RUTHFULLY YOURS

You cannot turn on a television or cable news show these days without hearing about another Hollywood celebrity claiming to have been sexually assaulted by someone with influence in show business. From influential producers to prominent actors to lesser knowns trying to make it to stardom, there appears to be a wave of predatory depravity emanating from the elite circles in entertainment. I say “appears” because we all know the truth. This stuff; the people who do these acts and are willing to have these acts done to them have been around since the first movie studio and recording contract.

When the revelation that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein used his power and position to intimidate women – young starlets – to have sex with him came to light, one of the most disingenuous gasps wafted across the information sphere. News programs and social media were on fire in their castigation of the man. Somehow, in an industry that created the term “casting couch,” the idea that a powerful movie producer would extract sex in exchange for making someone famous was suddenly foreign and appalling.

Just as with the transition from darkness to light in the flip of a switch, many who once found moral relativism in advancing their careers through gratuitous sex acts with the powerful now see themselves as victims. It is as if being a predatory victim of the elite in Hollywood is now a prize to be coveted; a label that gains the wearer entry into the “in crowd.” The designation is a cloak of relevance in today’s entertainment industry.

This is not to say that all of those who are claiming victimhood in this wave of wanton subjugation are not indeed victims. Many naïve people have gone to Hollywood only to become the prey of maniacal degenerates and megalomaniacs who dwell in that sphere; opportunistic cretins whose only way to find self-worth is to oppress and damage others, physically, emotionally and intellectually. Those people, the bright-eyed and star-struck who end up used and cast aside, they are the real victims of an industry peppered with human refuse that has been allowed to ascend to influence.

However, just as there are naïve innocents that get chewed up in the pornographic gears of Hollywood, so, too, are there the opportunists employing moral relativism who intellectually barter their dignity for stardom. There are, and there can be no doubt about this, people – both men and women – who will and have rationalized getting on their backs and/or knees to be “anointed” to fame and fortune. One can only imagine the “stains” a fluorescent light would reveal if shined on the inhabitants of Tinsel Town’s red carpets. It is enough to make one feel the need for a hot shower.

Meanwhile, back at the Swamp:

In the weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a law firm near the Capitol, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, filled a white board with a secret battle plan to fill the federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn, instructed by Mr. Trump to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary, mapped out potential nominees and a strategy, according to two people familiar with the effort: Start by filling vacancies on appeals courts with multiple openings and where Democratic senators up for re-election next year in states won by Mr. Trump — like Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — could be pressured not to block his nominees. And to speed them through confirmation, avoid clogging the Senate with too many nominees for the district courts, where legal philosophy is less crucial.

Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor.

Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them.

Gee, that’s too damn bad. As I wrote at the time, the Harry Reid Democrats were acting like a party that thought the fix was in, and that they would never lose another election for a long, long time. Oops. CONTINUE AT SITE

Morris “Moe” Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972), was a baseball catcher and later coach in the Major League. Berg graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was a polyglot with scholarly interests in history.

In 1934 during a trip to Japan, ostensibly to play in baseball demonstrations, Berg was able to surreptitiously film Tokyo City harbor. As spy he traveled in Europe to gather intelligence on resistance groups and the German nuclear program.

During World War 2 Berg traveled throughout Europe gathering intelligence on partisan groups and German nuclear programs.

At great risk as a Jew, Berg spent parts of 1944 and 1945 in Germany, helping arrange for the capture of several prominent German atomic scientists by U.S. troops before the Russians got them. At war’s end, Berg was offered the Medal of Merit, the highest award given to civilian in the war effort, but he modestly declined it. His sister accepted on his behalf.

He died in May 1972. His remains were cremated and the ashes spread on Mount Scopus in Israel.

His baseball card is displayed in the CIA.

One of my favorite things is to read about baseball players who served in World War II, from Bob Feller in the U.S. Navy to Jerry Coleman in the U.S. Marines.

How do you get any attention when your brother Joe is the best paid player in the game and your teammate playing right field is arguably the best hitter ever?

Well, that’s the story of Dominic Paul DiMaggio, who was born in San Francisco and actually wanted to be a chemical engineer. Eventually, baseball caught up with engineering, and Dom played in the majors with his famous brother Joe and other brother Vince.

The story goes like this:

Dominic made his major-league debut on April 16, 1940, and had little trouble adjusting to the big leagues, hitting .301 and scoring 81 runs in 108 games in his rookie season. Going into spring training, Dom was concerned that he might not get to play because Boston was loaded with good outfielders: Ted Williams in left, Doc Cramer in center, Lou Finney in right, and Joe Vosmik, a 10-year veteran, as backup.

But Dom, at age 23, had a solid spring and was able to beat out Finney, a .300 hitter the year before, for the starting right fielder’s job. Later in the season, Dom was moved to center field, and there he remained for the rest of his career. The Red Sox showed confidence in DiMaggio by trading Doc Cramer to the Senators during the offseason.

Dom had fond memories of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, and especially the media interest in the DiMaggio brothers in center field. He recalled that the newspapers made a big deal out of the first time in 1940 when the Yankees visited Boston for a five-game series.

Dom had 11 hits to Joe’s nine, or as Dom said, “Twenty hits for the family in one series.”

One week later in New York, Joe advised his younger brother to move back because the ball carried well in that part of the ballpark. The next day Dom, taking Joe’s advice, was able to run down a fly ball hit 460 feet to deep center – off the bat of brother Joe.

Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and baseball had to take a back seat:

In July 2016, the Obama administration announced its decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for felony mishandling of classified information and destruction of government files. In the aftermath, I observed that there is a very aggressive way that the Justice Department and the FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case — one profoundly different from the way they went about the Clinton emails investigation. There, they tried not to make the case.

That observation bears repeating today, as we watch Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of any possible Trump-campaign collusion in Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mueller is a former FBI director and top Justice Department prosecutor. To say he is going about the collusion caper aggressively would be an understatement. The earth is being scorched by the stunningly large team he has assembled, which includes 16 other prosecutors (among them, Democratic party donors and activists) along with dozens of investigators (mostly from the FBI and IRS).

At the end of October, Mueller announced the first charges in the case. In the intensive commentary that followed, another investigative development attracted almost no attention. But in terms of Mueller’s seriousness of purpose, it speaks just as loudly as the George Papadopoulos guilty plea and the indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates.

Mueller succeeded in convincing a federal judge to force an attorney for Manafort and Gates to provide grand-jury testimony against them. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports, just as the charges against these defendants were announced with great fanfare, the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., quietly unsealed a ruling compelling the testimony of the lawyer — who, though not referred to by name in the decision, has been identified by CNN as Melissa Laurenza, a partner at the Akin Gump law firm.

Interestingly, the jurist who rendered the 37-page memorandum opinion is Beryl A. Howell, who served for years as a senior Judiciary Committee adviser to the fiercely partisan Democratic Senator Pat Leahy (of Vermont) before being appointed to the bench by President Obama. Howell is now the district court’s chief judge. Why do I think that, in choosing to set up shop in Washington, Mueller and his team noted the district court’s local rule that vests the chief judge with responsibility to “hear and determine all matters relating to proceedings before the grand jury”? (See here, Rule 57.14 at p. 168.)

And why do I think that the Trump collusion case is not getting the kid-glove Clinton emails treatment?