Does she deserve an orange jump suit?

As a First Amendment maximalist, I am inclined to reply an automatic "No" to my own headline — should journalists go to jail for spreading their seditious lies?

But a penalty of some kind, indeed a serious one, should certainly be levied for misinforming the public on the most important subject of our day, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years concerning the Russia probe.

And when these prevarications can be shown to have been deliberate, to have been done knowingly, difficult as that may be to prove, the line to sedition may have been crossed.

Thus there is an argument the reporters involved should face legal consequences.  Are they guilty of sedition? Decide for yourselves: read 18 U.S. Code § 2384. Seditious conspiracy.

In a recent New York Times  op-ed (5/01), fired FBI Director James Comey was back again preaching to the nation about the dangers of Donald Trump and his capacity to corrupt any top-ranking federal official of lower character than Comey’s own.

Comey seems to have become utterly unhinged by Donald Trump, especially when the president, in his Queens accent, scoffs in the vernacular—quite accurately, given the transgressions of the FBI hierarchy—about “crooked cops.”

What an affront to Comey’s complexity, his subtlety, his sophistication, his feigned Hamlet-like self-doubt—at least as now expressed in his latest incarnation as Twitter’s Kahlil Gibran.

One can say a number of things about the timing of Comey’s latest sermon and his characteristic projection of his own sins on to others.  Here they are.

The only thing uglier than an angry Washington is a fearful Washington. And fear is what’s driving this week’s blitzkrieg of Attorney General William Barr.

Mr. Barr tolerantly sat through hours of Democrat insults at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday (5/01). His reward for his patience was to be labeled, in the space of a news cycle, a lawbreaking, dishonest, obstructing hack.

Yet the attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light.

What do Democrats have to object to?  Some of this is frustration, some of this is personal, some of this is bitterness.  But most of it is fear.

They smeared him, called him a liar and said he should resign. The same Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who tried to assassinate the character of Judge Brett Kavanaugh last year pulled the same stunt on Bill Barr — with the same result.

They failed because, once again, they were throwing mud while shooting blanks.

Despite the Dems’ desperate efforts to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination with false accusations, he is now on the Supreme Court. Barr was obviously prepared for his mud bath and was unflappable in the face of Wednesday’s mean-spirited assault, proving himself to be a rock-solid attorney general.

As he said at his confirmation hearing, “I won’t be bullied,” and he wasn’t.  Now they’ve poked the tiger – very big mistake.

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report.

She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”

Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.

Psychologist might then conclude her projection means she’s very worried about the certainty of being indicted herself.

The Democrat Party is so unrecognizable today because it’s gone.  The name is still there.  Some of the old faces are there.

But the party of John Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Barbara Jordan and Zell Miller is dead.

Today’s Democrat Party is hollowed out by a chronic addiction to hyper-partisan controversies that only mimic the feeling of being alive.  Controversy gives Dems a constant drip of political dopamine they could never find in solving real problems. And they’re hooked now.

So, we’re witnessing a case of shared psychotic disorder that’s driving the party to self-medicate. Drug of choice? Donald Trump. Democrats are so impaired by their craving to “get Trump” that they imbibe day-in and day-out despite the deadly consequences to their party and to the country.

The Russian Navy – More Rust Than Ready

The Russian navy, the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), always a poor relation to the Russian Land Forces given geography and national traditions, has been contracting in size since 1985.

Now, as Izvestia announced last month, it is going to decline still further because of a decision by the Ministry of Defense to scrap two major surface vessels and four submarines rather than modernize these aging Soviet-era naval assets (Izvestia, April 18).

Defenders of this decision say these ships will be replaced by more capable vessels, but even they concede that the new craft are not going to join the fleet anytime soon.

All this has sparked a debate in Moscow about whether the Russian VMF is capable of supporting Moscow in the war that Vladimir Putin keeps saying is coming or even in more limited theaters. The overwhelming answer from independent experts is “No.”