You know, Obama didn't follow the so-called Biden Rule in 2016, but Mitch McConnell sure did

You can listen to Biden in 1992, here, when he said Bush should refrain from nominating anyone if a vacancy occurred on the Supreme Court in that election year.

Biden also said the Senate should refrain from holding hearings on any nominee if Bush happened to nominate anyone anyway against this advice.

Well, fellow Democrat Obama ignored the Biden Rule in 2016, an election year, by nominating Garland, which goes little remarked.

But even more little remarked is that the Republican McConnell acted in agreement with the rule in 2016, and refused to conduct hearings on Obama's nominee.

The Executive and the Legislative act as they please in these matters, as is their right. They make their own rules, no matter how much the partisans of this world may try to constrain them.

Elections have consequences.

The New York Times makes us relive high school with Brett Kavanaugh

Here, where nothing in particular jumps out except the thought that the biggest problem for many Americans is that they remain teenagers.

Julie Swetnick was in college when Brett Kavanaugh was 17: Maybe she supplied them the alcohol and drugs

Questions About Julie Swetnick’s Claims: She Was in College When Brett Kavanaugh Was in High School:

[A]ccording to the New York Times, “Ms. Swetnick grew up in Montgomery County, Md., graduating from Gaithersburg High School in 1980 before attending college at the University of Maryland, according to a résumé for her posted online. Judge Kavanaugh graduated from Georgetown Prep in 1983.” That means she would have met Kavanaugh while she was 17 or 18, and he was 15 or 16 years old. It also would mean that she was attending high school parties while in college.

McCabe memos appear to have been leaked to NYT saying Rosenstein wanted to entrap Trump by wearing a wire

From the story Rosenstein Suggested He Secretly Record Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment:

Mr. McCabe, who was later fired from the F.B.I., declined to comment. His memos have been turned over to the special counsel investigating whether Trump associates conspired with Russia’s election interference, Robert S. Mueller III, according to a lawyer for Mr. McCabe. “A set of those memos remained at the F.B.I. at the time of his departure in late January 2018,” the lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said of his client. “He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.” ...

One week after the firing [of Comey], Mr. Rosenstein met with Mr. McCabe and at least four other senior Justice Department officials, in part to explain his role in the situation.

During their discussion, Mr. Rosenstein expressed frustration at how Mr. Trump had conducted the search for a new F.B.I. director, saying the president was failing to take the candidate interviews seriously. A handful of politicians and law enforcement officials, including Mr. McCabe, were under consideration.

To Mr. Rosenstein, the hiring process was emblematic of broader dysfunction stemming from the White House. He said both the process and the administration itself were in disarray, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

Mr. Rosenstein then raised the idea of wearing a recording device or “wire,” as he put it, to secretly tape the president when he visited the White House. One participant asked whether Mr. Rosenstein was serious, and he replied animatedly that he was.

If not him, then Mr. McCabe or other F.B.I. officials interviewing with Mr. Trump for the job could perhaps wear a wire or otherwise record the president, Mr. Rosenstein offered. White House officials never checked his phone when he arrived for meetings there, Mr. Rosenstein added, implying it would be easy to secretly record Mr. Trump.

The suggestion itself was remarkable. While informants or undercover agents regularly use concealed listening devices to surreptitiously gather evidence for federal investigators, they are typically targeting drug kingpins and Mafia bosses in criminal investigations, not a president viewed as ineffectively conducting his duties.

In the end, the idea went nowhere, the officials said. But they called Mr. Rosenstein’s comments an example of how erratically he was behaving while he was taking part in the interviews for a replacement F.B.I. director, considering the appointment of a special counsel and otherwise running the day-to-day operations of the more than 100,000 people at the Justice Department.

Mr. Rosenstein’s suggestion about the 25th Amendment was similarly a sensitive topic. The amendment allows for the vice president and majority of cabinet officials to declare the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Merely conducting a straw poll, even if Mr. Kelly and Mr. Sessions were on board, would be risky if another administration official were to tell the president, who could fire everyone involved to end the effort.

Brett Kavanaugh's pal was Mark Judge

Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Friend Isn’t Helping the Nominee’s Case:

The New York Times reported that the friend the woman alleged to be in the room with Kavanaugh was conservative writer Mark Judge, who attended Georgetown Prep with the nominee. On Friday, Judge told the Weekly Standard that no such incident took place. “It’s just absolutely nuts,” he said. “I never saw Brett act that way.” ... The amount of drinking Judge describes himself undertaking [at the time] might suggest that his memory of those days may not be entirely reliable.

Ari Fleischer to anonymous op-ed writer: Who the hell are you to decide what the right direction is?

New York Times op-ed betrays Trump, voters. Staffers don't get to steer US: Ari Fleischer

"No White House staffer is above the will of the people, especially one whose name none of us know." 

Trump evidently has a John McCain mole in his administration

The mole writes an anonymous op-ed here.

The op-ed simply rehashes all the complaints of NeverTrump.

She's oh so precious boys and girls, keeping the Never Ending Funeral going.

If only the American people had elected John McCain!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

The pastor who stood by Bill Clinton during his impeachment, Bill Hybels, crashes and burns in his own sex scandal

He’s a Superstar Pastor. She Worked for Him and Says He Groped Her Repeatedly

How the Willow Creek Church Scandal Has Stunned the Evangelical World

The many tweets of Sarah Jeong, now of The New York Times, add up to just one thing

A multitude of vulgar turds she tweets,

poured forth through soiled lips not sweet;

On men of just one tribe and race she heaps,

a steaming pile of excremental heat.

-- Johnny

Sarah Jeong of The New York Times is guilty of far worse than racism

Nikolas Cruz was failed at least twice, by the cops months before the shooting he perpetrated, and by his school

He had called the cops on himself around Thanksgiving 2017, as The New York Times reported in February.

Now it turns out his school failed to inform him he was eligible for counseling services when he asked for help around the same time.

His mother had died on November 1, 2017. His father had died years earlier, in 2004. So this was an already troubled young man who became lost and alone in the world before he did what he did.

The arbiters of taste at The New York Times rule Roseanne unpalatable but hire a racist pig to write editorials

Dissent emerges in China from a high place

From the story here:

Censorship and punishment have muted dissent in China since Mr. Xi came to power. So Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, took a big risk last week when he delivered the fiercest denunciation yet from a Chinese academic of Mr. Xi’s hard-line policies, revival of Communist orthodoxies and adulatory propaganda image.

“People nationwide, including the entire bureaucratic elite, feel once more lost in uncertainty about the direction of the country and about their own personal security, and the rising anxiety has spread into a degree of panic throughout society,” Professor Xu wrote in an essay that appeared on the website of Unirule Institute of Economics, an independent think tank in Beijing that was recently forced out of its office. ...

“As things continue in this direction, the question arises whether reform and opening up will come to a halt and totalitarian rule will return,” Professor Xu said in the essay, written in a densely classical style speckled with recondite phrases and historical allusions. “At this time, no other anxiety weighs most heavily on most people.” ...

Professor Xu’s future may now become a test of whether Mr. Xi will display greater tolerance of criticism.

“I have said what I must and am in the hands of fate,” he wrote at the end of his essay. “Heaven will decide whether we rise or fall.”

Jessica Valenti: The snowflake/safe-space phenomenon is all the fault of feminism

And darn it, it just hasn't spread far enough.

The tantrum against intractable human nature continues.

Here:

One of feminism’s biggest successes was creating an alternative culture for girls and women seeking respite from mainstream constraints. Girls worried about unrealistic beauty standards, for example, can turn to the body positivity movement. Those of us who find traditional media’s treatment of women unappealing can read feminist blogs and magazines; female college students who have critical questions about how gender shapes their lives can take women’s studies classes.

From social media campaigns to after-school equality clubs, feminism has birthed dozens of online and real-life spaces where girls can find alternatives to the sexist status quo.

But boys and young men who are struggling have no equivalent culture.

Why Hillary hates it now: Remembering Trump's completely unexpected landslide victory over Hillary in the Electoral College

Flashback Reuters October 15, 2016:

Clinton heavily favored to win Electoral College: poll

Hillary projected to win "by a margin of 118 Electoral College votes".

Or The New York Times October 17, 2016:

Showing Confidence, Hillary Clinton Pushes Into Republican Strongholds

"The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?"

Or International Business Times November 7, 2016 (Hillary +108):

Electoral College Map Update: Pollster Predicts Hillary Clinton Landslide, Winning All Swing States Except Iowa, Ohio

"Emerson pollsters predicted Clinton will garner 323 electoral votes compared to 215 for Trump."

Jean-François Revel recognized in America's Protestant legacy its key strength in 2003, he just didn't call it that

Nor did the New York Times in his obituary, here, but that's what it is:

In an interview in 1970 with The New York Post after publication of "Without Marx or Jesus," he said his research did not involve talking to political leaders.

"I just looked around, talked to people, to students," he said. "And in the 20th century the information is pretty good, and I read a lot of your press and books."

In the introduction to his "Anti-Americanism" book, Mr. Revel wrote that he found an America "in complete contrast to the conventional portrayal then generally accepted in Europe." In particular, he was impressed with Americans' willingness to address and correct their own faults.

From the Confession of Sins in the Lutheran liturgy:

Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in Your will and walk in Your ways to the glory of Your holy name. Amen.

Lefty mag The Nation: Not a hack at all, but a leak

Flashback to August 9, 2017:

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack: Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

This official intelligence assessment has since led to what some call “Russiagate,” with charges and investigations of alleged collusion with the Kremlin, and, in turn, to what is now a major American domestic political crisis and an increasingly perilous state of US-Russia relations. To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” ...

Despite all the media coverage taking the veracity of the ICA assessment for granted, even now we have only the uncorroborated assertion of intelligence officials to go on. Indeed, this was noticed by The New York Times’s Scott Shane, who wrote the day the report appeared: “What is missing from the public report is…hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack…. Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

Edward Snowden documents help The Intercept identify eight AT&T buildings central to NSA spying on global internet, phone, email, chat

From the story here:

THE EIGHT LOCATIONS are featured on a top-secret NSA map, which depicts U.S. facilities that the agency relies upon for one of its largest surveillance programs, code-named FAIRVIEW. AT&T is the only company involved in FAIRVIEW, which was first established in 1985, according to NSA documents, and involves tapping into international telecommunications cables, routers, and switches.

In 2003, the NSA launched new internet mass surveillance methods, which were pioneered under the FAIRVIEW program. The methods were used by the agency to collect – within a few months – some 400 billion records about people’s internet communications and activity, the New York Times previously reported. FAIRVIEW was also forwarding more than 1 million emails every day to a “keyword selection system” at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters.

Central to the internet spying are eight “peering link router complex” sites, which are pinpointed on the top-secret NSA map. The locations of the sites mirror maps of AT&T’s networks, obtained by The Intercept from public records, which show “backbone node with peering” facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

One of the AT&T maps contains unique codes individually identifying the addresses of the facilities in each of the cities.

Among the pinpointed buildings, there is a nuclear blast-resistant, windowless facility in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood; in Washington, D.C., a fortress-like, concrete structure less than half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol; in Chicago, an earthquake-resistant skyscraper in the West Loop Gate area; in Atlanta, a 429-foot art deco structure in the heart of the city’s downtown district; and in Dallas, a cube-like building with narrow windows and large vents on its exterior, located in the Old East district.

Elsewhere, on the west coast of the U.S., there are three more facilities: in downtown Los Angeles, a striking concrete tower near the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Staples Center, two blocks from the most important internet exchange in the region; in Seattle, a 15-story building with blacked-out windows and reinforced concrete foundations, near the city’s waterfront; and in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, a building where it was previously claimed that the NSA was monitoring internet traffic from a secure room on the sixth floor.

The peering sites – otherwise known in AT&T parlance as “Service Node Routing Complexes,” or SNRCs – were developed following the internet boom in the mid- to late 1990s. By March 2009, the NSA’s documents say it was tapping into “peering circuits at the eight SNRCs.”

Flashback: There's government indifference to your problems, and then there's Obama's indifference to your problems

The New York Times, March 8, 2009, just as Mr. Market was tanking, the discount window was lending trillion$, and millions of Americans were losing their homes, here:

"Well, I just think it’s clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis."

Trump's determination eventually to remove US troops from South Korea isn't what the South wants or the North demands

From the story here in early May:

The South Korean government reiterated this week that the troops were still needed and would not be pulled out as a result of a peace treaty with North Korea. ...

Mr. Kim recently declared, through South Korean officials, that he would drop the North’s longstanding insistence that American troops leave the peninsula. Some experts argue that watching American soldiers depart is far less important to him than winning relief from economic sanctions.