Flynn Discussed by Obama in Oval Office

In a column at PJ Media, Matt Margolis reports that documents released yesterday by the Department of Justice show that President Obama, while still in office as a lame duck, knew details about the wiretap of Michael Flynn’s call with Russian ambassador Kislyak. He writes:

Obama’s direct knowledge of the details of Flynn’s wiretapped calls even shocked his then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Obama had fired Flynn as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 in order to protect Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Obama’s knowledge of Flynn being wiretapped raises significant questions about what Obama knew and when he knew it with regard to the attempt to railroad Flynn and prevent him from serving as Trump’s national security adviser.

An optimist would conclude we are one small step closer to seeing the former president in an orange jumpsuit. A pessimist would say he’s untouchable, regardless of what he knew or ordered done.

Fox News has a longer story about these documents and what they show, including that Biden was present at these discussions.

1996 Document Backs Tara Reade Claim

The Sacramento Bee is reporting that documents filed with the court in San Luis Obispo County in 1996 confirm Tara Reade‘s estranged husband believed she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against someone while working in Sen. Joe Biden’s office in 1993. He adds she “eventually struck a deal with the chief of staff of the Senator’s office and left her position.”

The article quotes the then-chief of staff as having no recollection of this deal-striking whatsoever, alleging it didn’t happen. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, Ms. Reade has been convinced of its reality since the mid-1990s.

Flynn Charges Dropped

PBS carries an Associated Press report that the Department of Justice is dropping their case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. He admitted lying to the FBI before asking the court to withdraw his guilty plea.

Documents recently released appeared to indicate the FBI attempted to entrap Flynn because of political malice. They did this after concluding he had done nothing wrong vis-a-vis the Russians.

It is widely believed that after their investigation determined Flynn had broken no laws, they set out to get him to break the one about lying to the FBI in order to get him fired or, even better, jailed. The motive was hatred of president-elect Trump and a wish to hobble or destroy him, which they failed to accomplish.

The Obama administration, in the waning days of which this all happened, appears to have very dirty hands, so much so that it was likely the Flynn case would not succeed. As we all know, judges throw out cases where the prosecution or police can be shown to have exceeded their authority or acted corruptly. That seems to be the case here.

Occam’s Razor Wins

Regarding the post we did about the ethnically Chinese CoV researcher in Pittsburgh who was murdered by a Chinese-American fellow who, police claim, committed suicide almost immediately thereafter.  Police are now saying there was a long term disagreement between the two men concerning a third person who was the love interest of one of the two, or possibly of both.

The police won’t say who that person was, which makes me suspect it was Dr. Liu’s wife. It is hard to imagine who else the police would try to protect, unless that third person was a minor - a scary thought. Old homicide squad truism: suspect love and/or money as the motive for murder.

A Major Riposte

The Daily Wire has a transcript of Trump’s new Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany taking a snarky personal question, reversing it, and ramming it down the collective throats of the assembled media. The schadenfreude is amazing.

Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked McEnany, “In a previous life, before you were press secretary, you worked for the campaign and you made a comment, I believe on Fox, in which you said President Trump will not allow the coronavirus to come to this country. Given what has happened since then, obviously, would you like to take that back?

Her obviously pre-researched answer is a killer:

I guess I would turn the question back on the media and ask similar questions. Does Vox want to take back that they proclaimed that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic? Does The Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to get a grip, the flu is bigger than the coronavirus? Does The Washington Post likewise want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus? Does The New York Times want to take back that fear of the virus maybe spreading faster of than the virus itself? Does NPR want to take back that the flu was a much bigger threat than the coronavirus? And finally once again The Washington Post, would they like to take back that the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus?

I’ll leave you with those questions and maybe you’ll have some answers in a few days,” McEnany concluded. “Thank you very much.

I believe that’s referred to in modern parlance as her “owning” the #NeverTrump media. Do you notice that Reuters is not among those whose earlier reporting she criticized?

Jeff Mason is a decent guy, often on Bret Baier’s panel on Fox News. I‘m devious enough to wonder if he collaborated with McEnany to ask that question? Hat tip to Stephen Green guest blogging at Instapundit for the link.

Identifying the Problem

I’d like to call your attention to an article by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative on the topic of the bad situation in public schools. He reacts to a letter a middle schoolgirl wrote to the New York Times about how superior her online schooling is to the chaotic public school she attended before the CoV lockdown. Some key Dreher quotes:

What if the problem is not the system, but the kids, and the families that send them to school without the character qualities necessary for their success?

Education is not a mechanical process (inputs + process = outputs), but an organic one. It requires students, teachers, and parents working together, in harmony. The role parents play is to create a habitus in which the student is prepared to learn, and to acquire the self-discipline to participate in the process. If parents do not or cannot do that, the system breaks down.

A friend who teaches at a very poor rural school here in Louisiana told me at length that the biggest obstacle to his students learning is the culture they bring with them into the classroom. It is a culture of natural hatred of authority, of chaos, and in the worst cases, contempt for schooling. He said that when you meet the parents of these kids, you know exactly where it comes from.

Amen, brother. Much of what is wrong with the schools, as opposed to with the students, is the result of well-meaning but ineffectual attempts to counteract the lack of parental support and structure, to have the schools somehow try to do what the parents can’t or won’t do, which task the schools are unable to accomplish.

What We’ve Learned

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds writes a weekly column for USA Today, today he explains there four things we have learned from the Wuhan virus epidemic. They are these:

Density kills.
Mass transit kills.
Bureaucracy kills.
Censorship kills.

Reynolds explains each of the four to my satisfaction. If any is unclear to you, see his reasoning. NYC is the poster child for the first two. The federal bureaucracy is the villain for the third. And Chinese government censorship is the fourth example.

Weird Biological Science

Talk about setting a thief to catch a thief, check out an article at Science Alert about a way to keep mosquitoes from passing along malaria. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

The team discovered that a new type of spore-forming single-celled microbe found in mosquitoes, which they've called Microsporidia MB, has the amazing ability to stop the transmission of Plasmodium falciparum – the parasitic protozoan which causes most malaria cases.

It also doesn't seem to hurt the mosquito, meaning that if we can increase the prevalence of Microsporidia MB in local mosquito populations, it could be a good way to stop malaria in its tracks without having to mess up the rest of the ecosystem.

Because Microsporidia MB is passed down the maternal line, once it's in the mosquito population, it's unlikely to be going anywhere. The team found that some areas they tested already had nine percent of the mosquito population with the malaria-busting microbe.

And the article adds something already underway that I’d not seen.

We are already using a transmission-blocking symbiont called Wolbachia to control dengue, a virus transmitted by mosquitoes," University of Glasgow microbiologist Steven Sinkins says.

"The Microsporidia MB symbiont has some similar characteristics, making it an attractive prospect for developing comparable approaches for malaria control."

This is some neat science, both dengue and malaria are things we could easily do without.

Ban Cruises? Not So Fast

One of my news aggregators links to a Gizmodo article with the abrupt title “Ban Cruises.” The author really thinks we should stop the whole cruise ‘thing.’

Some of the criticisms are valid, they do burn junk oil, stuff so thick it has to be heated before it will fuel their diesels. It is sooty and smells nasty when burning. On the other hand, most cruise ports are windy and the pollution is blown away before it grosses out the locals.

And the ships are, in effect, giant Petri dishes where a cold or a norovirus will get passed around easily. I have come off a cruise ship sick too often to minimize that risk, it is real and I wish it wasn’t.

On the other hand, don’t feel sorry for the crew. Every one is a volunteer, and many are the sole or major support of an extended family back in the third world country from which they’re recruited, often the Philippines, Indonesia or India.

Yes, they work long hours but they also have a couple of months vacay after every contract. They leave an unsanitary third world environment which is potentially dangerous and spend 6-8 months living a bare-bones first world life: decent food, clean quarters, actual drinkable water, flush toilets, plenty of hot water, laundry facilities, medical care, entertainment, WiFi, uniforms to wear, and normally a whole bunch of other folks from back home to hang with off duty.

I’ve chatted with many crew and they often call what they’ve got a “dream job.” They aren’t “trapped” as the article’s author claims, each time they come back for another contract they volunteer anew and particularly after the first contract, they know what they’re getting into.

Crew life is normally a step (or several) up from what they’ve got at home. When they go home for a couple of months they are big heroes who bring their families hard currency and first world goodies. While they’re gone they Skype or FaceTime their families so their kids don’t forget them. And another plus that doesn’t get talked about, like carnies, some have a sex partner on board as well as a spouse and kids back home.

If they weren’t cruise crew most would live less well, in less healthy conditions. Respiratory infections go around the ship, and norovirus too, but there is no malaria, no dengue, no river blindness, no cholera, no yellow fever, most third world diseases are not aboard and not missed, either.

Young Russians: We’re Not Europeans

A survey of young Russians found that some 58% either strongly or somewhat agree that Russia is not a European country. Only 36% believe it is European. Hat tip to RealClearWorld.com for the link.

It is certainly true geographically that a majority of Russian territory is located in Asia, although a majority of Russians reside in the European part, that is, west of the Ural Mountains. These mundane facts were not what was measured.

I suspect what the poll discovered was that most Russians understand their country’s interests to lie elsewhere, rather than as part of something loosely defined as “Europe” or more specifically with the EU. In this understanding they are most likely correct.

The study also found most young Russians are not fond of NATO. Since NATO was conceived to keep “the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down,” their attitudes are both logical and well-founded.

Mind you, as originally conceived, the slogan referred to “the Soviets” instead of the Russians. The two were often used interchangeably by non-Soviets who understood the USSR to be a Russian empire, flying the false (or at least misleading) flag of ideological unity.

Putin’s rather famous characterization of the Soviet fall in 1991 as one of history’s grand tragedies certainly underscores the reality of the USSR being a Russian empire. His eulogy could just as well been given by Churchill bemoaning the loss of a British empire upon which the sun never set, until 1946 when it rather conclusively did.

About Fake Meat

I was rereading the post below about vegans being depressed, or depressed folk being vegans, and I was reminded of something that happened earlier today. The other DrC and I are in the habit of watching an old YouTube episode of either America's Test Kitchen or Cook's Country (they're near-identical) as we eat lunch.

Maybe every 5th episode they'll do a vegan main dish, today it was a spaghetti "meat" sauce with no meat. They did several things to give it the appearance and (they claimed) flavor of a real meat sauce.

They added roughly ground crimini mushrooms, roughly ground chickpeas, and soy sauce, all with the aim of increasing umami flavors. They browned things and worked hard to create a no-meat dish that tasted like it had meat.

My question: why would people who reject the idea of eating meat want food that seems to have meat in it? If you've (a) had big-time heart trouble, (b) been put on an almost no meat diet to save your miserable life, and (c) you have no moral scruples about killing and eating animals, I get it, you miss the meat.

But for those who avoid meat for moral or ethical reasons, it seems crazy. I suspect most non-meat eaters are in this second category.

To them I say, if you like meat flavor, nothing does it quite like actual meat. The reason you miss the meat flavor is that we are the omnivore ape, meat is a core part of our diet. Doing what is necessary to get meat is what our heritage is all about, from the hunter-gatherer days on. Life without bacon? Be serious.

Afterthought: Read the diaries of the Lewis and Clark expedition. They lived on almost nothing except meat for two years and were remarkably healthy, even by today's standards, wildly so by the standards of the time.

A Suspicious Murder

An ethnically Chinese researcher - Dr. Bing Liu - at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was working on sussing out the nature of the Covid-19 virus. It is believed he was murdered at his home by an older Chinese man who subsequently committed suicide (or was himself killed). Daily Mail (U.K.) has the story.

Liu leaves behind a wife in Pittsburgh. His parents still live in China. Police say Liu knew his killer but won't say how.

Everybody in the comments thinks it was a CCP hit job, where the killer was ordered to kill himself to avoid questioning or was killed by a second guy to "tie off" the inquiry. The police seem to think otherwise, unclear why.

Liu's employer - UPMC - is a highly respected, extremely professional outfit. I've been treated there. They obviously liked Liu's work a lot.

Depressed Folk Predisposed to Avoid Meat

It’s time to revisit that old chestnut “a substantial correlation does not answer the question of causation.” The Daily Mail (U.K.) describes a meta analysis done at the University of Alabama, looking at the relationship between vegetarianism or veganism and mental health.

The very first sentence shows DM doesn’t understand causation.

A vegetarian or vegan diet may be increasing the likelihood of depression, a US-based study suggests.

It is equally likely that depression may increase the likelihood of following a vegetarian or vegan diet. In fact I’d suggest it is more likely, although the data don’t support my conclusion either. The article continues:

People with a plant-based diet were twice as likely to take prescription drugs for mental illness and nearly three times as likely to contemplate suicide.

The report, which looked at more than 160,000 people, also found that a shocking one in three vegetarians suffer from depression or anxiety.

Researchers reviewed 18 studies examining the relationship between mental health and eating meat, involving a total of 160,257 participants.

Finally, we get close to the truth, which the researchers understood all along.

The researchers suggest that avoiding meat may be a 'behavioural marker' indicating people already with poor mental health.

Unhappy people, including the clinically depressed, cast about for ways to lessen their "down" feelings.  Changing diet is one of those ways, and it may create a "placebo effect" for some whose depression isn't severe. They feel they're doing something to feel better, providing a sense of control.

Still, it's a fine excuse to have a nice medium-rare ribeye steak, calling it a mental health activity. Hat tip to Ed Driscoll who guest blogs at Instapundit for the link.

Thoughts About Covid-19

There has been a lot of argument and gnashing of teeth over the pace at which we stop sheltering-in-place and begin acting more normal. People have correctly said that if we begin going about our lives more or less normally, additional people will be infected and a few of those will die.

On the other hand, there are plenty of behaviors we continue knowing that they increase the risks of dying. Something like 35,000 people die in auto accidents every year, that dissuades few people from traveling by auto. Obesity is a negative factor for health, yet nearly half of us are overweight. You get the point.

It is clear older Americans in long-term care facilities are at extreme risk, they are doing most of the dying. Such places need to continue to take serious precautions, if only to keep their customers alive and paying.

Doing so is complicated by the reality that most employees of these establishments are low-wage minorities. Evidence suggests minorities are at increased risk of contracting CoV and unwittingly bringing it to work. I'm not sure how we solve this issue, maybe replace them with friendly robots?

If doctors can focus on managing the cytokine storm in sick patients, it is likely CoV is no more dangerous than influenza. Which is not to say it's safe, but flu is a risk we all take, and most of us will suffer from a few times in a long life, without it greatly disrupting our living patterns.

Fake Headline

Interesting example of a misleading headline at USA Today. The headline:

Fact check: Obama administration did not send $3.7 million to Wuhan lab

Then, if you read the article, it turns out that they gave the money to an NGO - EcoHealth Alliance - which they knew would send it to the Wuhan lab. Their reasoning:

“It's hard to do this work in other countries. Very complicated. It requires a lot of traveling. It would be so convenient if we could do it in our own backyards,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, told USA TODAY. “The viruses that are a high risk to public health are not in the U.S., they are in China. If we want to know anything about the next pandemic, we need to be working in the countries where these viruses are.”

Seems to me there are plenty of bats in North America including some in swampy places - think Louisiana, for example. I read somewhere the real reason it was being done in China is that the U.S. had banned gain-of-function research after some modified viruses leaked out of a U.S. lab putting Americans at risk.

Claiming our government didn't fund virus research in China is like claiming you didn't buy drugs if you had your friend buy them with your money. No court would buy that alibi. I fear this relatively feeble attempt at fact checking doesn't exonerate Dr. Fauci.

May the 4th Be With You

To COTTonLINE readers who are Star Wars fans, today is the special day each year when we wish each other, “May the 4th be with you.” Sure, it’s corny, so is Star Wars, so what? It was and is great fun nevertheless.

I’m remembering a long ago colleague who was the quintessential dorky college prof, with the classic dorky prof’s wife and a couple of jerky kids. When the first Star Wars film came out (you’ll remember it was no. 4 in the chronology of nine), they went nuts, saw it repeatedly and basically made it their religion-substitute.

He retired several years before I did and moved to Oregon (a perfect choice for dorks) so I lost touch. I wonder if they stayed with Star Wars or lost the magic? As noted above, I found SW fun, but not magic. The original Blade Runner or Dune are more my style, though neither was a born-again experience.

A beginning is a very delicate time. Endings OTOH are brutal, those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Fauci at Fault?

Meanwhile at Power Line, John Hinderaker likely is the angriest of the four who post there. He writes about the recently famous Dr. Anthony Fauci funding research on viruses at the Wuhan lab during the Obama administration, in 2015.

At the very least, Fauci should be asked to explain his reasoning. Why he believed gain-of-function research should be done at all? Why we should fund it in a lab run by a nation unfriendly to us? And whether or not the research he funded there (with our money) could have produced the coronavirus with which we now struggle?

Fauci isn't being asked these questions because neither Trump nor the Democrats, for quite different reasons, want him discredited while we're still in the pandemic hot zone. Once it quiets down I expect GOP senators will subpoena his testimony on this matter before their committees.

This history is unfortunate, because he and Deborah Birx have been decent spokespersons for a scientific but human approach to this respiratory plague.

Blaming Cuomo

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff writes of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. He isn't the most angry of the guys who post there, but he sure does enumerate the recent mistakes of stumbling NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo’s most egregious error was his approach to nursing homes, which are, in a real sense, the epicenter of this pandemic. On March 25, after Cuomo issued the lockdown order, the New York State Department of Health ordered that nursing homes and rehabilitation centers admit and readmit patients sick with the coronavirus.

Mirengoff quotes the first two sentences of that order as follows:

No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. Nursing homes are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

And he concludes:

New York and nursing homes are the epicenter of this pandemic. Cuomo’s incompetence and stupidity are at the center of both disasters.

Those "orders" make one wonder whether many secretly view nursing home deaths as a feature, rather than as a problem?

Why Entrap Flynn?

Andrew C. McCarthy has been one of the invaluable voices on understanding the whole bogus Trump-as-Russian-asset smokescreen thrown up by Obama-era holdovers. His work normally appears at National Review.

Today he has a long, thorough column detailing his deconstruction of the motive for the FBI entrapment of Michael Flynn. Check out his reasoning.

How could the FBI sustain an investigation targeting the president when the president would have the power to shut the investigation down?

The only way the bureau could pull that off would be to conceal from the president the fullness of the Russia investigation — in particular, the fact that Trump was the target. That is why Flynn had to go.

President Trump was a political phenomenon but a novice when it came to governance. (snip) The staff he brought into the government consisted mainly of loyalists. There were some skilled advisers, too, but their experience was not in the national-security realm.

The exception was Flynn. The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency knew how the spy agencies worked. He knew where and how they kept secrets.

The FBI did not start out with that perjury-trap plan. They ended up with the perjury-trap plan because there was no practical alternative if the bureau was to achieve its objective — the withholding of information about Russia from the incoming Trump team, in order to keep the Trump–Russia investigation alive.

The goal was to get Flynn to lie. Not to lie so they’d have leverage to threaten a prosecution and thus pressure Flynn to reveal vital evidence he’d been concealing. They wanted him to lie for the sake of lying — so they could get rid of him.

It is probably best to view McCarthy’s argument as a reasonable hypothesis, rather than as proven fact for the moment at least. Perhaps subsequent prosecution will show it to be fact.

Motives of evildoers are not always discernible, and the Obama administration was well-supplied with evildoers: Clinton, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Rice, and Jarrett were all-stars of the Obama coven. Slo Joe Biden was more of a mascot.

Update

As far as I knew yesterday, it was true nobody was speculating about the role of Obama in spying on the Trump campaign. Today, I reach a different conclusion.

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit has Fox News video of Kellyanne Conway being interviewed about the new revelations in the Michael Flynn case. She says:

I will remind everybody that President Obama told President-elect Donald Trump he had two things to worry about, North Korea and Michael Flynn! Folks that’s just weird on its face! You gotta worry about a nuclear capable dictator in North Korea and you gotta worry about a general of 37 years who served in the Obama administration.

Other sources suggest Obama's beef with Flynn was that the general didn't share Obama's optimistic view of Iran, but viewed them as what we know them to be - an implacable enemy of the U.S. If that was Obama's view of Flynn, doing what's necessary to get him fired or worse would make sense to Obama.

Hoft adds:

Earlier this week the DOJ released hidden documents that prove the Obama White House was running the operation to spy on and set up the Trump campaign and administration.

So far, Barack Obama has remained silent about his role in this historic crime. Eventually, he will have to try to explain why he was spying on the opposition party from the Oval Office.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the media to question the ethics of "St. Obama," the light-bringer. However, it is possible certain Republican Senators might have sufficient courage to face down the inevitable cries of "racism" that would follow doing so.

A Constitutional scholar would know if former presidents have some sort of immunity from prosecution when no longer in office. It is my hope they do not.