October 15, 2020

The Bidens: Corruption Of Progressive Media Rises To A Whole New Level

October 15, 2020/ Francis Menton

Yesterday, the New York Post broke its big story sourced from Hunter Biden’s emails, headlined “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” Probably, every regular reader of this blog is already familiar with that story.
I congratulate the Post on getting and breaking this story. The Post has now revealed definitive evidence of criminal conduct that VP Biden has previously denied.
But recognize that the new documents that the Post has uncovered aren’t anything that you didn’t already know had to exist. The chance that a Ukrainian oligarch hired Hunter Biden a month after his father took charge of US/Ukraine relations, and then paid Hunter $3+ million just to be friendly, was always exactly zero.
So the significance of these new documents is not that they reveal corruption that you didn’t already know about, but rather that they add the additional element of specifically contradicting previous lame attempts at denials by the candidate, which are now demonstrated to be incontrovertibly false.
And then there’s the even bigger story of the corruption of the media. . . .

October 13, 2020

The Washington Post Does George Floyd: Toxic And Patronizing

October 13, 2020/ Francis Menton

Over at the Washington Post, they are in the midst of running a big six-part series with the title “George Floyd’s America.” The subtitle is “Examining systemic racism and racial injustice in the post-civil rights era.” So far, two of the pieces have run.
On October 8 it was “Born with two strikes: How systemic racism shaped Floyd’s life and hobbled his ambition”; and on October 12, it was “Looking for his ticket out.” Forthcoming pieces, it appears, will cover the subjects of housing, criminal justice, healthcare, and the police.
In this post, I’ll take a somewhat detailed look at the first entry in the series, “Born with two strikes.” This is as good a place as any to get some insight into what currently passes for thinking on topics relating to race at the Washington Post and other woke media.

October 10, 2020

October 10, 2020/ Francis Menton

The impending confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court promises to bring us a Court with a 6-3 “conservative” majority. As a result, Democrats could be facing decades in the Supreme Court wilderness.
Even if Biden wins the election for President, the only member of the Court likely to retire in the next few years is Justice Breyer, who recently turned 82; but since Breyer is one of the Court’s “liberals,” Biden’s replacing of Breyer would not change the Court’s ideological balance. The next oldest Justice is Clarence Thomas, currently 72, which is youthful by today’s Supreme Court standards.
But there’s another possibility. Congress could potentially increase the number of Justices, giving Biden as President the ability theoretically to add four, or six, or even more Justices in an attempt to cement a permanent Democratic majority.

October 07, 2020

October 07, 2020/ Jane Menton

On September 23, we learned that a grand jury had declined to indict the officers involved in the Breonna Taylor case for causing her death.
Further protests erupted that denounced the result as thwarted justice. Most of the anger has been directed at the police, but that fixation overlooks the larger problem.
There are far too many encounters between civilians and the police that have the potential to turn violent. Punishing the officers will not limit the number of encounters between police and civilians that have that potential.
The only way to do that would be to roll back the number of laws police are called upon to enforce. Instead, the trend is in the opposite direction.

October 05, 2020

October 05, 2020/ Francis Menton

It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite link.
There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work.
Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past government climate data to create an impression of warming that does not exist in the data as originally reported.
Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points. . . .

October 02, 2020

October 02, 2020/ Francis Menton

Back on July 22, I participated in a debate hosted by the Soho Forum on the question of which presidential candidate a libertarian should support — Biden, Trump, or Jo Jorgensen (the candidate of the Libertarian Party).
I argued the case for Trump. You can watch the July 22 debate, including my presentation, by going to the Soho Forum website.
Later today, at the request of the Soho Forum, I will be recording an update to my July 22 presentation.
Not much has happened to move the needle since July 22, particularly given the dearth of public appearances by both Biden and Harris, and the flat refusal of those two to respond to any remotely unfriendly or probing questions from reporters.
That leaves mostly just the debate of September 29 in the category of new information. Trying to do my job conscientiously, I watched the whole thing. . . .