“A lawyer who admitted to lying to federal investigators probing alleged Russian election interference was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in prison, the first punishment to be imposed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe.
Alex van der Zwaan admitted in February he had misled investigators about his last contact with former Trump campaign aide Richard Gates and others. He said he had done so to protect his job as a lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, but he was later fired from the firm.
…Mr. van der Zwaan also admitted he deleted emails sought by investigators…”
So, Alex van der Zwaan…
…having lied to federal investigators and deleted incriminating emails, gets 30 days in stir. Kristian Saucier, a Navy sailor…
…pleaded guilty in May and was sentenced to a year in the brig for the “foolish mistake” of “unauthorized detention of defense information”, having taken photos inside a nuclear submarine on his cell phone.
Yet these former participants in a criminal conspiracy of mammoth proportions at the highest levels of government…
…continue to walk the streets of America collecting grossly bloated taxpayer-funded pensions…okay, all except one.
It’s just another one of those things that make you go, “hmmmm”, and which demonstrates Dimocrats in Washington aren’t subject to the rule of law; or at the very least operate under a very different “legal” system in which certaincrimes and certain criminals simply aren’t prosecuted.
Next up, as Bruce Bialosky avers at Townhall.com, no matter WHAT policies Progressives might espouse, no matter WHAT they might promise…
“…Before anyone jumps off a cliff about this proposition, let me state who I am on this issue. I am not a gun owner. I am not a member of the National Rifle Association nor any other group that supports gun rights. I was fairly ignorant about essential elements of guns and gun owners until I did a series of columns on the subject and became knowledgeable about the subject of guns through extensive research and interviews.
I strongly support the right to bear arms. I don’t care about or believe that garbage about a well-armed militia. The Second Amendment was put in place and obtained its lofty position as the “Second Amendment” right behind the most essential amendment giving us free speech etc., etc., for a reason. The people who founded this country did not trust government. Even though they were possibly the most talented, intelligent and capable group of people ever assembled for one cause, they lacked the arrogance of most people in government that government was or is the answer.
Today we have a multitude of reasons to have a high concern about a government that has become far too large, too invasive in too many issues and operated by people who are almost impervious to being fired (let alone imprisoned!) for normal matters that citizens have to face in their own lives.
When I have discussions with people wanting to shrink the rights of gun owners, they discount this essential aspect of why citizens should be allowed to own guns. When I ask them to explain the explosion of armed representatives of the government in non-military agencies, they are universally ignorant of that fact. Here are just a few:
1. The IRS has 2,300 Special Agents armed with AR-15s, P90 tactical rifles and other heavy weaponry. The IRS recently spent $12 million on ammo and weapons. 2. The Small Business Administration (SBA) spent tens of thousands on Glock hand guns. 3. In 1996 the Veterans Administration had no armed employees. Today they have 3,700 officers armed with millions of dollars worth of guns. 4. The list goes on.
As a Jew, I have a problem with any government having all the guns. The last time we allowed that to happen, it ended with millions of dead Jews. I believe any Jew who denies that reality puts their own political naiveté above the survival of the Jewish people.
If you think that is far-fetched because it happened over 70 years ago, then just cast your eyes south to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez took over a country that had open elections and was the most prosperous in South America in 1999.In less than 20 years Chavez and his successor Maduro have run an educated, productive country into the ground. It is a human disaster and they control all the guns while people are starving.
…I don’t trust the government and this country was established on that bedrock principle. I don’t trust the people who are lying to us about what their true intentions are about gun control just like they lied to us about government-run health care. They want all guns in the control of government-controlled apparatchiks.
As Charlton Heston said: “From my cold, dead hands.”“
“They freaked out that Kevin Williamson got a gig at the Atlantic. And they tried to drive Laura Ingraham off the air. But hey, I bet they’ll totally respect our civil rights once we are disarmed and they have a monopoly on force.”
Sorry, but we for one will never grant them that monopoly, willingly or otherwise.
Since we’re on the subject of Progressive poltroonery, courtesy of NRO, Victor Davis Hanson details…
“…In sum, Garcia has no drinking problem but has a keg in her office. Shedownplays her use of potty language and, to prove it, uses “sh**” in her interview.She does not slur gays but routinely uses “homo”(and denies reports of saying “faggot.”) In matters of sexual harassment and assault, she rails about the need to believe female accusers and demands that her colleagues so accused step down until cleared; but she does not believe her own four accusers and is, of course, going back to work before she’s cleared.
Again, why should we believe Garcia’s internally contradictory assertions?Because she is a social-justice warrior who does all these things as a “voice” for her “community” — and so is naturally being punished for her “advocacy”:
And this is about making sure I don’t have any more advocacy. That I don’t have any more voice. And it sends a message to people that I have mentored. I spend a lot of time trying to create advocates in the community. That’s my legacy. To make sure they’re told ‘if you rise up and you speak up this is going to happen you. So, sit down and don’t say anything.
Harvey Weinstein assumed that fighting the NRA and Trump would compensate for assaulting and harassing women. Steven Colbert thought that he could use gross homophobic slurs and avoid criticism because he was doing so to attack a despised Trump who holds the nation’s nuclear codes. Christina Garcia believes that as a Latina representative of her “community,” she is exempt from the very charges she often levels against others, and she assumes that using profanity, drinking in her office, and slurring gays are the exemptions given to one who is an “advocate.”
Political correctness is now the new last refuge of a scoundrel.“
Need we note were Ms. Garcia’s name followed by an (R) on the ballot, her hypocritical a*s would already have been kicked out of Sacramento?!?
Speaking of Socialist scoundrels (like Liberals come in any other variety!), as Jim Freeman relates at Best of the Web, it’s time to…
“…It seems that Mr. Zuckerberg will continue to offer an affordable service–assuming consumers don’t regard sharing their personal information as too high a price to pay for social media. Speaking of costs and benefits, Mr. Zuckerberg makes clear in his Vox interview that Facebook is becoming a more aggressive media gatekeeper:
In 2016, we were behind having an understanding and operational excellence on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference. And you can bet that’s a huge focus for us going forward…
After the 2016 US elections, a number of months later, there were the French elections. And for that, we spent a bunch of time developing new AI tools to find the kind of fake accounts spreading misinformation and we took down — I think it was more than 30,000 accounts, and I think the reports out of France were that people felt like that was a much cleaner election on social media.
A few months later, there were the German elections. And there, we augmented the playbook again to work directly with the election commission in Germany. If you work with the government in a country, they’ll really actually have a fuller understanding of what is going on and what are all the issues that we would need to focus on.
The idea of Facebook working with governments around the world to filter news is more frightening than almost any commercial use of user data one can imagine.
In a recent letter to the editor of this newspaper, Rodger Cornell of Kinsale, Va. no doubt speaks for many readers in addressing new proposals to filter Internet content on services like Facebook:
During most of my adult life the news that I received was indeed filtered, in most instances by liberal newspaper editors.I’ll take my chances on a wide-open internet, thank you.“
As will we…
…and hang onto our firearms! Yet another reason we’ll never use Facebook.
In a related item, also writing at NRO, J.J. McCullough offers us a perfectly plausible glimpse of America’s future were Progressives to successfully repeal the 2nd Amendment and turn their attention to the 1st, as he informs us…
“When the state gains the power to outlaw certain forms of expression as “hate speech” — a rising demand in some corners of America these days — the result is rarely a decrease in hate but always expanded power for grotesque new forms of bureaucratic busybodying.
I subscribe to an email service that provides me with the Canadian Border Service Agency’s “Quarterly List of Admissible and Prohibited Titles.” This is something the government of Canada produces every few months to inform its citizens which works of “Obscenity and Hate Propaganda” — that is, books, magazines, DVDs, CDs, and sometimes even flyers, posters, and stickers — have been denied entry into their country.
The lists are not long, and the works they declare prohibited are mostly obscure. Canada’s border censors appear far more biased against obscenity than hate, which often makes the lists more lurid than anything else, and prevents them from receiving the sort of attention one might expect for such a bluntly illiberal exertion of state authority. Yet hesitation and awkwardness also expose discomfort with the inescapably authoritarian reality of what Ottawa promised when it passed hate-speech legislation in the first place — legislation Justin Trudeau’s administration has since defended and strengthened.
Canadians do not enjoy a universal right to freedom of speech; expressing and consuming certain ideas and opinions is regulated by law. This is rationalized by the Canadian constitution’s declaration that government has a right to restrain freedoms with “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
Ottawa has thus elected to impose “reasonable limits” on speech deemed obscene, seditious, treasonous, pro-terrorist, or hateful. Since “hate speech” tends to be the most controversial category, it’s worth walking through the numerous layers of law and authority that Canada’s government invokes in order to prevent Canadians from, say, reading the wrong sort of book.
…Such prohibitions are rare and, as the above suggests, they tend to manifest mostly as censorship of fringe content considered unambiguously beyond the pale by most of Canadian society. Yet the tools used to achieve this mild social good remain disturbingly broad. The “identifiable groups” that Canadian authorities have a mandate to protect from disparaging claims include human beings of any religion, nationality, gender, or age. Any future administration that elects to enforce its mandate to scrub Canada of “hate propaganda” in a fiercer and more comprehensive fashion would certainly have the law on its side, and as the protection of collective dignities becomes a growing political priority, there’s little reason to err on the side of optimism.
This is what attempting to solve the hate-speech problem looks like: a clique of strange and selective censors raising the ominous question that any arbitrary, conditional protection of human rights inevitably does — “Who’s next?”“
Just ask any Venezuelan.
And on The Lighter Side:
Finally, if you missed the April Fool’s edition of Stilton’s Place, he offered these three headlines both he and we’d like to see:
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