Good op-ed piece in the WSJ, lauding Trump for decentralizing management of the crisis:

quote:

Washington’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is upending one of the most durable patterns of American politics. Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game.

The historical pattern is powerful and might have seemed inevitable. In times of war, natural disaster and economic upheaval, action is king. The president and his officials and agencies can act with much greater dispatch than Congress can. They may be forgiven for crossing statutory or even constitutional boundaries—in a crisis, the test of legitimacy is perceived effectiveness. But emergency actions often set precedents for normal times.

Moreover, crises generate proposals for preventing their recurrence. These typically take the form of an agency that, with the benefit of hindsight, could have nipped the crisis in the bud. Positing an omnicompetent government authority is political misdirection: It elides the profound problems of uncertainty and conflicting information and interpretation that precede every catastrophe. That is a sure recipe for highly concentrated, discretionary power.

These tendencies were dramatically on display in the first two national emergencies of the 21st century, 9/11 and the 2008 financial collapse. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration and Congress created two gigantic agencies with extraordinary powers and insulation from congressional control, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence was centralized and bureaucratized; federal police powers were extended down to driver’s licenses and much else; the administration established wide-ranging surveillance programs.

In response to the 2008 crisis, the administration arranged corporate mergers and bailouts with only fig leaves of statutory authority. It spent hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional appropriation. These crisis expedients provided the template for the Obama administration’s unilateral responses to mere political frustrations—congressional inaction on its climate change, immigration and other legislative proposals. At the same time, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 commissioned an army of new regulatory authorities with unprecedented discretion and autonomy.

It is not only crises that propel the administrative state. Lesser events of the 2000s—accounting scandals and a spike in energy prices—also led to new layers of freewheeling federal power. But major emergencies have unfailingly been major inflection points.

Until now. In responding to the coronavirus, the Trump administration has confined itself to longstanding statutory authorities that have been invoked routinely in responding to lesser emergencies. President Trump has used the Stafford Act of 1988 to provide states with emergency financial assistance—but has deferred to their decisions regarding social confinement, business closures, testing and treatment. He has employed the Defense Production Act of 1950 to cajole manufactures to prioritize urgently needed medical equipment—but has relied primarily on consultation, coordination and publicity to coach a private-sector-led mobilization. He has declared a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which can potentially trigger extraordinary regulatory powers—but so far he has used it only for deregulatory purposes, waiving Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act rules that restrict telemedicine and interstate medical practice.

Mr. Trump has received criticism from all sides for these measured responses. It is said, on the one hand, that he should aggressively commandeer state police powers and industrial resources to mount a uniform national response—and, on the other (sometimes by the same critics), that the crisis will sooner or later unleash the authoritarian ambitions Mr. Trump has supposedly been harboring all along.

His replies have been characteristically adamant. He has extolled his administration’s performance on the measures that are unarguably federal jurisdictions—restricting foreign travel, deploying the military’s medical resources, mobilizing production of materials in short supply and allocating them among states and cities, providing information on the spread of the virus and guidance on mitigation measures. He has been jealous of federal prerogatives and sharply critical of governors and business executives he regarded as uncooperative.

But mainly he has given pride of place to federalism and private enterprise—lauding the patriotism and proficiency of our fantastic governors and mayors, our incredible business leaders and genius companies, our heroic doctors and nurses and orderlies, and our tremendous truckers. By shouting out many of them by name and documenting their deeds on a daily basis, he has vivified the American way in action (once reluctantly aroused). When asked why he has not issued orders for nationwide home and business lockdowns, he has emphasized that the intensity of the epidemic varies widely and is best met by calibrated state and local judgments—and added pointedly that such steps would conflict with the Constitution....

Yet the administration seems intent on keeping the crisis from generating a permanent expansion of federal and executive powers. President Trump’s calling himself a “wartime president” has sounded authoritarian to some of his detractors. It is better viewed in conjunction with his constant assurances that the “invisible enemy” will soon be subdued and national life returned to normal—as a vow that his use of emergency authority will be as transitory as public-health conditions permit.

The most striking aspect of the administration’s response has been its waiving or liberalizing of hundreds of regulatory requirements that would otherwise impede efforts to cope with the epidemic and ensuing shutdowns. The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed its extreme restrictions on the development and deployment of medical tests, equipment, drugs and vaccines. The Medicare and Hipaa waivers, along with the suspension by many states of their restrictions on out-of-state medical professionals, are allowing doctors and nurses to go where they are needed and to practice telemedicine. The Education Department is easing its micromanagement of school districts to facilitate online teaching and other initiatives. Teachers I know are enthusiastic about the cancellation of this year’s federal testing requirements—now they can actually teach their students instead of merely preparing them for tests.

WSJ Link

Some non Wuhan Virus news, Anonymous identified?

Instead of Firing Newly ID'd 'Anonymous' Leaker, WH Is Punishing Her with Transfer to Saudi Arabia

A set of reports published Wednesday said the White House believes it has “Anonymous,” the senior White House official behind the infamous New York Times Op-Ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and subsequent book dealing with much the same ground.

Victoria Coates was on the National Security Council and was promoted to the No. 2 position there last fall. There’s been an abrupt shift in her fortunes, however, and she recently was demoted to a special assignment as a senior adviser in the Department of Energy, where she’s awaiting assignment to Saudi Arabia.

That, according to a report from Paul Sperry in RealClearInvestigations, is because the White House believes she’s the one behind the Op-Ed and book.

In a series of articles published Wednesday, Sperry revealed how sources inside the White House came to believe Coates was Anonymous, including textual analysis and curious coincidences between their lived experiences.

First, in case you’ve forgotten: Anonymous first published his or her Op-Ed back in September 2018, a time when the special counsel investigation seemed like The Most Important Thing That’s Ever Happened To Our Nation. In retrospect, those were blessedly simple times for our country and the world, but we were gripped for at least a few news cycles by The Times’ opinion piece in which the unnamed senior official declared that President Donald Trump was unaware “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

“I would know. I am one of them,” Anonymous declared.

That was one of plenty of mic-drop paragraphs that felt like they should have the “Law & Order” sound effect playing right after them. For weeks, we were inordinately interested in who wrote the thing and scouring other Trump administration figures’ oeuvres for uses of the word “lodestar,” a textual choice by Anonymous that seemed to stand out to everyone.

Again, in hindsight, the whole thing seems like a ridiculous parlor game; of course there were people in the Trump administration who wanted to frustrate its efforts, given that the president was fighting upstream against not only the Democrats but a wide swath of his own party, an establishment that was convinced he too would pass and they’d be laughing this off at the country club sooner rather than later.

After more than a few news cycles, we all lost interest. The book-length treatment of the subject, “A Warning,” was published roughly a year later to the interest of roughly no one who wasn’t inside the White House.

At 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., however, the book provided important textual clues to a team involved in a National Security Council probe trying to suss out who Anonymous was. Remember, Coates was promoted as recently as last autumn. To go from a promotion to near the head of the NSC to a demotion to the Department of Energy and a long flight to Riyadh is an unusual set of circumstances, and no other reports of sturm und drang from inside the presidential manse seem to point toward a reason for the move.

The establishment media have dismissed reports of Coates being Anonymous as “unsubstantiated rumors” that have been kicking around the internet. A source from the NSC, however, told RealClearInvestigations that the White House was convinced of Coates’ authorship.

“It’s her,” the source said. “That’s why she was shown the door.”

So, why Coates?

First, there’s the compelling evidence provided by computerized textual analysis of Anonymous’ two known works and what Coates has authored.

This sort of thing is pretty easy to do nowadays since advanced software can compare word choice, turns of phrase, sentence structures and other indicators to create a sort of authorial fingerprint match.

For instance, in a 2012 column, Coates described Hong Kong businessmen as “eager to curry favor with.” In a 2015 speech, she talked of “currying favor with Baghdad.” A previous book on art and democracy talked about how an Italian artist had worked “to curry favor with” a rich family. Meanwhile, in “A Warning,” the phrase “curry favor with” was used three times.

A list of other phrases that textual analysis found in common between Anonymous and Coates, as per RealClearInvestigations: “first principles,” “classical liberalism,” “chilling effect,” “wreaking havoc,” “gone sideways,” “ad nauseum,” “hell-bent” and “tin-pot.”

It’s not just phraseology, either. “Sextant” isn’t a word used much outside of nautical history books. Coates and Anonymous both used it, though.

“History doesn’t make us. We make history,” Anonymous wrote in “A Warning,” arguing for bending the arc of the Trump administration toward something more moral. “Its course is changed by the people themselves who, with their values as a sextant, navigate daily moral quandaries.”

A decade prior, Coates had used it in her book “Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum,” albeit in a nonmetaphorical way: “As several series of sextant angles taken from prominent vantage points show, his mission also entailed mapping the surrounding territory.”

There were a litany of these scattered throughout Anonymous’ and Coates’ work.

And, more importantly, both Coates and Anonymous seemed to have a different sextant than the president did in critical matters.

Coates was known to be a national security hawk, something at odds with the president’s aversion to getting bogged down more than he felt America should be in places such as Syria and Afghanistan. Sources say she’s privately dismissive of the president, and while friends say she was supportive of his run for Trump once he became the nominee, none of her tweets in the run-up to Election Day four years ago mentions her support for the president.

She’s also an ally of Sen. Ted Cruz, one who was “livid when the Texas Republican endorsed Trump and cited national security as one of his reasons for supporting the Republican nominee,” according to a 2017 Politico article.

Beyond all that, she’s a member of the national security community, a corner of our government known to tolerate Trump with a grimace when they tolerate him at all.

She also has a history of writing anonymously, which would make her a good candidate to be, well, Anonymous.

Anonymous and Coates also share a prominent literary agent, an expedient curiosity, especially since that agent hosts what Sperry described as “an author roster of disaffected ex-Trump officials.” The agency denies any link between Coates and Anonymous, however.

“To be very clear, so there is no chance of any misunderstanding: Dr. Coates is not Anonymous,” Javelin Literary Agency, which hosts both Coates and Anonymous, said. “She did not write it, edit it, see it in advance, know anything about it, or as far [as] we know ever read it.”

Firsthand accounts say that Coates and Anonymous experienced the same events in the White House, something only a handful of other people inside the Trump administration did; according to RealClearInvestigations, the others have been ruled out by the NSC team.

And then there are a handful of personal details that match the two.

Anonymous is fond of Philadelphia, reminding readers that it’s the birthplace of American liberty in one passage. In another, she discusses a Pennsylvanian Founding Father, John Dickinson, one who’s not generally discussed by your sixth-grader over dinner when discussing his American history project but who’s well known in the lore of the Keystone State. Coates, meanwhile, owns a Victorian mansion in Philadelphia and is descended from a line of Pennsylvanians going back to 1709, including Civil War-era Pennsylvania Gov. Andrew Curtin.

Anonymous also quoted American historian Bernard Bailyn, generally unknown if you’re not in intellectual circles and scarcely known even then. Coates would have been familiar with him, however: She received a master’s in art history from Williams College, which was Bailyn’s alma mater and which includes his works as required reading.

Coates declined to comment on the RealClearInvestigations pieces and has retained a lawyer. Many of her friends say that she didn’t author either the Op-Ed or book — and to be fair, there are good points to be made in that department.

“The suggestion that Victoria is ‘Anonymous’ is preposterous,” K.T. McFarland, Trump’s first deputy national security adviser, said. McFarland said she’d reached that conclusion not only because Coates had told it to her, but she’d also told it to a much more sensitive source.

“Victoria herself has denied being ‘Anonymous’ during her routine security clearance review,” McFarland said. “Anyone familiar with the security clearance process knows that it would have been a criminal offense, punishable by jail time, for her to lie about this.”

However, Sperry said her friends had issues explaining why she would accept a demotion just four months after being promoted to No. 2 on the National Security Council. And it’s quite the demotion, being sent to a country that isn’t known to respect human rights or women’s rights and is currently undergoing a painful, protracted proxy war with Iran in Yemen. Have fun, I suppose.

Trump has told reporters he knows who Anonymous is, and the demotion seems to at least signal he believes it to be Coates.

Sources have said the administration didn’t want the distraction of a firing. A bit of social distancing — roughly 7,000 miles worth of it — is one way to do it.

If Anonymous writes a third missive titled “A Warning 2: Unnamed Brutal Middle Eastern Dictatorships Which Are Questionable Allies of the United States Aren’t Fun Places to Wait Out Pandemics,” we’ll also have a better idea.

In short, despite the fact that the media has called these reports linking Coates and Anonymous “unsubstantiated rumors,” there’s plenty of evidence that the White House believes Coates is Anonymous.

Is she? If there’s any evidence to the contrary, the fact that Coates reportedly told officials she wasn’t Anonymous during her security clearance review sticks in my craw. Despite a plethora of coincidences, I don’t quite believe anyone would be that stupid, particularly given how hard Washington was sleuthing to find out just who this person was.

On the other hand, I suppose it all depends on how seriously Anonymous meant what he or she said during the preface to “A Warning”: “If asked, I will strenuously deny I am the author of this book.”

If it’s Coates and she said that during her security clearance interview knowing full well it was false, I’d have to say she meant it pretty darn seriously.

https://www.westernjournal.com...tent=libertyalliance

quote:

Is she? If there’s any evidence to the contrary, the fact that Coates reportedly told officials she wasn’t Anonymous during her security clearance review sticks in my craw. Despite a plethora of coincidences, I don’t quite believe anyone would be that stupid ....

Yeah: What other Washington insider has committed far more serious national security crimes—like leaking classified information or lying to the FSIA court—than lying during a background investigation interview?

What a ridiculous statement.

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:

HA! Yep.

Saw this on James Woods' twitter feed - Trump Chicken Wings SNL skit, you'll need to go to the twitter link to view the video:




https://twitter.com/RealJamesW.../1251340423345258496

Cliff and fearsome dreadnaught, please explain. I barely know who Tupac Shakur was and don't recognize either of the other men. (I don't get out much.)

flashguy

The late Tupac Shakur was a famous rapper in the 90s and with a reputation as a "hardcore gangsta motherfucker" (and the prison record to go along with that reputation). In his own words, a "straight thug mothafucka who ain't scared to bust."

The idea is that Trump is more badass than Tupac.

Are you saying the white man in that photo was Trump? I didn't recognise him.

flashguy

It's him.


Total badass!

quote:

Originally posted by ersatzknarf:
It's him.


Total badass!

OK, that explains the meme.

("It's he")

quote:

Originally posted by flashguy:
Are you saying the white man in that photo was Trump? I didn't recognise him.

Man, come on. Enough with the Twenty Questions.

Let's move on, please, guys.

He just flat out said I'm not a fan of Romney and don't want his advice

And CNN once again, pressing hard for a desperately needed splashy fake news headline.

Trolls.

quote:

Originally posted by cjevans:
And CNN once again, pressing hard for a desperately needed splashy fake news headline.

Trolls.

What's the context for this?

https://twitter.com/realDonald.../1252046878314770432

Watch the video at the link.

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
The late Tupac Shakur was a famous rapper in the 90s and with a reputation as a "hardcore gangsta motherfucker" (and the prison record to go along with that reputation). In his own words, a "straight thug mothafucka who ain't scared to bust."

The idea is that Trump is more badass than Tupac.

I like Tupac as much as any rapper of the era. He was alright.

But Tupac's mom was the editor of the original Blank Panther's newsletter and was the leader of the Harlem Chapter. While pregnant with 'Pac and with no law degree she represented herself in the Panther 21 trial for planning bombings in NY way back then. She was acquitted, too. Almost/allegedly a Terrorist, but not. Wild story.

That all happened in NY. They're from Harlem. it's no surprise to see a photo of Trump ans 2Pac.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
https://twitter.com/realDonald.../1252046878314770432

Watch the video at the link.

Great post ! Also - the Crenshaw vs. Maher conversation was spot on]. Not a fair fight - but spot on !! Sort of like check-mate in 3 moves.....

This message has been edited. Last edited by: parabellum,

Joey D
4/20/20



Description

INTERVIEW - JOE DIGENOVA - legal analyst and former U.S. Attorney to the District of Columbia – discussed Grenell’s dossier bombshells, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone’s trial.

Richard Grenell, new intel chief, pivotal in releasing classified dossier bombshell
McClatchy ‘Taking A Close Look’ At Its Cohen-Prague Reports In Wake Of New Evidence
Washington Post's ERIK WEMPLE: The Steele dossier just sustained another body blow. What do CNN and MSNBC have to say?
CNN: GOP seizes on newly declassified material to raise further questions about Steele
President Trump calls on New York Times WH correspondent Maggie Haberman to give back her Pulitzer Prize awarded for Russia reporting during coronavirus task force briefing.
Roger Stone denied new trial and gag order lifted.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
https://twitter.com/realDonald.../1252046878314770432



Very logical and well spoken.

But I DO blame the Democrats, as well as the Chinese. GDC's in charge, in both venues.

For their (the Dems) total focus on undoing the Presidential election of 2016, and impeding our President at every turn, no matter what he is doing for our USA.