The enterprise highlighted by a timeline on FBI encounters with the Hunter Biden laptop

A 25 July 2022 letter from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray is making the rounds.  In it, the senator informs Garland and Wray that he has received information from “whistleblowers” about biased assessment and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and related probes in the fall of 2020.  The biased behavior allegedly came from Timothy Thibault, Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and FBI intelligence analyst Brian Auten.

The whistleblowers came forward in response to a May 2022 letter from Grassley asking for information on Thibault, in light of the special agent’s biased, partisan social media postings.  Grassley sent a letter on the same topic to the DOJ IG, also requesting information.

The timeline on the reported activities of Thibault and Auten is put in a very interesting light by juxtaposition with the known sequence of events surrounding the laptop.  A brief initial summary:

RNC commercials: Do they resonate with anyone?

RNC commercials are dumb because Republicans are awful.  That’s the basic thesis of Salon’s Alex Pareene.  He doesn’t think the standard-issue millennial mouthing GOP platitudes (see videos below) is all that bad, but he’s certain that the actual, no-kidding Republicans out there are snaggle-toothed gay-bashers and other Dead White European Males who hate Diversity, think Cuddly Puppies are something to shoot at, and wouldn’t know Millennial Chic if they found it dead in their ditty bag (except, of course, that Pareene himself would have no idea what a ditty bag is, and is darn proud of it).

So RNC commercials must be silly and/or deceptive or something.

Battleground Texas: Defending the vote

 

Image via Fort Bend Democrats (who, bless their hearts, love this display because it involved “recycling”).

The new video from James O’Keefe (see below) has gone viral in the last 72 hours.  It was the first big “get” for Breitbart Texas, and for good reason: it shows an operative from the Obama-affiliated Battleground Texas PAC apparently violating Texas law on voter registration.

Crisis of politics: The opportunity in the storm

Each day brings new bad news about Obamacare.  Each day also brings another volley from one or both sides in the War Between the Republicans.  (See here, here, here, and here, if you must.)

This is silly.

A recap, to begin.  The Tea Party and limited-government folks are right that we are at a great crisis point in the life of the republic.  The “moderate” or “establishment” conservatives are right that there is a limit to what can be done at the moment within the constraints of law.

But two things really need doing.

A house divided: The GOP dialogue continues

I wrote a few days ago about the current division in the Republican Party, which is as profound as I can remember seeing it in my lifetime.  The dialogue on this isn’t going to end any time soon.  There’s a sense in which we would be shortsighted to want it to.  Some observations.

1.  Rush Limbaugh is right about the Tea Party and other limited-government conservatives.  They have been galvanized by the recent fight, not abashed.  The sense about Ted Cruz among limited-government conservatives may be best expressed by Lincoln’s famous exclamation