in a rather graphic form and may be disturbing to some readers.

The cops involved in the shooting of Jacob Blake — which touched off a fresh wave of angry, anti-police sentiment across the country — were attempting to arrest him for violating a restraining order stemming from an alleged sexual assault, The Post has learned.

Blake, 29, was forbidden from going to the Kenosha home of his alleged victim from the May 3 incident, and police were dispatched Sunday following a 911 call saying he was there.

The responding officers were aware he had an open warrant for felony sexual assault, according to dispatch records and the Kenosha Professional Police Association, which released a statement on the incident on Friday.

So this wasn’t some meeting of happenstance between Jason Blake and the police. They had been called to the scene by a repeat sexual assault victim. There was already a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and the cops were there to execute it. The cops knew about all of this before they arrived, explaining how they might have been prepared for a confrontation when they got there and their general approach in trying to take Blake into custody. Blake’s family is calling any discussion of his history prior to the shooting “garbage” but it certainly seems relevant. 

You should read the linked New York Post article to get fully elucidated.  This woman was damn scared of Jacob Blake.

It may be too much to ask in this overheated summer of 2020 that everyone insist on enough facts about these situations to preclude their coming to emotion-driven conclusions that have society-wide consequences. 

It doesn't take much - just a few of these situations that become the hot news of the hour without all relevant information on the table - for what remains of trust in post-America's news-reporting industry to fully evaporate. That void will be filled by common acceptance of the most inflammatory narrative out there, and the resultant anarchy will gain further momentum.

 

The Very Stable Genius seems not to have a clue about the position he's in

Nobody in the country beyond him and his die-hard base thinks his prospects are good.

As Peggy Noonan puts it at the Wall Street Journal, 

He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows. 

As Windsor Mann puts it at The Week:

Trump's challenge as a non-challenger is to talk about anything other than his record. At his rally in Tulsa last weekend, he spent nearly 15 minutestalking about his ability to walk down a ramp and to sip water with one hand. This week — as seven states reported their highest numbers of coronavirus hospitalizations and as 1.5 million Americans filed for unemployment — Trump said the lobster industry was "back, bigger and better than anyone thought possible."

Trump isn't talking about the issues that matter most. He's talking about lobsters, "Obamagate," flag burning, and Confederate monuments because he doesn't want — can't afford — to talk about three crises: the health crisis, the economic crisis, and his presidency.
With nothing to brag about, he is spouting Nixonian catchphrases about "THE SILENT MAJORITY," notwithstanding the fact that his base is neither silent nor the majority. Trump seems to think that by saying or tweeting something, his words will become actualized — that if he says his supporters are the majority, that means they are. Instead of persuading people to support him, Trump is deceiving himself into believing they already do.

To many voters in 2016, the idea of an outsider "shaking things up" was vaguely appealing, precisely because it was so vague. As a political neophyte, Trump could make sweeping promises without having to defend or explain anything. His inexperience was a boon. Having never been tested in politics, he had never failed. He talked like a regular guy, which is to say, like someone who had no idea what he was talking about. He still talks that way.
Now we know the consequences of a Trump presidency: mass death, mass unemployment, civil unrest, an erosion of democratic norms at home, and growing distrust of America abroad. Trump may not learn from experience, but voters do.

As Tucker Carlson put it in the monologue to his FNC show last night,

Not many people are saying this out loud on the Right, but President Trump could well lose this election . . .  

What seemed awful the other day is normal now . . . If you don't vigorously defend your own worldview, then you lose. Bad ideas spread and quickly congeal into conventional wisdom. This is especially true right now, as everything in American life is up for grabs . . . Once big things start changing, they change more quickly than we expect. All of this means that this is precisely the time - tonight - to defend the institutions that we desperately need to keep in this country. Those institutions include the nuclear family, our freedom of speech, shall, independent businesses, absolute colorblindness under the law, the noble tradition of nonviolent protest . .  Those are the things that make America worth living in. We need to defend these things with everything we have. All of us, including the president. That is his hope of re-election . . . 

As Erick Erickson puts it in his Substack newsletter,

The election is not today. That is really good news for President Trump. If the election were today, the President would be toast. It is really ugly out there right now.

As Jonathan Easley and Brett Samuels put it at The Hill,

There is frustration in Trump World over the president's lack of discipline and his confrontational tone during a time of high anxiety over the coronavirus and civil unrest around the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  

And right there, face to face, on the FNC program of one of his most slavish devotees, the VSG did nothing to disabuse us of the notion that he is without a rudder:

Fox News’ Sean Hannity teed one up for the president during a Thursday interview that was filled with simple, leading questions.

Hannity asked Trump: “If you hear in 131 days from now, at some point in the night or early morning: ‘We can now project Donald J. Trump has been re-elected the 45th president of the United States’—let’s talk. What’s at stake in this election as you compare and contrast, and what is one of your top priority items for a second term?”

A completely stumped Trump decided to riff and wound up rambling off a mess of words that were tailor-made for the viral comedic sensation Sarah Cooper’s next lip-synch video.

“Well, one of the things that will be really great, you know, the word experience is still good,” Trump said while turning to the audience. “I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s an, a very important meaning.”

The president continued to answer the question about some of the important issues he’d conquer during a second term if given the chance.

“I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, ‘This is great,'” Trump said. “But I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration.”

Without taking a breath, Trump then pivoted to his former national security adviser John Bolton, whose new book about his time in the White House has gotten under the president’s skin—but also, who has nothing to do with the question Hannity asked.

“You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. The only thing he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people,” Trump said.

As those of us who always saw the colossal mistake the Republican Party was making in getting behind this guy, who watched the at least 100 reasons he was unfit to be president present themselves, we knew this day would come.

It's going to be what it's going to be. It seems likely that November 3rd is going to be a big night for Democrats, and that will be horrible for America. We'll get identity politics and the erasure of Western civilization's history on steroids, redistribution like we've never seen, and the imposition of such utter fictions as that the global climate is in trouble requiring the urgent reversal of human advancement, and that there are more than two genders.

Donald Trump may win, and that will horrible, too.

It's hard not to conclude that our civilization is not only well past its peak, but unraveling by the hour.

The Mueller report release - initial thoughts

Its main effect is going to be to pull the puppet strings of the two main types of knee-jerk tribalists in post-America - the Leftists and the throne-sniffers.

 The Leftists, as exemplified by their standard-bearers in Congress, are already launching their own investigations, the tiresome nature of which will ensure an ever-shrinking interested public.

The throne-sniffers will crow. Their king will be insufferable. 

That's about it. 

As actually important stuff happens in the world, this whole thing will recede from the national radar.

I draw no firm conclusions on it, because there is no solid theme that emerges from the facts

Have you been enjoying the nonstop parsing of James Comey's possible motives, the blow-by-blow accounts of the Jeff Sessions testimony, the laser-like focus on how many meetings Kislyak and Sessions had in 2016, the MSM's insistence that all this has the strong smell of Watergate about it?

Me, neither.

The whole thing is the utterly predictable result of electing a rudderless loudmouth as president, surrounding him with some actually fine people, and then putting them in impossible situations due to the excesses of his character.

Sure, the MSM takes an unabashedly leftist slant toward everything.

Sure, there is validity to the claim of a "deep state" in which bureaucrats have strong motivation to protect the gravy train - and the institutional endorsement of their leftist worldview.

But to say that the man at the top has no culpability for this current morass is to reveal oneself as a willfully blind water-carrier. (Exhibit A: Charles Hurt at the Washington Times: "If only those in Congress had the political instincts or noble statesmanship of President Trump, we just might get something done around here.")

And when willful blindness gets wedded to positions of influence, truth fades from the scene:

Think of the avalanche of vitriol against James Comey. Trump fired him, misled the public about the reasons, and then absurdly trashed his reputation. But how dare Comey fight back and defend himself? How dare he “leak” a memo? Never mind that he stood up and answered questions, under oath, just days later. He’s a “leaker,” and no one likes a leaker. The same people who decry a rush to judgment against Trump are forwarding and sharing article after article claiming that Comey (without yet seeing the relevant evidence) potentially violated his employment agreement or even federal criminal statutes when he asked a friend to read excerpts of his memos to the New York Times.

Lost in the anger is a serious look at the truth (and implications) of his allegations. Did a president demand personal loyalty from an FBI director? Did he improperly ask him to drop an active criminal investigation of a former close adviser? Did he circumvent normal channels and demand that Comey, in essence, “clear” him publicly? Did Trump fire him when he failed to comply with these demands, and then hide the ball about the reason?

Instead, we get the Ken Starring of James Comey and Robert Mueller. It’s not enough to trash Comey; now there’s blood in the water around Mueller. Men like Newt Gingrich have pivoted on a dime. On May 17, Gingrich is declared that “Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity.” On June 12, he attacked Mueller, saying that it was “time to rethink.” Others already got the jump on Gingrich. On May 18, Judicial Watch put out a statement calling Mueller a “bizarre choice” to be special counsel — because he was allegedly too politically correct on his approach to Muslim terrorism when he was FBI director. How does that bear on his fitness to investigate various aspects of the Russian election-interference controversy?

"Cacophony" is a word I used frequently to describe what we were heading toward as the 2016 campaign season unfolded and finally presented us with the lay of the land for our present year. Layer upon layer of fevered voices defending various kinds of turf, from policy orientations to career and financial interests (all at the expense of the three pillars of actual conservatism to which I hearken back at the risk of appearing tiresome).

For instance, Mueller is coming in for attacks based on the Democrat donors on his independent-counsel team.

Would the attackers have us forget this track record?

How do you feel, for example, about these credentials?

• Handed over $41,000 to Eliot Spitzer, who made it all the way to the Governor’s Mansion before his relationship with a high-priced prostitute became public. And gave almost $4500 to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner who publicly tweeted lewd pictures of himself.
• Has no problem handing out cash to some of the most liberal politicians hailing from New York. Gave $64,000 to Andrew Cuomo, helped elect and re-elect New York mayor David Dinkins, and donated $8,900 to Chuck Schumer, one of the leading Senate Democrats advocating for amnesty and to put liberal justices on the Supreme Court.
• Is a significant backer of the corrupt Democrat machine in New York, giving $138,000 to the party over several decades. Since 1999, has personally contributed over $350,000 to New York candidates and committees, and at least an additional $50,000 through one businesses.
• Has contributed to Hillary’s New York senate and presidential campaigns, and given at least $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation (though some reports have it closer to $250,000).
• Given thousands of dollars to individuals with legal and ethical violations. Gave $56,000 to convicted felon Alan Hevesi who went to prison for a massive pay to play pension scandal. Contributed to a disgraced Queens assemblyman who stole $90,000 from a little league association. And he donated to Sheldon Silver, a former Speaker of the New York State Assembly who is facing 130 years in prison for a corruption.

Pretty unsavory, don’t you think? Well that’s not the CV of any of Mueller’s picks for the investigative team. It is in fact a list of some of the many contributions to Democrats made by Donald Trump over the years. (Source.)

And to Charles Hurt's assertion that Congress is getting nothing done, the House is actually making headway - generally out of the glare of a media machine obsessed with finding an impeachment-worthy scandal  - on a major front. It passed  the Financial CHOICE Act, which goes a long way toward rectifying Dodd-Frank's harmful absurdities. And in the Senate, a stroke of procedural luck has fueled the determination of that body's Republicans to get moving on health care in a serious way:

Last week, while most of Washington obsessed over the self-serving cavils of a cashiered federal bureaucrat, Senate Republicans focused on a project much nearer to the hearts of the voters — repealing Obamacare. And the GOP made significant progress in that effort. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that repeal can be passed via reconciliation and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fast-tracked the process by invoking “rule 14,” which permits the Senate to skip laborious committee hearings that Democrats planned to use for protracted grandstanding. Meanwhile, moderate Republicans are coming around on proposed changes to Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion about which they had expressed reservations.

The ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was crucial to the GOP plan to get “repeal and replace” done quickly. Thus, the Republican Conference breathed a sigh of relief when Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi announced MacDonough’s thumbs up: “The health care bill passed by the House of Representatives, H.R. 1628 — the American Health Care Act of 2017 [AHCA], providing for the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, complies with the Senate reconciliation process.” The use of reconciliation for repeal and replace has been denounced by the Democrats, of course, but they used it themselves to pass Obamacare. Senator Enzi’s announcement provides a summary of how it works:

After the House transmits H.R. 1628 to the Senate, the Senate Majority Leader will have the ability to bring up the legislation under the provisions of reconciliation, which include: a non-debatable motion to proceed that only reqquires a simple majority vote; no filibuster; time limits on overall debate, amendments, and motions; and adoption of the legislation by a simple majority vote. As well, there are strict parameters for contents of amendments, including the Byrd rule and compliance with various budget restrictions. 

It goes without saying that the Democrats are in denial about the parliamentarian’s ruling. The ranking member of the Budget Committee, alleged Independent Bernie Sanders, has already claimed that MacDonough didn’t actually say what she said: “The parliamentarian has ruled in favor of the Republicans on one narrow procedural issue, but it remains to be seen whether the House-passed bill qualifies for reconciliation in the Senate.” The Democrats will hang their hat on the “Byrd rule” mentioned in Senator Enzi’s announcement, which prohibits provisions unrelated to the federal budget from being included in a reconciliation bill. Sanders, et al., will no doubt claim that every provision of AHCA is precluded by the Byrd rule.

But let us remember that the federal government's primary raison d'être is keeping us safe, and the national security implications of whatever Russia's involvement in the 2016 election ought to be driving any investigations by Congress or independent counsels. Russia, by its alliances (think Syria and Iran), as well as its history of buzzing US planes and harassing US ships, as well as its previous forays into cyber-mischief, has proven that it must be dealt with warily.

And speaking of national security, while everybody is trying to make this former FBI director look good or bad, and switching sides at the slightest circumstantial prompting, and either lionizing Trump or making his cringe-worthy bluster the story of the day, how many people being paid by our tax dollars are focusing on the North Korean threat, which James Mattis has been calling urgent since he became defense secretary?

Hard to tell, with all this cacophony. A Left - the facets of which include elected officials, "deep state" bureaucrats, university students and professors, television talking heads, and social-media dispensers of venom - that is jockeying for the first opportunity to achieve its final goal of impeaching the president. A president whose repulsive character traits fuel that venom and that determination to impeach. A still-sizable army of his slavish devotees who want to obscure some very real questions, and who will toss anybody under the bus that threatens their Trump-can-do-no-wrong narrative.

And a world full of actors who don't see a sliver of daylight's worth of difference between all the factions within America, only an America that must be destroyed.

Not a recipe for making sense or maximizing human freedom, or even making America great again, however one would like to define that.

About that 20 million figure the Freedom-Haters trot out as the number who will lose coverage when the "A"CA is jettisoned

It's a crock, as Genevieve Wood of the Heritage Foundation explains:

The Obama administration claims 20 million more Americans today have health care due to Obamacare. The reality is that when you look at the actual net gains over the past two years since the program was fully implemented, the number is 14 million, and of that, 11.8 million (84 percent) were people given the “gift” of Medicaid.

And new research shows that even fewer people will be left without insurance after the repeal of Obamacare. Numbers are still being crunched, but between statistics released by the Congressional Budget Office and one of the infamous architects of Obamacare, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jonathan Gruber, it’s estimated that anywhere from 2 to 7 million people now on Medicaid would have qualified for the program even without Obamacare.

That further discredits the administration’s claim of 20 million more Americans having health insurance because of Obamacare.

Multiple studies have also shown that even those who are uninsured often have better outcomes than those with Medicaid. A University of Virginia study found that for eight different surgical procedures, Medicaid patients were more likely to die than privately insured or uninsured patients. They were also more likely to suffer complications.

And it is important to note that this study focused on procedures done from 2003-2007, prior to the geniuses in Washington deciding it was a good idea to put even more people on the already overburdened Medicaid system.

Additionally, despite what proponents of the law promised, there is little evidence to show that the use of emergency rooms, which have a higher level of medical errors, has decreased due to Obamacare.

Another narrative busted.

Staying true to the principles as the age of Squirrel-Hair gets underway

It seems to me that one mark of a conservative is getting the response to the remark, "It's a new day; the old ways have been tried and found ineffective, so we're going with something new" correct.

Clearly, if such a remark comes from a leftist, the way for a conservative to formulate the response is pretty much ready-made. "No, transgender bathrooms, subsidies to solar-panel "companies," pseudo-agreements that allow mortal enemies to obtain nuclear arsenals, therapy dogs for law students, government-run health-insurance exchanges, and race-based Congressional caucuses are as wrong as ever" is the proper rejoinder. Pretty much a no-brainer, right?

But what to say to the person so uttering when he or she is speaking about Trumpism, the injection of a populist-nationalist sentiment into the ideology heretofore known as conservatism?

We've had to contend with these get-with-the-program exhortations from the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, Gingrich, Root and Black since the summer of 2015.

What does a unreconstructed conservatism say to them?

Especially since they just won a huge political victory?

There's nothing gracious about the way they state it. Ask Jonah Goldberg:

From the Right, any time I say anything — and I mean anything — critical of Trump, I’m told it’s proof that I’m “bitter” or “biased” and that I can’t admit I was wrong about him, etc. I can go on TV and say that Trump has been brilliant at x and y but I’m still concerned about z, and all I’ll hear is the whistle of incoming ALL CAPS arrows: GET OVER IT! HE WON! GO AWAY NEVER TRUMPERS! HOW DO I TURN OFF CAPLOCK!!!111! Etc.

The quest for clarity gets much stickier in dealing with this bunch than it does with proudly overt leftists. For one thing, they have a point about how actual conservative principles do indeed get an airing in the age of Squirrel-Hair. Pompeo, Mattis,  DeVoss, Pruitt, Perry, Puzder, Sessions, and, obviously, Pence, are all great picks. What's there to gripe about?

Plenty. You see, there's the light-of-day Trump, who listens to those he respects and acts on their advice. That's clearly how we got such an overall great cabinet. Then there is the after-dark Trump, the one who barks and bellows at his thank-yu rallies, and, of course, tweets well into the night.

The one who leaves you shaking your head and muttering, "What the hell brought that on?"

The latest exhibit in substantiation of this assertion:

With the election behind him and nothing to lose, Trump is openly admitting what was pointed out on social media and more traditional news sources throughout the campaign: Trump supporters are dangerous.

From the Hill:

“You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean you are going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right?” Trump said in Orlando, Fla., during a stop on his “thank you” tour.

“But now, you’re mellow and you’re cool and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent, right? Because we won, right?”

Not nearly? Is that supposed to make the rest of society feel better?

I haven't read the transcript of the whole speech; I saw that he was at some podium as I channel-surfed and, as usual, found a college-basketball game that was much more to my liking. But what kind of context could an utterance like that be put in that would explain its fundamental weirdness?

I actually think the more important work to be done, in terms of arguing with the various types of people exhorting us to get with the program of a new day, is with leftists rather than the self-appointed populists who still consider themselves conservative. They are going to carry Squirrel-Hair's water long past the point where their self-respect is taking a beating. They truly don't care about the vulgarity, shallowness, narcissism and lack of core principles that have been the essence of real conservatives' opposition to Trump all along. He will get a pass for the most egregious outbursts.

But leftists, because they are ignorant - and by that I mean that they have zero interest in parsing the fissures on the Right and seeing that rightie sector that still has deep misgivings about this guy winning the presidency - will use all its formerly-mainstream organs (NYT, CNN, etc.) as well as social media and opinion-site comment threads to try to lump everyone right-of-center into a Trumpist camp.

The thorny task before sites like LITD is to navigate between the necessary task of keeping the three pillars of actual conservatism front and center and giving the nod to S-H when he gets stuff right.

It's important work. As always, the practice of conservative principles, both in official government proceedings as well as in the culture, is a mission of urgency. On the other hand, since, clearly, not a lot of people have not thought those principles out, the matter of distinguishing for them the stark difference between what they actually are and this imperfect vessel by which they will imperfectly be promulgated and implemented is going to occupy a lot of our time and mental energy.

And expect no help from you-know-who. He is who he is, for better and definitely for worse.

The question looms larger yet: failure born of incompetence, or by Cloward-Piven design?

We know beyond doubt that the Most Equal Comrade and his Freedom-Hater associates in Congress told us blatant falsehoods about keeping our plans and doctors, and how the"A"CA was going to put health care in post-America on a more stable and equitable footing.

It's plain to all that it has not worked out that way:

When Health Republic Insurance of New Jersey announced recently that it’s $46 million in debt and shutting down, it became the 17th failed ObamaCare co-op since the Affordable Care Act launched three years ago.

Those failures – just six of the original 23 co-ops remain – have left hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for coverage. 

Meanwhile, insurers claiming big losses are leaving some state exchanges -- including Indiana University Health Plans, whose exit is expected to result in 27,000 Indiana residents losing ObamaCare plans in 2017. And companies still operating in the federal and state exchanges are raising premiums for next year. 

Together, the developments are posing new challenges for Americans seeking affordable coverage, and show the highly touted overhaul of the country’s health care system is in some cases not yielding the savings President Obama once promised.

As a candidate on the campaign trail in 2008, Obama once said: “If you’ve got health insurance, we’re going to help that employer save $2,500 per family per year. … Those savings are going to be passed along to the workers.”

Nationally, though, premium hikes are expected to average 8 percent next year. Many insurance companies are seeking much more than that, for the exchange plans and those offered to employers. 

Premera in Washington state is approved to charge 19 percent more next year. Rates across California will go up an average of 13 percent. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas is asking to raise premiums a stunning 60 percent.

Long-time critics of ObamaCare say they saw it coming.

“That basic promise, that it’s going to make health care more affordable, it’s not making health care more affordable,” said Avik Roy, an author and Republican adviser. “It’s making health care more expensive, especially for the uninsured.” 

The problem remains a risk pool with too many sick people and not enough who are young and healthy. Also, federal backstop programs, aimed at helping companies that miscalculated how much to charge, are now expired. So insurance companies need higher premiums to cover payouts to doctors and hospitals.

The alternative is pulling out of health exchanges, which many companies have been doing. In recent months Aetna, United Health Care and several Blue Cross and Blue Shield subsidiaries have announced they will be leaving many of the exchanges in 2017.

“That’s going to be the future,” said Roger Stark of the Washington Policy Center in Washington State. “What we’re seeing here is the beginning of a death spiral as far as exchanges are concerned as more companies pull out.” 

In Indiana, the company pulling out of the exchange had covered 15 percent of those covered under ObamaCare. Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, a Republican, told The Washington Times this is further evidence the health care law is “collapsing before our eyes.”

Yet Madame BleachBit's solution is to double down. A public option.

Again, you have to ask if this was just a colossal oopsie or orchestrated socioeconomic decline.

In other words, are these people merely buffoons, or are they the most sinister kind of liar?

Another city in riot mode before facts of the catalyzing incident are established

Where have we seen this pattern before?

PUTNEY: The officers gave loud, clear, verbal commands which were also heard by many of the witnesses.  They were instructing in the subject, once he got out of the vehicle, to drop the weapon.  In spite of their verbal commands Mr. Scott, as I said, exited his vehicle with a handgun as the officers continued to yell at him to drop it.  He stepped out, posing a threat to the officers, and Officer Brentley Vinson subsequently fired his weapon, striking the subject.

And, because this is post-America, it must be pointed out that Charlotte police chief Putney is black.

So once again, as with the grand promises the Most Equal Comrade made to us about health care (like your doctor, keep you doctor, like your plan, keep your plan), Iran (can be brought into the "international community") and a host of other areas of national life, we have to ask: A failure or a lie from the outset?

James Comey must decide what kind of man he is

In his column today at the New York Observer, Austin Bay employs the rhetoric device of addressing a particular person. The person is FBI director James Comey. He basically lets Comey know that he's looking at his last chance to demonstrate character and salvage his reputation. Bay says it's abundantly clear that Comey has, and has had, the goods on Madame BleachBit.

He comes right out and says that it's on Comey if a known criminal becomes president.

Bay's focus is on Part IV of the report issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

Part IV is tedious reading. As a government worker, you ought to be able to handle that. Part IV provides the deep and documented background for the obstruction of justice charge.

For that matter, the entire report is a tedious read. That’s why I doubt the quick study artists in the mainstream media who already know everything didn’t bother to read the proposed report—much less the updated version.

Failure to slog through the brutal details didn’t stop the usual geniuses from immediately dismissing the  proposed report. We heard the lines, like “nothing new here” and “nothing interesting, move along.” Such dismissals slander a remarkably professional investigative effort led by Rep. Trey Gowdy. Gowdy knew the Benghazi massacre mattered and he wanted to produce a thorough report. We had an ambassador killed in an attack by a radical Islamist terror group sharing the same murderous goals as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Think about it, Jim. The Benghazi attack occurred on 9/11, an iconic date. That’s no coincidence.

15 years after 9/11 we are still at war with these religious totalitarians because they wage war on us. Your FBI Counter-intel guys are the domestic front line in the Global War on Terror. These agents—your Bureau’s outstanding line agents—know we’re at war. I’ve talked with several of them. So a thorough and responsible investigation of the Benghazi atrocity was justified… you do agree, don’t you, Jim?

I’ve read Part IV of the Committee’s report—the entire tedious all of it—even the footnotes. It has moments of drama, but Part IV is basically a lesson in fortitude. The Committee continued to hang tough despite the obnoxious bureaucratic foot-dragging, the calculated failure to provide requested documents and the ultimately illegal obstruction of justice.

I say the Committee. It’s really the majority, the Republicans, who faced the obstruction of justice. 

he Democrats on the Committee often appeared to act hand-in-glove with Team Hillary. They complained the Committee was wasting money, taking too long to investigate. You have to wonder if the Democrats on the Committee read Part IV.

My assertion of connivance isn’t too outlandish. Democrats did connive with Team Hillary when Ms. Clinton testified before the then Democrat-controlled Senate Benghazi committee in 2013.

Political obstruction. That’s bad when we’re investigating a war time massacre.

*  * *

Political obstruction segues into criminal obstruction and The BleachBit Timeline. March 2, 2015 is a critical BleachBit date. That’s when The New York Times reported Hillary had a private email system.

Sharyl Atkinson has kept a running Benghazi timeline that is quite thorough and admirable. I recommend her timeline as a reliable reference. (Atkinson has character and grit. She has the courage to take on powerful crooks. Between you and me, Jim, you’d do well to follow her example.)

However, Zerohedge’s September 3 timeline directly addresses the obstruction of justice. Here are some critical dates, courtesy Zerohedge. PRN means Platte River Networks, the outfit who Hillary hired to handle her rogue server system. The Apple MacBook mentioned in the timeline contained backup copies of Hillary’s emails.

• Early 2014—Monica Hanley advises Undisclosed PRN Staff Member to wipe the Apple MacBook clean after uploading Hillary’s emails to the new PRN server but he forgets to do it
• Early 2014—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member mails Apple MacBook back to Clinton and it is promptly lost
• Dec 2014—Hillary delivers 55,000 emails to State Department
• Dec 2014/Jan 2015—Heather Samuelson and Cheryl Mills request emails be deleted from their computer using BleachBit
• Dec 2014/Jan 2015—“Unknown Clinton staff member” instructs PRN to remove archives of Clinton emails from PRN server
• Mar 2, 2015—NYT releases an article showing that Hillary used a personal email server in violation of State Department rules
• Mar 4, 2015—Hillary receives subpoena from House Select Committee on Benghazi instructing her to preserve and deliver all emails from her personal servers
• Mar 25, 2015—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member has a conference call with “President Clinton’s Staff”
• Mar 25-31, 2015—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member has “oh shit” moment and realizes he forgot to wipe Hillary’s email archive from the PRN server back in December…which he promptly does using BleachBit despite later admitting he “was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s e-mail data on the PRN server”
• Jun 2016—FBI discovers that Undisclosed PRN Staff Member forgot to erase 940 emails from the gmail account he created to help with the PRN server upload

Zerohedge’s discussion of the March 4 subpoena includes a long quote from the House Select Committee’s report. March 4 is a particularly important date because that’s the date the committee requests the “preservation and retention of all documents and media” related to Hillary’s two rogue email addresses on her rogue email server operating (safely, she thought) beyond the reach of federal record retention regulations.

Then comes what Zerohedge calls a difficult “moment”:

“On March 25, 2015, the Undisclosed PRN Staff Member had a ‘conference call with President Clinton’s staff.’ Apparently, in the days following that call, the Undisclosed PRN Staff Member had an ‘oh shit moment’ when he realized he had forgotten to wipe the PRN server clean as he had been instructed to do back in December by Cheryl Mills.

Therefore, sometime within the 6 days after a call with ‘President Clinton’s Staff,’ that PRN server was wiped clean using BleachBit despite the subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi received weeks earlier on March 4, 2016.”

BleachBit, Jim. Software for a thorough scrub of a server. To remove evidence.
Now tell me, Comey. Do you really think (as Zerohedge says, tongue in cheek) “Mills, Hillary, President Clinton’s Office were all blissfully unaware of the actions of their rogue IT guy”? You and your agency know Hillary failed to turn over work-related emails to the Committee. You think these curiouser and curiouser shenanigans were all accidental? Are you and Alice living happily together in Wonderland?
In a letter sent to Platte River Networks on September 6 (the day before your protesteth too much memo), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), now head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, gave the FBI credit for confirming that Hillary failed to turn over work related emails despite repeated requests and subpoenas to do so.
I employ italics, Jim, to get your attention, because, dammit, Chafetz is doing your job. He’s going after the little fish to get to the shark. That’s how you Feebs operate when you’re doing your job. How come you didn’t indict this anonymous Platte River Networks employee for knowingly destroying subpoenaed evidence? I’m not the first to ask this question. Jonathan Turley asked it on September 6.
Turley even quotes 2 U.S. Code § 192. He just didn’t put the question to you as personally as I have.
Jim, I see you as a man in a responsibility-heavy government security position who has acted irresponsibly. Obstruction of justice is an indictable crime—that’s the crime Richard Nixon and his aides committed in the Watergate Scandal. You remember Watergate, don’t you? The scandal that made The Washington Postfamous? Turns out the Deep Throat source on whom WaPo reporters relied was the FBI’s Number Two Boss. Back in 1974 our country couldn’t stomach a criminal in the White House. So, Comey, why the hell in 2016 should you help get a criminal elected?
Mr. Director, it’s time for you to admit you erred in early July. You’ve got the evidence. Call a press conference. Recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted and, this time, let Attorney General Loretta Lynch make the decision. She’s the prosecutor—not you.

Recommend indictment for three reasons, Mr. Director. First and foremost recommend she face legal consequences because her actions were criminal.   

This is a classic example of a basic lesson: When Democrats say it's time to move on from something regarding the Clinton machine, it's time to look at it more deeply.

Who was Harvey Milk really?

You probably know about this by now:

“The Navy is set to name a ship after the gay rights icon and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, according to a congressional notification obtained by USNI News.
“The July 14, 2016 notification, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, indicated he intended to name a planned Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Harvey Milk (T-AO-206).”

Now, even if he'd been a model citizen, who'd had a relationship of deep commitment and fidelity to one homosexual sweetheart throughout his life, we'd still be talking about this nation's military making a "hero" out of someone specifically on the basis of his sin.

But he was no such person:

What would you call a man of whom, as regards sexual preference, his own close friend and biographer confessed, “Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance abuse problems”?

Let's recall the circumstances that form the basis for the hard left regarding him as a martyr:

Harvey Milk’s only claim to fame is that he was the first openly homosexual candidate to be elected to public office (San Francisco city commissioner). His chief cause was to do away with the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In 1978 Milk was murdered over a non-related political dispute by fellow Democrat Dan White.

Now, for some specifics:

Harvey Milk was both a pederast and, by extension, a statutory rapist. One of Milk’s victims was a 16-year-old runaway from Maryland named Jack Galen McKinley. Motivated by an apparent quid pro quo of prurience, Milk plucked McKinley from the streets.

Randy Shilts was a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and close friend to Harvey Milk. Though Shilts died of AIDS in 1994, he remains, even today, one of the most beloved journalists in the “LGBT” community.

Shilts was also Harvey Milk’s biographer. In his glowing book “The Mayor of Castro Street,” he wrote of Milk’s “relationship” with the McKinley boy: “… Sixteen-year-old McKinley was looking for some kind of father figure. … At 33, Milk was launching a new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction toward which his new lover would pull him.”

McKinley later killed himself.

Or there was this one:

Another teen who crossed paths with Harvey Milk was Christian convert and former homosexual Gerard Dols. In a 2008 radio interview with Concerned Women for America, Dols shared of how – as a physically disabled teen – the “very nice” Harvey Milk had encouraged him in 1977 to run away from his Minnesota home and come to San Francisco.
According to Dols, Milk told him, “Don’t tell your parents,” and later sent him a letter with instructions. Thankfully, the letter was intercepted by Dols’ parents, who then filed a complaint with the Minnesota attorney general’s office.
The incident was swept under the rug.
Milk was also reputed to offer room and board in his San Francisco flat to young sailors in exchange for sodomy. His history of child sexual abuse was (and is) no secret to Obama or the homosexual community.

The closest Milk ever came to the kind of hypothetical relationship[ I describe above was these:

“The information Shilts provides about Milk’s sexual partners is revealing about the nature of male homosexual life in America,” concluded Sprigg. “Milk’s first long-term lover, Joe, had his ‘introduction to gay life’ when he performed sex acts upon men in a movie theatre for money – at age 9. Milk’s next lover, Craig, had been arrested after having sex with a 40-year-old man – when Craig was 14. He met Milk when he was 17. ‘[I]t would be to such boyish-looking men in their late teens and early 20s that Milk would be attracted for the rest of his life,’ Shilts reports. Another lover, Jack, moved in with Milk when he was 16 and Milk was 33. Jack attempted suicide several times, and once when he physically attacked Milk, ‘Harvey literally tied him up and threw him in a closet,'” reports Shilts.

And it's not like this ship will be the only way he's being "honored" in post-America:

So what does a man like Harvey Milk get for his crimes and predatory predilections? While most sexual predators get time in prison and a dishonorable mention on the registry of sex offenders, Harvey Milk got his own California state holiday(“Harvey Milk Day”), officialU.S. postage stamp, aposthumous Presidential Medal of Freedomand, now, is honored with a U.S. Naval ship in his own name.

God help us.