RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

The billionaires and bureaucrats depend on the skilled workers they mock — and that makes them more than a little uneasy.

F ormer New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.

“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”

He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy” that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Gray matter?

For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.

Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/did-obamas-doj-leak-michael-flynns-russia-phone-call-to-set-him-up/

Did the Department of Justice leak or arrange the leak of Michael Flynn’s call with Sergey Kislyak to get around the FBI’s efforts to keep secret the investigation of Flynn?

One of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia saga that remains unsolved three years later, or at least uncharged, is who leaked Gen. Michael Flynn’s calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

As incoming national security advisor, Flynn spoke with numerous foreign officials in the lead-up to inauguration. This included a conversation with Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016 in which they discussed, among other things, measures taken by the Obama administration (also on Dec. 29) to expel Russian agents and levy financial penalties in response to Russia’s “malicious cyber-enabled activities” relating to the 2016 election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly responded to these sanctions the next day. He declined to escalate the situation, promised there would be no retaliatory expulsions, and said he would “take further steps towards restoring Russia-U.S. relations.” According to the Statement of Offense filed in Flynn’s criminal case, on Dec. 31, Kislyak “called Flynn and informed him that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to Flynn’s request.”

Meanwhile, President Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) staff wondered why Putin didn’t retaliate. Andrew McCabe, who was serving as the FBI’s deputy director at the time, maintains that the PDB staff requested information on Putin’s response. The intelligence community answered. It turns out they had information on Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.

McCabe wrote that he shared this information with FBI Director James Comey, who passed it on to director of national intelligence James Clapper. It was Clapper who informed President Obama. The Department of Justice had this information as well. In his book, “The Threat,” McCabe noted that “at Justice, one question arose: Was this a violation of the Logan Act?”

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-resistance-starts-to-infect-our-courts/91025/

We wonder what the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, makes of that headline about the Ninth United States Circuit Court of Appeals. “Trump has flipped the 9th Circuit — and some new judges are causing a ‘shock wave,’” the headline said. Los Angeles Times attributes the claim to one of the circuit’s own judges. Chief Justice Roberts can’t be happy.

The Chief Justice, remember, was so irked when President Trump laced into “Obama judges” that he issued a rebuke. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Mr. Trump would have none of it. “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’” Mr. Trump retorted. Obama judges, he added, “have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” The New York Times quoted one law professor, Josh Blackman, as warning the Chief’s statement could “backfire.”

So welcome to the 9th Circuit. The latest is that the judges who heretofore had held sway in the nation’s largest — and most liberal — circuit are now complaining to the press. The judge who says Mr. Trump has “flipped” the 9th Circuit is Milan D. Smith, Jr. He was moved to talk by the fact that Mr. Trump won confirmation of ten new judges to the Ninth Circuit.

That’s more than a third of the circuit and a 40% increase in three years from the seven judge President Obama was able to seat in his entire eight years. LATimes reports that some of the Trump judges “have quickly won the respect of their colleagues.” It quotes one judge, though, as complaining: “Ten new people at once sends a shock wave through the system.”

Los Angeles Times cites unnamed judges as saying that one Trump appointee, Judge Daniel Collins, early on appeared, as the paper paraphrased it, “oblivious to court tradition.” Judge Collins also apparently called for en banc review of five decisions by three-judge panels and allegedly used combative language. Land sakes!