A swamp creature speaks out by Aaron L. Hirschi – “Vote your conscience, but think about the consequences of your actions in cold, hard logical terms.”

“The presidency is only one branch and cannot legally do most of the necessary structural reforms without statutory changes. Whether the border wall is part of that statutory requirement is a separate debate. Congress must want to reform as well, but it doesn’t want to reform. Right now, it is the main nest of vipers poisoning the blood of the federal system; this branch has no incentive to change.
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Legislative politicians rely on a big weakness of the voting public that has kept the status quo going for decades. Most of the voters want to fix the system, but not if it directly affects themselves. Instead of following the idiom of “Throw the bums out!,” many voters embrace “Throw all the bums out except my bum.”

Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality by Victor Davis Hanson – “The more Washington journalists scream of collusion, the more they are willfully blind to one of the most disturbing scandals in American history brewing right under their noses.”

“The longer, like Captain Ahab, they hunt down the mythical white Trump whale, the more they are ruining the very reputation of journalism as they once inherited it.

So, we live in two worlds. One is the material cosmos of concrete action and deeds. The other reality is little more than the unfiltered fears, anxieties and fantasies of ill-informed television talking heads, groupthink opinion journalists, and progressive zealots who have conflated a sometimes-uncouth president with all their own apprehensions, and called the result Nazism and fascism.

When this depressing period in American news and commentary is over, the liberal order will not like the verdict.

Why AG Sessions declined to appoint a special counsel by Thomas Lifson – “A lot of conservatives are upset that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has declined for now to appoint a special prosecutor”

“But, for the moment, at least, I see good reason for Sessions to take this position. In the letter, Sessions noted that he has asked the DOJ’s Inspector General Horowitz to investigate these matters, and, in a new disclosure, tasked US Attorney John W. Huber to investigate. Huber serves in Utah, far from the beltway, and was first appointed US Attorney by President Obama, and reappointed by Trump.
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with the IG digging up information, and referring it to Huber, further steps, including subpoenas to former DOJ and FBI employees, such as Andrew McCabe and James Comey, can be taken before a grand jury in Utah. An indictments issued by that grand jury presumably could be tried before a federal jury in Utah, whereas a special counsel would most likely work with courts in the District of Columbia, Virginia, or Maryland, beltway strongholds. Which jury pool would you prefer? The District of Columbia or Utah?

Federal Court Delivers the Coup de Gras to Contraception Mandate by David Catron – “A long legal war on religious liberty is finally over.” Maybe

“deep state holdovers at the Justice Department, like those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender for decades after the end of WWII, continued to pursue the lost cause even after the Trump administration took office. On Wednesday, however, Judge David Russell of the United States District Court for Western Oklahoma flushed the last of these dead-enders out of their caves and forced them lay down their briefcases.

Judge Russell permanently enjoined the federal government from enforcing the mandate against the Catholic Benefits Association (CBA) and issued a declarative judgment to the effect that the mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Judge Russell’s ruling also rescinds nearly $6.9 billion in federal fines that have accrued against CBA members since Obamacare was enacted in 2014. The organization represents more than 1,000 Catholic health care providers, making it the largest single plaintiff that had challenged the mandate.
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In other words, the battle over the outrageous Obamacare contraception mandate is over. The Obama era holdouts who have been hiding deep in the dark recesses of the DOJ now stand in the cold light of reality, blinking, befuddled, and wondering what happened. Ironically, the answer is clearly printed on their ID badges over those outdated photos — Justice.

David Hogg Is Quickly Learning How to Be a Bully by Jim Treacher – “When is it okay to talk back to someone who keeps falsely branding you a murderer? Well, that depends on whether he’s being funded by Republicans or Democrats.”

“our media gatekeepers seem to think Hogg should be allowed to say whatever he wants without question, no matter how transparently false it is.
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As long as this kid is keeping lists of names, I hope he remembers all the adults who keep pushing him in front of the cameras.

“Collusion” stories undermine democracy more than the Russians ever could by Jazz Shaw – “Kirchick argues that Trump’s opponents who are constantly ginning up talk of collusion in terms of High Crimes and Misdemeanors are actually doing Russia’s work for them, undermining public confidence in our elections and even our democracy.”

“the President’s opponents in not only the Democratic Party but also the media, seem to be delivering in spades what Putin allegedly desires. (And I purposely say “opponents” here rather than “critics” because there is clearly an ongoing, direct campaign against the White House taking place.) With the employment numbers looking as good as they are, the stock market and people’s 401Ks soaring, taxes being lower and consumer confidence hitting impressive levels, how do you explain a sitting President who has to take comfort in his approval level which barely scrapes above 40% on occasion?

Easy. The poll respondents are being buried in a deluge of news reports every day suggesting that the sky is about to fall on the House of Trump. And if they lose faith in the person in the White House their confidence in the office itself begins to erode as well. In that regard, Kirchick makes a valid point. If Vladimir Putin’s goal truly was to undermine our democracy, he must be having a good chuckle at the moment.

Make the Democrats pay for stalling Trump’s nominees by Paul Mirengoff – “The Senate is sitting on 78 of President Trump’s nominees who have already been passed out of committee but can’t get a floor vote.”

“What to do? Try to change the rules requiring 30 hours of floor debate, a move that should have been made months ago. Sen. James Lankford has proposed that the debate time be shortened to eight hours. This, as the Journal notes, was the standard in 2013-14 after Republicans, then in the minority, agreed to a request by Harry Reid, then the Majority Leader.

It takes 60 votes to change this rule, so some Democratic support is needed. If it’s not forthcoming, and I don’t expect it to be at this juncture, then the Wall Street Journal editors urge Republicans to keep the Senate operating five days a week and even weekends until the deck has been cleared of nominees.
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Right now, the Democrats are paying no price for their obstruction. This has to change.

Every Word Liberals Say About Guns Is A Lie by Kurt Schlichter – “if liberals propose to gaslight us, to make us think we are insane for seeing what we are looking at, then they really need to be more … subtle.”

“It’s a lie when they say an armed citizenry would be powerless in the face of a leftist government equipped with tanks and artillery and bombers – though their assumption that a leftist government would use tanks and artillery and bombers on the American people seems like a pretty good reason for having an armed citizenry.

It’s a lie when they say they only want to have a “conversation” and seek only “bipartisan compromise.”
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What they cannot abide is us Normals being proud and free.

To disarm us would forever convert us from citizens to subjects. They get that our identity is wrapped up not in our guns themselves, but in the fact that armed we have the ability to control our destiny. If necessary, an armed citizenry can tell those who would trample our rights, “No” – and to back it up with force if necessary.
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They want us disarmed because they want us disenfranchised, discouraged, and no longer disobedient. They want us broken.

California coffee cancer warning: wrong by Luboš Motl – “A Californian judge had enough power to decide that all coffee sold in California has to carry a warning: coffee causes cancer.”

“Note that presumption of guilt, instead of innocence – also known as the precautionary principle – is used here. But if you evaluate the literature rationally, you will conclude that the threat is insignificant. What the literature doesn’t show is that the threat is zero. Well, it’s because no threat is zero. And with these insanely ambitious standards, you can’t prove the harmlessness of anything. I am sure that water also causes some kinds of cancer, in some amounts and under certain circumstances. So far, these activist judges “only” attack coffee (and things like carbon dioxide). But they may attack water or the air or at least the meat, sugar, bread, or vegetables in the future, too.

Why you stink at fact-checking by Lisa Fazio – “Research from cognitive psychology shows that people are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic.”

First, people have a general bias to believe that things are true. … Second, people tend to accept information as long as it’s close enough to the correct information.
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Detecting and correcting false information is difficult work and requires fighting against the ways our brains like to process information. Critical thinking alone won’t save us. Our psychological quirks put us at risk of falling for misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Professional fact-checkers provide an essential service in hunting out incorrect information in the public view. As such, they are one of our best hopes for zeroing in on errors and correcting them, before the rest of us read or hear the false information and incorporate it into what we know of the world.

Ah, yes, we need to rely on someone else as if they are really better at whatever than us? The essay bypasses, skips, and skirts the second finding, the one about “close enough” and therefore misses or conflates the fact that misinformation is not a binary phenomena. Critical thinking is dismissed but not defined. Critical thinking is what allows building knowledge from facts and it is knowledge that counts. (see Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills) Knowledge considers selfawareness, context, accuracy, precision, needs, the ‘big picture’ and limitations. Knowledge grows and changes as the person does and as his experience expands. This can’t be delegated to others and must resist assault by ‘fact checkers’ who often have their own agenda and try to impugn knowledge with the escalation of de minimis.

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?

Stop Diminishing the Men By Eileen F. Toplansky – “in the space of just a few decades[,] American women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and expendable” (Venker & Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism).

“The decline in the primary male economic function of being a provider and working is huge, and ”as the centrality of work among males declined, so, apparently, has their ardor to go to college – why bother? Why do well in high school? Viewed increasingly negatively by society, men have engaged in increasingly violent, anti-social behavior, manifested in more of them rioting, taking drugs, and ending up in prison. Society urges women to study the STEM disciplines, but not men.”
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Recently, I had a class of mostly single mothers analyze Hymowitz’s piece. After they had considered her points, I asked the following: if single moms keep reiterating that men are unnecessary, how will this affect their own young sons’ perceptions of themselves?

You could hear a pin drop. They had never considered the consequences of this on their own sons.

The Ignored Correlation Between Fatherlessness and Mass Shooters By Rachel Alexander – “No one wants to talk about the importance of fathers in boys’ lives, because society is too concerned with not stigmatizing single mothers.”

“Seven of the 19 shootings since 2005 were committed by young males. Peter Hasson at The Federalist observed that only one of the seven “was raised by his biological father throughout childhood.”
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Sociologist David Popenoe notes that “fathers are important to their sons as role models. They are important for maintaining authority and discipline. And they are important in helping their sons to develop both self-control and feelings of empathy toward others, character traits that are found to be lacking in violent youth.”

Boys need fathers. Some boys really need them. The data shows that. As Susan L. M. Goldberg asks in a column at PJ Media, “When Will We Have the Guts to Link Fatherlessness to School Shootings?”

New physics lessons help girls catch up by Michael Walther – “Many school pupils fail at physics because they misunderstand the fundamental concepts. A new teaching method can change this – ETH researchers have now proven its effect. It particularly helps intelligent girls to learn more effectively.” Good teaching matters. School teachers, especially, need effective curriculum guidance. For physics, there was a revolution with the IGY and Sputnik with the Physical Science Study Committee. What is described in this article only emphasize that the ‘market’ has its interest in simple measures for simple skills and very little patience for education and intellectual grasp of concepts. See the student gun control show for example.

It is also interesting that the focus of the article is gender bias. Education is a matter for all students. Why leave out the boys? Why the assumption that girls need to “catch up?” The reason for a decent education in physics is to avoid the sort of intellectual dishonesty on display.

How Successful Climate Pressure Tactics Paved The Way For Gun Control Bullying by Marc Morano – “The gun control lobby is borrowing the playbook from one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history: anthropogenic global warming…”

Hypocritical Enemedia Pushing Trump Bimbo Eruption to Derail His Pro America Agenda by Alicia Colon – “He was known as a billionaire playboy not a choir boy and the very idea that the media is bringing his past up when it ignored the much more sordid lives of prominent Democrats is concrete evidence of its hypocrisy.”

“Why does it take revelations decades after for the public to know the disgusting activities by these notables that make Trump’s sins pale in comparison?
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While the upcoming film, Chappaquiddick will finally shred the legacy of the “esteemed” lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, the very idea that Kennedy escaped censure for so long is unacceptable.
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Now why didn’t the feminist hierarchy raise a stink about this?
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Although most of we deplorables can see through the leftwing attacks on our president, but for those who may have voted for him but did so reluctantly because they disapproved on the character issue, the media bimbo coverage is diminishing their support and this is dangerous.

President Trump needs full support in his battle to drain the swamp

John Nolte says the 60 Minutes interview “ended up being the Al Capone’s vault of anti-Trump news.” Giraldo, where are you?

Is Trump Using Omnibus Bill To Now FULLY FUND The Border Wall? It Sure Looks That Way. by DCWhispers – “It would be a truly MAGA Art of the Deal moment.”

I Refuse to Lose My Mind Over the Omnibus Fiasco, and So Should You by Kurt Schlichter – “Remember the Kobayashi Maru scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Sometimes, you end up with no good options.”

“Trump chose the least worst of two bad options, and I, for one, refuse to lose my Schiff over it.
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There’s another spending fight coming. Trump says he won’t sign another flaming pile of garbage like this. After the reaction he got the other day, it’s likely he’ll keep his word.
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What do the rest of us do? Not quit. Get up, brush off, and get ready to fight. Tighten the hell up and jump back in the game. If you can’t take a hit, if you can’t stand to encounter an obstacle, if you’re giving up everything because something goes wrong, you’re not really committed to recovering your country and your own freedom.

Obama’s third term by Don Surber – “Liberals are as spontaneous as a wedding.”

“No, liberals wait for an event that is slightly off-kilter and flawed.

This was planned. They wanted the right shooting. They will wait years for one. This one fit because unlike, say, Dylann Roof’s obviously racist slaying in a church.
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Liberals seek flawed cases because they want to give conservatives traction to oppose them because liberals want to battle. All the time. On all fronts because what liberals seek is power, and they know the power of the state peaks in times of chaos and turmoil.
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The shooting spree triggered actions planned months ago.
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We are seeing Black Lives Matter again. If Barack Obama had a school shooting, it would look like this.

The Me Too movement was carefully crafted as well.
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This is Maoism. This is Barack Obama’s third term.

09:50 – Doesn’t Add Up. Never Has. Never Will. 09:50 The FBI Lied, Not Steele by sundance – the latest exploration of bits and pieces and how they fit into a bigger picture.

Michael Waldman’s video on gun control is historically askew by Taylor Millard – taking apart a propaganda flic.

Revealing scenes from the “March for our Lives” by Jazz Shaw – “Nearly all the coverage of the March for our Lives events today predictably looked like a scene straight out of central casting.”

“I thought this was a rally to end gun violence in schools? Or at least a more generic call to “action.” When did the focus of the entire thing become “gun control?” Ah, well. Nevermind, I guess. This is CNN.

They were at least revealing some of the conveniently repeated themes on display with the shirts and signs in the crowds. A more suspicious person might guess that this was all being orchestrated from somewhere. Here’s one of them which caught my eye immediately.
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those kindergartners are really upping their game in mastering printers and label making.

Seven reactions to the “March for our Lives” by Scott Johnson – “Paul passed on seven observations on the “March for our lives.” Having slept on it for a couple of nights, I have seven seven personal reactions to offer as a counterpart.”

“1. I hate being lectured.

2. I hate being lectured in a tone of moral superiority.

3. I hate being lectured by preening ignoramuses.

4. I hate being lectured by teenagers who know next to nothing and who demand that “something be done.”

5. I find that approximately everything the teenage mob and its spokesmen “know” to be false.

6. I find it loathsome that one of the leading spokesmen of this mob — one David Hogg — feels free to make loathsome claims to advance his cause. I am referring to David Hogg. The young Mr. Hogg should be hogtied, figuratively speaking.

7. I hate the media’s imputation of “absolute moral authority” to mobs with which they are politically simpatico. The media rush to join the mob if the mob is on the left. The media types are even more loathsome than the ignorant teenage mob.

Oakland Mayor who gang-signals illegals can’t stop talking about Trump by Jazz Shaw – an indication of an obsession that is overcoming reality – take heed.

“It was, according to Schaaf, all a big misunderstanding and she never intended to thwart the ICE raid, so there was no need to discuss it further. That’s not a position she seems to be sticking with since she keeps talking about it.
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That’s certainly an interesting set of claims to break down, isn’t it? First comes the usual strawman argument
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And that brings us to her stunning claim that California allows ICE to detain the most dangerous criminals.

Our expectations of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are what ruined them by Jazz Shaw – “If you set up a water pipe and allow people to freely add to it, someone will always be upset when another person decides to put grape or cherry Koolaid in it. But that’s not the fault of the person who built the pipe.”

“In a way, the fashion in which Facebook and YouTube have failed is the perfect example of why the First Amendment protects the most offensive speech. As soon as you allow someone to begin drawing the line as to which speech is “acceptable” and which isn’t, that line may move and you could be the next one to find yourself on the wrong side of it.

That’s what’s happened with YouTube and their decision to delete videos discussing gun sales or firearms use. There’s nothing illegal about selling firearms to qualified buyers. But now the guardians of speech on YouTube have decided that such things can be banned. What’s next? If you post a video saying there are only two genders (such as Bill Nye the “Science Guy” did), will it be removed? If you claim a 7 week old fetus is a baby, will your video disappear?

Don’t laugh at the idea of the slippery slope. It’s very real and both Facebook and YouTube have already shoved armies of people down it. And the saddest part of this tale is that they’re doing it because we asked them to.

Camouflaged Elites by Victor Davis Hanson – “An anonymous and irascible Athenian author: You would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome.”

“Yet the irony of this new camouflaged status is that appearances are conflated with reality. Mark Zuckerberg may look like an average American, but that does not mean he has the same interests or lives a similar sort of life as ordinary citizens. The concerns of an ostensible everyman with $71 billion could not possibly be the same as those of the rest of us. It may be that their casual clothes, cool phraseology, and radical politics serve as penance for exercising power that was once considered inordinate and dangerous.

Which raises an interesting point: People like Zuckerberg are actually far more powerful than their looks suggest. The robber barons of the nineteenth century are disparaged today for their greed and power. But Amazon, Facebook and Google operate virtual monopolies, the influence of which exceeds the oil, rail, steel, and banking trusts of the Gilded Age.
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One reason billionaire Donald Trump won the Electoral College was that he was transparent. He did not fake a southern drawl or an inner-city patois in the manner of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Unlike Mitt Romney, he exaggerated rather than apologized for his wealth. His loud clothes, garish jet, and American boosterism were in your face, and allowed Americans to draw their own conclusions—and, in contrast, made vastly rich progressive activists like Tom Steyer and Al Gore seem disingenuous.

Visible class distinctions of the past were a result of pride in achievement and old-fashioned snobbery. But their practical effect was to warn that the interests and agendas of the elite were not always the same as those of the public. Today’s billionaire hipsters blur these ancient distinctions. But just because a Master of the Universe looks like us does not mean that his dogged pursuit of tax exemptions, offshoring and outsourcing, and vertically integrated monopolies is in our interest.

Clues gone. Deception and deceit run rampant. There is need to be very careful.

When Unfounded Smears Are Treated as Facts By Jonathan S. Tobin – “Brennan admitted his charge that the Russians were blackmailing Trump was pure speculation. But that didn’t stop him or anyone else from spreading the smear.”

“The case of the Brennan smear is, however, instructive in that it shows how coverage of Trump and Russia works. When Brennan spoke of the Russians’ having something on Trump, not one member of the panel asked the former Obama staffer whether his opinion was rooted in actual knowledge rather than pure speculation. Nor did many others ask that question over the course of a day in which Brennan’s comment was among the most discussed stories.

That fits a pattern that applies to every stage of the Russian-collusion investigation.
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It used to be that partisan assumptions fueled by pure speculation and unaccompanied by proof didn’t pass the smell test at any major network or newspaper. The fact that political smears of this sort have now become not only possible but also normal says a lot about the way animus for the Trump administration has distorted much of the media’s judgment and coverage. If liberals want to know why conservatives no longer trust the media about Trump even when the facts are on their side, they need look no further than the way the media covered Brennan’s unfounded accusation.

Mainly McCabe By Clarice Feldman – “McCabe is in serious legal jeopardy for a series of illegal acts which the author details.”

“It’s clear to me that these agencies, under these former officials, were operating in the Soviet style — appropriating to themselves the right to run the government. All three branches of it.

Had Trump not been elected president, we would have been kept in the dark as to what they had been up to. And sadly, the media failed in its duty to expose them, acting instead as the recipients and megaphones of self-serving leaks from the corrupt deep state.

What Is John Brennan Hiding? By Andrew Klavan – “Former CIA Director John Brennan has become the sleaziest man on cable news”

“He continually peddles wholly unsubstantiated horror stories about the president of the United States, stories which the insanely anti-Trump press is only too happy to echo and magnify. It’s time to wonder just what this guy is trying to accomplish and why.
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It now seems clear that Barack Obama, in transforming the federal government into a Chicago-style machine, allowed and perhaps encouraged the leadership of the Department of Justice and the FBI to behave in shamefully political and dishonest ways.
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But what about the CIA? What were they up to during this time? Why was Brennan so afraid of the election of Donald Trump that he was willing to spread fantastic stories to prevent it, and why does he fear the president so much now that he is making up even more nonsense in order to discredit him.

On the budget: You fight the battles you can win by Don Surber – “The power of the purse belongs to Congress … The children got to order the meal, and it is all candy, candy, candy.”

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.

The left at work: Let’s hope Trump survives by Patricia McCarthy – “Without question, this bunch of white-collar criminals has orchestrated the biggest, most serious campaign of political corruption in American history.”

“Who are the culprits? All upper-echelon bureaucrats who considered themselves above the law: Comey, Holder, Lynch, Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, Rice, and Power are well known names, the public faces of Obama’s administration. Now we know there was a host of lesser known operatives working behind the scenes, as Lois Lerner did, to manipulate facts and events in order to ensure Clinton’s win.
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How did this happen? When did the American left begin its descent into sanctioning all manner of law-breaking to advance its political goals? Probably long before any of us know.
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The left will always be with us, but its members must be denied power. The least informed, least mature people think they should be running the show. And the people who think they should run the show love fascism, communism, and totalitarianism. They always assume that in such regimes, they will be the ones doing the ruling. It never occurs to them that they might come under someone else’s authoritarian thumb.

It is impossible to state with any accuracy the degree of damage the Obama-era policies did to America, but the damage was and remains profound.
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Let us hope that President Trump survives the all-out , all-agency long knives attack on his personal life, his family, and his presidency. Washington, D.C. is a swamp that must be drained, no matter how disagreeable the process. Trump won for a reason. He must prevail, or the idea of America, the most successful miracle of democracy ever to exist on the planet, will be lost.

Funny, When Obama Harvested Facebook Data On Millions Of Users To Win In 2012, Everyone Cheered by Investor’s Business Daily – “Facebook faces what some are calling an “existential crisis” over revelations that its user data fell into the hands of the Trump campaign.” … “Since this involves the Trump campaign, the news accounts have been suffused with dark conspiratorial tones.”

“Nor was this the first time Facebook users had their data unwittingly shared with a political campaign.

In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.

According to a July 2012 MIT Technology Review article, when you installed the app, “it said it would grab information about my friends: their birth dates, locations, and ‘likes.’ ”
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The campaign readily admitted that this subtle deception was key to their Facebook strategy.
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The effort was called a “game-changer” in the 2012 election, and the Obama campaign boasted that it was “the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for the campaign.”
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But keep in mind that it wasn’t the Trump campaign that solicited the collection of the data. And, as we said, it didn’t use the data in the general election campaign.

Obama, in contrast, was collecting live data on active users right up until Election Day, and at a scale that dwarfed anything the Trump campaign could access.
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There is one other big difference: how these revelations were received by pundits and the press. In 2012, Obama was wildly celebrated in news stories for his mastery of Big Data, and his genius at mining it to get out the vote.
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But the recent fury exposes a massive double standard on the part of those now raising hell.

When Obama was exploiting Facebook users to help win re-election, it was an act of political genius. When Trump attempted something similar, with unclear results, it’s a travesty of democracy and further evidence that somehow he stole the election.

Democrats’ Obstructionism Is Unprecedented By John Hinderaker – “When the Democrats say, “He’s not my president,” they aren’t kidding.”

“On Friday Marc Short, the administration’s Director of Legislative Affairs, joined Sarah Sanders at a White House press briefing. He laid out the facts regarding the Democrats’ unprecedented obstructionism, beginning with a description of the nomination process
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How bad has the Democrats’ obstruction been? It has violated all historical norms:
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If there is a reporter in Washington concerned about the Democrats’ unprecedented effort to block the executive branch from operating, he didn’t attend Friday’s press briefing.

The bad news is the swamp is deeper than we knew by Don Surber – “What happened to all that information — at least eight years of spying on Americans — that Obama gathered?”

Monmouth: Think you know who’s concerned about the “deep state”? Think again by Ed Morrissey – “Concern over the so-called “deep state” isn’t just confined to the demographics that Hillary Clinton most laments. In fact, it’s not even confined to Trump country, or Republicans either. A new poll from Monmouth University shows large majorities of all political persuasions worried about an unaccountable cabal that controls the federal government, especially when it comes to surveillance”

Former FBI Director Goes On Record: “Comey, McCabe, & Brennan All Corrupt & Everything Leads Back To Obama” (VIDEO) by DCWhispers – “Barack Obama wanted a third term. His support-system within the FBI, DOJ, State Department, CIA, the Establishment Media, etc., wanted the same and they all broke the law in their attempt to do it.”

“Donald Trump has managed to reveal much of it. The media continues to ignore it because so many of them are implicated in the illegal manipulations of the public as well. That means it’s up to YOU to bypass the media and help to spread the truth of what is really going on.

Collateral damage: How Trump threw Canada’s refugee system into turmoil by Anna Mehler Paperny – “Buffered by three oceans and the United States to the south, Canada has for decades had the luxury of being able to pick and choose its newcomers.”

“That has changed dramatically over the past 14 months. U.S. President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and his move to strip Haitians, Salvadorans and others of their temporary legal status have had a broad effect on Canada’s refugee system
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Rulings reviewed by Reuters indicate the tribunals are giving credence to claimants who say they feared deportation or racist attacks following Trump’s election on a platform advocating more restrictions on immigration.

Canada struggling with the ‘new normal’ of illegal immigration by John Sexton – “I’ll just remind that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invited this problem himself last January:”

Conference on alternative math did spark a war, after all by Luboš Motl – “On Valentine’s Day, I attended the conference on the alternative methods to teach mathematics. I was honored to stand on the same side as some top authorities of the Czech mathematics “establishment” who gradually realized what’s going on.”

“But the granddaddy’s animals aren’t the truly most threatening thing about the method. I think that the ideological underpinnings are the true key problem. The method wants to spread the opinion that the truth is always relative; errors should never be corrected by the teacher; it’s always more important to whine that someone has insulted you than to care about the truth; mathematics isn’t really needed and may be replaced by visual arts or civic education; and a dozen of similar things.

The main gap between the two camps is a deeply ideological, political, if not moral one.
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But I am still not sure who will win this war if one really explodes. God bless Czechia.

Who’s truth will out?

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.

White South African farmers in fear for their lives as the government prepares to seize their land by Rick Moran – “The government of Australia is offering to fast track visas for white South African farmers who are under siege on their own land.”

“It’s a story that’s not getting much play in the US – for obvious reasons. A group representing Afrikanners, the white minority claims that 82 white farmers were murdered just last year with 432 incidents of violence. The government is challenging those numbers and even whites admit that white farmers are not the only victims of violent crime in rural areas.

But at least some white farmers are living in fear and they are blaming the bill passed by parliament last month that will allow the government to sieze white owned land without compensation.
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The whole nation is descending into chaos with Capetown literally running out of water and urban areas suffering from extreme levels of violence. But with the government getting ready to sieze land that’s been owned by the same families for hundreds of years, the sense that white farmers are targets is impossible to ignore.
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But radical black South Africans now appear to be running the country. And the worst fears of white farmers are being realized.

OWN GOAL: Politico, House Democrats Unintentionally Launch the Dismantling of the ‘Deep State’ by David Steinberg – “They might not have known that federal civil service employment protections rubber-room a majority of the Executive Branch — no matter whom the people have elected to run it.”

“Politico, Cummings, and Engel just demystified the Deep State for American voters. It’s not about paranoiac white men bumbling about like Inspector Clouseau. It’s about an irrational set of laws that allow thousands upon thousands of unelected Executive Branch employees to work against the elected boss.

Some of them are even the precise cause of the constant “chaos” that the mainstream media loves to ascribe to this White House. Some of them routinely commit felonies by leaking confidential information to those media outlets.

And, unbelievably, one was a JCPOA architect so blinded by a lifetime in government that she actually thought America embraces her “right” to be an un-fireable bureaucrat.

The Clapper News Network by George Neumayr – “One can only laugh at the utter fraudulence of CNN: it pads its panels with government officials who leak to it, then presents them to its audience as “nonpartisan” experts commenting on the aftershocks of the very stories they leaked.”

“Trump’s intuition about a politicized intelligence community is confirmed daily by the rantings of its former members who treat the studios of television news like a retirement center. Eager to get in on this act, NBC recently hired former CIA director John Brennan, who also ingratiated himself to reporters through leaks. On his Twitter account, he describes himself as “nonpartisan” and NBC supports that con by letting him comment on the investigation his partisan manipulation of intelligence instigated.

Almost all of the principals responsible for the Russian farce are confirmed liars and leakers. They said Trump Tower wasn’t the target of spying. It was. They said a FISA warrant wasn’t issued. It was. They said Trump officials weren’t unmasked. They were. They said (as even the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman acknowledged) Hillary didn’t finance the Steele dossier. She did.
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Clapper probably penned the letter while on the phone with CNN and now enjoys his reward: a cushy seat from which to pronounce on the Trump administration’s lack of “integrity.” The other day he was on CNN vouching for the integrity of Andrew McCabe, another nabbed leaker. Maybe McCabe can become a CNN contributor too now that his FBI pension is in peril. They could co-host a show called Reliable Leakers.

CNN anchor to Florida Dem: Why isn’t Marco Rubio, who’s been focused on gun violence for weeks, focused on gun violence? By Allahpundit – “It’s not news that CNN is in the tank, particularly on the issue of guns. What’s newsy here is that there’s no Republican in Congress who’s been more aggressive in floating legislation about gun violence since the Parkland shooting than Rubio has.”

“And naturally, despite his very recent work on school shootings, he’s getting killed on CNN for having his priorities wildly out of whack.

Stephen Hawking Wrote a Popular Book About Physics and Spent the Rest of His Life Crusading for Awful Causes by Noah Pollak – “After the celebrity he earned from A Brief History of Time, Hawking grew into that special kind of scold—think Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—who trades on his reputation as an impartial man of facts and logic in order to condescend to ordinary people.”

“When he weighed in on the Syria war, he was self-congratulatory and dishonest.
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One of the traditional checks in human societies on “inbuilt greed and aggression” is religion—and so one might have thought Hawking would say something nice about western religious observance, which tends to promote humility and respect for life. Of course not
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I am not a physicist and am unable to understand the actual merits of Hawking’s contributions to the field. But no amount of scientific greatness can excuse his political crusading—far left, viciously anti-Israel, and contemptuous of the culture and values that sustain western societies.

The Left and Distraction: Pulling It All Apart by David Prentice – “Look at what they have torn apart. It’s more than distracting; it’s staggering.”

“Our university system is a shadow of itself. … Our media. … Hollywood. … Our judicial system. … Our government bureaucracies. … Corporate America. … This list is the tip of the iceberg.
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They are tearing apart our culture, tearing apart each institution one by one.

Why?

So many reasons. Power, mainly. They can inhabit the chaos.
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In that corruption, somewhere is a willingness to sacrifice an entire civilization, to tear apart each of our institutions one at a time, to cast an entire generation to the ocean without life rafts
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The brainwashing of the leftist voter may be the most injurious thing the left has done.

It is difficult to wrap one’s head around what can be seen.

The Right Needs To Learn From The Left’s Astroturfing Of The Parkland Survivors By Ashe Schow – “Just because Trump’s in the White House doesn’t mean the Right should stop working to influence the conversation.”

“About two weeks after what was reported as a movement by the students, forensic science specialist David Hines discovered that the whole “movement” was actually a coordinated plan from the Left. Within two days of the shooting, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was helping the kids; teacher’s unions, groups associated with Michael Bloomberg, and people connected to the Women’s March were all assisting in securing funding and promotion. Planned Parenthood, George Clooney, and Oprah Winfrey all donated money to the effort.
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Basically, the left had money and infrastructure ready to go for an all-out assault on guns and the NRA, they just needed the right moment — the right victims.

It’s sickening, when you think about it; they were basically waiting for children to die so that they could swoop in and blame everyone they dislike, instead of the actual shooter. They paraded grieving children in front of cameras without any care for their well-being just to help their cause.

Student walkout to protest gun violence goes nationwide by John Sexton – “The thing to get about all of this besides the clearly partisan intent is the scope of it.”

“The next big event on the Parkland agenda is the march taking place in Washington, DC in 10 days. That promises to be another mass protest that will keep the story in the news. It’s not going to lead to a vote to ban guns, which is what the Parkland students want. Democrats know that. They’re getting on board with this in anticipation of November. But that’s still a long way from now. There’s really no telling what the political landscape will look like by election day.
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Walter Olson: “Students across the US are learning an important lesson at this hour, which is that whether you are allowed to walk out of class as a statement depends entirely on whether the school authorities approve of that statement.”

Culture Rot: irrational passion expressed as action that is ignorant of civics; the ‘innocent’ subject to easy manipulation because critical thinking is absent; and then the parent is proud? Truancy, protesting, and acting out do not solve problems — Neither does ignorance or lack of critical thinking. There should be shame but instead the rot that is a cancer on civil society is on display. Here from social media:

“Today at my daughters school, a group of students participated in a walk out in protest of school violence, gun laws and the safety they feel they do not have. I am not posting this to start a comment war or to set a right fighting stage. I am taking this moment to share my pride that I feel for my daughter, her friends and all of the young people today who felt strong enough about something to participate in an action against it in hopes of making a statement loud enough to provoke change. She shared with me tonight her experience and from what she told me it was respectful, mature, organized and powerful. That’s a pretty big deal to me and I am just really moved by their passion. These young people we are raising have a voice and they are gaining the bravery, knowledge and power to use it. No matter the cause, no matter the issue, use your voice. I am a proud momma tonight

On Today’s Despicable Misuse Of Children by John Hinderaker – “Today students were excused from classrooms all across America to participate in demonstrations in favor of firearms bans of one sort or another. These were anything but spontaneous actions organized by children.”

“Rather, the anti-gun demonstrations were condoned, if not sponsored, by school administrations that are almost universally liberal. And the teachers’ unions played a part too.
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Ironically, the demonstrations in favor of school safety featured, in some instances, attacks on non-conforming students.
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It is fair to say that school administrators and teachers organized children’s demonstrations on behalf of the Democratic Party. Today, the Democratic National Committee sent out an email fundraising on the students’ gun control protests
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Beyond the contemptible enlisting of uninformed children in a political cause, today’s demonstrations were disgusting because they represented a massive passing of the buck.
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they are using silly demonstrations by ignorant children to deflect attention from their own dereliction of duty.

Baltimore teachers threaten to walk out if any of them are armed by Jazz Shaw – “Some of the quotes in this report are truly remarkable. The head of one of the teachers’ unions said, “Our teachers did not sign up to be armed guards in school and most teachers do not want to go anywhere near having guns.”

“Here’s a couple of hot tips for you. First of all, nobody is suggesting that teachers who don’t want to be involved with firearms should be forced to carry and receive training. It’s voluntary for those who wish to help safeguard the children in the event of an active shooter episode. One might imagine that if a crazy person with a weapon shows up in the school, the next person with a gun you’d like to see would be a friendly face with adequate training who is also armed and prepared to save you. But hey.. you do you, I suppose.

Also, some of Baltimore’s teachers are saying they don’t want to be anywhere near a gun. That might be an understandable sentiment, but… have you looked outside? You’re in Baltimore. There were more than 340 murders in your city last year and God only knows how many non-fatal shootings. If you don’t want to be “near a gun” you need to move.

Parents Argue School District’s Decision to Allow Student Walkout Breaks Law by Dr. Susan Berry – “the parents – who wish to remain anonymous – argue the student walkout might appear to be a fairly innocuous First Amendment event to honor the students killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting and to advocate for gun control.”

“However, the parents add, the decision involves issues concerning “adherence to law and policy, the manipulation of minors, the misuse of tax dollars, and indoctrination and political activism during school hours.”

They are especially concerned the student walkouts were organized by the Women’s March, an anti-Trump organization with ties to radical anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan.
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“It’s one thing to teach civics and to teach history and to teach current events,” Stevenson explained. “But it’s another thing to encourage minors, whose maturity level is not that of an adult, to take a position one way or another.”

Establishment Media Ignores All Of The Young NO WALKOUT School Patriots Who Think School Is For Learning Not Far-Left Indoctrination by DCWhispers – “The Mainstream Media largely created the anti-gun rights walkouts being staged today so it’s no surprise they are covering them both breathlessly and lovingly as thousands of school kids snicker and preen for their own social media accounts while accomplishing little beyond being allowed to skip class.” But dig the picture of a high school parking lot in Illinois!

“Meanwhile, there are thousands of other schools and millions of other students who feel school is for learning, not taxpayer-funded protest movements.

The media isn’t covering them though because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
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Fewer and fewer are buying into this mass-manipulation of teenage Americans.

K-12: The War on Boys and Men by Bruce Deitrick Price – “Men account for 77 percent of the nation’s suicides, they are more than twice as likely to become alcoholics, they are more likely to die of an overdose than women, and 90 percent of inmates are men.”

“The dirty big secret here is that our public schools don’t announce social engineering; they simply do it, especially with regard to altering how children view themselves.

The “party of science” needs to realize that sex reassignment surgery doesn’t work by Jazz Shaw – “an example of how far one can fall off the beam if they proclaim a love for and dedication to scientific reality but then abandon it when it suits their political needs.” … “The most alarming statistic is obviously the suicide rate which has been confirmed now in multiple studies.”

“But there’s one aspect of the discussion highlighted in this article which relies less on post-surgery statistics and more on a basic understanding of human biology. It comes from Dr. Paul McHugh, service professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His observations pull no punches.

“Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’ In that lies their problematic future.

“When ‘the tumult and shouting dies,’ it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb.”
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This way lies madness. The liberals in most of these social debates always seem to claim to be the ones relying on science. It’s their rallying cry when it comes to climate change. But when you bring up the subject of gender dysphoria it seems that all interest in generations of established medical science disappears. This is a form of communal insanity. And from what I can tell, it’s spreading.

NeverTrumps: Please Rally behind America by Lloyd Marcus – “My focus is on being grateful to God for bringing our country back from the edge of destruction rather than focusing on the flaws of His chosen vessel.”

“For decades, the Democrats’ socialist-progressive parasitic tapeworms have been allowed to embed themselves into the bowels of America – consuming all nutrients, leaving only foul-smelling cultural and economic excrement.

These people on the left are insane with hatred for our country. They will never give up or surrender, fighting with their last breath to bring down America. I cannot understand anyone who claims to love America not rallying behind our only present hope of restoring our Founding Fathers’ vision of America. Let’s please come together for our country.

UniParty At Work – Paul Ryan SuperPac Campaigned to Elect Democrat Conor Lamb by sundance – “a stunning discovery surfaces of Paul Ryan’s Congressional Leadership SuperPAC, congressionalleadershipfund.org, actually campaigning for the Democrat, Conor Lamb, in the recent PA18 congressional race.” Paul Ryan: Let’s face it, a pro-gun, pro-life, anti-Pelosi conservative won in Pennsylvania last night by Allahpundit – “Just not the pro-gun, pro-life, anti-Pelosi conservative who ran as a Republican in a heavily Republican district and was endorsed by everyone in the Republican Party, including the president of the United States.”

Ace: Lawyer Who Served as Christopher Steele’s Back-Channel to Senator Mark Warner Reveals His Belief That Steele Was Being Funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley Tech Billionaires

Dissecting the ‘dusty agent’ used in UK attack by Stephen Bryen – “A militarized nerve agent is designed to be easily deployed and used, to be persistent on the battlefield or targeted area, and to kill efficiently and quickly.” A contrasting point of view is by Luboš Motl who thinks that a British witch hunt against Russia is immature, unfair, myopic, and dangerous.

House Intel releases verdict in Russia probe: No collusion by Byron York – “In addition, the committee took issue with the intelligence community assessment of Russian motivations in the 2016 election.”

“The collusion question has been the most basic, and the most contentious, of the entire Trump-Russia investigation. After this or that revelation — the emergence of the Trump dossier, the June 9 meeting, the plea bargain of George Papadopoulos, the activities of Carter Page, the analysis of Facebook ads — partisans on both sides claimed that collusion had been either proved or not.
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“There is already, in my view, ample evidence in the public domain on the issue of collusion if you’re willing to see it,” Schiff told reporters last month. “If you want to blind yourself, then you can look the other way.”

It is not clear how Democrats will respond, either with a formal report or series of findings. Republicans said the full report will be provided to Democrats on Tuesday and will be released to the public after it has been fully vetted for classified information.

Eric Holder Comes Unglued After GOP House Intel Committee Rules No Trump-Russia Collusion “This is a Cover Up” by Cristina Laila – “Leaker Adam Schiff immediately blew a gasket and released a ridiculous statement claiming the Republicans don’t care about the fact that the Russians may have leverage over Trump.”

“Eric Holder (tweet): “Republican House Intell Comm shut down Russia probe before doing a complete job This is a coverup and a lasting stain on the reputation of what used to be a bipartisan Committee when it was run by Republican Rogers and Democrat Ruppersberger. Politics beat a desire for the truth”

Eric Holder is the one who left a lasting stain on the Justice Department after his gun-running operation spun out of control.
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The demons always scream the loudest when they are being exorcised.

Report: James Clapper Was Leaking Intelligence Reports to CNN During President-Elect Trump Transition (January 2017) by sundance – “According to an article published today by Sara Carter her congressional sources have told her of an investigation into former ODNI James Clapper and his leaking of “intelligence information” to CNN in an orchestrated effort to damage the incoming Trump administration.”

“Here’s why it’s particularly interesting. Back in January of 2017, we noted a series of events between James Clapper (ODNI), John Brennan (CIA) and Jake Tapper (CNN) that appeared transparently obvious about creating a specific narrative.
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In essence the week beginning January 10th, 2017 was the origin of the vast ‘Muh Russia’ conspiracy/collusion narrative against the incoming administration. The CNN report pushed by Jake Tapper was also the distribution of leaked information James Clapper and John Brennan. This false narrative was specifically the origin of the “collusion” angle.

James Clapper appeared nervous and playing CYA when he released a statement trying to cover-up his leaking of information to CNN. Remember this?

BUSTED: Former Director Of National Intelligence, James Clapper, Caught Lying During CNN Broadcast by sundance – “It is easy to get lost in the weeds if you don’t follow the details closely”

“last night James Clapper appeared on CNN to defend himself against mounting evidence he leaked, and falsified the content of a presidential briefing of an Intelligence Discussion -including the “Steele Dossier”- to CNN January 9th or 10th 2017.

Before getting to the CNN/James Clapper video, it’s important to revisit the specific sequence of events. It is difficult to spot lies if you don’t have events to reference. Here’s a recap of the exact timeline of events from 2017:

Ace: “Shocker: James Clapper Will Avoid Charges For Perjuring Himself Before Congress, As of Today The government that enforces our laws has declared itself immune to the very laws they inflict on the commoners.”

“When a government no longer has moral authority over its citizens, it must rely exclusively on physical coercion and force, and then things get ugly quickly.

They let the statute of limitations run out on his perjury.

Mueller’s new fishing hole: ‘Conspiracy to defraud the government’ by Rick Moran – “Special counsel Robert Mueller is invoking a new charge in his Captain Queeg search for the lost strawberries.”

“He is looking to tie Trump and his aides to a “conspiracy to defraud the government charge.”

What makes this such a stretch is that Mueller apparently doesn’t have to tie it to a criminal action. This puts a lot more of Trump aides in danger of being ensnared in Mueller’s ever widening net.
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Nothing quite excites partisan investigators like the term “significant flexibility.” This is great news for Mueller and the Democrats. Trump aides who never committed a criminal act could be caught up in Mueller’s dragnet and sent to jail.
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At least in the Clinton investigation, there was an actual criminal act – perjury – which led to the denial of Paula Jones’ rights and obstructed the Starr investigation.

Now, Mueller is saying he doesn’t have to prove that a criminal act resulted from the underlying actions of aides for the conspiracy charge to stick.

I’m sure Democratic legal experts are cheering Mueller on at this point. But at what cost? These Mickey Mouse charges are going to be used in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election of a president. Don’t you think that legal standards should be extraordinarily strict if that’s the case?

Hillary on 2016: I won the places that aren’t looking backwards by Allahpundit – “her theory for why she lost still boils down to one word: Deplorables.” Consider the author and then note the ‘side equality’ false meme. Denial comes in hard (e.g. Holder, Clinton) or soft (e.g. Allahpundit) forms.

“After all the brutal polling about how unlikable she is, all of the analysis about how poor her campaign strategy was, all of the reporting about her party’s disastrous disinterest in competing for working-class white votes in the belief that the Obama coalition was insuperable and unbreakable,

I don’t think this is some arcane, embittered view that Hillary is clinging to in order to soothe herself over her defeat, though. I think this is liberal orthodoxy, part of the red/blue divide. The country is trapped in a toxic marriage that can’t end in divorce, so the two parties forge on thinking the worst of each other and trying to talk to each other as little as possible. A Clinton might understandably be more comfortable articulating that dynamic than most people are.

Are nationwide court injunctions shutting down our democracy? By Jazz Shaw – “This is an old argument which is getting a fresh look in the age of Trump, particularly after a recent op-ed written by the Attorney General and some interviews he’s done.”

“When the executive branch issues an order covering something not regulated by the legislative branch, should a judge from one district be able to shut down the order across the entire nation? That’s the question being tackled by Jeff Sessions this month and he clearly feels the answer is no. (National Review)
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Sessions goes on to note that judges didn’t issue these sorts of national injunctions against executive actions for the first 175 years of our country’s existence, but now they have become increasingly more common.
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Also pertinent (and we’ve mentioned this here before), is the “forum shopping” which goes on in these cases.
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Now, however, we live in an era of hyperpartisan political warfare. Every president and Congress going forward can (and very likely will) be stymied any time they do anything more complicated than naming a new Post Office branch. And to be honest, I can think of a few of those that might face injunctions too. But the Supreme Court has never ruled on the question of national injunctions instituted by lower courts and they tend to be loathe to bring the hammer down on them too heavily. This may be a problem without a solution.

An incredible racist restaurant in New Orleans by Luboš Motl – “a restaurant where white consumers have to pay extra $18 because they are white”

“I find this business to be an amazing proof of the omnipresent racism permeating the American society. Can you imagine that a white owner would introduce the analogous “tax for being black”? You can come to my restaurant but you must pay an extra $18 because you’re black. Well, this owner would be attacked by the left-wing press, maybe physically attacked by the Antifa, the Open Society Foundation, or similar terrorist organizations that operate de facto legally, and someone would find a trick to cause legal problems to the owner, too.

But when a black guy does something like that, everything is just fine and cute, it seems.
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All these insane policies are justified by the victimhood complex which is treated as OK if not justified even though they are pathetic fairy-tales trying to blame the successful people and groups for someone’s relative failure. Clearly, it’s the white who are the victims here, not blacks – and especially the whites who dare to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

Swamp Things in the Russia Investigation by Victor Davis Hanson – “They are often exempt from the consequences of the laws and regulations that affect others.”

“The chief characteristics of the swamp are the interlocking friendships, business relationships, marriages and partnerships in Washington, and their immune response against anyone who challenges them.

Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has proven the locus classicus of a dysfunctional and highly incestuous Washington culture—so much so that it borders on being a caricature of a Washington investigation.

Meet the players, if you don’t know them already.

It’s Time for Juan Williams to Go by Peter Barry Chowka – jumped the Farrakhan, he has, but he is a useful tool on Fox News to illustrate why any discussion of current affairs can be rather fruitless. He also may have an impact on the market for remote controls as people wear out the ‘mute’ buttons.

“Why is Fox News continuing to tolerate Juan Williams – not only for his apparent defense of what their own hosts, Shannon Bream and Sean Hannity, and numerous others have termed a “racist” and an “anti-Semite,” but who is also responsible – in my opinion – for spouting useless total nonsense that takes up valuable time whenever he’s on the air?

Juan Williams has jumped the shark. He has had a long, largely undeserved, and extremely well compensated, run on Fox News.

California’s Reputation for Loony Left Behavior Only Gets Worse by John Fund – “In Oakland, the mayor warns illegal immigrants of an ICE raid, and a coffee shop refuses service to the police.”

“I don’t think it will be hard to pick the political winner in this current dispute. On the one side, you have liberals who are thumbing their nose at legitimate law enforcement. Their allies include the mayor of Oakland and the owners of Hasta Muerta, who have contempt for the rule of law and those who enforce it. On the other side, there’s the admittedly controversial Trump administration. But it has a powerful argument that transcends partisan politics: If you don’t like the law, work to change it. But don’t prove your membership in the Loony Left by spitting on it and pretending that makes you virtuous.

Why Democrats Would Lose the Second Civil War, Too by Kurt Schlichter – “It’s obvious that the central tenet of the Democrat Party platform is now hatred and contempt for Normal Americans.”

“ In California, the leftist government is practically firing on Fort Sumter. And nationally, these aspiring fascists are especially eager to disarm Normal Americans – doing so would be an object lesson in who’s the boss, as well as solving that frustrating problem of the Normals having the ability to resist.

Probably because I’ve spent time where they actually had a civil war, many people ask me – people whose names you know – whether I think this turmoil will all end in a Second Civil War. They are seriously concerned, and not without cause – the left’s hatred for Normal Americans and its dedication to totally stripping the people who are the backbone of this country of their ability to participate in their own governance is threatening to rip the country apart.
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Do I think there will be a civil war? No, but there could be. This is the Age of Black Swans, and anything is possible
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Democrats, who think history began when Obama was elected, don’t understand the dangerous game they are playing when they talk about how they want to impose their brown shirt vision upon red America.
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There are two Civil War II scenarios, and the left is poorly positioned to prevail in either one. The first scenario is that the Democrats take power and violate the Constitution in order to use the apparatus of the federal government to suppress and oppress Normal Americans. In that scenario, red Americans are the insurgents. In the second scenario, which we can even now see the stirrings of in California’s campaign to nullify federal immigration law, it is the blue states that are the insurgents.
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Then there’s another factor, an intangible but a crucial one. It’s commitment. The Democrat threat to peace is based on its policies designed to deprive Normal Americans of their right to speak freely, to worship freely, and to defend themselves and their rights with firearms. Make no mistake – millions of Normal Americans are willing to risk death to defend those rights.

The facts about guns at school by John R. Lott Jr. – “any serious look at the data shows that Mr. Trump’s arguments are more clearly grounded in facts and a deeper understanding of these attacks than the fact checkers would dare let their readers know.” Calling one’s self a “fact checker” is virtue signaling in order to put a false veneer on a fake reality.

“Perhaps fact checkers think that their readers live in a bubble and will never see how they exclude facts to attack Mr. Trump. But it is a dangerous game because when readers catch on to such consistently blatant distortions, fact checkers risk losing all credibility.

Washington Post: Trump Wants Government Climate Scientists to Stop Being Dramatic by Eric Worrall – “Government Climate scientists are upset that President Trump wants them to avoid using emotive language in their press releases.”

“What a shocking development – government climate scientists are being required to objectively report their findings, instead of trying to influence the political process by publishing emotionally charged official press releases.

What a shocking development!

Amulets, White Noise, and Trump Reality by Clarice Feldman – “The left (I refuse to call regressives “progressives”) is finding it hard to deal with a reality in which the markets are up, unemployment is down, household income is rising, ISIS is being crushed, and Kim Jong-un is being lassoed.”

“Jeffrey Satinover observes: “‘Believing readers of the Times, however, and authors for the Times, they are far more ignorant than the know-nothings for they are chock full of beliefs that more often than not, and mostly on matters of great importance, are flatly false. It’s not nearly so bad to say, ‘I don’t know if the earth is round or flat’ as it is to be arrogantly certain that it’s flat.”
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They laughed and said he couldn’t get the nomination. He did. They never believed he would be elected. He was. They said his election would tank the market. It’s risen substantially. They said his blunderbuss style would cause the world to blow up. Obama said the lost jobs would never come back. They have. It’s more likely that the president will bring peace to the Middle East and Asia.
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After ISIS and North Korea, I expect that the Iranians are next on the neuter list, and that has to scare the bejeebers out of those who’ve been peddling the Russiagate nonsense, which I think is in large part to hide their own collusion with the ayatollahs.

Stormy Daniels And Ted Kennedy by John Hinderaker – “the story is interesting because it raises questions about what, in our era, constitutes a scandal.”

“Worst case, Trump paid Stormy Daniels. But he didn’t kill her. That distinguishes him from the Liberal Lion of the Senate. If you want a scandal, and a cover-up that succeeded to a remarkable degree, look no further than Chappaquiddick. The Democratic Party conspired to cover up Ted Kennedy’s crime–manslaughter, in a particularly vile form–to preserve his political viability, at the cost of an innocent young woman’s life.

To this day, most people have no idea what the Chappaquiddick scandal was all about. That is how successful the Democrats’ cover-up has been. Most Americans assume that Kennedy was guilty of drunk driving and negligently causing the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. But the truth is much worse.
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That is what I call a scandal: not only Ted Kennedy’s manslaughter–frankly, a charitable characterization–but the Democratic Party’s decades-long cover-up.

In Trump-Russia probe, what’s with that meeting in the Seychelles? by Byron York – “A Trump supporter met with a Russian in the Seychelles in January 2017, and something consequential may or may not have happened.” This is the other half of the Left’s scandal management: create diversions via allegation and innuendo that impugn the opposition.

“The story baffled some Republicans who have been following the Trump-Russia affair, for two reasons. One, the core question of the investigation is whether the Trump campaign and Russia colluded to influence the 2016 election. The Seychelles meeting took place on Jan. 11, 2017, more than two months after the election.
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The second reason Republicans were baffled is that even if Prince were representing the Trump transition, and even if he were trying to establish a back channel with the Russians — two points Prince vehemently denies — there would be nothing illegal or improper about the incoming Trump administration setting up a channel, back or otherwise, to speak to a foreign country, including Russia.

No New Special Counsel by Andrew C. McCarthy – “Sessions should appoint a Justice Department prosecutor to investigate the investigators” … which it looks like he has. The Mueller Investigation is another example of how the Left handles scandal and McCarthy thinks a new one would be just as scandalous.

“Original Sin: A Prosecutor but No Crime … The investigation has no parameters, and thus no limitations.
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Before explaining my disagreement with them, I must first observe that Chairmen Goodlatte and Gowdy, along with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), continue to perform an invaluable service in exposing investigative irregularities and demanding accountability. Where I part company with them is not over whether we need an investigation; it is over whether that investigation should be done by a special counsel.

The patent flaw in the Goodlatte-Gowdy proposal is the same one that plagued Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller: There is no triggering crime.
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there is a big difference between (a) giving a court information that is unverified because it has not been adequately corroborated and (b) knowingly giving a court information that is false. The former is abusive; the latter is felony obstruction of justice.
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My point is simply this: It would not be credible to claim that the Trump-Russia investigation was fabricated out of whole cloth. Even stipulating that the top FBI/DOJ hierarchy was biased against Trump, and thus too quick to credit sensational allegations of Trump wrongdoing, there were good-faith reasons for concern about ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian regime.

What McCarthy cites for support is extremely weak tea. The matter is not about “fabricated out of whole cloth” but rather exaggerated beyond recognition. His support for the “FBI/DOJ hierarchy” contradicts his points about ‘evidence of a crime’ necessary for investigation. Second or third level associations are not such evidence. Goodlatte and Gowdy many not have explicitly defined crimes in their letter but the crimes related to their request are known to the point of being major topics of public discussion. So, in both the rationalizing the behavior of the “FBI/DOJ hierarchy” and in dismissing the request for a special counsel, McCarthy is dancing around reality in strange ways himself.

Who Believes in Russiagate? By Lee Smith – “Knowledgeable reporters on the left and right are frightened by the spread of an elite conspiracy theory among American media.” The author has a problem: “No doubt that’s one reason why whatever is thrown at him seems to stick.” That ‘observation’ doesn’t appear to be well founded. Otherwise …

“there is a growing consensus among reporters and thinkers on the left and right—especially those who know anything about Russia, the surveillance apparatus, and intelligence bureaucracy—that the Russiagate-collusion theory that was supposed to end Trump’s presidency within six months has sprung more than a few holes. Worse, it has proved to be a cover for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies to break the law, with what’s left of the press gleefully going along for the ride. Where Watergate was a story about a crime that came to define an entire generation’s oppositional attitude toward politicians and the country’s elite, Russiagate, they argue, has proved itself to be the reverse: It is a device that the American elite is using to define itself against its enemies—the rest of the country.

Yet for its advocates, the questionable veracity of the Russiagate story seems much less important than what has become its real purpose—elite virtue-signaling.
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In other words, there’s the truth, and then there’s what’s even more important—sticking it to Trump. Choose wrong, even inadvertently, Chen explained, no matter how many times you deplore Trump, and you’ll be labeled a Trumpkin.
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From the beginning, Gessen saw the collusion story as dangerous, not because she supported Trump but because it fed into a fantasy that convinced Trump’s opponents that they need not bother with the difficult and boring work of procedural politics.
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Yes, the left hates Trump. I didn’t vote for him, either. But what Gessen, Greenwald, Lears, and Cohen all understand is that Russiagate isn’t about Trump. He’s just a convenient proxy for the real target.

A Doozy of a Dossier by Eric Felten – “What we can learn rereading it.”

“The dossier is a series of memos written from June to December 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, alleging a Trump/Kremlin conspiracy. Paying for Steele’s work was the opposition research company Fusion GPS; paying Fusion GPS was the law firm Perkins Coie; paying Perkins Coie was the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Given that Steele presents largely uncheckable allegations from anonymous sources, the reliability and credibility of the dossier has rested on the reliability and credibility that has been claimed for Steele himself.
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In all the scuffling over whether Clinton’s funding of the enterprise calls Steele’s credibility into question, little attention has been devoted to a more basic and obvious question posed by the dossier: How could a former spy in the U.K., in a matter of months, squeeze the highest ranks of the Russian government like a sponge and expose one of its most consequential and closely guarded schemes? Why do we pay CIA agents if a freelancer like Steele so easily runs circles around them?
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On the first page of the dossier, Steele claims to have gotten senior Russian officials and their trusted friends to chit-chat about a secret plan crafted for five years by no less than Putin himself. Given the relative trivialities that can get one beaten to death in a Russian prison, these senior officials would seem to have exhibited an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward their own health and well-being.
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Aside from the difficulty of clearing basic-believability hurdles, the dossier also appears to be padded.
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There are glaring inconsistencies.
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Time and again the dossier attributes to Trump feats of political trickeration that would be astonishing if performed by a disciplined and experienced organization. Nothing we have learned of the Trump campaign suggests either the discipline or the competence.
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The dossier has launched investigations and lawsuits and thousands of arguments since its original publication. Rereading it now, in light of all that has subsequently come to pass, shows that the best summary of its contents is still the one BuzzFeed began with: The allegations remain unverified, and the report contains errors. And how.

Stormy Daniels? Seriously? By John Hinderaker – “The Democratic Party New York Times headlines: “The Stormy Daniels Scandal Gets Serious.” If you wonder where Smith (above) gets the idea that things seem to stick to Trump, this story is an illustration of the source. Keep slinging mud and keep sticking stories to that mud and one can thinks there is something permanent and not just persistently re-applied.

“Let’s just pause on that. President Trump’s alleged dalliance with Ms. Daniels occurred, if it occurred at all, 12 years ago. Long before he was a presidential candidate, let alone president. How much interest has the Democratic Party New York Times shown in sexual relationships entered into by John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or any other Democrat more than a decade before entering public life? Nevertheless, the Times argues that this is somehow a big deal
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The left-wing press is working overtime today to make the 12-year-old Stormy Daniels story into news. Why? I don’t think the answer is hard to find. President Trump’s administration, so far, has been remarkably successful. At home, the rate of economic growth has doubled, millions more are employed, wages are rising, the stock market is soaring, moribund industries are coming back to life. Abroad, American interests are being asserted; NATO allies have increased their contributions to mutual defense; the administration is standing up to Russia and China; after many years of inaction, the menace of North Korea is being confronted; and so on. The Democratic Party is trying to distract voters from these accomplishments with irrelevant stories about a former porn star.

Desperation is showing. The effort to make reality what it isn’t is creating ever more implausible rationalizations and fantasies.

Exposing Eric Holder’s Obstruction of Justice By Daniel John Sobieski – “Have they no shame?”

“You can’t be embarrassed if you are incapable of feeling shame over causing the death of two border agents and hundreds of Mexican nationals targeted by Mexican drug lords. This may change with the announced release of the documents hidden away by Eric Holder
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Holder’s obstruction of justice and lying to Congress were crimes that went unpunished. As Rep. Darrell Issa, who headed the House Oversight Committee during the Fast and Furious investigation, has noted. But as with the current scandals involving Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, and the corruption of the FISA court process by the FBI and DOJ to aid one party’s attempt to collude with the Russians to overturn a sitting president, Holder was not counting on a Trump election to expose his corruption

This is only one example. Consider also, the recent denial of the Oakland mayor asserting righteousness for aiding and abetting fugitives from law and blaming her behavior on others. No shame. No shame at all.

We already have 12,000 tariffs by Don Surber – “To hear Never Trumpers (and a few Trumpkins) tell the story, Donald Trump is the first president since Hoover to impose a tariff on imported products.”

“But Gus Lubin of Business Insider in 2010 reported, “The International Trade Commission lists over 12,000 specific tariffs on imports to America. Hundreds of agricultural, textile, and manufacturing items are highly protected. So are obscure items like live foxes.”

From a 4.8% tariff on live foxes to a 350% tariff on tobacco, America protected its industries in 2010.

Secretary Wilbur Ross Outlines The New Era in Trade Priorities After Steel and Aluminum Action by sundance – “What POTUS will announce is “targeted exemptions” to the trade tariffs on Steel and Aluminum. Not “targeted tariffs”, but rather “targeted exemptions”.

“The exemption approach puts more power in the hands of Team ‘America-First’ than targeting the steel dumpers directly. Team Trump will reward good behavior.

Any nation that acts like a Chinese proxy in the trans-shipment problem will not get relief from the tariffs. However, the nations that manufacture and trade honestly will be granted tariff relief. This allows Team Trump to evaluate the origin of the Steel used by countries that want to import their finished goods into the U.S. If they are using Chinese Steel, the tariff applies. If they are using their own manufactured steel, there is no tariff.

See how brilliantly that works?

By taking the position of his opposition and modifying it to enhance his own policy, POTUS has gained leverage.

The opposition displays several key behaviors, even in headlines. Here’s from AEI: WSJ readers school Trump on trade, tariffs, consumers and deficits – The president is not being served well on trade – note that it isn’t a matter of disagreement but rather one of schooling the ignorant. The effort is not to try to understand and learn about something strange representing a different perspective or approach but rather that of hubris. Even the Coyote fell for this calling the trade ideas “sanctions” rather than tariffs or negotiating positions. Trump is shaking up long held (swamp) paradigms and his execution and success are creating heaping doses of cognitive dissonance. Trade, International Affairs, and the Labor Report are all in the news this week as examples.

The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News by Robinson Meyer – “Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.” It’s putting numbers on a phenomena any propagandist or salesman ‘just knows.’ The problem is when ‘reputable sources’ join in on the game, sources like CNN, NYT, NBC, etc. and what is Real is distorted by loose, changing, and expedient implied definitions of Fake.

“The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
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Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumors—like whether that person had more followers or was verified—falsehoods were still 70 percent more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.

And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”
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This new paper takes a far grander scale, looking at nearly the entire lifespan of Twitter: every piece of controversial news that propagated on the service from September 2006 to December 2016. But to do that, Vosoughi and his colleagues had to answer a more preliminary question first: What is truth? And how do we know?
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First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.

Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.
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Some political scientists also questioned the study’s definition of “news.” By turning to the fact-checking sites, the study blurs together a wide range of false information: outright lies, urban legends, hoaxes, spoofs, falsehoods, and “fake news.” It does not just look at fake news by itself—that is, articles or videos that look like news content, and which appear to have gone through a journalistic process, but which are actually made up.
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In short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one—neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies—knows how to reverse that trend. It is a dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common public reality.

Ace: Media Intensely Interested in Right-Wing (Allegedly) Anti-Semite That Draws Crowds of Less Than 50; But Not At All Interested in Left-Wing Anti-Semite Louis Farakhan Who Draws Crowds of 10,000, and Has High-Profile Democrats Like Barack Obama Courting – Showing that Fake News is often a means to rationalize No Shame. And here’s another common trait:

“Indeed, they’ve had to invent a new word to describe skin-color-based-discrimination by blacks or hispanics against other blacks or hispanics. They can’t call this what every sane person would call it — “racism” — because, as a fundamental semantic truth, they’ve decreed that blacks and hispanics cannot be racist, even when being super-racist.

So they’ve created a new word for discriminating based on skin color or race by people who are black or hispanic: “colorist.” See, they can’t be racists; only white people can be racists.
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It’s high time this central lie justifying racist hate was confronted and called a lie, as it is, and the people trafficking in racism were called racists, which they are.

Ace: Hair on Fire Alert: Donald Trump Spoke to Two Witnesses After Their Interviews with Mueller, Going So Far As to Ask Don McGahn If the Interviewers Had Been “Nice”

“So what we have here are prosecutors looking to charge Trump for something that is not a crime while giving their Government Colleague a pass on something that actually is a crime.

OUT: You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.

IN: You want actual revolution? This is how you get actual revolution.

If You’re Trying to Ban Guns, the Least You Could Do Is Learn the Basics by David Harsanyi – “Sloppy thoughts, sloppy policies.”

“The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by writer Adam Weinstein in which he argues that Second Amendment advocates “use jargon to bully gun-control supporters.” “While debating the merits of various gun control proposals,” he contends, “Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology.”

How dare Second Amendment advocates expect that those passionately arguing to limit their constitutional rights have some rudimentary knowledge of the devices they want to ban? To point out the constant glaring technical and policy “faux pas” of gun controllers is to engage in “gunsplaining,” a bad-faith argument akin to intimidation.
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“Jargon” is words and expressions that are difficult for a layman to understand or use. Rather than using jargon, Second Amendment advocates are usually mocking those who use jargon-sounding words in an effort to fearmonger viewers and constituents. When you claim that the streets are rife with “high-capacity, rapid-fire magazines” or “jumbo clips,” you’re trying to fool your audience with a veneer of expertise. When you claim that we need to ban “gas-assisted receiver firearms,” you’re trying to make a semi-automatic weapon sound like a machine gun for a reason.
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All these people use a moralistic fallacy, which is often predicated on the ignorance Weinstein rationalizes—not that it stops him from embracing the appeal to authority he condemns elsewhere.

Also: HuffPost: Sure, women have Second Amendment rights, but ‘guns are unabashedly, toxically masculine’ and ‘What a trip’: Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv meets with POTUS and first lady, shows off ReachOut app

Nick Freitas of Virginia on gun control by neo-neocon – “He’s talking about gun control, but it’s a primer on how to talk about heated issues in general” … Eight minutes on YouTube cited by several pundits. A Republican speaks Truth to Power and it’s powerful.

Almost All Anti-GMO Articles In The US Are ‘Clickbait’ Promoted By Russian Propaganda Sites By Hank Campbell – it’s too easy to take this overboard but the idea does fit Russian propaganda history and policies. Meanwhile, Campbell offers a good summary definition of GMO.

At Iowa State University Crop Bioengineering Center’s annual meeting, a team of scholars showed their research validating what the scientific community has long suspected – that some anti-GMO groups are either sending information to Russian propaganda sites to assist in their efforts to undermine American agricultural dominance or they are acting as what Joseph Stalin called “useful idiots” by promoting concern about America’s food supply.

GMOs are genetically modified organisms, where a gene has been moved from one species to another to instill a useful trait. GMOs are a more precise successor to the thousands of foods previously produced by genetic modification techniques like mutagenesis, which includes many foods labeled organic, and hybrids and selective breeding before that. Though more precise, they were once controversial because of concerns about unintended effects. Yet history has validated the science. From the Rainbow Papaya that saved the industry in Hawaii in the 1990s to corn that has meant more yield using less water on less land with less environmental strain than ever possible, GMOs have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people and a hundred billion animals with no ill effects. Insulin, the first GMO product approved, has been in use for 36 years.

Democrats must be made to pay a price for coziness with Farrakhan by Thomas Lifson – listening to Juan Williams on The Five yesterday rationalizing and excusing indicates that it’ll be difficult.

Mueller keeps fishing in back channels, casting a new fly line in Seychelles by Monica Showalter – “Oh, desperation, thy name is Robert Mueller!” Here’s another case to illustrate just how entrenched the Left has become in trying to fit reality into its fantasies.

“Going against all precedent to see a crime where there never was one, the special counsel is now pursuing the potential back channels Trump administration officials set up with the Russians in Seychelles shortly before he took office.
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This is an old story, by the way, first reported 11 months ago, in 2017.
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back channels are nothing new; they’re just problematic when President Trump does them, and Democrats want to prove that he conspired with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Yeah, sure.
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What we are seeing here is more grasping at straws, a phenomenon first noted by Mike Allen of Axios.

Senator Jeff Sessions Confirms Prior Appointment of “DOJ Prosecutor” to Parallel IG Horowitz, NOT a Special Counsel by sundance – “There is already an appointed person, likely a prosecutor, from “outside of Washington”, in place prior to the recent request for a Special Counsel by Goodlatte and Gowdy.” Things are happening and patience is needed to see how it works out. Sundance covers the history and explains why it all fits a pattern.

Sessions: We’re Finally Going To Release Fast & Furious Documents Withheld From Congress By Holder by Ed Morrissey – “The decision will allow the committee to complete an investigation over a program that was linked to hundreds of deaths, including that of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry” and then there’s the lawsuit against California sanctuary city laws. Things are happening.

When a picture is worth a thousand nervous breakdowns by Rick Moran – “The editor of the newspaper was terrified that the mere sight of Murray would be a traumatic, triggering event for many students and felt compelled to explain himself in an editorial.” This essay harks back to the Russian propaganda campaign noted above.

“Just another example of mind-blowing stupidity on campus? More proof that many college students will be unable to function in a society that doesn’t care how woke they are?

Yes, and more. Hit and Run’s Robby Soave explains
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What they’re terrified of is not “feeling” the correct amount of outrage at what they’re told to be outraged about. If they don’t hate the target of the day enough, their own place in the community of the oppressed may be questioned.

This is not about social activism. It is a classic exercise in how to wield power.

Wield power by levering ignorance. So easy.

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.