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Why impeachment now?

Friday, October 4th, 2019

The intention to impeach Donald Trump actually followed his election by a day or two. The idea that “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” have been committed is ludicrous. So, why go to this risky strategy now ?

Well, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation was a dud. Even the left recognized that it did them no good.

President Trump’s job approval rating has rebounded since the release of a summary of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to a new poll.

A Gallup survey released Friday finds that 45 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, up from 39 percent in March …

[T]he latest approval figure matches two previous highs in Gallup polling.

Trump’s earlier 45 percent readings came during his first week in office in January 2017 and in June 2018 after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

And when it turned out the report itself contained very damaging evidence of presidential obstruction of justice, Democrats began to think that perhaps public opinion would turn even further against the 45th president, and there was some evidence of that, too:

The last sentence is wishing.

At FiveThirtyEight, which maintains the most comprehensive database of polls, Trump’s average approval rating was at 42.1 percent on March 24, the day Barr released his “summary of principal findings.” A week later it was exactly the same. On April 18, when the redacted Mueller report was released, Trump’s average approval rating was 42 percent. FiveThirtyEight reported 14 polls taken (partially or fully) on or after that date. Trump’s average is now at 41.3 percent.

In simpler terms, it was a flop. So why keep at it ?

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Tags:politics, Trump
Posted in corruption, politics | Comments Closed

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.

Tags:Democrats, politics
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.

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

Trump and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson

Wednesday, May 29th, 2019

I think I see some similarities between the Democrats’ apparent efforts to try to impeach President Trump and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Andrew Johnson was a “war Democrat,” meaning that he was a Democrat who supported the Union. He was Governor of the border state of Tennessee. Lincoln considered the border states critical in saving the Union.

“I hope to have God on my side,” Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said early in the war, “but I must have Kentucky.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Lincoln hesitated to invoke divine sanction of human causes, but his wry comment unerringly acknowledged the critical importance of the border states to the Union cause. Following the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops in April 1861, public opinion in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri was sharply divided and these states’ ultimate allegiance uncertain. The residents of the border were torn between their close cultural ties with the South, on the one hand, and their long tradition of Unionism and political moderation on the other.

In 1864, after Atlanta was taken by Sherman, Lincoln began to think about the situation after the war. He met with Sherman and Grant on March 28, 1865. He had two weeks to live. He talked to them about his plans for after the war ended. Sherman later described the conversation. Lincoln was ready for the post-war period and he told Sherman to assure the Confederate Governor of North Carolina that as soon as the army laid down its arms, all citizens would have their rights restored and the state government would resume civil measures de facto until Congress could make permanent arrangement.

In choosing Johnson as his VP in 1964, Lincoln was doing two things, he was supporting his argument that no state could secede from the Union. The radical Republicans like Stevens and Sumner had taken the position that states had “committed suicide” by seceding. There was even a movement at the Baltimore Convention to nominate someone else, like Fremont who had been the nominee in 1856. The other was allowing the Convention to choose the VP nominee. It did seat some delegations from states, like Tennessee, that were still the scene of fighting. Only South Carolina was excluded.

The Convention was actually assumed to be safe for a Hannibal Hamlin renomination. Instead it voted for Johnson by a large margin. The final ballot results were 494 for Johnson, 9 for Hamlin. Noah Brooks, a Lincoln intimate, later recounted a conversation in which Lincoln told him that there might be an advantage in having a War Democrat as VP. Others, including Ward Hill Lamon, later agreed that Lincoln preferred a border state nominee for VP.

An so, Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, was elected to an office that no one ever considered as likely to become President. No one anticipated Lincoln’s assassination. However there was a significant segment of radical Republicans that wanted to punish the states that had seceded and those who had joined the Confederacy, contrary to Lincoln’s plans. He had intended to restore the local governments, pending Congressional action to restructure the state governments. The Convention was well before Atlanta fell to Sherman’s army and Lincoln was not convinced he would be re-elected. The War Democrat VP nominee would help with border states.

Johnson humiliated himself with his inauguration speech, at which he was suspected to be drunk. He may have been ill; Castel cited typhoid fever,[95] though Gordon-Reed notes that there is no independent evidence for that diagnosis

Six weeks later, Lincoln was assassinated. Johnson was not well prepared to assume the Presidency.

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Tags:Congress, History, politics
Posted in elections, History, politics | Comments Closed

The agriculture war.

Saturday, May 11th, 2019

We are entering a period when the tariff controversy with China is getting serious.

The Wall Street Journal is worried.

A failure to break an impasse in talks in Washington on Friday opened a new phase in the trade fight after more than five months of back-and-forth negotiations. This time, some economists and analysts said, Beijing is taking stock of potential economic damage from higher tariffs.

The U.S. raised punitive tariffs to 25%, from 10%, for $200 billion in goods leaving China on Friday and thereafter. President Trump also ordered staff to begin the paperwork to impose levies on the more than $300 billion worth of everything else China sells to the U.S.

While Beijing has met previous volleys of tariffs from the U.S. by raising duties on American goods—and the government has promised to retaliate—it held its fire. Though China has more limited tariff options, since it imports fewer products from the U.S. than the other way around, the Chinese leadership is also constrained by an economy that is in a shaky recovery from a sharp slowdown.

There is talk of China boycotting US farm products. They tried it a year ago.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war.

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.”

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans.

The boycott failed.

“China has to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans,” Oil World said in its latest newsletter. “The South American supply shortage will make it necessary for China, in our opinion, to import 15 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in October 2018/March 2019, even if the current trade war is not resolved.”

China may not be in good shape to handle a trade war.

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Tags:economics, politics
Posted in corruption, economics, politics | 1 Comment »

Vote Fraud will be the deciding factor in 2020.

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2019

The Democrat Party has been perfecting their techniques of voter fraud for many years. In 1960, the presidential election was determined by vote fraud in Chicago and Texas. Chicago has a long history of stolen elections. It is a joke to many Chicago residents but Chicago determines Illinois’ electoral votes.

Chicago is famous for its history of people voting from the grave and for helping President John F. Kennedy “steal” the 1960 election. (JFK beat Richard Nixon by 9,000 votes in Illinois by capturing what some considered a suspiciously high 450,000 advantage in Cook County.)

Officials insist voter fraud has largely disappeared in Chicago, but Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has said voter fraud and “horrendous” things happen in Chicago.

The city’s election history is even crazier than most people realize, though, with Republican feuds leading to homes being bombed and names being stolen from tombstones just to get extra votes for the “Democratic Machine.”

Texas was just as bad in the days when it was run by Democrats. San Antonio was particularly famous as a corrupt fief of George Parr, a political boss. Lyndon Johnson used his influence with that boss to win the Senate election of 1948 and the presidential election of 1960.

A study of Lyndon B. Johnson provides new evidence that the 36th President stole his first election to the United States Senate, in 1948.

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found.

In 1960, Lyndon proved his worth again. Those problems have also fueled continuing scholarly interest in the 1960 presidential election because of the difficulty in determining whether Kennedy really won through honest means or corrupt ones.

Scholarly analysis of the question of how Kennedy won has focused, quite rightly, on administration of the electoral process in two crucial states: Illinois and Texas. Kennedy ultimately was credited with the electoral votes of both, which gave him victory in the Electoral College tally. The problem with answering the question of how he prevailed there is twofold in nature. In Illinois, the most recent and fair-minded study (Kallina’s Kennedy v. Nixon) concludes that sufficient evidence does not exist to determine whether Chicago’s Democratic machine stole more votes there than Republicans did downstate. Texas presents a different kind of problem. A system of free and fair elections in the modern sense had not yet taken hold on the ground there in 1960. Voter fraud was fairly common, safeguards to prevent it were few, and 1960 was no different in those respects. Thus, the most dispassionate analysis of this issue from the perspective of fifty years later is that we will never know whether Kennedy really “won,” in the sense of what result an entirely honest and effective administration of the electoral process in Illinois and Texas would have produced on Election Day in 1960.

Now, we face another at-risk election. The most recent vote fraud methods include The “Motor Voter Act,” passed by a 1993 Democrat Congress and signed by Bill Clinton and which included voter registration with driver’s license renewal. No proof of citizenship is required and states like California have now legalized drivers’ licenses for illegals, facilitating non-citizen voting. In 2018, some precincts in California had 114% voter turnout, reminiscent of Philadelphia. Also, 11 California counties have more registered voters than citizens.

Judicial Watch says 11 counties in California are in violation of a section of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to do a “reasonable list maintenance” of voter registration lists.

To support its argument, it compares population numbers in the 2011-2015 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to California’s registered voters — which combines those on active and inactive voter lists. By that calculation, 11 counties have more total registered voters than adults over the age of 18.

“In our experience, these kinds of registration rates indicate a failure to comply with the voter list maintenance requirements of the NVRA,” the letter says, adding that such inaccuracies undermine public confidence in the electoral process.

Naturally, the California Attorney General denied this and accused Judicial Watch of “Voter Suppression.”

Other attempts at validation of voter registration, this time in Texas, resulted in harassment and attempted prosecution of those trying to control vote fraud.

Engelbrecht said shortly after founding and leading True to Vote and King Street Patriots, she was visited by law enforcement agencies and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), even though outside of filing their tax returns, she and her husband never dealt with any government agency in nearly two decades of running their small business.

“We had never been audited. We had never been investigated, but all that changed upon submitting applications for the non-profit statuses of True the Vote and King Street,” she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee.

“Since that filing in 2010, my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, my family and I have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies,” she added.

That, of course, was when Obama was president. Elijah Cummings is the Congressman who is attempting to obtain President Trump’s and his family’s financial records for a fishing expedition.

The latest method, which is related to the increasing use of mail-in ballots, is called “ballot harvesting” or Vote Harvesting”

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”

The voting system in California is so bad that a Democrat in California’s 21st district who was down by 6.4% on election night ended up winning three weeks later.

The Democrats don’t even hide their blatant voter fraud anymore – they just pass laws to make election fixing legal and the Republican party just sits back and allows it.

How does it work? Absentee ballots used to be available to those who would be unable to vote in person on election day. This has changed. Some states have 100% “mail-in” balloting. All votes are by mail and there is no way to verify if the voter is the one who fills out the ballot. A variation on this is for a “volunteer” to visit homes of voters and “offer to carry the ballot to the polling place.” If the “Volunteer” happens to be a Democrat activist who visits only homes with Democrat registration, 100% voter turnout for Democrats is assured. There are even a few instances where the “Volunteer” visits a home where a Democrat voter resides along with a Republican voter or two. The “Volunteer” accepts the Democrat ballot but not the others. Worse, the “Volunteer” might accept all the ballots but discard the ones from “the wrong party.”

This method relies on the “Motor Voter Law,” which registers low interest or illegal voters, then the passage of 100% “mail-in” ballot laws. The 2018 election was a test run of the method and it worked like a charm in Orange County CA and in Phoenix AZ, where late votes defeated Martha McSally in the Senate race. It will be ready for 2020 and Republicans had better be prepared.

Tags:election, politics
Posted in corruption, elections, politics | Comments Closed

The Mueller Report

Friday, April 19th, 2019

The Mueller report was released to the public with sections redacted that apply to possible future prosecutions or Grand Jury proceedings. Naturally, this created a firestorm among Democrats hopefuls. Ans conspiracy theorists on the Left.

The actual volumes (There are two) are here.

Useful analysis is here on volume 2, which seems to be very subjective.

Another opinion.

In this sense: At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.

Everything else in the Trump-Russia affair flowed from that one question. Paul Manafort’s shady finances would not have come under investigation were it not for that question. Carter Page would not have been wiretapped were it not for that question. Michael Flynn would not have been interviewed by the FBI were it not for that question. Zillions of hours on cable TV would not have been expended on Trump-Russia were it not for that question. And in the largest sense, there would have been no Mueller investigation were it not for that question.

A more complete analysis is here.

On page 323 of the report, the special counsel acknowledges that he is aware of the origin of the Russia hoax because he quotes the president’s Aug. 24, 2018, tweet asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele and “his phony and corrupt Dossier.” But somehow neither Sessions, nor Mueller, nor anyone else has been able to put 2 + 2 together and come up with the correct answer.

Why did the investigation not end there ?

The fact that there is no mention of Steele at all in Volume 1 of the report (which covers Russian interference in the 2016 election) is shocking since it was his unverified dossier that promoted the lie that the Russians had control of Trump because they possessed compromising material on the real estate tycoon. Steele’s participation with Russian sources is the most direct evidence of Russian interference in the election, but Mueller showed no interest in it because it implicated Democrats.

Steele and his “dossier” was the reason for the FISA warrants. Oh well.

Volume 2 (which covers obstruction) does on page 235 acknowledge Steele’s existence as the source of what even Mueller calls the “unverified allegations” published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. It also notes on pages 239 and 240 that Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the phony dossier on Jan. 6, 2017, and that the briefing was subsequently leaked to the public.

Moreover, page 246 acknowledges that the president wanted the FBI to investigate Steele’s allegations on Jan. 27, 2017, but that Comey talked him out of it.

Can’t have that. It would ruin the story.

Most telling perhaps is that there is no direct reference to GPS Fusion in the entire report other than that anonymous reference by Corallo to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Nor for that matter is there any reference to the Perkins Coie law firm that was the go-between that hired GPS Fusion on behalf of the DNC to generate the phony Steele dossier.

The story will continues with lies instead of facts,

Tags:politics
Posted in corruption, politics | Comments Closed

Some thoughts on what reform in healthcare would look like.

Monday, April 1st, 2019

I have previously posted some articles on the French healthcare system, which is the best in Europe.

Here is an article on the French system.

The French citizen or resident joins Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie deTravailleurs Salariés (CNAMTS)—health insurance organisation for salaried workers. That covers about 80% of the population now and it pays 80% (often more like 70%) of a fee schedule for the doctor visit although specialists are allowed to charge more. French doctors are divided for payment and fee schedule purposes into three “sectors” after 1980. Sector 1 doctors agreed to abide by the fee schedule established in 1960, modified for inflaton and technological changes. They are mostly primary care doctors although some had waivers from the fee schedule prior to 1971 because they were more experienced or had great reputations. Few are still practicing. Sector 2 doctors could set their own fees but reimbursement was still determined by the fee schedule. These two categories correspond roughly to Medicare assignment in the US. If you accept assignment, you agree to accept Medicare payment as the full payment (or 80% of it plus the Medi-Gap payment).

The French have private insurance companies that provide what we call “Medi-Gap policies for Medicare. Theirs cover everyone.

It seems unlikely to me that Democrats would accept a health plan that allowed balance billing, which is the only way to control costs, short of pure rationing. The French basically provide a fee schedule that is the same for everyone but which allows doctors to charge more if the patient is willing to pay. For example, I called the office of a new internist last week to schedule an appointment. The clerk required that I submit all my insurance information, not my health status, and the doctor would decide if he would see me. If he is that busy, perhaps he could justify charging more.

Here is another article from that series explaining the French system.

French primary care physicians are paid less than American but medical school in France does not require a college degree and is free. I suspect that system might be more attractive in the US than many realize.

Unfortunately, such a radical reform is unlikely. There are other options under consideration.

(more…)

Tags:health care, politics
Posted in health reform, medicine, politics, technology | Comments Closed

The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year,. two small activist groups planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.

groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.

The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.

“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.

The other “activist” group present was The “Indigenous Peoples March” made up of American Indian protestors.

We stand together to bring awareness to the injustices affecting Indigenous men, women and children as Indigenous peoples and lands from North, Central and South America, Canada, Pacific Islands, Oceania, Asia, Africa as well as the Caribbean diaspora are a target of genocide.

“We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.” – Malcolm Fraser

This is certainly true of those who live on reservations and maintain the primitive practices of pre-Columbian aboriginals.

That certainly was not true of Ely S Parker, who was the Colonel on US Grant’s staff who wrote out the surrender documents at Appomattox Courthouse which ended the Civil War.

Parker was born in 1828 as the sixth of seven children to Elizabeth and William Parker, of prominent Seneca families, at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).[1] He was named Ha-sa-no-an-da and later baptized Ely Samuel Parker. His father was a miller and a Baptist minister.[2] The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Ely had a classical education at a missionary school, was fully bilingual speaking Seneca as well as English, and went on to college. He spent his life bridging his identities as Seneca and a resident of the United States.

The confrontation between Indian activist Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann was staged with a cameraperson behind Phillips recording Phillips’ version of the incident. The result was a national uproar that has not settled down yet.

Fortunately for the boys, the Black Israelites had been recording their own video for an hour. It showed that Phillips approached the boys and precipitated the confrontation, which was peaceful.

The blogosphere has been correcting the record while the MSM spreads lies. That may change as the boy’s family has hired a libel attorney. Apologies are starting to roll in. I expect there will be quite a few although some media sources are doubling down.

Part of this story is the media’s war on Catholics. It might just be related to the next Supreme Court nomination.

An excellent discussion this incident has appeared today and makes some additional good points.

Mark Steyn has anatomized with his customary insight.

There is, Steyn noted, a “strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors—as in the stampede of congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times.” Just so. And here is the kicker: “Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay—which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.”

What is it with the cringing right ?

How is the shutdown going ?

Friday, January 11th, 2019

We are now in week three of the partial government “shutdown” over the refusal of Democrats to fund any of Trump’s wall. They see this as another “Read My Lips” situation which, if they can make Trump back down, it will kill his re-election campaign just as it did to Bush in 1992.

But Trump’s base takes the wall itself seriously, and, like George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign pledge on taxes, the wall has become the president’s “read my lips” albatross. His supporters may not abandon him over it, but Trump’s re-election hinges entirely on their enthusiasm. Yes, they will vote for him, but will they engage in the get-out-the-vote activities that drive to the polls enough additional voters to put Trump over the top?

How is that going ? Even Texas Monthly, no friend of Republicans agrees.

Jet skis dropping off pregnant women. Chinese border crossers in fancy workout attire. A park full of could-be spies. These sights of the Rio Grande are almost hallucinatory, but they don’t seem to alarm Spratte. They seem to fatigue him. Not long ago, he says, agents’ mouths would drop open when they’d hear about a group of fifty immigrants getting caught. Now, he says, “if you tell me, I’ve got a group of fifty, I need help, I would laugh at you. If you said, I’ve got a group of three hundred, now that would be cool, because that would be a new record. And the records are only going to keep increasing.” (According to Spratte, agents in the Valley have had a single pickup of around 280 immigrants.)

Trump visited the wall yesterday and CNN’s Jim Acosta gave Trump a hand at making his case.

I know this might be hard for you to comprehend Jimbo, but the reason why all of Twitter has been mocking you today is because you were at a part of the border WITH A WALL. So yes, of course it was working. Replicate that across the border & we’ll all be safer. #RealNews #ByeBye

It did not look too good for Acosta to brag about how safe it was near a wall. OR fence, if you prefer.

The Democrat strategy was also questioned by their own side.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t blow it.

The surest way for them to do so would be to keep on their present path of emphasizing that the government must be reopened because of how the shutdown is hurting federal workers.

Government employees are not the most sympathetic figures in the present controversy. The “shutdown” has inconvenienced few citizens as the Obama tactic of trying to inflict as much pain as possible is not in use this time.

Then, of course, anything that detracts from the narrative is excluded. KUSI anchors revealed on air that CNN requested, then declined, to use their border reporter after finding out his coverage of a broadly successful San Diego border barrier didn’t match their preferred narrative.

Whoops !

The final act is yet to open but probably is related to this. The Ninth Circuit once again ruled that the injunction against deporting DACA recipients should stand. This happened before and the Supreme Court had only 8 members at the time, who tied 4 to 4. Now there are 9 Supreme Court justices.

In an opinion issued today, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit upheld a federal district court’s order requiring the government to keep the DACA program in place. Although the 9th Circuit’s ruling went against the government, the decision likely helped the government’s cause at the Supreme Court, because the justices rarely grant petitions for review before the courts of appeals have ruled; the justices prefer to have the benefit of those courts’ opinions, even if they often do not follow them.

The challengers’ response to the government’s petition is currently due on December 5. Assuming that the court does not extend that deadline, the justices could announce as soon as mid-January whether they will take up the dispute.

The last time this happened, the Democrats were negotiating with Trump. AS soon as the ruling was upheld, they stopped. Why legislate if the Courts will do it for you ? Remember, Obama himself said his DACA ruling was unconstitutional.

Tags:Obama, politics
Posted in elections, immigration, politics | Comments Closed

A Brief History…

Posts Tagged ‘politics’

Why impeachment now?

The War on Trump. Stage Two.

Trump and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson

The agriculture war.

Vote Fraud will be the deciding factor in 2020.

The Mueller Report

Some thoughts on what reform in healthcare would look like.

The Covington story and hatred of Catholics.

How is the shutdown going ?

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