The other night, my wife asked me how many women I'd slept with. I told her, "Only you. All the others kept me awake all night!"
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Against Trump, Comey sees himself as a saint.
As a self-righteous moralist, Comey proved to be a flop. (See 1 below.)
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There are those who worry about climate change. I worry about EMP. (See 2 below.)
I suspect my EMP concern could happen during my lifetime and I will be dead when the impact of climate change actually occurs, if ever.
Meanwhile, my biggest concern is the continued deficits our government uncurs. If current projections come to pass, entitlement spending will push the deficit from 77% of GDP to 150% of GDP in three decades.
Democrats use entitlements as a way of garnering votes. Democrats know toothpaste will never be returned to the tube. Republicans talk a better game but when it comes to taking effective action they are no better.
If my deficit concern is also yours you might want to read "Budget Blunders" by James Carpretta, PP 33-36, in the May 7, Weekly Standard.
Finally, I have no great love for Mitch McConnell but I do give him high marks as a political strategist. On page 17-18 of the same issue, Fred Barnes discusses why "Mitch" is optimistic. He , and I believe correctly, sees the Senate's power to make appointments, that outlast tax law changes etc., as the greatest opportunity Republicans have to impact the direction of America's future.
There is not doubt judges, appointed for life, can do a great deal of good and/or harm.
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Dick
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1) James Comey’s Judgment Days
Comey was temperamentally unfit ever to be director of the FBI, and never more so than during Donald Trump’s presidency.
It is beyond imagining that even the politics of the United States could simultaneously put before us two protagonists such as Donald Trump and James Comey —the one a dedicated amoralist who ascends to the presidency, the other an FBI director who quotes Reinhold Niebuhr.
Of Mr. Trump, not enough will ever be said. James Comey, however, stands before us as the most public FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover, also a moralist in his own peculiar way.
Representing the FBI and at times the Justice Department, Mr. Comey spent almost two years answering the siren song of modern media—with press conferences amid a presidential election, appearances before Congress, and now high-profile interviews to market his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
Who is James Comey?
Thanks to the musical version of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” everyone knows the figure of Inspector Javert, relentless pursuer of Jean Valjean. Less known is Hugo’s own description of Javert, whom he calls “this unspotted police agent.
Hugo continues: “It was evident to anyone acquainted with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere and ferocious conscience, that Javert had just gone through some great interior struggle.”
James Comey’s interior struggle appears on every page of his book. A few hundred words past the first page, Mr. Comey declares, “I have learned that ethical leaders lead by seeing beyond the short term, beyond the urgent, and take every action with a view toward lasting values.”
It is a most unusual man who takes “every action” with a view toward lasting values. But as Mr. Comey makes clear, he is that man. He spends eight pages on the moral justification for his decision to prosecute Martha Stewart while he was U.S. attorney in New York. “There was once a time,” he says, “when most people worried about going to hell if they violated an oath taken in the name of God.”
He explains how as a young 6-foot-8 man, he would tell people who asked that he did indeed play basketball in college, though he had not: “This was a seemingly small and inconsequential lie . . . but it was a lie nonetheless. And it ate at me. So after law school, I wrote to the friends I’d lied to and told them the truth.”
The Catholic tradition places great emphasis on the value of conscience as a guide to behavior. Less well-known is its warning against developing a “scrupulous conscience,” which is an obstinate fascination with one’s own moral standing.
Mr. Comey describes going to the FBI cafeteria while director: He “never cut the line. Even when I wished I could . . . I thought it was very important to show people that I’m not better than anyone else. So I waited.”
One could go on with examples of his high-minded earnestness, but that would require quoting the entire book: his account of prosecuting Scooter Libby or opposing the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance program, Stellar Wind; his pre-emption of Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the Clinton email-server investigation; and, of course, his crucible with Donald Trump.
In an intriguing contrast to his disdainful accounts of Presidents Bush and Trump, he recounts going home after a meeting with President Obama to tell his wife: “I can’t believe someone with such a supple mind actually got elected president.” They have much in common.
In fact, James Comey was temperamentally unfit ever to be director of the FBI, and never more so than in our intense times.
Mr. Comey’s daily visits to his personal chapel of an apolitical “higher loyalty” impaired his professional judgment. Instead, he is judgmental. Judgmentalism is a flaw in an FBI director, because it undermines the objective credibility of his role. A high officer of government shouldn’t see his job as doing battle with the seven deadly sins.
After Donald Trump won the election, an opposition rose on a wave of moral revulsion. The moralistic Mr. Comey let the FBI get swept into a politicized crusade.
Halfway through the book, Mr. Comey describes addressing the FBI’s employees in Washington for the first time. It reveals a lot:
“I gave the talk sitting on a stool, wearing a tie but no jacket. I also wore a blue shirt. This might not seem like a big deal to outsiders, but Bob Mueller [as FBI director] wore a white shirt every day for 12 years. . . . Not some days, or most days—every day. That was the culture, and I thought shirt color was one early, small way to set a different tone. I said nothing about my shirt, but people noticed.”
Perhaps they did, because what happened at the highest levels of the FBI afterward through the Clinton and Trump investigations was a collapse of professional discipline. The FBI needs to find its way back to the culture of the white shirt, every day.
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2) Why does this not appear to be the TOP PRIORITY of our governments, city,state and federal?
America and the EMP threat By Daniel Ashman
Posted By Ruth King
A Congressional Committee report states that a large electromagnetic pulse (EMP) inundating America could cause 90% of Americans to die. The EMP is inevitable. The dead Americans are not.
Mark Levin invited Dr. Peter Pry on to his show to illuminate this issue. It’s not hard to see why Pry is considered America’s foremost expert on this topic. He has two PhDs, a certificate on nuclear weapon design, worked at the CIA for a decade, worked on the House Armed Services Committee, and then served as Director of the EMP Committee.
Pry explained that an EMP can happen a few different ways: if adversary attacks America using nuclear weapons, or naturally via a large solar storm. The reason a large EMP hitting earth is inevitable is that solar storms are inevitable. They happen regularly. The only question is when a large one will cross earth’s path. For instance, NASA reported that if a solar superstorm from 2012 had happened just one week earlier, it would have blasted the earth with a catastrophic EMP. We are playing this slot machine every day. Eventually we’re going to hit the jackpot.
Actually, we have already been hit by a large solar storm. In 1859, the Carrington Event melted circuits, caused forest fires when telegraph wires burst into flames, and even destroyed the transatlantic cable placed miles beneath the surface of the ocean.
Electronics nowadays are far more sensitive and thus even more vulnerable to an EMP. The next Carrington Event will destroy electronics around the entire world. Refrigerators will stop cooling food. Gas pumps will stop working. Even tap water will stop flowing. Perhaps survivalists who live in rural areas will be okay. But many Americans live in cities and are no longer equipped with the skills to live on their own.
Of particular worry is the fact that extra high-voltage transformers, which our electric grid depends on, will be wrecked. The North American grid has about 2,000 of these transformers. They are so huge and difficult to make that the worldwide capacity for manufacturing new ones is just 200 a year. In fact, America doesn’t even make these transformers anymore (they are imported). It would take years to replace our transformers in a best-case scenario. Thus, Americans would be without electricity indefinitely. Also problematic is the fact that there wouldn’t be electricity to use to restore the electric grid.
Beyond a solar storm, the other possibility is an EMP caused by a nuclear strike. Specifically, a single nuclear warhead detonated 100 miles above Kansas would create an electromagnetic wave which would propagate down and outwards and destroy America’s entire electric grid (including the transformers).
The nuclear bomb EMP effect was confirmed by the 1962 Starfish Prime test. A nuclear bomb was detonated 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It knocked out some electrical equipment almost a thousand miles away in Hawaii.
The Starfish Prime test was done with a “primitive” nuclear weapon. Since then, some countries have developed specialized nuclear warheads for the exact purpose of creating larger EMP effects. Dr. William Graham, President Reagan’s science advisor, wrote, “In 2004, two Russian generals, both EMP experts, warned the EMP Commission that the design for Russia’s super-EMP warhead, capable of generating high intensity EMP fields of 200,000 volts per meter, was ‘accidentally’ transferred to North Korea.”
Many people assume that America is safe from a nuclear EMP attack due to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But the world is changing. There are numerous “tricky” attack vectors which may appear attractive to an aggressor. For instance, Iran could undertake the attack for religious reasons. North Korea could give a nuclear bomb to terrorists. China could coerce North Korea into attacking and then deny all responsibility.
There is no reason that America must keep playing the slot machine. It would only take two to three billion dollars to harden the electric grid, to protect the core components which would be difficult to replace. Then, when an EMP does hit, we can restore electricity. Given the gargantuan budget America has for the military, this would seem to be a straightforward matter.
Lack of EMP preparedness has dragged on for far too long. Naive politicians have wanted to ignore the problem away. But physics doesn’t work like that. Levin and Pry have done an excellent service by reminding America of this danger. God knows we have enough problems as it is without leaving one more very fixable problem on the table.
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