Jack T.


Here's what he looked like.


The Clintons, then and now



A Hoax Pointed at Starbucks





Crossing the line






A Hoard of Harald Bluetooth

A boy has made a major find:



That late a date means that it would have been after Bluetooth's conversion to Christianity. Bluetooth is, of course, the king with whom the protagonists of The Long Ships feasted one memorable Yule. He is also the namesake of those "Bluetooth" devices you see everywhere; the logo is a bindrune of his initials, the runic forms of H and then B.

Purely Coincidence, Your Honor



Kimberley Strassel on Comey

She has a series of penetrating questions of the sort that, of course, Comey has not been asked. He ought to be, though.

James Comey, Anchorman

As explained by Ron Burgundy.

The Constitution, How Does It Work?

The President is going to court to force the Department of Justice, which works for him, to take his lead on how to handle the seizure of his own attorney's papers. This is roughly like the House of Representatives suing the Senate in Federal Court because they disagree with how the Senate has handled a bill they forwarded.

What the court should say, of course, is that this is an internal Executive Branch matter over which the court has no power. Instead, they are apparently taking seriously the assumption that a court should have authority to rule over a dispute between the President and his employees in the Executive Branch.

Meanwhile, the Senate is considering a law that would give a Special Counsel recourse to the courts to sue if they are fired and get themselves reinstated. Presumably that would have to be passed into law over the President's veto, but if so it would represent a seizure of constitutional authority from the Executive by the other two branches of government.

The proposed law also seems to create the Department of Justice as a kind of independent secret police. You can see how wise this is if you substitute in the name of any other secret police: "...a [Stasi investigator] may be fired only by the [head of the Stasi], and only for good cause, like misconduct." I'm sure we all have a higher opinion of the DOJ and the FBI than we do of the Stasi or the Gestapo, but the point of constitutional limits on power is to assume that someday bad people might get in charge. Do you really want to set up a secret police that is fully independent of elected officials?

This really has turned into a constitutional crisis.

The real problem with greed

I'm often exasperated by attacks on the profit motive.  The one area where I'm willing to attack it is the action of an individual who knows what's right and what's wrong but chooses the wrong because he's paid to do it.  From a surprising source--CBS, for Pete's sake--comes this spot-on criticism of James Comey's new book "A Higher Loyalty":
As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com tweeted, it's "not particularly honorable, if you have information you believe is of immediate and vital national importance, to wait 11 months to release it until you can have a giant book launch and publicity tour." Silver—no Trump fan--calls the book "A Higher Royalty."

Truth and pity

Chesterton on virtue:

Prediction is hard

Powerline chuckles at the latest strike of the "Al Gore Effect," which is the juxtaposition of record-cold temperatures in Minnesota with a "March for Science" dominated by climate alarmists. He notes, of course, that these days HotColdWetDry is as eager to explain record cold as record heat by pointing to catastrophic climate something or other. Whatever we just experienced, it was somehow linked to original climate sin. I like his conclusion: "I will be more impressed with the alarmists’ models when they predict something before it happens."