Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’

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Impeachment follies

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Nancy Pelosi announced that the Democrats will proceed with impeachment. This after Jerry Nadler botched another hearing by inviting radical leftist law professors to testify about the law. What they did, instead was to rant about all the things they don’t like about Trump. The media is trying to cover for them but look at that video clip.

The last time Nadler held a hearing, he was punked by Cory Lewandoqwski.

Democrats brought former Trump Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to testify before the Judiciary Committee. The move is part of a strategy to nail Trump on the long-debunked Russian collusion and obstruction allegations that didn’t pan out for Dems during former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lackluster testimony.

Since Lewandowski is not a government employee, Dems were hoping to pull an “end run around Trump’s executive privilege assertions,” Darren Samuelsohn and Kyle Cheney reported for Politico back in June.

Samuelsohn noted on Twitter as Lewandowski took the stand, his testimony might be something Democrats would come to regret. At least, according to Fox News contributor Joe diGenova, who was reportedly relishing the day when Lewandowski would be called to testify.

“If they want to call Corey [Lewandowski], that’d be their biggest mistake,” diGenova added. “Ooohoo! I hope they do it. They’re going to regret it.”

Lewandowski made Nadler look a fool by answering each question with a request for the location of each item. Nadler was not prepared. He spnt all his time searching for the item in the record. Every trial lawyer knows better.

Nadler continued to cite the Mueller report as Lewandowski demanded he uses the exact language from the report before answering.

“I’d like a reference sir, so I can follow along on what you’re asking,” Lewandowski demanded as banter about stopping the clock took over the hearing.

When the clock finally began again, Lewandowski kept tensions high as he “looked” for the references Nadler continued to cite in the report.

Now, if Nancy Pelosi can be believed, and I wonder if they will really go this far, impeachment will go to the Senate.

What happens there will depend on Mitch McConnell.

Most Republicans assume the Senate will vote on partisan lines and Trump will be kept in office. McConnell is a Ruling Class member and can not be wholly trusted. Still, it is hard to believe he would risk war with the Republican voters.

The first opportunity for leverage over the White House will come in the shape of the Senate “rules of impeachment”. The senate will have wide latitude in how they set-up the processes and procedures for the trial – and McConnell never misses an opportunity to leverage a “get” from his senate position.

So what will the White House need to give McConnell… or what will McConnell’s ask be, in order to protect the office of the president? Here’s where you have to remember Tom Donohue and the Wall St priorities.

McConnell (subtext Donohue) would prefer the confrontation with China be eliminated and the tariffs dropped. Is that too big an “ask”? Would the White House sell/trade McConnell a China deal for better impeachment terms?

All of these are questions worth pondering now, because there’s no doubt they are being discussed amid those in DC sitting on the comfy Corinthian wing-backs and gleefully rubbing their hands around a well polished mahogany table….

The Chamber of Commerce is no friend of Trump. Still, if they stabbed him in the back, it would probably end in civil war.

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The War on Trump. Stage Two.

Saturday, August 17th, 2019

The release of the Mueller Report with his painful conclusion that there was no Trump Russia collusion, has sent the political left on a search for another issue. “Obstruction of Justice” is not working out so the strategists at the New York Times, GHQ of the Trump Resistance, has settled on a new theme, explained at an Editorial Board meeting last week.

A transcript of a recording was obtained by Slate.

In the 75 minutes of the meeting—which Slate obtained a recording of, and of which a lightly condensed and edited transcript appears below—Baquet and the paper’s other leadership tried to resolve a tumultuous week for the paper, one marked by a reader revolt against a front-page headline and a separate Twitter meltdown by Jonathan Weisman, a top editor in the Washington bureau. On Tuesday, the Times announced it was demoting Weisman from deputy editor because of his “serious lapses in judgment.”

The headline issue was a hilarious swap of headlines after the first was considered too friendly to Trump.

[R]eader expectations of the Times have shifted after the election of President Trump. The paper… saw a huge surge of subscriptions in the days and months after the 2016 election… The Times has since embraced these new subscribers in glitzy commercials with slogans like “The truth is more important now than ever.” Yet there is a glaring disconnect between those energized readers and many Times staffers, especially newspaper veterans. [Executive Editor Dean] Baquet doesn’t see himself as the vanguard of the resistance… He acknowledges that people may have a different view of what the Times is, but he doesn’t blame the marketing. “It’s not because of the ads; it’s because Donald Trump has stirred up very powerful feelings among Americans. It’s made Americans, depending on your point of view, very angry and very mistrustful of institutions.

So, readers who hate Trump went nuts after the first headline was not angry enough.

So, what to do ?

But there’s something larger at play here. This is a really hard story, newsrooms haven’t confronted one like this since the 1960s. It got trickier after [inaudible] … went from being a story about whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia and obstruction of justice to being a more head-on story about the president’s character.

In other words, the New York Times went all in on RussiaGate and that exploded in their faces, so now they’ve had to shift their Main Narrative to denouncing Trump as racist:

We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story. I’d love your help with that.

As Audra Burch said when I talked to her this weekend, this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that requires deep investigation into people who peddle hatred.

People who peddle hatred, of course do not include New York Times staff writers.

but it is also a story that requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years. In the coming weeks, we’ll be assigning some new people to politics who can offer different ways of looking at the world. We’ll also ask reporters to write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions. I really want your help in navigating this story.

One new project is The 1619 Project.

America was racist before it was America. The Pilgrims landed in 1620, as every school child used to learn. But slavery beat them to it.

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Slavery seems to be the new theme of American history, at least according to the New York Times and the Democrat Party. Interestingly enough, it was the Democrat Party, once it had been founded, that was the pillar of slavery. I doubt that will appear in the new propaganda.

Baquet: OK. I mean, let me go back a little bit for one second to just repeat what I said in my in my short preamble about coverage. Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.

It doesn’t matter if it was true. It was “covered.”

The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?

New story to be created.

How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

In other words, invent a new story.

Do you feel that there is a person in a high position of power who can be as explicitly self-critical of this organization as Roxane Gay has, and is in a position to be, because she’s on the outside? Do you think that we would benefit from that?

This is about the spat in which NYT columnist Roxane Gay (who enjoys Intersectional Pokemon Points for being black, a woman, and obese) called the NYT’s deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman “unqualified” and he demanded an “enormous apology” from her. He wound up demoted, which probably tells you something about who is higher up on the diversity totem pole.

NYT internal politics and what we have to look forward to if a Democrat wins the 2020 election.

Staffer: Hello, I have another question about racism. I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is in everything.

The hounds have caught the new scent and are ready to run again.

It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country. And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 Project,

“America is racist 24/7” until November 2020 and after if a D wins.

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Posted in elections, politics, racism | 2 Comments »

Post Mueller, what happens now ?

Monday, July 29th, 2019

The Mueller hearings were a huge disappointment to the Democrats, who were counting on scandal and impeachment to substitute for governing. Two leaders, Schiff and Nadler, seem unwilling to give up and try legislating. Schiff, who seems to most devoted to the Russia Hoax, has a darker side.

Schiff is the first Democrat since 1932 to represent the region.

He was an eloquent booster of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, seeking to put limits on some of the very expenditures that swamped his own race against former Rep. James Rogan, whom he beat by three percentage points.

(Limiting expenditures is a point Colbert needled him on. Colbert: “Isn’t that the equivalent of sleeping with a prostitute and then strangling her to hide your shame?” Schiff: “Well … I wouldn’t want to say it like that.”)

Rogan, of course was the target of massive Democrat fund raising to punish the House prosecutor for the Clinton impeachment.

That fawning “The Hill” tongue bath did not provide much for the “darker side.”

Nadler, another Clinton defender, has shed 60 pounds since his gastric bypass but he still looks about 100 pounds overweight. He is a little less strident than Schiff in public.

Where do they go from here ?

They get no help from Andrew McCarthy who demolishes their arguments.

Mueller’s anti-Trump staffers knew they were never going to be able to drive Trump from office by indicting him. The only plausible way to drive him from office was to prioritize, over all else, making the report public. Then, perhaps Congress would use it to impeach. At the very least, the 448 pages of uncharged conduct would wound Trump politically, helping lead to his defeat in 2020 — an enticing thought for someone who had, say, attended the Hillary Clinton “victory” party and expressed adulatory “awe” for acting AG (and fellow Obama holdover) Sally Yates when she insubordinately refused to enforce Trump’s border security order.

Of course, it wouldn’t be enough to get the report to Congress. The challenge was to get it there with the obstruction case still viable even though prosecutors knew they couldn’t get away with recommending an obstruction indictment. How to accomplish this? By pretending that the OLC guidance prevented prosecutors from even making a charging decision.

This resulted in the Ted Lieu question and Mueller’s answer which he had to retract after the break.

It is becoming more and more apparent that Mueller’s ‘assistant” prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann is the lead conspirator in the coup.

Weissmann is distinguished by his abysmal record as a corrupt prosecutor in several cases.

A lawyer representing whistleblowers referred Andrew Weissman to the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG) for “corrupt legal practices”.

Weissman is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lead investigator in the Russia-Trump probe. He is the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That was Loretta Lynch’s territory. He rose through the ranks under Mueller’s stewardship.

In 2015, civil rights attorney David Schoen referred Weisman to the IG for his handling of a case targeting the Columbo crime family. Schoen said he is not a member of a political party and there is no political motivation.

Weissman was the lead attorney in the Persico trial and he withheld exculpatory evidence, a Brady violation. Schoen said he decided to revisit the nearly two-decade-long cases based on new witness information and “recent evidence that has come to light in the last several months.”

Weissman never told the defense that a prosecution witness, Gregory Scarpa Sr., was also working for years as an FBI informant. The underworld witness was nicknamed ‘Hannibal’ and the “Grim Reaper’ and committed over 100 murders.

The judge described AUSA Weissmann’s conduct as the “myopic withholding of information” and “reprehensible and subject, perhaps, to appropriate disciplinary measures,” according to the opinion obtained by investigative reporter Sara Carter.

He further distinguished himself with a rare Unanimous Supreme Court decision reversing his conviction of Arthur Anderson in the Enron case.

With a brief, pointed and unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned Arthur Andersen’s conviction for shredding Enron accounting documents as that company was collapsing in one of the nation’s biggest corporate scandals.

The court held that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury failed to require the necessary proof that Andersen knew its actions were wrong.

But the decision represents little more than a Pyrrhic victory for Andersen, which lost its clients after being indicted on obstruction of justice charges and has no chance of returning as a viable enterprise. The accounting firm has shrunk from 28,000 employees in the United States to a skeleton crew of 200, who are attending to the final details of closing down the partnership.

28,000 people lost their jobs. The prosecutor who hid evidence was Weissmann.

In the interview with Devin Nunes, Maria Bartiromo asks the ultimate question: “who was the mastermind” behind all of these intelligence operations?

Released FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller revealed the remarkable trail of the 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed {Go Deep} where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.

On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000 in cash for future consultancy based on a $10k/month retainer.

This is a key part of the plot to destroy Trump. Read the whole thing. In fact, Papadopoulis’ book is a good place to start.

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Posted in corruption, elections, espionage, politics, social issues | Comments Closed

Trump is winning on immigration.

Friday, December 28th, 2018

UPDATE: Another Althouse post, emphasizing a new Beto O’Rourke video ad that argues that a wall would hurt the environment and animals. Since that is what middle aged white women care about (like Ann) the ad is aimed at them.

Fence

This is what the fence/wall really looks like. Beto’s ad is showing parks nowhere near the border.

We currently have a “partial government shutdown” which no one seems to notice. Most of the appropriations bills were passed and signed. The Homeland Security budget became a Continuing Resolution and is being held hostage in the Senate where Chuck Schumer has vowed “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,”

Trump has not vetoed anything so the responsibility for the “shutdown” is not obvious. The 40,000 federal employees who are furloughed or not getting paid are over 80% Democrats. The most recent pay period will result in checks today. Then the next pay period in two weeks will be the one where the “nonessentials” will not be paid.

Schumer: “So, President Trump, you will not get your wall,” Schumer added. “Abandon your shutdown strategy. You’re not getting the wall today, next week, or on January 3 when Democrats take control of the House.”

How is this playing in the country ? Some surprises.

Ann Althouse reads the Washington Post so I don’t have to.

She notices the comments to that article on the child that died in US custody.

I’ve excerpted the parts of the article that might make a reader want to blame the father. Was the boy exploited? Was he regarded as expendable? There’s plenty else in the article that might make you want to blame the U.S. government (mainly for not giving quicker medical treatments). I would also think many readers would mostly feel sad that a boy died and bemoan poverty generally. So I was surprised at how harsh the comments were against the father. I didn’t expect this at The Washington Post. This is the most liked comment:
This child’s siblings in Guatemala are alive and well. The child was dragged to the US using money that could have paid the father’s overdue electric bill, which is not a reason to grant asylum.

I wonder how long the Democrats will let this go on if Trump does not cave in ? He seems to have a gut instinct about what Americans think.

CNN seems to think that signing MAGA hats in Iraq is some sort of crime.

CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr said “a lot of questions” have been raised following President Trump’s surprise visit to troops in Iraq where he signed ‘Make America Great Again’ hats and flags.

“There’s a lot of concern because military policy, military regulation prohibits military members in uniform from doing anything that can be construed as a political endorsement. That’s what you want from your U.S. military. They’re not a political force,” Starr reported.

“How did the red hats get there? Some people are saying, well, the troops just brought them and wanted to get them signed. But even if that is the case, the question remains, there were commanders, there were senior enlisted personnel on the scene, they know the regulation. Why did this happen?” Starr asked.

The cluelessness is almost painful. Obama signed stuff when he was president.

What will the end game look like? The new House is even farther left wing than the Senate. Could the “shutdown” go on for months ?

Look at the comments to the WaPoo article.

Thank you. I am liberal myself but I get tired of people who shut off their critical thinking when it comes to brown people. This guy made a spectacularly risky decision, and his child paid the price. It’s on his head. This is, of course, on the assumption that the U.S. wasn’t negligent in the kid’s care – which is certainly possible. Nonetheless it’s his father who endangered him.

This looks like trouble for Democrats. What if Trump stares down Democrats for months ?

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What is going on with the border wall?

Sunday, December 23rd, 2018

UPDATE: Here is a pretty good argument for a very long “shutdown.”

make the Trump Filibuster as ridiculously overblown and dramatic as possible. Someone somewhere will die, and they will blame it on the shutdown. They will blame global warming on the shutdown. Freezing blizzards on the shutdown. They will blame tornadoes, hurricanes, and Kevin Hart’s tweets on the shutdown. They will blame the Trump Filibuster for Michael Moore gaining weight and for Ocasio-Cortez being unable to remember whether she was elected to Congress, the Senate, or the New York State Assembly. But it all will be stuff and nonsense. None of it matters. Every three minutes on Fox, there will be a loud clang followed by “Fox News Alert.” Even Fox aficionados long ago learned to tune those out; they never amount to anything.

Nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. The furloughed federal workers all will get their back-pay in the mail as soon as the Government reopens.

We have a “partial shutdown” of the government over an issue that was the centerpiece of Trump’s presidential campaign. The GOP Congress has finally gotten the budget process back to “Regular Order” after decades of “Continuing Resolutions” that allowed Harry Reid to hide the votes of Democrats on spending. This present fight is over the CR that funds the remaining 10% of the government , but it includes Homeland Security and that means the wall.

Democrat Chuck Schumer has said there will “never” be a wall. Why ?

In 2006, Democrats, although not then in the majority, voted for the construction of a border wall. After the 2006 election, which put the Democrats in control of Congress, they ignored the law, which still may be on the books. It included $10.4 billion. Could Trump use that law ? I don’t know.

Why the showdown now ? Remember George HW Bush’s promise ? In 1992, as he accepted the nomination at the convention, he promised “No New Taxes. Read My Lips” Of course, he violated this promise later. My theory, which I have seen him deny, is that Rostenkowski, the House Appropriations Chair, made a deal for Democrat support for the Gulf War in return for a raise in taxes. Bush accepted this and it was fatal.

The Democrats reason that it worked once. Getting a Republican President to renege on a promise essential to his election, was enough to defeat him in the next election. Schumer is determined to force Trump to back down. The news media is hysterical but I don’t think it will work. The new budget process has funded most of the government now. What is “shut down” is about 10% and most federal employees who are not getting paid are Democrat voters who hate Trump now. 96% of DC voters voted against Trump.

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The story of the Trump spying scandal.

Sunday, November 25th, 2018

Dan Bongino is a former Secret Service agent who is prominent commentator on Fox News.

His presentation at the David Horowitz meeting is worth watching.

He has a book out and I have ordered it on Kindle.

He also says that he thinks Bill Priestep is working with the people investigating this scandal.

The link at Conservative Tree House has some additional suggestions.

One of the key points Bongino highlights is how none of the paper-trail; nothing about the substance of the conspiracy; can possibly surface until *after* Robert Mueller is no longer in the picture. Until Robert Mueller is removed, none of this information can/will surface.

That’s why every political and media entity are desperate to protect Mueller; and also why Mueller’s investigation will never end.

This may well be true and it is depressing.

The source of the famous Fusion GPS “Dossier” on Trump is probably a 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal where Simpson worked at the time.

Simpson and Jacoby co-wrote a Journal article in April 2007, “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.” In it, Smith notes, they identified Paul Manafort as a key player in introducing Russians to Beltway circles. They kept reporting on him over the years. When Manafort was hired to manage the Trump campaign, Simpson — by now running Fusion GPS — made him a focus of his research, and knew enough background information to build a plausible case.

The reporter who dug up this story, which you will never see in the New York Times, is named Lee Smith and writes for Tablet Magazine.

A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s top-secret “sources” in the Russian government—which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control—but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed, and Donald Trump was simply another loud-mouthed Manhattan real estate millionaire. Understanding the origins of the “Steele dossier” is especially important because of what it tells us about the nature and the workings of what its supporters would hopefully describe as an ongoing campaign to remove the elected president of the United States. Yet the involvement of sitting intelligence officials—and a sitting president—in such a campaign should be a frightening thought even to people who despise Trump and oppose every single one of his policies, especially in an age where the possibilities for such abuses have been multiplied by the power of secret courts, wide-spectrum surveillance, and the centralized creation and control of story-lines that live on social media while being fed from inside protected nodes of the federal bureaucracy.

Anyway, the story is there and I am beginning to read Bongino’s book.

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The Election Results.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2018

Since I now live in Arizona, the result that most affected me was the Arizona Senate race which was won by far left loony tune, Krysten Sinema.

Sinema is a far leftist who has used the typical Democrat strategy of sounding moderate until elected.

Sinema began her political career as a Green Party activist before joining the Democratic Party and becoming a state legislator.[2]

After her election to Congress, she shifted toward the political center, joining the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and amassing a center-left to centrist voting record.[3] Sinema worked for the adoption of the DREAM Act and campaigned against Propositions 107 and 102, two voter referendums to ban the recognition of same-sex marriage and civil unions in Arizona.

Since she is “bisexual” her support of gay marriage is understandable. I have no problem with that although Civil Unions would have accomplished all the requests of gays.

According to Elle, “her first public comment as an elected official came in 2005, after a Republican colleague’s speech insulted LGBT people. ‘We’re simply people like everyone else who want and deserve respect’, she passionately declared. Later, when reporters asked about her use of the first person, Sinema replied, ‘Duh, I’m bisexual.'”

Of course. Why did McSally lose ?

Martha got 1,059,124 votes.

Governor Ducey, running for re-election, got 1,241,028 votes.

Why the difference? Did almost 200,000 more people vote for Ducey and not for McSally ? Why ?

Here is a site that purports to be Republican that asserts Trump’s support hurt her.

It’s fine, Martha. You didn’t lose. Donald J. Trump beat you. He beat Lea Marquez Peterson’s bid to replace you. He looks like he’s electing Democrats Katie Hobbs, Sandra Kennedy and Kathy Hoffman to statewide office. A Democrat took your seat in Congress because Trump made the election all about him.

Republicans have a choice to make. Are they the party of Doug Ducey, who this Red State’s voters still embrace, or the party of MAGA, turning off everyone without a red hat? One has a bright future in the Sonoran Desert. The other does not.

That sounds like a NeverTrumper and how many are there in Arizona?

Trump exists in another dimension and he has demanded Republicans join him there. It’s a place where refugees are diseased and shithole invaders, the truth is whatever instant lie he just fell out of his mouth, and no one has ever been a better president than him. McSally had to follow him there or face the GOP wrath that kneecapped Flake. He even boasted that he, personally, “retired him” and he was “very proud.”

That sure sounds like a Democrat and Tucson has plenty of them.

Nationally, National Review is pessimistic

What a difference a week makes, huh? With Arizona’s Senate seat lost, Florida and Georgia down to the wire, and GOP House losses approaching 40 seats, it’s time to adjust Wednesday morning’s “It wasn’t that bad” assessment.”

What’s more, President Trump and his team should be nervous about 2020. There’s still a lot of road between now and the next presidential election. We don’t know what the state of the country will be in autumn of that year. What will the unemployment number be? Will Americans feel prosperous and that American has been made “great again”? Will there be a terrorist attack? Another war?

I think most people who have supported Trump as president have done so on the basis of results, not affection.

I also doubt that many will consider Hillary, or Booker, or Harris, an improvement, almost no matter the state of the country,

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What happened with the Election ?

Wednesday, November 7th, 2018

Update #2: Arizona is now reporting that 600,000 ballots have not yet been counted.

• 472,000 ballots still to be counted in Maricopa County, including 277,000 early ballots that were received before Election Day and 195,000 early ballots, provisional ballots and out-of-precinct ballots from Election Day.

• 90,000 votes to be counted in Pima County, said Chris Roads of the Pima County Recorder’s Office. This includes about 70,000 early ballots and 18,000 provisional votes. Not all the provisional votes will count.

These apparently are absentee ballots that were turned in on election day. I just hope the Democrats are not digging up Phoenix cemetaries to find votes.

UPDATE: A pretty good analysis from Steve Hayward early on.

Some of the Democrats gains in the House came in districts that will be hard for them to hold in 2020. We’ll have to wait until all of the west coast House races come in to know what the margin is going to be, but I suspect putative Speaker Pelosi is going to have a miserable time. At the very least, we’ll have gridlock on Capitol Hill, and as I always like to say, gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government.

I think there will be pressure from left wing Democrats to shut the government down with each budget confrontation. That may play into Trump’s hands.

Rush Limbaugh has a good point today. The left, and the Media, has spent the two years since Trump’s election predicting a “Blue Wave” and asserting that Trump is not a legitimate President and will be rejected if not impeached. His theory is that this constant refrain scared 40 GOP Congressmen into retiring. They were convinced he would be rejected by the voters and that they would be too. Had they not retired, they might well have held the House. Forty open seats were just too many to defend.

A number of close races remain to be determined, including Martha McSally here in Arizona. My congressional district was lost to the Democrats as a professional politician named Kirkpatrick swooped down from Flagstaff and succeeded in defeating the local candidate Lia Martinez/ Peterson. Kirkpatrick seems to have no talent for anything but politics.

In 1980, she was elected as Coconino County’s first woman deputy county attorney. Kirkpatrick later served as city attorney for Sedona, Arizona. She was a member of the Flagstaff Water Commission. In 2004, she taught Business Law and Ethics at Coconino Community College.”

(more…)

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The Papadapoulos sting operation.

Thursday, November 1st, 2018

One of the branches of the FBI/CIA /DNC Trump operation has been to entrap and prosecute Trump associates. The first was The Michael Flynn prosecution.

General Flynn was DIA head at one time in the Obama administration. He became Trump’s National Security Assistant after the election. He was visited by FBI agent Peter Strzok on the pretext pf establishing the FBI presence in the White House, but, in fact, it was a setup to entrap him. The NSA had intercepted a telephone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador, as part of his normal duties. The transcript of that call was used to charge Flynn with “lying to a federal officer” in spite of the fact that Strzok and the other agent reported that Flynn had not lied. Acting Deputy AG Sally Yates, an Obama holdover, decided to charge him anyway and he eventually pled guilty to avoid crushing legal fees and threats against his son.

Paul Manafort, a late hire of the Trump campaign, was similarly prosecuted by Mueller for actions taken years before he met Trump and probably at the instigation of Ukranian political figures who opposed the people Manafort worked for.

The most recent revelations concern George Papadopoulos, who was briefly a member of the Trump campaign but held no office in the Administration.

George Papadopoulos and his wife Simone Mangiante approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlists George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and hands him $10,000 in cash to take back to the U.S. Upon arrival at the Dulles airport Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and searched; however, he never had the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Further:

[W]hen he was arrested at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint. The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington.

This was a setup in an attempt to “turn” a Trump associate and force him to testify about alleged Russian possession of Hillary Clinton emails.

The FBI who met Papadopoulos at the airport had no warrant, no indictment and no criminal complaint…. because they believed George would be carrying the evidence they would need to structure their legal leverage.

The FBI behavior became a scramble, and the DOJ needed their hastily constructed indictment to be sealed, because their initial leverage fell through. The $10,000 was a set up.

Unless the Democrats can take over the House and the Intelligence Committee, this will likely blow wide open the whole Mueller witch hunt.

One more question about Mueller and his operation. What, if anything, did Mueller have to do with the Whitey Bulgar hit in prison this week ?

89-year-old Boston mob boss James ‘Whitey’ Bulger was killed in prison by a ‘fellow inmate with mafia ties’ shortly after he was transferred to a West Virginia federal prison.

Bulger was reportedly wheeled away from security cameras and beaten with a lock in a sock and also had his eyes gouged out.

Sources told The Daily Mail that Whitey Bulger was about to out people in the FBI, specifically FBI officials of the informant program.

Mueller was described by Representative Gohmert as Acting US Attorney in Boston during the years that Bulgar was an FBI informant.

Gohmert’s report is here.

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The Trump-Russia conspiracy becomes clear.

Thursday, October 25th, 2018

The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 was a catastrophic event for a segment of the US government. It had been assumed by the entire “Ruling Class” that Hillary Clinton would, at last, be elected president. Books have been written about her reaction to the loss. One was titled, “Shattered” and recounted her reaction. A pretty good analysis in this Amazon book review.

To be fair to the authors, they lay the blame for her loss squarely on her. They sort of feel bad about it but their close access makes it obvious to them and they are objective enough to report it. The other main person held responsible is campaign manager Robby Mooks, who is so enamored with ‘analytics’ that he can’t see the forest for the trees. The canary in the coal mine is Bill Clinton, who senses that his wife and her campaign are not connecting with the white working class, but is ignored by the team who consider him washed-up and out of date.

What happened after she lost ? The Russia Collusion story was concocted.

Here is an analysis of How it began and why.

It turned out, however, that the dossier was a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project, the main allegations of which were based on third-hand hearsay from anonymous Russian sources. Worse, though the allegations could not be verified, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used them to obtain surveillance warrants against Page, in violation of their own guidelines against presenting unverified information to the FISA court. Worse still, the Obama Justice Department withheld from the FISA court the facts that the Clinton campaign was behind the dossier and that Steele had been booted from the investigation for lying to the FBI.

Now, more analysis is coming from Sheryl Atkinson.

Taken together in context, the evidence points to two important findings. First, U.S. government insiders, colluding with numerous foreign citizens and governments, conspired to interfere in the 2016 election. Second, after the election, these figures conspired to undermine, oust, and perhaps even frame Trump and some of his associates.

The methods used, according to factual accounts and witnesses, include collusion with reporters and politicians, leaks to the press, and paid political-opposition research. Officials in the intelligence community were involved in the effort, which included the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), domestic and foreign informants or spies, and electronic surveillance.

Both articles are worth reading in full. The fact that other diversions are appearing, like the hoax bomb story, suggests that the Democrats know the Mueller “investigation” is going to be ended soon with a dud.

We are still dealing with reaction from Angelo Codevilla’s “Ruling Class.”

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

This is how we got Trump and why there is a well funded effort to get rid of him him any way possible.

Joel Kotkin has a good analysis.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has developed essentially two economies. On the one side is the widely celebrated “post-industrial” economy: software, entertainment, media, and financial and business services. These sectors flourished as the stock market soared in the ultra-low interest-rate environment fostered by the Obama administration, whose recovery strategy was built around bailing out major banks, all headquartered in deep-blue cities. The winners under Obama included urban real estate, financial-service firms, and the tech oligarchs. These elements now constitute the Democratic Party’s burgeoning financial base, allowing it consistently to spend more than the GOP in key congressional races, while the GOP still gains support in energy and other less heralded “legacy” industries.

The whole thing is well worth reading and explains a lot about why the big money is backing Democrats.

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