“Todd asked: “Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed? Because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name.”

POLITICS

Here’s Why The Hunter Biden Corruption Story Is Worth Investigating, Chuck Todd

BY: DAVID HARSANYI at the Federalist:

JANUARY 16, 2023

The Praetorian Guard, reporting for duty.

DAVID HARSANYI

This weekend, NBC’s Chuck Todd and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson had a tense exchange over the importance of the Hunter Biden story. After whatabouting the issue for a bit, an agitated Todd asked: “Senator, do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed? Because I’ve yet to see anybody explain. It is not a crime to make money off of your last name.”

There can’t be an investigation until we know for certain that something criminal occurred, but we can’t know if anything criminal occurred until there’s an investigation. Convenient. This, of course, is not the standard journalists have ever embraced for scrutinizing presidential wrongdoing in the past. Todd regularly entertained notions about Donald Trump’s alleged seditious conspiracy in 2016 — which would have been the most diabolical political crime in American history — without any tangible evidence of criminality.

Also, not inconsequentially, Hunter is already under criminal investigation for tax and gun charges by federal prosecutors in Delaware. So, surely, the case has hit the threshold of a criminal investigation. Does Todd not know about this?

That said, a president doesn’t necessarily have to break a specific criminal code to be corrupt. And this scandal isn’t about Biden’s son or his brother, but about Joe. At worst, Biden benefitted and participated in the family influence peddling, or, at best, he spent years lying to the American public about his knowledge of that business. Even if we found pictures of Trump and Putin taking shots of Imperia vodka together to celebrate the defeat of American democracy, it still wouldn’t change the fact Biden has much to answer for.

Recall that in an interview with Axios, Biden claimed he knew absolutely nothing about what Hunter was doing with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that was paying the younger Biden $50,000 monthly. Joe said he trusted Hunter, who had accepted a no-show job while his father was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in Ukraine. That firm was led by an oligarch who at the time was under investigation for corruption.

Joe Biden claims that as vice president, he threatened Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko with the withdrawal of United States aid if he didn’t fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. That, at the very least, was a serious conflict of interest. In 2015, some Obama administration officials — not exactly right-wing conspiracy theorists — raised concerns about the Bidens and Ukraine.

Because of the New York Post’s investigation into Hunter’s laptop — a story ignored by the Chuck Todds of the world for transparently partisan reasons — we also learned that an executive from Burisma thanked Hunter for facilitating a meeting between him and Joe while the latter was still vice president. This week, The New York Times gingerly confirmed that Biden had, indeed, met with Burisma reps. We also know that Hunter’s business partner made at least 19 visits to the Obama White House. We know that former Hunter associate Tony Bobulinski has sworn that Joe Biden discussed the family business. Emails suggest that Biden was the recipient of 10 percent in all those deals. I suspect if this was about Donald Trump, Chuck Todd would care more?

None of this even gets into the fact that Hunter’s associates allegedly facilitated a meeting between then-Vice President Biden and Chinese Communist Party members and billionaires in Beijing. Or that Hunter’s emails claim that You-Know-Who got a 10 percent share in a deal Hunter struck with a Chinese energy firm.

Todd, incidentally, decried the “political” nature of the Hunter investigation in an interview with incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer last week. Of course there’s a political motivation here. Every investigation into Trump had a political motivation, as well. Virtually every congressional investigation in history, to some extent, is politically motivated. This is how the American government works. One side keeps the other honest. That alone doesn’t make the underlying claims untrue. Remember, Hillary Clinton’s illegal server and influence peddling were ferreted out in the Benghazi investigation — which, unsurprisingly, Todd also claimed was propelled by “conspiracy theory.”

It’s not the partisan incentive that made the Russia collusion narrative a hoax, it was the complete lack of merit and evidence. Republicans would be wise not to obsess over Hunter Biden, but they already have far more genuine evidence to justify a House investigation.

Now, I’m not certain if taking a cut from the family racket is technically a criminal offense, but it’s most definitely a worthwhile story. Maybe Joe Biden, noted civil rights activist and college football star, merely lied to distance himself from his son, or maybe not. How will we ever know? Republicans can’t rely on the political media to do its job. Todd, Jake Tapper, Joe Scarborough, and many others don’t merely dismiss inconvenient stories as unworthy of their attention, they act like members of the Biden Praetorian Guard. 

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.

IN OUR FASCIST YEAR 2023: “Harvard classifies history as a “social science,” while Yale places history in the humanities.

JANUARY 16, 2023 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: ME, ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ACADEMIC HISTORY

I have a chapter on “When Reason Replaces Wisdom: How the Neglect of History and Statesmanship Has Diminished Political Science,” just out in a multi-author collection from Bloomsbury Academic entitled Applied History and Contemporary Policymaking, edited by Robert Crowcroft of the University of Edinburgh. Here’s an excerpt:

Today academic history is going through something of an identity crisis, with the number of undergraduate majors in the discipline plummeting while its academic practicioners descend further into esoteric or narrow investigations that have little appeal or importance beyond a tenure review committee. One sign of this identity crisis can be seen in the fact that Harvard classifies history as a “social science,” while Yale places history in the humanities.

Another clue comes from this curious fact about biographies of major historical figures: The general reading public can’t get enough of them. Biographies especially of presidents and figures from the American Founding, but also generals and major business leaders, have not only rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists, but even spawned Broadway musicals. And yet very few of them are written by academic historians any more, unlike the 1950s and 1960s when leading academics such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Arthur Link, and James Macgregor Burns produced multi-volume works on American presidents. Academic historians today still write often about presidents, but usually confine themselves to a narrow aspect rather than a synoptic biography, i.e., “President X and Civil Rights,” or “President Y and Latin American Policy.” Instead, today best-selling biographies tend to be written by journalists or professional non-academic writers like Ron Chernow (George Washington, Andrew Hamilton, Ulysses S. Grant, and J.P. Morgan), James Grant (Bernard Baruch), Doris Kearns Goodwin (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln), or David McCulloch (John Adams, Harry Truman). There are some exceptions such as Yale’s David Blight, author of recent biography of Frederick Douglass, but these tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. The few academic historians like Blight who have written popular biographies tend to be older, and withdrawn from the mainstream of academic history, like Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, Andrew Roberts, Julian T. Jackson, Joseph Ellis, and the recently deceased Jean Edward Smith.

If you’re interested, you can download my chapter here.

Or Too Lefty In California?

January 16, 2023

Too Wet? Too Dry? It’s All Climate Change!

By Brian C. Joondeph at American Thinker:

Climate change, as defined by the United Nations: “Refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. These shifts may be natural, such as through variations in the solar cycle.” That’s actually a good definition.

But not willing to leave well enough alone, the UN goes further, spoiling a simple and straightforward definition with: “But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”

It is amazing that before humans burned fossil fuels two centuries ago, it was only natural cycles that changed the climate, not backyard barbecues, gas stoves, and SUVs. Yet the UN does not explain how previous ice ages developed due to global cooling, followed by melting of mile-thick ice over the upper Midwest due to global warming, multiple times over the Earth’s history, long before there was any significant human activity.

It seems that a changing climate was a thing long before Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, and the UN thought they figured it all out. Not only does the climate change, based on both short- and long-term cycles, but much of it is also unpredictable. According to the Intragovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Climate change had other names over the years. In the 1970s it was “global cooling” with predictions of a coming ice age. NPR, the guardians of all proper knowledge and thought, first used the term “global warming” in 1989. It doesn’t make sense, at least to most logical people, that the planet can be both warming and cooling on a global scale, outside of normal seasonal variations, so the term “climate change” was popularized to encompass all weather events.

“Climate change” was first mentioned in 1975, but this was a time when climate scientists could not decide if temperatures were rising or falling, attributing sinister causes rather than natural and cyclic warming and cooling trends which have long preceded humans and their activities.

Since then, climate change has engulfed more than temperature, adding weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, and flooding. It seems that any deviation from a sunny day with temperatures in the mid ’70s with a light breeze is evidence of climate change and Republicans scheming to destroy the planet.

Democrats, the left, and the media have an uncanny ability to balance two contradictory propositions in their minds, believing both can occur simultaneously due to the same cause. It would be like Goldilocks finding all three beds or bowls of porridge just perfect, regardless of whether they were too hot or too cold, too hard or too soft.

The New York Times, in 2014, ran an opinion piece titled, “The end of snow?” predicting the demise of winter sports and the Winter Olympics due to global warming. Eight years later in 2022, the New York Times told us, “How climate change can supercharge snowstorms.”. Or also in 2022 how, “The deadly freeze that swept the United States was extraordinary, but while scientists know that global warming can intensify extreme weather, the effects on winter storm are tricky to untangle.”

Tricky indeed. Climate change causes both not enough and too much snow. How does that work?  But it’s not only snow but water, both not enough and too much, all due to omnipotent climate change.

Let’s look at droughts in California.

According to the California Department of Water Resources,

California is no stranger to drought; it is a recurring feature of our climate. We recently experienced the 5-year event of 2012-2016, and other notable historical droughts included 2007-09, 1987-92, 1976-77, and off-and-on dry conditions spanning more than a decade in the 1920s and 1930s.

Paleoclimate records going back more than 1,000 years show many more significant dry periods. The dry conditions of the 1920s-30s, however, were on a par with the largest 10-year droughts in the much longer paleoclimate record.

Unfortunately, the scientific skill to predict when droughts will occur – which involves being able to forecast precipitation weeks to months ahead – is currently lacking. Improving long-range weather modeling capabilities is an area of much-needed research.

In a nutshell, droughts are nothing new in California, have been far worse in the past, before anyone talked about global warming or climate change, and they are impossible to predict, as the IPCC noted above.

Floods are much the same. The same California agency notes,

 California is prone to potentially devastating impacts of periodic floods. All 58 counties have experienced at least 1 significant flood event in the past 25 years, resulting in loss of life and billions of dollars in damages.

Floods are naturally occurring phenomena in California.

Again, floods are normal and expected. They are nothing new. Here are photos of floods going back 150 years.

But look at media headlines claiming droughts and floods are new and due to climate change rather than natural phenomenon.

From National Geographic last month, “Climate change and California’s drought.” A local ABC News affiliate explained, “California Drought: New research ties specific extreme weather events to climate change.” They went further, “California Drought: How will climate change affect California’s ski industry?”

Drought is due to climate change. Yet at the same time so is flooding.

Last week Vox claimed, “California’s floods reveal a likely climate change symptom: Quick shifts between opposing weather conditions.” Climate pseudo-scientist Ellen DeGeneres unsuccessfully weighed in, “Ellen DeGeneres mocked for video blaming California flooding on climate change.” USA Today at least asked a question, “Are California’s storms normal, or is climate change making them worse?”

It seems all manner of weather is due to climate change, ignoring past far more extreme weather, when the world’s population and activity was much less than today. Perhaps historical perspective is necessary. After all, history didn’t begin when Greta Thunberg or writers at Vox or the New York Times came of age.

The climate has been changing for millennia, since the Earth was formed, and will continue to do so in the future. Most change is due to earth and solar cycles some of which we understand, none of which we can alter or control.

Market Watch reports: “Climate change has cost the government $350 billion” as of 2018 and that number is rising. Yet it’s still snowing in Colorado and both dry and wet in California. We are pissing away money we don’t have, ignoring far more important and fixable problems at home, attempting to fix the unfixable. Government at its finest.

Is this really about “saving the planet” or is the climate movement about money and control, similar to the COVID pandemic, the new homes of communism and tyranny?

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a physician and writer. Follow me on Twitter @retinaldoctor Truth Social @BrianJoondeph and LinkedIn @Brian Joondeph.

“…..news that Joe Biden had classified documents, obtained when he was vice president and some labeled top secret, stored insecurely in his Washington office at the Penn Biden Center of the University of Pennsylvania (funded by the Chinese government), and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware…”

January 15, 2023

The Corvette Files

By Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

The internet posters are making hay of the news that Joe Biden had classified documents, obtained when he was vice president and some labeled top secret, stored insecurely in his Washington office at the Penn Biden Center of the University of Pennsylvania (funded by the Chinese government), and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware where Hunter had resided for some time, including at least one document found his garage.

I don’t know which post is my favorite, but this one by David Burge (Iowahawk) certainly makes my list:

“Just got a smokin’ deal on a hot rod project from Craigslist, plus it had some free nuclear codes in the glove box.”

Then, of course, there’s the never-outdone satirists at the Babylon Bee and the New York Post’s photo editors. 

The documents reportedly were discovered by lawyers working for Biden — some of them found before the midterms when Biden tut-tutted about whatever was found during the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home. But the discovery was kept silent until now. Ostensibly the Mar-a-Lago raid was to discover if any documents marked “classified” — all of which Trump said he declassified while president and was entitled to do — were outside the sealed room under Secret Service guard — you know, like in Melania’s underwear drawers which the FBI rummaged through. A raid which was purportedly initiated after a complaint from the National Archives archivist. Biden claimed at the time he had no advance notice that the FBI (read: Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray) had ordered such a raid. I doubt he’d remember if he had been told. In any event, he placed the onus on others. He used the raid to excoriate Trump.

During an interview on “60 Minutes” from September, Biden was asked about the viral photograph of top-secret documents spread across the floor by the FBI following the raid of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. 

“When you saw the photograph of the top-secret documents laid out on the floor at Mar-a-Lago, what did you think to yourself looking at that image?” CBS’ Scott Pelley asked. 

“How that could possibly happen, how one anyone could be that irresponsible,” Biden responded. “And I thought what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods. By that, I mean, names of people helped or et cetera.” 

Biden also claimed he did not know he had those classified documents. Again, given his obvious cognitive decline it may seem plausible to some, though his penchant for lying must be weighed, too, when deciding if this defense is credible. Credible or not, it is not a legal defense for mishandling classified material. Law Professor Jonathan Turley explains why that excuse is not exonerating, and moreover, why the claim appears factually false.

Democrats and the media (I repeat myself here) are rushing to find distinctions between the two cases and Congressman Hank Johnson, a man so ignorant he openly wondered whether Guam might tip over because of military placements there, suggested these documents might have been placed there to harm Biden.

Unfortunately, just as he was floating this preposterous scenario, Biden’s lawyers seem to have conceded he “inadvertently” was responsible.

For Merrick Garland, who oversees the FBI, the discoveries were not a joke. He’s now in the crosshairs of those who, like me, think we are once again seeing a double standard of justice on his watch. (Forget that his predecessors ignored Hillary’s mishandling of classified information on an unsecured server; this discovery so near in time puts him and the National Archives on the hot spot.) Why did the archivist raise an issue before the midterms respecting Trump, and never raise any issue about Biden? Why did the archivist’s complaint trigger a grand jury, subpoenas, and a raid on Mar-a-Lago, yet these new discoveries seem to end with a full acceptance of what Biden’s attorneys say they found?

Yes, Garland has tried to pass this off to Robert Hur, whom he named special counsel to look into it, but despite his credentials, Hur doesn’t seem to some to be the best choice. For one thing, he’s as Deep State as you can imagine:

…those accolades were spoken by none other than disgraced former-deputy attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who conspired with the fellow disgracee Andrew McCabe to wear a wire to catch Donald Trump in a 25th Amendment-worthy meltdown because they hated him so much.

Pardon me if I don’t swoon.

The high government official was at the right hand of the awful FBI Director Chris Wray, who has overseen the complete transmogrification of the bureau from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence entity that spies on Americans. And the man touting his “distinguished career” is none other than the most ideologically Leftist hack who’s ever disgraced the office of the attorney general, Merrick Garland. And that’s saying something. Looking at you, “wingman” Eric Holder.

And there’s more. Robert Hur is the man who served as the DOJ point man to Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation looking into Donald Trump’s alleged side hustle as a Russian secret agent — Double 45.

He is the same guy who vetted retired British spy Christopher Steele, a disgraced (sensing a pattern here?) spy who was fired by the FBI (and then used on the QT by his cutout Bruce Ohr) and hired actual Russian spies on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to make up information on Trump. [snip] He was Rosenstein’s lawyer during the Russiagate probe and used his office to block the so-called Nunes memo that described the corrupt law enforcement and Democrat campaign against Trump….

For another, Paul Sperry has more on this swampy appointment:

“BREAKING: FBI Director Christopher Wray’s chief of staff Jonathan Lenzner was newly appointed Special Counsel ROBERT HUR’s deputy in Maryland. Lenzner’s father was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s private eye fixer. Lenzner is married to WaPo national editor Matea Gold, both Democrats”

Is it any wonder that people like Larry O’Connor believe Hur was chosen to impede congressional Republicans in their own investigations? Even if you disagree with this supposition, you must see that the appointment was to cover Garland’s actions against Trump, including his appointment of a special counsel to investigate the former president to make it appear that he was even-handed.

Garland, Wray, and the national archivist are not the only ones squirming right now. Don Surber masterfully establishes on the record the two-step the major media is dancing right now, comparing how they viewed the many fruitless investigations and charges against Trump and how they are reporting the planned investigations of Biden:

“When they won the majority last year, House Democrats promised a barrage of investigations into President Trump and those around him. It now looks more like a continuous bombardment.”

This time the list of investigations are

• The ‘Weaponization’ of Government
• Biden Family Businesses
• Origins of the Covid Pandemic
• China Competitiveness
• The Withdrawal From Afghanistan
• Border Enforcement
• Treatment of Jan. 6 Defendants

This time the press coverage is not on the target of the investigations but the investigations themselves. That is because the press knows the investigations of real events, not imaginary events dreamed up by Hillary’s opposition research team that could find nothing worse than Trump saying “pussy” in a private conversation to Billy Bush in 2005.

The press knows the laptop, the origin of covid and the surrender of Afghanistan are real. They worry that Republicans might actually have something. The press worries that they might actually do something with it.

 It’s going to be a fun-filled 2023 for media watchers.

“….but we can hope that the Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions will start America down the path of unwinding racist classifications!”

JANUARY 15, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN RACIAL PREFERENCES, SUPREME COURT

OUR INSANE RACIAL CLASSIFICATIONS

Perhaps the saddest fact in a sad era is that we are officially a racist society. Our governments at all levels, along with all of our major private institutions, divide Americans into a bizarre schema of racial categories and treat them differently based on those classifications. The whole system is both crazy and corrupt.

Law professor David Bernstein is the author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. Glenn Reynolds interviewed Bernstein at Glenn’s Substack site. You should read the whole thing; here are some excerpts:

Americans typically make two primary errors about race. The first is that the racial classifications we use in common parlance–Black, White, Asian, Native American, Hispanic—are somehow natural and arose spontaneously. Very few of us realize that the US government codified them in 1977 in a formal federal law called Statistical Directive No. 15. Before that, almost no one called people of Spanish-speaking descent “Hispanics.” What we now call “Asian Americans” were nothing like a coherent group; Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans had distinct cultures and significant history of inter-group conflict. Americans from India were typically classified as “white” or “other,” but a last-minute lobbying campaign resulted in them being added to the Asian American group.
***
Contrary to popular belief, “Hispanic” includes Spaniards, but not Brazilians. The government defines indigenous people from Spanish-speaking countries as having Hispanic ethnicity, but thanks to lobbying from Native American tribes, are not “Indians” and have no racial box that fits them. Arab Americans, Iranians, Armenians, and other people from Western Asia are white, not Asian or Middle Eastern (there is no such official classification).

People also assume incorrectly there is some sort of cut off, that you can’t claim “X” ancestry if, say, only your great-great-grandfather was “X.” But the Black/African American classification is defined as anyone with “origins in one of the black racial groups of Africa,” so the one-drop rule prevails. The Small Business Administration has concluded that a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors haven’t lived in a Spanish-speaking country for centuries can still claim Hispanic status.

Bernstein points out that ethnicity increasingly matters little in American society, but entrenched interests insist on racist classifications:

At the grassroots level, Americans are more tolerant than ever, and mixing socially and romantically in every possible way, rapidly creating a non-racial multi-ethnic American identity. But the elite has created and seeks to defend a whole intellectual, business, and educational infrastructure based on freezing people into classifications created without much thought (or foresight) in the 1970s.

Ultimately, the classification scheme owes its existence to the history of slavery and Jim Crow:

When the US government created our modern classification system in the 1970s, the country was still overwhelmingly black and white, about 81% white, 13% black. Around 5% were Hispanic, but the government traditionally considered this to be a “white” ethnic category. Given American history to that point, it’s not surprising that the bureaucrats who invented the system simply assumed that blacks and whites, respectively, would be pretty easy to identify, that they wouldn’t mix much, and that the division would likely be something close to permanent. Also, the statistics were meant primarily to be used for civil rights record-keeping. With “whites” not facing nearly as much discrimination as blacks, subdividing the white group was seen as unnecessary, though some experts advocated for doing so.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy failed to anticipate the massive immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa that would upset the classification scheme.

Last time I saw the Census bureau data, whites–bizarre though that category may be–ranked 17th among ethnic groups in median income, outstripped by Indian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Ghanian-Americans, Nigerian-Americans, and others. The racist classification scheme that is now implemented by both governments and private entities is not just evil, but ridiculous.

A final interesting point: in oral arguments on the Harvard and North Carolina race discrimination cases, Supreme Court justices expressed interest in arguments beyond the obvious equal protection:

For the first time last fall, the Supreme Court, hearing oral argument in the Harvard and UNC affirmative action cases, seemed to question not just the constitutionality of affirmative action preferences, but whether the classifications themselves are unduly arbitrary and thus illegal.

Racism is deeply embedded in our governments, our universities, and nearly all large corporations. It will not be easy to uproot, but we can hope that the Supreme Court’s upcoming decisions will start America down the path of unwinding racist classifications.