On Fast & Furious,

During Avila’s allocution, no mention was allowed to be made of Agent Terry’s death, or of Fast & Furious, or the two guns. Follow the linked Fronteras leads to other stories, which shows that Agent Terry’s family had sought to be listed as victims in the Avila 20 case, that petition denied by a Tucson Federal judge in Jan 2012, then accepted an informal deal with the new federal prosecutor to withdraw in Feb 2012. Their reasoning: “The request would have opened the possibility of turning the smuggling case into one against the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.”

If you throw the Department of Justice into the mix, that is precisely the point. They should be.

I’ll tell you why.
Found thanks to Codrea


Not Gunwalker, but also corrupt politicians:
In a response to the senators, shared with PJM, the Integrity Committee agreed to meet July 12 to review the allegations that Kendall failed to manage — and perhaps impeded — a full investigation of the White House and Salazar’s twisting of the findings of the National Academy of Engineers report into supposedly endorsing the moratorium.

Kendall, the senators noted in their request, was reportedly involved in the so-called 30-Day Report, “which erroneously indicated that independent peer review experts endorsed the Administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.” Then, Kendall conducted an oversight investigation of the report.
What? A IG being corrupt and screwing with the process? Why that's- um, kind of like the 'IG investigation' in Gunwalker, isn't it...


The Robert's Taxon


Systems behave the way that they are structured to behave. All have to work within the framework of what is possible, not what is desired. And so to Progressives who think that they're nicer people because their new system is now a'coming, remember who your "nice" new system is going to kill.

Because kill it must. There's no magic wand that will increase the number of doctors, there's no health care fairy who will keep lines from lengthening. There's no untapped pool of money to keep Senior's care from having to be raided for your different set of priorities. These people must die, because you want to spend that finite set of health care resources a different way.


The 7 Most Badass Founding Fathers. On Washington:
This is a guy who could settle an argument among a room full of the best and brightest men in the world with a simple declaration of how things should be. (At least 2 of those men had the hubris to rewrite the Bible the way they thought it should be, and all of them had risked hanging to establish a new form of government.)

And when you think of the contentious fights between those egos over who would be the succeeding presidents to Washington, the idea that he would be the not only unanimous — but obvious — choice of this group to lead them is just mind-boggling.

Without the rhetorical flourishes of a Henry or a Paine, Washington could enter a room full of possibly rebellious soldiers whose rightful pay was being withheld by the Congress and leave them weeping simply by the force of his character.

And last, but not least, nearly everything he did to establish how a president should act and lead (basically on the fly and by instinct) was naturally accepted as correct and proper by his peers, and established precedent for centuries.


Yes, he should be hurt for this