RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273006/media-and-michael-cohen-deserve-each-other-daniel-greenfield

While President Trump was away on a diplomatic mission to Hanoi to negotiate a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un, the media breathlessly turned its eye to Capitol Hill to hear from a sleazy disbarred lawyer.

The dueling news stories summed up the country’s two political movements. Republicans were trying to dismantle weapons of mass destruction, while Democrats were deploying weapons of mass distraction.

In Vietnam, President Trump was dealing with serious problems. In Washington D.C., Democrats and their media arm can’t imagine any problem more serious than Trump. Forget North Korean nukes, the true threat to Democrats and the media isn’t radiation, it’s viewership. What keeps CNN’s, MSNBC’s, the New York Times’ and the Washington Post’s bosses up at night is fear that Mueller might not deliver.

And as the atomic report clock ticks down to zero, bringing Michael Cohen to Washington D.C. was a desperate effort to squeeze 15 more minutes out of their smear campaign by pretending to believe the same guy they had been calling a liar last year. Michael and the media are a perfect fit for each other.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cohen-in-the-colosseum-11551314328

Are you not entertained? That disdainful line from “Gladiator” came to mind watching Democrats and Republicans maul each other Wednesday over Michael Cohen’s long denunciation of Donald J. Trump. The day proved again that Mr. Trump has associated with some dreadful characters, and has no great character himself, but Democrats will need more than the testimony of a former fixer to impeach him.

Mr. Cohen spared no nasty noun in describing the mogul turned President he served—blindly he now says—for 10 years. “Con man,” “racist” and “cheat” were highlights, as Mr. Cohen unburdened himself of what he called a decade of lies. He admitted lying for years to protect Mr. Trump, including to Congress, though he now says he’s telling the truth to ruin him. He will soon serve a three-year sentence for his crimes, most unrelated to Mr. Trump.

Histrionics aside, the hearing revealed few new details. The most potentially damaging was Mr. Cohen’s disclosure that Mr. Trump knew in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic documents in July 2016. He says he was present in Mr. Trump’s office when Roger Stone, a Trump hanger-on, called to say he’d personally confirmed the dump with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Mr. Cohen says Mr. Trump replied “to the effect of, ‘wouldn’t that be great.’”

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/democrats-are-interminably-waiting-for-mueller-just-as-in-samuel-becketts-absurdity/

I have no doubt that some theatrical director specializing in the work of Samuel Beckett has been eying the investigation of Robert Mueller with envy. After all, what the nation calls “Waiting for Mueller” has been running nearly two years and, just as in the famous Beckett absurdity, the title character never shows up. We’re told that may be coming to an end, that finally, at last, Mueller really will deliver the goods, as soon as next week, CNN reported. But then it was CNN that reported it, so of course it turned out not to be true but just another installment of its fake news machine. Still, soon, soon, he’ll be wrapping up “soon,” just as he was last spring, this past summer, and all through the fall. He’s shedding lawyers, he’s wrapping up, he’ll be done … soon.

Well, sooner or later, he will be done soon, and then he really will be done. Maybe Donald Trump will have served out the whole of his first term by then, or maybe he will just be entering the 2020 election cycle when Mueller and his team of Clinton-Obama prosecutors turn off the lights and slide their report over the transom to Attorney General William Barr. We just don’t know.

But here’s something we do know. While the nation’s eyes have been riveted on the Mueller Russian Collusion investigation, its father, the Clinton Email investigation, has been quietly swept under the rug, pushed into the oubliette, stricken from the public’s consciousness.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/25/former_federal_prosecutor_sidney_powell_the_entire_russia_collusion_narrative_was_made_up.html

Journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the host of “Full Measure,” interviews former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell about her allegation that the “entire Russia collusion narrative was made up” by anti-Trump political partisans in the FBI and Department of Justice:

SHARYL ATTKISSON, FULL MEASURE: Nearly two years ago, Special Counsel Mueller was named to investigate whether President Trump broke the law by somehow conspiring with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the presidency. We still don’t know the outcome of that. But we’ve learned a lot about what some in our intelligence community have been up to. And some argue that’s proving to be an equally important— and chilling— story.

From Trump associate Roger Stone to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, the Trump-Russia probe has indicted or convicted 34 people so far. And although Special Counsel Robert Mueller has yet to publicly pinpoint illegal Russia collusion on Trump’s part he’s still looking. Meantime, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell is making an explosive allegation. She’s among those who believe there’s now compelling evidence pointing to a parallel scandal.

In the simplest of terms if possible, what do you think is the story that’s been uncovered in the past two years?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nyc-to-pay-3-3-million-to-family-of-teen-who-languished-at-rikers-island-11548371523?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

New York City will pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of the teenager who spent three years at the Rikers Island jail complex after being accused of stealing a backpack, becoming a symbol of dysfunction in the criminal-justice system.

In 2010, 16-year-old Kalief Browder, originally from the Bronx, was arrested and held at Rikers on $3,000 bail. He spent time in solitary confinement and returned to court dozens of times. In 2013, the charges were dismissed. After his release, Mr. Browder died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22.

“Kalief Browder’s story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island,” a spokesman for the New York City Law Department said on Thursday. “We hope that this settlement and our continuing reforms help bring some measure of closure to the Browder family.”

The city didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing in the settlement.

“This was a fair and reasonable settlement,” said lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, who represents Mr. Browder’s estate.

The $3.3 million settlement includes attorney fees and expenses. A surrogate judge will determine how the money is distributed among Mr. Browder’s family members.

https://www.city-journal.org/bail-reform

Last September, as part of a national push for criminal-justice reform, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a charitable organization, announced a plan to pay the bail of every woman and minor held in New York City’s jails. According to the group, run by Kerry Kennedy, the slain senator’s daughter, “access to justice depends on whether you can afford bail. The majority of people incarcerated in the notoriously violent Rikers Island are behind bars for the crime of being too poor.”

This is a favorite theme of the reformers, but most Rikers inmates are accused of serious crimes. Around 11.4 percent of the population is there for murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter; 20 percent are in for robbery or burglary; and another 25 percent face charges involving weapons, felony assault, sale of drugs, or rape or other sexual offenses. New York’s jails are not crowded with people whose only crime was jumping a subway turnstile or smoking weed; the average number of people held in Rikers on a given day for fare-beating is two, and for pot possession, one. And “the majority” of Rikers inmates are behind bars because they’re serving out a sentence, are ineligible for bail because of outstanding warrants, or are awaiting trial for a serious crime—not because they can’t afford bail. Even the majority of women and juveniles at Rikers, the target of the Kennedy group’s efforts, are ineligible for bail.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-americans-confidence-in-nations-world-image-grows/

58 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll of American adults released Monday said they believe the U.S. is seen “very favorably” or “somewhat favorably” by the rest of the world — a three-point increase from last year’s survey, and the highest percentage recorded by the poll since 2003.

About 80 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of Democrats said the country is seen favorably by the rest of the world, and neither number represented much change from last year. But the number of independents who said the same jumped eight points.

Despite the broad confidence in America’s image, only a small percentage of respondents, 31 percent, said the current president is respected by foreign leaders.

Respondents’ confidence in how other countries see the U.S. appears to be separate from confidence in the Trump administration, whose controversial foreign-policy decisions have sometimes been criticized on both sides of the aisle. It also appears to be separate from their confidence in the nation’s position on the global stage, with which 53 percent of them expressed dissatisfaction.

https://spectator.org/jonah-goldbergs-answer-

EXCERPT”Why does opposing Trump mean that one must be nasty to Trump’s more respected and erudite defenders? What purpose is there, for example, in trying to destroy Victor Davis Hansen? When Trump gets out of office (and it will happen, if not by the glorious swan dive of impeachment or by rotting away his dotage in prison as the Never Trump wing hope), how will attempting to destroy someone personally influence the post-Trump party? What place will the most vociferous anti-Trumpers have once they’ve alienated everyone with whom they disagree?Many members of Trump’s base are disappointed in the Wall funding and building, a point the Never Trumpers find endlessly mirthful.

Yet, do any of the Never Trump crew give a rat’s fanny about the Wall? Most use the policy to poke fun at Trump’s forlorn and most devoted followers. Their language around the Wall has been nigh unto open-borders blather (to own Trump). But is that policy position conservative? Libertarian, maybe. Reaganite? Not really.

Ninety percent of the GOP support Donald Trump. They’re happy, for once, to have someone respond to the media and not allow their worldview to be the butt of every joke, and that be the last word. The feeling among these folks, though, is that the conservative thought leaders, NRO and Weekly Standard writers among them, of the center-right coalition laughed along with Obama when he made fun of bitter-clingers and tea baggers. These True Cons™ agreed with Hillary that those people are deplorable.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/time-for-action-chase-bank-denies-service-to-conservatives/

It’s hard to imagine how conservatives could be even more complacent than they actually are about what’s being done to this country.The schools our children are taught in are almost universally run by liberals who hate everything we stand for, but we don’t demand that our representatives pull funding from state schools that behave that way.Hollywood has become vocally, over-the-top hostile to Christians and conservatives, but we go see the movies anyway.

We still buy the papers and watch the cable news shows of networks that talk about us like we’re Nazis because we don’t agree with their liberal worldview.More recently, increasingly monopolistic social media companies that have an inordinate amount of control over who gets heard and who doesn’t have started actively targeting conservatives and we just shrug or spout platitudes.
CONTINUE AT SITE

https://theweek.com/articles/824999/mueller-joke 

Excerpts:
“From the very beginning, the special counsel investigation has been a string of anecdotes, compound adjectives (“Russia-linked”), and vanquished dreams in search of a conspiracy. The only crimes of which Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and the rest have been accused are ones that were alleged to have been committed either well before or long after the 2016 election; in many cases, indeed, they were said to have occurred during the course of the investigation itself — process crimes. None of the charges in question were about colluding with Russia. The only one that has even directly involved the presidential election was a violation of federal campaign finance law.

“The findings of the special counsel, if they are ever in fact released to the public in full, are likely to be insignificant. The investigation itself, however, has been one of the most consequential events in recent American history. It has forced the Democratic Party to change its position on Russia from “The ’80s called” to clamors for a new Cold War. It has led hard-news television reporters to make comments about anodyne diplomatic proceedings that would have done the John Birch Society proud during the height of McCarthyism. It has led otherwise sensible adults to attempt to make arguments about the supposedly sacrosanct nature of the American election system that they will, I hope, find embarrassing in just a few years. It has prevented the duly elected president of the United States from doing his job, poorly or otherwise.”