A Once Great Institution Craters

For John, BLUF:  Yup, I mailed off my letter to the Executive Director earlier this week, asking them to take me off their list, as I no longer saw the ACLU as aligned with my civil rights views.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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American Civil Liberties Union, RIP

Here is the sub-headline:

The ACLU no longer even pretends to believe in civil liberties.

From The Volokh Conspiracy, by Law Professor David E. Bernstein, 17 November 2018.

Here is the first sentence:

In the late 1960s, the ACLU was a small but powerful liberal organization devoted to a civil libertarian agenda composed primarily of devotion to freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and the rights of accused criminals.

And here is how the article ends:

Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU's long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation "promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused." Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections "inappropriately favor the accuse."

The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh end signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.

It is sad, very sad.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Trump Wins Again

For John, BLUF:  Sometimes it is better not to stir the pot.  And, odds are that in 2025 Mr Trump will be a retired two term President and Jim Acosta will be forgotten.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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How Trump won the Acosta lawsuit.

Here is the sub-headline:

You don't alway win by winning. That's too easy. The genius move is to win by losing.

From the eponymous blog of Retired Law Professor Ann Althouse, 16 November 2018.

Here are the last two paragraphs:

The judge framed it as a matter of process, which justifies Trump issuing a set of rules of decorum.  I assume the rules will include a requirement that a reporter who has received a response (whether it's to his liking or not) must relinquish the microphone, that there can be no physical interference with a staff member who reaches out to take the microphone, and that one much stop talking once the President (or press secretary) has moved on to the next questioner.

Any complaints about these rules and the prescribed consequences of violating them can be met with pieties about adhering to the judge's ruling.  Things must be done in an orderly way — in the press room and in a system of due process.  Any complaints premised on freedom of the press will be met with statements like "We want total freedom of the press" and we want perfect due process.  So here you are, here's notice of our rules of decorum. And that should be the end of the kind of questioning Acosta has become famous for.  Trump wins.

Best Comment so far:

Jupiter said...
These Democrats just can't seem to keep their hands off the White House interns.

11/16/18, 8:46 PM

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Never Getting It Right

For John, BLUF:  With the Feds tell the truth or take the Fifth.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Jake Tapper Falsely Claims Scooter Libby "Leaked" Noted Anti-Semite Conspiracy Theorist Valerie Plame's Name to Press; Refuses to Correct

From the Ace of Spades, on 13 April 2018.

Jake is wrong.  Mr I Lewis Libby♠ didn't leak the name.  Just flat out wrong.♥

Incidentally, Mr Lewis was not convicted of "burning" Ms Valerie Plsme, but of lying to the FBI.♦

O F F E N S I V E   L A N G U A G E   W A R N I N G
Not here, but at the link at the top.

President Trump did give Mr Lewis a full pardon on Friday the 13th.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Full disclosure, while in the Pentagon for my second tour I interacted with Mr Lewis, a little.
♥  While Mr Lewis did get his law license back, it took President Trump to give him the pardon.
♦  Yes, it is OK for the Feds to lie to you, but not for you to lie to the Feds.  I think that is very un-American.

Computer Problems at IRS

For John, BLUF:  Send Ms Lois Lerner to where we sent I Lewis Libby.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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We talked about this yesterday.  The IRS has lost a bunch of Ms Lois Lerner's EMails.

Today we have a short and not very informative article in The Boston Globe, "E-mails sought in IRS probe lost, agency says".  This happened years ago, but only on Friday was it announced.  Here is a possible reason they are really gone:

The IRS explains in the letter that it has not always backed up all employee emails due to the cost the agency would incur for allowing 90,000 employees to store their information on the IRS’s internal system.

Currently, IRS employees have the capacity to store about 6,000 emails in their active Outlook email boxes, which are saved on the IRS centralized network. But the letter and background document sent to the Hill Friday said they could only store about 1,800 emails in their active folders prior to July 2011.

When their inboxes were full, IRS employees had to make room by either deleting emails or archiving them on their personal computers. Archived data were not stored by the IRS but by the individual.

Such archived emails on Lerner’s computer were what were lost when her computer crashed.

“Any of Ms. Lerner’s email that was only stored on that computer’s hard drive would have been lost when the hard drive crashed and could not be recovered,” the letter reads.

This is The Politico, not The Boston Globe. So, while this description seems plausible, if accepted it requires an indictment of IRS management for exempting itself from the rules that apply to the rest of us.  Indictment, as into the legal hopper.  Issues of public integrity.  Is that what the DOJ Public Integrity Section is for?  Wasn't current Attorney General Eric Holder an attorney in the Public Integrity Section for his first twelve years as a lawyer?

However, not everyone wants to see this overall issue fall into the Public Integrity Section of DOJ.  Law Professor Ann Althouse wants a Special Prosecutor. 

For decades the received wisdom has been it's not the crime, it's the coverup. And here we see evidence of a coverup. What kind of crime must there be that after all these years of warnings that it's the coverup that will get you, we've got a glaring, egregious coverup?!

Her BOLD, not mine.  Even if this was just a mistake, we need someone outside the circle to look into it and agree.  Someone "independent".

Here are some comments at the Althouse Blog:

At 0904 John Henry noted:
Forget just now who it was but a Congressman or Senator said that NSA should provide the metadata.

At 0909 Meade asked:
Can we hire Edward Snowden to find the missing emails?

At 00921 Tom Gallagher says:
It's nice to know the people who manage these bureaucracies will be looking after our health care.

To that last comment, I would note that this IRS EMail situation is just like the VA scheduling situation.  It is Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR).  That is one reason why concentrations of power is so dangerous.  The other reason, of course is malicious people doing malicious things (There is "Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity").

Is there some third explanation here, which is neither malice nor stupidity?

Regards  —  Cliff

Internal Immigration Checkpoints

For John, BLUF:  Our freedoms are slowly bering eroded.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From Reason Magazine we have "America's Internal Checkpoints".  This is about how "Refuseniks fight back against feds demanding papers" within 100 miles of US borders.  Not so much a problem here in Massachusetts, but a big deal from California east to Texas.♠  The author is Mr Wes Kimbell.

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  New York City is a special case, with its "Stop and Frisk" law.