[Wash Times] The Watergate scandal of 1972-74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.
In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985-87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the "Deep State" to subvert the law for political purposes.
We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.
But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.
Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.
Nor did officials add that a Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, had met privately with Steele ‐ or that Mr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, had been hired to work on the dossier.
#2
The sheer magnitude of FisaGate with all its connections and tentacles is staggering--far larger than Watergate. FisaGate is an existential threat to our Republic and system of justice.
#4
We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.
A hand picked court of nodding nabobs and pisslewinks.
#5
This is an extension of the technique known as 'pretexting'. Pretexting is used when the "law enforcement" people need an excuse for a prosecution, but can't get a legally defendable trail. So they use illegally gained knowledge (from let's say, a wiretap) to feed a source who will send confidential information back to them, allowing a paper trail to begin.
They've been doing it for years in drug smuggling arrests. You actually thought a random traffic stop just happened to come up with ten tons of pot?
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/08/2018 8:32 Comments ||
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..I'm not at all confident that a single one of these ba$tards will ever swing for their crimes, but let me suggest this: has anyone noticed how (relatively) quiet the Clinton and Obama teams have been on this? No ringing denials from the mountaintop? No rallies to support bringing down these falsehood-speaking Republicans? No nothing.
With that in mind - is it possible the Trump Administration has quietly put the word out that though we might not be able to get you for this...we know you did it. Keep your mouths shut and behave from here on out, or you may well discover that there are far, far worse things than Federal trial for treason and fraud.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
02/08/2018 8:37 Comments ||
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#7
...has anyone noticed how (relatively) quiet the Clinton and Obama teams have been on this?
Yes, on the advice of legal counsel no doubt. I am savoring the quiet interlude, and I still have my Robben Island dream foto.
[Brutalist.press] It’s been almost a year since Swedish politician Zaida Catalan was beheaded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, most people haven’t even heard her name ‐ and there’s a good reason for that.
According to the U.K. Sun, Catalan was killed along with American Michael Sharp, a United Nations worker, as part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission to the troubled African nation.
On March 12, 2017, Catalan and Sharp were kidnapped along with four Congolese in the disputed province of Kasai. The BBC reports that the two had been dispatched to the region "to investigate reports of abuses after local rebels took up arms."
On March 27, their bodies were found.
"We have been informed that two Caucasian bodies have been found in shallow graves in the search area, one male and one female," Sharp’s father, John Sharp, posted on Facebook after the discovery of their bodies.
Since no other Caucasians have been reported missing in that region, there is a high probability that these are the bodies of MJ and Zaida.
Dental records and DNA samples will be used to confirm the identities. This will take some time.
However, a video of the murders quickly surfaced, showing the two being shot by members of the Kamwina Nsapu rebels, according to The Guardian.
Congolese government spokesman Lambert Mende later confirmed that "the woman was found beheaded, but the body of the man was intact," the BBC reported.
According to the International Crisis Group, the Kamuina Nsapu insurgency is a localized conflict which occurred when "the state refused to recognize the traditional appointment of Jean-Pierre Mpandi as Kamuina Nsapu," a traditional chiefdom.
While a localized conflict, the Kamwina Nsapu fighting has helped to add to the instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly given that President Joseph Kabila’s government had begun a brutal crackdown in the region, which is what Sharp and Catalan were investigating.
In December, a local militia leader was arrested in the deaths of Sharp and Catalan, according to The New York Times, but the case has been largely kept in obscurity ‐ likely because it didn’t fulfill the liberal media’s narrative of open borders as a panacea for the world’s ills.
Ironically, Catalan was a member of the Swedish Green Party. While generally Euroskeptical, the party has still embraced open borders. Its 2013 platform states that the Greens "are warm adherents to international cooperation. We want to see Europe as a part of a world of democracies, where people move freely over borders, and where people and countries trade and cooperate with each other."
While the Kamuina Nsapu insurgency is a localized one without the taint of globalized Islamic fanaticism, the destabilization of the Congo represents a larger problem, especially if terrorist groups are able to flourish within the failed state.
Terrorist groups often do flourish in failed states, the same way that al Shabab flourished in Somalia or Al Qaeda did in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Indeed, according to the U.K. Express, the Islamist Allied Democratic Force has also been busy in the DRC, attacking Christian villages and hospitals as part of an attempt to "carve out" a caliphate in the east of the unstable country.
While it may not be the Allied Democratic Force or Al Qaeda who’s responsible for Catalan’s death, the message is clear: The world is often a fragile place, filled with terrorist groups who want people dead for no other reason than they live in the West or they don’t believe in their religion.
Open borders would utterly destroy our most effective measure to keep those individuals from inflicting the harm they wish to. That’s something the media doesn’t like talking about, which is why you don’t hear a lot about Ms. Catalan or her death.
Zaida Catalan may have died in Africa. Make no mistake, though ‐ the next time terrorism claims a politician’s life, it may be in Europe, all thanks to policies Zaida Catalan’s party supported.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
02/08/2018 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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#1
It was the only way they could get her to shut up.
(I know. Corner. sigh)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/08/2018 10:10 Comments ||
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[BBC] The fall and sack of the city of Troy at the hands of an avenging Greek army is one that has been told for some 3,000 years, but contained within it are clues to a much wider global collapse - with lessons for our own 21st Century.
In 1300BC, at the height of the Bronze Age, the great powers of Egypt, the Hittites in central Turkey, the Greeks, Babylonians and Middle Eastern city states would have seemed secure to any merchant sailing around the Mediterranean.
None more so than the walled city of Troy, on Turkey's north west coast at the mouth of the Dardanelles.
Ships were often forced to wait in its harbours for suitable winds to sail into the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea, so it was ideally placed to grow rich by taxing this trade.
Yet just over 100 years later, by about 1170BC, almost all these civilisations had collapsed. In the dark age that followed even the art of writing was lost.
#1
I read the article and couldn't help read between the line what the author doesn't state.
All of the 'failed' economies (hitties, Babylonians, even Egypt eventually) only the Greeks survived. The only culture that was attempting alternatives to dictatorship in most of the city-states.
Centrally planned economies have always led to failure and even trade is not enough to sustain them. Of course the BBC wouldn't/couldn't say that.
#2
There was also an abrupt 'Global Cooling' in the region from the Minoan Warm Period (look at Fig.1). The Minoans who depended on long distance trade for prosperity went into decline first (Thera was the garnish on their apocalypse sandwich). Cool and dry hurts agriculture...
"Mycenaean Greece perished with the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean, to be followed by the so-called Greek Dark Ages, a recordless transitional period leading to Archaic Greece where significant shifts occurred from palace-centralized to de-centralized forms of socio-economic organization"
Posted by: james ||
02/08/2018 18:16 Comments ||
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#4
Consider the Dark Ages in Western Europe as a further example. A central authority needs a steady income stream to enforce its will on its subjects. No money, no influence, then no central authority. One advantage the Eastern Roman Empire had in its stranglehold on the East-West (Silk Road) and the Black Sea-Mediterranean (Grain and Troy's old revenue stream) was enough 'cash flow' to avoid devolving into a squabbling collection of petty states.
With modern civilization it is the flow of cheap energy that keeps us out of barbarism.
An eruption of political correctness on Eastern Europe's populist right helps clarify the source of political correctness on the American left. Poland has just passed a law that imposes jail time for any claim about Poles or Poland "being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich." Poland suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazis, but plenty of individual Poles collaborated with them and helped exterminate Jews.
...The US government, the Israeli government, the President of France and most of the Western world deplored the Polish law. As it happens, similar laws already are on the books in Ukraine and Latvia.
...Poland's Law and Justice Party government is right wing, Catholic and nationalist. It strongly opposes the European Community's attempt to impose immigration quotas on its members, in alliance with anothother right-wing populists, Hungary's Viktor Orban as well as the Czech Republic's Miloš Zeman. But there is no difference whatever between the American Left's witch hunt against "micro-aggressions" and the imposition of speech codes at American universities, and the new Polish law. They both criminalize speech that injures self-esteem, and they do so for exactly the same reason.
#3
Polish laws are similar to PC anti-speech codes and micro aggressions rules at American universities? Time to test the constitutionality of these anti-first Amendment speech codes and rules. Universities are not some special case where they get exclusions from obeying our laws. They should not be protected hot houses allowed to germinate leftism.
#4
There was a stupor bowl commercial about safe places and snowflakes by the California Avocada growers that was really funny...you can find it on YouTube.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Young male refugees in Germany got the blame on Wednesday for most of a two-year increase in violent crime, adding fuel to the country’s political debate over migrants.
Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees.
It noted, however, that migrants settling from war-torn countries such as Syria were much less likely to commit violent crimes that those from other places who were unlikely to be given asylum.
Migration will be a key issue in forthcoming coalition talks between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). The arrival of more than a million migrants since mid-2015 hurt both parties in last September’s election.
The government-sponsored study showed a jump in violent crime committed by male migrants aged 14 to 30.
#2
And I'm guessing the other 10% is probably a combination of the natives defending themselves and a political attempt to say that the natives are just as much a part of the problem.
[Arms Control Wonk] The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, as advertised, is devoid of new diplomatic initiatives to reduce nuclear dangers and endorses new, low-yield nuclear warhead designs for sea-based delivery. It also expands the scope of potential U.S. military activities by establishing the requirement for “enforceable” arms control compacts.
U.S. nuclear posture reviews have continuity from one administration to the next because acceptance of basic premises is a prerequisite to being part of the drafting process. Those who think that nuclear deterrence doesn’t matter enough to spend large sums on its upkeep, or that numbers are immaterial beyond a certain point, or that the Triad and its offshoots are not sacrosanct won’t be doing the writing and editing. Those looking for fundamental change on these matters don’t play inside baseball.
This posture statement comes at a particularly rough time, reminiscent of the transition from President Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. Back then, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan killed prospects for the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Well before the Red Army rumbled into Kabul, President Carter’s ambitious arms control agenda, which included negotiations on nuclear testing and space warfare, was already in tatters. As one who served in the Carter administration, I watched the downsizing of President Obama’s ambitions with a sad sense of déjà vu.
#1
You know, if they had put the "As one who served in the Carter administration" at the beginning, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary reading.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/08/2018 12:05 Comments ||
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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.
...has anyone noticed how (relatively) quiet the Clinton and Obama teams have been on this? 
[Brutalist.press] It’s been almost a year since Swedish politician Zaida Catalan was beheaded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, most people haven’t even heard her name ‐ and there’s a good reason for that.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Young male refugees in Germany got the blame on Wednesday for most of a two-year increase in violent crime, adding fuel to the country’s political debate over migrants.
