[PJ] Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo says "a Russian national FBI informant" offered to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton in May of 2016, but no one, including DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, seems interested in hearing about it.
Caputo says that he forgot to mention a couple of suspicious episodes when the House and Senate Intelligence Committees first asked him if any Russians had offered him dirt on Clinton.
It wasn't until the New York Times published a bombshell story in May of 2018, disclosing that the FBI had indeed used informants in its "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation in 2016, that Caputo says a "light bulb" went off in his head.
He says he went back and shared the information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as soon as he remembered.
Not long after that, Caputo was interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. He told PJ Media that he expected to be there until nightfall. As it turned out, he was done by 3 p.m.
He said the prosecutor who interviewed him -- Aaron Zelinsky -- was keenly interested in hearing more about the Russian who had offered him dirt on Clinton because Caputo had at first forgotten to mention it during his House and Senate interviews. Now, in retrospect, he thinks they were going to try to ensnare him in a "1001" process crime.
#1
Not long after that, Caputo was interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. He told PJ Media that he expected to be there until nightfall. As it turned out, he was done by 3 p.m.
[Washington Examiner] Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to bully a prestigious scholarship program into selecting Chelsea Clinton’s then-boyfriend and then sought "payback" when they were resisted, according to a former top foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama.
The episode took place nearly 19 years ago but has fresh resonance after revelations last month of multimillion-dollar bribes paid by parents to get their children into elite colleges, including Stanford University, which Chelsea Clinton and her then-boyfriend Jeremy Kane attended. Among those recently implicated was Michelle Obama's former tennis coach.
Trina Vargo, a veteran U.S. adviser on Ireland, founded the George J. Mitchell Scholarship in 2000. It was named after the former senator who brokered the talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. Vargo said that Bill Clinton intervened in the first year of the scholarship, when Kane, whose 3.19 grade-point average was much weaker than those of the top candidates, had failed to make the final selection round.
President Clinton, who was in his last weeks in the White House, called Mitchell to express his displeasure, according to Vargo in her new book Shenanigans: The U.S.-Ireland Relationship in Uncertain Times. He had submitted a letter of recommendation for Kane, who had already landed an internship in the Clinton White House during his relationship with Chelsea.
Kane worked in the White House speechwriting office from June to September 2000, arriving some 18 months after Clinton had been impeached over this affair with another White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Vargo told the Washington Examiner that the timing of Clinton’s call, which came while the program was choosing its 12 scholarship awardees from a group of 20 finalists, was a blatant attempt to game the selection process. "There’s no way to see that as anything other than an attempt to influence a situation that hadn’t been finalized yet," she said.
"In light of the college admissions scandal, I don’t think it’s very unusual for people who have money or influence to use what means they have, whether it’s for their children or friends."
While no money was involved in the Clintons' attempt to procure a scholarship for Kane, by bowing to their wishes Vargo and her program would have been well-placed to benefit in future years from the largesse of the former first couple and their influential network of Irish American fundraisers.
Bill Clinton's press secretary, Angel Urena, called accusations of nepotism "baseless and patently false."
[Babylon Bee] MIAMI, FL‐Florida man Clint Cooper has obeyed all state and federal laws and generally stayed out of trouble. He has not fired any guns in his backyard and hit random strangers with .22 caliber bullets. He hasn't attacked a McDonald's employee or hit his dad with a pizza for helping give birth to him.
He hasn't murdered any ex-girlfriends in an attempt to get rid of the devil or driven his Ferrari 360 into the ocean at top speed. He had no syringes hidden anywhere on his person and was not arrested in an argument over a cheesesteak.
Additionally, he has not burned his children to teach them about fire or fooled his family into believing his murdered wife was still alive. He has not chewed up any police cars after being arrested for cocaine possession and he has not found a boa constrictor in his car engine. He never harassed anyone in the park while drunk and shirtless, or threatened to kill them with kindness in reference to his machete, which he named kindness.
He also never caused any traffic pile-ups or stole any vehicles then blamed Jesus. He has not been accused of drinking 18-20 beers before talking to children.
When Cooper inevitably does something noteworthy, this story will be updated.
[Quillette] A review of Serotonine (French Edition), by Michel Houellebecq. French and European Publications Inc (January 3, 2019), 352 pages.
Michel Houllebecq, the bestselling French novelist and provocateur, has a knack for predicting disasters. His sex-tourism novel Plateforme (2001) featured a terrorist incident at a resort in Thailand that was eerily similar to the 2002 Bali bombings. Soumission (2015) was released on the day of the al-Qaeda-linked Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris; the novel’s subject (an Islamist takeover of France) made the coincidence distinctly uncomfortable. Now Houellebecq’s most recent book, Sérotonine (2019), appears to have foreseen the ’gilet jaune’ (’yellow vest’) protests that have rocked France since November.
Clearly Houellebecq saw something like this coming, and understood that it was inevitable. Yet for all his perspicacity, Houellebecq is often dismissed as a mere literary troll. Certainly he has a troll’s gift for identifying weak spots in his targets, and then attacking them relentlessly. He is not above this sort of nihilistic glee; but unlike a normal troll, he focuses his rage and disgust, not on random individuals, but on the culture that has grown to dominate the French governing class in the wake of the May 1968 student protests in Paris.
Houellebecq is not a conventional literary artist, or a particularly skilled one. His attempts at philosophical discussion cannot withstand scrutiny for long. He has little critical acumen; even his opinions are, for the most part, conventional and unsurprising, except (sometimes) in their provocative manner of expression. Where Houellebecq stands out from his peers is in his freakish gift for observation. He is not a lyrical writer or a storyteller: he is a seer.
Houellebecq’s seventh novel Sérotonine, published this January, is without question his most impressive achievement to date. He has figured out how to work around his limitations and incorporate them into a unified work of art. The novel is not a complete success; though the first two-thirds are assured, confident and often powerful, and there are haunting passages throughout. Read on for the full review. Powerful stuff. This man sees clearly where others do not.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
04/12/2019 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11127 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
His essay To Stay Alive on the poet's role in society is a classic. You can find it online if curious.
[Rollingstone] Rep. Ilhan Omar is once again being targeted by Republicans and right-wing media. Once again, the attacks against the Muslim lawmaker are clouded in bad faith. The latest round of outrage comes in light of comments Omar made last month at a Council on American-Islamic Relations event in Los Angeles, where she spoke about the anti-Muslim bigotry spawned by 9/11. Here’s what she said:
"Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and frankly, I’m tired of it and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties."
The comments surfaced this week, and Republicans have responded by questioning Omar’s patriotism, accusing her of downplaying 9/11. On Wednesday night, she went on the Late Show to defend herself. "I took an oath to uphold the Constitution," she told Stephen Colbert. "I am as American as everyone else is."
#4
As a few commenters at AoS pointed out yesterday, CAIR was actually founded after the FIRST World Trade Center attack.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
04/12/2019 8:25 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Look behind Rhodes and you get the real power, and it’s not the narcissist pothead, it’s ValJar, living in the one place in Washington DC where you cannot run a wire tap because the Secret Service protection would detect it. Odd that she lives there isn’t it.
#6
"They hit me back!" Omar/OAC
These young kids have no idea what it is like to have their vapid or evil thoughts confronted. Universities have done them a disservice.
[DAWN] THE relationship between the PTI and the late Maulana Samiul Haq ...
the Godfather of the Taliban, leader of his own faction of the JUI. Known as Mullah Sandwich for his habit of having two young boys at a time. Now beyond all cares and wore, courtesty of his jealous secretary... ’s party is not new.
While the ruling party may have initially been drawn to the murdered holy man’s JUI-S due to the mutual animus between the PTI and the JUI-F, the KP government appears to be constant in its support for Darul Uloom Haqqania ...an Islamic seminary located in Akora Khattak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The seminary propagates the Deobandi trend of Sunni Islam and is headed by Maulana Samiul Haq, known as the Godfather of the Taliban. It has been dubbed The University of Jihad due to the methods and content of instruction along with the future occupations of its alumni.... , the controversial seminary located in Nowshera and known as ’jihad university’.
This sobriquet is, of course, well earned, as the madressah has been churning out fighters since the days of the Afghan jihad, while it counts members of the Afghan Taliban ...the Pashtun equivalent of men... amongst its alumni.
As reported in this paper on Wednesday, the KP government has diverted Rs30m meant for higher secondary schools and given them to the Haqqania madressah. This would be the third time the KP administration has showered its munificence on the seminary; in the 2016-17 budget, it had allocated a whopping Rs300m, while in February, Rs277m were reportedly allocated to the Haqqania madressah.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/12/2019 00:00 ||
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Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under: Jamaat-e-Ulema Islami
Hong Kong (CNN) A Chinese researcher who sparked improved cognitive function in monkeys by implanting human genes into their brains has defended his experiment, which has divided the scientific community.
The research, undertaken by multiple universities and led by the Kunming Institute of Zoology in southwestern China, was intended to shed more light on the evolutionary process which led to human intelligence.
"Brain size and cognitive skills are the most dramatically changed traits in humans during evolution, and yet the genetic mechanisms underlying these human-specific changes remain elusive," said a report published on March 27 in the China-based journal National Science Review.
The research paper said it was the first time such a study had taken place.
One of the lead researchers Su Bing, from China's Science of Academy's Kunming Institute of Zoology, said the experiment has been reviewed by the university's ethics board and had followed not only Chinese and international best scientific practices, but also international animal rights standards.
"In the long run, such basic research will also provide valuable information for the analysis of the etiology and treatment of human brain diseases (such as autism) caused by abnormal brain development," he said in an email to CNN.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/12/2019 10:50 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Right up there on Gandhi's list:
Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without Sacrifice
[PJMedia] The arrest of Julian Assange by British authorities was met with nearly unanimous hosannas by U.S. politicians who gave their requisite soundbites cum gravitas on Capitol Hill Thursday. The self-styled journalist, they almost all said, should be extradited to the U.S. as quickly as possible to face the proverbial music for having exposed state secrets of our country ‐ or at least the Democratic Party. Well, not exactly that ‐ more accurately for having conspired with former U.S. intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases, a legal distinction.
Ironically, not a peep has been heard from the same people (or almost anybody for that matter) thus far about another recent egregious misuse of journalism that resulted not in arrests but in the awarding of its most famous prize, the Pulitzer. As Beth Baumann noted for Townhall:
Let's not forget that The Washington Post and The New York Times won the 2018 Pultizer Prize for their national reporting of President Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.
#3
Don't forget the times blew up the Bush 44 intelligence operation that monitored cellphone calls and how they blew up waterboarding and other intelligence gathering protocols that were yielding significant material in our war on terrorism.
I propose that without those blow ups of our intelligence, we might have had a handle on ISIS years earlier.
#4
Who's Worse‐Julian Assange or the New York Times and Washington Post?
The government keeps way too many secrets from the citizenry, but I don't want freelancers, media types or actual spies and traitors deciding what gets outed.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/12/2019 18:32 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Considering Assange did NOTHING wrong... going with the Post and Times. They're slanderous hounds, if nothing else. Assange is a foreigner who has no duty to protect any US secrets, first of all. And secondly, he tattled on people far and wide who, most of the time, were actually on the other side (the globalists of the EU and US foreign policy who defy Putin just so they can continue to involve the US in a bunch of pointless, minor wars). I'll repeat... "Conspiring with Chelsea Manning" was not a crime for Assange because he isn't an American. Why the hell would you expect him to hold our secrets as sacred? Would you, an American citizen, hold secrets sacred for the EU (don't lie, people of the Burg, you know you wouldn't).
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.
[PJ] Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo says "a Russian national FBI informant" offered to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton in May of 2016, but no one, including DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, seems interested in hearing about it.
[Washington Examiner] Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to bully a prestigious scholarship program into selecting Chelsea Clinton’s then-boyfriend and then sought "payback" when they were resisted, according to a former top foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama.
[Babylon Bee] MIAMI, FL‐Florida man Clint Cooper has obeyed all state and federal laws and generally stayed out of trouble. He has not fired any guns in his backyard and hit random strangers with .22 caliber bullets. He hasn't attacked a McDonald's employee or hit his dad with a pizza for helping give birth to him.
[Rollingstone] Rep. Ilhan Omar is once again being targeted by Republicans and right-wing media. Once again, the attacks against the Muslim lawmaker are clouded in bad faith. The latest round of outrage comes in light of comments Omar made last month at a Council on American-Islamic Relations event in Los Angeles, where she spoke about the anti-Muslim bigotry spawned by 9/11. Here’s what she said:
an Islamic seminary located in Akora Khattak, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The seminary propagates the Deobandi trend of Sunni Islam and is headed by Maulana Samiul Haq, known as 
