Your Weekend Must Read: AG Bill Barr on the Executive branch

Quite a few blogs are linking to AG William Barr’s recent speech at the Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society, and with good reason.  It is excellent for his insights into the present political landscape, and also in tracing the provisions in our founding documents as influenced by earlier European history. A short extract:

I wanted to choose a topic for this afternoon’s lecture that had an originalist angle. It will likely come as little surprise to this group that I have chosen to speak about the Constitution’s approach to executive power.

I deeply admire the American Presidency as a political and constitutional institution. I believe it is, one of the great, and remarkable innovations in our Constitution, and has been one of the most successful features of the Constitution in protecting the liberties of the American people. More than any other branch, it has fulfilled the expectations of the Framers.

Unfortunately, over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on Presidential authority by the other branches of government. This process I think has substantially weakened the functioning of the Executive Branch, to the detriment of the Nation. This evening, I would like to expand a bit on these themes.

. . .

Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.

In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of “review,” substituting its judgment for the Executive’s in areas committed to the President’s discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.

Read the full speech here. I hope Mr. Barr’s words are followed soon by indictments.

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About those polls: mistakes or lies?

Image credit: NowProphecy

The Hill reports that

Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.

“It’s going to put the polling industry out of business,” said CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “It’s going to put the voter projection industry out of business.”

This is rich. Tapper is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the polling industry got it wrong, so embarrassingly wrong. Tapper knows full well that CNN has been in collusion with the polling industry that DELIBERATELY manipulated the numbers. Sundance has been tracking this racket for years, and today he summarized his research during the 2015-16 election cycle:

THE MEDIA DIDN’T GET IT WRONG –  The pollsters did not work from the wrong data set; the media pollsters, consultants and professional political class did not work from the wrong assumptions, or use the incorrect baselines…..  THEY LIED.

The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was. They lied and manipulated their data in a concerted effort to intentionally falsify reality. There should be no doubt, EVER, in the mind of any political observer as to what took place within the expressed and broadcast polling which fueled over two years of broadcast news. The media intentionally lied.

They knew the truth. The same tools available to us, and to those who were ridiculed for truth-telling, were available to them and many more. They did not get it wrong. They chose to lie to you the American electorate. So let’s name the liars so their names can forever be dispatched from the land where credibility is of value:

• Fox News, pollster Daron Shaw, Shaw Research and associates and the Wall Street Journal. Rupert Murdoch.
• NBC News, pollster Mark Murray, Hart Research and Associates.
• Monmouth University, pollster Patrick Murray.
• CBS News and New York Times writ large.
• ABC News and The Washington Post.
• CNN News Network and ORC Polling.
• Rasmussen and Reuters Polling Operations.

These individuals along with every single corporate national media polling outlet, which in turn contributed to -and skewed- the larger aggregate of the Real Clear Politics average of polls, were complicit in their intent to deceive the American electorate in an ideological scheme to manipulate the psyche of the American voter.

. . .

They did not make mistakes; they did not operate from the wrong assumptions.  These organizations, as part of the larger corporate objectives from those who fund their endeavors, lied. Allowing them to say they made a mistake is only dooming ourselves to the continued cycle of battered electorate syndrome.

. . .

There’s more at his blog post. And for icing on the cake, Sundance reproduces tweets and headlines from polling guru Nate Silver on Trump's candidacy. Go here and scroll down to see the composite of Silver’s propaganda. (If you want to get into the weeds to see HOW they lie, here's an earlier blog by Sundance with a detailed analysis.)

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The next President

photo credit: CNN

Our new President-Elect

Congratulations, especially to all you Deplorables!

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Hillary’s track record as Secretary of State

photo credit: businessinsider.com

Betsy McCaughey contributed a post-debate essay today to The American Spectator website. The article, “Failure at Foggy Bottom,” examines Hillary’s track record running the Dept. of State:

Hillary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president. Don’t believe it.

At the end of her taxpayer-funded audition on the world stage, she came home empty-handed, with no meaningful gains for the United States. Voters are too smart to be wowed when she rattles off names of Islamic terrorist splinter factions and third-world capitals.

Evidence shows she left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. If anything, her record at Foggy Bottom should disqualify her to be president.

. . .

This presidential race is a contest between a builder and a blabberer. The builder, Donald Trump, manages 185 major business ventures around the globe. Until 2009, Clinton had never run anything. Running the State Department was her chance to prove she could do it. She failed miserably.

Read the chapter and verse here.

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