The Inevitable New The Inevitable Trump Mocking Thread

affc043b-ea7d-40c8-9a2f-8394079ce144.jpg

NY Times: Say, this Steele dossier appears to be false (and maybe was a Russian disinformation effort)

JOHN SEXTON Posted at 8:31 pm on April 20, 2019

Well, it took them a while to get there but the NY Times has finally taken notice that the Steele dossier appears to contain a lot of false and unverifiable garbage:











The 35-page dossier, spiced up with tales of prostitutes and spies, sketched out a hair-raising story more than two years ago. Russian intelligence had used bribery and blackmail to try to turn Donald J. Trump into a source and ally, it said, and the Kremlin was running some Trump campaign aides practically as agents.

But the release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months — that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out…

Interviews with people familiar with Mr. Steele’s work on the dossier and the F.B.I.’s scramble to vet its claims suggest that misgivings about its reliability arose not long after the document became public — and a preoccupation of Trump opponents — in early 2017. Mr. Steele has made clear to associates that he always considered the dossier to be raw intelligence — not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation.

Hold on a minute. If Steele considered the dossier raw intelligence and merely cause for further investigation, why was he talking to multiple news outlets about the dossier prior to the election? He gave quotes to Mother Jones about it in October of 2016. That doesn’t sound like someone who is handling raw intelligence. It sounds like someone helping to dump oppo prior to the election.







After pointing out that the dossier itself is now under scrutiny from AG Barr, the DOJ Inspector General and Republicans in Congress, the Times suggests two explanations for why the document appears to contain so much that isn’t so:

By January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele’s main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document and three people familiar with the events, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After questioning him about where he’d gotten his information, they suspected he might have added his own interpretations to reports passed on by his sources, one of the people said. For the F.B.I., that made it harder to decide what to trust…

How the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details remains uncertain, but the document may be the result of a high-stakes game of telephone, in which rumors and hearsay were passed from source to source.

If the FBI knew this might be a bunch of hearsay by early 2017, why did they brief the president and thereby provide the news hook needed for CNN to publish the allegations (and Buzzfeed to publish the dossier)? Shouldn’t they have been downplaying this rather than elevating it?
 
e2c614f7-f69f-49b6-b3c0-ec403ec69280.jpg

George Mason University to angry students: Kavanaugh’s teaching a course for us whether you like it or not

ALLAHPUNDIT Posted at 6:41 pm on April 19, 2019

First Camille Paglia’s university stands up to students on her behalf, now this. Since when do universities resist the whims of the woke brigades?











If you find it gross that college students would support blackballing someone on the basis of a bare allegation, remember that that’s how students themselves are treated on campus under Title IX. Guilty until proven innocent is academia’s version of due process when it comes to sexual misconduct. If you can destroy a young adult’s future on someone’s say-so in the name of zero tolerance for rape, surely you can deny a Supreme Court justice his summer side hustle for the same reason.

And before you ask: Yes, of course Bill Clinton has spoken at GMU before. In 2008, at a campaign event for Hillary, in fact.

Here’s HuffPost reporting on a campus town hall held on Tuesday night by the university’s president and other officials to let students vent about their decision to hire Kavanaugh for a part-time teaching gig. Students won’t even have to interact with him on campus: His summer class will be taught in England during July and August, when the Court — and school — aren’t in session. Even so, 10,000 people have signed a petition cancel his gig. The crowd on Tuesday night was aghast that administrators seemingly didn’t share their disgust that GMU was about to employ someone accused of something terrible:







Provost S. David Wu said it was the law school’s choice to hire Kavanaugh, and he saw “no reason for university administrators to override” their decision. Cabrera agreed, emphasizing the need to protect the law school’s ability to hire who it wants. Alison Price, senior associate dean of GMU’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, said she would ensure going forward that faculty would thoughtfully consider a hire’s “implications to all students.”

Students were somewhere between baffled and outraged that none of their school’s leaders saw a problem with giving Kavanaugh a job.

“In hiring Kavanaugh, to what extent did you consider the mental health of the survivors on campus and how that might affect them and their education?” asked one male student, as the room filled with the sound of students snapping their fingers in support…

HuffPost asked Cabrera after the event if he saw any possibility of revisiting the school’s contract with Kavanaugh if students continue to protest and say his association with the school feels inappropriate or makes them revisit their own sexual trauma.

“No,” he said. “It’s done.”

One student asked the six administrators on the panel who have kids to raise their hands if they’d feel comfortable having someone accused of sexual assault around them. Only two did. Which was clever because of course there *are* cases where you’d want to usher someone away from children even though they haven’t been convicted of a crime. No one wants Harvey Weinstein as a guest lecturer on gender studies. No one wants O.J. coaching the women’s swimming team.







Actually, O.J. has been convicted of a crime, hasn’t he? Well, you know which crime I mean. That other one.







What they could have said, though, (and probably wanted to say) was that it depends on how credible the accusation is. If the accuser can’t remember where the attack happened; can’t remember when; can’t remember who was at the party where it allegedly occurred; didn’t tell a soul for decades; made her accusation in the context of a politically turbo-charged confirmation fight; and was contradicted by character testimonials from dozens of women who know the accused, then yes, perhaps you’re okay with your kids around that person. Another way they could have answered is this: If Christine Ford had decided not to testify but Michael Avenatti had brought Julie Swetnick forward to make her claim about Kavanaugh and gang rape, would that have sufficed to drive him away? How bare does a bare allegation of sexual assault need to be to justify blackballing?







But the administrators couldn’t say that. To imply that they didn’t believe Ford would have invited disingenuous attacks that they don’t think accusers should ever be believed. Then their political problem would have been worse.

I understand why GMU chieftains want Kavanaugh there. This is the university that renamed its law school after Antonin Scalia, a decision that came with big money attached. How big? When they announced the name change, they also announced that they had received $30 million in gifts, of which $10 million came from the Charles Koch Foundation and the other $20 million came from an anonymous donor who had approached Scalia’s friend Leonard Leo about it. (Leo is now Trump’s right-hand man on judicial appointments, a key player in getting Kavanaugh on the Court.) A few months ago the school announced a new donation of $50 million(!) from the Rouse family, admirers of Scalia. To have pulled the rug out from under Kavanaugh now under left-wing pressure would have jeopardized GMU’s lucrative relationship with the conservative legal world. I think long-term they’re hoping not just to rake in the dough but to build a strong enough brand in the conservative imagination that they become a top pick for talented young right-leaning lawyers — basically the Federalist Society JV team.
 

Pirro: Mueller Statement He Couldn't Exonerate Trump a Show of 'Political Whoremanship'


JEFF POOR 21 Apr 2019

Saturday during the “Opening Statement” segment of “Justice” on the Fox News Channel, host Jeanine Pirro criticized Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller for including the statement that his report did not exonerate President Donald Trump of obstructing justice. Instead, it stated that there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed charges.


Pirro said such a statement should not have been included and she called it a show of “political whoremanship” because she viewed as an effort to pave the way for Congress to proceed with investigations.

“They will seize upon the language that you cannot indict a sitting president, which is simply the law,” Pirro said. “Yet Mueller comes out and says he cannot exonerate the president of obstruction. There was not sufficient evidence to bring a charge. If there’s not sufficient evidence to bring a charge, that should have been the end of it.”

“But no,” she continued. “In a show of political whoremanship – that’s what I said, political whoremanship – Mueller left crumbs for Congress. He added he couldn’t exonerate Trump to give the Democrats something to work with. Now, we’re about to get 18 more months of this.”


Pirro went on to play a clip of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) vowing not to give up until President Donald Trump was impeached.
 
APRIL 21, 2019
ObamaCare robs Medicare
By Chriss Street
A new Rand study found that with ObamaCare robbing Medicare of $716 billion, payments to primary care doctors plunged to just 3.5 percent of total program spending.

Despite funding of primary care doctors being “associated with higher quality, better outcomes, and lower costs,” the Rand Corporation was concerned that ObamaCare delivery system reforms “devoted to primary care have not been estimated nationally."

Congressional Budget Office estimated after ObamaCare passed in 2010 that over a 10-year period beginning in 2013, the law would take $716 billion from Medicare to subsidize ObamaCare exchange premiums and its broad expansion of Medicaid.

Pres. Obama falsely claimed that under the new law, “If you like your doctor, you can keep you doctor.” But primary care doctors filing Center for Medicare Services affidavits to “opt-out” of the program hit triple digits for the first time in 2010, with 130 leaving. The number spiked to over 1,600 in 2013; more than doubled to over 3,500 in 2015; and more than doubled again to 7,400 in 2016, according to data released by the CMS.

Rand Corporation’s analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine Journalreviewed 16 million Medicare primary care office visits across the United States. Rand concluded:

“Depending on whether narrow or expansive definitions of primary care are used, primary care spending represents 2.12% to 4.88% of total medical and prescription spending by Parts A, B and D of the Medicare program.”

210661_5_.png
Lead investigator Dr. Rachel O. Reid commented that although there has been no consensus about the optimal share of medical spending that should be devoted to primary care, the current spending percentage is substantially below prior estimates.

The most clever “bait and switch aspect of ObamaCare was giving Medicare Primary care doctors a 10% percent annual “bonus” in the four years from 2011 to 2015. ObamaCare also raised Medicaid Primary care reimbursement rates to the same level as Medicare for 2013 and 2014 to encourage supposedly accepting ObamaCare patients.

More in Home

the commercial insurance companies, such as WellPoint, that contracted with ObamaCare and Medicare Primary doctors for up to a 50 percent extra award for generating patient “nonvisits” by primary and specialty issues on the phone.

According to a report by the Massachusetts Medical Society’s ‘Recruiting Physicians Today,’ “physicians who have a lot of elderly Medicare patients may want to change their payer mix.” The report clearly suggested that by dumping or restricting new Medicare patient participation, Primary care doctors could dramatically expand compensation by contracting to accept ObamaCare “younger patients, who need fewer healthcare services than older patients.”

There are no good statistics regarding how many primary care doctors are dumping Medicare patients, but 21% of primary care doctors were no longer accepting new Medicare patients by 2015.

The CMS saw a sharp decrease in the number of providers opting out of Medicare in 2017, after several years where thousands indicated that they did not want to participate in the program.

The Trump administration has been moving aggressively to focus more Medicare reimbursement toward primary care. As a result, the number of doctor “opt-outs” slowed to 3,732 in 2017, according to the latest CMS data.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top