The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

O(n^2)

Those of us who've worked in the computer sciences for decades are well aware of "scalability." A system (hardware and software) that works well for a small set of end-users (or devices or data points) must often be capable of being scaled upward to accommodate hundred or thousands or even millions of end-users (or devices or data points).

Proponents of Big Intrusive Government (B.I.G.) make the tacit assumption that federal government functions and federal government control are scalable. That a centralized "server" (the federal bureaucracy) can be scaled to accommodate hundreds of millions of clients (individuals and businesses) and do this efficiently and cost-effectively. That, for example, universal health care (current euphemism—"Medicare for all") or education policy controlled by a centralized government would be efficient and effective. After all, if localized or private control of healthcare or education works, all we need to do is scale it upward and make it a federal government function. Problem is—it doesn't scale!

And therein lies the problem and the inherent fallacy of the effectiveness of B.I.G. To try to overcome the scalability problem, proponents of B.I.G. institute a tsunami of regulations that dictate how clients should behave, how they should interact with one another, how much freedom of choice, movement, and action they should have—all in then hope of mitigating an insurmountable scalability problem.

Francis Turner describes this using communications theory:
...A classic bit of communications theory is that such a network has O(n^2) potential relationships between the nodes. 2 nodes have 1 potential relationship. 4 nodes (twice as many) has 6 potential relationships (6 times as many). 8 nodes (twice again) has 28 potential relationships.

100 nodes => 450 relationships
1,000 nodes => 499,500 relationships—nearly half a million.

And in a client-server network, the server has to be ready to manage every single relationship. In peer-to-peer, each node has a hand in managing its own relationships, and maybe a few others along the way. The work is distributed.

And it finally got through my head: NO server, no matter how large and how powerful, could keep up with O(n^2). Even if it were perfectly designed and never broke down, there was some number of nodes that would crash the server. It was mathematically unavoidable. You HAVE TO distribute the management as close as possible to the nodes, or the system fails.
But proponents of B.I.G, led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren along with a significant percentage of all Democrats, rely on magical thinking, not communication theory, to define their ideology. Let O(n^2) (an illuminating technical discussion can be found at this link) be damned, centralized control is their future!!

Even if we reject the mathematics, common sense (and a lifetime of experience) indicates that the closer the server is to the client, the better and more efficient the service. A local server will be more responsive to the demands of local clients. The server can be tuned to the local environment. At a local level, peer-to-peer processing flourishes, eliminating the demands placed on the centralized server.

As the Democratic Party becomes a left-wing entity, we increasingly hear suggestions that capitalism is predatory and that socialism is "the way" forward. Forget the fact that socialism has recently led to ruin in places like Venezuela, Dems would argue that Scandanavia is a counter-example. But is that a valid argument as the Dem's push for more and more B.I.G?

Turner comments:
Lefties in the US tend to talk about how wonderful Scandinavian nations are (high taxes, equality, blah blah), they totally miss that in Scandinavia everything from Hospitals to Electricity to the Internet is regulated and financed at a local level. Sure there are coordinating bodies and financial transfers from richer places to poorer ones but the locals raise most of the money from local sources and they control it all too. Moreover the Scandinavians do not control markets (or when they do – e.g. with Norwegian farmers – they subsidize the farmer and his land but don’t set prices on the outputs) so the market still operates and consumers get to decide whether they want locally produced subsidized stuff or foreign not-subsidized stuff. The US probably should do more things like Scandinavia, but to do that the US would need to be cutting most of the federal bureaucracy, and something tells me that all those people who say the US should be more like Scandinavia don’t actually mean it that way…
Because the Bernie Sanders in our politics cannot respond to O(n^2) in any meaningful way, they simply ignore it, just as they ignore the repeated failures of their model when it has been applied in the real world. They also ignore the very real potential that centralized control can become totalitarian control. Just ask any citizen of Venezuela, where the current inflation rate—a result of the socialist B.I.G model—exceeds 24,000 (!!!) percent.

UPDATE:
------------------

In the body of this post, I noted that regulation is the mother's milk of B.I.G. The current President is a sworn enemy of B.I.G. but unlike establishment GOP and Dem politicians, he's actually done something about it. He's reduced federal government regulations—substantially. James Freeman writes:
History shows that when a new President arrives in Washington, many elements of his campaign agenda do not survive the first 100 days in office. Others are jettisoned over the course of the following several months as political hopes collide with Beltway reality. Yet after a promising start in 2017, it appears that Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate government red tape is not only still active but may even be accelerating.

That’s the news today from Washington’s unofficial scorekeeper of the federal regulatory burden, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Over the years, candidates too numerous to count have promised to streamline and reduce Washington’s myriad rules and regulations. By Mr. Crews’s tabulation, the current occupant of the White House is one politician who is actually exceeding his signature promise in this area.

Mr. Crews recalls that Mr. Trump promised that his administration would knock out two rules for every new one added. The tabulation gets a little complicated, but Mr. Crews reports that Mr. Trump is delivering more than he promised. Specifically, Mr. Crews counts five deregulatory actions for every one regulatory rule-making during the Trump administration.

Mr. Crews also notes that by this metric the pace of red-tape destruction is actually increasing, from a 4-to1 rate in the fall of 2017 to a spring 2018 ratio of six deregulatory rules for each regulatory addition.

Mr. Trump has famously remarked that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful and he’s surely right about that. Mr. Crews figures the President cut the overall cost of federal regulation by $6 billion in 2017 and the White House is hoping to cut the burden by another $10 billion this year.

How beautiful is Mr. Trump’s $6 billion cut in year one in the regulatory costs imposed by Washington on the U.S. economy? It depends on how you look at it. It is certainly a remarkable and welcome change from his predecessor, who in eight years increased the regulatory burden by some $600 billion.
Proponents of Big Intrusive Government (BIG) love regulations. It gives them power, it allows for government to grow endlessly, and it is largely invisible, meaning there is no price to pay at the ballot box. The Dems love BIG, so its not surprising that they are apoplectic about reduced regulation, dishonestly suggesting that it somehow puts us all at risk. Nonsense!

Donald Trump should be commended for keeping a campaign promise that needed to be kept.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Break-in = "Investigative Entry"

Let's consider a bit of alternative history.

On the evening of June 17, 1972, burglars working at the behest of the Nixon administration broke into the offices of the DNC. Once the break-in became public knowledge, the Nixon administration, senior officials within the intelligence community and the FBI, and their allies in the media (like I said, this is alternative history) stated emphatically that it wasn't a "break-in," but rather a legitimate "investigative entry." They argued that the intent was to look for evidence that members of the DNC were colluding with the then-hated Russians.

When asked what evidence they had to justify the break-in (oops, "investigative entry"), they informed inquiring minds that they used a unsubstantiated dossier paid for by Nixon and the GOP. The dossier was proof positive of wrong doing, they claimed, and brought it to a judge to get a warrant for their entry. Oh ... I almost forgot, they never told the judge about the provenance of the dossier. When asked for further information by Democrats, they refused, citing "national security." The members of the Nixon administration further noted that the "investigative entry" was intended to protect the DNC and that investigative entries are quite legitimate when national security is at stake.

The Democrats formed congressional committees to investigate, but were accused by the GOP and their media allies (remember, alternative history) of traitorous conduct, attacks on the FBI and intelligence community. The DoJ refused to turn over critical documents, citing national security.

A member of the intelligence community, later called "deep throat," leaked exculpatory information to Woodward and Bernstein, who did little additional investigation but rather wrote piece after piece justifying the "investigative entry" and attacking anyone who questioned their belief in the high moral standards and patriotism of the burglars (oops, investigative entrants). Others in pro-Nixon media were oddly incurious about the strange events that surrounded the Watergate investigative entry, but at the same time defended the President. Not a single GOP member questioned the legality or ethics of Watergate, no one was indicted, and Nixon served out his term.

Sound ridiculous? Sure does.

But here's the thing. Change the dates, the terminology, the parties, and the players, and by analogy, this is exactly what's happening with the Crossfire Hurricane scandal. And BTW, if even 25 percent of the claims of wrongdoing for Crossfire Hurricane are proven true, this Obama administration scandal makes Watergate look like a school yard prank.

Monday, May 28, 2018

The Evidence

I've spent a lot of time on the Crossfire Hurricane scandal (e.g., here, here, and here) because it is an epic example of gross government misconduct accepted with a wink and a nod by a corrupt Obama administration. Sure, the Democrats are sanguine about the whole affair, using a variety of magical thinking that: (1) denies that it even happened, even though one of the principles, James Clapper, states that it did, or (2) justifies an intelligence operation directed by a sitting Democratic administration against an GOP opponent, unprecedented in U.S. history.

The Democrats, along with their trained hamsters in the media, are working feverishly to make it all go away, suggesting that the "threat to democracy" is the victim of this surveillance, not the weaponized government agencies that conducted the surveillance.

The Dems conveniently refuse to ask: (1) whether Barack Obama, the sitting president was aware of the surveillance; (2) whether he or one of his direct reports (e.g., AG Loretta Lynch) authorized it, (3) what was done with the 'intelligence' that was gathered (e.g., was it shared with operatives from the Clinton campaign), and (4) why a Clinton/DNC opposition research dossier, developed with the help (collusion?) of "Russians" was used as a lever to justify surveillance to find "collusion" with the Russians? Nah ... those questions aren't important to those who are oh-so worried about "Threats to Democracy" ... nothing to see here ... move along.

Andrew McCarthy, an ex-Federal Prosecutor, provides us with a conceptual view from 10,000 feet when he writes:
As progressivism has magnified the administrative state, the self-image of federal bureaucrats has become technocratic altruism: Let us explain what’s going on; after all, we’re just selflessly looking out for you, calling agenda-free balls and strikes. Think of Barack Obama, dyed-in-the-wool leftist, insisting he’s just a pragmatic, non-ideological problem-solver.

Is this bureaucracy “the deep state”? That’s an exaggeration — try, say, China or Turkey if you want to see what a real deep state looks like. Nevertheless, our modern form of government does make technocrats a force to be reckoned with, and they abide supervision and oversight only by other progressives. When a constitutionalist has the temerity to observe that technocrats are subordinate to executive political leadership and must answer to the legislature that created and funds their agencies, they brood about their “independence.” In their minds, they are an unaccountable fourth branch of government — at least until their fellow non-ideological pragmatists return to power.

For this species of arrogance, setting the narrative is a jealously guarded prerogative. We are to understand the bureaucracy’s work as unimpeachably noble and that so, therefore, are its tactics. Consequently, the government’s “cooperator” is never to be called a spy. He’s a “confidential informant” or, as the FBI’s former Director James Comey put it in a tweet this week, a “confidential human source.”
As Crossfire Hurricane unfolds, progressives have leaped to defend the federal bureaucracy, suggesting that anyone who questions the unprecedented surveillance of the Trump campaign is somehow attacking the FBI and our other intelligence services; that proven liars such as Comey, Brennan and Clapper are beyond reproach, and that their version of events is be accepted without question.

McCarthy summarizes nicely:
In the Trump–Russia affair, officials of the Obama-era intelligence agencies suggest that there are grounds to believe that the Trump campaign was in a traitorous conspiracy with the Kremlin. What grounds? They’d rather not say. You’ll just have to trust them as well-meaning, non-partisan pros who (all together now) can’t be expected to divulge methods and sources.

Countering that are not only Trump fans but growing ranks of security-state skeptics. The Obama administration blatantly politicized the government’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus. Their Chicken Little shrieks that public disclosure of FISA warrants and texts between FBI agents would imperil security have proven overblown at best (and, in some instances, to be cynical attempts to hide embarrassing facts). “Trust us” is not cutting it anymore.

In the end, it is not about who the spies are. It is about why they were spying. In our democratic republic, there is an important norm against an incumbent administration’s use of government’s enormous intelligence-gathering capabilities to — if we may borrow a phrase — interfere in an election. To justify disregarding that norm would require strong evidence of egregious wrongdoing. Enough bobbing and weaving, and enough dueling tweets. Let’s see the evidence.
But that's the Dem's core problem. There is NO evidence—only a need to weaponize the government bureaucracy again a political opponent that their administration found objectionable/unacceptable.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

A James Bond Villain

The Crossfire Hurricane ("Spygate") scandal just won't go away. As a consequence, the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media careen from cries of "constitutional crisis" to "attacks on our democracy," from obfuscation to ad hominem attacks, from desperate attempts to change the subject (OMG, Donald Trump Jr. met with a Ukrainian representative—the humanity!!), from specious claims that the Congress has no oversight role to play with our intelligence agencies, from lengthy dissertations on the definition of what a "spy" is, to appeals to authority based on the words of proven liars like James Clapper and John Brennan (not to mention Jim Comey).

Gosh, if we are to believe the Dems, Donald Trump is a Master Villain who would rival any James Bond character. From his lair at Mira Lago, he colluded with Russia to undermine our elections while at the same time defeating a slam-dunk Dem candidate who led in all the polls and was heir apparent to the beloved Barack Obama. And to quote Sharyl Attkisson, he "was so good at covering it up he’s managed to outwit our best intel and media minds who've searched for irrefutable evidence for two years [and found absolutely none]."

On its face, this is so ridiculous it's laughable, were it not for the deadly serious game being played. The Dems want to unseat an elected president and will use any means necessary to do so. Lies, innuendo, fantasy allegations are par for the course, but the Crossfire Hurricane ("Spygate") scandal isn't about that. It involves something far more sinister—the weaponization of our intel agencies by a sitting administration against its political opponent.

The Democrats and their trained media hamsters along with most progressives are making a lot of noise, but they're having trouble dismissing the core elements of Crossfire Hurricane . First there is irrefutable evidence that the intelligence operation was real, it even had a code name—Crossfile Hurricane—that was leaked to the Dem-friendly New York Times to try to get ahead of the ongoing revelations.

Sharyl Attkisson describes other known elements of the operation as we currently understand them:
Wiretap fever. Secret surveillance was conducted on no fewer than seven Trump associates: chief strategist Stephen Bannon; lawyer Michael Cohen; national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn; adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner; campaign chairman Paul Manafort; and campaign foreign policy advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos ...

[Of course, in the fevered imaginations of progressives, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a decorated military veteran with over 30 years of service was somehow influenced by the Bond Villain who is Donald Trump to become a traitor. Interesting though that only the Trump campaign was surveilled, even after it was leaned that Hillary Clinton maintained a secret, unprotected email server, was almost definitely hacked by the Russians and other adversaries, and deleted 33,000 emails that may have shown, what, Russian collusion??]

National security letters. Another controversial tool reportedly used by the FBI to obtain phone records and other documents in the investigation were national security letters, which bypass judicial approval.

Improper use of such letters has been an ongoing theme at the FBI. Reviews by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General found widespread misuse under Mueller — who was then FBI director — and said officials failed to report instances of abuses as required.

Unmasking. “Unmasking” — identifying protected names of Americans captured by government surveillance — was frequently deployed by at least four top Obama officials who have subsequently spoken out against President Trump: James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence; Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Susan Rice, former national security adviser; Sally Yates, former deputy attorney general.

[Gosh, those folks were pretty close the Barack Obama, but we can all rest assured he didn't know a thing about this operation, the unmasking or anything else. ]

Changing the rules. On Dec. 15, 2016 — the same day the government listened in on Trump officials at Trump Tower — Rice reportedly unmasked the names of Bannon, Kushner and Flynn. And Clapper made a new rule allowing the National Security Agency to widely disseminate surveillance material within the government without the normal privacy protections.

Media strategy. Former CIA Director John Brennan and Clapper, two of the most integral intel officials in this ongoing controversy, have joined national news organizations where they have regular opportunities to shape the news narrative — including on the very issues under investigation.

Clapper reportedly secretly leaked salacious political opposition research against Trump to CNN in fall 2017 and later was hired as a CNN political analyst. In February, Brennan was hired as a paid analyst for MSNBC.

Leaks. There’s been a steady and apparently orchestrated campaign of leaks — some true, some false, but nearly all of them damaging to President Trump’s interests.

A few of the notable leaks include word that Flynn was wiretapped, the anti-Trump “Steele dossier” of political opposition research, then-FBI Director James Comey briefing Trump on it, private Comey conversations with Trump, Comey’s memos recording those conversations and criticizing Trump, the subpoena of Trump’s personal bank records (which proved false) and Flynn planning to testify against Trump (which also proved to be false).

Friends, informants and snoops. The FBI reportedly used one-time CIA operative Stefan Halper in 2016 as an informant to spy on Trump officials.

Another player is Comey friend Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor, who leaked Comey’s memos against Trump to The New York Times after Comey was fired. We later learned that Richman actually worked for the FBI under a status called “Special Government Employee.”

The FBI used former reporter Glenn Simpson, his political opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele to compile allegations against Trump, largely from Russian sources, which were distributed to the press and used as part of wiretap applications.
There's a lot we still don't know yet, but what we do know has the Dems circling the wagons. We also know that something sinister was happening. The big question is, Who authorized it?

Friday, May 25, 2018

Whatcha Gonna Do About it?

Mark Steyn does an in-depth analysis of the Crossfire Hurricane (a.k.a "Spygate") scandal that reads like a spy novel (read the whole thing). Yeah, I know, the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media have spent days trying to redefine what a "spy" is, so they can argue that any claim of "spying" by our intelligence agencies is inaccurate. They're terrified that this will be traced back to the golden era of the Obama administration and tarnish what they and they alone characterize as a "scandal free" administration.

Using a winning strategy buried deep in the Benghazi and IRS scandal playbooks, the Dems are working feverishly to obfuscate and stonewall. Led by Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff—the tweedle dee and tweedle dum of sanctimonious dishonesty, they're viciously attacking those who are trying to understand what happened and scrambling to do anything to misdirect the public's attention. Innocuous meetings that focused on digging dirt on Hillary Clinton have been twisted into "Russian collusion" and worse, used to justify FBI/CIA spying (that word again) on an opposition opponent. Ironically, unproven dirt on Trump, paid for by Clinton and the DNC has become the Dem's gold standard.

But the truly shocking thing is that not a single prominent Democrat politician has expressed alarm that our intelligence agencies may have been used for partisan purposes. Not one.

Kim Strassel, a dogged journalist who has followed this breaking scandal from the beginning, writes:
Democrats and their media allies are again shouting “constitutional crisis,” this time claiming President Trump has waded too far into the Russia investigation. The howls are a diversion from the actual crisis: the Justice Department’s unprecedented contempt for duly elected representatives, and the lasting harm it is doing to law enforcement and to the department’s relationship with Congress.

The conceit of those claiming Mr. Trump has crossed some line in ordering the Justice Department to comply with oversight is that “investigators” are beyond question. We are meant to take them at their word that they did everything appropriately. Never mind that the revelations of warrants and spies and dirty dossiers and biased text messages already show otherwise.

We are told that Mr. Trump cannot be allowed to have any say over the Justice Department’s actions, since this might make him privy to sensitive details about an investigation into himself. We are also told that Congress—a separate branch of government, a primary duty of which is oversight—cannot be allowed to access Justice Department material. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes can’t be trusted to view classified information—something every intelligence chairman has done—since he might blow a source or method, or tip off the president.

Kurt Schlichter
adds his acerbic commentary:
Think about this – a significant portion of our country, including a majority of its elite, thinks that it’s A-OK for a Democrat administration to spy on a Republican candidate. Think hard about that. And think about whether or not we can ever put the pieces of our shattered republic back together again if we can’t even agree that using government power against our political enemies is a bad thing.

But the terrifying truth is that liberals and their Never Trump enablers actually think this kind of tyranny is a good thing. You see, they think Normal Americans are so transcendently awful (and, even more importantly, that the elite’s power so precious) that all is fair in order to stifle their opponents’ collective voice.
But back to Mark Steyn. He notes that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and Strzok are now in full protective mode. They were caught doing dirty stuff, so now they must double down on their lies. He writes:
... They took tools designed to combat America's foreign enemies and used them against their own citizens and their political opposition. It was an intentional subversion of the electoral process conducted at the highest level by agencies with almost unlimited power. And, if they get away with it, they will do it again, and again and again. That's what Brennan's telling us on Twitter, and Clapper on "The View":

Yeah? So what? Whatcha gonna do about it?

Good question.
If the Dems, their trained hamsters in the media, denizens of the deep state, and even a few GOP #NeverTrumpers have their way, nothing will be done about it.

The Dems have decided that Hillary Clinton didn't lose, that instead, a deep conspiracy involving the Russians and Donald Trump allowed Trump to win. That blue states like PA or MI, or WS were swayed by the Russkies. There's no evidence whatsoever to support that fantastical thinking, but that doesn't seem to matter. The Dems purposely and cynically conflate Russian mischief in social media with "Russian collusion" with the Trump campaign. Now it seems that conflating those two issues allowed the Obama administration to weaponize intelligence agencies in some bizarre attempt to harm Trump before and then after the election.

That's a MAJOR scandal. It's not surprising that the Dems are scared.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Nice

The blog Declination discusses something we encounter almost every day—the notion that being "nice" always trumps doing or saying something that is not perceived to be nice. In general, that's true. Most of us try to be nice, to measure our language, to avoid direct criticism of others for a more circumspect approach—all in the name of nice. Some refer to this as "civility," and it does have merit. But sometimes (as the saying goes) we lose ourselves for caring. Sometimes we see people use the fact the everyone wants to be nice to bulldoze their ideas and ideology, knowing that people hesitate to object because they don't want to be perceived as "not nice."

Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) couch all of their positions in "nice." For example: The City Council of Seattle decided that a head tax of $500 per employee should be levied on big companies in order to ease a housing crisis that has created additional homelessness. They argue that the tax would help house the homeless. That's nice, but wrong. Similarly, in CA, there's a move afoot to provide "free" healthcare for illegal immigrants because ... well, illegal immigrants have health care needs too. That's also nice, but wrong. Those who argue that the costs of such measures are significant, that they will have unintended consequences, or that they are simply wrong-headed are criticized for being "not nice." The opponents of such "nice" proposals are accused of being against the homeless or anti-immigrant, or in the case of the illegal immigrants, "racist." Of course accusing someone of being a "racist" isn't very nice, but SJWs do it ALL the time. It's their cudgel and they use it with glee, along with accusations of misogyny, Islamophobia, bigotry, white privilege and the like. None of those epithets are nice, or accurate, or honest.

Declination writes:
Whether we consciously know it or not, this thinking [the need to be nice] is everywhere, and at some level all people are aware of it. Watch almost any political debate and you will notice the person espousing a “not-nice” opinion will invariably be apologetic; after all, he is quite sorry that his opinion isn’t as nice as his opponent’s. He doesn’t want the spectators (the real arbiters of debate) to think he’s a big meanie.

Note also that the debate opponent with the “nicer” opinion will generally be quite ruthless and cruel to the not-nice debater. After all, since his opinion is not nice, it is permissible to treat him like shit in order to change his opinion into the nice. Furthermore, it exposes his not-niceness for the spectators to see, this winning the debate for the nice. This shows us that this form of rhetorical niceness is conditional. Do not harm the criminal who breaks into your house, but feel free to punch Rightists, because their not-niceness proves they are all Nazis.

This ties into Weaponized Empathy; the notion that your own good nature and desire to be seen as righteous can be turned against you with one sad picture, with one sob story. What, you don’t want to push granny off a cliff, right?

There’s a fallacy buried in all this. Good is not necessarily nice. What is moral may not appear nice, and what appears nice may, in fact, be quite evil. Niceness has little – if any – correlation with goodness. It is good to defend your family from a murderer. It is not nice to the murderer, obviously. This is one of the reasons modern pacifism is rooted in moral cowardice disguising itself as moral superiority.

Social Justice elevates niceness above goodness, and tries to claim the moral high ground in any debate as a result. They are taking advantage of a cheap rhetorical trick. Fortunately, there is an easy defense. Invariably, SJWs will get ugly. Their not-niceness will be exposed. If they sling it at you, you are permitted to sling it right back. Quid pro quo may be the most effective means of combating SJWs. Any tactic they use is now on the table for our use, regardless of how nice it is. Intellectual courage demands it, actually. After all, if a nation lobs a nuke at you, you are not only permitted to nuke them in turn, but morally demanded to do so – else others might get it into their heads that they can lob nukes around without consequence.

The world is not nice. Reality doesn’t care. They are hard lessons that SJWs have failed to learn because many of us have restrained ourselves out of politeness.
Nice has limits, particularly when it's not reciprocated. It's not nice to call half the country "deplorable." It's not nice to suggest that America is currently a "racist" country. It not nice to ask people to apologize for their "white privilege." It's not nice to shout down a speaker with whom you disagree or even worse, ban that speaker entirely? It's not nice to be selective in the facts you choose to acknowledge. It's not nice to demonize free markets. And when those things happen, the response should be NOT nice. It should NOT be apologetic, it should NOT be circumspect, it should NOT bow at the alter of political correctness. It should NOT worry about name-calling and it should NOT give an inch. After all, SJWs propose nice" but then react to objections not nice. The response should reciprocate.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

The "Sensitive Matters Team"

As more information surrounding the Crossfire Hurricane scandal is released, the hunters are becoming the hunted.

The "hunted" in 2016 were Donald Trump and his campaign team — so threatening the the Washington swamp, so abrasive in tone, and so menacing to Hillary Clinton's campaign and its effort to continue the debacle that was the Obama presidency, the hunters justified any action to bring Trump down, and if he did win, destroy his presidency.

The "hunters" in 2016 were: (1) a Democrat administration that either directly or indirectly, allowed rogue elements of the FBI and other intelligence agencies to surveil the opposition candidate; (2) senior executives of the FBI and other intelligence agencies who not only surveilled, but also actively worked to set up the incoming president after his upset victory, and (3) the Democrats whose hysteria at their collective loss drove them to pursue a patently ridiculous narrative of Russian collusion, leading ultimately to the disclosure of Crossfire Hurricane.

In their early days, the hunters of 2016 has many successes, including multiple leaks that damaged Trump and the appointment of a special counsel. Some of those successes continue to pay dirty dividends, but the halcyon days as the hunters are gone.

Today we learn that James Comey created a "Sensitive Matters Team" within the FBI. Sharyl Attikisson reports:
Newly-examined emails among high-ranking U.S. intel officials at the time—including then-Director James Comey and his chief of staff James Rybicki—reference a “sensitive matter team.”

Based on the context of the emails, the “sensitive matter” appears to be the Trump-Russia narrative, and political opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The research— known as the “Steele dossier”— was peddled to the press and secretly used, in part, to justify controversial FBI wiretaps against at least one Trump associate.

The emails were first obtained by the Justice Department Inspector General and recently turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray Monday asking for the identity of all members of the “sensitive matter team.”

According to Sen. Johnson’s letter, Comey chief of staff Rybicki emailed unidentified recipients on the morning of Jan. 6, 2017 stating, “[Director Comey] is coming to HQ briefly now for an update on the sensitive matter team.”

Later in the day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a few of the salacious, unverified allegations in the Steele dossier. The next day, Comey reported on his briefing in an email to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI General Counsel James Baker and Chief of Staff Rybicki. (All four men have since resigned or been fired from the FBI.)

“I said there was something [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper wanted me to speak to [President Elect Trump] about alone or in a very small group,” Comey wrote in the email. “I then executed the session exactly as I had planned…I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook.” (Clapper now works as a CNN contributor.)
The Comey-Trump meeting was a setup, allowing the hunters to leak the existence of the dossier to the trained hamsters in the mainstream media, who dutifully trumpeted the salacious and false details to the general public. Of course, the hunters never mentioned that Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid for the dossier, even though Comey et al knew about it. The hunters smiled and put a notch in their bow.

But the story doesn't end there. The Democrats, bitter at Trump's victory, thought they were bulletproof (arrow proof?) and allowed their trained hamsters in the media great latitude to create fake news in an effort to damage the new president. They lied, they fabricated, they insisted that evidence of collusion was forthcoming. They became desperate, using innocuous meetings as "proof" of collusion. Their special counsel indicted people close to Trump, but for nothing even remotely connected to collusion.

And now? The entire sordid affair is beginning to unravel ... and not in a good way for 2016's hunters. It's extremely satisfying to watch the hunters and their protectors in the media scramble to control the narrative and protect themselves from humiliation or worse, criminal indictment.

In John Steinbeck's literary classic, The Grapes of Wrath, Muley Graves said, “When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted - that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong: maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong."

The Democrats, along with all in the deep state who decided the would try to negate the results of a democratic election, thought they were strong — you know, the #Resistance and all that. But they confused dishonesty, stridency, venality, viciousness, and manipulation with strength. They may be "fierce," but they aren't "strong."

And maybe, just maybe, they're going to go down.



Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Transformative

FoxNews gets it snark on when it tweets: "Hillary Clinton to get Harvard metal for transformative impact on society." Obviously, FoxNews finds this ironic or amusing. I don't see why ... uh, yeah, I do.

Giving Hillary an award like the one Harvard is providing is like giving Bernie Madoff an award for transformative impact on the financial markets.

After all, both raised huge sums of money while doing their jobs, both made implicit promises about a "return on investment" that donors/investors would receive; both became very wealthy as a consequence of their schemes, both refused to share the inner workings of their money raising schemes, both were dishonest and corrupt, both destroyed evidence of wrongdoing, both had powerful friends who repeatedly looked the other way as illicit activities continued.

In fact, there's only one real difference—Bernie is in jail and Hillary isn't. Bernie is a pariah, but Hillary remains an icon to many.

UPDATE:
--------------

Upon reading this, many of my pro-Hillary progressive friends will be upset. How can I compare HRC with Bernie Madoff, even with a smile? Bernie, after all, is a Ponzi scheme operator who swindled thousands out of their hard earned money. Hillary, on the other hand ... let's take a look.

Hillary and Bill Clinton raised well over $100 million (some say $150 million) for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) over a period of about 16 years. IRS records indicate that just over 6 percent of that money went to the charitable causes they pitched. Six cents on the dollar! What happened to the rest? Law enforcement agencies and the main stream media seem quite uninterested in that very simple question.

But its more than that. Many of the donors to the CGI were from far away places (can you spell Russia?) and there are significant pay-for-play implications for the "donations" made while Hillary was Secretary of State under Barack Obama. Again, Law enforcement agencies and the main stream media seem quite uninterested in finding out whether there was, in fact, pay-for-play.

But its more than that. Hillary used her influence to play fast and loose with taxpayer money. Here's a tiny example:
A company [Long Term Strategy Group] whose president [Jacqueline Newmyer] is "best friends" with Chelsea Clinton [that would be the same Chelsea that 'earned' $600,000 plus 'expenses' per year working part time for the CGI] received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Department of Defense think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents ...

The Office of Net Assessment is so sensitive, the specialized think tank is housed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and reports directly to the secretary.

To date, the Long Term Strategy Group has received $11.2 million in contracts, according to USAspending,gov, a government database of federal contracts.

But after winning a decade of contracts from the Office of Net Assessment, the federal agency is only now in the process of granting clearance to the company. Long Term Strategy Group never operated a secure room on their premises to handle classified materials, according to the Defense Security Service, a federal agency that approves secure rooms inside private sector firms. Long Term Strategy Group operates offices in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.
I know ... this is chicken feed by federal government standards, and yes, everyone in Washington does things like this, but wasn't Hillary supposed to be different? If Donald Trump had done this for his son before he was elected president, there'd be another special prosecutor appointed to investigate.

I repeat ... HRC is dishonest and corrupt, but she's so well-connected and so well-protected that she'll never be held accountable for anything. I guess that makes her "transformative."

Monday, May 21, 2018

Crossfire Hurricane-II

Over the weekend, Donald Trump (justifiably) demanded that the DoJ investigate whether the FBI conducted surveillance on his campaign, who authorized it, and how it was executed. The trained hamsters in the mainstream media immediately got the vapors, suggesting that his "demand" was "authoritarian" and "unprecedented" and that a constitutional crisis was in the offing. The hamsters don't seem nearly as concerned about the authoritarian and unprecedented use of our intelligence agencies against the opponent of the Democratic candidate hand picked by the Obama administration. But whatever.

By making his "demand," Trump has as usual outsmarted the media, forcing them to carry a story they truly want to bury. As a consequence, the Crossfire Hurricane scandal begins to come into public view.

When considering the facts of this situation, murky as they are, it's reasonable to begin using comparisons to Watergate—a scandal that brought down a president. But there really is no comparison. First, in the case of Crossfire Hurricane the president who was either indirectly or directly responsible is no longer in office. Second, the scope of wrongdoing in Crossfire Hurricane is significantly broader and more dangerous, and third, the media had taken on the role of protecting the administration responsible for the scandal rather than uncovering additional information that might help us understand what happened.

Roger Simon writes:
One of the more notable differences between Watergate and the metastasizing scandals involving the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the Obama administration -- subjects of the soon-to-be-released inspector general's report -- is that the media exposed Watergate. They aided and abetted the current transgressions.

By providing a willing and virtually unquestioned repository for every anonymous leaker (as long as he or she was on the "right" side) in Washington and beyond, the press has evolved from being part of the solution to being a major part of the problem. Gone are the days of the true "whistle-blower." Here are the days of the special interest provocateur, shaping public opinion by passing on half-truths and outright lies to their favorite reporter. One might then even call the media, in Orwell's words, "objectively pro-fascist," functioning much in the manner of Pravda and Izvestia during that famous author's time, covertly or overtly pushing the party line in the most slavish and orthodox manner while feigning "objectivity."

CNN, NBC, the Washington Post and The New York Times -- misinforming the public as it hasn't since the days of their great Stalin-excuser Walter Duranty (still pictured on their Pulitzer wall of honor) -- are particularly egregious in this regard. But there are many others.

And the current scandal is far, far worse than Watergate, which, bad as it was, was the coverup of a completely unnecessary buffoon-like break-in during an election that was already won in a landslide. What is being exposed now is an attempt by our highest law enforcement agency working in concert with our intelligence agencies and, evidently, the blessing of the former administration itself to block the candidate of the opposing party, even to defraud and spy on him, that is to, as others have said, "set him up." And then, if they were unsuccessful, make it impossible for him to govern. In addition, in all probability, the same players conspired to make certain Hillary Clinton was not indicted for a crime for which virtually any other American would have done jail time.
There is one other major difference between Crossfire Hurricane and Watergate. My guess is that few of the right people will go to jail. Sure, a few may have to be sacrified, but the deep state and the Dems trained hamsters in the media will work to ensure that the wrongdoing is buried in obfuscation or ignored altogether and that the guilty are protected.

UPDATE (5/22/2018):
------------------------
Investors Business Daily does an excellent job of summarizing the Crossfire Hurricane scandal. It's worth a read.

Like all big government scandals, there's always the opportunity to obfuscate, misdirect, re-interpret obvious wrongdoing in ways the exculpate, recruit trained hamsters in the media to protect the wrongdoers, shrug off blatant lies as if they didn't happen, demonize those who are trying to uncover the truth, and give far too much credence those who have been recruited to protect the perpetrators, rather than uncover the truth. If you pay attention, that's what has already begun to happen.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

The "Professor"

There is no longer any doubt that the FBI used an operative to attempt to penetrate on the Trump campaign during his presidential run (the FBI admitted as much in a conveniently leaked document to the New York Times). There is also no longer any doubt that a concerted intelligence operation focusing on Trump began in 2016 while the presidential campaign was underway. Since this explosive information came out (consider for a moment how Democrats would react if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton has suffered the same thing), there has been a concerted effort to normalize and quash it.

The campaign is being conducted by the Democrat's trained hamsters in the media. The intent is to normalize what is, in all likelihood, the biggest political scandal in United States history. The hamsters at the Washington Post, used the audacious headline, "If the FBI used an Informant, It wasn't to Go After Trump. It was to Protect Him."

Yeah ... riiiight. I suppose that Trump's absolutely justified characterization of the vicious Latino gang, MS-13, wasn't to criticize the gang, but to give them a path for a better future. OMG!! The hamsters have literally crossed over into self-caricature.

But it continues. Here are the trained hamsters at the Washington Post, a once repected journalistic source (my comments are in indented italics), describing the FBI spying on Trump:
For years, the professor has provided information to the FBI and the CIA, according to people familiar with the matter. He aided the Russia investigation both before and after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s appointment in May 2017, according to people with knowledge of his activities ...
So ... we use the "professor" label, rather than a name (more on that in a moment) not so much to identify the man/woman, but to soften his activities ... after all ... professors are harmless academics, right?
The FBI plant first met with Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide. Here's a excerpt from WaPo:
Page and the FBI informant stayed in touch after the conference, meeting several times in the Washington area, Page said. Page said he did not recall exactly what the two men discussed.

“You are asking me about conversations I had almost two years ago,” he [Page] said. “We had extensive discussions. We talked about a bunch of different foreign-policy-related topics. For me to try and remember every nuance of every conversation is impossible.”
Interesting technique here. The hamsters sort of put the person who was spied upon on trail. First, the hamsters ask Page ... not the 'professor' about the conversation, and when Page says he can't remember every detail, there's the subtle implication that he is hiding something. Remember, Page was the target of the FBI via the professor.
Later in their apologia, the WaPo hamsters write this about a young, unpaid assistant, George Papadopoulos to the Trump campaign:
“Please pardon my sudden intrusion just before the Labor Day weekend,” the professor wrote to Papadopoulos in a message described to The Post.

He said he was leading a project examining relations between Turkey and the European Union. He offered to pay Papadopoulos $3,000 to write a paper about the oil fields off the coast of Turkey, Israel and Cyprus, “a topic on which you are a recognized expert.”

It is a long-standing practice of intelligence operatives to try to develop a source by first offering the target money for innocuous research or writing.

The professor invited Papadopoulos to come to London later that month to discuss the paper, offering to pay the costs of his travel. “I understand that this is rather sudden but thought given your expertise, it might be of interest to you,” he wrote.

Papadopoulos accepted. While in London, he met for drinks with a woman who identified herself as the professor’s assistant, before meeting on Sept. 15 with the professor at the Traveler’s Club, a 200-year-old private club that is a favorite of foreign diplomats stationed in London, according to the emails described to The Post.

After Papadopoulos returned to the United States and sent his research document, the professor responded: “Enjoyed your paper. Just what we wanted. $3,000 wired to your account. Pls confirm receipt.”
It's worth noting that the hamsters do not comment on any of this and simply end the piece ... the implicit bribery, the subterfuge, not to mention the impropriety of it all. After all, it's Trump, and that justifies any means necessary.
Like the New York Times piece on Crossfire Hurricane, the writing is matter of fact, bland even. Activities that would have created screams of outrage if perpetrated agains a Democratic candidate are implicitly defined as "long standing practice." The spy is framed as a benign, studious investigator. He "reached out" to a Trump operative. The "professor was a good soldier who "for years ... provided information to the FBI and the CIA, according to people familiar with the matter." Nothing to worry about here, just another case for "the professor.

And then, of course, the coup de grace, that the "professor's name cannot be revealed* because ... "following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts." Conveeeenient! The only people endangered here are senior appointees of the Obama administration.

It's also interesting that the WaPo hamsters don't ask the really important questions, not to mention answering them:

1. Given the obvious sensitivity of the professor's actvities, who in the Obama administration authorized it?
2. How was he/she compensationed for his/her spying and how much as she/he paid? Was it US taxpayer money?
3. What was done with the intelligence he/she gathered? Who was on the distribution list?
4. Was the legality of the spying run by DoJ lawyers and who among them said it was lawful?

Ooops! None of that is the least bit important, at least as far as the hamsters are concerned. This is just routine stuff. Nothing more to see here ... move on.

UPDATE:
-------------------

* The conservative Daily Caller reports:
Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.

The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.

Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.

Papadopoulos now questions Halper’s motivation for contacting him, according to a source familiar with Papadopoulos’s thinking. That’s not just because of the randomness of the initial inquiry but because of questions Halper is said to have asked during their face-to-face meetings in London.

According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”
Hmmm. I guess "the professor," if in fact Halper is the guy, was either fishing or leading his target. Stay classy, FBI.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

2013, 2014, 2015 and 2018

The denizens of the anti-Israel left, along with far too many progressive followers in the USA and Europe, supported by their trained hamsters in the main stream media, are doing what they always do when Israel defends itself against violent attacks by Hamas.

Wrapping themselves in moral outrage, the Left ignores Hamas' long and sordid history of lies and deception, violence and disregard for their own people. Leftists wail about "war crimes;" they demand UN investigations; they characterize acts of was as "protests" or uprising" giving them a revolutionary patina that they so adore; they lament the deaths on "innocent palestinian civilians" and reject subsequent evidence that those civilians are neither "innocent" nor "civilians." They demand "proportionality" implying that an Israeli must die for each Hamas attacker killed. They are useful idiots in an Islamist war to eradicate Israel.

Nothing changes. Hamas becomes violent; Israel protects itself, and the Left wails and spews its own form a bias and hatred ...

Don't believe me? Here are three excepts from posts I made after/during other violent Hamas "uprisings" over the past five years:

I wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2015:
No one has been paying much attention to the palestinians lately, so like a small child that demands that his parents give him time, the palestinians do the only thing they're really, really good at. They throw their version of a violent tantrum. Their leaders incite the populace using phony claims, their imams incite further anger from the mosque, and street gangs use violent attacks against Israeli civilians, police, soldiers and infrastructure to emphasize their "plight." Their intent, of course, is to provoke an aggressive response from the Israelis, after which, they will wail about the disproportionality of the response, the resultant physical damage to their "refugee camps," (actually cities with shopping malls, gas stations, hospitals and the like), the inevitable occurrence of civilian injuries, and the "war crimes" that have resulted.

Leftist politicians and their trained media hamsters in the West will cluck their tongues and condemn Israel for protecting itself, redouble their monetary support for the murderous Hamas regime, and look for UN sanctions against Israel. It's all so predictable, it would be laughable, if not for the carnage.

-----------------------------

I wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2014:
As Palestinian violence escalates in Israel, the Obama administration and their fellow leftists in the worldwide media ramp up the rhetoric that condemns Israel rather than the palestinians who drive cars into civilian crowds or stab innocents on the street. This open letter by Dr. Arieh Eldad, an Israeli Plastic surgeon,(validated by Snopes) has been making the rounds. It presents a counter-narrative:
I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza. She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.

This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilizational conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.

Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not ...

-----------------------------

I wrote wrote this as palestinian violence escalated in 2013:
A cease fire in the current hostilities between Israel and Hamas was announced a few hours ago. It will accomplish nothing, except to give the Palestinian terrorist group a chance to re-arm by smuggling still more long range rockets from Iran. Incredibly, Hillary Clinton has "negotiated" an agreement that has the Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood policing the Gaza border to keep weapons smuggling from happening. Yeah ... right.

Throughout 2012 and prior to recent hostilities, Hamas and its sister terrorist groups in Gaza have launched almost 1000 rockets with the intent of killing Israeli citizens. I was in Eilat, Israel in April when one such rocket landed with a very loud explosion in an empty field. Israel did not respond to that rocket or hundreds of others.

Finally, it did something that Barack Obama has done dozens of times in Afghanistan—it used a weaponized drone to assassinate the terrorist leader of Hamas. When rocket fire escalated, Israel finally acted with precision air power, destroying missiles sites purposely embedded in civilian neighborhoods, next to schools, hospitals, and mosques. Even with precision weapons and great skill, collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths had to occur.

These deaths are the fault of Hamas—and Hamas uses them in what Charles Krauthammer calls "Grief Porn." First, Hamas purposely puts Palestinian civilians in harm's way, then when injuries or deaths inevitably occur, it parades the results of its use of human shields to an all too complicit western media. As I mentioned a few posts back, this is standard operating procedure for Hamas.

Worse, far too many Western diplomats and virtually all Leftists condemn Israel for being "disproportionate" in their defensive response. Michael Goodwin discusses the idiocy of this position:
Double standards are par for the course in the Mideast and all the Jew-hating salons from Turtle Bay to Paris. While the hatred is shouted with a clenched fist on the smoldering streets of Gaza City, equally absurd claims are made by striped-pants diplomats and left-leaning sophisticates who insist Israel is guilty of “disproportionate” force because it uses its huge military advantage.

Their argument moves the goal posts. They tacitly accept Israel’s right to respond, but only up to a point. No matter its losses, the Jewish state must never “escalate” because that would be unfair.

Think about that: Affirmative action has come to the battlefield, where the results must be level for the sake of fairness. Coming soon, the demand that Israel turn over half of its weapons to its enemies. Perhaps Hamas would like an Iron Dome of its own?
But none of this comes as a surprise.It's all part of the Groundhog Day feel to this conflict. The only real outcome is more of the same, postponed until Hamas can smuggle still more weapons under the less-than-watchful eye of the Muslim Brotherhood. Someday, when Hamas' weapons become more deadly, Israel will act more forcefully—as it should. That will be the day that affirmative action on the battle field dies. It will also be the day that Hamas will finally meet its bloody end.
-----------------------------

Only one thing has changed during all of this time. We now have an American President who is considerably less receptive to the anti-Israel bias of the Left. That won't change things in Gaza, but it certainly will change the American position toward the conflict.

UPDATE:
----------------

I used the phrase "useful idiots" at the beginning of this post. Jonah Goldberg does the same thing, but provides a profoundly more detailed description:
The people who insist that the Palestinians are unalloyed victims remove human agency from them. [The soft bigotry of low expectations] According to this thinking, they are not making choices; they are playing their parts. How dare you ask why someone would bring a (very sick) baby to a riot? How dare you suggest that there is subtext to the story of Palestinian righteousness? [How dare you ask why a man on crutches in a palestinian propaganda video is shown running like a gazelle in an independent video?] ... Populists always tell a story about the righteousness of “the people,” but they invariably mean only “the right people”; the rest are barely people at all.
Oh ... how true that is.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Crossfire Hurricane

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, has been vilified by many Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media for well over a year. He has been accused of everything but treason for doggedly investigating then-alleged clandestine surveillence of the Trump campaign by the Obama administration. The reaction to Nunes' investigation by Democrats was so extreme (borderline hysteria) that only one conclusion could be drawn—he and his committee were on to something, and that something was big, very BIG.

In their unhinged efforts to negate the results of their upset loss to Donald Trump, the Dems have opened a pandora's box of scandalous behavior by the Obama-era FBI and DoJ, and the Clinton campaign (the only campaign proven to have indirectly colluded with Russians to create a phony dossier on Trump). By pressing an empty collusion investigation the Dems (and a few GOP #NeverTrumpers) have also demonstrated that in recent years, dishonest testimony by the senior officials in the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence services is commonplace.

Because of Devin Nunes' investigation, the dam of lies and deceit is cracking. It appears, based on very recent events, that the Dems understand that the truth will come out—that for the first time in modern history, a sitting administration tried to rig a national election by surveilling the opposition party candidate for president. That the Democrats, through an outgoing president from their own party, placed a "spy" inside the Trump campaign to provide intelligence. Was that intel passed long to the Clinton campaign? Stay tuned.

But the bigger question for the Dems is What to do?

Never at a loss for sleazy strategies, the Dems will rely on their trained hamsters in the media to suffocate the story, through spin, omission, and lack of coverage. Here's the scheme going back 15 - 20 months:

  1. Deny, deny any wrongdoing. That didn't work because facts got in the way.
  2. Ridicule anyone that suggests that malfeasance or worse did occur under Obama's watch. That was tried, but didn't work.
  3. Vilify the investigators who (unlike Robert Mueller) did find hard evidence of wrongdoing and demanded more information from the FBI and the DoJ. That almost worked, but Nunes prevailed.
  4. Stonewall. Requests for additional information were slow-walked or outright denied for "national security" reasons. That worked, but only for a while. The threat of contempt of congress broke the stone wall.
  5. Provide a "leak" to the Dem-friendly New York Times, that on its surface, makes the NYT seem to have produced an objective investigative report, when in fact, it is simply acting as conduit to allow the Obama-era intelligence community and DoJ holdovers to get ahead of the story for a few days or weeks. That happened two days ago.
Molly Hemingway discusses the NYT piece:
The New York Times‘ story, headlined “Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation,” is a dry and gentle account of the FBI’s launch of extensive surveillance of affiliates of the Trump campaign. Whereas FBI officials and media enablers had previously downplayed claims that the Trump campaign had been surveiled, in this story we learn that it was more widespread than previously acknowledged:
The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said…

The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.
This is a stunning admission for those Americans worried that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies might use their powers to surveil, leak against, and target Americans simply for their political views or affiliations. As Sean Davis wrote, “The most amazing aspect about this article is how blasé it is about the fact that the Obama admin was actively spying on four affiliates of a rival political campaign weeks before an election.”
Yeah ... the NYT gets all agitated about an $130K payment to a porn star who is alleged to have had a one night stand with Donald Trump over a decade ago. They do deep investigation and do so with more than a little enthusiasm. But their own reporting about a conspiracy among high government officials to destroy a presidential campaign of the opposing party (or provide an "insurance policy" if Trump should win) reads like a bad book report written by a disinterested fourth grader. Not a shred of the usual NYT editorializing, not a scintilla of added information, not a hint of investigative enthusiasm—flat and detached.

But that's all part of the master strategy. Now that the 'newspaper of record' (LOL) has reported (well, more like recited) what their Dem masters have given them, any future revelations—and those revelations are coming—will be waved off with a yawn, "old news, already covered in our 'groundbreaking' article, nothing more to see here, move along."

So to add to the Dem strategy noted earlier:
6. Make any future revelations "old news" so that the trained hamsters have an excuse for not covering them.
Hemingway goes on to cite (read the whole thing) a number of "takeaways" from the NYT article. Here are the three most important in my view: First, FBI officials admit they spied on Trump's campaign. Second, the Dems are terrified about the looming Inspector General Report, and third, the surveillance involved wiretaps, National Security Letters, and at least one spy.

The interesting thing to watch is how the Dems and their trained hamsters apply their strategy to cover-up what may very well be the biggest scandal in American political history. If recent history serves, they'll succeed. And if for some reason you're rooting for their success, you don't give a damn about our democracy, about the rule of law, about the weaponization of major government agencies, about the politicization of intelligence, and about basic fairness.

Inadvertently, the bland NYT article, written to temper the blow of coming revelations, gives us a window into the reprehensible activities gladly executed by rabid partisans in the Obama administration. The perpetrators should be indicted and jailed, but our intrepid special counsel is nowhere to be seen.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Wrong Again

Regular readers of this blog already know my opinion of the vast majority of the main stream media—they are ideologically left-wing, biased in favor of the Democrats, dishonest in their reporting of the news*, utterly devoid of objectivity when it comes to Donald Trump and his many substantive accomplishments on both the domestic and foreign policy front. But there's one more thing—the majority of the trained hamsters in the main stream media are not very bright. Their comments are often uniformed and piece-meal, shocking for "journalists" at the pinnacle of the "profession."

Daniel Henninger comments on the current media meme that Trump has alienated "our closest allies" by (1) abrogating the Iran deal between Barack Obama and the Mullahs in Iran (a deal never approved by Congress) and (2) moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. He writes:
No one has suggested yet that the Trump withdrawal from Barack Obama’s nuclear-weapons deal will cause the sea level to rise, but we’re almost there. The chain reaction of post-withdrawal disasters cataloged by the global media includes the possibilities that Iran will race now toward building a nuclear weapon, that a war between Iran and Israel could engulf the Middle East, and that America has become “divided” from its allies ...

“America’s three closest friends in Europe,” the Washington Post reported, “are near-bursting with anger and exasperation at the United States.” A rule of thumb suggests itself: Might European anger correlate directly with the correctness of U.S. policy, such as this decision to withdraw from the Iran deal and restart the sanctions regime? And when does an ally become something less than that?

Once the media takes ownership of any fixed thought—here that the U.S. withdrawal from the Obama agreement will drive Iran to build a nuclear weapon—no other fact or consideration is permitted to intrude.
The media doesn't provide honest and accurate analysis, they promote a predefined and often dishonest narrative.

Henninger does provide a level of analysis that should be commonplace in the NYT and WaPo, but never is. The reason, it conflicts with the prevailing left-wing narrative, not to mention TDS:
Europe became an economic power whose interests are solely commercial. Despite the Middle East’s continued strategic importance, Europe’s view of it is entirely bloodless—a region that is merely a dependable trading partner for Europe’s biggest companies.

When in 2013 Mr. Obama raised the possibility of a deal that would lift the Iranian sanctions regime, the Europeans were all in. Whatever Mr. Obama’s nuclear dreams, the deal’s primary attraction for Europe—and Iran—was always overwhelmingly about money.

Recall that in 2012, the European Union’s growth rate had fallen below zero. Europe was also dealing with an existential threat in the Greek debt crisis, which required several multibillion-euro bailouts.

Once the Obama nuclear deal became final in 2015, Europe’s deal makers were inside Iran like a shot. European Union members, led by Germany, quickly became the mullahs’ main trading partners.

Bear in mind that the agreement’s flaws were recognized at the time, such as ignoring Iran’s messianic and imperial projects. Just days after the agreement was reached in July 2015, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, was in Moscow, no doubt discussing the Russo-Iranian alliance in Syria, which quickly drove torrents of refugees into Europe. In other words, the Obama-Kerry deal with Iran helped to destabilize Europe’s politics. The European publics should demand a new deal.
The same Euros who allowed their continent and their culture to be overrun by a slow motion invasion from the Middle East now suggest that Iran can be mollified and that a very bad deal should be continued (so they can make money). They're wrong again.

Footnote:
--------------

* Just last night, the vaunted New York Times hit a new low in fake news. Donald Trump on a visit to California was commenting on the Mexican drug gang, MS-13, a group that routinely murders innocents, kills the entire families including children of its opponents, and has been known to behead them either before or after they are murdered, hanging the corpses from light poles. With that gruesome information, Trump rightly characterized MS-13 members as "animals." Here's what the NYT (and WaPo and CSPAN among others) tweeted:
Trump lashed out an undocumented immigrants during the White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country's borders "animals"
The level of dishonesty here is breathtaking. The NYT purposely omitted context so that it could reinforce the leftist meme that Trump thinks all immigrants are "animals"—a flat-out distortion and lie.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Ankle-Biting

As a person, Donald Trump can be hard to like—that's a fact. He is pompous and narcissistic, brash and inexact, often blunt and insulting to a fault. There's only one qualifier—as President of the United States, he has been remarkably effective. The list of his actual, measurable accomplishments on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts is growing longer by the week, and that creates cognitive dissonance for those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. How can a man who is so un-woke, so crass, so icky be so effective?

In response to Trump's many important wins, the #Resistance and #NeverTrumpers have focused solely on character assassination of both Trump and everyone around him. Sure they've also been able to get a special counsel appointed, but even that now has morphed into a "witch hunt" with no relevance to the original phony allegations that precipitated the original investigation.

For example, Trump's daughter, Ivanka, goes to celebrate the historic opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and The New York Daily News front page headline in 148 point type is: "Daddy's Little Ghoul." Seems that the trained hamsters at the Daily News are outraged that palestinian "civilians" have been killed doing what they always do—throwing a hyper-violent tantrum. Following a palestinian script that has been their go-to strategy for over 40 years, these "civilians" were largely Hamas terrorists, those injured were cynically put directly in harm's way by Hamas, who produced fake news videos depicting the carnage which as then protoed by the useful idiot trained hamsters of the main stream media. Those palestinians killed were in the process of attacking the border fence with the obvious intent of killing the Israeli soldiers behind the fence.

Funny that no one among the #Resistance and #NeverTrumpers are "outraged" by the Daily News headline and no one has asked th editors of The New York Daily News to apologize for publicly suggesting that somehow Ivanka Trump is a ghoul who celebrates death. But never mind.

Over the past week, those same hypocrites among the #Resistance and #NeverTrumpers have become "outraged" over a leaked private comment about John McCain in a closed meeting by Trump advisor, Kelly Sadler. Hours upon hours of "reporting" at mainstream media outlets have been expended on what is essentially a non-story. Kurt Schlichter does what he does best when he writes:
And then there is the case of Kelly Sadler, the White House political advisor who the mob is seeking to decapitate for the fake sin of telling the truth in private in the course and scope of her job duties.

John McCain is dying. That is not in dispute. I had plenty of beefs with him when he was well, and now my thoughts are with his family. I choose to forget my anger and remember his service. Others are not forgiving, and that’s between them and the senator. The consequence of being a maverick who steps on people’s toes is that sometimes people stay angry about their stomped piggies. For my part, I hope he finds peace and that his family is comforted during this difficult time (and I think the people trying to score petty points in his name are doing him a disservice. Stop it.).

But none of this relates to Kelly Sadler. Her job is to analyze the political situation based on the facts, and the fact that the senior senator for Arizona is passing away is hugely relevant to the issue at hand, the controversial nomination of a new CIA director, which McCain opposes. In a closed meeting where the family was not present and the media not invited, she told the truth - he is dying and his opposition is unlikely to derail the nomination. But some jerk decided to leak this private brainstorming to the press - that person is a dirtbag and needs to be fired.

The family was outraged, and I will not fault them. They are grieving. But a bunch of other people - many of whom called McCain a ‘Nazi” and a “racist” and all the rest of the usual slanders back in 2008 - pretended that this statement of fact was somehow outrageous. It was not. It was her job, and she did it behind closed doors where speaking harsh truths is not only necessary but laudable. She was under no obligation to qualify her statements or be sensitive in private chats; her job was to analyze the political situation and McCain’s condition was one of the key facts. She chose to apologize - I would not have - but, of course, the liberals and the Fredocons still demand her as a sacrifice to their fake fussy outrage.
The people who today are outraged about Sadler's inappropriate but otherwise accurate private observation were among the same Democrats who as Schlichter notes, publicly called McCain a ‘Nazi” and a “racist” back when he was running against their candidate—Barack Obama—way back in 2008. All of this is breathtakingly hypocritical, but what else is new.

What the #Resistance and #NeverTrumpers are doing is (in Schlichter's words) "ankle-biting." They will do anything, no matter how craven, to take down Trump. There's only one problem, as they snip at his ankles, the public watches and shakes its collective head. It isn't working, and it shouldn't.

Tom Wolfe

One of the premier observers of the American scene over that past 40 years died this week. Tom Wolfe was 88. Over his long life, Wolfe wrote essays and novels that were wicked in their depiction of the hypocrisy and pretension of the glitterati, the literary elite, the intelligencia, all politicians, and other of the country's movers and shakers. He defied political labels.

In an homage to Wolfe, Roger Kimball characterized him this way:
Wolfe was a profound observer of culture, a sort of super-sociologist who could emit singing prose and deliver deadly characterizations.
Wolfe's skill was that he was never strident and rarely preachy. He told a story and you just had to smile as his characters made his sociological points for him.

He reveled, I think, in pointing out much of the idiocy of many aspects of political correctness, but at the same time, was fearless in pointing out social injustice, not as the current progressive movement thinks it is, but as it actually exists.

We need more Tom Wolfes, but his breed is increasingly rare. In Kimball's words:
With the passing of Tom Wolfe we have lost one of our greatest, if not our greatest, men of letters. He was—to cite the title of one of his novels—a man in full. His many friends will miss him. Our culture is the poorer for his absence.
R.I.P.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Complexity

In the criminal world, if you hold up a convenience store, are caught doing it on CCTV, and subsequently arrested by the police, the evidence is both simple and obvious. That's why junior assistant district attorneys love to prosecute such cases. They're a slam dunk -- in fact, they're normally settled with a plea bargin and a light sentence without a trial.

But what if there's a high level white collar conspiracy directed at an opponent of the then-current president and his preferred successor? What if the conspiracy is perpetrated in secret meetings by senior government officials and politicians? What if it's justified using sham evidence of Russian "collusion", or reports derived from clandestine spying?

Things get very complicated very fast. There is no single event that one can point to indicating that a crime has been committed. There is little hard evidence, but copious circumstantial evidence. There is considerable complexity and lack of clarity—and that's what protects the perpetrators.

The Clinton campaign paid a Democrat smear shop, Fusion GPS, to create an opposition research dossier that contained salacious slander that they hoped would destroy the candidacy of Donald trump. Nothing new there—that's Washington hardball politics. But things got very interesting when the phony dossier was used by the FBI as grounds for FISA surveillance on the Trump campaign. Even more interesting, senior FBI officials knew the provenance of the dossier but never let the FISA court know where it came from. As if that weren't bad enough, things get much, much worse.

Andrew McCarthy writes:
Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele [author of the Trump dossier] told him the FBI had a “human source” —i.e., a spy — inside the Trump campaign as the 2016 presidential race headed into its stretch run.

When he realized how explosive this revelation was, Simpson walked it back: He had, perhaps, “mischaracterized” what he’d been told by Steele, the former British spy and principal author of the anti-Trump dossier he and Simpson compiled for the Clinton campaign.

Simpson gave his testimony about the FBI’s human source at a closed Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on August 22, 2017. He did not try to retract it until the uproar that followed the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018. The latter date is significant for reasons we’ll come to.
So ... the FBI had a "source" inside the Trump campaign. Ya think that might be a little bit unethical? Ya think that some of the intel gathered might have been funneled through cutouts to the Clinton Campaign or leaked to the Democrat's trained hamsters in the media? Ya think when the FBI's Peter Strzok texted this:
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s [McCabe, now disgraced second in command at the FBI) office - that there’s no way he [Trump] gets elected - but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok texted on Aug. 15, 2016. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
to his lover, lawyer Lisa Page, he just might be referring to a conspiracy within the FBI. Exactly what "path" and what "insurance policy" was he referring to?

But back to the funneling of the FBI intel to the trained hamsters. McCarthy explains:
Simpson’s testimony was released to the public on January 9, 2018. That was just a few days after the New York Times had published its big New Year’s weekend story claiming, based on anonymous intelligence officials, that the Russia investigation had been opened sometime in July 2016. The catalyzing event, we were told, was a report to the FBI that Papadopoulos, a young Trump- campaign adviser, had alleged that Russia possessed thousands of stolen Hillary Clinton emails. According to the story, Papadopoulos had been informed of this by Joseph Mifsud, a London-based academic who professed to have Kremlin connections. A few weeks later, while drinking in a London bar in May 2016, Papadopoulos blabbed the news to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat.
McCarthy explains (read the whole thing) that that story falls apart when the time line of events is considered. But never mind.

Here's the thing. This is a complex story, and it's the media's job to unravel the complexity so that the American public better understands what happened, and through its elected representatives, corrects any governmental wrongdoing that did occur. But in this case, the trained hamsters revel in the complexity and make no effort to investigate and simplify it. They smirk and talk about conspiracy theorists.

Why is that? Because if they did investigate and simplify, they just might lead the public to the conclusion that the Obama administration knowingly or unknowingly allowed an FBI operation to be conducted on a candidate for the presidency to provide "an insurance policy" against a win by Donald Trump. That's wrong ... that's big ... that's a MAJOR scandal ... and that's why the Democrats trained hamsters would prefer the complexity to continue.

UPDATE:
------------

You know something is up when the Democrat smear shops and their trained hamsters in the media go into overdrive in an effort to smear one of the few Washington politicians, Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has doggedly pursued this complex and growing scandal.

In an article aptly entitled, "The Deep State Mob Targets Nunes", Julie Kelly reports:
The Deep State Mob is continuing to squeeze the California congressman after he again threatened to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for ignoring congressional subpoenas and withholding crucial documents from Congressional investigators. Nunes has minced no words about how the Justice Department and FBI have been “stonewalling” his committee’s investigation for months. And as Nunes inches closer to revealing the stinking core of what is potentially the biggest political corruption scandal in U.S. history, the Deep State Mob is trying to close in on him first.

Nunes and other House Republicans want to find out exactly how and why the FBI’s counterintelligence operation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government began in the summer of 2016, and what intelligence sources either aided or instigated that probe. The latest showdown, according to the Washington Post, is because Nunes has issued a subpoena demanding that the Justice Department provide information about an unnamed individual referenced in a classified letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month.
The closer Nunes and his collegaues get to the truth, the more the Dems' smears escalate.

The Dems get so, so angry at any mention that special counsel, Robert Mueller, might be biased and should bring his "investigation" to a conclusion. "Let him do his job!" they proclaim.

But when Nunes gets far closer to the truth that Mueller ever will, the Dems don't seem as inclined to let him do his job. Heh.

Friday, May 11, 2018

1,826 Days

Today is the five year anniversary (actually 1,826 days) of the disclosure that the Obama administration either directly or indirectly weaponized the IRS to go after Obama's conservative opponents. During the five years that have passed, the Obama administration first denied any wrong doing; when that became untenable, they lied about the events and the breadth of the scandal; when that became a joke, they stonewalled all congressional attempts to uncover the truth. A senior IRS official, Lois Lerner, took the Fifth rather than testify, and the Democrats trained hamsters in the mainstream media were notably incurious about the entire thing.

No special counsel was appointed; no indictments occurred, no one went to jail. Of course, the Dems tell us there was nothing to see, so we better move along.

Bradley Smith, former chair of the Federal Election Commission writes:
Imagine if liberal groups discovered that President Trump’s Internal Revenue Service was targeting them for heightened scrutiny or harassment. The media and Democrats would decry this assault on the First Amendment and declare the U.S. on the brink of autocracy. The scandal would dominate the midterms, and the legitimacy of the election would be called into question.
But weaponizing the IRS, and it now appears based on Kim Strassel's Pulitzer Prize worthy reporting, the FBI, was S.O.P for the Obama administration. They did it, in part, because they were convinced that they were the truly righteous. More cynically, they did it because they were certain that another Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would follow Obama's reign, and everything would be swept under the rug. Showing incredible hubris when Hillary lost, the Dems opened the door to uncovering even more of their own dirt by specious claims of Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, and now, a combination of dirt associated with a porn star and Trump's sleazy lawyer.

CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, NYT, WaPo, etc. are obsessed with Trump-related non-stories. They have elevated an increasingly questionable special counsel investigation into a holy war. They are so biased and increasingly deranged that they repeatedly create fake news, and then become incensed when the president calls them on it. But those are sins of commission. Even worse are their sins of omission.

For five years they refused to do any real investigation of the IRS scandal. Oddly, there were no "leaks" from "unnamed sources," and no Pulitzer-Prize winning reports on myriad Obama-era scandals. Now, they outright refuse to report the ongoing mega-scandal that is enveloping the FBI at its senior levels. For details, read here, here, and here.

The trained hamsters of the main stream media have become a laughingstock, but don't realize it because they operate in a progressive echo chamber. They have done this country a great disservice.

In the meantime, the IRS scandal remains unresolved and the FBI mega-scandal? It'll probably die as well. The swamp has far too much to lose.

Questions

Ask almost any Democrat and they'll tell you that ... Donald Trump is a full-blown racist. He's anti immigrant and absolutely, positively, anti-Latino, given his position on the need to secure our southern border with Mexico.

It's odd, therefore, that under Trump, Latinos are doing well. In fact, amazingly well. Steve Cortes reports:
Among Latinos, the jobless rate has only registered below 5 percent for seven months total – in the history of this country. Six of those months have occurred with Donald Trump in the White House, including the April report released last week.

The jobs data was terrific news for Americans of all ethnicities. For the first time since the year 2000, the overall unemployment rate dipped below 4 percent. Just as significant, almost 1 million Americans who had previously given up on finding a job have rejoined the workforce since Trump was elected.
It appears that the thing that really frightens Democrats isn't Trump himself (although they'll tell you he's a monster) but rather, the successes he has achieved in improving the economy and helping people of color as a consequence. That tiggers hysteria among the Dems because they worry, I think, that people of color—African Americans and Latinos to name two, just might begin asking inconvenient questions.

Cortes continues:
This movement toward self-sufficiency is a notable achievement for all Americans, but particular focus should be placed on the gains for communities of color. Why? Because identity politics and Democrats’ Big Government policies have failed minorities. Only now, at long last, are those communities beginning to realize their potential, which has clearly been unleashed with help from the pro-growth Trump administration economic policies of deregulation, tax cuts, and border enforcement.
That's why the trained hamsters in the media offer us a daily ritual narrative of "white supremacy," all tied to Donald Trump's presidency. They hope that their cynical outrage drowns out the increasingly good economic news for people of color. That's also why they reacted viciously when Kanye West began asking the questions they hope that other people of color won't ask.

If people of color start to aggressively question why their personal economic fortunes have improved significantly under a "racist, white supremacist" GOP administration, while they didn't improve at all under the previous Democrat administration, the answers may not be the ones that Democrats what them to hear.