Author: admin

Agree or Disagree With Him, We Need People Like Judge Napolitano

Let us now praise Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News senior legal analyst who is currently trending on Twitter because he thinks the Senate should remove Donald Trump from office. I don’t agree with him on that—or his views on abortion (he’s against), Abraham Lincoln (also against), and a number of other things (including his flirtation with 9/11 conspiracy theories)—but goddammit, we need more people in the public arena who stick to their principles even in the face of constant criticism and vicious personal attacks. One of the main problems in contemporary politics is precisely that people on all points of the spectrum routinely defer to power and popularity on matters of conscience. Not so the judge.

“What is required for removal of the president?” asks Napolitano in his latest column published at Fox News (of all places). “A demonstration of presidential commission of high crimes and misdemeanors, of which in Trump’s case the evidence is ample and uncontradicted.” This isn’t a popular view among Fox News viewers and the broadly defined right wing. But the judge is less interested in what’s popular than in what he thinks is right. His personal hero is Thomas More, the chancellor to Henry VIII who refused to sanction the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and was subsequently executed and, later, made a Catholic saint. Napolitano dedicated his 2005 book Constitutional Chaos to More, telling Reason in an interview:

I dedicate the book to St. Thomas More and cite the most frequently quoted passage from A Man for All Seasons [in which More says he would extend due process even to the devil]. More is basically saying everyone is to due process, rights are not discretionary; and his son-in-law challenges him, saying, what about the rights of the devil? And More says, I would give the devil his due because when they come after me, I want them to give me my due. Every human is entitled to the protection of the law.

In a nutshell, Napolitano’s argument for removing Trump from office is the obverse of what More is discussing in the passage above. The president, says the judge, is acting like Henry VIII and refusing to abide by the limits of his office; if we let that stand, then there will be no grounds upon which to limit future presidents. In an interview with Reason last November, the judge predicted correctly that House Democrats would charge the president with abuse of power and obstructing Congress’ investigation. He also stated that impeachment was “absolutely constitutional” but “probably morally unjust,” partly because Trump was merely the latest in a line of chief executives since Woodrow Wilson who flout constitutional limits to power. “No American president in the post–Woodrow Wilson era has stayed within the confines of the Constitution,” said Napolitano.

His latest column has made him a “new impeachment hero” among Democrats, writes The Washington Post and no less than the queen of “the Resistance,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has tweeted him out approvingly:

But it’s not simply partisan Democrats and #NeverTrumpers who support the judge. The highly principled Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), who left the Republican Party because he felt it was no longer even paying lip service to the ideals of limited government, writes: “My friend @Judgenap has remained true to his principle.”

Like Napolitano, Amash has taken an enormous amount of abuse for remaining true to what he believes, and he might well lose his seat in Congress as a result. (He has already lost backing of groups supposedly devoted to small government.) Indeed, the president denounced Amash “as a total loser” and “one of the dumbest & most disloyal” members of Congress. (Amash explained his reasons for leaving—and why he thinks he will now be more effective in reducing government—to Reason last summer. Watch that here.)

We live in a hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized era; with impeachment, the stakes (and passions) are especially high. But even—perhaps especially—those of us who think Andrew Napolitano and Justin Amash are wrong in this particular instance should salute them for standing true to their principles. They have nothing to gain from their courage other than the satisfaction of speaking truth as they see it. I don’t believe they are looking to be heroes or martyrs, and they are certainly not seeking and will not get invitations to all those vaunted Establishment cocktail parties you always hear about on Twitter. In fact, they may well each lose their jobs.

Judge Napolitano, who relentlessly attacked George W. Bush and Barack Obama when they contravened the Constitution, is now doing exactly the same thing when it comes to the current occupant of the White House. As Thomas More explains in the judge’s favorite play, A Man for All Seasons, principles must trump personal and partisan allegiances when it comes to such serious matters as rights and the rule of law:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

I think you’re wrong here, Judge, but long may you run. We need more people like you, now more than ever.

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Gh9By9
via IFTTT

E-Verify: Making Life Harder for Workers and Small Businesses, With Enthusiastic MAGA Support

Florida’s Trumpy congressman Matt Gaetz has an article in the Tallahassee Democrat encouraging his state to impose “E-Verify” on all workers, as some states already do. In other words, he wants to curb the alleged crisis of illegal immigration by ensuring that no one can work in his state without meeting government-imposed documentation mandates and getting approval from a government database.

Gaetz is a Republican, so feel free to insert the obligatory reference here to the GOP’s alleged former devotion to not hobbling Americans with officious red tape.

Not that he admits that there is any red tape involved. Gaetz gripes that “Florida Senate President Bill Galvano…has argued E-Verify will be costly and time-consuming for businesses,” but the congressman insists that this “couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is E-Verify free, it processes applications quickly and efficiently. It is a simple step employers can (and should) take to ensure they are hiring legal employees.”

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) says otherwise. The congressman may believe that because the government doesn’t literally charge a fee to run employees through their system, it’s costless. But the paper’s authors—economists Shalise Ayromloo, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Darren Lubotsky, all of the University of Illinois at Chicago—note that “there are non-trivial set-up, training, and compliance costs to using the system. These costs are particularly cumbersome for small firms, which a 2011 analysis suggested would spend $2.6 billion on compliance-related costs if forced to utilize E-Verify.”

The law, which is currently imposed on some or all workers in 22 states, is thus widely flouted, and smaller firms are more likely to evade it.

The NBER paper is based on “a new analysis of administrative data from the Department of Homeland Security on usage of the E-Verify system.” It finds “a high degree of non-compliance,” especially “among firms with fewer than 20 employees,” and infers from this that “the mandates may impose substantial costs.”

Do not conclude from this that the system has no effect at all: The economists found reasons to believe that E-Verify produces “significant declines in Hispanic worker employment.” But they saw “no evidence that native-born workers benefit from E-Verify mandates,” and in fact found that those mandates “reduce employment among some lower-skilled groups of native-born workers.” Specifically, “the passage of any E-Verify mandate reduces employment among natives with a high school degree or less education by 2.7 percent,” an effect “entirely driven by reduced employment among low-skilled natives who are 16 to 40 years old.”

So the costs of E-Verify don’t seem to pay off by helping the lower-skilled Americans often invoked as an excuse for imposing the aggravating mandate.

Indeed, despite those employment declines among Hispanics, the authors did not find evidence that E-Verify lowers the actual “potentially undocumented population” in areas where the system is enforced. The authors suggest that they’re instead getting by with “increases in supplementary family income sources”—i.e., being helped by others in their households.

All employers are supposed to use I-9 forms to check potential employees’ citizenship status, but without E-Verify federal law doesn’t force employees to verify the authenticity of whatever document a would-be worker supplies. The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrestah has found that the existing I-9 system already “costs employers an estimated 13.48 million man-hours each year.” E-Verify magnifies those costs considerably. And when something goes wrong with the system, nearly half of the problem cases can take up to eight days to resolve, creating uncertainty and paralysis for both hired and hirer—and giving employers an incentive just to cut out potential workers who might have eventually made it through the system.

How often does E-Verify mistakenly mark people as legally unable to work when they should have been approved? About 0.15 percent of the time, which sounds impressive, but if it were applied to every American worker via federal mandate it would leave more than 187,000 people a year barred from work for no reason at all.

The system can be gamed with borrowed or stolen identify documents, and the low compliance with state mandates does not hold out promise of success for any federal mandate that might come along. But do not expect E-Verify’s failures to produce a humble retreat if it were to be imposed nationally. Nowrastah speculates that the feds would instead try to “close the E-Verify loopholes” by integrating “other biometric information like fingerprints or perhaps even DNA into a national identity system.” As we know from past government expansions of allegedly single-problem programs, such an identity system may well expand to other uses, from gun registries to tracking the members of minority groups—whatever your personal surveillance dystopia looks like, expanding E-Verify makes it more likely. The program embodies the “papers please” mentality that in more innocent days signaled a sinister tyranny to any decent American.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2U4LeMj
via IFTTT

Agree or Disagree With Him, We Need People Like Judge Napolitano

Let us now praise Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News senior legal analyst who is currently trending on Twitter because he thinks the Senate should remove Donald Trump from office. I don’t agree with him on that—or his views on abortion (he’s against), Abraham Lincoln (also against), and a number of other things (including his flirtation with 9/11 conspiracy theories)—but goddammit, we need more people in the public arena who stick to their principles even in the face of constant criticism and vicious personal attacks. One of the main problems in contemporary politics is precisely that people on all points of the spectrum routinely defer to power and popularity on matters of conscience. Not so the judge.

“What is required for removal of the president?” asks Napolitano in his latest column published at Fox News (of all places). “A demonstration of presidential commission of high crimes and misdemeanors, of which in Trump’s case the evidence is ample and uncontradicted.” This isn’t a popular view among Fox News viewers and the broadly defined right wing. But the judge is less interested in what’s popular than in what he thinks is right. His personal hero is Thomas More, the chancellor to Henry VIII who refused to sanction the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and was subsequently executed and, later, made a Catholic saint. Napolitano dedicated his 2005 book Constitutional Chaos to More, telling Reason in an interview:

I dedicate the book to St. Thomas More and cite the most frequently quoted passage from A Man for All Seasons [in which More says he would extend due process even to the devil]. More is basically saying everyone is to due process, rights are not discretionary; and his son-in-law challenges him, saying, what about the rights of the devil? And More says, I would give the devil his due because when they come after me, I want them to give me my due. Every human is entitled to the protection of the law.

In a nutshell, Napolitano’s argument for removing Trump from office is the obverse of what More is discussing in the passage above. The president, says the judge, is acting like Henry VIII and refusing to abide by the limits of his office; if we let that stand, then there will be no grounds upon which to limit future presidents. In an interview with Reason last November, the judge predicted correctly that House Democrats would charge the president with abuse of power and obstructing Congress’ investigation. He also stated that impeachment was “absolutely constitutional” but “probably morally unjust,” partly because Trump was merely the latest in a line of chief executives since Woodrow Wilson who flout constitutional limits to power. “No American president in the post–Woodrow Wilson era has stayed within the confines of the Constitution,” said Napolitano.

His latest column has made him a “new impeachment hero” among Democrats, writes The Washington Post and no less than the queen of “the Resistance,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has tweeted him out approvingly:

But it’s not simply partisan Democrats and #NeverTrumpers who support the judge. The highly principled Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.), who left the Republican Party because he felt it was no longer even paying lip service to the ideals of limited government, writes: “My friend @Judgenap has remained true to his principle.”

Like Napolitano, Amash has taken an enormous amount of abuse for remaining true to what he believes, and he might well lose his seat in Congress as a result. (He has already lost backing of groups supposedly devoted to small government.) Indeed, the president denounced Amash “as a total loser” and “one of the dumbest & most disloyal” members of Congress. (Amash explained his reasons for leaving—and why he thinks he will now be more effective in reducing government—to Reason last summer. Watch that here.)

We live in a hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized era; with impeachment, the stakes (and passions) are especially high. But even—perhaps especially—those of us who think Andrew Napolitano and Justin Amash are wrong in this particular instance should salute them for standing true to their principles. They have nothing to gain from their courage other than the satisfaction of speaking truth as they see it. I don’t believe they are looking to be heroes or martyrs, and they are certainly not seeking and will not get invitations to all those vaunted Establishment cocktail parties you always hear about on Twitter. In fact, they may well each lose their jobs.

Judge Napolitano, who relentlessly attacked George W. Bush and Barack Obama when they contravened the Constitution, is now doing exactly the same thing when it comes to the current occupant of the White House. As Thomas More explains in the judge’s favorite play, A Man for All Seasons, principles must trump personal and partisan allegiances when it comes to such serious matters as rights and the rule of law:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

I think you’re wrong here, Judge, but long may you run. We need more people like you, now more than ever.

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Gh9By9
via IFTTT

E-Verify: Making Life Harder for Workers and Small Businesses, With Enthusiastic MAGA Support

Florida’s Trumpy congressman Matt Gaetz has an article in the Tallahassee Democrat encouraging his state to impose “E-Verify” on all workers, as some states already do. In other words, he wants to curb the alleged crisis of illegal immigration by ensuring that no one can work in his state without meeting government-imposed documentation mandates and getting approval from a government database.

Gaetz is a Republican, so feel free to insert the obligatory reference here to the GOP’s alleged former devotion to not hobbling Americans with officious red tape.

Not that he admits that there is any red tape involved. Gaetz gripes that “Florida Senate President Bill Galvano…has argued E-Verify will be costly and time-consuming for businesses,” but the congressman insists that this “couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is E-Verify free, it processes applications quickly and efficiently. It is a simple step employers can (and should) take to ensure they are hiring legal employees.”

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) says otherwise. The congressman may believe that because the government doesn’t literally charge a fee to run employees through their system, it’s costless. But the paper’s authors—economists Shalise Ayromloo, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Darren Lubotsky, all of the University of Illinois at Chicago—note that “there are non-trivial set-up, training, and compliance costs to using the system. These costs are particularly cumbersome for small firms, which a 2011 analysis suggested would spend $2.6 billion on compliance-related costs if forced to utilize E-Verify.”

The law, which is currently imposed on some or all workers in 22 states, is thus widely flouted, and smaller firms are more likely to evade it.

The NBER paper is based on “a new analysis of administrative data from the Department of Homeland Security on usage of the E-Verify system.” It finds “a high degree of non-compliance,” especially “among firms with fewer than 20 employees,” and infers from this that “the mandates may impose substantial costs.”

Do not conclude from this that the system has no effect at all: The economists found reasons to believe that E-Verify produces “significant declines in Hispanic worker employment.” But they saw “no evidence that native-born workers benefit from E-Verify mandates,” and in fact found that those mandates “reduce employment among some lower-skilled groups of native-born workers.” Specifically, “the passage of any E-Verify mandate reduces employment among natives with a high school degree or less education by 2.7 percent,” an effect “entirely driven by reduced employment among low-skilled natives who are 16 to 40 years old.”

So the costs of E-Verify don’t seem to pay off by helping the lower-skilled Americans often invoked as an excuse for imposing the aggravating mandate.

Indeed, despite those employment declines among Hispanics, the authors did not find evidence that E-Verify lowers the actual “potentially undocumented population” in areas where the system is enforced. The authors suggest that they’re instead getting by with “increases in supplementary family income sources”—i.e., being helped by others in their households.

All employers are supposed to use I-9 forms to check potential employees’ citizenship status, but without E-Verify federal law doesn’t force employees to verify the authenticity of whatever document a would-be worker supplies. The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrestah has found that the existing I-9 system already “costs employers an estimated 13.48 million man-hours each year.” E-Verify magnifies those costs considerably. And when something goes wrong with the system, nearly half of the problem cases can take up to eight days to resolve, creating uncertainty and paralysis for both hired and hirer—and giving employers an incentive just to cut out potential workers who might have eventually made it through the system.

How often does E-Verify mistakenly mark people as legally unable to work when they should have been approved? About 0.15 percent of the time, which sounds impressive, but if it were applied to every American worker via federal mandate it would leave more than 187,000 people a year barred from work for no reason at all.

The system can be gamed with borrowed or stolen identify documents, and the low compliance with state mandates does not hold out promise of success for any federal mandate that might come along. But do not expect E-Verify’s failures to produce a humble retreat if it were to be imposed nationally. Nowrastah speculates that the feds would instead try to “close the E-Verify loopholes” by integrating “other biometric information like fingerprints or perhaps even DNA into a national identity system.” As we know from past government expansions of allegedly single-problem programs, such an identity system may well expand to other uses, from gun registries to tracking the members of minority groups—whatever your personal surveillance dystopia looks like, expanding E-Verify makes it more likely. The program embodies the “papers please” mentality that in more innocent days signaled a sinister tyranny to any decent American.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2U4LeMj
via IFTTT

Whole Neighborhoods Destroyed In Houston Plant Explosion: Multiple Fatalities, 1 Still Missing

Whole Neighborhoods Destroyed In Houston Plant Explosion: Multiple Fatalities, 1 Still Missing

Houston was rocked by a large explosion in the early dark hours of Friday morning, which could be felt for miles across the city, when a manufacturing facility in the northwest erupted in a massive fireball. Houston police have confirmed that at least two people died in the blast, with one plant employee still missing, and a criminal investigation is underway as to the cause — though there’s no evidence thus far to suggest an intentional act or terrorism was involved. 

Damage to homes was reported up to a half-mile away after it occurred at about 4:15am, some 18-miles away from the downtown area, though people reported being jolted from their sleep for miles across the city. Later in the morning Friday multiple people were reported hospitalized, and others may still be missing. 

Image source: KTRK via AP

“We have no evidence at this point … that an intentional act is involved. Having said that, part of our protocol is always to (start) a criminal investigation” Houston police chief Art Acevedo said, who also ruled out terrorism. “It’s going to take days, if not weeks or months, to get a final determination of what’s going on here.” 

Early reports suggest propylene tanks ignited, which is a common but extremely flammable gas used at manufacturing plants. The explosion occurred at Watson Grinding and Manufacturing where emergency crews are still trying to contain a possible gas leak.

Local videos showed a large fireball rising from the site of the plant in the blast’s immediate aftermath. Officials say the blast was so big it appeared on weather radar.

Police further issued a statement calling for the public’s help, and suggested the grim reality that body parts of blast victims may have spread from the site.

“People who are within a mile of the blast site should look for debris — including body parts — and report it to authorities if they see something,” Acevedo said.

“Please search your homes, and if you can, take a look at your roof,” the police chief added. 

A fireball was seen over the northwest Houston plant shortly after 4am.

The ATF is also assisting the investigation. Throughout the morning, the site was still unsecured and the area considered dangerous:

Flames no longer were visible by daylight, but firefighters hadn’t explored the blast site because an unspecified gas was flowing in the damaged business, and crews were trying to shut it off, Houston fire Chief Samuel Pena said.

“We won’t be able to get in there until we secure that,” Pena told reporters at a news conference.

“Entire structures were destroyed in the blast. Homes were blown off their foundations in the adjoining neighborhood, authorities said,” as reported by local ABC 13.

In the early morning hours firefighters were seen going door to door in surrounding neighborhoods checking on residents. At least one person has been reported missing.

“Broken windows, doors, and garage doors were also reported across a wide area around the blast site,” the report said. 

Over the past year there’s been multiple manufacturing and chemical plant disasters in the area, especially in the port area, where residents have feared air and water contaminants. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 01/24/2020 – 11:34

Tags
Disaster Accident
Environment

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GjaENM Tyler Durden

Naughty librarians to face 1 year in prison

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.

Which specific body parts can women expose before being sex offenders?

After installing fiberglass insulation, Tilli Buchanan and her husband stripped off their shirts in the garage for safety reasons.

They didn’t want to track any of the debris into the house. While walking topless to the shower, Tilli’s stepchildren saw her bare chested.

Two years later, the children’s biological mother reported the incident to authorities.

Tilli was charged with “child sex abuse” under Utah criminal code 76-9-702.5(2)(a)(ii)(B) for exposing “the female breast below the top of the areola. . .”

Rather than argue that this specific incident was not sexual, Tilli opted to challenge the entire law.

She claimed that the law is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. She and her husband were in the exact same state of undress, but she was charged with a crime, and he was not.

What has unfolded in the courts is a lengthy and ridiculous discussion about male and female body parts, and what constitutes lewdness.

Unfortunately for Tilli, the judge ruled against her, and she could face prison time, plus ten years on the sex offender registry.

Click here to read the full ruling.

Missouri bill proposes imprisonment for librarians who don’t ban books

A Missouri bill would create “community oversight boards,” (i.e. censorship boards) to decide what books are appropriate for certain ages.

The bill says children should not have access to any book which includes descriptions of sexual content that “appeals to the prurient interest of minors.”

And according to the bill, sexual content includes even mere mentions of nudity.

Bear in mind– we’re not just talking about the Game of Thrones books, which are pretty clearly intended for adult audiences.

This applies to even classics like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and of course, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

There are dozens more.

The ban would be in effect at all town libraries across the state. And if librarians don’t aggressively enforce the book ban, they could face a year in prison.

Just imagine A YEAR IN PRISON because some eighth grader was reading Shakespeare.

What’s even more interesting is that the bill doesn’t seem to think violence is inappropriate.

So the murder of two children in Lord of the Flies would be fine, but not the innocent skinny-dipping in the lagoon.

Click here for the full story.

County threatens to demolish Amish homes for code violations

Amish people are exercising their religious freedom to live a simple life without any technology. And most state and local governments tend to leave them alone.

But for some reason, a Michigan county decided to pick a fight with the local Amish community.

County officials posted notices on several Amish houses that their homes were unfit for human occupation because they did not have modern plumbing.

The county says unless they are brought up to code, the houses will be demolished.

Click here for the full story.

12 years in prison for possession of phone

Willie Nash was booked on a misdemeanor charge and spent some time in a Mississippi jail.

During the booking process, the jail staff failed to take the man’s phone.

Willie clearly didn’t know that there was a ban on phones, or else didn’t think it was a huge deal, because he asked a jailer to charge the phone for him.

The jailer confiscated the phone, reported the incident, and Willie was charged with possession of a phone in jail.

In Mississippi, the possession of a phone while in jail carries a prison sentence of 3 to 15 YEARS.

The judge, feeling especially lenient, magnanimously opted to sentence the man to a patry TWELVE years instead of the maximum fifteen.

For having a phone. Because the jail staff’s failure during booking.

Willie appealed, and the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled that the twelve year sentence was perfectly reasonable.

Click here for the full story.

Source

from Sovereign Man https://ift.tt/2tEaYEr
via IFTTT

NYTimes Quashed Story About 2016 WH Meeting With ‘Whistleblower’ & Ukrainians On Burisma: Report

NYTimes Quashed Story About 2016 WH Meeting With ‘Whistleblower’ & Ukrainians On Burisma: Report

Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness blog,

In an exclusive report, Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham revealed that the New York Times last May quashed a story about a White House meeting in January of 2016 between Obama administration officials – including the so-called whistleblower – and Ukrainian officials that addressed Hunter Biden’s problematic position at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings.

Ingraham said she obtained a chain of State Department emails between NYT journalist Ken Vogel and State Department official Kate Schilling centering on the reporter’s request for comment on the story.

Hunter Biden, 49, the scandal-plagued son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, is a central figure in the Ukraine scandal due to his high-paid no-show job at Burisma, a position he secured despite having no relevant experience in that field.

Democrats say the president withheld military aid from Ukraine until he could get a guarantee from the Ukrainian President Zelensky that the Bidens would be investigated. However, a document unearthed last October shows that Ukrainian officials had actually opened a new probe into Burisma months before President Trump’s July 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president.

Some Republicans have called for Hunter Biden to testify in the Senate impeachment trial.

Ken Vogel is the reporter who wrote the oft-cited January 2017 piece in Politico titled: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire. Subtitled: “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.”

Media reports referring to Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 election did not become controversial until Biden announced his candidacy for president in April of 2019. Then, as President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani conducted his very public investigation into the matter throughout 2019, Democrats and their allies in the media started characterizing the claim that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election as a “conspiracy theory.”

In Vogel’s May 1, 2019 email to Schilling about the Obama White House meeting, the reporter reportedly mentioned the name of the CIA analyst widely believed to be the anti-Trump whistleblower, whose complaint against the president sparked the Democrats’ impeachment efforts.

Ingraham did not reveal his name because Fox News hosts are banned from doing so until the identity is confirmed, but she was likely was referring to Eric Ciaramella, who has been outed in conservative media as the whistleblower.

In the email, Vogel wrote, “We are going to report that (State Department official) Elizabeth Zentos attended a meeting at the White House on 1/19/2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and embassy officials as well as … [redacted] from the NSC… the subjects discussed included efforts within the United States government to support prosecutions, in Ukraine and the United Kingdom, of Burisma Holdings … and concerns that Hunter Biden’s position with the company could complicate such efforts.”

“The State Department eventually declined to comment,” Ingraham said.

The Fox host noted that the email was forwarded to Schilling’s colleagues Zentos and diplomat George Kent, who has apparently been a source for Vogel in the past.

Kent, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, told House investigators last November that he had expressed concerns in 2015 that Hunter Biden’s position with Burisma raised the possibility of a perception of a conflict of interest. He testified that he reported his concern to the Office of the Vice President and nothing came of it.

The names Zentos and Ciaramella also came up during a hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee about Puerto Rico’s debt on Oct. 22, 2019.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asked Natalie Jaresko, Ukraine’s former finance minister, who is currently executive director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, whether she had any knowledge of the pair’s meeting with a Ukrainian official at a DC restaurant in 2016.

Gohmert told the Washington Examiner, “Specifically, I asked about an April 12, 2016, meeting between Ukrainian parliamentarian Olga Bielkova and Liz Zentos and Eric Ciaramella of the National Security Council, in which energy issues were discussed. I thought it was prudent to ask Ms. Jaresko on the record and under oath about this meeting, since the time frame and subject align with the concerning reports of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.”

Bielkova met with Ciaramella and his colleague, Liz Zentos, then the director for Eastern Europe on the National Security Council, on April 12, 2016, at Le Pain Quotidien, on 17th Street N.W., a block from the White House. The same day, Bielkova also met with State Department official Michael Kimmage and, separately, with Kramer of the McCain Institute. Kramer figures prominently in the Trump-Russia saga — he met with Steele in December 2016 at Heathrow Airport to obtain a copy of the British ex-spy’s unverified dossier and provided information from it to over a dozen journalists after the presidential election.

Ingraham said her team was able to corroborate details of the January 2016 meeting mentioned in Vogel’s email by perusing archived Obama White House visitor logs. She reported that the logs confirmed that a number of Ukrainian officials were checked into the White House by the whistleblower [Ciaramella], who was at the time the Ukraine director on the NSC. This was the day Vogel claimed there was a meeting between Obama administration officials and Ukrainians to discuss “the complications of Hunter Bidens sweetheart gig” at Burisma, as Ingraham put it.

Vogel’s explosive story, which would have broken about a week after Joe Biden announced his candidacy, was never published.

Ingraham said she reached out to both the New York Times and Vogel to ask why the story was quashed. She said that Vogel never replied, but the Times’ director of communications simply stated that Vogel’s request for comment was consistent with their news-gathering process.

Ingraham’s scoop shows that once again, due to the corporate media’s obsequious desire to assist Democrats, another important story was smothered.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 01/24/2020 – 11:15

Tags
Politics

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3aDhuf7 Tyler Durden

Soybean Prices Plunge To Six Week Low On Lack Of China Buys

Soybean Prices Plunge To Six Week Low On Lack Of China Buys

Chicago Board of Trade soybean futures plunged to a six-week low on Friday – giving up at least half of the gains seen in the run-up to the signing of the “Phase One” Trade deal last week. 

Reuters notes that uncertainty is increasing among traders whether Chinese demand can fulfill trade deal commitments.

There’s also new concern that a massive soybean harvest in Brazil could entice China to source more beans from the South American country than the U.S. — due in part because market conditions are much more favorable (i.e., prices of beans are cheaper in Brazil). 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has yet to confirm massive agricultural purchases by China since both countries signed the trade agreement last week. 

Here are some of the agriculture commitments China pledged in the trade deal: 

· China Purchases to Include Oilseeds, Meat, Cereals, Cotton

· China to Buy Add’ l $19.5B U.S. Agriculture Products in 2021

· China to Buy Add’ l $12.5B U.S. Agriculture Products in 2020

As Bloomberg notes, China is committing to buying about $32 billion in additional U.S. farm products over the next two years, that’s coming on top of levels seen in 2017 (pre-trade war). Specifically, China committed to importing at least $12.5 billion more agricultural goods this year than in 2017, rising to $19.5 billion next year. It’s unclear just how this will happen without China’s destroying existing supply chains. China will also “strive” to purchase an additional $5 billion a year in farm products.

Consultancy firm Agritel told Reuters that, “Soybeans are still waiting for confirmation of purchases from China, while Brazilian harvest pressure will soon be felt.” 

It appears the sizeable Brazilian harvest, expected to hit a record, could be very attractive for China considering bean prices are cheaper than the U.S. This would further complicate things between both countries, as it’s likely China could have a commitment issue and might not fulfill hard targets of the trade deal in year one. 

Refinitiv data shows current bulk carriers hauling agriculture products from the U.S. to Asia is very little at the moment. At the same time, dozens of carriers are transiting to and from Brazil to Europe and Asia. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 01/24/2020 – 11:00

Tags
Business Finance
Environment

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3aBrgP3 Tyler Durden

As Progressive Twitter Erupts at Joe Rogan Endorsing Bernie Sanders, a Reminder: Elizabeth Warren’s Sexism Gambit Backfired

One of the top trending topics on Twitter this morning is the hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan. Why? Here’s the outspoken progressive commentator Carlos Maza:

Maza was referencing this Thursday tweet from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.):

Cue the outrage-headlines: “Bernie Sanders’ Use of Joe Rogan Endorsement Sparks Debate: ‘The Campaign Didn’t Need to Amplify It’” and “Joe Rogan Triggers Internet Outrage Because He Endorsed Bernie Sanders.”

It’s an odd if predictable way for politically engaged progressives to greet the news that a socialist has been endorsed by one of the most popular podcasters in history. Maza, you may recall, successfully browbeated YouTube to demonetize the account of conservative shock-jock Steven Crowder last June after Crowder had repeatedly mocked Maza as a “lispy queer.” Maza is from that part of the social media left that prioritizes deplatforming various influential people who have various unacceptable views.

So what are Rogan’s? That the comedian and Mixed Martial Arts broadcaster finds it “preposterous” for male-born athletes to compete against women after transitioning. That he lamented the cancellation of The Dukes of Hazzard, using rather salty language. That he has interviewed such even-less-acceptable people as Milo Yiannopoulos and Jordan Petersen. (Rogan’s M.O. is to do insanely long interviews with various newsmakers, including, perhaps most spectacularly, a stoned Elon Musk.)

This latest skirmish in the left’s ongoing identity-politics war comes against a backdrop of powerful female politicians and their supporters coming after Bernie Sanders and for his alleged misogyny. First it was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) asserting on January 13 that Sanders told her in a private December 2018 conversation that he did not believe a woman could win the presidency. After Sanders denied the claim in a subsequent Democratic presidential debate (in which moderators from CNN, which had broken the original story, treated Warren’s side of the story as settled fact), Warren famously refused to shake Bernie’s hand.

A few days later, 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton jumped into the fray, claiming that Sanders has a “pattern” of saying misogynistic things and supporting a culture of anti-women behavior within his campaign.

When the Warren news first hit, I argued that she was making the “exact same tactical mistake” as five presidential candidates who had already flamed out of the race: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.), Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Julián Castro, and Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.). Namely, they banked on identity politics as an electoral winner.

While those five were also trying to downplay their past centrist heresies—a problem Warren doesn’t exactly have, even if Sanders surrogates like to paint her as a closet neoliberal—the Massachusetts senator nevertheless appears to have calculated that reviving the feminist critique of “Bernie Bros” and stressing the extra obstacles female candidates have to overcome was a sound strategy to regain the lead she enjoyed throughout the fall over the other progressive stalwart in the race. So how did that go?

So far, not so well. On January 12, the day before the private meeting became public, FiveThirtyEight‘s rolling adjusted national polling average had Sanders at 18.4 percent and Warren at 16 percent. (Frontrunner Joe Biden was at 27.6 percent, as he has been since forever.) As of this morning, the spread between the northeastern senators had doubled: Sanders is at 20.6 percent, at Warren 15.4.

As of mid-October, Warren had arguably run the most impressive campaign on the trail, drawing large crowds, slinging out detailed policy plans, shining in debates, marching up in the polls from the single digits to nearly 24 percent. Perhaps ironically, her momentum started to founder when she began conjuring specific price tags and implementation strategies for her ambitious plans to overhaul various parts of the economy, thus opening her up to both pragmatist attacks from the center and utopian attacks from the Bernieite left.

Attempting to cast the Sanders campaign as overly bro-tastic hasn’t worked so far. It’s early and other factors could affect things, but my guess is that the attempts to marginalize Joe Rogan, or somehow to punish Bernie Sanders for receiving Rogan’s endorsement, won’t work either. If there is evidence that woke politics is broadly popular, even in the Democratic primaries, we haven’t seen it yet.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/38xFvCk
via IFTTT

Ecomodernism Is the Solution to Man-Made Climate Change

In “Ignore the Fake Climate Debate,” an essay in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus cuts through the co-dependent alarmist/denier dialectic that drives headlines and fuels overheated tweet-fights. Americans should reject both climate doomism and climate denialism, he argues; ecomodernism is the best way forward.

First, Nordhaus points out that there is no real debate over the fact that human activities are boosting concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that this is contributing significantly to increases in average global temperatures. “In the fake climate debate, both sides agree that economic growth and reduced emissions vary inversely; it’s a zero-sum game,” Nordhaus writes. “In the real debate, the relationship is much more complicated.”

Among the complications is that we’re seeing more or less the opposite of the worst-case emissions scenario. Instead of being on a trajectory in which humanity burns 10 times more coal by 2100, the amount of carbon used to produce a dollar of GDP has fallen by more than half since 1990. Thanks to improving energy efficiency and ever-cheaper renewable energy supplies, Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado argues that global carbon dioxide emissions have likely ceased rising.

This is just one indication that humanity is becoming more technologically adept. And we will probably become more adept, because more and more of us are better off: While 36 percent of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 per day in 1990, today less than 10 percent do. Both technological prowess and rising wealth enable people to respond better to whatever weather extremes and natural disasters may occur in the future. Nordhaus cites a new study in the journal Global Environmental Change that reports “a clear decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability, with global average mortality and economic loss rates that have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016.”

Nordhaus’ ecomodernist solution to climate change mirrors my own analysis from back in 2009: “It is surely not unreasonable to argue that if one wants to help future generations deal with climate change, the best policies would be those that encourage rapid economic growth. This would endow future generations with the wealth and superior technologies that could be used to handle whatever comes at them including climate change.”

Taking economic growth and technological trends into account—along with the fact that the world’s population will probably peak before 2100—the Breakthrough Institute’s Zeke Hausfather and the University of British Columbia’s Justin Ritchie recently calculated that the real business-as-usual trajectory of future emissions would result in an increase of global average temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Challenging, but not apocalyptic.

So Nordhaus is certainly right when he concludes:

The utopian dreams of those who wish to radically reorganize the world to stop climate change are not a plausible global future. Nor will denying the relationship between carbon emissions and global warming make the real risks of climate change go away. The world will tackle this problem the way that it tackles most other problems, partially and incrementally, by taking up the challenges that are right in front of us—adaptation, economic development, energy modernization, public health—and finding practical ways to address them.

Disclosure: I have had the pleasure of attending several Breakthrough Dialogues and participating in discussions where I made the case that supporters of free markets are natural ecomodernists.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ROq7ea
via IFTTT