[WSJ] In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public.
That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning‐that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation.
At issue is the FBI’s "origin story," in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe‐Crossfire Hurricane‐did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes.
This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian "government" connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info‐a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign.
The story is full of holes, and they are widening. No one has explained why two months passed between the Papadopoulos-Downer conversation and the July 31 probe. We’ve learned that it wasn’t Australian intelligence that passed along the info, but Mr. Downer personally, to State Department personnel in violation of procedure. And a growing list of Trump officials now relate moments when they were approached by suspicious figures before July 31.
That’s why congressional investigators have come to suspect the real origin story is very different. They believe the FBI was investigating Trump officials well before July 31, on the basis of the dossier and dubious information from State Department officials. They think the bureau was employing a variety of counterintelligence tools before there was an official counterintelligence probe‐and that this included deploying spies against political actors. They suspect that only when the FBI decided that it wanted to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Trump aide Carter Page (which requires an official investigation) did it surface the Downer information (collected back in May) and make it the official pretext in July.
This theory is at the heart of the standoff with the Justice Department, which focuses on FBI actions prior to July 31. I’m told that multiple senior congressional members have repeatedly asked Justice Department leadership to affirm that the department had provided Congress everything relevant with regard to the Trump investigation. The department has said yes. Yet investigators have credible evidence pointing to the use of FBI informants against the Trump campaign earlier than July 31, and last week’s resolution requires the department to answer whether that is true, and if so, on what basis they were used.
The FBI and its media allies have waged a ceaseless campaign to lower the bar on what counts as appropriate. We are told it is OK that the government opened a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign. OK that it obtained a warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen. OK that it based that warrant on an unverified dossier from the Democratic campaign, and then hid that true origin from the FISA court. OK that it paid a spy to target domestic political actors.
It’s not OK. Not so long ago, the FBI would have quailed at the idea of running an informant into any U.S. political operation‐even into, say, a congressman under criminal investigation for bribery or corruption. These are the most sensitive of lines. But Mr. Trump’s opponents, in government and media, have a boundless capacity to justify any measures against the president.
If it turns out that the Justice Department and FBI lied about how and when this all started, that is scandalous. Worse if it comes out that senior officials lied to Congress about whether they had complied with its demands for information. And once again, it is a reason for Mr. Trump to step in and declassify everything. Emphasis added.
#3
If Congress holds these people in contempt, that is all the excuse Trump needs to terminate their employment.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/06/2018 11:19 Comments ||
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#4
Trump should send federal marshals over to seize everything and arrest anyone resisting. Maybe it's time to drop the FBI and hand it all back over to the Marshal service.
As for the CIA, it should be quietly shot in the head and the OSS brought back under it's original rules.
[Townhall] The late Charles Krauthammer was right about the rules of good writing. The use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin.
To get a sense of how bad someone's writing is count the number of times he or she deploys the Imperial "I" on the page. Krauthammer considered a single "I" in a piece to be a failure.
Use "I" when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer herself has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. (The story itself, naturally, should have relevance.) The second is my excuse here.
As a legal immigrant to the U.S., now an American citizen, I have a right to insert myself into the noisy narrative.
As a legal immigrant who was separated from her daughter, herself a legal immigrant, the onus is on me to share a scurrilous story that is part of a pattern:
America's immigration policy‐driven as it is by policy makers and enforces‐exalts and privileges those of low moral character. It rewards law-breakers, giving them the courtesy and consideration not given to high-value, legal immigrants.
The same U.S. immigration law enforcers who cater so kindly to each illegal immigrant‐the kind that is a drain on the country and has no right to be in the country‐stripped my daughter of her American permanent residency privileges.
#1
DUI with kids in the car: separated.
In the bar, kids in the hot car: separated.
Rob a 7-11, kid in a backpack: separated.
Breach the border of a sovereign country with kid in tow: separated.
[Wash Times] Buenos Aires ‐ When Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega first took power in mid-1979, his admirers included a 17-year-old Caracas high school dropout who celebrated a "newly lit light" in Latin America as he maneuvered his bus around Venezuela’s hilly capital.
Nearly four decades down the road, the driver, Nicolas Maduro, clings to power as his country’s embattled president, and it seems to be the increasingly unpopular Mr. Ortega who is taking cues from his Venezuelan counterpart as he tries to hold on to power.
It has been a stunning comedown for Mr. Ortega, who led the anti-U.S. Sandinista movement in the Reagan era and seemed so secure in power two years ago that he engineered the election of his wife as vice president in a landslide electoral win.
All that has changed since an outbreak of popular discontent in April. It is so severe that some warn of a coup and others fear the country could face another civil war.
Faced with nationwide protests ‐ initially over a pension reform but rapidly expanding against his autocratic rule overall ‐ Mr. Ortega has led a violent clampdown, with security forces and paramilitary forces killing an estimated 297 demonstrators in less than three months. That number exceeds the deaths from political protests in Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela in the same period.
[Townhall] One fact a lot of Americans forget is that our country is located right up against a socialist failed state that is promising to descend even further into chaos ‐ not California, the other one. And the Mexicans, having reached the bottom of the hole they have dug for themselves, just chose to keep digging by electing a new leftist presidente who wants to surrender to the cartels and who thinks that Mexicans have some sort of hitherto unknown "human right" to sneak into the United States and demographically reconquer it. There’s a Spanish phrase that describes his ideology, and one of the words is toro.
Mexico is already a failed state, crippled by a poisoned, stratified culture and a corrupt government that have somehow managed to turn a nation so blessed with resources and hardworking people into such a basket case that millions of its citizens see their best option as putting themselves in the hands of gangsters to cross a burning desert to get cut-rate jobs in el Norte. It is a country dominated by bloody drug/human trafficking cartels that like to circulate videos of their members carving up living people. They hang mutilated corpses from overpasses and hijack busloads of citizens to rape and slaughter for fun. Whole police agencies are owned by the cartels. Political candidates live in fear of murder. The people are scared. And this chaos will inevitably grow and spread north.
...The chaos in Mexico will spill over the theoretical border. It is just a matter of time. Normal Americans know it. As my book upcoming book Militant Normals explains, the establishment willfully ignoring their legitimate concerns about border security is a big part of why Normals are getting militant. The Democrats, and the GOP donor class stooges, have a vested interest in ignoring the issue, and they will insure that both the political class and the hack media will continue to play ostrich. Already there are Americans, on American soil, living near the border who cannot venture outside at night on their own property for fear of being murdered because of foreigners invading out territory. This is intolerable for any sovereign country. Yet there is a huge liberal constituency, abetted by GOPe fellow travelers, not merely willing to tolerate the invasion but who actively want to increase the flow.
...When the 125-million-man criminal conspiracy that is Mexico falls apart completely, as it will, we are going to have to deal with the consequences. Watch the flood of illegals become a tsunami, a real refugee crisis instead of today’s fake one. Watch the criminal gangs and pathologies of the Third World socialist culture they bring along turn our country into Mexico II: Gringo Boogaloo. And importing a huge mass of foreigners, loyal to a foreign country and potentially susceptible to the reconquista de Aztlan rhetoric of leftists, both among them and among our treacherous liberal elite, would create a cauldron for brewing up violent civil upheaval right here at home. Kinda like Israel's situation with "Palestine"
So, what do we do? We defend ourselves, obviously. But how?
#7
Another Fast and Furious might be appropriate if the guns go to the right people, if there are any right people down there. But, yeah, build the damn wall ASAP.
If we're not gonna build the wall then put the Army down there with orders to shoot anyone who steps across the line.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/06/2018 11:30 Comments ||
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#8
Just line the border with our radioactive waste, then put up signs saying "If you cross this fence you will die."
[Zillow Research] The economic recovery produced a sharp rise in home prices from 2010 to 2016, and a simultaneous drop in the birth rate. The trends might be related (which is not to say causal), especially for women in their late 20s: Birth rates fell the most in counties where home values grew the most, and birth rates fell less and sometimes even increased in counties with smaller home price increases.
Economic Recovery, But No Baby Recovery
The U.S. baby bust started at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, when the total fertility rate began falling. It dropped from a high of 2.12 per woman in 2007 to 1.93 by 2010.
Most observers expected that fertility would rebound as the economy recovered, but instead the fertility rate has continued falling. In 2016, the most recent year with detailed birth records, the total fertility rate was down to 1.82, and preliminary data show it dropped to 1.76 in 2017.
#4
You understand that there's a delay built in the production of humans that is not in most other 'products'. Posted by Procopius2k
Exactly! Our current ponzi schemes simply cannot wait the 26 (+/-) years necessary for your helicopter sheltered prodigy to become productive. We have a BUSINESS to run !
#6
When the government guarantees sketchy loans and people don't have to put any money down for a mortgage, that is a green light for sellers to raise their prices.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/06/2018 11:34 Comments ||
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#7
In 2016, the most recent year with detailed birth records,
Back when all the predictions were that Hillary Clinton would be elected, continuing President Obama’s policies. I suspect the birthrate will show unexpected improvement, following the unexpectedly improved employment rate.
#8
This is as it always has been about the survival of the fittest. When all is about me and my comfort there is little room for commitment to something greater than one's self.
[BBC] US tariffs on $34bn (£25.7bn) of Chinese goods have come into effect, signalling the start of a trade war between the world's two largest economies.
The 25% levy came into effect at midnight Washington time.
China has retaliated by imposing a similar 25% tariff on 545 US products, also worth a total of $34bn.
Beijing accused the US of starting the "largest trade war in economic history".
"After the US activated its tariff measures against China, China's measures against the US took effect immediately," said Lu Kang, a foreign ministry spokesman.
Two companies in Shanghai told the BBC that customs authorities were delaying clearance processes for US imports on Friday.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers likely maintained a brisk pace of hiring in June while increasing wages for workers, which would reinforce expectations of robust economic growth in the second quarter and allow the Federal Reserve to continue raising interest rates.
Nonfarm payrolls probably increased by 195,000 jobs last month, adding to the 223,000 positions generated in May, according to a Reuters survey of economists. The economy needs to create roughly 100,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.
The Labor Department will publish its closely watched employment report on Friday at 0830 EDT (1230 GMT).
[CNBC] Germany exporting more than it imports is becoming a big problem for its economy, a director from the country’s closely-watched Ifo Institute said Wednesday.
"(The trade surplus) is turning out to be an increasing issue, not just with the U.S. but with other trade partners as well, and also within the European Union," Gabriel Felbermayr, the director of the Ifo Center for International Economics at the Munich-based institute, told CNBC’s "Squawk Box Europe."
"The surplus is becoming toxic, and also within Germany many argue now that we need to do something about it with the purpose of lowering it. It turns out to be a liability rather than an asset." Who changed this? Trump.
Germany’s export-orientated, manufacturing economy and its resulting trade surplus ‐ the value of its exports exceeding that of its imports ‐ has long been a subject of criticism and Berlin has been pressured to encourage more domestic spending and boost imports.
Trade surpluses are viewed as encouraging trade protectionism and worsening the economic problems of other countries. The Euro works as a cheat for German economy. The euro is way underpriced for Germany. They also receive massive subsidies in the form of free protection for their exports from the US Navy. Something we never get thanked for.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
07/06/2018 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[10 views]
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#1
And here they thought that fourth time is lucky.
#3
They failed their stress test, but the stockholders didn't care (cause they believe the American taxpayer will be stuck with the bill again in a failure).
[National Review] Prominent Democrats have decided that the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be abolished. We aren’t surprised the "Abolish ICE" slogan has caught on, given the party has been moving left on the immigration issue for years. And for now, "Abolish ICE" is nothing but rhetoric: Even the agency’s most strident opponents, perhaps wary of adopting a position too far outside the mainstream of public opinion, have been vague about what they would do after abolishing the agency. Hence Kirsten Gillibrand wants to abolish ICE, but also to "start over, reimagine it, and build something that actually works."
Nonetheless, the slogan is a useful shorthand for the Democratic position on internal immigration enforcement: as little as possible. Democrats have pointed to ICE’s newness ‐ it was created in 2003 ‐ as evidence that the agency is inessential. But internal enforcement happened before 2003; it was simply performed by Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11 prompted a reshuffling of the executive branch’s national-security apparatus. The wing of INS that handled green cards, citizenship, and work permits was reconstituted under U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, while the "enforcement" branch of INS was combined with certain customs operations to become ICE.
ICE is thus composed of two parts: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which enforces our immigration laws within the borders, identifies illegal aliens, and conducts deportations; and Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts investigations into smuggling, human trafficking, and assorted criminal activity. Because this investigative wing of ICE is also responsible for conducting worksite enforcement ‐ taking action against employers who hire and profit off of unauthorized workers ‐ it may be that ICE’s structure could be improved: The agency’s enforcement-and-removal wing may be better suited to enforcing the law against these businesses than is the investigative wing.
But of course this isn’t what "abolish ICE" is about. The Democratic party already has coalesced around the policy that only illegal immigrants who are convicted felons should be deported; internal enforcement against non-felons would then be unnecessary. We suspect it is the enforcement of our immigration laws itself that the Left objects to. A significant chunk of illegal immigrants are people who overstayed their visas. Abolishing our internal-enforcement agency would mean that these immigrants were de facto free to stay in the country so long as they did not commit a felony. And though ICE does not police the border, illegal border-crossing would be incentivized in a world without internal enforcement, as those who managed to make it into the country would not be subject to deportation. Without ICE, the U.S. would have an immigration system with mostly meaningless limits.
We would be happy to discuss ways to reform ICE and make it a more effective tool of internal enforcement. That is not the conversation Democrats want to have. "Abolish ICE" is at once an empty rhetorical flourish, a poorly conceived policy, and a sign of how much the Democrats have radicalized on immigration.
#1
Anyone who wants to abolish ICE should take a trip to Mexico - not Cancun or Cabo San Lucas - but to the real Mexico. Drive across the border at San Diego or El Paso, if you don't mind a little risk taking. Check it out. The dirt, the shacks, the poverty. If you want America to look like that then go ahead, abolish ICE.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
07/06/2018 11:47 Comments ||
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#2
empty rhetorical flourish, a poorly conceived policy
Sounds like Notional Review talking about themselves
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/06/2018 13:54 Comments ||
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#3
Change it's name back to INS and declare ICE abolished.
End of story.
[Free Beacon] The victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over longtime Democratic congressman Joe Crowley of New York inspired some hysterical punditry. We were told that the 28,000 people that voted in a district of more than 600,000 had decided the fate of the political universe. Ocasio-Cortez, in this telling, heralds the coming of Democratic Socialist, multiracial, female-dominated America.
The 28-year-old bartender and community activist is the Democrat of the future‐according to no less an authority than the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And in a polarized media climate, with hyperbolic insinuations of "civil war" and calls for the harassment of political opponents, one is tempted to believe that romanticism and extremism grow ever stronger.
I remain skeptical. For one thing, New York politics is sort of the equivalent of the Las Vegas party scene‐what happens there tends to stay there. Crowley was boring and out-of-touch; Ocasio-Cortez is appealing and a tireless campaigner. Her picture of democratic socialism is all rainbows and unicorns, platitudes and aspirations. And the numbers involved in the primary were so small that randomness has to have played some part in her 4,000-vote win. Ocasio-Cortez is neither a threat to America nor to the American right. But she is representative of the transformation of the American left.
The only civil war happening at the moment is within the Democratic Party. The old-guard corporatists are under attack from activists with radical goals and immoderate tempers. You can trace a line from Occupy Wall Street in 2011 through Black Lives Matter in 2013 through Bernie Sanders in 2016 through the Women's March a year later, Tom Steyer and Maxine Waters's impeachment campaigns, the growing prominence of Democratic Socialists of America, and the movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement today.
[American Thinker] Catholics are the sole remaining religious group that it is politically correct to slander and denigrate and the consideration of nominees for the Supreme Court vacancy left by the retiring Anthony Kennedy has brought out the liberal anti-Catholic bigots en masse. Their target is Justice Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
Just as John F. Kennedy was said by some to be a stalking horse for the Vatican who would clear each major decision with the Pope, Barrett a practicing Catholic who actually gets it right, has been charged with embracing Catholic dogma so tightly that there is no room left for the Constitution and those "emanations from a penumbra" that sanctified Roe V. Wade. Catholic League President Bill Donahue addressed the issue on "The Ingraham Angle" on Fox:
#7
Play their game of conflating illegals with legal immigration. By November, make it the Donk war on Christians. They think they have a problem now with shifts in the Black community, sell that one and they're toast.
[The Weakly Standard] His relationship with James Comey could present problems.
Robert Mueller received a limited vindication last week when U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled the special counsel’s Virginia prosecution of Paul Manafort can proceed. Vindication, because Manafort’s legal team had hoped the judge would declare that Mueller’s enterprise had sprawled outside its legal mandate. Limited, because Judge Ellis denounced the prosecutors’ tactics as "distasteful" and cautioned "those involved" to be "sensitive to the danger unleashed when political disagreements are transformed into partisan prosecutions."
The challenge in Judge Ellis’s courtroom is hardly the only question of legal legitimacy facing the special prosecutor. There are regulations governing what federal prosecutors are to do if they suspect there is even the possibility they have a conflict of interest. Those regulations may be interpreted as requiring Mueller to step aside.
No doubt, some challenges to the legitimacy of an investigation can be seen as shameless efforts to derail justice. I surmised, back in January, that the special prosecutor’s investigation into Trump might turn into a sort of O.J. Trial in which the sloppiness and mistakes of investigators would make possible a cynical defense based on an imagined conspiracy. I had no idea that the Justice Department’s inspector general would eventually document extensive evidence of actual bias by the lead investigator. FBI agent Peter Strzok "clearly shows a biased state of mind," the IG testified. It is as if Mark Fuhrman had been on tape, not just using the n-word, but explicitly saying he was out to get Simpson. It may not have changed the question of Simpson’s guilt, but it would have changed, dramatically, how people viewed his acquittal.
#4
The Mueller witch hunt has been tainted from the beginning. The DOJ IG report and hearings indicated that the FBI investigators sere biased even before the Mueller SC was formed.
#5
Miller doesn't have a conflict of interest, rather, he is an enemy of the constitution and therefore the nation. So if you recognize him as a warrior of an enemy creed you can't use words like conflict of interest as he is no agent of the constitution.
[Right Scoop] Of course all the liberals are trying to destroy Amy Barrett just because she’s not a mindless liberal drone. But if you actually care about rational decisions out of the Supreme Court, this statement from her about the role of the court is pretty amazing.
Watch below:
Yeah anyone who can make a literary allusion to the Odyssey in order to explain conservative Supreme Court jurisprudence has utterly captured my heart. GO BARRETT!!
Trump’s List
INTELLECTUALISM, INTELLIGENCE, JUSTICE, LAW, THE COURTS
Amy Coney Barrett: How can one fail to be impressed by this 46-year-old mother of seven, former Notre Dame law professor and clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia?
Speaking on Fox News (7/5), constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, certainly an intellect, intimated to Jason Chaffetz that none of the justices on Trump’s list quite matches Neil Gorsuch for intellect. Turley sagely advised that the president “choose intellect, not optics.”
As Micky Kaus grumbles, the Federalist Society vets for Roe v. Wade. But do they vet for Flores? Making sure Trump doesn’t pick a Bushesque act-of-love justice seems like Job #1 for border controllers right now.
Ted Cruz and Rand Paul support Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), for reasons they don’t specify. They say he has fine principles. Well, what are Lee’s principles?
Principle is important. So is intellect.
This Washington Post item is crammed with grammatical mistakes. Mismatched subject and verbs, for example. Disgraceful. But here is, “Trump narrows list for Supreme Court pick, with focus on Kavanaugh and Kethledge.”
#12
I would love to see Judge Barrett appointed and confirmed. At last we would have a good looking female justice. I mean, tody, we have Kagan, Sotomayor, and (ugh) Ginsburg.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
07/06/2018 9:13 Comments ||
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#13
I hate to be sexist (!), but there are enough broads women on the SC already.
In baseball, a cleanup hitter is the fourth hitter in the lineup. They are the ones with the most power in the team and their most important job is to bring runs in, the cleanup hitter “cleans up the bases” meaning that if there are runners on the bases the cleanup hitter scores them in ergo the name.
#16
The theory is the 1, 2, and 3 hitters are the best hitters on the team. Even if they become outs, they are to make the pitcher work for the outs which both fatigues the pitcher and allows the batters to see the pitches and performance; is the fast ball locating, how much break on the curve ball, so forth.
[PJ] Maxine Waters has never been the mildest and most judicious of politicians, but there is a method to her current (extreme) madness. She does have something to be afraid of. Identity politics - her bread and butter - is, for the first time in years, in some trouble.
This is particularly true in the black community where Donald Trump's approval level is climbing. And the reason for this isn't all Kanye West. African Americans have the lowest unemployment rate ever under Trump and are beginning to have more cash and better lives.
This is not good for Maxine and she knows it. No more fancy house in Hancock Park. She might have to go back and live with her constituents in South Central. Hell, she might even be voted out. Hence, the acting out.
#5
Hey, wait... You mean the policies championed for decades by people like me result in better lives for blacks? After less than two years of implementation? And compared to WORSE lives after eight years of the "enlightened" Obama?
All my adult life I've been called "racist" for wanting things that are making the lives of people of other races better... When will I hear the apologies?
(Yeah, I know. Now the definition of "racist" has been changed to "doesn't think the US is responsible for caring for all the world's poor".)
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/06/2018 8:39 Comments ||
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#6
"Identity politics" has always been in the Dem playbook. Divide and conquer. Maybe Kanye W. should run for her seat.
#8
Maxine is purposely drawing attention away from Obama and his huge full time DC staff of stalkers, agitators, and establishment handlers.
Just before the chaotic public harrasment began NYT puts out a smoke screen story that he was out of the scene and every one bought it. That allowed them to GO with harrasing staffers and thier families. Maxine then kicks her mouth into gear as a diversion to protect something America has never seen a former president do to a sitting president.
Obama and his staff ïs also running the entire Mueller sham investigation.
[Townhall] Yesterday, on MSNBC, host Nicolle Wallace had historian and writer Jon Meacham, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and others on the panel to discuss the Trump White House because the network isn’t doing its job if it isn’t making liberals feel better about themselves. It was the typical Trump criticism, though Meacham is not one to go on insane tirades. He did think that Trump is an unstable and unreliable actor, and that the reason why the markets have not reacted to such volatility is that the "401(k) Trumpists" are sticking with him. They see their portfolios going up, so why change horses. He also said that explains why Trump’s approval rating hovers in the mid-40s‐and stays there.
Meacham then added that Watergate didn’t engulf Nixon until the economy started to tank. This perked the attention of Wallace who joins the ranks of Bill Maher and other liberals who are hoping for America to fail to torpedo the Trump White House.
#5
I could boycott their advertisers, if I knew who they were. Never watched MSNBC and can't remember the last time I watched NBC. Might watch an hour of CBS per week...
[Breitbart] Lonnie Walker IV, the recently selected 1st round pick of the San Antonio Spurs, took to Twitter on Independence Day, to say that he "will never celebrate 4th of July."
The tweet read, "Will never celebrate 4th of July. Know your history!! and stay woke."
Reaction to Walker’s tweet came in quickly. FS1’s Jason Whitlock blamed social media for Walker’s ignorance:
#2
It's as if all the idiots in America have suddenly decided en masse they need to convince us that they are even bigger idiots than we might have expected.
#9
Lonnie Walker IV, the recently selected 1st round pick of the San Antonio Spurs, took to Twitter on Independence Day, to say that he "will never celebrate 4th of July.
...Whatever, bub. More hamburgers and hot dogs for the rest of us.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
07/06/2018 8:03 Comments ||
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#10
Amazing how none of them immigrate to a more perfect society (but tens of millions of illegals do).
[National Review] There’s no better explanation for the current progressive meltdown.
Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged protesters to hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations, or department stores.
Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant, or buffoon. Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.
What is behind the unprecedented furor?
Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, neither is Trump. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States. Trump pledged to do the same and more ‐ but in the exact opposite direction.
The Trump agenda enrages the Left in much the same manner that Obamacare, the Obama tax hikes, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks, and the Iran nuclear deal goaded the Right.
Yet the current progressive meltdown is about more than just political differences. The outrage is mostly about power ‐ or rather, the utter and unexpected loss of it.
In 2009, Obama seemed to usher in a progressive revolution for a generation.
Democrats controlled the House. They had a supermajority in the Senate. Obama had a chance to ensure a liberal majority on the Supreme Court for years.
#1
Well, if you (secretly) know that you're second rate and hold a position way above your abilities, you can't feel safe unless you have absolute control.
#3
BLUF - Voters in 2016 bristled at redistribution, open borders, bigger government, and higher taxes, but progressives are now promising those voters even more of what they didn’t want.
Furious over the sudden and unexpected loss of power, enraged progressives have so far done almost everything to lose even more of it.
That's how you get More Trump. Dr. Hanson didn't say it; he didn't need to.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/06/2018 9:57 Comments ||
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#4
I believe the left has always had less support for their opinions than anyone perceived. A lot of folks vote Democrat because their grandfather did, that sort of thing can't be counted on now.
#5
The left's ideas have not had support at any time in my life -- they just lie about them until they sue a federal agency into implementing them, and a judge (carefully picked) to rubber-stamp them.
They had control of most media until the "fairness doctrine" was removed, and they HATED the existence of alternate voices. Now they hate the alternate voices in the internet, and are desperate to shut them down as well.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
07/06/2018 10:43 Comments ||
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[DAWN] THE normalisation of the religious far right and the myrmidon right in national politics ought to be of great concern to all right-thinking and democratic citizens of Pakistain. It is not clear if a so-called policy of mainstreaming of myrmidon groups is being surreptitiously foisted on a largely unsuspecting electorate or if the religious far right and myrmidon groups have themselves identified a political opening of a lifetime. What is apparent, however, is that the 2018 general election will likely witness a historic participation of radical and fringe religious groups, some explicitly militarised and others less so. In terms of candidates fielded, the eventual votes polled and the number of seats won, the 2018 election may rival or perhaps far outstrip the 2002 general election outcome, which saw the rise of the MMA. But the MMA comprised largely of mainstream religious parties with electoral and parliamentary track records. The recent rise of a disparate group of ultra-right and myrmidon electoral contenders and their supporters is surely without precedent.
How has this happened? The sudden political rise of the Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistain; the rebranding of the Moslem Milli League, which failed to convince civilian institutions that the party ought to be registered with the ECP; and the sudden removal of legal impediments for candidates affiliated with the ASWJ are of particular concern. Certainly, the right of individuals to participate in an election, as candidates or voters, must not be limited or infringed upon unless there is a compelling legal reason or judicial verdict declaring otherwise. At the very least, however, all candidates should be required to renounce violence and pledge their support for a democratic, constitutional form of government. But the rhetoric of the far right can often be considered hate speech, an incitement to violence and an attempt to spread sectarian discord. When it comes to groups with an external myrmidon orientation, participation in the general election could leave Pakistain on the wrong side of international law and a global consensus against militancy.
Yet, while some mainstream political parties have been subjected to exceptional scrutiny and several mainstream politicians have struggled to get their names on a ballot paper, the new ultra-right religious crop has faced virtually no public scrutiny. Perhaps more astonishing, for example, than the TLP’s ability to field 150 candidates for the National Assembly across the country is that none of those candidates appears to have encountered any resistance during the nomination process overseen by the ECP. Meanwhile, ...back at the wreckage, Captain Poindexter awoke groggily, his hand still stuck in the Ming vase... the Allah-o-Akbar Tehrik, the latest incarnation of the LeT’s political wing, has managed to field 50 MNA candidates in Punjab 1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots.... and KP ‐ again with virtually no known scrutiny. The contentious issue of mainstreaming and the myriad policy and legal questions it raises cannot simply be brushed away. The democratic system may not survive such ill-thought-out tampering and interference.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/06/2018 00:00 ||
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[Jpost] On Monday, seven former US ambassadors to the UN sent a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisting that the administration restore full funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that funds so-called Palestinian refugees.
Since UNRWA was established in 1949, the US has given nearly $5 billion to the agency tasked with perpetuating refugee status among descendants of Arabs who left Israel in the 1948-1949 pan-Arab invasion.
In January, then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson informed the UN that the US was slashing its assistance to UNRWA by 50%, from $260 million to $130 million.
At the time, citing UNRWA’s support for terrorism and economic corruption, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley recommended ending US financial assistance for the agency outright.
The issue of UNRWA, and the US’s involvement with the group, hasn’t received much attention in the intervening months. But now that the former ambassadors have brought it up, it is worth taking a second look at UNRWA and considering whether they are right, and what their bipartisan position tells us about the bipartisan consensus that controlled US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians until President Donald Trump took office.
UNRWA and its supporters present the agency as an organization dedicated to supporting Palestinian refugees. But this is a lie.
UNRWA is a political warfare organization that deliberately perpetuates the misery of innocent people.
...UNRWA’s distinctively non-humanitarian purpose is baked in. Refugees worldwide are helped by the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR targets its services to real refugees ‐ people who meet the definition of the Refugee Convention of having lost their state home due to persecution. UNRWA targets its services to people of Palestinian descent it calls "refugees" for political reasons; fewer than 1% of the UNRWA refugees would actually meet the Refugee Convention definition.
UNHCR finds refugees and gives them help; UNRWA finds people who need help and makes them refugees.
The UNHCR is responsible for helping refugees find asylum and settle in another country. Today it cares for nearly 66 million refugees worldwide. It has one staffer for every 6,000 refugees.
UNRWA, in contrast, is responsible for preventing Palestinian refugees from gaining asylum or resettling anywhere. It is responsible for 5.2 million refugees and has one staffer for every 186 refugees.
Over the past 70 years, UNHCR has permanently resettled tens of millions of refugees. It found permanent homes for 189,300 refugees in 2016 alone.
UNRWA has resettled no refugees in its 69-year history.
It is now responsible for the fifth generation of descendants of the Arabs who left Israel in 1948-49.
Every dollar the US transfers to UNRWA is a dollar used to perpetuate this misery. And it is arguably a dollar spent in breach of US law. According to the US Law on Derivative Refugee Status, spouses and children of refugees can apply for derivative status as refugees. Grandchildren are explicitly ineligible for that status. But by funding UNRWA, the US funds an agency that has required the perpetuation of refugee status of the Arab refugees from 1948-49 for five generations.
...For years, then-US senator from Illinois Mark Kirk tried to compel the State Department to reveal how many Palestinian refugees actually left Israel during the pan-Arab invasion. Due to his efforts, in 2013, the Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved an amendment to the annual State Department foreign operations appropriations bill requiring the State Department to report how many of the 5 .2 million Palestinians on UNRWA’s rolls were actual refugees.
Rather than reveal the number, which is estimated to stand at 20,000, or 1% of the number UNRWA claims, the State Department classified the figure in 2015. It still refuses to release it.
#1
Every dollar the US transfers to UNRWA is a dollar used to perpetuate this misery.
In strict compliance with the United Nation's 'global misery' business model. Without conflict, suffering and misery, there would be no need for a United Nations.
#2
Former UN ambassadors Thomas Pickering and Edward Perkins, who served under president George H.W. Bush; Madeline Albright and Bill Richardson, who served under president Bill Clinton; John Negroponte, who served under George W. Bush; and Samantha Power and Susan Rice who served under President Barack Obama,
#3
Pickering and Negroponte made their bones in the Law of the Sea struggles that involved the State Department in the nineteen seventies. Active and intelligent young Foreign Service officers, over the years their vision has been clouded as they moved closer to the center of power in Washington. Now they are old and suffer from cataracts.
#4
...You know, given the current leadership in DC and our representation at the UN, this is easy: Not one more damned dime until UNRWA turns over accurate, realistic numbers. I suspect Ambassador Haley would relish delivering that message.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
07/06/2018 8:09 Comments ||
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#6
What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to drive them before you, and to read their womanly letters of lamentation.
Pickering and Negroponte made their bones in the Law of the Sea struggles
If memory serves, the Convention on the Law of the Sea was a global freakout over the the cover story for the Glomar Explorer attempting to raise a Russian sub. World + Dog went nutso thinking the evil Americans going to hoover up all the manganese nodules off the entire seafloor, but all we really wanted was one teensy ballistic missile sub.
[National Review] Judge Raymond Kethledge is a committed originalist and textualist, which means he shows no favoritism to either side in any case, and instead applies the law as it is written. Judge Kethledge uses this sound approach to judging ‐ the same approach used by Justices Antonin Scalia and Neil Gorsuch ‐ in every case that comes before him. Judge Kethledge has also criticized judicial activism, which is when judges insert their own policy views into their decisions rather than applying our laws and Constitution as they were written and understood at the time they were enacted.
Importantly, when faced with questions involving immigration law, Judge Kethledge takes the same approach he takes in every other case ‐ he faithfully interprets and applies the laws as written and adopted by the politically accountable branches. And if those laws are not as stringent as some may prefer, it speaks to the need to address the laws themselves ‐ a need that must be addressed by the legislative and executive branches, not the judiciary.
Judge Kethledge has adjudicated nearly 120 immigration cases during his decade on the Sixth Circuit. In every one, Judge Kethledge applied the same rigorous textualism he applies in every case that requires statutory interpretation. And that approach required him to affirm the Board of Immigration Appeals in 97 percent of those cases.
h/t Instapundit
[National Review] It appears to have been the Supreme Court of the United States, the most unremitting and inscrutable center of government, that has been a deus ex machina in clarifying issues for the American voters in the run-up to the midterm elections. It is almost a mnemonic feat now to recall 17 months ago when Senator Chuck Schumer was weeping on the Senate floor, in emulation, he said, of the Statue of Liberty, over President Trump’s proposed curtailment of the rights of entry into America from a number of terrorism-plagued or sponsoring states. We dimly remember the immense demonstrations, the lectures from the most gaseous Hollywood air-heads, the interdiction by relatively peaceful mobs of demonstrators at major airports, as the Democrats got overreaching leftist federal district judges to strut their moment of national fame and presume to wrench control of immigration from the president, to whom the Constitution assigns it. President Trump sensibly resisted the temptation to ignore the federal district judges, imposed his policy with modifications, and was upheld last week by the Supreme Court. (Justice Clarence Thomas rightly implied in his judgment that the district courts have to be put in their place.)
As it cleared the docket for its extended summer recess, the Supremes also decided that religiously based pregnancy counseling centers will not have to emphasize the speed and convenience of abortions by Planned Parenthood. This is the beginning of the lifting of the jack-booted official foot from the windpipe of anyone who believes in any version of the God whom the Deist Jefferson believed created us all (equal). The high court completed the trifecta by affirming the right of public-sector employees who do not join the union not to have dues deducted from their pay anyway. All that is holding the discarded skeleton of organized labor together is the public-service unions and the craven predilection of governments to surrender to them. They should all be decertified, led to extinction by the teachers’ unions that have reduced much of the state education systems to unruly day-care centers.
The Supreme Court capped its action-packed week with the announced retirement of unpredictable swing judge Anthony Kennedy after 30 years. (He was appointed after the great Robert Bork was virtually assassinated by Teddy Kennedy, and by Joe Biden.) It is shocking that four justices apparently agreed that foreigners had a prima facie right to enter the U.S., and the presidency surrendered its constitutional rights by this president’s ambiguous comments about criteria for entry into the United States. After such a battering by the finely balanced court, it is small wonder that the next vacancy in the court became an instant call to arms (literally).
The Democratic hot-air balloon about separating illegally entering children from their parents was still hissing furiously when the Supreme Court spoke. The president’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was evicted, ex officio, from a Virginia restaurant that appeared to be named after its bellicose owner (The Red Hen), as she then stormed across the street and demanded a competitor not serve Mrs. Sanders either. Maxine Waters, the egregious and inexplicably prosperous African-American foghorn of racist demagogy for decades from the Great Arsenal of Political Stupidity, California, called on the Democratic faithful to harass Trump supporters in all circumstances. The Homeland Security secretary was heckled and derided unmercifully in a Washington restaurant as she tried to have her dinner, and protesters then gathered in front of her house and shouted obscenities (because her department is in charge of immigration).
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Wash Times] Buenos Aires ‐ When Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega first took power in mid-1979, his admirers included a 17-year-old Caracas high school dropout who celebrated a "newly lit light" in Latin America as he maneuvered his bus around Venezuela’s hilly capital.
[Townhall] One fact a lot of Americans forget is that our country is located right up against a socialist failed state that is promising to descend even further into chaos ‐ not California, the other one. And the Mexicans, having reached the bottom of the hole they have dug for themselves, just chose to keep digging by electing a new leftist presidente who wants to surrender to the cartels and who thinks that Mexicans have some sort of hitherto unknown "human right" to sneak into the United States and demographically reconquer it. There’s a Spanish phrase that describes his ideology, and one of the words is toro.
[Townhall] Yesterday, on MSNBC, host Nicolle Wallace had historian and writer Jon Meacham, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and others on the panel to discuss the Trump White House because the network isn’t doing its job if it isn’t making liberals feel better about themselves. It was the typical Trump criticism, though Meacham is not one to go on insane tirades. He did think that Trump is an unstable and unreliable actor, and that the reason why the markets have not reacted to such volatility is that the "401(k) Trumpists" are sticking with him. They see their portfolios going up, so why change horses. He also said that explains why Trump’s approval rating hovers in the mid-40s‐and stays there. 
