Two lectures on YouTube address controls on a federal government. One is about the problem with the Judiciary and current issues of rogue judges. The other is the opposing views of a state’s role in a federal government contrasting and comparing a Jeffersonian view with a Lincolnian one.

“Judicial Power and Virtue” by Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, gave this lecture about judicial virtue at Hillsdale College on April 4th, 2018.

The Real Reason the South Seceded by Donald Livingston at the Abbeville Institute Stone Mountain Conference, October 2015.

The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation by Victor Davis Hanson – “The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he ignores the actual lawbreakers.”

“The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

In one direction, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.

The oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves congressional investigations, Department of Justice referrals, and inspector general’s reports — mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and DOJ behavior during the 2016 election.
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Mueller has searched far and wide for wrongdoing but so far has found little. Meanwhile, there is plenty of other wrongdoing already found, but no one seems to be looking at it.

Flynn, Cohen, and other Trump aides are considered small enough fry to go after. Clinton, Comey, McCabe, and others seem big enough fry to leave alone.
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The more Mueller searches for hypothetical lawbreaking, the more he is inadvertently underscoring that actual lawbreakers must be subject to the same standard of justice.
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For over a year, we have had two standards of legality when there can only be one.

A reckoning is near.

Destroy Trump! The deep, dark shame of the left by Patricia McCarthy – “The Russia collusion hoax and the Mueller investigation have been exposed for what they are: a criminal attempt to prevent the inauguration of a duly elected president, then to see him driven from office by any means necessary.”

“For the left, the ends always justify the means, no matter how nefarious. This plot to undo the results of an election is the most serious, most villainous political scandal in American history, but masses of Americans know little or nothing of it thanks to our equally criminal mainstream media. So arrogant are the Jim Acostas of the MSM that they actually believe that if they do not report it, no one will know it.

The truth about the shameful left has been obvious for years and years. Harry Reid regularly lied to defeat opponents and was openly proud of himself when his lies worked. Obama lied over and over again about what Obamacare would do. The list of devious, deceptive persons in Congress is long. There are far too many crooks among them spending our money and seeking ever more control over our lives.

Leftists are masters of projection, always accusing those with whom they disagree of what they are actually doing.
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For leftists, rules don’t apply. They consider themselves to be above the law.
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the left cares not at all about the country and only about its own power and its members’ place within it. They have no shame – none at all.

If Obama could start DACA, Trump can end it by W. James Antle III – “The problem is that setting up an official program modeled to some extent after a law Congress rather pointedly failed to pass and then issuing work permits to its beneficiaries goes beyond merely setting enforcement priorities. It usurps the powers of the legislative branch of the federal government.”

“House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte went a step further.

“For a federal judge to rule that the current administration cannot change a memo from the previous administration is absurd,” the Virginia Republican said in a statement. “The DACA program was unilaterally created by the Obama Administration in a memo penned by former Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano. Just as easily as it was issued, it can be rescinded — presidential policy is not set in stone and often changes from one administration to the next.”
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When it comes to DACA, Obama could rightly tell Congress: You did not build that. Now Democrats must rely on judges to keep Trump from tearing it down.

Federal Judge: To Hell with Trump! Long Live Barack Obama’s DACA Program! Even Patterico? – “But this decision is worse than the previous ones.”

Dr. Ronny Jackson and the Curious Case of Sudden Journalism by Stephen Kruiser – “No one was interested in Jackson for several years, but now that Trump wants him to have higher profile job the “journalism” knives are out and wrecking him has become a media priority.”

“Whether true or untrue, it seems pretty clear that we wouldn’t know about any of this unless Jackson were about to become a member of President Trump’s cabinet. The clear signal from the Democrats and the MSM (redundant, I know) is that they are willing to destroy anyone who dares accept a job offer from this president.

The MSM spent the three weeks leading up to the attacks on Jackson by trying to get Scott Pruitt fired. Quick — name the last two EPA directors.
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Even George W. Bush’s cabinet members weren’t subjected to public character assassination like this, and the MSM — despite its revisionist history — really hated President Bush.

Should even one or two of the allegations be completely proven true we should have known about them before. There is no way Jackson could have been squeaky clean, then become 2018’s Greatest Monster merely through professional contact with President Trump.

If they aren’t true, it is just another nail in the coffin of journalistic integrity, all of which are being provided by the press themselves.

Reporters Without Borders ridiculously declares press has diminished freedom under Trump by Larry O’Connor – “Reporters Without Borders is a noble and proud organization that does very good work representing journalists across the globe engaged in fights against totalitarian regimes. That’s why their latest “Press Freedom Index” is an outrage for declaring that the free press is under assault in Trump’s America.”

“According to the index, America has fallen to 45th out of 180 nations when it comes to press freedom. The reason? President Trump says mean things about reporters.
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If Reporters Without Borders wants any level of credibility they probably should report the full and accurate truth when describing Trump’s statements. For the record, President Trump has NOT “referred to reporters ‘enemies of the people,’” he referred to “fake news media” as “enemies of the American people.”

That’s right, while decrying President Trump’s rhetoric against reporters who sloppily or willfully report false or misleading information for their own political purposes, Reporters Without Borders has reported false and misleading information for their own political purposes.
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While actual dictators kill reporters around the world for exercising their craft, Reporters Without Borders diminishes their own important and essential work by crying wolf on the nation that invented freedom of the press in the first place.

The NY Times’ fake fake news by neo-neocon – “No, that doubling of “fake” is not a typo. Irony, they name is NY Times.”

“although the idea of truth may be mutable in the post-modern relativistic world of the university, the newspaper world is still at least somewhat subject to fact-checking. That means that the Times was ultimately forced to issue the following retraction, which you can find if you scroll down to the end of the very long article
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But never fear, the Times soldiers on with the “far-right conspiracy programming” accusation about Watch, even though it can no longer seem to offer a single example of the fake news it wants to spotlight. But I would wager that the vast majority of its readers don’t require examples and take the Times’ authority on faith.

At war and with the separation of powers by Andrew P. Napolitano – “A popular way to begin the first day of class in constitutional law in many American law schools is to ask the students what sets the U.S. Constitution apart from all others.” But he’s going after the Syria retaliation and, in doing so, destroys the value of his argument. The idea that Congress must declare war for any military action is a long standing debate with much nuance. Exploring that nuance could be educational but using the either/or logical fallacy is not.

“the overarching and most important unique aspect of the Constitution is the separation of powers. The constitutions of many totalitarian countries pay lip service to free speech, privacy and due process, but none has the strict separation of powers that the U.S. does.

In the south it is ‘the war between the states’ and it was all about separation of powers. The struggle continues.

Revolution and Worse to Come by Victor Davis Hanson – “When legal bloodhounds and baying critics fail to take out Trump, what’s next? The Resistance wants Trump’s head — on the chopping block.”

“the aim of the so-called Resistance to Donald J. Trump is ending Trump’s presidency by any means necessary before the 2020 election. Or, barring that, it seeks to so delegitimize him that he becomes presidentially impotent. It has been only 16 months since Trump took office and, in the spirit of revolutionary fervor, almost everything has been tried to derail him. Now we are entering uncharted territory — at a time when otherwise the country is improving and the legal exposure of Trump’s opponents increases daily.
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As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing.
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Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States.
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The danger to the country this time around is that the Left has so destroyed the old protocols of the opposition party that it will be hard to resurrect them when progressives return to power.

We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

The Weekly Standard: Rand Paul’s Dangerous Exhibitionism – “Leave aside the partisan hackery of those Democrats who supported Pompeo as CIA director and now purport to believe he can’t lead the State Department. We’ve come to expect as much from them.” Democrats are a very solid block. Republicans often seem to be a flock of turkeys.

“while conservatives may agree or disagree with Paul’s stated aim on a particular issue—we often share his views on fiscal questions, though we loathe his tactics and attitudinizing—his self-righteous exhibitionism isn’t just silly and off-putting. It’s dangerous.
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One wonders what the point of all this gesturing was, but Paul has long made perverse and pointless obstructionism his brand.
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Paul is entitled to take strong libertarian views on counterterrorism and health care policy. His views aren’t the problem. The problem is that he advances those views, not by proposing alternatives and leading his colleagues to embrace them, but merely by blocking whatever he can find to block. Rand Paul’s perverse and increasingly dangerous naysaying affords him copious attention from the news media—and that, we’re left to conclude, is the point.

The curious DACA order from a DC District Court judge by Jazz Shaw – “At the heart of the matter, since when does a program instituted by an executive order take on the same level of durability as a federal law?”

Elizabeth Warren unloads another 100 CFPB questions on Mick Mulvaney by Joseph Lawler – “The questions add to the 105 that Mulvaney previously brushed off while telling Warren that it was essentially her fault that he didn’t have to answer her, based on her role in designing the structure of the agency.” See VDH cited above for what this is about.

Lankford: It’s time to reimpose Democratic limitations on confirmation debate by Ed Morrissey – “Lankford told C-SPAN that he plans to introduce a rule change that will copy, word for word, a temporary changed pushed by Harry Reid and Senate Democrats to keep Republicans from stalling Barack Obama’s judicial nominations.”

Investor’s Business Daily: Turns Out, The Rich Will Pay A Bigger Share Of Income Taxes Under GOP Tax Cuts – “The most frequently repeated complaint about the Republican tax cuts is that they are a massive “giveaway” to the rich. New evidence shows that this claim, like almost every other attack on the tax bill, is false.”

“So, thanks to the GOP tax cuts, the rich will pay either the same or a greater share of the nation’s income tax bill and millions more will pay zero income taxes. How exactly is this a “giveaway” to the rich?

Indeed, by the Democrats’ own definition, the Republican tax reform — which zero Democrats voted for — has made the tax code more fair, not less.

Just don’t expect them to ever admit this.

A Further Perspective by Jeffrey Lord – “The Hannity Rule.” Yellow journalism isn’t new, it just has been mainstream. Here’s one way to summarize the current phenomena (satire).

What Randa Jarrar Teaches by Craig Bernthal – answers to questions being asked about how a faculty can be smeared and allow it to happen.

“What can Randa Jarrar teach our students? That hate is efficacious? That it does something positive? That grenade-throwing terrorism is good? I don’t want Fresno State to stand for that. I want a university where everyone can thrive and no one is made to feel guilty because of their color. I want a country where white women belly-dance, Arab women rock and roll, Venezuelans knock baseballs out of the park, and the Chinese come to play basketball. I want a world where love wins out over hate.

A positive perspective on electric vehicles by by Jan Kjetil Andersen – “let us take a look on the more theoretical and technical constraints of electric versus fossil fueled cars.” good summary with numbers and calculations, even.

How Solar And Wind Are Causing Electricity Prices To Skyrocket by Michael Schellenberger – “That leaves us with solar and wind as the key suspects behind higher electricity prices. But why would cheaper solar panels and wind turbines make electricity more expensive?.”

“In a paper in Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.

The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.
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Part of the problem is that many reporters don’t understand electricity. They think of electricity as a commodity when it is, in fact, a service … the price of services like eating out and electricity reflect the cost not only of a few ingredients but also their preparation and delivery.

This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass.

Teachers With Guns by John Stossel – “What should be done about school shootings?”

“After the horrible shooting in Parkland, Florida, President Trump suggested that some teachers carry guns. “We need to let people know, you come in to our schools—you’re gonna be dead.”

Anti-gun activists were horrified.

But they probably didn’t know that many teachers have brought guns to work with them for years.

The New York Times Corrects by John Hinderaker – “If the journalist’s best example of “far-right conspiracy programming” on Facebook turned out to be wrong, why should we believe that Facebook’s Watch is “flooded” with such content?”

Is ‘can’t prove untrue’ new standard in Trump probe? by Byron York – “the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false?”

“ Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” asked former CIA Director John Brennan, “So far with this dossier, nothing yet has been proven untrue. How significant is that?”

“As Jim Comey has said, I think very famously, these were salacious and unverified allegations,” Brennan responded. “Just because they were unverified does not mean they were not true.”

That’s where the Trump dossier story stands today. No one has proved that the most serious allegations are true. But since no one has proved them false, either, some in the political class act as if they were true.
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“Setting aside the absurd and patently unfair ‘guilty until proven innocent’ standard that thinking requires, it also ignores the fact that the FBI has never tried to disprove it,” Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor who now serves on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a recent text exchange. “When the president asked the FBI to do exactly that, one of Jim Comey’s secret memos documents the response: [Comey] told him it is ‘very difficult to disprove a lie.'”

From Don Surber: Comey admitted breaking the law – “Good people should not allow the bad people to define things.” Mueller’s harassment of Hannity may be criminal – “Mueller is a real fascist who uses the power of the state to attack individuals.”

At Instapundit, “Broward county law enforcement seems to be a real hive of contemptible weasels” Anti-Gun Control Parkland Survivor Kyle Kashuv Questioned By School Security For Visiting Gun Range With His Father.

Russiagate’s Epic Fail vs. Watergate’s Windfall by Deroy Murdock – “Mueller’s barely productive odyssey is an enormous embarrassment compared with the mass ichthyocide that was the Watergate investigation, even at the equivalent stage in that long, national nightmare.”

“In a humiliating contrast to these legendary law-enforcement victories, Mueller has yet to prove that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin. If there were as little to Watergate as there is to Russiagate, Nixon would have finished his second term, South Vietnam most likely would have stayed free, and Cambodia’s killing fields never would have opened.

John Brennan’s Secret Trip to Moscow by Daniel John Sobieski – “there are plenty of legitimate reasons for a CIA director to make a trip to Moscow, but when a Russian deputy foreign minister says he didn’t visit the Foreign Ministry itself but did visit the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), it raises some eyebrows..”

“Consider that John Brennan is a Trump-hating perjurer who lied to Congress about secret surveillance. He is the crown prince of a Deep State fiefdom that has its own agenda. The end justifies the means in their world, and Brennan may have been up to his eyeballs in developing that “insurance policy” against a Trump victory.

But Mueller’s epic fail has not dampened his overzealousness or that of other prosecutors who follow his lead.

Mark Levin and His “Great Patriot” by Mark Steyn – “Time for Conservatism, Inc to clean up its act.” He’s got a bone to pick.

“Trump came along and snaffled the GOP nomination away from the donor class because Conservatism, Inc had proved itself largely impotent. In the hands of Cary Katz, it’s both impotent and corrupt. Katz is not a “great patriot”: right now, he’s a great scofflaw and a great deadbeat. And anyone who makes the mistake of subscribing to his “wonderful network” is just roadkill in the path of his fleeing limo.

Us and Those Bushes by William Murchison – “The death of Barbara Bush reminds us of the decencies and civility that are long gone from our politics and public life.”

“The spirit of which “The Bushes” partook, as mentors, was the spirit of a culture generally content, when it came to engaging problems, to consult the resources of inner character — getting things done, rather than yelling and scoring points. American culture still had a sense of humor. It didn’t fly into rages. It put a low premium on venomous modes of expression. It appeared to value human achievement, both honoring and promoting it. It had by present standards good manners; it tended, with little show of latent Puritanism, to value honesty, dignity, and personal restraint.

I think “The Bushes” lived — continue to live — in this spirit. They are poor haters, reluctant revilers. They do not storm about looking for people to beat up and malign. They would rather encounter people to work with, or to help.

Is the Bible Overrated? by John Hinderaker – “GQ, which stands for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, ran a feature on “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.” Number 12 is the Bible. … Spoken like an ignorant liberal, the exact opposite of the truth.”

More Contemptible Behavior By Liberals by John Hinderaker – “We haven’t yet written about the fact that the Left is engaging in the despicable tactic of “demonstrating,” i.e. committing vandalism, at the home of Chris Cox of the National Rifle Association, and harassing his wife’s business.”

“Democracy presumes a certain level of civility and accommodation among citizens. But how can we coexist with people this awful? Probably the only way to stop liberals from engaging in these disgusting tactics is to do the same to them, but I doubt that we can find conservatives who can match the Left for obnoxiousness, even if we want to.

My only other comment is this: it may be the NRA today, but if Leftists think the tactic is working, they will deploy it against conservatives of all stripes. It is important for all conservatives to stand with Chris Cox and anyone else who is subjected to this contemptible form of “protest.”

It’s wrong to summarize the multiverse as “left-wing” by Luboš Motl – “And Keating’s proposed Nobel prize reforms are left-wing lunacy.” It’s a long slog through the weeds with a few pretty things here and there.

“If God could have created (the laws that produced) a round Earth, small planets and large planets, one galaxy and billions of other galaxies, He could have created laws that produce a single patch of the visible Universe, a trillion of patches, googol to the 5th power of patches, or infinitely many patches. What is the problem? I think that you must imagine a very weak, anthropomorphic God if such things are a problem for you.
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OK, Susskind stood on the opposite side than Keating but the underlying logic is equally unscientific and both of them “politicize” a topic that shouldn’t be political.

Cambridge Analytica researcher: We didn’t hack Facebook — we played by their rules by Ed Morrissey – “Did Cambridge Analytica hack Facebook and steal data from tens of millions of users? That’s what Mark Zuckerberg led Congress to believe, but the researcher behind the app accused the Facebook CEO of being “flat-out wrong.”

“Kogan’s not wrong about that, even if he does minimize the intrusiveness of Cambridge Analytica’s actions. The guilt of others does not minimize one’s own responsibility, but the bigger issue here is whether Zuckerberg has been honest with Congress and the public about what happens to user data. Both Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have tried to evade the obvious in denying that users are the commodity by which Facebook has made itself and its executives filthy rich in a little over a decade.

That is the fundamental business model of Facebook and other “free” internet services. If anything good can come out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the education this moment provides users might be it. Don’t want to be the product? Pay for your services. Otherwise, don’t act shocked to discover that you’re the one being sold.

J.J.Sefton over at Ace of Spades has The Morning Report 4/24/18 with a list of stories with links to follow if you need to mess with your mind and get the blood stirring. – “So there you have it. A nation that is all but completely rotted from within and by its own hand. As George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “the English and Americans are two peoples separated by a common language.” The question is, are we to be two peoples united by a common fate? The world wonders…”

Ace: Judge Forces Michael Cohen to Disclose Name of Client Who Had Instructed Him to Keep It Secret – “Cohen was forced to disclose this in court. Why it wasn’t disclosed in the judge’s private chambers and kept secret, I don’t know.”

A quick look at Michael Cohen’s judge by Henry Percy – “Judge hands defeat to Trump and Cohen,” blares the headline.

“Kimba Wood…Kimba Wood…where have I heard that name before? Well, look at this. She was Bill Clinton’s second choice to be attorney general, after the Zoe Baird nomination blew up. Kimba’s blew up, too, because she forgot to tell the White House she had employed an illegal as a nanny.

Is this amazingly great luck for the Mueller-U.S. attorney tag team or what?

Mueller Targets Sean Hannity Following Cohen Raid, DCWhispers – “While the court proceedings took place in New York, make no mistake those proceedings were being guided by the hand of D.C. Special Counsel and former FBI Director, Robert Mueller.”

“The U.S. District Court raid on Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen’s offices was a direct offshoot of the Mueller investigation. Today that Mueller-influenced (and many feel highly illegal) raid forced Mr. Cohen to start disclosing names on his client list. First and foremost was Fox News personality and avid Trump supporter, Sean Hannity.

The abuse of power by the federal government today is a clear example of something a Congressional staffer source indicated to D.C. Whispers some time ago – that Trump is to be destroyed and those who supported him are to be punished/destroyed as well.
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Like Trump, Sean Hannity is a fighter. Look for him to come out swinging against this abuse of power.

He’s in for a fight. We all are.

Colluders on the Loose by Victor Davis Hanson – “Comey, McCabe, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, Andrew Weissmann, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Harry Reid, Samantha Power, Clinton attorney Jeannie Rhee … f collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington.”

“Robert Mueller was tasked to find evidence of Trump and Russia collusion that might have warped the 2016 campaign and thrown the election to Trump. After a year, his investigation has found no concrete evidence of collusion. So it has often turned to other purported Trump misadventures. Ironically, collusion of all sorts — illegal, barely legal, and simply unethical — has been the sea that Washington fish always swim in.
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Some sort of collusion likely occurred when the Obama DOJ and FBI sought FISA-court requests to surveille Carter Page and, indirectly, possibly many other members of the Trump campaign.
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Apparently, a number of government officials must have been in cahoots to get all their stories and agendas straight ahead of time. They certainly agreed on talking points to keep embarrassing facts from FISA judges, and they did so on a number of occasions. Does that behavior fall under the definition of some sort of colluding obstruction?

Trey Gowdy: Comey was willing to put all of his supposed problems with Trump aside to keep his job by Allahpundit – “His [Trey Goudy] point isn’t made often enough about Comey even though to some extent it’s self-evident.”

“If you can spare the time, start from the beginning and watch the whole Gowdy interview as he has thoughtful things to say about the Michael Cohen raid, Mueller’s and Rosenstein’s respective duties, and the Russiagate probe, whose justification he’s never doubted. The Comey segment is actually the only part of the interview where Gowdy took Trump’s side. HIs point on the Cohen raid is simple: Once Bob Mueller thought he had probable cause of criminal activity by Cohen, what else was he supposed to do except do what he did?

Oh My: Congressional Leader Calls For Impeachment Of Rod Rosenstein Over Uranium One Scandal, DCWhispers – “During that highly controversial agreement that sold 20% of U.S. uranium stock to Putin-controlled interests in Russia then-U.S. attorney Rod Rosenstein was charged with investigating the deal as allegations of bribes, extortion, and money laundering involving the Clintons and Obama-related figures, quickly mounted.”

“And guess who was the FBI Director at the time? None other than Robert Mueller, the man now charged with investigating Donald Trump.
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To date, the only real evidence of any Russian collusion has been between the Obama White House, the Clintons/Clinton Foundation, Robert Mueller, and Rod Rosenstein (among other Obama-era figures)
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Should the truth ever break free it might very well reveal how the Obama years were among the most dangerously corrupt in the history of America. The Mueller investigation has nothing to do with finding the truth but doing all it can to destroy it.

The McCabe Report is Just an Appetizer by Roger Kimball – “Horowitz will follow up with entrees on the FBI’s partisan activities in the 2016 presidential election and, later, another report on (if I may employ the term) collusion with the State Department.”

“We’ll have to wait for Horowitz to serve up the additional courses he has cooking. But right now we can enjoy his refreshing treat of McCabe-kabob, grilled to perfection.

Andrew McCabe, you might recall, was a central player in the pseudo-investigation of Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified information and self-enrichment schemes while Secretary of State. He was one of the people who made sure that went nowhere. He was also a central figure in the get-Mike-Flynn operation and, later, the Great Trump Hunt that has been occupying Robert Mueller for nearly a year.

McCabe leaked information about an investigation to a Wall Street Journal reporter, lied about leaking in casual conversations with superiors as well as under oath.”
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This meal is far from over. But I suspect that Michael Horowitz will be filling out the menu at least as robustly as that fisher of men, Robert Mueller.

Ace: Inspector General Report Into Hillary Email Investigation to be Released In May – “A lot of investigations into Hillary Clinton died on McCabe’s desk.”

Judge rules to unseal 11 cases related to Starr’s Clinton investigation, following CNN request by Katelyn Polantz – “Though Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion Monday deals with secret legal proceedings from 20 years ago, it could offer a road map for making court records in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation public eventually.” This has the appearance of grabbing at straws after a long series of dry holes at CNN. It is also an attempt to rationalize Mueller’s tactics by smearing previous special prosecutors.

Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West by John Sexton – “The story of Western civilization, and really civilization itself, is the story of productively sublimating human nature.”

Court shoots down Acosta DOL’s attack on religious freedom by Paul Mirengoff – “What is perhaps most troubling about the Department’s position in this case, however, is the conceit of unlimited agency power that lies behind it. The power of a federal agency is no more than worldly. The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone.”

Is It History, Or Is It Propaganda? By John Hinderaker – “This sort of ignorance and bias is rampant throughout American education. Some have suggested that it is parental malpractice to send your children to a public school. In many areas of the country, that proposition is hard to deny.”

The air is full of “Trump morally unfit” assertions what with the Comey book but it is difficult to figure out what exactly these people consider support for their views. Here are two – immigration and tax policy. Another looks to be opposition to abortion. The sad part is that these people disagree not by challenging opinions and values but by casting judgment. Surber lists 52 examples of this despicable behavior by Trump opponents. Let’s start with a counter example.

Parkland Survivor’s Mom: Trump Hugged Him, but School Didn’t Even Know He’d Been Shot by Tom Knighton – “The media has focused plenty of attention on Parkland survivors since the February 14 massacre, but mostly on the survivors who A) were not wounded and B) demand gun control.”

“I actually had to show a district staff member Williams x-rays to verify them. How could the district fail to contact each of the students in the classrooms where murders and injuries occurred. This borders on negligence.”

I have to disagree with her. It “borders” on nothing. It is negligence.
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Lisa Olsen sure appears to have the evidence for her criticism. We’ve seen non-stop media squabbles rather than a total focus on all the kids with physical wounds and emotional struggles.

Apparently this district’s priorities were so off that administrators needed x-rays for proof, somehow missing that President Trump had visited him in the hospital.

Starbucks feels the Trump Effect by Don Surber – “Starbucks is the latest to learn not to mess with Trump.”

“When the president imposed a legal and constitutional moratorium on visas from six countries, Schultz attacked Trump.
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The instant backlash forced Starbucks to promise to hire 10,000 veterans and military spouses.

Then Schultz attacked the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

‘Global warming’ claims a victim by Thomas Lifson – “After some reflection, I see that this is a tragedy the Greek sense of the word, being based on a fatal human flaw.” These Trump haters take it seriously, even to the point of self immolation.

“Buckel was no loser with no prospects. He is someone who had a big hand in changing the way American law and public opinion regard same sex marriage
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Reportedly, Buckel recently “turned his attention” to apocalyptic predictions of climate disaster, which he fully bought into, presumably based on the phony scientific consensus propagated by the fraudsters who have to “adjust” real data in order to make their hypothesis slightly plausible. The fraudsters know well that the human mind is vulnerable to predictions of apocalypse, and that encouraging panic is a great way to generate money.
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I am actually very sad for Buckel, and for his friends and families. He is a victim of hucksters who scared him and countless school children into panic. The fraudsters continue to fly on private jets and occupy multiple lavish residences, which people genuinely convinced that the end is near would shun. His death is tragic, but it is also really, really stupid, once again proving that smart people, when beyond their sphere of expertise, can be deeply dumb, because they have no humility. The Greeks called it “hubris.”

Sen. Cory Booker Violating Constitution: Voting Against Pompeo for Religious Beliefs by Ken Klukowski – “announced on Friday that he will vote against CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s nomination to become secretary of state because of Pompeo’s beliefs on marriage and sexuality — beliefs consistent with Pompeo’s Christian faith.”

“Booker sharply questioned Pompeo on Thursday during the nominee’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, referring to words Pompeo spoke at a church in his district when the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was still serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Article VI of the U.S. Constitution provides, “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office of public Trust under the United States.”

Trail of James Comey’s Dirt on Loretta Lynch Discovered Within IG Report on Andrew McCabe by sundance – “keep in mind, that at the time the book was written, Mr. Comey had no idea exactly where the ongoing Inspector General investigation might lead; nor did he know the timing of release.” The analytic examination of recently released evidence in the greater context is explained.

Comey’s last stand for the deep state by Mark Penn – “The post-election actions of these former officials makes suspect their actions as officials.”

“They were among the most powerful men of the last decade. They commanded armies of armed agents, had the ability to bug and wiretap almost anyone, and had virtually unlimited budgets. They were the leadership of the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence under President Obama. Each day, it becomes clearer that they are the real abusers of power in this drama.

The book by former FBI Director James Comey and the daily hyperbolic John Brennan sound bites are perhaps the final reveal of just how much hubris and vitriol they had. Comey’s book, according to reports, contains nothing new of legal consequence to Trump (while suggesting that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has something to worry about), but it unmasks the hatred that Comey had for Donald Trump from the beginning. It impeaches Comey’s fitness to have ever held high, nonpartisan office.
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The Mueller investigation bears all of the hallmarks of prosecutorial overreach: pre-dawn raids, denial of reasonable bail, threats to prosecute family members, investigations of unrelated business matters. He didn’t appropriately subpoena selected transition emails but collected every email in the entire transition without notice, prying them from holdover employees at the General Services Administration.
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Moreover, the double standards being applied here are undermining the rule of law.
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As these deep staters turn into paid talking heads profiting through books, speeches and clicks, they undermine any notion that they acted professionally instead of politically while in office, and the evidence continues to mount that the foundation for turning the country upside down for the last year was most likely two parts politically tinged hubris and one part sketchy evidence.

Max Boot: Sure Andrew McCabe lied under oath…but Trump by John Sexton – “When FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired, Boot was one of the people who came out swinging.” Illustrating confusion about what is moral and what isn’t?

“In short, there was nothing that could possibly justify the firing of Andrew McCabe. It was a Trumpian plot. So when the DOJ Inspector General released his damning report on McCabe which concluded he had lied to James Comey, to FBI investigators while under oath, to the IG, and had even lied about his lies to FBI investigators when changing his story, suddenly Max Boot had some backtracking to do.

The recommendation from the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility was that McCabe should be canned for his repeated and intentional “lack of candor.” And that’s what happened. But having already blasted this as an attempt to “undermine the FBI” etc., Max Boot couldn’t bring himself to admit he got this one wrong. Instead, he wrote a blog post yesterday titled “Sure, McCabe and Comey made mistakes. But that’s not why they were fired.”
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I think the problem here is that Boot insists on treating everything as a subset of the one story that he is focused on: blasting President Trump. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that two things could be independently true here. First, Trump really did go after McCabe and celebrate his firing. Second, McCabe is a self-serving liar who deserved to be fired.

About that Syrian scientific research center by Paul Mirengoff – a bit more about the response to Syrian use of chemical weapons. This one isn’t headed towards “aspirin factory” irrelevance.

“Claudia Rosett takes up the question for PJ Media. Based on the Pentagon’s description, she believes with a very high level of confidence that the target was the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC).

According to Rosett, the SSRC is “an incredibly high-value target, an outfit central to some of the worst depravities of Assad’s weapons programs, and — as it happens — a longtime client of North Korea and Iran.”

Trump pacifies Cory Gardner on marijuana issue by Paul Mirengoff – There was a story that Trump instructed Sessions to back off on marijuana law enforcement in states that legalized the recreational drug. Here’s another part of the story. It has something to say about what Trump’s opponents consider moral and honorable and valuable.

“For months, Sen. Cory Gardner has been blocking the Trump administration from staffing key positions at the DOJ. Among these position are Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division; Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division; Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division; and, until Gardner was finally shamed into relenting, Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division. In all, around 20 positions reportedly were affected.

You might think that Gardner’s obstruction leaves these key divisions directionless, or at least without the degree of direction they should have. It’s actually worse worse than that. As Christian Adams has shown, the absence of presidential appointees at the Assistant Attorney General level can leave left-wing Obama holdovers with enormous sway at the Justice Department.

Why has Gardner done this significant favor for the left? Because of marijuana.

Instapundit on Carl Cannon: Special Prosecutorial Abuse. “Since the day Trump entered political life, liberals, Democratic activists, and media pundits have issued ominous warnings about the coming authoritarianism.”

Feminists don’t care about the gender gap in ballet. Why should we care about the one in tech? – Publications – AEI by Mark Perry – “That’s the excellent title of an excellent op-ed in the Washington Examiner by ballet dancer Madison Breshears”

Anchorage looks to be thinking it OK to allow perverts into women’s bathrooms; the ACLU applauds violation of attorney client privilege on the presumption of guilt; the NYT says objecting to excessive prosecutor behavior is implying guilt;

Bipartisan Senate effort: Operation Protect Mueller begins by Ed Morrissey – “The intent is to head off Donald Trump from provoking a “constitutional crisis,” but …”

“The president has the right to hire and fire people within the executive branch of government without Congressional interference, especially high-ranking political appointees. Firing a special counsel is in itself not a constitutional crisis; it is the constitutional exercise of the authority of the presidency. The bill seeks to change that for one particular office, which is in itself a recognition of the president’s current authority.
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Special counsels have inevitably proven to be disastrous to due process and accountability, which is why they should only be deployed when (a) a demonstrable crime has occurred, (b) explicit conflicts of interest prevent the Department of Justice from investigating them, and (c) stringent limitations are put on the scope of the probe. The issue with special counsels isn’t that they are too accountable, but are almost entirely unaccountable and grossly expansive by their nature. They exist mainly for political reasons, which means any attempts to enforce boundaries on their probes will generate accusations of politically motivated interference, and that means hardly any control at all is achieved. That leaves no effective check at all on a special counsel that strays far beyond his mandate (whether or not Mueller has is a matter of debate, of course) short of termination through the executive-branch chain of command.

This bill makes special counsels, now and in the future, even less accountable for their actions. If the report is true, it inserts both the judiciary and the legislature into the personnel decisions of the executive branch, which is itself a potential affront to the constitutional separation of powers. Congress’ upper chamber has a role in confirming political appointees that reflects the shared authority of many federal agencies, but they have no role in firing them other than through impeachment.

That is the proper remedy for a president that abuses his authority, too. If Trump fires Mueller and Congress perceives it to be an abuse of power and/or an obstruction of justice, they can impeach Trump and remove him from office. However, the better option all along would have been to form a select bipartisan committee under their own authority to investigate the Russia-collusion issue, one which Trump would have no authority to disband or to obstruct at all. Instead of passing the SCIIA, Congress should eliminate special counsels altogether, and bear the political costs of investigations themselves rather than hide behind special counsels.

Washington Lies In a Parallel Universe by John Hinderaker – “In a battle between reality and fantasy, it usually is prudent to bet on reality. Here, I am not so sure. The Democrats have a near-monopoly on the organs of perception, and they may be able to bend a majority of Americans to their topsy-turvy view of things. We will find out in November.”

“In the real world, the Trump administration is humming along. Its domestic policies are sensible and have been remarkably successful in a short time. Abroad, the administration has pursued American interests, again with considerable success. It has also made progress, at least, at cleaning up the appalling messes left behind by Barack Obama in Iran, Syria, Russia and North Korea. By any objective standard, the Trump administration is, so far, a major improvement on its predecessor.

But our “news” organizations have little interest in any of those topics. They are obsessed with tweets, with ten-year-old liaisons, with non-existent collusion and with investigations of nothing that apparently will never end. In their parallel world, Trump is such a failure that he might as well quit and save the Democrats the trouble of impeaching him. (For what? is a question that rarely seems to be asked.)

parallel universe or different planet?

Guess Whose House Wasn’t Raided by the FBI by Daniel John Sobieski – a compare and contrast of the sort that is becoming quite common to illustrate the corruption in the FBI and DOJ.

“This is the FBI of Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, whose mission was to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House. They never raided the home and office of Cheryl Mills, did they? They never raided Hillary’s house or seized the acid-washed server, did they? But Michael Cohen is a threat to our democracy warranting brute force? Why wasn’t Michel Cohen offered the immunity deal given to Cheryl Mills and other Clinton cronies?
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The facts and the lack of an actual crime will not stop Robert Mueller. Just show him the man, or woman, and he will show you the crime, whether it be Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, or now Michael Cohen. As with the pre-investigation exoneration of Hillary Clinton by Comey, the facts don’t matter. Neither does, apparently, attorney-client privilege. Sentence first, trial later. These individuals are merely collateral damage in Mueller’s vendetta against Trump.

Lost amid all the ‘noise’ over Scott Pruitt is the very real damage Obama’s EPA did to rural communities by Daniel Turner – “The far left will stop at nothing in their efforts to derail the presidency of Donald Trump. Still bitter about the outcome of 2016, the left claims much of their outrage toward the president is driven by his unpredictable personality, but ideological opposition to his administration’s reform-minded agenda is the real root of their anger.”

“Pruitt’s “scandals” are exaggerated for political expediency: never mind that the Obama EPA spent just as much, if not more, than Pruitt’s team, according to a recent Fox News report. Or that Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA chief, was caught using the email alias “Richard Windsor” to communicate with people outside the government. Or that one Obama-era EPA employee was caught downloading and watching pornography on the job. These issues prompted no outrage from Hill offices, and one questions if Congressional inquiry could possibly be politically motivated, or if left-wing outrage is a one-way street.
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Lost amid all the noise is the extreme damage the previous EPA did to rural communities.

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration by Victor Davis Hanson – “Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist.”

“Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions
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The ideology of illegal immigration rests on certain illogical assumptions that must not be questioned.
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In the absence of intellectual honesty about the need for political and economic reform in Latin America, mythologies can abound.
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The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian.
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Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down.
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In rural California, the law as it once was is now often inoperative, if not sometimes nonexistent.
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Illegal immigration and environmentalism war with each other. But the former usually is exempted from any green audit.

EDITORIAL: All’s fair in love, war and the pursuit of Donald Trump – Washington Times. “Alas, these are not happy days for the fundamental civil rights we’ve always taken for granted in America.”

“The U.S. government raids a lawyer’s office at daybreak to fish for evidence against a designated target, and on Capitol Hill the CEO of Facebook testifies that he has been colluding with Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor in hot pursuit of Donald Trump, hoping to collect whatever evidence, or reasonable facsimile thereof, they can find to destroy a duly elected presidency.

This has never been tried before, not even in the hoary past, but who’s to say it won’t work. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told Congress Tuesday that his company is working with Mr. Mueller as “part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.”
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Mr. Mueller has had a distinguished career and is held as decent, honorable and well-regarded by his peers, but if he winds up his investigation with nothing to show for it he knows he will never be forgiven. The mob, which has been unable to come to terms with losing the election, wants somebody’s blood. Mobs always do.

More on the Michael Cohen seizure by neo-neocon – “One of the things about the lawfare against Trump is that it has four related effects that are not directly legal.”

“The first is that anyone considering a job in the Trump administration would have to think twice about accepting it, unless that person is ready to have his or her entirely life scrutinized
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The second effect also would tend to handicap the president’s ability to govern, and that is just the stress and anger he is likely to feel.
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The third effect is to gain access to all of Trump’s correspondence with his lawyer.
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The fourth effect is on the public. The constant pounding on associates of the president—where no crime by Trump has ever been shown to exist in the first place—has the effect of indicating to many people that with all this smoke there must be fire.

It may also be that there is a violation of a ‘sense of fairness’ that will surface as a reaction to all of these events.

Civilization – Is The West History: Episode 06 Work [YouTube 47 min] by Niall Ferguson “argues that the real threat to our survival is our loss of faith not in religion but in ourselves.” In the series he bumps up against everything from slavery to eugenics to climate alarmism. In the last few minutes of his last episode, he crawls over the bumps and barriers to his “is the West history” worry. Read the comments and you can see his worry has justification.

The Limits of American Patience by Victor Davis Hanson – “Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism.”

“Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.
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Donald Trump’s presidency is many things, but there is one common denominator with all that has transpired since November 2016. The once unimaginable can become normal. When the veneer of conventional wisdom and practice is torn off, Americans learn that was not much there underneath after all, whether that idea is that we can never question open borders or Chinese commercial cheating—or whether it is complacency in our penchant to keep borrowing without worries over tomorrow.

Can we just say it? Loretta Lynch is lying by Jazz Shaw – “What’s most insulting here is the way that Lynch can shrug off the obvious and simply smirk at the nation, knowing that she will never be definitively exposed. And she has to know it. Captain Louis Renault would be more believable saying that he had no idea about gambling going on in the casino.”

The raid on Trump’s lawyer: Why? And why now? By Thomas Lifson – “we can only speculate as to the motives for a thermonuclear escalation of tactics being used against President Trump, in the effort to reverse the presidential election of 2016.”

“They have extended the fishing expedition to include seizure of protected communications between the president and his lawyers, now in the hands of the FBI, the same agency that has been stonewalling Congressional investigation into its behavior in launching the surveillance of the Trump campaign on charges of collusion with Russia. It should be noted that no evidence whatsoever of such collusion has been developed and made public, which has to be a deep embarrassment at a minimum.

‘Deafening Silence of ACLU’ After Raid on Trump Lawyer ‘Really Appalling’ As seen on Hannity – Alan Dershowitz reacted to a federal raid on the office of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Dershowitz said it is a “dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations.”

The Mueller coup by Don Surber – “Robert Mueller’s unconstitutional raid on the president’s lawyer — with Democratic Party operatives grabbing privileged communications — is the last straw. Mueller should not be fired“Mueller should be arrested and charged with political espionage.”

“Sadly, this unconstitutional spectacle is only the latest attempt by the Democratic Party to invalidate the last election and overthrow the president.

If you vote for any Democrat from senator down to county surveyor this year, you are condoning this un-American activity

The FBI Escalates Its War on the Trump Administration by John Hinderaker – “It is blindingly obvious that this whole story, and the leak thereof, is a political attack on President Trump by the Democratic Party.”

“So here’s the situation: the Special Democratic Party Prosecutor and the Department of Justice, in the person of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, have nothing better to do than investigate a 12-year-old, one-night consensual encounter involving Donald Trump. Apparently, actual crime in New York is a thing of the past. Organized crime is extinct; political corruption is non-existent; illegal immigration has ceased; violent crime is unknown. Stormy Daniels is the most pressing item on the law enforcement agenda.
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We are witnessing, as Scott says, “a political death struggle with the authorities operating under [President Trump’s] nominal control.” President Trump and his loyal appointees need to assert the powers that the voters have given them.

The President’s Trump Card For Spending Restraint by Stephen Moore and James Carter – “The White House is seriously considering a strategy to cancel tens of billions of dollars of wasteful spending in the $1.3 trillion budget.” It’s easier to rescind than it is to allocate.

“a political death struggle with the authorities operating under [President Trump’s] nominal control.”

‘Attn:’ Video Spreads Lies About Processed Food In America, Europe By Alex Berezow – “”Attn:” is an activist website that produces extremely popular videos, … And like most activist websites, truth comes in a distant second place to eyeballs.”

“the video pushes the old trope that Europeans eat food hand-picked from the Garden of the Gods, while Americans eat slop filled with dangerous chemicals. So far, it’s received 62 million views.

The lies come early and often. Let’s break them down:
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The definition of “processed” itself is so vague, that it’s meaningless. [like “Assault” Rifle]
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the video casts doubt not only on this fundamental tenet of toxicology but on the scientific integrity of the FDA. It then touts the benefits of the precautionary principle in Europe, which essentially means that Europeans assume every single chemical is deadly unless it can be proven safe. Since science can never definitively prove that something is 100% safe, that’s a ridiculous standard, but it’s enshrined in the EU’s constitution.

62 million people saw that video. That’s the scope of the problem actual science communicators are facing.

Why a 53-Year-Old Big-City Lawyer Who Has Never Shot a Gun Joined the NRA by Josh Kantrow – “I did so because the anti-gun hysteria that I’ve witnessed is dangerous, alarming, and ignores the facts.”

“I have found that instead of focusing on these social issues and law enforcement breakdowns, we’ve seen unbridled hatred and rage directed toward responsible gun owners. I’ve seen this personally by my friends on the Left.

The Knee-Jerk Liberals Spit At Sinclair by L. Brent Bozell And Tim Graham – “In a 60- to 75-second second promo, the local anchors in each market read the script, and the Trump-hating media gave birth to a large cow.”

“On HBO, John Oliver denounced Sinclair anchors as sounding like “members of a brainwashed cult.” So, exactly how do anchors of news or entertainment shows across the country deliver their reports? Oliver doesn’t have a script? The HBO denunciations of a “brainwashed cult” are especially hilarious, since it creates Democratic propaganda films like last year’s “fly-on-the-wall” documentary “The Final Year” on Obama’s team of supposed foreign-policy geniuses.

The Herd Media Stampedes Sinclair by George Neumayr – “In an unguarded moment during the 2016 campaign, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski remarked that it is “our job,” not Trump’s, to “control exactly what people think.” The Sinclair Broadcast Group referenced that line in its promo”

“beneath the hysterical blather was nothing more than the hurt feelings of an exposed liberal propagandist. Sinclair had nailed her and she didn’t like it.

It is rich farce to see the herd media stampeding Sinclair for refusing to join it.
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The hypocrisy of this hectoring is only exceeded by its presumption.
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The attacks on Sinclair amount to nothing more than a brainwashing exercise designed to get all media companies to forfeit their autonomy to liberals.
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Sinclair shouldn’t surrender an inch to these frauds who feel entitled to set their employee and editorial policies for it. They are just a herd of embittered, has-been monopolists who still think it their sacred right to “control exactly what people think” without competition. They are the greatest enemies of a free press — conformists who chill free speech and call it journalism.

On the Trump-Russia investigation and the rule of law by Byron York – “This week I took part in a debate on the question “Does the Russia investigation endanger the rule of law?” I said yes, and here is why”

“First, a caveat: If “endanger the rule of law” means “destroys our legal order and threatens our democracy,” then no, I don’t think the Trump-Russia investigation does that. But if it means “involves our nation’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies in reckless political conduct that undermines our system of elections and the orderly transfer of power,” then yes, the Trump-Russia investigation does, in fact, endanger the rule of law.

Two incidents from 2016 and early 2017 point to the danger posed by overzealous Trump-Russia investigators.
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The bottom line is, the Flynn saga, which is at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation, appears to have hinged on a trumped-up suspicion that a new administration had broken a centuries-old law that has never been prosecuted before — when in fact, the new administration’s real transgression was to make clear it would throw away many of its predecessor’s policies.

The second incident that suggests the Trump investigation threatens the rule of law is the FBI’s use of the Trump dossier — a Clinton campaign opposition research product — as a part of its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.
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this was all done by the nation’s top law enforcement and intelligence officials, targeting a new president. So yes, it is reasonable to say the Trump-Russia investigation endangers the rule of law.

The Justice Department Sues California by Margot Cleveland – “The state is trying to grab control of federal lands.”

“Given the clarity of this command, in conjunction with the governing constitutional provisions, SB 50 seems destined for a quick demise — but not without a cost: As Attorney General Jeff Sessions pointed out in a scathing statement announcing the lawsuit, California is wasting government resources on litigation. “The Department of Justice is fighting every day to take illegal guns and drugs off our streets, combat the opioid epidemic and secure our borders from drug traffickers and criminal aliens, and protect our national security from radical Islamic extremists and foreign threats to our cyber security,” he wrote. “But once again, we see that too many of our resources are being diverted to deal with meritless and unnecessary lawsuits.”
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Restrain may not be the correct word, though. Resistance seems the more apt descriptor, but as Attorney General Sessions stressed, “government-by-litigation isn’t what the American people voted for and attempting to thwart an administration’s elected agenda through endless, meritless lawsuits is a dangerous precedent.”

Nonetheless, California seems undeterred — as further seen yesterday, when Democratic attorney general Xavier Becerra threatened to sue the Environmental Protection Agency following EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s announcement that the federal government intended to roll back the fuel-efficiency standards for cars adopted by the previous administration. This development is yet more proof that, notwithstanding the cost to taxpayers — both federal and state — California remains committed to using the courts to overturn the consequences of the 2016 presidential election.

This method of going to court to pursue anything is one of the Rules for Radicals. As with the immigrant horde heading to the boarder being trained to seek asylum or the ‘slow walking’ of nominees in the Senate or examining administration member behavior under a cynical microscope to make allegations, the effort is to hobble and destroy proper governance. It is fomenting revolution, a civil war, and tearing down the house in which those doing the destruction live themselves.

Caravan? What Caravan? By John Hinderaker – “Weirdly, the liberal media pretended to have no idea what the President was talking about. Politifact purported to fact-check”

“Politifact finally concedes that what Trump said was true, but inconsistent with Democratic Party narratives. (That’s my paraphrase.)
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Politifact linked to the Associated Press’s similarly angst-ridden “fact check.”
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Oddly, neither the AP nor Politifact shows any sign of having read the press release issued by the caravan’s leaders, which explains what it is all about.
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There you have it. These leftists demand open borders because as Hondurans, they are just as much citizens of the U.S. as we are. This is simply a false statement of fact. But it nevertheless represents a political agenda. These would-be migrants and their supporters in the U.S.–who, unfortunately, are plentiful–don’t believe in sovereignty. They don’t believe in borders. They don’t believe in citizenship. They don’t believe in countries. Most particularly, they don’t believe in ours, notwithstanding the fact that some of them, at least, want to come here.

So the caravan represents a direct, if symbolic, challenge to our sovereignty and our right to govern ourselves as a free people. President Trump understands this, while Politifact and the Associated Press do not. Or, perhaps, they do understand but pretend not to.
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The Democrats and their press minions see nothing problematic about this. But the rest of us do.

Instapundit: “I QUESTION THE TIMING: Rosenstein Memo confirming Mueller could investigate Manafort came a week after raid on Manafort’s home. Prof. Jacobson notes: “The August 2, 2017 memo was classic bootstrapping. It purported to confirm Mueller’s authority to go after Manafort’s business dealings, but Mueller already was doing that and had been doing it for weeks, culminating in the July 26 home raid. So to the extent the Rosenstein August 2, 2017 memorandum is supposed to instill confidence that Mueller is receiving proper DOJ oversight, it does just the opposite.”

Ben Rhodes cranks up the smear machine by Monica Showalter – “The sentence is so bonkers, so pristine in its conspiratorial insanity that it should one day grace a Museum of Natural History exhibit on early-21st-century US politics.”

“Not worried in the least about his own credibility, Ben Rhodes and his minions are making wild, outrageous, fact-free, lunatic-fringe claims against incoming national security adviser John Bolton, correctly perceiving that the new national security adviser will be a threat to their self-vaunted Iran deal.
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Not only does the seedy little outfit Rhodes is running to spread fake news and change the “narrative” have all the top Obama national security team officials on it (flushing their own credibility down the toilet as these crazed smear-tweets go out), but it also has smear-artist extraordinaire on its masthead: Ben Wikler of MoveOn.org, whose organization is a leading Washington slime machine.

The real reason behind Sessions’ special counsel decision by Michael Goodwin – “Sessions’ decision is far more complex than reports suggest.”

“Sessions wants first to determine whether the situation meets the legal standard of “extraordinary circumstances” involving conflicts of interest that would allow him to move an investigation outside normal channels. I believe the standard will be easy to meet because there are numerous smoking guns showing that the 2016 investigations into both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were rigged by top government officials.
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The two clouds hanging over Washington — whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the election and the conduct of government officials who apparently abused their powers to try to defeat him and elect Clinton — must be resolved as soon as possible.

Sixth-grade teacher delivers 15-minute rant claiming Trump’s MAGA slogan is a call to bring segregation back and accuses white students of being descended from mass killers by Keith Griffith – “It comes days after another social studies teacher at the same middle school assigned students to write a letter to lawmakers demanding new restrictions on gun ownership.”

School Worker Accused of Threatening to ‘Execute’ White Men (AP) – “A Connecticut high school employee is accused of threatening to “execute” white men and stomping on an American flag in a classroom.”

Anti-Trump artists turn room in President’s Manhattan hotel into rat-filled exhibit by Rich Schapiro – “A band of renegade artists released live rats inside a Trump hotel room in the city as part of a highly unauthorized exhibit complete with a Donald impersonator in golden handcuffs.”

California governor pardons 5 men facing deportation by Paul Elias – “Brown’s intervention for the men — among 56 pardoned — marked the Democratic governor’s third consecutive pardon round in which he intervened on behalf of immigrants who were deported or faced deportation because of criminal convictions.” Think back to Arlo Guthrie and the Group W bench. No joke this time.

Is a backlash brewing over sponsors fleeing Laura Ingraham’s show? By Karen Townsend – “Funny how corporations have caved so quickly to the demands of the young Floridian, isn’t it?”

“As Hogg fancies himself a student journalist, it is hard to not notice he has his act down cold.
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While he enjoys playing the victim when he finally gets a bit of pushback from others – he is a liberal, after all, and they always throw the victim card into a debate – it is amazing to me how long it took for any public opposition to take hold.
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In the meantime, hashtag warriors are gonna hashtag and now David Hogg thinks he’ll just take a gap year and go on the campaign trail anyway. Anyone surprised by this?

Scott Pruitt’s “housing problem” by Jazz Shaw – “Those sleuths at the Washington Post (among other outlets) have been hard at work, sniffing out corruption and wrongdoing inside the Trump administration.”

“What are they on the trail of this time? Election rigging? Bribery? Something new with the Russians? Nope. The WaPo is raising a considerable fuss over EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s “unusual housing arrangement” during his first months in Washington after joining Trump’s cabinet.

So what’s unusual about it? Apparently, while looking for a long term lease arrangement, Pruitt rented a room from friends of his who failed to charge him enough money. And no… I’m not even kidding. (WaPo)
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Since everyone seems to be trafficking in speculation and innuendo these days, allow me to offer a different take. This looks like yet another case of scalp-hunting on the part of the media. If they can manufacture enough “scandals” around any of Trump’s cabinet members or advisers, it might result in calls to remove them. Then we’re treated to the next round of breathless media coverage about how the Trump White House is “in chaos” and can’t keep any people on staff.
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Here’s one question for the reporters at the WaPo, the New York Times and all the rest. Did you exercise this much effort in placing the rental accommodations of Barack Obama’s newly arriving staff members under scrutiny in 2009? Surely they all had to find places to live when they arrived as well. Did anyone even think to ask? Pruitt was only renting a room at the Harts’ condo until July and since then has taken up leases on two different apartments which rent for more than three to four thousand dollars per month.

Huh. I wonder if the next story will be that his new digs are too expensive and extravagant.

An army of illegal aliens is marching on America by Jazz Shaw – “Sounds like the first line of a movie script based on some dystopian future, doesn’t it? But it’s actually an underreported story from the real world.”

“Flores is apparently on a lengthy trek through all of Mexico with a literal army of migrants from a number of countries including Honduras. Normally one might imagine that a potential national security crisis for the United States such as this would be cause for raising the alarm. Instead, the Buzzfeed reporter is cheering them on and talking about their “struggle.”
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This isn’t a group of family members or some isolated, organized clan. This is an army. Flores numbers them in the hundreds but looking at the pictures coming from the “march” it clearly appears that their numbers are swelling. The real figure, as cited by Mora, is likely already more than a thousand. Their purpose? They make no bones about it when asked. They, “hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally.”
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This army of interlopers moving across Mexico “without authorization” as Flores puts it (translated to “illegally”) is seeking to overwhelm the resources of immigration officials and are ready to cross the border illegally if an opening presents itself. If Mexico allows this to simply happen with no intercession they shouldn’t expect such a friendly reception with the State Department and the White House.

Federal Judge: Environmental group has sued others, therefore it can be sued by John Sexton – “Last August, Energy Transfer Partners, the company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued a number of environmental groups, including Greenpeace, BankTrack, and Earth First!, alleging the groups were collectively engaged in racketeering.” It’s about accountability. But then, there’s the Boston judge:

Boston Judge Accepts Climate Necessity Defence, Dismisses Charges by Eric Worrall – “Judge Mary Ann Driscoll has dismissed criminal charges against protestors including Al Gore’s daughter on the grounds that their actions were necessary to prevent climate change.” Whither the law?

“It might even lead to loss of life – sneaking onto active worksites, jumping into construction trenches, closing valves without warning on high pressure pipelines and scaling smokestacks is dangerous, both for the activists themselves and for any workers caught up with trying to save activists from their own stupidity.

At Instapundit – Suzanne Venker: Feminists are to blame for the plight of boys and men. – “In this and in other areas, we’ve given a small angry group of people with dubious mental health way too much control over the culture. Unsurprisingly, it’s working out badly.”

It’s 2018 and NPR Doesn’t Know What Christians Commemorate on Easter by Stephen Kruiser – “Do we only publicly fund entities that don’t like Christians (looking at you, Planned Parenthood)?”

“Feeling the need to Eastersplain to their postmodern, “no objective truth” fans, someone wrote an article for the NPR website that described Easter as “the day celebrating the idea that Jesus did not die and go to hell or purgatory or anywhere like that, but rather arose into heaven.”

Obviously, what is being described is the Ascension, which comes after Easter
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Even if this writer hadn’t managed to get two huge things wrong in just twenty-five words, I would have taken objection that we celebrate “the idea” of the Easter story. We celebrate that it actually happened.

Denying Genetics Isn’t Shutting Down Racism, It’s Fueling It by Andrew Sullivan – “I felt a genuine relief reading the op-ed because it was so nuanced and so low-temperature; it reflects precisely my own thoughts on the subject; and it’s hard to smear a Harvard geneticist for being a white supremacist (the usual gambit).” referring to David Reich’s “rather seismic op-ed” in the New York Times.

“I know this is a touchy, fraught, difficult subject. I completely understand the reluctance to discuss it, and the hideous history of similar ideas in the past. But when people seeking the truth are immediately targeted for abuse and stigma, it matters.
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When that classical liberalism is tarred as inherently racist because it cannot guarantee equality of outcomes, and when scientific research is under attack for revealing the fuller truth about our world, we are in deep trouble. Because we are robbing liberalism of the knowledge and the moderation it will soon desperately need to defend itself.

Psychology Today: “Break the Spiral of Silence on Climate Change” by Eric Worrall – “Patricia Prijatel thinks the silence of Germans oppressed by the NAZIs is comparable to not talking about the alleged dangers of anthropogenic climate change.” … “What a bizarre conflation of ideas.”

Bankruptcies caused by medical bills are not common by neo-neocon – “one of the reasons for passing Obamacare was the idea pushed by the liberal/left (including and especially Elizabeth Warren) that medical bills were an enormous driver of bankruptcies.”

“Actually, a bigger driver is probably loss of income as a result of illness … “If Dobkin et al. are right, the people who quoted [Elizabeth] Warren’s inflated statistics, focused around medical bills, didn’t just overstate the problem; they had us focus on a problem we didn’t have, instead of the one we did.”

This ‘technique’ of argument based on fake or created or misrepresented ‘news’ is common. The gun control and climate change arguments are full of questionable or false or distorted claims used to rationalize irrational opinions.

Of Course Children Prefer Liberalism by Trevor Thomas – “The most significant principle of conservatism is that our rights come, not from man or from government, but from God.”

“Because what is tried and true can sometimes be viewed as stale and boring, and because being moral is often difficult, conservatism is frequently presented with challenges that liberalism is not. … For liberals … governing becomes a matter of seeking what is popular and pleasing, not what is right.

Much of our childhood is spent doing the same. We are by our nature selfish (many of us say “sinful”), self-centered creatures. We want what we want, when we want it. As children, we want the toys, food, entertainment, and so on, that make us feel good, or at least what we think will make us feel good, because others have told us, or sold us, on such an idea.
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One of the great lies of modern liberalism — perhaps the great lie — is that the world owes us something, and it’s up to us to do whatever it takes to get it.
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Because such a mindset is so familiar to them, it’s pretty easy to convince children — or those who think and reason like a child — that this is how the world should be.

Trump and the Great Unmasking of the Left by Thomas Lifson – “progressives are escalating their rhetoric, and in the process, unmasking their true beliefs.”

“For decades, they have obscured their real goals, and pretended to be interested in moderate, incremental measures that they believe would be acceptable to mainstream Americans. Using terms like “compassion” and “fairness,” they have sought to justify handing more and more power to the state, and the importation of a population amenable to state control of all aspects of life.

But in reaction to President Trump’s in-your-face persona and use of the mechanisms of state power for goals they oppose, they have escalated their rhetoric, and in the process exposed their real beliefs that long have been kept hidden from the broader public.

The week Trump was the only sane man in Washington by Keith Koffler – government spending, national defense, international relations, fairness in trade … “One might even say it was a very “sane” approach amid the insane cacophony of Washington.”

Partisanship and John Brennan’s Plot by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. – “Obama CIA use of foreign spies against the Trump campaign should be cause for alarm, no?”

“What passes for the current wisdom today contains a great deal of solemn slop. Yet there are some solemnities in the current wisdom that one assumes are legitimate.
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We have been hearing for years that the existence of the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies of the intelligence community constitute a threat to our civil liberties.
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Last week, however, I personally discovered the left’s concern for civil liberties has vanished or at least become muted by partisanship.
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spying on American citizens one would think would be opposed by all sides in America today. One would expect a consensus to exist at least on this. But it does not appear to be the case. Members of the left have uttered not a peep. Even the ACLU is quiet.

Former EPA Head Turns Out To Be A Huge Fan Of Secret Science by Jazz Shaw – “If you want everyone to be confident in the work being used, be transparent. It’s really that simple.”

“ It turns out that a previous EPA chief, Gina McCarthy, and Janet McCabe, the Obama era author of the Clean Power Plan, don’t care for this new system at all. In fact, they published an op-ed to remind all of you peasants that it’s none of your darn business what data went into any given study and you should just take their word for it. (The Hill)
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This poorly explained op-ed relies on the same two arguments which Pruitt’s critics have attempted to foist off on us before, neither of which does them any credit. The first is the claim that any scientific study involving medical data could compromise the confidential medical data of patients. …

The second argument is the real kicker, in which we are informed that there’s no need for the hoi polloi to have a look at studies which have been peer reviewed.

Fear & loathing at the DoJ , cont’d by Scott Johnson – The case is that of Howard Root and proprietorial misconduct. “Howard faced down the government.”

“The jury didn’t think much of the government’s case. It returned with a verdict of acquittal on all charges after a day of deliberations, and that includes the time spent electing a foreman.

Howard’s case is important in its own way. The crimes charged were bogus. The prosecution was based in part on prosecutorial misconduct. The case represents fruit of the poisonous Yates Memo tree. Howard had the resources to fight the government’s unjust prosecution of him and his company, but the case exacted an enormous toll. It cries out for study and reform.
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The Department of Justice declines to answer to Howard or me, but it might answer to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Utah Senator Mike Lee.

Young Anti-Gun Demagogues Copy Their Elders by Jacob Sullum – “There cannot be two sides,” say the adolescent activists, tarring their opponents as NRA puppets.”

“Taking their cues from the grownups they say have failed them, Hogg and his compatriots assume their opponents are motivated by greed, cowardice, and crass political considerations—anything but honest disagreement.
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Lara Vance, a middle-aged Kentucky woman who was interviewed at the D.C. rally, said she was “rather shocked that this is even an issue.” After all, “This is something that can be solved. It doesn’t take a lot of thought. We know what the problems are, and we need Congress to get their act together and get this problem solved.”

I disagree with pretty much every part of that, but I have no doubt that Vance sincerely believes it. I wish she would extend me the same courtesy.

Of Laws And Men by Sarah Hoyt – “This is emblematic of what leftists can’t grasp about laws: that laws aren’t magical and words don’t compel obedience.”

“If — in the world we live in — laws compelled obedience in and of themselves, murder would be unheard of since almost every human society since the dawn of time has had a law against it.

And yet murder, theft, and all the other lawbreaking imaginable still happens, which proves to us it is possible for people to ignore and contravene the law.

Sometimes, in fact, you have to ignore and contravene the law to survive. The black markets in various communist countries sprang up not out of the contrariness of the citizens, but because it was vital for survival. …

But the left piously believes in laws and that laws have the power to change people’s behavior. It’s part of their fanatical devotion to a society organized by the numbers and from the top down.
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To have these people learn the error of their ways in a practical fashion will only destroy the world for the rest of us. And besides, judging from Europe, they’ll never learn. They’ll just refuse to admit their plan failed and pile on more laws and more regulatory bodies, till someone’s whole job is regulating the curvature of a banana.

Who’s your hero?

Twenty-One Bad Things About Wind Energy — and Three Reasons Why by John Droz, Jr. – “When you hear that wind opposition is all about NIMBYs, think about the above points, and then reflect on what NIMBY really means: The Next Idiot Might Be You.”

“Trying to pin down the arguments of wind promoters is a bit like trying to grab a greased balloon. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, it morphs into a different story and escapes your grasp. Let’s take a quick highlight review of how things have evolved with merchandising industrial wind energy.
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A hundred-plus years ago, wind energy was recognized as an antiquated, unreliable and expensive source of energy – and now, after hundreds of billions of wasted tax and consumer dollars, we find that (surprise!) it still is an antiquated, unreliable and expensive source of energy. This is what happens when science is relegated to a back-of-the-bus status.

Bombshell reveal: A grand jury already is hearing evidence on DOJ and FBI scandals by Thomas Lifson – “We are on the verge of a huge political explosion.” Grand Juries, criminal prosecutions, and administrative proceedings (firings) are not public matters in their early stages so what is known is rather sketchy. The dots are being connected and the story should be known in due time.

Between Brennan and McCabe it does appear there is a politicization problem in our agencies by John Sexton – “Brennan is free to say what he wants so long as he’s not revealing classified information, but his speculation lends credence to the idea that there is partisan bias at work here.” While many are appalled that the President assailed the intelligence community, as is usually the case it appears the President was right and was highlighting a significant problem that needs to be addressed.

My War With Russian Trolls by Victor Davis Hanson – “Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has two overarching goals. First, the Russian people must believe the Kremlin version of domestic and world events. … Second, Kremlin propaganda must discredit Western democracy as dysfunctional and inferior to Russia’s managed “democracy.”” Behavior and goals are described and it’s not only the Russians that exhibit them.

Poisoning Paradise: I Was On A Film Panel Devoted To Hating Science, And Here Is Why You Should Be Also By Hank Campbell – “a film by trial lawyers to help public opinion force Syngenta to settle a lawsuit that may not even have happened yet. And with a hand-picked panel to help.” Here is what civilization is up against.

“f it was not obvious by the halfway mark that the movie is stuffed with litigants and lawyers because it was made by and for litigants and lawyers, the “For More Information” at the end which goes to two litigation groups will be enough to convince you.

So the movie is against science and the panel was against science. To really drive their agenda home, they made sure they stacked the audience with activists too. So much that when their publicity stunts began, the people genuinely concerned about science issues walked out.

And that is important. The people who walked out are why you should attend these events. They are reasonable. They can be reached.
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This technique of pretending to be welcoming and neutral and compassionate about diverse beliefs and thoughts while really being hatemongers was a litany that was to be repeated throughout the evening.

Jordan Peterson is Driving His Critics to Desperate Attacks by Russ McSwain – “His refusal to use legally mandated language has reverberated around the world.” The foil is Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs.

“The original basis for Peterson’s worldwide notoriety is his objection to being compelled to use legally mandated language. This is a huge step beyond the current Canadian laws, which prohibit and criminalize certain speech.
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Again, I don’t think Robinson is lying. There is a funny space that some people on the left occupy that blinds them to facts. They are just very odd people.

Barking mad by Scott Johnson – “We are in day two of the left’s administration of punishment to Katherine Kersten for her Star Tribune column Undisciplined: Chaos may be coming to Minnesota classrooms, by decree. ”

“There is a gaping hole in Cassellius’s column where demonstration ought to be. Cassellius’s column is an exercise in pretense and distraction. And this woman is Minnesota’s commissioner of education. In case anyone is paying attention, that too is a scandal.

I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you by Quincy Larson – “all the security in the world can’t save you if someone has physical possession of your phone or laptop, and can intimidate you into giving up your password.” This is related to the current Obama scandals.

“take a moment to think about all the apps you have on your phone. Email? Facebook? Dropbox? Your browser? Signal? The history of everything you’ve ever done — everything you’ve ever searched, and everything you’ve ever said to anyone — is right there in those apps.
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What we’re seeing now is that anyone can be grabbed on their way through customs and forced to hand over the full contents of their digital life.
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What’s the worst thing that could happen if the Customs and Border Patrol succeed in getting ahold of your unlocked phone? Well…

It’s only a matter of time before downloading the contents of people’s phones becomes a standard procedure for entering every country. This already happens in Canada. And you can bet that countries like China and Russia aren’t far behind.

The conflict is between privacy and anti-terrorism efforts. Just how far should governments be allowed to go? Does the Obama administration history with FISA and other abuses feed fear about governmental overreach?

Austin bombing suspect dead, apparently tracked down by surveillance state By Thomas Lifson – “police were led to him through the blanket surveillance capabilities that have come characterize American society in the wake of the “war on terror.””

“This is called the “panopticon” state that can see you everywhere. China is spending a lot of money and devoting intellectual resources to becoming the most thoroughgoing panopticon state in human history. But if you think you are not subject to constant surveillance and keep a cell phone with you, the police can find out where you’ve been and where you are now, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The demise of the presumptive perp in Austin is an upside of this situation. The downside has yet to be fully plumbed here, but in China, it is clear that it is a foundational element of twenty-first-century tyranny.

John Brennan: Deep State Political Hack by Daniel John Sobieski – “he redefines chutzpah when in a tweet he describes President Trump in words that sound as though they were plagiarized from FBI lead investigator Peter Strzok”

“The only “disgraced demagogues” in this scenario are John Brennan; James Clapper; Andrew McCabe; James Comey; Peter Strzok; and, yes, Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, all parties in a political resistance whose purpose was to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House. And John Brennan dares to talk about political corruption?
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Brennan’s venomous tweet, like Strzok’s infamous text messages to his lover and co-conspirator in the FBI, Lisa Page, show the depth of the political corruption infesting an intelligence community that conspired to interfere in our elections to deny Donald Trump the presidency. Brennan and his colleagues are supposed to serve the president, not conspire against him.

John Brennan, like Clapper, McCabe, and Comey, is a liar for whom ideological goals overrule political morality and personal honor.
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Considering his past record and current shenanigans, it is John Brennan who is guilty of political corruption and using the extraordinary powers of his office – not to serve his country, but to subvert it.

The Nuclear Option: Limitless Investigation of Trump Was Always the Plan by Charles Hurt – “So this is the new standard for electing a president here in America, the greatest living experiment in self-governance.”

“And damn the innocent host! The more devastating the cancer is to the very body politic that gives it life, the better!

It is the truest form of injustice. Singular evil. Blind hatred.

So they changed the rules. We can pick our president. But then the powerful established bureaucracy must conduct a massive, sprawling, limitless investigation into any and all aspects of the president we pick.
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They exposed people, spied on people and began setting the trap just in case the stupid people of America picked Mr. Trump to be their president. They lied, conspired and held secret meetings.

So special counsel Robert Mueller’s endless investigation in search of a crime should have been no surprise. It was cooked up long before Mr. Trump even won the election. Of course, these people were going to do this.

It is the new standard for “self-governance” in America. The people can elect any president they want. But then these people will do everything including assassinating their character to hound them from office.

Scandal Questions Never Asked, Much Less Answered by Victor Davis Hanson – “Sometimes the hysteria of crowds causes them to overlook the obvious.”

“Here is a series of 12 questions that do not seem to trouble anyone, but the answers to these should expose why so many of the people today alleging scandals should themselves be considered scandalous.

Instapundit: Retrograde to avoid Facebook problems.

“I hope a lot of people will move back to blogs and away from big corporate platforms. As I wrote a while back: “I think that the old blogosphere was superior to ‘social media’ like Twitter and Facebook for a number of reasons. First, as a loosely-coupled system, instead of the tightly-coupled systems built by retweets and shares, it was less prone to cascading failure in the form of waves of hysteria. Second, because there was no central point of control, there was no way to ban people. And you didn’t need one, since bloggers had only the audience that deliberately chose to visit their blogs.”

This is how you can achieve net neutrality.

There is much anticipation about the Inspector General’s report due any time now. One shouldn’t get one’s hopes up too much else one might suffer like the Left on its repeated ‘we got Trump now’ revelations. The difference is that the Trump anticipation foundation was usually Fake News while the IG report has already produced disciplinary action and a steady drip of testimony and evidence.

Discipline Quotas: The Obama Administration’s Evil Lives On by John Hinderaker – “litigation against schools where black students are disciplined (e.g., by suspension) more often, on a pro rata basis, than white students, on the ground that such numerical discrepancy is evidence of discrimination.” There’s a famous book about society’s efforts to make all citizens equal …

“My colleague at Center of the American Experiment, Katherine Kersten, has a brilliant op-ed on the Dayton administration’s phantom letters in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune:
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It’s a funny thing about liberals–they are undaunted by failure. It’s almost as though they don’t really care whether their policies work or not.
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Liberals who claim that disparate discipline rates must be evidence of racist teachers never want to talk about the fact that Asian students are suspended much less often than whites.
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The whole “school to prison pipeline” myth is disingenuous. It shouldn’t be surprising that teenagers who bring weapons to school, get into fights, assault teachers, are chronically disobedient and disruptive, take drugs on school property, and so on, are disproportionately likely to commit crimes that land them in prison. Only a liberal could be surprised at this correlation.

Sessions makes his move by J.R. Dunn – “Sessions is the quintessential Eagle Scout. He will follow the rules down to the last subclause and will not make his move until every “t” has been crossed and every “i” dotted.” There is a need these days to be careful about using Eagle Scout as a standard as this standard has been corrupted by the Left as it has corrupted so many others standards of honor and integrity and civility.

“This comes under the rubric of “strategy,” a concept unfortunately foreign to too many active conservatives. A large number of cons recognize only one course of action: a headlong charge against the closest target while howling at the top of their lungs. Not only do they dismiss any more subtle form of action, but they often attack those engaging in it of cowardice or corruption, or of being an “Alinskyite-Obamaist commie stooge” – despite the fact that their kamikaze runs usually end up heading over the nearest cliff.

So it was with Sessions, who has been routinely dismissed as “paid off,” being “asleep under his desk,” or as “part of the swamp.”

Sessions took his time, did things according to the book, and dealt the swamp a good, stiff blow while leaving its denizens little recourse but to throw tantrums in the media, which they have been doing the weekend long.
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Look forward to seeing more of this kind of thing as Sessions and the Trump administration as a whole drill deeper into the muck of liberal D.C. At times you will see little, since much of the action will be occurring behind the scenes. But pay close attention to what you can see. You will be witnessing master strategists in action, and much of what they do can be applied to other scenarios similar in nature.

The Coming Collusion Bloodbath by Kevin McCullough – “So many Democrats and Republicans have asserted the lack of evidence in the Russian collusion issue its become comical if not annoying to endure as the uninformed continue to argue otherwise.”

“But few have had interest in addressing a separate issue that demands attention. For while the Russians attempted mass chaos. The more serious scandal appears to have covered up criminal behavior, illicit manipulation of the FISA process, and an attempt to undo the quite serious results of an election.
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The Democrats’ illicit partnership with the Obama Justice Department and what appears to be an increasingly corrupted leadership at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was yet one more logistical hurdle that President Trump would have to overcome in his surprising and transformational win.
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What the universe has truly ignored is the fact that the Inspector General’s investigation (which has been far less publicized than Special Council Robert Mueller’s), and in large measure has had much more devastating impact. Agents have been fired, reassigned, and otherwise dealt with just within the process of the investigation. The limited amount of what we’ve seen from the efforts thus far have painted a picture of corruption at the highest levels, and potentially “Watergate” comparable outcomes upon the report’s issuance.
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In some respects Robert Mueller never asked for the position he finds himself in. But if he is not willing to look at the evidence before him and truly follow where it leads then it is time for him to go as well.
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Former high-ranking FBI officials (like Chris Swetzer who appeared with Harris Faulkner’s FoxNews broadcast on Friday) believe that the Inspector General’s coming report will be explosive.

For the sake of justice, above all else, I hope it brings clarity to a story our modern media landscape is highly invested in keeping as convoluted as possible.

Influential Dem operative “stands with McCabe” even if he’s guilty by Paul Mirengoff – “Klain is so committed to the anti-Trump resistance that guilt and innocence don’t matter to him anymore”

“When the merits don’t matter — when the only questions that need to be asked are whose side is one on, who benefits, and who has the superior claim to being “powerless” — our polity is in serious trouble.

Via Instapundit The Two Million Dollar Dem: More Dems offer to hire McCabe. Some folks need to do some deep introspection about their choice of heroes.

The Joy and Necessity of Driving Liberals Nuts by Kurt Schlichter – “It’s just a matter of pushing their buttons.”

“Don’t worry – we’re not showing our cards here. Napoleon (allegedly) warned that you should never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake, and dismissing your opponent – especially one who snatched away the presidency from The Smartest Women in the History of Ever – is always a grave strategic error. But we can safely discuss it here because they won’t listen. They can’t listen – to listen to us is to take us seriously and admit to themselves that We The People are a threat to Them Our Betters. Just look at the comments below – go and see how many of them draw exactly the opposite point that this column makes. They have to minimize and marginalize us because labelling our rebellion against their self-serving, failed rule a mere temper tantrum allows them to avoid the painful reality that they brought this on themselves because they are terrible.
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But getting under our opponents’ collective collectivist skin is more than just an enjoyable way to pass the time. It performs vital functions for the movement both by exposing our enemy for what it is, and for supporting our own side’s morale.
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The real purpose of our relentless mockery and our relentless highlighting of their relentless hypocrisy and incompetence is to demonstrate to the sleeping masses that the people claiming to be their betters are, in fact, not better at all.

WaPo fact checks Trump’s “Comey lied” tweet with curious results by Jazz Shaw – “The President once again had the press collectively setting their hair on fire this weekend with yet another tweet.”

“So according to the WaPo, Trump “misrepresented” the coverage, “misquoted” the testimony and “mangled the truth.” Clearly, his claim must be a real whopper, right? There’s only one problem with that conclusion, however. Selk goes on for more than two dozen additional paragraphs and completely fails to negate the basic substance of what the President tweeted, nor does he bail Comey out of trouble.

McCabe just made life tough for Comey and the special counsel by Jonathan Turley – “McCabe may have rectified his “singled out” status with his long statement criticizing his termination: In the middle of it is a line that could be viewed as incriminating fired FBI director James Comey, not just in leaking sensitive information but also in lying to Congress.”

“If this was determined to be a leak with his approval, Comey likely would be labeled not just a leaker but a liar. Worse, his second-in-command just lost his pension after more than 20 years with the bureau, while Comey is about to cash in on a book and publicity tour potentially worth millions.

Comey also will be releasing his book around the same time as the inspector general’s report is expected to be made public.
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More generally, the apparent conduct of both McCabe and Comey have fulfilled the narrative long advanced by Trump of a biased and unprincipled FBI investigation.
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This country is deeply divided over the allegations against Trump and his opponents. We will not overcome this chasm until we are satisfied that we have the full factual record from the Clinton and Russia investigations.

This is particularly true for the FBI, which will not be able to regain the trust of many Americans without making a clean break from scandal. That means total transparency, which runs against the bureau’s culture. Yet, without greater disclosure, the public will be left wondering if a sense of Comey’s “Higher Loyalty” dangerously blurred the lines between “Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”

This trap set long before Donald Trump won by Charles Hurt – “So this is the new standard for electing a president here in America, the greatest living experiment in self-governance.”

“Through a combination of representative democracy and a balancing of state power against federal power, we the people pick our president.

Unless, of course, the president we the people pick turns out to be a grave and odious threat to the powerful established bureaucracy in Washington that — like cancer itself — is entirely dedicated to its own preservation and spread.

And damn the innocent host! The more devastating the cancer is to the very body politic that gives it life, the better!

It is the truest form of injustice. Singular evil. Blind hatred.
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It is the new standard for “self-governance” in America. The people can elect any president they want. But then these people will do everything including assassinate their character to hound them from office.

Truly, these people cannot fathom how much innocent taxpayers despise them.

Prequel – Reminder of The ‘Big Picture’ in Summary by sundance – “Here’s the basic overview of how all those threads come together to paint a picture.”

“There are so many threads of information surrounding the 2016 operation to conduct political surveillance on the Trump campaign by various officials and offices within corrupt structures of government it’s easy to get lost. However, if we take all the various bits of information and place them together a less confusing picture emerges.

The denial is so strong, so adamant, so vehement, that it stimulates hesitation about the evidence that is on the table. It creates dissonance to look at that evidence and then the behavior of so many distinguished government leaders and executives. That dissonance will be resolved and the behaviors in evidence suggest the process will not be smooth or easy.

It depends upon what you want and how far you are willing to suspend reality to pretend its going to come to you. The CIA nominee is a classic case of using deceit to dishonor political opponents. The McCabe situation turns the situation upside down as it is a case of trying to protect against established dishonorable behavior. What you get is a comparison and contrast on how the Left maligns its opposition compared to how they respond to being maligned themselves.

On the Gina Haspel torture story: fake, but inaccurate by neo-neocon – “In still another example of the sad and sorry and downright dangerous state of journalism today”

“the tale of Gina Haspel’s (Trump’s new pick to head the CIA) involvement in overseeing the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in Afghanistan in 2002, published in February of 2017 by ProPublica, is now being retracted as false.

The Democrats’ response to Haspel’s nomination was to accuse her of being a torturer overseer on the basis of these stories.
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Extraordinary. Or maybe the most extraordinary thing about it is that it was ultimately retracted, because such errors (if they are errors rather than deliberate falsifications) are not unusual. How did these intrepid journalists get it wrong?
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So the original claim seems to have been based on the reports of some people who weren’t necessarily there and who remain unnamed and whose positions are unspecified. And fact-checking the most simple fact—when was Haspel posted to the Thai prison and did it coincide with the timeline of the waterboardings—seems to have been beyond the capacity of the Times or ProPublica.

That’s the way reporting goes these days; lots of mistakes. However, have you ever noticed that the errors seem to mostly go in one direction only, the direction that favors the left’s “narrative”? How can that be, since we all know reporters are oh-so-objective?

Andrew McCabe was just offered a job by a congressman so he can get his full retirement. And it just might work by Amber Phillips – “At least one Democratic congressman has offered McCabe a temporary job so he can get full retirement benefits.” Just how partisan was the FBI? Here’s an answer. It’s also an illustration of just how far the Left will go to protect its own. What will happen if a Congressman hires a security person who is then indicted for federal felonies?

‘Deep State’ top brass hand Trump more ammo by W. James Antle III – “political combatants have become even more committed to their preferred narratives about President Trump and the Russia investigation.” Notice that evidence is not a part of the story.

“For Republicans and Trump supporters, it is the latest evidence of permanent government interests working to undermine a duly elected president who was never part of their establishment clique, leaking about matters they were supposed to be investigating impartially as part of a probe that could trigger a constitutional crisis.

For Democrats and “Never Trump,” it was the latest handiwork of a spiteful and vengeful president, who routinely transgresses institutional norms and legal boundaries while traducing the dedicated public servants who stand in his way, perhaps precipitating a constitutional crisis of his own making.

If You Are a Fed Official, Perjury Is ‘Lacking Candor’ by Clarice Feldman – “Lacking candor under oath” is the operative phrase. If it were you or I, the charge by a special prosecutor would be perjury. Ask Lewis Libby or General Mike Flynn.”

“Of note, the President had nothing to do with this; the recommendation came from within the FBI itself based on its analysis of the report it received from the Justice Department’s inspector general, an Obama appointee. Bear this in mind when you read McCabe’s response and the twist the major media are putting on the firing.
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Many other instances of McCabe and his staff’s misconduct have been reported and are not included in Sessions’s statement, but they seem certain to be revealed when the OIG reports are released.
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It’s hard to ignore, however, that this firing and the constant disclosures about those closest to Comey and McCabe likely will lead to a significant restructuring of the FBI. Whether it will restore faith in that corrupted agency remains to be seen.

Interesting Response Statement By McCabe Attorney Michael Bromwich by sundance – “in order for McCabe and Bromwich to have lengthy prepared statements ready for immediate release – they were well aware of the pending public release of the DOJ notice of termination.”

“So attorney Michael Bromwich was for the OIG investigation (January 2017) until his client, Andrew McCabe, was found to have acted inappropriately/unlawfully as a result of the OIG investigation (March 2018) – and now he’s against it.

Great News – Andrew McCabe Claims He Kept Notes of Discussions With President Trump by sundance – “Within hours of Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the politicized intelligence community and their media advocates began shaping a narrative.” It’s innuendo, not evidence. It’s narrative, not substance. It’s threats against prosecution.

“In an effort to assist his wounded-indian-routine, politically thinking McCabe claims to have taken copious notes of interactions with President Trump, who –according to McCabes prior sniffeling– hurt his feelings.

Yes, that’s right, the Deputy Director of the FBI clutches his pearls while proclaiming his innocence against the charges he politicized his position; and defends against his firing by saying he had his sensibilities wounded when President Trump pointed out -to his face- that McCabe held an important position, and was stupid for thinking it was a good idea for his wife to run for political office.
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It might be worth noting, McCabes notes all stem from President Trump questioning the judgement of a guy who was eventually fired for lying about his actions – which evidenced a brutally obvious lack of judgement – that he tried to hide…

McCabe Should Sweat Prison, Not Pension by Daniel John Sobieski – “In his response to his firing, McCabe lied again, ignoring his multitude of offenses only to whine about persecution by a vindictive President Trump.”

“Chutzpah has a new poster child in Andrew McCabe, who, after aiding and abetting Hillary Clinton’s exoneration and collusion with the Russians, committing a fraud upon the FISA court to aid one political party over another, and being an active participant in the attempted deep state coup against Donald Trump, dared to ask he not be fired so he can retain a cushy pension
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McCabe is an accomplished Deep State liar and co-conspirator who took his leave in January to avoid demotion and preserve his pension. That came after current FBI director Christopher Wray reviewed the House Intelligence Committee memo in which his activities in the vendetta against Trump involving the now infamous Christopher Steele dossier were prominently featured.
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Connect those dots: Democrats and others looking for Russians hiding under Republican beds. A deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, campaigning for his wife, who receives huge sums of money from the Democratic Party of Clinton political ally Terry McAuliffe. Flynn, character witness on behalf of one of McCabe’s accusers, becoming a target of an FBI probe in which his identity is illegally unmasked. Was Mrs. McCabe’s subsidy a quid for a future quo? Was Flynn’s unmasking McCabe’s revenge?

McCabe’s firing is a well deserved outcome. But he shouldn’t sweat the loss of his pension. Federal prison inmates get free room and board.

McCabe waiting for his indictment now by Thomas Lifson – “The odds are very high that an indictment will be forthcoming for Andrew McCabe.”

“This finding came from the nonpartisan Office of Professional Responsibility, acting on the basis of a referral from the nonpartisan Inspector General.

We already know that a US Attorney in Little Rock is on the case, thanks to a comment from Sessions. We don’t know if a grand jury has been empaneled, but that is how US attorneys get subpoenas, so my guess is that one is sitting, and has or soon will get to consider an indictment that could remain sealed until it is needed.

Meanwhile, McCabe’s defenders in the media are planting the seeds of their own credibility destruction.
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This maybe the most interesting political season ahead in living memory. I certainly hope so.

Don Surber: Press failed to prepare us for this – “Roger L. Simon correctly framed the pension-hampering firing of Andrew McCabe as the beginning of the biggest scandal ever. The Gate of Gates, as he put it.”

“The real draining of the Swamp has finally begun. Jeff Sessions may have quietly been engineering it in ways his critics, even Trump himself, didn’t realize. It is time for every concerned citizen to keep up the pressure. At moments like this, it’s easy to be cynical and think, oh, this is a good moment, but it will go back to business as usual soon. By thinking that way, you become part of the part of the problem. Don’t. Act,” Simon wrote.

I believe the man who appointed Sessions is more likely behind this because for all his bluster and exaggerations, Trump knows of which he speaks.

However, Sessions is quite knowledgeable about criminal justice, and should not be dismissed as a prissy gentleman.
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The public is not prepared for what is about to come down. Marxists hold out hope that by keeping the public in the dark, they can frame this as a political witch hunt.

My guess is that will fail because Americans have an affinity toward the truth.

Trump Rips Mueller Investigation. He’s Right By John Hinderaker – that’s why his political opposition has gone over the shark in denouncing Trump’s Tweets.

Man of Steel by Pedro Gonzalez – “If the American Dream was flat-lining, the Trump administration may be acting as a defibrillator.” It’s about the Republican Establishment and their stand on tariffs, free trade, protectionism, and trade wars that have been buried in the past with pleasant words. It’s about swamp draining and making an aquarium to properly view its contents.

Waco: The Untold Story by David T. Hardy – “The sad fact is that the documentaries to date contain major errors. I know this because I spent three years in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits in a quest for the truth.” It is a story of government malfeasance and just how far some will go when it oversteps.

“There were, of course, official investigations and congressional hearings. The documentary films released to date largely parallel the government’s “official line” voiced during these. …

The FOIA lawsuit turned up evidence contradicting all of this. …

The official explanation for why the ATF did not peacefully arrest David Koresh was that he was a paranoid recluse who never left the Davidian building; a sudden, forceful, raid was the only way to root him out. The ATF had installed undercover agents in a house across the street from the Davidians, but they weren’t sure what Koresh looked like and never saw him leave.

This explanation was a complete fabrication.
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Twenty-four children and fifty men and women had died in the flames.

All this evidence has been available, largely on the internet, for over a decade. We are left to hope that some journalist or documentarian will pick up the ball.

The Age of Expert Ignorance by Christopher DeGroot – “It seems to stand to reason that mass education would have produced a more curious and educated citizenry. Still, that is not what has happened.”

“Before the academy was overrun by leftist pretenders, scholars were committed to teaching the truth about human history. So students used to learn that, just as imperialism was not unique to the West, so slavery existed on every continent and among virtually all peoples. …

Making human beings responsible for events with which they themselves had nothing to do is not only incoherent, it is an infinite task. When does it end? Is God, or the Big Bang, or what you will, finally to be found fault with?
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One reason Donald Trump was elected was the need to restore law and order in America. Yet here, too, we face the obstacle of expert ignorance.

It all depends upon your point of view and your anchors. “The public is not prepared for what is about to come down.” — “This maybe the most interesting political season ahead in living memory.” Interesting or painful?

McCabe fired by Don Surber – “Look for a legal challenge, a book deal, and being officially placed on the CNN payroll after years of illegal leaks to the Fake News network.” The reaction to the firing is instructive. McCabe himself is outraged and making accusations about cover-up and worse on his political or supposed enemies. His friends are also full of denial and venom and they parade the public with their faux outrage and fantasies.

Ace: Sessions Fires McCabe; McCabe Claims It’s All a Conspiracy To Damage Him as a Witness. Other stories indicate a lawsuit for improper dismissal and denial of pension citing Trump Tweets etc.

After firing, McCabe claims he’s a victim of administration’s ‘war on the FBI’ by John Sexton – “McCabe doesn’t say he’s completely blameless, only that he’s paying too big a price for what was merely a misunderstanding.”

“Already, the reactions to the firing are falling into two distinct camps. On the one hand, there are those claiming this is justice:
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On the other hand, McCabe issued a lengthy statement claiming this is part of a Trump administration “war on the FBI” and, more specifically, an attempt to discredit his testimony
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So was this just a big misunderstanding? One former supervisory special agent with the FBI who describes himself as a “fan” of McCabe, says it’s difficult for him to believe the Office of Professional Responsibility, which recommended McCabe firing, is acting politically. … He concludes that while this move may benefit AG Sessions and the White House, that doesn’t automatically prove it’s some kind of partisan setup.

Don’t Ignore the Obvious – Key Words from AG Sessions: “Including Under Oath” by sundance – “Don’t be so blinded by the tripwire flares you fail to see the obvious. Within the statement from Attorney General Sessions hopefully you’ll note: “Including Under Oath”

“The IG doesn’t place the internal investigative target “under oath”. An outside prosecutor who is assisting the IG does. Hence Attorney General Jeff Sessions is telling us what is going on

House Intel Dem to Trump: ‘Gloat now, but you will be fired soon’ by Jacqueline Thomsen – one of several she has this morning at The Hill.

CNN’s absurd reaction to Andrew McCabe’s firing by Patricia McCarthy – “Channel surfing after the announcement that AG Sessions had indeed fired Andrew McCabe was like being yanked into the Twilight Zone.”

“Switch to CNN and one would be told that it was Trump who did the firing, that Sessions did it to keep his job. Barely mentioned was the fact that the recommendation to fire McCabe came from the FBI’s own Office of Personal Responsibility (OPR), an almost unprecedented event. Don Lemon and his guests were apoplectic that this “fine and respected” man has had his pension taken away. They were not concerned at all about what he may have done to elicit the OPR’s recommendation that he be fired. Not one bit.
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Like Adam Schiff, the folks at CNN, CBS, MSNBC, etc. have apparently avoided all the news that has been revealed over the past year that proves it was Hillary and the DNC that commissioned and paid for the ridiculous dossier. We know now that many of the higher-ups in the DOJ and the FBI colluded to prevent Trump from winning, and after he won, to see that he did not take office
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The rest of the mainstream media, equally committed to the hoped-for impeachment scenario, also ignores all the facts that have come to light. They are grasping at straws and Stormy Daniels is just the latest straw. Their hysteria would be comical if it were not so deadly serious. What these people, the Clintons, the DNC, these schemers at the DOJ, NSA and FBI, have done is the biggest political scandal in modern American history. They have been exposed as arrogant elitists who believe they are above the law and have ruined the reputations of their respective institutions.

Trump fatigue and good news by Silvio Canto, Jr. – “Over the last week, we’ve heard about “chaos,” “personnel changes,” “Stormygate,” and lots of other things.”

“Like the old story about the kid who cried wolf, this constant anti-Trump drumming gets old after a while. In Aesop’s fable, the townspeople just tuned out the kid. Today, the negativity is so over the top that it becomes hysterical noise.

The problem with negativity is that it can’t compete with good news, as we see in these examples:

Mueller’s Investigation Flouts Justice Department Standards by Andrew C. McCarthy – “These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.”

“With Rosenstein’s passive approval, Mueller is shredding Justice Department charging policy by alleging earth-shattering crimes, then cutting a sweetheart deal that shields the defendant from liability for those crimes and from the penalties prescribed by Congress. The special counsel, moreover, has become a legislature unto himself, promulgating the new, grandiose crime of “conspiracy against the United States” by distorting the concept of “fraud.”

Why does the special counsel need to invent an offense to get a guilty plea? Why doesn’t he demand a plea to one of the several truly egregious statutory crimes he claims have been committed?

The Mueller switch project by Scott Johnson – “The Mueller project to continues on its inevitable path, yet every day the synthetic Trump-Russia collusion scandal appears more absurd.”

“The Mueller project, not to put too fine a point on it, is to remove President Trump from office. Thikn of it as the Mueller switch project. You’d have to be a fool not to see it. Yet that is far from the only problem with it.

Special Counsel is not a creature of statue; his appointment and jurisdiction is governed by regulations promulgated by the Department of Justice. Unlike many regulations, these are relatively brief and to the point. They are accessible online here. Under the applicable regulation, Special Counsel may be appointed when the Attorney General or his surrogate “determines that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted,” and that the Justice Department’s handling of “that investigation or prosecution of that person or matter” in the normal course “would present a conflict of interest for the Department” (emphasis added).
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Mueller’s appointment lacks a legal predicate. This failure is fundamental.
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These departures from law and practice cannot be justified by necessity or the supposed good works of Mueller’s probe. The Mueller investigation remains a continuing affront to due process. As I say, one would have to to be a fool not to see the object of Mueller’s probe. I am not an optimist by nature, but I think one would also have to be a fool to doubt that there will be a day of reckoning.

Ace: The Real Collusion Story: How Hillary, the DNC, Brennan, Clapper and Obama Conspired to Frame Trump for a Crime That Never Even Happened – Citing a TL;DR as a ‘must read’ at National Review: This is the real story, the one that Washington Consensus doesn’t know.

Stormy Daniel’s Attorney Worked For Barack Obama’s White House Chief Of Staff by DCWhispers – “The Establishment Media is working double-time to try and make something of the sordid Stormy Daniel allegations that she had a brief affair with Donald Trump ten years ago” but it begins to look like a political opposition taking advantage of a celebrity troll.

Meanwhile, Trump lawyer claims up to $20m in damages – “Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, wants a lawsuit brought by porn actress Stormy Daniels moved to federal court, and claims the woman could owe $20 million in damages for violating a non-disclosure agreement.” It looks like there is some learning from the Left in how to respond. Jazz Shaw has some confusion that points to a nuance he is missing: Trump’s lawyer wants Stormy Daniels to cough up $20M for… something – “Trump should really just get it over with and dare her to put all her cards on the table.” Since Daniel has little that will damage Trump, perhaps there is something for Trump in having the media distracted by the story and belittling itself with its meaningless obsession. See also Steven Hayward’s week in pictures.

Let the Boys Fight: Why Anti-Bullying Policies Fail and Why Fighting May Be the Answer by Megan Fox – “What stops a bully? Physical force. Every time.”

“Unlike the millions of wasted dollars the federal and state governments spend on speakers and programs to stop students from bullying one another (that ultimately fail), Gracie jiu-jitsu has tried and true methods that have worked since the beginning of time. It gives kids physical training to neutralize a bully and get away quickly, but everything they teach goes against almost every school bullying policy. Most schools have a “zero tolerance” policy for aggressive behavior, including all hitting, punching, kicking and wrestling. There is no exception for self-defense. This means that if your child is being hounded by bullies and one day your kid snaps and puts the hurt on another kid, your kid is getting expelled, not the culprit.

Gone are the days when Johnny met Steven down by the bike rack to duke it out, shake hands, and become buddies. Now schools are focused almost solely on limiting all physical contact. The problem with this is that males especially need the physical contact of grappling and wrestling to establish boundaries, hierarchy, or just blow off steam. (Girls, on the other hand, will terrorize a target emotionally, which is far more damaging than a bloody lip.)
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Where is a boy’s natural aggression going to go if he has no outlet and is told he is unable to defend himself, even when under attack?

An issue here is age. Prior to high school, physical conflict injury risk is rather small. After puberty, the boy gains size and muscle and that increases risk. The traditional means of reducing that risk is conflict via rules via boxing, wrestling, or other sports.

The case against education: A long-read Q&A with Bryan Caplan by James Pethokoukis – “The American education system is a waste of both time and money — at least according to Bryan Caplan, author of the new book, The Case Against Education.”

“Rather than actually impart useful skills, education’s benefits stem mainly from “signaling,” implying that as a nation we could drastically reduce years of schooling and be no worse off. It’s an explosive thesis challenging the conventional wisdom of labor economists, and he recently joined me on the podcast to convince me of its merit and explain its implications for student, parents, and society.
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Another problem going on is that by the time that someone emerges from American high school not really proficient in literacy and numeracy, they are in no mood to go to do some online education at that point. They are frustrated, they are angry, and of course mostly male and are like “No I’m not going to go and try some other kind of school now. I am sick of this.”

The massive growth in the cost of college in recent years is stimulating talk of a bubble. So much is put into such an effort ‘for the children’ yet what many are seeing is indoctrination and frivolousness and not an education. College is shifting from skill and intellectual development into a signalling certification.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Should Be Prosecuted by Daniel John Sobieski – “Mayor Schaaf recently acted as the functional equivalent of a gang lookout, shouting “ICE!” upon learning of a raid on criminal illegal aliens in her city.” People are getting antsy about equality in justice.

“Realizing that in the era of crime monitor Jeff Sessions, who plays attorney general on TV, no crime by a public official gets prosecuted for anything, one can only hope that for the safety of the people of Oakland that its mayor, one Libby Schaaf, is arrested and prosecuted for harboring criminal illegal aliens in her city.
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It was the ICE agents conducting the raid who were protecting the citizens of Oakland, not Mayor Schaaf. Rather than a random sweep of convenience stores and the like, immigration enforcement critics charge happens, the ICE raid was targeted and effective
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If any of the felons alerted by Mayor Schaaf harms, rapes, or kills one of her constituents, she should be charged with aiding and abetting.

California’s Defiance Exposes a House (and Senate) Divided by Michael Walsh – “California’s slow-motion revolt against the federal government continues apace.”

“What began with the acceptance of lifestyle crimes such as marijuana smoking in violation of federal drug laws has turned into an all-out rejection of the nation’s immigration laws, followed by unilateral action by states and cities to declare themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens.

As we learned in 1861-65, state nullification of federal laws is not compatible with a federal system; “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in his famous speech accepting the Republican nomination for Senate from Illinois in 1858. Although he lost to Stephen Douglas that year, and while he was talking about slavery, the principle still holds true today as applied to similarly divisive issues.
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Don’t think for a moment that the Left doesn’t fully understand Lincoln’s warning in the boldface words. In fact, they’re counting on it, just as the old South was counting on it when the Confederate states undertook secession. And for many of the same reasons.
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday will inform a meeting of the California Peace Officers in Sacramento that the feds went to court late Tuesday night to invalidate three California state laws that inhibit federal immigration officers from doing their jobs.
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the Left doesn’t like the law—and because it needs the votes of aliens, legal or otherwise, while it awaits the complete demographic replacement of the current U.S. majority population—it has decided to fight it. Not in the legislature, mind you, or even primarily in the courts, but on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. This is a prescription for disaster if not, down the road, civil war. So good for Trump and Sessions for finally taking on California head-on.

The modern Left prefers to argue emotions rather than principles. As it happens, their principles are entirely fungible, unless you count their one overarching principle, which is to achieve and maintain power by any means necessary.

The REAL Reason Barack Obama Was Touting The Saudi-Funded Global Warming/Climate Change Hysteria by DCWhispers –

“The Saudis (as well as Russia and China) spent billions of dollars in media propaganda, university funding, political donations, United Nations funding etc. during Barack Obama’s eight years in office to further push the global warming agenda. None of that effort had anything to do with global warming/climate change though.
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It should also be noted that that same forces behind all the global warming/climate change propaganda are also the same ones funding the open borders and gun restrictions movement in America as well. There is no greater collusion of foreign influence upon this country’s political process than that.

Ace: The McCain Associate Who Delivered the “Steele” Dossier to the FBI Hoped to Blackmail Trump out of the Election – “When you tell someone you have information over them and that therefore they must do something they otherwise wouldn’t do — well, that’s blackmail, isn’t it?” Another war hero soils himself.

Ace: Peter Strzok Was Told of Possible Breach of Hillary Clinton’s Illegal Homebrew Server, But Chose Not to Pursue That Lead – “One might speculate that proving conclusively that Hillary’s unsecure homebrew bathroom server had been breached by hostile foreign powers would have made exonerating her impossible, ergo, it was something that could not be pursued.”

Trump Vs. Our Perpetually Panicked Press by L. Brent Bozell And Tim Graham – “the Trump presidency is an ongoing and frenetic demonstration of the media choosing “scandal over substance.” It is virtually all scandal all the time, even when there isn’t a lick of evidence.”

“A new Media Research Center study of the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC during January and February found that 91% of Trump evaluations were negative. Nearly 63% of news coverage was devoted to scandals like the Russia investigation (204 minutes), the allegations of wife beating against White House aide Rob Porter (54 minutes), unproven gossip from Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House (53 minutes) and reports that Trump used the term “s—hole countries” in a discussion on African countries and immigration (31 minutes).
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The networks obviously believe their nightly narrative should not be diluted by focusing on any matter where Trump might be succeeding.
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Every study of the media’s performance reveals the “news” product is hyperbolic, negative and seemingly designed to make the Trump presidency appear perpetually on the verge of collapse. How can any of these journalists be surprised that Trump backers don’t trust their narration of the first draft of history as it unfolds?

Trump Syndromes by Victor Davis Hanson – “Trump is politically dangerous to progressivism. In military terms, he is a strategic B-52 on a deep mission. Trump targets the enemy’s homeland, even as his opponents’ far-flung and attenuated expeditionary armies bog down abroad.” Caveat: VDH dances around the ‘equality pro and con’ trap. He mostly leaves it as platitudes as he gets into observation but it does infect his rationalizations of the ‘syndromes’ he notes.

“Equally explosive is the syndrome in which middle-class moderates and independents are tired of being damned as privileged and biased, on the basis of their appearance — often by those who enjoy far more privilege and exhibit far more bias. For all the hype that the stereotypical Trump voter was uneducated and without a degree, Trump appealed as much to the college educated and professionals for what he at least was not, rather than for what he was.
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Finally, is there any serious introspection as to why so many misjudged Trump’s trajectory? After Trump’s supposedly impossible election, many doubled down and suggested that he would soon be impeached, or quit, or prove non-conservative or impotently conservative. And the critics continue in this vein today. What was continually missed, and why, and how is such acknowledgment critical in offering believable assessments to come?

Politico: Texas primary puts egg on DCCC’s face by Ed Morrissey – Most of the Propaganda Machine is about turning Texas Democrat. Ed qualifies that story.

Russia Scandal: Did Hillary Clinton Run FBI’s Trump Investigation? IBD editorial – “The entire “investigation” of Trump, start to finish, seems to have been propelled by Hillary Clinton and her minions.”

As of today, that year and a half old investigation has yielded nothing, but has taken down a bunch of peripheral players in and around the Trump administration on technical violations of the law.
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At some point, Congress, which is responsible for this corrupt and likely illegal mess, should step in and end it by either defunding Mueller, forcing him to focus on the original aims of the investigation, or by simply shutting it down.

If not, it’s likely to end up with trumped up charges, pun intended, against a sitting president and demands for his impeachment.

Jane Mayer’s Dossiad (1) by Scott Johnson – “Mayer’s article should not be ignored. Mayer and the New Yorker mean to fix — repair and set — the Democrats’ story line.” Limbaugh mentioned this effort as well. It is change in the propaganda machine towards a more insidious and desperate approach. Johnson cites other analysis and promises more to follow.

“Mayer’s article is 15,000 words long. Reading it is an ordeal. It’s not all Dullness. She mixes Dullness with Dishonesty. Indeed, in Mayer’s Dossiad, Dishonesty predominates.

The dishonesty permeates the article and it is infuriating. An article at least as long Mayer’s is needed to disentangle and rectify it. Mayer’s pretense of impartiality in adjudicating questions of fact and credibility must count as the article’s leading misrepresentation. If only she had a sense of humor, one might think surely she jests.

Pity a Poor Liberal Activist by Christopher Chantrill – “In the liberal universe, activism and protest are the highest forms of human social interaction.”

“When liberals enact a day of marches, or a town hall full of baying students, this is seen by all as a triumph of the progressive will and faithfully recorded by our modern Leni Riefenstahls.

But is it really such a good idea? Is all this activism really going to lead to fundamental transformation? Suppose it leads to a backlash.

“Backlash,” by the way, is a term liberals invented back in the ’60s to stigmatize average Americans who really didn’t like what the Kids and their Movement and their Protests were doing to America.
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No wonder our progressive friends are switching into witch-hunting mode, lashing out at individual citizens and voluntary associations of patriotic citizens. It cannot be true, it must not be true that the politics and the activism of the global educated elite are an utter failure.

Really, if our rulers and their supporters were not such a threat to our lives and our jobs and our sacred honor, we could just sit back and laugh at their pathetic antics.

When Democrats “gunsplain” by Allahpundit – “There’s an op-ed at WaPo today complaining that it’s the right, not the left, that has a problem with “gunsplaining.” It’s a diversion tactic”

“The mistake made by Bloomberg and others, that “assault weapons” are automatic weapons and are freely available for purchase, is non-trivial. The fact that so many have difficulty defining “assault weapons” at all while intent on banning them is also non-trivial. And it’s not just the ignorant average man on the street who’s guilty
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“Gunsplaining” isn’t about silencing the other side with gotchas (or it shouldn’t be), it’s about making sure regulators know precisely what they’re doing and why.
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the gun debate is frequently more about emotion than pragmatism. If it weren’t, we would spend more time debating gun control as a measure to reduce suicides than as a measure to reduce homicides, especially mass shootings. The latter are horrendous, all the more so when children are the victims, but rare. The former aren’t rare and are horrendous in their own way. Yet it’s the latter that drives national gun debates, not the former.
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“Mansplaining” is offensive because it involves a man assuming he knows more about a topic than a woman purely because he’s a man. “Gunsplaining” really does involve superior knowledge, though, but Weinstein wants to treat that as a liability. Go figure. Anyway, I’m sure with smart, serious, virtuously ignorant Democrats like the ones in the clip steering national policy, everything will work out.

A victory for the law: Maryland judge upholds DACA phaseout by Paul Mirengoff – “Its value resides, first, in the refreshing reaffirmation of the proper role of judges and, second, in its power to persuade higher-level courts. I believe Judge Titus’ opinion is persuasive, though I doubt that five Supreme Court judges need to be persuaded of his position.”

The Broward County Superintendent’s Corrupt and Dangerous Agenda by M. Catharine Evans – “in the classroom and out of the courtroom,” and the deeper you dig, the worse it gets.

“Runcie’s plan served as an exemplary model for 50 participating school districts across the country, affecting 6.35 million children. In a July 2015 White House conference attended by Runcie and his former boss in Chicago, education secretary Arne Duncan, the superintendent received high praise for leading the nation in reducing student arrests.

But according to many outside reports, by 2015, the Obama-directed school discipline guidelines were creating chaos in the country’s classrooms. After Oklahoma City instituted the new discipline policies, teachers referred violent students to the administration, only to have them returned to the classroom a short time later.
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The superintendent’s silence on the issue is deafening.

Federal Judge Rules Trump DACA Program Elimination Appropriate and Authorized – Full Judicial Ruling by sundance – “It is likely SCOTUS will take the same position on DACA as they did on DAPA; overrule the state challenges and determine the program unconstitutional.”

“Federal judge Roger W Titus (Maryland) has ruled that President Trump acted appropriately and within his authority by announcing his intent to rescind the Obama-era executive order surrounding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). However, the Judge Titus order does not stop the previous blocks by activist judges currently working through the courts.

Eventually the state challenges to the recension of DACA will work through the appellate courts and arrive at the Supreme Court.
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Here’s the back-story to the parallel executive action around DAPA.

Judge issues surprise ruling on withholding funds for sanctuary state by Jazz Shaw – “If you are a noncompliant jurisdiction in terms of cooperating with immigration enforcement and you take the White House to court, demanding that you receive your Justice Department grant money anyway, be careful what you wish for.”

“Judge Orrick is not only a District Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but he’s an Obama appointee to boot. If he’s concerned about the “weighty and novel constitutional issues” raised by California’s claim then the case is in serious trouble.

Of course, as I’ve opined here from the beginning, it’s difficult to imagine the Supreme Court siding with California or any of the sanctuary cities. We’re not talking about money appropriated specifically for individual states and cities which they’re “entitled” to. This is money appropriated for the Justice Department to issue in the form of Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance grants. And the word “grants” is key here. As with any other grant program, there’s an application process with the applicants needing to meet certain criteria established by the agency issuing the funds. And not everyone who applies wins a grant, even if they meet all the qualifications. If the Justice Department decides that one criteria is that you must cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officials to protect your citizens, that should really be the end of the conversation.
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In any event, it wasn a pretty good week for Trump in the courts. (Not that you’re likely to hear a lot about it on cable news.)

Media can’t get over the FLOTUS citizenship question by Jazz Shaw – “One might have thought that such a boondoggle would be the end of that particular trainwreck.” Meanwhile, they are still after Trump for citing an Obama birther story.

“Last month we looked at the Washington Post’s jaw-dropping attempt at “fact checking” the details of the immigration status of First Lady Melania Trump and her parents. That was a true tour de force in the fact-checking world since they asked a variety of questions and then proceeded to list a number of possible answers, basically ranked by people who wanted to try guessing, while finally admitting that they had no answers to either prove or disprove the original claims. …

One would be wrong. The WaPo is back at it again this week, delving further into questions of how the First Lady scored an EB-1 visa (known as an “Einstein visa”), replete with plenty of insinuations about how she and the President must have gamed the system.
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In the end, I think what really drives the WaPo batty about Melania Trump is that they can’t find any easy route to tear her down.
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And what the Washington Post probably hates the most about her is the fact that people really seem to like her.

Socialized medicine: Almost a century of failure already by Ed Morrissey – “Progressives plan to make a big push for single-payer health care in the midterms, hoping to force Democrats even harder Left than in the past four Congressional election cycles.”

“Before they start creating new single-payer systems, though, perhaps they should fix the broken single-payer systems already in place.
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Clearly this must be a new development, one on which advocates have not yet been briefed … right? Wrong. As Andrew Siddons notes, that report first came to Congress ninety years ago — and it’s been true every year since then as well
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In other words, nothing has changed in ninety years in this single-payer system, nor in the nine years that have passed since the Associated Press offered a very similar exposé on IHS. That’s because the same basic structure remains — a single-payer system in which government has to ration care based on allocated funds rather than a free-market system in which providers are incentivized to expand to meet market demand.

Two Op-Eds Draw a Stark Portrait of Left vs. Right by Andrew Klavan – “Last Friday, two op-eds, one in a leftist newspaper, one in a paper that leans right, drew the starkest possible portrait of the difference between our two political cultures.”

“On the left was The New York Times, a former newspaper, which now reads like a cross between Pravda and a cluster of six-year-old girls who have just seen a mouse. On the op-ed page I like to call Knucklehead Row, David Brooks delivered himself of the opinion that the left is winning the culture war. How? By brute force.
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Note the field on which Brooks thinks the culture wars are being fought: “decent society,” “elite campuses.” It does not occur to him that what Brooks considers decent and elite are precisely what is currently coming under question.
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Witness the fact that the left cannot actually win a political argument but can only, by Brooks’ own account, use raw power to force those who oppose them to shut up. There are many words for this, only some printable, but decent isn’t one of them and neither is elite. Culturally fascist seems as good a term as any.
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Now consider another Op-Ed, over at the grown-ups’ table, also known as the . There, on the same day, Annafi Wahed, who describes herself as “a tiny, talkative South Asian woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff,” relates the tale of her visit to CPAC, the annual gathering of the conservative base.
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Suppression of opinion, or free discussion? Which way forward do you think Americans will ultimately choose?

Against Fake Civility by Kurt Schlichter – “They tell us that our uppity refusal to quietly submit to abuse and subjugation, both figurative and literal, makes us bad people.”

“Civility, once properly understood as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself, has morphed from an aspiration into a political/cultural gimp suit designed to prevent you from effectively asserting your interests and your point of view.

For liberals, civility is a grift – they think it’s a punchline and they’re waiting to laugh at you for embracing it. It’s a way to keep you from interrupting their non-stop attacks on your rights, your faith, and your dignity by convincing you that it’s somehow wrong to get upset when, say, some Astroturf Tot backed up by a bunch of leftist Red Guard orgs like Planned Parenthood and Move On starts shrieking that you have blood on your hands.
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Bush was not just attacking Trump. He was attacking us Normals for daring to elect Trump. Many of us defended him when he was busy being oh-so-dignified and civil. And when we defied him and his class, he turned against us. Like a true gentleman.

Civility is a component of a system of reasoned debate, not its end product. Civility is necessary in a system where people reason in good faith in order to come to the best solution to the policy challenges facing them. Civility lubricates that process, and allows people of good faith to disagree without engendering unnecessary and destructive discord.

People of good faith. See, that’s key.

The problem is that progressives are not people of good faith.
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This country is in grave danger of real chaos as the Normals confront an elite that seeks to rule it without accountability or challenge.
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Civility is not a sign of weakness when a system of reasoned debate is in effect. But it is a sign of weakness, and will be taken as such by our enemies, when we cling to civility because we are too weak and afraid to admit the awful truth, that we are no longer a society ruled by reason but by power.

Ace: “FBI: No, We Will Not Turn Over Information About Secret Meetings Between Barack Obama and James Comey Because The Liberal Media Isn’t Super-Interested In It” The corruption resists being pulled out of the darkest corners of the fetid swamp.

“This is the meeting that prompted Susan Rice to write an email to herself claiming Obama had told her to do everything “by the book” — including concealing the existence of the probe from the soon-to-be Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States.

No, that doesn’t raise questions about the integrity of the FBI at all.

Dawn, March 6, 1836, Siege of the Alamo – Day 13 by By Elvis Chupacabra Posted on March 6, 2012 by WeeWeed – a dramatic telling of the siege of the Alamo and the birth of the Texas Republic. The story indicates that historical research has uncovered a lot of the story in the last 50 years.

Jack Cashill: “Incompetence Wasn’t The Problem in Broward County” by sundance – “Mr. Cashill, a person adept at tracing complex issues to their truthful origin, has it entirely correct.”

“This is a simple cause and effect. There are no mistakes being made here. This is entirely by design; as Mr. Cashill notes, this is not “incompetence“, it’s strategic. The fact that Nikolas Cruz was able to exit high school without a police record, then began amassing weapons, and eventually became a school shooter killing 17 students and staff; is an outcome of strategic policy, not incompetence.

While Nikolas Cruz was being ‘handled’ and not documented. The Sheriff’s police force was conducting diversity training seminars, de-escalation meetings, and sensitivity training exercises. The last active shooter training was somewhere around 2006.
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Give it a few more days and everyone will move on. This is not my cynicism, this is the reality of my having seen -first hand- the scale of the political machine that creates and defends outcomes like the Parkland School shooting.

Much of what is being revealed reinforces an understanding of PC and where it leads. When the ‘let no crisis go to waste’ use of children as ideology shields and the over-the-top gun paranoia, the view of the argument as irrational is reinforced.

Why the Left Opposes Arming Teachers by Dennis Prager – “When asked, their response is consistent: “It’s a crazy idea.” And “We need fewer guns, not more guns.“

“Beyond such arguments, the left rarely, if ever, explains why allowing some teachers and other adults in a school to be armed is a crazy idea. They merely assert it as a self-evident truth.

But, of course, it’s not a self-evident truth. On the contrary, having some adults who work at schools be trained in the responsible use of guns makes so much sense that the left’s blanket opposition seems puzzling.

It shouldn’t be. On the question of taking up arms against evil, the left is very consistent.

The left almost always opposes fighting evil and almost always works to disarm the good who want to fight.

This is as true on the national level as it is on the personal.
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That is why the left opposes enabling some teachers and other adults in schools to carry arms in order to possibly stop a mass murderer: The left doesn’t fight evil; it fights those who do. Just as the left hated anti-communists, hates opponents of Islamism and hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (far more than the Iranian ayatollahs), it hates those who wish to see teachers and others voluntarily armed take down the murderers of our children.

How Environmentalists Keep Heating Bills High by Stephen Moore – “the left-wing politicians who say how shameful it is to cut energy assistance are the ones who want America to stop producing shale gas by banning fracking and other modern drilling technologies that make natural gas so cheap.”

“The story doesn’t end there. Home heating and electric bills would be much cheaper still for poor families without the so-called renewable-energy standards pushed by greens and liberal politicians at the state and local levels. The Manhattan Institute has found that states with these wind and solar mandates have had much larger hikes in utility costs than states without them. New York, which is revving up its green energy policies, charges its residents 40% more for electric power than the national average.
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One reason is that we don’t have pipelines to inexpensively transport the natural gas to the Northeast. Environmentalists who hate oil and gas have spent years blocking this vital infrastructure — not just the Keystone Pipeline but also many other pipelines that should be transporting shale oil and gas efficiently across the country. It doesn’t seem to bother the green groups that the biggest victims of anti-fossil fuel policies are low- and middle-income Americans. Never has.

Environmentalism is effectively a regressive tax on America’s poorest households, imposed upon them by liberal politicians and the rich liberals who fund them, such as Democratic donor-extraordinaire Tom Steyer.

One #RESIST shrink is really upset about the Goldwater rule by Jazz Shaw – “She was smacked down for that decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), who told her to stop practicing “armchair psychiatry.”

Dr. Lee has declared war on President Trump for reasons unknown, and she’s no longer acting in any way which can be justified under standard professional protocols. If she wants to make a few bucks off of her fifteen minutes of fame by publishing a book, so be it. But she shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously by anyone at this point.

One has to wonder why such severe behavioral distortions are on display in public. Lee is not alone in displaying psychotic behavior with Trump as a stimulus.

Dems worry: Are we overplaying the gun-control hand? By Ed Morrissey – “Once again, the answer is obvious. Once again, the question probably comes too late”

“Only after a week of demonizing law-abiding gun owners around the country and the NRA as child-killers for a crime to which they had no connection, Democrats have begun to worry that they may have gone too far, according to The Hill
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The bill itself demonstrates the problems Democrats face in dealing with issues outside of their own cultural experience.
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The only qualifier on this prohibition is that it applies to firearms “with a military-style feature,” which is left undefined. …

We don’t know, and it’s a safe bet that the people who wrote this bill know even less. Nor do they care; they want this bill to render most of the weapons held by legal gun owners illegal. It’s the basis for a massive gun grab.

And that’s the reason why some Democrats who understand cultural differences and political geography see a replay of the last four elections about to unfold
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Between “crumbs” and gun grabbing, Democrats really have set themselves up to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in this midterm. If this bill goes nowhere, Democrats will likely run on the message that only a Democratic majority can get this bill passed. And you know what? Republicans will run on the exact same message. Good luck with that, Mrs. Pelosi.

Democrats are surprised that more money in pay checks is popular by Paul Mirengoff – “You know the Dems are hurting when their organ, the Washington Post, concedes there’s a problem and feels compelled to invoke “the billionaire Koch brothers” to help account for it.”

“In short, one party is working to allow American citizens to keep more of the money they earn. The other is ridiculing this effort, while forcing a government showdown to help illegal immigrants. And it’s surprised to learn that this approach isn’t going over well in the heartland.

That’s how out of touch the Democratic Party is.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Pulls Off A Stunning Coup With Map Drawing Stunt by Kyle Sammin – “The court’s decision, which incredibly did not cite case law or a constitutional provision, was a show of legislative force.”

“Pennsylvania’s legislature gained a third chamber over the weekend. No one can quite say how it happened.

Usually, such as sweeping constitutional alteration would require an amendment, if not a state convention.
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the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared itself a lawmaking body, one over which the real legislators have no veto. They did so for all the usual reasons tyrants do what they do. “Fairness.” “Equity.” “Justice.”
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In other countries, in other times, we would call that a coup d’état. Here, it’s just another day in the life of a country where the people have forgotten that the legislature is the branch that is supposed to write laws.
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The court’s opinion, which amazingly cited no case law and no constitutional provision, was not an attempt at persuasion. It was a show of force, not reason. The Democrats had the votes, so the law be damned.
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Politics is a part of a democratic republic. It is how we, as political animals, govern ourselves. Even within a system of neutral guidelines, choices must be made, and those choices have political consequences. When a court is compelled to make those choices, they do not magically become apolitical choices. To the contrary, the apolitical courts take on a political sheen. As bad as this decision is for the rule of law in Pennsylvania, one silver lining might be that it shows why it would be an even worse idea for the Supreme Court to apply a similar tactic nationwide.

DACA and the Politicization of the Courts by Evan Berryhill – “What President Trump and Americans across America should take note of is the continued desire of certain courts to inject their personal feelings toward a policy decision that results in a decision divergent from the Constitution.”

“To see a judge use a roundabout way to reach his desired conclusion is not necessarily new or surprising. What is surprising is a newfound willingness to grandstand, from lower courts in particular, and to ignore clear constitutional authority because the policy at issue differs from their political ideology.
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we have seen an uptick in federal judges ruling based more on ideology than merit. It is a trend we should all be concerned with as Americans.

The Schiff Obstruction by Roger Kimball – “It is interesting to compare the two memos, both as rhetorical artifacts and as substantive contributions to the debate over possible “Russian collusion” in the 2016 presidential election. Even a comparison of their physical appearance is revealing.”

“The Democrats’ memo makes some effort to counter, neutralize, or distract from these realities. But Andy McCarthy—who has just posted at must-read anatomy of the Dems’ memo—is right: “The Schiff Memo Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them.” As I say, there’s a lot we don’t know. But the Nunes memo presented a number of disturbing revelations. The Dems, on the other hand, are stuck in the “dogmatism of mere assertion.” Their performance in this memo is partly comic, but mostly it’s contemptible, dishonest, and alarming.

The War of Trump’s Hair by James Lewis – “Narcissists don’t laugh at themselves.” One example where those who use allegations about Trump to rationalize their repugnance need to get a grip on reality.

“Can you imagine Obama laughing at himself, in public, maybe laughing at his own big ears? Never in a million years. Or Michelle? She might be going for the Democratic nomination next time, but she always projects anger. Getting her to smile is going to be tough.

So sorry – no can do.

Trump just pulled a sight gag on himself at the start of his CPAC talk, turning his back to the audience and stroking his (phony) golden hair in a sort of goofy way. It must have gone on for a minute or two, and the C-packers roared. Then he turned around, smiled slightly, and started his speech.
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This is why Trump is not a narcissist – because narcissists never laugh at themselves. They are too vulnerable inside.

Newmark is one of these who is blinded. She ridicules Trump’s brag about going in to danger by bringing up the Vietnam draft dodging meme. That is unnecessary and misses the facts, including Trump stopping an assault with a baseball bat in 1991. Trump was a cadet at a military academy with training of the sort that contributed to 2 JROTC cadets getting shot recently protecting fellow students. The ‘draft dodger’ meme is also malicious as student and medical deferments in the Vietnam era were common. The best Politifact can come up with is that Trump didn’t volunteer.

Fernandez also notes this blindness by the press choosing “ex-reality TV show host pretending to be president” rather than billionaire international real estate baron and claiming Trump’s efforts “hardly seems to make a difference.” His post is about networks versus hierarchies and shifting governance paradigms.

Stalking an Active Shooter by Jeffrey James Higgins – “Police officers need to confront suspects immediately during an active shooter situation in a school or other public place.” An insider’s view from an officer who has ‘been there, done that’ and lived to tell the tale.

Protect Kids or Confiscate Guns? by Patrick J. Buchanan – “The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite.”

“Cruz’s punishment seems neither commensurate with his crimes nor a deterrent for sick and evil minds contemplating another Columbine.

It didn’t use to be this way.
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With Cruz, the system failed up and down the line.
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The anger and anguish of those who lost family or friends in this atrocity is understandable. But passion is not a substitute for thought.
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Most mass shootings take place in gun-free zones, where crazed men of murderous intent know their chances of maximizing the dead and wounded are far better than in attacking a police station.
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The best way to protect kids in schools may be to protect schools, and run down and incarcerate the known criminals and crazies who are the primary threats.

Exposing the Deep Rot in the Deep State by Clarice Feldman – “Once again, the president has pried behind the stucco of the Deep State’s institutional edifice and shown that the pillars are termite-ridden.”

“In fact, there were four armed deputies at the Parkland, Florida high school, none of whom entered to intervene when the shooting occurred. Heroes like the JROTC students and the coach gave up their lives to protect others, while four armed cops did nothing to end the carnage.
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After Columbine, the FBI training and tactical advice to local law enforcement officials was not to wait for a SWAT or tactical team to show up, but to immediately engage and disarm the shooter.
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Local governments were rewarded with grants if they kept school arrests down, the cover being “let’s stop the pipeline from schools to prisons.” Without arrests, there was no record in background checks to keep violent people from having guns. It’s that simple: no matter what steps you put into place to prevent such things, if the procedure is corrupted, it won’t work.
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If journalism awards were handed out to those who actually are engaged in journalism, Sundance would be getting one. Here are some of the things he turned up in his hard years long slogging through Broward and Miami-Dade Counties’ police practices and operations.
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In time, the situation got so bad that to keep lowering their statistics, they were hiding evidence and failing to recover stolen merchandise because to return it would be to admit that the stuff was the fruit of criminal activity.

Criminal gangs soon realized that the way to avoid arrest was to recruit students to carry out their actions, and they also realized that when the quota for arrests near the end of the month was reached was the best time to get away with crimes.
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This is the story worth telling, not the scripted anti-gun pap CNN offered up or the ten-minute hate town hall designed to play on your emotions while ignoring the truth. But only one blogger, Sundance, did the work to expose it.
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The rest of the MSM seem to be fine with jeopardizing students’ lives, enabling criminals, and using public funds to advance the fortunes of Democrat candidates who allowed this tragedy to occur.

Assessing the new Democratic intel memo by Byron York – “FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign,” the Democratic memo declares. (All emphases are in the original.)”

“In sum, it appears that of the four bullet points listed by Democrats to support the most important assertion in their memo, three would not be sufficient to win a warrant on Page, and the fourth is — yes — the unconfirmed allegations in the dossier. … We won’t know who is right definitively until the application is released to the public, but it seems hard to believe a warrant would have been approved absent the dossier’s allegations.

On to other parts of the Democratic memo. The next big point is a refutation of an assertion that Republicans did not make in their original memo.
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So there it is. Yes, there were flaws in the original Republican memo, like failing to mention Carter Page’s history. But despite their early protests, Democrats have not come up with a terribly effective rebuttal.

What The Democrats Left Out Of Their Memo by Peter Hasson – “The Democrats’ memo, released on Saturday, claimed to refute a similar memo released on Feb. 2 by committee Republicans who alleged that the FBI and DOJ had abused the FISA system in obtaining the warrant.”

“Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell claimed earlier this month that Republicans had mischaracterized McCabe’s testimony. However, Democrats declined to directly refute that claim in their own memo.

Republicans noted several other omissions in their rebuttal to the Democratic memo.
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“Amazingly, the Democrat memo does not contain a single reference to the DNC or Clinton campaign, or acknowledge that they funded the dossier, or admit that this information was not provided to the FISA Court.”

Doctor Hamburger Diagnoses a Malignant Administrative State by John Dale Dunn – “Any regular reader at American Thinker is aware of the rising concern about government overreach and amplified, expanded executive branch abuses and multi-agency multifarious misconduct.”

“Emblematic of the administrative state problem is the slow-rolling special counsel coup being orchestrated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies intent on overturning a presidential election, energized and perpetrated by human creatures in the embedded federal bureaucracy that occupies a wide swath of swampland on the Potomac River.
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Phillip Hamburger, Friedman Professor of constitutional law at Columbia, reminded me of the problem of administrative law growth in America with his 2017 bite-sized 70-page book, The Administrative Threat, that summarizes the points of his magisterial and erudite 650-page 2014 book, Is the Administrative State Legal?
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Hamburger writes a damning indictment of the administrative state, and he makes his case carefully and with attention to detail.

Is ‘Collusion with Russia’ Over? By Andrew C. McCarthy – “Mueller may be seeking to defend at least the investigative decisions made by the FBI and the Justice Department, institutions he served for many years.”

“Of course, “collusion with Russia” was the suspicion — or, skeptics would counter, the carefully crafted political narrative — that launched the Mueller investigation. So has the collusion theory been abandoned? Is the fundamental rationale for the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel, which has addled the Trump administration for seven months, now a big “Never mind”?

I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think that’s the way Mueller is looking at it.
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Still, that does not mean he has entirely given up the quest. At the very least, I believe, Mueller intends to demonstrate that FBI and Justice Department suspicions about possible collusion were reasonable, even if there is no criminal case to be made against the president or his campaign.
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Mueller cannot refute every claimed irregularity. There is no defending, for example, the intelligence leaks to the media; the blatantly disparate treatment between the kid-gloves Clinton-emails investigation and the zealous effort to derail Trump; or the presentation to the FISA court of the traitorous dossier allegations, against Trump and his campaign, that had not been corroborated by the FBI. … Mueller could be contemplating a report that portrays as justifiable the Obama administration’s use of the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of government to investigate the presidential campaign of the opposition party.

In short, the special counsel may be preparing to argue that the Obama officials were acting on rational suspicions, not partisan politics. He may be laying the groundwork to argue that, while political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials made mistakes, the main culprit was Trump’s judgment in recruiting Manafort and Gates — particularly under circumstances in which the candidate was already publicly flattering Putin in an unseemly way.

Trump fans wedded irrevocably to the conceit that there was no way, no how their man would ever have colluded with Russia would be left cold by this. Others, like myself, who see “collusion with Russia” as primarily a political narrative that the Obama administration, Democrats, and the anti-Trump media settled on to rationalize Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss and to hamstring Trump’s administration, will be underwhelmed. But I’m betting Mueller figures most of the country would agree with him.

McCarthy is betting that those who do not trust teachers, or any citizen, with self defense will out. He is saying that sedition and the undermining of an election will be of no significance to “most of the country.” If he is right, the country will have tossed aside equality under law and its founding values. That is frightening.