A Few Thoughts on Recent Events
Last Week in Review
In no particular order, I have just a few observations on the past week.
College Athletics. I am not a fan of NIL (name, image, likeness) money and the transfer portal in college athletics. One of the reasons why I have long enjoyed collegiate sports is the loyalty athletes pledge to their team. Players who ‘bleed’ scarlet, or burgundy, or purple because they are true to their school.
Go watch pro sports if you want to see players hop from team to team. Consider that EJ Warner will quarterback for the Fresno State Bulldogs in the fall. This will be his third team in two years after having played for Temple Owls last year and Rice Owls this year. Couldn’t he at least be playing for Florida Atlantic in order to keep the Owls theme intact?
Apparently, there are other athletes that have played on at least four teams. Notre Dame played in the national championship game last week and appears to have the pieces in place to be in the national championship conversation next year. Yet, that didn’t stop three offensive linemen (including starters) from entering the transfer portal for other schools. I presume it is NIL money they are chasing.
Presidential Pardons. The flurry of executive clemency doled out by outgoing President Joe Biden and incoming President Donald Trump was dizzying. I wrote a book about presidential pardons that included the origin of official state forgiveness and highlighted some of the more controversial pardons in history. ‘Pardongate’ is available at Amazon and elsewhere.
I couldn’t have imagined anything would have topped Bill Clinton’s shameful pardons in the final year-and-a-half of his presidency. A shocking number were in return for support of Hillary’s political ambitions.
In the frenzied final hours of his presidency, Clinton was scribbling names on slips of paper for the pardon attorney to prepare clemency paperwork. In some cases, Clinton wrote vague names and there was no information on what crimes they committed or where they lived. In many cases, the recipients’ names were misspelled on their pardon certificates and the crimes they committed were not mentioned. The Justice Department didn’t even know where to mail the pardon certificates. It was a free-for-all. Here is how I addressed it in Pardongate:
Most of the attention regarding presidential pardons and commutations handed out by Clinton toward the end of his presidency was focused on the 176 he doled out literally in the dead of night only hours before George W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-third president. Forty-seven recipients, or nearly one in three, did not have a current application filed with the Department of Justice at the time Clinton pardoned them or issued commutations. Thirty recipients had not submitted a clemency application at all. Another fourteen had previously filed applications, but Clinton had denied clemency. Two more lucky recipients had filed applications with the Justice Department, but they were deemed ineligible because they did not meet the bare minimum requirement of having waited five years since their release from imprisonment. Inexplicably, they all received executive clemency from Clinton.
The process became so absurd during the final hours that the pardon attorney had to resort to conducting internet searches, looking for news stories of criminal involvement, to determine an applicant’s fitness for clemency.
(By the way, message me if you buy the book and I will send you an autographed bookplate.)
I was wrong about the Clinton pardons not being topped. Biden’s preemptive pardons for several members of his family, and a slew of public officials not being investigated of, let alone having been charged with, crimes is mind-numbing.
The Biden pardons underscore a couple of points. Apparently, Joe Biden absolutely believes he was the head of a crime family.
Those preemptive pardons imply criminal guilt. Here is one example. A pardon covering a decade for Anthony Fauci suggests criminal vulnerability over Fauci’s secret funding of gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence suggests Fauci got around prohibitions of NIH funding gain-of-function activities by giving money to a cut-out organization (EcoHealth Alliance), which then funneled money to the Chinese virus lab. According to reporting, the pseudo-money laundering scheme began in 2014, the same year Fauci’s pardon coverage begins.
NFL Playoffs. I am not a fan of the Buffalo Bills nor the Kansas City Chiefs. After watching the AFC championship game, I can understand why fans believe the game is rigged. There was no shortage of atrocious calls and they all went in the favor of the Chiefs. Only for the Chiefs would a ball that hits the turf be ruled a catch.
Professional sports leagues are not agnostic as to which teams play in their big games. Pro sports leagues have preference for specific teams due to financial considerations. The World Series dream match-up is the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees. It would invite a monster audience and would be an advertiser windfall. Major League Baseball would lose its mind over a Minnesota Twins-Milwaukee Brewers World Series. It would likely set a record-low audience.
Election Promises. President Trump is making good on his election promises. And he is doing so transparently and very publicly. Some of his actions may drive the final nail into Barack Obama’s promise to fundamentally change America (which continued during his third term when Biden was the titular head of the administration). On the eve of his 2008 election Obama said, “ We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Obama’s goal is something that has been soundly repudiated by the American voter. And Trump appears to be carrying out the will of the voters.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
Mark welcomes all news tips and story ideas in the strictest of confidence. You can reach him at markhyman.tv (at) gmail.com.