Weiner Laptop, Obstruction Of Justice in the DOJ

The DOJ is participating in a massive cover up for Hillary Clinton. The Weiner laptop is the smoking gun. Contrary to what Comey said, it was never fully investigated. The rule of law means that everybody is subject to the same laws. It doesn't mean one law for Republicans and a free pass for Democrats. Under Obama, the Justice Department became a partisan tool for protecting Democrats and prosecuting Republicans.  The Justice Department participated in a massive obstruction of justice to clear Hillary Clinton of crimes that include 100 felony counts of mishandling classified information and also lying to the FBI.  Anthony Weiner did not have a security clearance, but the FBI found classified material on his laptop. Why wasn't he indicted? Because he is a Democrat and Huma Abadin's husband. Huma is a close friend and aide of Hillary.  Here's a link on the Weiner laptop.
 
As Attorney General, Sessions has the standing to bring obstruction of justice charges against Clinton and all of her aides. Sessions could start with the people inside the Justice Department and the FBI who clearly didn't want to find anything when it came to Clinton's crimes, so they didn't seriously investigate any of them. These people are guilty of obstruction of justice, starting with Strzok, Ohr and McCabe and moving on up to Lynch and Comey. This probably requires a special prosecutor because it's clear the Justice Department itself is severely tainted.
 
There is no equality before the law.  If you are a politically connected Democrat, you can violate the law with impunity.  If you are connected to Trump, you get extra scrutiny.  If you are an ordinary person, one count of mishandling classified information sends you to jail.  I'm not saying that Manafort and Cohen are innocent, because they aren't.  I'm saying that Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Samantha Power and Susan Rice are guilty, and they have been given a free pass, at least so far.
 
Tony Podesta was in the same business of lobbying for the same Ukrainian oligarch as Paul Manafort, but Podesta is a Democrat. The FBI raided Manafort's house with drawn guns in the middle of the night, like it was a meth lab. Podesta hasn't even been investigated.
 
If this lack of equality before the law continues, the rule of law in the US is over. The Justice Department becomes a bureaucratic struggle for power, not an agency for enforcement of the law. The US becomes a banana republic, not because of Trump, but because of Obama and the bureaucratic mess he left in the Justice Department.

Sun May Attack Our Electric Grid

Electromagnetic pulse isn't the only reason, or even the best reason, to harden the grid.  Geomagnetic storms from the sun can have similar, but even bigger, catastrophic effects.  The last really big storm, in 1859, would be a severe disaster if it occurred today.  It caused sparks that jumped the gaps in telegraph keys. severely shocked telegraph operators and set telegraph paper on fire in 1859.  We almost had one in 2012, but luckily it missed us by 9 days of orbit position.   The odds of getting hit with a solar storm in the next decade might be over 10%.  An 1859 sized storm would destroy transformers all across the electric grid.  It would take months to restore service.  In the meantime, distibution of running water, natural gas for heating and gasoline to drive our cars would all stop, because all of them depend on electric pumps.  The electronics in our cars might be fried as well.  Please see the links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_2012
http://www.businessinsider.com/solar-storm-effects-electronics-energy-grid-2016-3

Consent of the Governed and Interpreting the Constitution

If consent of the governed means anything, we have to apply the Constitution in the way the people who ratified it understood it.   Otherwise we are imposing laws nobody consented to, which is tyranny.  It's easy to say that people who object to decisions like Roe v Wade and Obergfell are just misguided bigots.  But in fact, they are objecting to laws invented by the courts that were not lawfully adopted by the legislature or consented to by Constitutional ratification.  The ends don't justify the means.  The means change the outcome.  If the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in ways that nobody consented to, there is no limit to the Supreme Court's power.  There is also no binding precedent, because any precedent can be reinterpreted to mean something entirely different.  The Supreme Court becomes a Supreme Revolutionary Council with essentially unlimited powers and life appointments for members.

Let me give you an example of how this works.  The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, when homosexual acts were illegal in every state.  If the legislators who voted to ratify the 14th Amendment had known they were ratifying same sex marriage, it wouldn't have passed.  Obergfell should have been decided on the full faith and credit clause.  Any marriage validly performed in one state must be recognized in all states.  This would have left the states in control of who could marry inside their borders, but forced all states to recognize same sex marriages performed elsewhere.  Such a decision would have been consistent with the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which conservatives liked because of the states rights reasoning, even though the outcome didn't go their way.  DOMA was invalidated because the Supreme Court ruled marriage was a state matter, and federal law could not interfere with it under the 10th Amendment.  A ruling on full faith and credit would have been much more easily defended as consistent with the original intent of the Constitution.   If Obergfell had been decided on full faith and credit, doubt about the permanence of Obergfell, including this article, wouldn't be necessary.  Since using the 14th Amendment was a stretch, Obergfell is a shaky decision.

Samantha Bee and the Goal of the Resistance

This was my reaction to a WSJ article on Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless c*nt."   It got 102 likes, more than any other comment I've made on WSJ.

Samantha Bee's insulting obscenity was in service of a slow-motion coup d'etat under the color of authority, intended to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.  President Trump was duly elected according to the Constitution.  The #Resistance wants to use any and all means possible to either remove President Trump or paralyze him with pseudo legal lawfare.  For serving the cause of undermining the Constitution, Samantha Bee was applauded by people who not only have no decency.  They have no respect for Constitutional government.  To a Vietnam Era Veteran like me, Samantha Bee and the people in the #Resistance are getting very close to becoming domestic enemies of the Constitution.  This isn't a mere squabble about the niceties of discourse.  The election outcome was incorrect, according to the left, so they need to fix it.    The left's temper tantrum over Hillary's loss is assumed to be more important than the rule of law, checks and balances or preserving the Constitution itself.

Why I Dislike Coastal Elites

I generally find leftist elites hard to tolerate because they take no responsibility for their actions. For me this started at the end of the Vietnam War, when Democrats in Congress outlawed US air strikes in Southeast Asia and cut the aid budget for South Vietnam by 75% between 1973 and 1975. From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed about 2 million Cambodians. Victorious communists in Vietnam and Laos killed several hundred thousand more people. Roughly 2 million people fled South Vietnam to escape communist rule in leaky boats. The "Give peace a chance" folks maintain to this day there was no bloodbath.

The same people, like John Kerry, or people mentored by the antiwar crowd, like the Smartest President Ever, are still leading the left. The number of dead and the number of refugees in Syria that resulted from Obama's self restraint in the Middle East, where, like in Vietnam, we chose not to use air power effectively, are reminiscent of pictures of refugees from Vietnam for a reason. The same policies by the same people gave the same outcomes.

As to why I dislike coastal elites more than fly over country elites, that's easy. Coastal elites are snobbier. They are much more likely to tell me that I can be ignored because I have horse manure on my boots and my degrees from fly over country schools are far inferior to their degrees from Harvard.

I interviewed to go to Harvard. I was a 3rd generation legacy at Harvard, with the grades, SAT scores and extra curricular activities to get in there. Their snooty attitude, and the aniti-war slogans all over campus, repelled me. I didn't even apply. So part of why I dislike coastal elites is that I could have been one and chose not to be.

 

Then there are people who say that if you are elite yourself, you can't complain about elites. These folks are also very irritating. John Hinderaker wrote a piece in his Power Line Blog about "Why Normal Americans Hate the Elites." The comments claimed that since Mr. Hindraker graduated from Dartmouth and Harvard Law, he was an elite and had no right to complain about other elites. I thought that was a particularly funny socialist class solidarity argument, so I wrote this comment in response:

 

I need your advice urgently. I have an MS in Management from Northwestern University (Kellogg Graduate School of Management) and an MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, both in fly over country. Since I went to grade school in Missoula, Montana, I identify as a redneck, even though I am over educated for this status and can turn the accent on and off like a faucet. My alternate accents include Montgomery, AL, and Skokie, IL. I live in North Suburban Cook (Crook) County, Illinois, which is a very blue state, but I voted for Trump in the general election (not the primary). I'm a Vietnam Era veteran with a low tolerance for leftist malarkey. Do I have enough street cred to be tired of coastal elites with leftist attitudes, or am I still too elite myself to have this position? In your answer, please state your credentials for judging when people can be fed up with elitist fertilizer of equine origin. 

Then there was a woman who argued that elite status was just superior intellect and should be celebrated. She said the author and other bloggers on the site should "own their elite status." For her, I had this response: 

The problem with leftists, ma'm, is they know so much that just ain't so. When their arguments break down, intellectually, these folks depend on the authority of their credentials to carry their arguments. They claim it's true because they have elite credentials, and you ain't. Well ma'm, my MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, tells me that extrapolating from less than 100 years of observations of statistical noise to forecast climate patterns that last hundreds or even thousands of years is statistical folly. People who make the "settled science" argument use their better credentials to claim better credibility, but their arguments remain statistical folly. That's why people like me, in fly over country, are tired of elites who refuse to engage intellectually, when they can condescend instead using their "superior credentials" to avoid having to face the fallacies of their arguments.

The same lady demanded, "Give me one concrete example of a member of a member of "majority" being "tyrannized" by an "academic."  I responded, "If Republicans were a protected class, almost every university in the country would lose an adverse impact lawsuit."