53percenter's Blog

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that, due to changes in tax law last year that repealed the individual mandate to buy Obamacare insurance, the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

The bombshell ruling by Judge Reed O’Connor will be appealed and Obamacare will remain in effect during that process.

The Hill:

President Trump took to Twitter on Friday night to tout the judge’s ruling while calling on congressional leaders to work on a new law, despite the chances of Congress passing a replacement law that both parties can agree being essentially zero.

“Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!” Trump tweeted, referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and expected incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

O’Connor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged in his ruling that health care is a “politically charged affair — inflaming emotions and testing civility.”

But he added courts “are not tasked with, nor are they suited to, policymaking.” Instead, he said they must determine what the Constitution requires. In this, case O’Connor said the Constitution does not allow the mandate to stand.

The 2012 Supreme Court ruling declared the mandate was a tax. But last year, Congress repealed the penalty for not buying insurance. The judge ruled that this means that the mandate is no longer a tax, and since the mandate cannot be separated from the entire ACA, the law itself is unconstitutional.

Legal experts in both parties have denounced that argument, saying it is obvious that Congress wanted the rest of the Affordable Care Act to remain when it repealed only the mandate penalty last year.

Democrats accused the judge of waiting until after the election to issue the ruling, saying he knew striking down the law before the election would harm Republicans.

The court case, brought by 20 GOP-led states, was at the center of this year’s campaign after Democrats attacked Republicans for supporting the lawsuit and seeking to overturn ObamaCare’s protections for pre-existing conditions.

The Trump administration, in a rare move, declined to defend the law in court and instead argued the pre-existing condition protections should be overturned.

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote on Twitter Friday night that he thinks the ruling does not prevent the Affordable Care Act from remaining in effect while the appeals process plays out, because there is no injunction from the court.

“Everyone should remain calm,” he wrote. 

The decision is an outlier, but gives Congress an opportunity to redraw the entire ACA – without the insurance mandate or mandatory coverages that make policies so expensive. There is bi-partisan sentiment to save the pre-existing conditions mandate, but beyond that, there is little the two sides agree upon.

From what we’ve seen over the years from the federal courts, this decision is likely to be reversed. But it is still an important statement that upholds constitutional principles – something that should have happened in 2012 when Chief Justice John Roberts inexplicably sided with liberal judges in upholding the mandate. 

I can’t think of a government program that has failed so spectacularly to live up to the promises made by its supporters in congress and the White House. But courts can’t overturn a law based on how many lies were told to get it passed in the first place. Despite the ruling yesterday, we are likely to see Democrats try to “fix” Obamacare when they take power in the House in January. They may very well attempt to pass some form of “Medicare for All,” which would cost $32 trillion over 10 years. Now, more than ever, the power grab by the federal government to take over private health insurance has to be stopped before the US healthcare industry is destroyed. 

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that, due to changes in tax law last year that repealed the individual mandate to buy Obamacare insurance, the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

The bombshell ruling by Judge Reed O’Connor will be appealed and Obamacare will remain in effect during that process.

The Hill:

President Trump took to Twitter on Friday night to tout the judge’s ruling while calling on congressional leaders to work on a new law, despite the chances of Congress passing a replacement law that both parties can agree being essentially zero.

“Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!” Trump tweeted, referring to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and expected incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

O’Connor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged in his ruling that health care is a “politically charged affair — inflaming emotions and testing civility.”

But he added courts “are not tasked with, nor are they suited to, policymaking.” Instead, he said they must determine what the Constitution requires. In this, case O’Connor said the Constitution does not allow the mandate to stand.

The 2012 Supreme Court ruling declared the mandate was a tax. But last year, Congress repealed the penalty for not buying insurance. The judge ruled that this means that the mandate is no longer a tax, and since the mandate cannot be separated from the entire ACA, the law itself is unconstitutional.

Legal experts in both parties have denounced that argument, saying it is obvious that Congress wanted the rest of the Affordable Care Act to remain when it repealed only the mandate penalty last year.

Democrats accused the judge of waiting until after the election to issue the ruling, saying he knew striking down the law before the election would harm Republicans.

The court case, brought by 20 GOP-led states, was at the center of this year’s campaign after Democrats attacked Republicans for supporting the lawsuit and seeking to overturn ObamaCare’s protections for pre-existing conditions.

The Trump administration, in a rare move, declined to defend the law in court and instead argued the pre-existing condition protections should be overturned.

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote on Twitter Friday night that he thinks the ruling does not prevent the Affordable Care Act from remaining in effect while the appeals process plays out, because there is no injunction from the court.

“Everyone should remain calm,” he wrote. 

The decision is an outlier, but gives Congress an opportunity to redraw the entire ACA – without the insurance mandate or mandatory coverages that make policies so expensive. There is bi-partisan sentiment to save the pre-existing conditions mandate, but beyond that, there is little the two sides agree upon.

From what we’ve seen over the years from the federal courts, this decision is likely to be reversed. But it is still an important statement that upholds constitutional principles – something that should have happened in 2012 when Chief Justice John Roberts inexplicably sided with liberal judges in upholding the mandate. 

I can’t think of a government program that has failed so spectacularly to live up to the promises made by its supporters in congress and the White House. But courts can’t overturn a law based on how many lies were told to get it passed in the first place. Despite the ruling yesterday, we are likely to see Democrats try to “fix” Obamacare when they take power in the House in January. They may very well attempt to pass some form of “Medicare for All,” which would cost $32 trillion over 10 years. Now, more than ever, the power grab by the federal government to take over private health insurance has to be stopped before the US healthcare industry is destroyed. 

A seven-year-old migrant child died of shock and dehydration in Border Patrol custody last Dec. 6, and already the left is after them. The Washington Post (hat tip: Daily Caller) reports:

The child’s death is likely to intensify scrutiny of detention conditions at Border Patrol stations and CBP facilities that are increasingly overwhelmed by large numbers of families seeking asylum in the United States.

…and…

The ACLU blamed “lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP” for the girl’s death. “The fact that it took a week for this to come to light shows the need for transparency for CBP. We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” Cynthia Pompa, advocacy manager for the ACLU Border Rights Center, said in a statement.

Oh, what garbage. Next up, a $40 million lawsuit and some kind of taxpayer payout.

What’s obnoxious here is the left’s quickness to blame the Border Patrol for the actions of her father, dragging a seven-year-old through one of the world’s most hostile deserts like that, and using her as a human shield to avoid immigrant detention and to partake in ‘catch and release.’ The father was traveling with a group of 163 illegals and their human-smuggler escort who broke into the U.S. unvetted and without authorization and turned themselves into the lawmen in order to claim zero-fee asylum on the spot with them, playing the migrant game. Either they would get it or they wouldn’t get it, but the honorable-mention prize for the father if he didn’t would be to get several free years to work in the U.S. and send remittances back home before the likely deportation. And what did he bring here? Zero skills, no education, not even the Spanish language, let alone English, and an appetite for all that free stuff the gringos hand out.

With a prize like that on offer, yes, there are a certain number of people who would risk their children’s lives with human smugglers through one of the world’s most dangerous and remote deserts, which is what went down.

If an American did that, he would be charged with child abuse, and quite a few of them already have been. But break the law for entry and somehow, the Border Patrol is the bad guy.

That would be the same Border Patrol that tried to save the child, offering her food and water as she apparently seemed in decent health, with her father saying nothing to help them figure out what was going on. It’s quite possible he didn’t know what was going on, either, some of these people have amazingly weak parenting skills. Once, when I was in Los Angeles, a non-English-speaking group of likely illegal Salvadorans spilled hot chocolate all over one of their toddlers at a Starbucks and didn’t seem to understand that hielo was what she needed to avoid permanent burns. I saw that scalding hot chocolate go all over the child’s delicate skin and was horrified more by that than by the toddler’s screams of pain. And they just kept trying to shut her up as she screamed. I had to get up and tell them that hielo was muy necesario right now and went to the barista to insist that she give us some, and then had to show the Salvadoran dad how to put it on the screaming child until she was able to calm herself. I suspect the father of this now-deceased child didn’t know much about a seven-year-old’s need for basic hydration.

Over here, that would be child abuse, and some version of a child protective services agency would be all over any American who dragged his kid through a dangerous desert, ruling such a person an unfit parent and taking the child away.

But here the ‘narrative’ is to blame the lawmen, and probably sue for big bucks. One set of laws for them, one set for us, got it.

And it also highlights the need for a border wall, something Congress refuses to fund, even as kids with parents who game the system and use its incentives, put those incentives above the lives of their kids. What the left, of course, wants, is completely open borders with no enforcement whatsoever.

It highlights is that illegal immigrants are a sort of doll-toy for the left, easily manipulated in any direction by leftwingers, yet with nothing expected of them in return. Normal people expect normal parents to treat their children humanely. Nobody takes their seven-year-old into the dirty, dangerous, remote desert. Normal people alert lawmen that their children are in distress in order to get them some water or whatever it is they need. Normal people know where they are going and know the customs of the country where they are headed, particularly if they have kids. Yet according to this press and activist narrative, it’s always O.K. when the illegals do it. Had the father stayed in Mexico, the Mexicans would have provided for him – as they have shown they are willing to do with the caravan migrants of Tijuana. He ignored that just because he didn’t want to wait his turn in line. Which raises questions again about his decision to take his little one through the desert in the hands of human smuggling profiteers who just dumped them into the remote New Mexico panhandle to await the free care and treatment of the lawmen, who frankly, have another job to do.

Someone needs to be arrested for child abuse in this case and it’s not the Border Patrol.

A seven-year-old migrant child died of shock and dehydration in Border Patrol custody last Dec. 6, and already the left is after them. The Washington Post (hat tip: Daily Caller) reports:

The child’s death is likely to intensify scrutiny of detention conditions at Border Patrol stations and CBP facilities that are increasingly overwhelmed by large numbers of families seeking asylum in the United States.

…and…

The ACLU blamed “lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP” for the girl’s death. “The fact that it took a week for this to come to light shows the need for transparency for CBP. We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” Cynthia Pompa, advocacy manager for the ACLU Border Rights Center, said in a statement.

Oh, what garbage. Next up, a $40 million lawsuit and some kind of taxpayer payout.

What’s obnoxious here is the left’s quickness to blame the Border Patrol for the actions of her father, dragging a seven-year-old through one of the world’s most hostile deserts like that, and using her as a human shield to avoid immigrant detention and to partake in ‘catch and release.’ The father was traveling with a group of 163 illegals and their human-smuggler escort who broke into the U.S. unvetted and without authorization and turned themselves into the lawmen in order to claim zero-fee asylum on the spot with them, playing the migrant game. Either they would get it or they wouldn’t get it, but the honorable-mention prize for the father if he didn’t would be to get several free years to work in the U.S. and send remittances back home before the likely deportation. And what did he bring here? Zero skills, no education, not even the Spanish language, let alone English, and an appetite for all that free stuff the gringos hand out.

With a prize like that on offer, yes, there are a certain number of people who would risk their children’s lives with human smugglers through one of the world’s most dangerous and remote deserts, which is what went down.

If an American did that, he would be charged with child abuse, and quite a few of them already have been. But break the law for entry and somehow, the Border Patrol is the bad guy.

That would be the same Border Patrol that tried to save the child, offering her food and water as she apparently seemed in decent health, with her father saying nothing to help them figure out what was going on. It’s quite possible he didn’t know what was going on, either, some of these people have amazingly weak parenting skills. Once, when I was in Los Angeles, a non-English-speaking group of likely illegal Salvadorans spilled hot chocolate all over one of their toddlers at a Starbucks and didn’t seem to understand that hielo was what she needed to avoid permanent burns. I saw that scalding hot chocolate go all over the child’s delicate skin and was horrified more by that than by the toddler’s screams of pain. And they just kept trying to shut her up as she screamed. I had to get up and tell them that hielo was muy necesario right now and went to the barista to insist that she give us some, and then had to show the Salvadoran dad how to put it on the screaming child until she was able to calm herself. I suspect the father of this now-deceased child didn’t know much about a seven-year-old’s need for basic hydration.

Over here, that would be child abuse, and some version of a child protective services agency would be all over any American who dragged his kid through a dangerous desert, ruling such a person an unfit parent and taking the child away.

But here the ‘narrative’ is to blame the lawmen, and probably sue for big bucks. One set of laws for them, one set for us, got it.

And it also highlights the need for a border wall, something Congress refuses to fund, even as kids with parents who game the system and use its incentives, put those incentives above the lives of their kids. What the left, of course, wants, is completely open borders with no enforcement whatsoever.

It highlights is that illegal immigrants are a sort of doll-toy for the left, easily manipulated in any direction by leftwingers, yet with nothing expected of them in return. Normal people expect normal parents to treat their children humanely. Nobody takes their seven-year-old into the dirty, dangerous, remote desert. Normal people alert lawmen that their children are in distress in order to get them some water or whatever it is they need. Normal people know where they are going and know the customs of the country where they are headed, particularly if they have kids. Yet according to this press and activist narrative, it’s always O.K. when the illegals do it. Had the father stayed in Mexico, the Mexicans would have provided for him – as they have shown they are willing to do with the caravan migrants of Tijuana. He ignored that just because he didn’t want to wait his turn in line. Which raises questions again about his decision to take his little one through the desert in the hands of human smuggling profiteers who just dumped them into the remote New Mexico panhandle to await the free care and treatment of the lawmen, who frankly, have another job to do.

Someone needs to be arrested for child abuse in this case and it’s not the Border Patrol.

A new survey found that 27 percent of Americans want Santa Claus to be rebranded as either female or gender-neutral.

A new survey by a graphic design company revealed that 27 percent of Americans want to see Santa rebranded as a female or a gender-neutral figure. More than 10 percent of respondents said that Santa should be a woman. A whopping 17 percent said that Santa should be a “gender-neutral” figure.

“I picture a woman giving presents,” one New Jersey resident said. “I just feel like a white, old man giving presents is kind of creepy.”

“I think Santa is a mystical creature, so it can be whatever you want it to be,” said another New Jersey resident said, referring to the belief that Santa could be a “gender-neutral” figure.

Santa Claus is based on St. Nicholas, a historical figure who lived between 270 and 343 AD. St. Nicholas inspired the traditional Santa Claus figure due to his real-life habit of secret gift-giving.

Paris Dennard explained to Breitbart News how he was kept off television networks following his suspension by CNN in August, his former employer. He spoke with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

Dennard was suspended days after appearing on a CNN segment in which he explained how security clearances are monetized by former government officials seeking employment with news media outlets and other outfits in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump praised Dennard’s commentary the next day via Twitter:

Just watched former Intelligence Official Phillip Mudd become totally unglued and weird while debating wonderful @PARISDENNARD over Brennan’s Security Clearance. Dennard destroyed him but Mudd is in no mental condition to have such a Clearance. Should be REVOKED? @seanhannity

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 21, 2018

Dennard said of his August segment, “After that episode, if you will, I wasn’t back on the network, and I guess if you’re going to go out, that’s the way you want to go out; totally destroying — in the president’s words, when he tweeted about it — Phil Mudd’s argument and the claims that he was making and having a solid, thoughtful, insightful, and calm approach to his points.”

Dennard added, “If that’s my finest hour, if that was threatening enough, then that’s a good way to go out on the network. So I’m proud, and I stand by everything I said in that exchange.”

Dennard spoke about his conversation with a Washington Post reporter who wrote an ostensible investigative report of allegations of sexual harassment made against him in 2014.

Dennard said, “I asked him ‘Why? What is the relevancy of this?’ and he linked it back to the president and my commentary in support of the president. And he said, ‘You had defended President Trump in the past. So why can’t we bring up things from your past?’ I said, ‘This is about the president?’ When I heard that, I knew then this was not about justice, this wasn’t about #MeToo, this wasn’t because somebody had come forward — none of that.”

Dennard went on:

It was because they were upset — “they” meaning the deep state, meaning those impacted by the CIA operative Phil Mudd, or my former employer, whoever it was — they didn’t like that exchange, didn’t like my voice, didn’t like the points that I made, and knew this was on the pulse of the midterm election coming up, that my objective commentary needed to be silenced, and they felt this was the best way to do it because of the climate that we’re in in this country.

Dennard continued, “They effectively went forth with this article, and it was very hard to deal with, calling my mother, talking to my girlfriend — who already knew about this situation — but it was just [hard], to see that in print. We’ve seen it before. We’ve seen other people go through it, but it’s a different story when it’s you, personally.”

CNN suspended Dennard hours after the Washington Post published its aforementioned report.

“I got a call immediately — that night,” recalled Dennard. “That evening, I got a call from CNN saying that I was suspended pending an investigation. A suspension meant I could not be booked on CNN by their bookers because I was a paid commentator. After that, I stayed off of social media to respect their investigative process, whatever that was. I don’t know what that was, and they did not put me back on the air.”

Dennard explained how CNN’s decision to suspend — not terminate — his contract meant he could not procure political commentary employment elsewhere.

“They did not fire me like they did Marc Lamont Hill,” remarked Dennard:

It wasn’t a pay-per-hit [contract with CNN]. It was sort of a retainer, if you will. I was still paid, no matter what, but they just decided to keep me off the air. Because I was under contract with CNN — which was exclusive — I could not appear on any other network. Effectively, what they did was kept me off CNN and also kept me off of any other network because I refused to resign because that’s not who I am.

Dennard added, “I was going to fight this, which I did fight that as hard as I could. It was a clear example to me that they had no intention of putting me back on the air. They wanted to get me off the air and keep me off the air throughout the midterms and through 2018, and that’s why I called it … a political hit job. It had nothing to do with anything but politics, and the Washington Post reporter told me that from day one: this was about the president.”

Dennard stated, “I have returned on Twitter because I wanted to be respectful of CNN’s quote-unquote investigation, and I’m back. I’m commenting. I’m doing radio, and if anybody wants to have my commentary, I’m available to do that, and I will fight back and continue to speak up and support this president, this administration, and the values I believe as a black conservative.”

Dennard said, “Because of CNN’s disparate treatment towards me compared to others who have done and said things — allegedly — my position is going to be different. The way I react is going to be different. I will fight back, and I won’t be silenced. I am going to continue.”

Dennard praised Breitbart News’s coverage of his fallout with CNN.

“If they thought — whoever they are who tried to silence me and others like me — if they thought that’s the last they got of Paris Dennard, think again,” cautioned Dennard. “I’m appreciative of outlets and people like you, Alex, and like Breitbart, and all of your readers and viewers and listeners who stand by the truth and know exactly what these things are. They’re political hit jobs, the politics of personal destruction.”

Dennard concluded, “We’re not going to stand for it. I’m going to move forward. We, collectively, are going to continue to fight against what we know to be people with hatred over conservatives who dare to speak out. I’m going to keep fighting.”

Both CNN and the Washington Post market themselves as politically objective and non-partisan news media outlets, branding themselves with the slogans, “Facts First” and “Democracy Dies In Darkness,” respectively.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

A federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration’s religious and moral exceptions to the Obamacare birth control mandate from being implemented in five states.

On Thursday, a split three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction by the district court. Judges John Clifford Wallace, a Richard Nixon nominee, and Susan Graber, an appointee of Bill Clinton, upheld the district court’s ruling.

The decision allows the states of California, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and New York to ignore the Trump administration’s rules that protect employers with religious or moral objections to abortion-inducing drugs and birth control from being forced to provide them to workers.

In the majority opinion, Wallace wrote that women who are denied free birth control through employer health insurance plans will end up costing states more money.

“The declarations submitted by the states further show that women losing coverage from their employers will turn to state-based programs or programs reimbursed by the state,” he wrote, though he added that the record did not support affirming the district court’s ruling on a nationwide basis.

The dissenting judge, Andrew Kleinfeld, a George H.W. Bush appointee, said the states lack standing in the case because their problem of incurring more costs for contraception that may result from the Trump administration’s rules is “self-inflicted.” The problem occurred for the states, according to the dissent, because lawmakers decided to promise free birth control to women in response to the release of the Trump administration’s rules.

“The reason they lack standing is that their injury is what the Supreme Court calls ‘self-inflicted,’ because it arises solely from their legislative decisions to pay these moneys,” Kleinfeld wrote, adding:

The federal regulatory change itself imposes no obligation on the states to provide money for contraception. The plaintiff states choose to provide some contraception benefits to employees of employers exempted by the federal insurance requirement, so the narrowing of the federal mandate may lead to the states spending more because some employers may spend less.

Planned Parenthood celebrated the ruling on Twitter:

This is a win! Access to birth control is crucial, and the admin’s interim rules to roll back birth control coverage are harmful and show their disdain for our health care. We won’t stop fighting to protect our care. #fight4birthcontrol #courtsmatter https://t.co/VCxbfl8aPG

— Planned Parenthood Action (@PPact) December 13, 2018

In November, Trump’s Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and the Treasury issued two rules intended to protect those with religious or moral objections to Obamacare’s mandate for most employers to provide abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, or sterilization procedures – free of charge – to employees via health insurance plans.

The first rule provided an exemption from the contraceptive coverage mandate to entities that object to services covered by the mandate on the basis of faith beliefs. The second final rule provided protections to nonprofit organizations and small businesses that have non-religious, moral convictions opposing the services covered by the mandate.

The religious and conscience exemptions provided by these rules also applied to institutions of education, issuers, and individuals. The rules were scheduled to go into effect at the start of 2019.

The Trump administration can now petition the Supreme Court to take up the case.

The case is California v. Azar, No. 18-15166, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

What was once an outstanding source of great conservative writing is no more. The Weekly Standard officially folded yesterday, making it the first actual fatality attributable to Trump Derangement Syndrome. That cause of death seems indisputable to me, even though John Podhoretz, who was involved in the creation TWS and now publishes Commentary, vehemently disagrees, charging that TWS was “murdered”:

There is no real reason we are witnessing the magazine’s demise other than deep pettiness and a personal desire for bureaucratic revenge on the part of a penny-ante Machiavellian who works for its parent company.

There would at least be a larger meaning to the Standard’s end if it were being killed because it was hostile to Donald Trump. But I do not believe that is the case. Rather, I believe the fissures in the conservative movement and the Republican party that have opened up since Trump’s rise provided the company man with a convenient argument to make to the corporation’s owner, Philip Anschutz, that the company could perhaps harvest the Standard’s subscriber-base riches and then be done with it.

That this is an entirely hostile act is proved by the fact that he and Anschutz have refused to sell the Standard because they want to claim its circulation for another property of theirs. This is without precedent in my experience in publishing, and I’ve been a family observer of and active participant in the magazine business for half a century.

Though I am not familiar with its books, my understanding is that from the beginning TWS was on financial life support, requiring million-dollar-plus subsidies to stay alive, first from News Corporation, and subsequently from Colorado Billionaire Philip Anschutz, who also publishes the Examiner and other media properties. Conservatives may fiercely debate whether or not removing life support from a human in a coma is murder, but the Constitution offers no guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to publications, only to humans. So, removing the financial life support cannot be considered murder, much though those involved with publications consider them to be living organisms.

Daniel McCarthy, who founded The American Conservative, sagely comments on why money-losing magazines about politics sometimes enjoy life support form billionaires:

The Weekly Standard’s value lay in the fact that it was an insider magazine. It was a top-down product — there was never an independent mass audience clamoring for a second National Review or for a specifically neoconservative publication. (Commentary, as a monthly, already served that market as far as demand could justify.) What was important was that the magazine be read not by a mass market but by Republican officials and their staff and various other influential persons, primarily in Washington, D.C. If officialdom read the Weekly Standard, then it was worth continuing to spend millions on it.  (snip)

The person most identified with the brand is Kristol, by far. He stepped down as editor at the end of 2016, but his public persona still defines the magazine: his bitter, flippant, or sarcastic tweets about Trump and Trump supporters are the Weekly Standard’s brand in the public’s eye. Few people look at the masthead of a magazine closely enough to realize when a prominent editor such as Kristol has been replaced by a less prominent once such as Steve Hayes — and because Kristol remains on the masthead as editor-at-large, ordinary readers have even more cause for confusion. (‘Editor-at-large’ sounds a lot like ‘editor’ to most people, but in fact usually means ‘ex-editor.’)

Fairly or not, Bill Kristol is the brand.

With Trump administration officials ignoring TWS, and Dems not interested in a conservative publication that is most closely identified with enthusiastic support for the Iraq War and occupation, what real benefit would any prospective owner of TWS be getting?

From the standpoint of a wealthy subsidizer of conservative journalism, the subscriber database of TWS is far more valuable as a way of launching a new, not anti-Trump weekly magazine. That would help the new magazine reach the target audience that is worth spending money to reach.

Selling the magazine or its subscriber database to others, would actually frustrate that initiative, as there would be competition for those subscribers, and less reach for the new magazine.

When I founded American Thinker, I resolved to not be dependent on a wealthy patron for our survival. The dangers involved in that sort of relationship are now apparent with the death of TWS. For better or worse, we depend on advertising revenue and the kind donations of individual readers.

What was once an outstanding source of great conservative writing is no more. The Weekly Standard officially folded yesterday, making it the first actual fatality attributable to Trump Derangement Syndrome. That cause of death seems indisputable to me, even though John Podhoretz, who was involved in the creation TWS and now publishes Commentary, vehemently disagrees, charging that TWS was “murdered”:

There is no real reason we are witnessing the magazine’s demise other than deep pettiness and a personal desire for bureaucratic revenge on the part of a penny-ante Machiavellian who works for its parent company.

There would at least be a larger meaning to the Standard’s end if it were being killed because it was hostile to Donald Trump. But I do not believe that is the case. Rather, I believe the fissures in the conservative movement and the Republican party that have opened up since Trump’s rise provided the company man with a convenient argument to make to the corporation’s owner, Philip Anschutz, that the company could perhaps harvest the Standard’s subscriber-base riches and then be done with it.

That this is an entirely hostile act is proved by the fact that he and Anschutz have refused to sell the Standard because they want to claim its circulation for another property of theirs. This is without precedent in my experience in publishing, and I’ve been a family observer of and active participant in the magazine business for half a century.

Though I am not familiar with its books, my understanding is that from the beginning TWS was on financial life support, requiring million-dollar-plus subsidies to stay alive, first from News Corporation, and subsequently from Colorado Billionaire Philip Anschutz, who also publishes the Examiner and other media properties. Conservatives may fiercely debate whether or not removing life support from a human in a coma is murder, but the Constitution offers no guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to publications, only to humans. So, removing the financial life support cannot be considered murder, much though those involved with publications consider them to be living organisms.

Daniel McCarthy, who founded The American Conservative, sagely comments on why money-losing magazines about politics sometimes enjoy life support form billionaires:

The Weekly Standard’s value lay in the fact that it was an insider magazine. It was a top-down product — there was never an independent mass audience clamoring for a second National Review or for a specifically neoconservative publication. (Commentary, as a monthly, already served that market as far as demand could justify.) What was important was that the magazine be read not by a mass market but by Republican officials and their staff and various other influential persons, primarily in Washington, D.C. If officialdom read the Weekly Standard, then it was worth continuing to spend millions on it.  (snip)

The person most identified with the brand is Kristol, by far. He stepped down as editor at the end of 2016, but his public persona still defines the magazine: his bitter, flippant, or sarcastic tweets about Trump and Trump supporters are the Weekly Standard’s brand in the public’s eye. Few people look at the masthead of a magazine closely enough to realize when a prominent editor such as Kristol has been replaced by a less prominent once such as Steve Hayes — and because Kristol remains on the masthead as editor-at-large, ordinary readers have even more cause for confusion. (‘Editor-at-large’ sounds a lot like ‘editor’ to most people, but in fact usually means ‘ex-editor.’)

Fairly or not, Bill Kristol is the brand.

With Trump administration officials ignoring TWS, and Dems not interested in a conservative publication that is most closely identified with enthusiastic support for the Iraq War and occupation, what real benefit would any prospective owner of TWS be getting?

From the standpoint of a wealthy subsidizer of conservative journalism, the subscriber database of TWS is far more valuable as a way of launching a new, not anti-Trump weekly magazine. That would help the new magazine reach the target audience that is worth spending money to reach.

Selling the magazine or its subscriber database to others, would actually frustrate that initiative, as there would be competition for those subscribers, and less reach for the new magazine.

When I founded American Thinker, I resolved to not be dependent on a wealthy patron for our survival. The dangers involved in that sort of relationship are now apparent with the death of TWS. For better or worse, we depend on advertising revenue and the kind donations of individual readers.

President Trump took a lot of flak from the left for warning that the migrant caravan, heading up to the U.S. from Honduras, had a lot of “stone cold criminals” in its ranks.  Here’s a Nov. 26 report from USA Today to show just how insistent the left was with that “narrative”:

President Donald Trump continued his attacks against a caravan of Central American immigrants [sic] Monday, describing some of them as “stone cold criminals,” but his administration provided scant details to back up the president’s assertion.

Trump’s attempts to portray members of the caravan as criminals capped off a chaotic weekend that saw immigrants [sic] rushing the San Ysidro Port of Entry and U.S. agents responding by firing tear gas into the crowd, leaving a tense standoff that could escalate in the days to come.

Snopes, too, got into the act, tut-tutting that any mention of criminals in the caravan is just “fear-mongering, misinformation, and hoaxes“:

Several caravans of migrants originating in Central America headed toward the U.S. border, although they were still hundreds of miles away in southern Mexico, proved a constant target in the U.S. for fear-mongering, misinformation, and hoaxes in the lead-up to consequential 2018 midterm elections[.]

Well, now we know that Trump was right: there certainly were criminals in that caravan – and they haven’t hesitated to provide demonstrations of what they do to the good citizens of Tijuana.  Here’s a Tijuana city councilman (known as a delegate in that city) describing the scope of the caravan crime just in Tijuana:

House break-ins. A three-week school shutdown.  Filth and garbage.  Robberies galore.  Two hundred eighty arrests and counting.

Such nice people, and the left – Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, assorted archbishops and clerics, lefty activists – would like them all up here.  They’d like to bring them in ahead of legitimate immigrants and asylum-seekers, cutting the line in the criminal fashion, if not slipping under the fence and getting an asylum claim filed right then and there as others wait in Mexico or back in Honduras.

This is how criminals behave.  They lack the wherewithal to wait their turn in line as a matter of fairness and insist on cutting ahead, getting theirs, and to hell with the others.  They litter.  They steal.  They block roads.  Now 280 have proven their criminal intent by getting themselves arrested, and those are the 280 the Tijuana cops were able to catch.  The rest are still getting away with it.  Yet Democrats call it an “injustice” not to just wave them all in.  And they’re still yelling about not building a fence.

The Tijuana official, like many of the people being heard from in Tijuana, are losing a lot from involuntarily hosting these crooks, courtesy of the rabid far left and their liberation-theology enablers.  The city’s critical tourism industry is down, their maquiladoras – which are some of the world’s best medical equipment- and oil drilling equipment-manufacturers – are facing uncertainty and higher costs on the prospect of additional border shutdowns, and their people are being robbed blind and littered on like nobody’s business.

The city councilman in the Carlson report, Genaro López, sounded so reasonable, not foreign at all, a normal person who wants to live in normal place, in normal peace that all people deserve, and he’s looking on in disgust as his city’s efforts are crushed by the rabid left and the mainstream press.

Should anyone have to put up with this?  Should we?  Yet the left just won’t stop insisting that we import them all here.  The only thing, in fact, standing between us and the large numbers of crooks in that mob are the Tijuana cops.  Trump was right about the nature of these hoods, and Democrats should be held up to shame for this outrageous scheme to inflict these criminals on all of us here.

Image credit: Grabien screen grab of Fox News report.

President Trump took a lot of flak from the left for warning that the migrant caravan, heading up to the U.S. from Honduras, had a lot of “stone cold criminals” in its ranks.  Here’s a Nov. 26 report from USA Today to show just how insistent the left was with that “narrative”:

President Donald Trump continued his attacks against a caravan of Central American immigrants [sic] Monday, describing some of them as “stone cold criminals,” but his administration provided scant details to back up the president’s assertion.

Trump’s attempts to portray members of the caravan as criminals capped off a chaotic weekend that saw immigrants [sic] rushing the San Ysidro Port of Entry and U.S. agents responding by firing tear gas into the crowd, leaving a tense standoff that could escalate in the days to come.

Snopes, too, got into the act, tut-tutting that any mention of criminals in the caravan is just “fear-mongering, misinformation, and hoaxes“:

Several caravans of migrants originating in Central America headed toward the U.S. border, although they were still hundreds of miles away in southern Mexico, proved a constant target in the U.S. for fear-mongering, misinformation, and hoaxes in the lead-up to consequential 2018 midterm elections[.]

Well, now we know that Trump was right: there certainly were criminals in that caravan – and they haven’t hesitated to provide demonstrations of what they do to the good citizens of Tijuana.  Here’s a Tijuana city councilman (known as a delegate in that city) describing the scope of the caravan crime just in Tijuana:

House break-ins. A three-week school shutdown.  Filth and garbage.  Robberies galore.  Two hundred eighty arrests and counting.

Such nice people, and the left – Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, assorted archbishops and clerics, lefty activists – would like them all up here.  They’d like to bring them in ahead of legitimate immigrants and asylum-seekers, cutting the line in the criminal fashion, if not slipping under the fence and getting an asylum claim filed right then and there as others wait in Mexico or back in Honduras.

This is how criminals behave.  They lack the wherewithal to wait their turn in line as a matter of fairness and insist on cutting ahead, getting theirs, and to hell with the others.  They litter.  They steal.  They block roads.  Now 280 have proven their criminal intent by getting themselves arrested, and those are the 280 the Tijuana cops were able to catch.  The rest are still getting away with it.  Yet Democrats call it an “injustice” not to just wave them all in.  And they’re still yelling about not building a fence.

The Tijuana official, like many of the people being heard from in Tijuana, are losing a lot from involuntarily hosting these crooks, courtesy of the rabid far left and their liberation-theology enablers.  The city’s critical tourism industry is down, their maquiladoras – which are some of the world’s best medical equipment- and oil drilling equipment-manufacturers – are facing uncertainty and higher costs on the prospect of additional border shutdowns, and their people are being robbed blind and littered on like nobody’s business.

The city councilman in the Carlson report, Genaro López, sounded so reasonable, not foreign at all, a normal person who wants to live in normal place, in normal peace that all people deserve, and he’s looking on in disgust as his city’s efforts are crushed by the rabid left and the mainstream press.

Should anyone have to put up with this?  Should we?  Yet the left just won’t stop insisting that we import them all here.  The only thing, in fact, standing between us and the large numbers of crooks in that mob are the Tijuana cops.  Trump was right about the nature of these hoods, and Democrats should be held up to shame for this outrageous scheme to inflict these criminals on all of us here.

Image credit: Grabien screen grab of Fox News report.

Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) destroyed a potential treasure trove of evidence about the “insurance policy” Trump-haters Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were implementing against the Trump administration as it prepared to take office and establish itself in its first few months.  Whatever the purported lovebirds texted each other and others during the tumultuous period, the SCO thought it was not worth scrutiny by outsiders not on the team.

Given the scandalous earlier texts between the two released by the OIG, this claim is so arrogant that it would be laughable, but for the profound implications of a rogue law enforcement operation covering its tracks, secure in its belief that it will never be prosecuted thanks to Deep State operatives throughout the FBI and DoJ.

We learn of this destruction of evidence only now thanks to the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, headed by Michael Horowitz, who issued a report on its investigation of the “gap” in the text messages of the two from 12/15/16 to 5/17/17.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) initiated this investigation upon being notified of a gap in text message data collection during the period December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mobile devices assigned to FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG’s Oversight and Review Division.  Specifically, the OIG’s Cyber Investigations Office (CYB ER) was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text messages for the referenced period from FBI issued mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page.

But when the OIG went looking for the phones, there were two different sets of smart phones in use by Strzok and Page, apparently.  The SCO issued iPhones to them, in addition to Samsung Galaxy phones that the FBI had utilized.  Those SCO-issued iPhones, like dead men, will tell no tales (emphasis added):  

The OIG was told that the DOJ issued iPhone previously assigned to Strzok had been re-issued to another FBI agent following Strzok’s departure from the SCO.  The SCO obtained the iPhone from that individual and provided it to the OIG.  CYB ER obtained a forensic extraction of the iPhone previously assigned to Strzok; however.  [T]his iPhone had been reset to factory settings and was reconfigured for the new user to whom the device was issued.  It did not contain data related to Strzok’s use of the device.  SCO’s Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages.

But relax: according to the SCO, none of Strzok’s text messages would be of any interest, so we should just chill out.  We are supposed to trust the merry band of Clinton donors, because we can rely on the integrity of people like Andrew Weissman.

Page’s smartphone was treated even more cavalierly:

The SCO was unable to locate the iPhone previously assigned to Page, which had been returned to DOJ’s Justice Management Division (JMD).  Subsequently, in early September 2018, JMD informed the OIG that it had located the iPhone that had been assigned to Page.  The OIG took custody of the device.  Page’s iPhone had been reset to factory settings on July 31, 2017, but had not been reissued to a new user.  (The Office of the Deputy Attorney General told the OJG that the Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.)  The OJG forensic review of the phone determined that it did not contain any data related to Page’s use of the device.  SCO’s Records Otlicer [sic] stated that she did not receive the phone following Page’s departure from the $CO [sic] and therefore she did not review Page’s iPhone for records that would possibly need to be retained prior to the phone having been reset.

But the FBI-issued Galaxy phones apparently left some digital footprints, so we have some of the evidence.

The OIG asked the FBI Inspection Division to locate the FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S5 devices formerly assigned to the subject employees and to obtain from the same individuals their assigned FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S7 devices.  The FBI provided these four devices to the OIG in late January 2018.  CYBER utilized digital forensic tools to obtain data extractions from the four FBI issued mobile devices.  To ensure the thoroughness of text message recovery efforts, OIG also consulted with the Department of Defense, conducted additional quality assurance steps and hired a Subject Matter Expert.  The result of these steps was the recovery of thousands of text messages within the period of the missing text messages, December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap lime [sic] period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool.

This is absolutely outrageous coming from team Mueller, so anxious to construe crimes related to the president, but blithely deep-sixing whatever data it wishes, telling the public to trust them.

Julie Kelly of American Greatness connects the timeline dots:

Think about it: Mueller was investigating Flynn for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who interviewed Flynn – Peter Strzok – was on the team. But after he was fired for biased texts on his FBI phone, someone scrubbed his SCO iPhone… a few weeks after the date on Flynn’s 302. https://t.co/WCb6fGw8fY

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) December 13, 2018

Mueller’s office is thumbing its nose at us.  The MSM will bury this story.  How about a special counsel to investigate the Mueller special counsel?

Image credit: Donkey Hotey

Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) destroyed a potential treasure trove of evidence about the “insurance policy” Trump-haters Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were implementing against the Trump administration as it prepared to take office and establish itself in its first few months.  Whatever the purported lovebirds texted each other and others during the tumultuous period, the SCO thought it was not worth scrutiny by outsiders not on the team.

Given the scandalous earlier texts between the two released by the OIG, this claim is so arrogant that it would be laughable, but for the profound implications of a rogue law enforcement operation covering its tracks, secure in its belief that it will never be prosecuted thanks to Deep State operatives throughout the FBI and DoJ.

We learn of this destruction of evidence only now thanks to the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, headed by Michael Horowitz, who issued a report on its investigation of the “gap” in the text messages of the two from 12/15/16 to 5/17/17.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) initiated this investigation upon being notified of a gap in text message data collection during the period December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mobile devices assigned to FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG’s Oversight and Review Division.  Specifically, the OIG’s Cyber Investigations Office (CYB ER) was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text messages for the referenced period from FBI issued mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page.

But when the OIG went looking for the phones, there were two different sets of smart phones in use by Strzok and Page, apparently.  The SCO issued iPhones to them, in addition to Samsung Galaxy phones that the FBI had utilized.  Those SCO-issued iPhones, like dead men, will tell no tales (emphasis added):  

The OIG was told that the DOJ issued iPhone previously assigned to Strzok had been re-issued to another FBI agent following Strzok’s departure from the SCO.  The SCO obtained the iPhone from that individual and provided it to the OIG.  CYB ER obtained a forensic extraction of the iPhone previously assigned to Strzok; however.  [T]his iPhone had been reset to factory settings and was reconfigured for the new user to whom the device was issued.  It did not contain data related to Strzok’s use of the device.  SCO’s Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages.

But relax: according to the SCO, none of Strzok’s text messages would be of any interest, so we should just chill out.  We are supposed to trust the merry band of Clinton donors, because we can rely on the integrity of people like Andrew Weissman.

Page’s smartphone was treated even more cavalierly:

The SCO was unable to locate the iPhone previously assigned to Page, which had been returned to DOJ’s Justice Management Division (JMD).  Subsequently, in early September 2018, JMD informed the OIG that it had located the iPhone that had been assigned to Page.  The OIG took custody of the device.  Page’s iPhone had been reset to factory settings on July 31, 2017, but had not been reissued to a new user.  (The Office of the Deputy Attorney General told the OJG that the Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.)  The OJG forensic review of the phone determined that it did not contain any data related to Page’s use of the device.  SCO’s Records Otlicer [sic] stated that she did not receive the phone following Page’s departure from the $CO [sic] and therefore she did not review Page’s iPhone for records that would possibly need to be retained prior to the phone having been reset.

But the FBI-issued Galaxy phones apparently left some digital footprints, so we have some of the evidence.

The OIG asked the FBI Inspection Division to locate the FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S5 devices formerly assigned to the subject employees and to obtain from the same individuals their assigned FBI issued Samsung Galaxy S7 devices.  The FBI provided these four devices to the OIG in late January 2018.  CYBER utilized digital forensic tools to obtain data extractions from the four FBI issued mobile devices.  To ensure the thoroughness of text message recovery efforts, OIG also consulted with the Department of Defense, conducted additional quality assurance steps and hired a Subject Matter Expert.  The result of these steps was the recovery of thousands of text messages within the period of the missing text messages, December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap lime [sic] period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool.

This is absolutely outrageous coming from team Mueller, so anxious to construe crimes related to the president, but blithely deep-sixing whatever data it wishes, telling the public to trust them.

Julie Kelly of American Greatness connects the timeline dots:

Think about it: Mueller was investigating Flynn for lying to the FBI. One of the agents who interviewed Flynn – Peter Strzok – was on the team. But after he was fired for biased texts on his FBI phone, someone scrubbed his SCO iPhone… a few weeks after the date on Flynn’s 302. https://t.co/WCb6fGw8fY

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) December 13, 2018

Mueller’s office is thumbing its nose at us.  The MSM will bury this story.  How about a special counsel to investigate the Mueller special counsel?

Image credit: Donkey Hotey