October 27, 2019

The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (3) -- Any Remaining Doubt Should Be Investigated!

October 27, 2019/ Francis Menton

On October 6 I put up two posts calling the two Bidens, Joe and Hunter, “stone cold crooked.” The basis for the label was a series of factual assertions listed in the first of the posts, none of which had received any meaningful refutation in any source I could find.
Since the October 6 posts, facts keep coming out that, as far as I can see, only make the Bidens’ position more and more indefensible.
Simultaneously, organs of the progressive press keep doubling down on the narrative that there is “no evidence” of wrongdoing of the Bidens in Ukraine, and any assertion to the contrary is a “conspiracy theory.”
Let me list some facts that have at least come to my attention since those prior posts. . . .
One thing is immediately obvious about each of these issues: all or almost all of the relevant documents and witnesses are in Ukraine. In other words, if you want to take testimony or subpoena documents, you are going to need to go through a Ukrainian prosecutor. So is anybody in the U.S. government allowed to ask that these obvious pieces of evidence of corruption be investigated?

October 22, 2019

A Serious Contender For Stupidest Litigation In The Country Goes To Trial

October 22, 2019/ Francis Menton

From time to time here at this blog I have considered candidates for the title of “Stupidest Litigation in the Country.”
Today I have a new candidate for the coveted title. The title of the case is People of the State of New York v. ExxonMobil Corp., currently pending in the New York State Supreme Court, New York County. Trial in this case began today.
The history of the case goes back to a big press conference held by then NY AG Eric Schneiderman, together with AGs from some 20 or so other states, and Al Gore, in March 2016, to breathlessly announce that they were commencing a prosecution of Exxon for lying to the public for years about the dangers of human-caused climate change when knowing all along how catastrophic it was and that they were causing it. A massive investigation commenced. After a flurry of subpoenas and some 4 million or so documents produced, many documents emerged wherein Exxon openly acknowledged the risks of climate change, thus contradicting the theory of the investigation; the 20 or so AGs who had previously supported Schneiderman all walked away from the case; Schneiderman himself resigned in disgrace in May 2018 in a sex scandal involving much physical violence on his part; and the whole theory that Exxon had lied to the public about the dangers of climate change or its role in same was quietly withdrawn.
The new Complaint is some 91 pages long, but remarkably there’s almost nothing there.

October 20, 2019

October 20, 2019/ Francis Menton

In recent months the phrase “conspiracy theory” seems to have taken on a whole new meaning. At one time the phrase was reserved for only the craziest of crazy far-out and unprovable theories.
We now have voices in the media using the phrase “conspiracy theory” to refer to President Trump’s assertions that people in the permanent bureaucracy are working to undermine his administration and remove him from office.
Funny, but I could cite dozens of examples of the media and Democrats excitedly cheering on government career operatives and holdovers trying to thwart Trump’s agenda, and doing it completely out in the open and without any kind of attempted secrecy.
The recent impeachment brouhaha is no less of an open and notorious initiative by elements of the permanent bureaucracy to undermine and remove the President. While some in the Democrat media may call that a “conspiracy theory,” others are openly bragging about it and cheering the conspirators as heroes.

October 17, 2019

October 17, 2019/ Francis Menton

“Vile.” “Repugnant to the American dream.” “Cruel.” “Callous and despicable.” “An abhorrent act of moral terrorism.” These are just a few of the comments that have been uttered in the past few weeks with respect to a policy change recently announced by the federal government.

I know what you are thinking: What completely sensible thing has the Trump administration done now?

The quoted comments all relate to a so-called “final rule” issued by the Department of Homeland Security in the Federal Register on August 14, scheduled to take effect on October 15, on the subject of “Inadmissibility [for immigration] Based on Public Charge Grounds.”

So what is this new rule, and what about it has caused the progressive left to go completely berserk?

October 14, 2019

October 14, 2019/ Francis Menton

San Francisco is the latest American city to try to solve the problem of “homelessness” by throwing more and yet more taxpayer cash at it. Should we check in on how it’s going?
You may recall that I last visited the issue of homelessness in San Francisco about a year ago, October 2018, in a post titled “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” At that time, the number of “homeless” in San Francisco was estimated at about 7000, but there was an initiative on the November 2018 ballot, known as Proposition C, calling for a new payroll tax on large employers in San Francisco, intended to raise some $300 million per year to solve this homelessness problem once and for all.
On October 25, 2018, one Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, had an op-ed in the New York Times supporting Proposition C. My post noted that Benioff was only too happy to advocate that others should be forced to spend hundreds of millions on this project through a new tax, while he himself offered to put up none of his own personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, for the purpose.
So where are we now, a year later?

October 10, 2019

October 10, 2019/ Francis Menton

Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website.
[N]ow we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”
[According to Warren] we have a “crisis of environmental justice,” caused by racist people like you putting “profits before people” while the government “look[s] the other way.”
I have a different word to describe Warren’s Plan for Climate Justice. There’s nothing uplifting about my word. The word is “cruel.” Warren’s Plan is truly cruel to the poor and to the people in “frontline and fence line communities” (as Warren calls them). It is cruel because it points only toward greater dependency, which will mean worse health, and toward higher energy costs, which will mean further impoverishment.