RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-are-umpires-not-ringmasters-11589387368?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Constitution limits the jurisdiction of federal judges to actual cases and controversies. They may not offer advisory opinions or intrude on executive or legislative powers, except when the other branches have exercised them in an unconstitutional manner. Federal judges are umpires deciding matters about which litigants disagree. If the litigants come to an agreement, there is no controversy. The case is over.

Many judges disapprove of this limitation on their power. Not happy being umpires, they want to be commissioner of baseball. Thus courts have arrogated to themselves powers the Constitution explicitly denies them. They have invented exceptions to give themselves jurisdiction over cases in which there is no longer any controversy between the litigants.

It is against this constitutional background that we should evaluate Judge Emmet Sullivan’s Tuesday order inviting friend-of-the-court briefs advising him whether to accept the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the case against Mike Flynn—a motion to which the defense consents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-michael-flynn-debauchery-11589410340

Barack Obama is turning into the reverse Oracle of Delphi. He sometimes gets it right for the wrong reasons.

Sensing the populist mood in 2008, he intoned about people “who get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.” Missed in translation was that these “people” thought elites like him were the ones who had separated culturally and politically from mainstream Americans.

Now he says the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against Mike Flynn because of multiple prosecutorial violations of rules protecting defendants’ rights means “the rule of law is at risk.” Right subject, wrong lecture.

Herewith a tutorial. Back in the 1980s, writers for the Journal’s editorial page coined the phrase “inside the Beltway” to describe the moatlike highway around the nation’s capital, whose inhabitants had become politically and psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.

Many Americans then came to believe presidential elections were the one way they could send the Beltway a message. In 2016, we had an Earth-to-Beltway election, whose message was about more than Donald Trump.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/13/obamagate-isnt-a-conspiracy-theory-its-the-biggest-political-scandal-of-our-time/

When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.

But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.

If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

A Brief History of the Flynn Case

This is to be expected. For years now the media have done everything they can to push the Trump-Russia collusion hoax—even after a years-long special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller turned up nothing—using the complexity of the scheme to hide the greatest political scandal of our time in plain sight.

A key aspect of that scheme was—and is—to make the case against Flynn appear legitimate. Flynn faced trumped-up charges that he mislead FBI agents about conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. (As the incoming national security advisor, Flynn was doubtless having conversations with numerous heads of state and ambassadors during this time, so there was nothing unusual about him talking to the Russian ambassador.)

The Obama administration already knew about the conversations with Kislyak because it had recordings of them thanks to a series of investigations it spun out of the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign. Crossfire Hurricane, launched in the summer of 2016, was itself a bogus investigation based on the Steele dossier—an entirely fraudulent document riddled with Russian disinformation and paid for by the Democratic Party.

https://spectator.us/generation-unmasked-trump-world-war-two-mask/

President Trump invited World War Two veterans to Washington to commemorate the Allied victory in Europe last week — and the media and public health establishments threw a fit. ‘Ninety-three-year old veterans will be traveling to visit the White House — they should not be traveling!’ groused MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on May 7, the day before VE (Victory in Europe) Day. ‘People should not be doing non-essential travel,’ fretted one of the channel’s health experts. ‘Don’t leave home!’

Trump compounded his public health heresies by not wearing a mask during the ceremony. The day after the commemoration, the New York Times complained: ‘The president hosted a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War Two Memorial in Washington on Friday to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany by inviting several veterans aged 95 and over, even though they were in the most vulnerable age group.’The photo of the ceremony in the print edition was captioned: ‘President Trump did not wear a mask Friday during a wreath-laying ceremony that was attended by World War Two veterans, who are in the 90s and highly vulnerable.’

The mask scolds were silent about the fact that the medal-bedecked veterans, standing yards behind the president and saluting the flag, were also unmasked.

The furor over the maskless VE celebration highlights the forces driving this moment of national fear and submission. At stake is whether there are any values more important than maximal safety and protection from risk.

The first thing to be said about the VE Day episode is that the criticism of Trump for not donning a mask outside is based on no science at all. Outdoor transmission of viruses in a wide-open space is virtually unknown. Infection occurs overwhelmingly indoors, and requires close and prolonged contact. People are less likely to get infected by the coronavirus outside than they are to die inside from falling, poisoning themselves, or choking, as Vanity Fair writer T.A. Frank has pointed out.