If you like René Magritte

If you like René Magritte, then you’ll love this by Tom Stiglich at Townhall:

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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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Tom Stiglich's "Pencil Neck" cartoon

Tom Stiglich’s cartoon on Townhall

Click to embiggen or click on the link above. Extra funny bit with a No. 2 pencil . . .

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Veteran's Day

Today is Veteran’s Day.

Veterans Day (originally known as Armistice Day) is a federal holiday in the United States observed annually on November 11, for honoring military veterans, that is, persons who have served in the United States Armed Forces 

Remember those who served. The photos above are my late father (U.S. Navy) and late father-in-law (British 8^th Army), both of whom served in WW2.

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Veteran’s Day weekend: a feel-good report

Photo via Don Surber

Via Don Surber at his blog:

Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved

In August 1995, organizers for the annual Veterans Day Parade in New York City looked at how much money they had three months before the big day.

$1.21.

The New York Times reported, "A request to airlines to donate blankets for aging veterans was turned down because logos might not be visible on television."

Wow.

The Times reported, "Then Donald Trump, a non-veteran, agreed to throw in $200,000 as well as raise money from his friends, in exchange for being named grand marshal."

In short order, they had $2.4 million, saving the parade and the city's honor.

On Veterans Day 1995, United Press International reported, "More than 500,000 people jammed the sidewalks of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Saturday to watch three generations of veterans march in the Nation's Parade. The crowd cheered as 25,000 veterans marched in one of the last national events marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. The mood of the parade was festive despite the blustery weather, with marching veterans smiling and onlookers shouting 'Thank you.'"

The story also said, "Organizers, who placed the turnout at closer to a million, said the parade would not have been a success if it hadn't been for real estate developer Donald Trump, who contributed $200,000.

"'Donald Trump saved the parade,' said parade director Tom Fox, himself a Vietnam veteran. 'We had asked for donations from 200 corporations, and none of them came through,' he said.

"'This donation is the single most important thing I've ever done,' said a beaming Trump. 'This is more important than all of my buildings and my casinos. This is my way of saying thank you to all the men and women in the armed services who have made it possible for me to become a success. Without them freedom and liberty would be gone.'"

24 years later, hounded by politicians and high taxes, President Trump has moved to Mar-a-Lago.

But he'll be back on Monday in the city he saved to lead the parade he saved.

I like the quote "This is my way of saying thank you to all the men and women in the armed services who have made it possible for me to become a success. Without them freedom and liberty would be gone." Amen. Read the full report here.

Big Tech – and now Huawei

The censorship on Facebook, Twitter, and Google is bad enough. Yesterday, Gordon Chang (a regular guest on Lou Dobbs) has somber warnings on another front -- Huawei:

China, with control of 5G, will be in a position to remotely manipulate the world's devices. In peacetime, Beijing could have the ability to drive cars off cliffs, unlock front doors, and turn off pacemakers. In war, Beijing could paralyze critical infrastructure.

There is no mystery to how Beijing thinks it will grab control.... The Chinese will use Huawei Technologies.... Huawei is a dagger aimed at the heart of America, and as the unnamed adviser... suggests, the threat is a mortal one.

. . .

"A prominent Republican who advises President Donald Trump called America's 5G strategy 'the biggest strategic disaster in U.S. history,'" wrote China-watcher David Goldman recently.

Many people will regard that as an exaggeration, but America's failure to have a 5G strategy will almost certainly prove to have historic consequences.

"5G" is shorthand for the fifth generation of wireless communication.

"In the very near future, dominating the wireless world will be tantamount to dominating the world," wrote Newt Gingrich in Newsweek in February. That is not an exaggeration.

Why not? With speeds 2,000 times faster than existing 4G networks, 5G will permit near-universal connectivity to homes, vehicles, machines, robots, and everything plugged into the Internet of Things (IoT).

Full article is here.

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Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President

I’m on Newt Gingrich’s e-mailing list, but his column is also online here.

Lee Smith has written a book so important and so revealing that every American who cares about the future of our Republic should read it.

The Plot Against the President is a remarkable history of our times. It captures what historian Edward Luttwak called “the paper coup.”

Luttwak is a famous historian who wrote an authoritative study of governments being overturned by coups. Entitled Coup d’etat a Practical Handbook, it established Luttwak’s credentials when he analyzed the post-election war against President Trump.

As Smith reported: “The ‘anti-Trump operation,’ says Luttwak today, ‘was a very American coup, with TV denunciations by seemingly authoritative figures as a key instrument.’ The plot against Trump was a bureaucratic insurgency waged almost entirely through the printed word. It was the ‘Paper Coup.’"

Smith’s book is built around the courageous hard work of Congressman Devin Nunes and his team of Republicans at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Living through the last four years, it has been easy to confuse what was going on and who to trust and distrust.

Smith captures it all in one clear sentence: “Without the big titles and the national security bureaucracy’s legalistic self-defense mechanisms, the story was pretty straightforward: The Clintons hired a bunch of con men who got their dirty cop friends to frame Trump. The press and a corrupt prosecutor handled the cover-up."

Throughout all the confusion, Nunes and the courageous group he assembled kept pursuing the truth through what was an ocean of lies, obstruction, and resistance. In his book, Smith describes a pattern of senior US intelligence officials systematically undermining and targeting people seeking the truth – even one of Nunes’s own investigators, who was a former Department of Justice lawyer.

At the same time, instead of upholding the law, Mueller perverted it. The clear signal Americans got from the spectacle around the Mueller investigation was that the elites in this country were determined to smear the President, even though he’d done nothing wrong.

In fact, Smith writes that the Mueller investigation in fact just became an extension of the larger effort to oust the elected president, and Mueller was a “fixer” to cover-up that the effort was happening.

Nunes understood how Mueller had perverted his role. Smith explains: “Nunes had described ...Mueller produced a perfect feedback loop: intelligence leakers spin a false story to the media, the media publishes the story, Mueller cites the story, and the media and the Democrats then fake outrage at Mueller’s findings. It was as if Nunes were guiding a tour of the underworld."

The news media was so dedicated to the anti-Trump coup attempt that it was impossible to deal with them. Smith describes how Jack Langer, Nunes’s communications director, slowly realized that talking to the mainstream media was actually hurting the truth-finding effort rather than helping inform the public. It didn’t matter what Langer would tell the press because reporters, editors, and producers had already made up their minds about the substance of the story. Talking to Republicans was just a ploy to retain a whiff of objectivity.

At the same time that much of the media was skirting its traditional role, the very nature of the FBI-intelligence community war against Trump made it even harder for legitimate news media to be neutral. In order to get scoops, reporters had to agree to protect anonymous sources – and print what they were told. If they didn’t, they would lose access.

Smith describes the cumulative effect of the bureaucratic corruption and news media collusion (the real collusion story), and it is devastating.

Sadly, we had seen this kind of bureaucratic-news media corruption before, in 2003. It involved some of the same players – including former FBI Director Jim Comey. That time, they tried to destroy Vice President Dick Cheney by framing his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and forcing Libby to bargain for his freedom by selling out his boss.

However, Libby refused to lie about the Vice President and accepted a totally framed punishment. President George W. Bush commuted his sentence. The Washington Bar Association reinstated him for having been the victim of prosecutorial malpractice. President Donald Trump pardoned him completely.

As Smith writes: "the Libby case had been a baseless media-driven scandal, a press frenzy that had resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Mueller 2017 was a replay of Fitzgerald 2003. The latter went after Cheney, the former Trump.”

The current sickness in the Justice Department is deeply rooted. In addition to Smith’s book, informed citizens should read Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie. Powell is currently defending General Mike Flynn and challenging the entire case against him as an illegal frame by willfully dishonest prosecutors.

When you read The Plot Against the President, you will realize there is a lot more going on – and a lot of people may end up in jail for having attempted to destroy an elected president.

Every citizen should read it to understand how sick the system has become.

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