Narratives

Nazis Clarify They’re Only Calling For ‘Democratic Nazism'--Babylon Bee


Chris' surgery is this morning.

Economic growth won’t last as the U.S. labors under the burden of growing entitlement programs, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC.

Since we are willing to govern our lives on narratives and tropes, we now have proof that a wall at the border works: A wall kept the North free of Wildlings for one thousand years. Take that, Pelosi.

A new app for the iPhone named Jumbo will automatically delete old tweets on Twitter, apply Facebook privacy settings, and delete history stored by Google and Amazon Alexa.

Reuters

Smoke rises around the altar inside the Notre Dame Cathedral.

San Francisco’s Speakeasy Ales; Lagers or New Hampshire’s Smuttynose Brewing, which relied on traditional distribution, have been forced to sell in the face of looming foreclosures.

No primitive people were ever yet so stupid as to suppose that they could increase their wealth by taxing themselves. (george)

Anna Wintour has suggested that Melania Trump will likely never be on the cover of Vogue in the future. Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of the magazine, explained her reasoning in an interview with CNN. "You have to stand up for what you believe in, you have to take a point of view,” she told chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. “I don't think you can try to please everyone all the time.”  My goodness. Who knew fashion cut so wide and deep?

“The villain here is big oil. The fossil fuel industry did this to us,” said De Blasio at a press conference, standing at a podium adorned with a “Stop Plastic Waste, Stop Big Oil” sign. “Today, we say no to plastics. We say no to fossil fuels. We say yes to a better and fairer future.” This is not Agincourt. He is speaking here about single use plastics, like bags and straws. It sounds like The Onion.


Almost all federal income taxes (97%) are paid by the top 50%, more than 2/3 of income taxes are paid for by the top 10% and more than 40% of taxes are paid by the top 1% of taxpayers. 

The rising percentage of Americans who are not required to pay taxes — whose percentage as a share of all taxpayers has more doubled over the last 25 years.
The notion that the rich do not pay taxes is a canard.

                                   Narratives

We are obsessed by stories, news. And, conversely, we are disinterested in old news as it is replaced by the new, shiny story. So one wonders how far this new question about an old story--the AG question about the government spying on the Trump campaign--will go. With this in mind:

From an old, 2017, article by Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review (the emphasis is his):

"FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. This indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]).

McCarthy writes, "a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on. There is a way – a notoriously aggressive way – that the Justice Department and FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case. Here, they were trying to unmake a case."

He summarizes: "The decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was not made by then-FBI Director Comey. It was made by President Obama and his Justice Department – Comey’s superiors.

....Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States. With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent,” in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. When damning proof nevertheless mounted, the Obama administration dismissed the whole debacle by rewriting the statute (to impose an imaginary intent standard) and by offering absurd rationalizations for not applying the statute as written."

If true, such a distortion could not occur without the help of opinion-makers. And, would it have been a lot worse if it had been done by Russians?