John T. Reed’s news blog

Last night, my wife and I went to see Beautiful, the Carole King Musical. Fantastic! We love these juke box musicals We also love and highly recommend two other similar such musicals: The Million-Dollar Quartet (which we saw in Chicago twice and Vegas once) and Jersey Boys (which we saw in Manhattan with the original cast).We saw Beautiful in San Francisco at the Orpheum Theater. The cast there was terrific, but that neighborhood really sucks. It is also playing in NYC, London, and Australia. And the group we saw is touring the U.S. The schedule is at http://beautifulonbroadway.com/tour/. Carole King...

Michelle says she lives in a house built by slaves. Not much. In 1948, Truman’s daughter’s piano leg punched a hole in the floor and ceiling of the room below. The White House was rotten to the core.The engineers wanted to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. Truman said to preserve the exterior shell as much as possible. The inside was totally gutted including all floors, ceilings, walls, stairways. It looked like the interior of a circus tent when it was gutted.They created a steel structure then tried to recreate the original rooms. within that steel structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_ReconstructionTruman spent...

During the primaries, I and others warned the parties that they were playing with convention fire when they tried to use various procedural games to deny Trump and Bernie the nomination. With the Republicans, it was “rules are rules” games where Cruz got the delegates Trump had won in some places. With Bernie, it was a sort of pervasive sense that there was no way he was getting the nomination, even if he somehow won the delegates.In the event, Trump gave Cruz a prime-time speech and seemed genuinely concerned about whether Cruz hated him. Then Cruz more or less unified...

Comey keeps saying he did not find the “necessary intent.” There is no necessary intent. What is necessary is intent OR gross negligence. Comey should be forced to explain what more Hillary needed to do for him to find gross negligence. The lead here is Comey did not recommend prosecution because he, a former prosecutor, and his fellow prosecutors, all by themselves, have decided that gross negligence is not enough. They have placed themselves above the Congress and president and the Constitution and given themselves the power to repeal the words “gross negligence” from the pertinent part of the U.S....

Comey’s logic is that clear violation of a statute is not enough. You must also have prior successful prosecutions under that part of that statute. If congress and a past president say gross negligence is against the law and a felony by enacting a law that says that, it’s not enough. There must also be successful previous prosecutions, or so Comey would have us believe. That begs the question of how a new law would ever get prosecuted. It also begs the question of whether prosecutors now have some sort of prosecutorial-nullification power. That is, they can repeal laws they...